The Creeping (25 page)

“Sorry,” I blurt. “I mean, c'mon in.” I step clumsily back on a pair of Dad's running shoes by the door and almost sprain my ankle trying to hide what a klutz I am.

“These are for you.” He offers me the bouquet of delicate ruffled pink rosebuds.

“Non-date flowers,” I say before I can stop myself.

He frowns at the bouquet. “I'm confused.” He looks from the flowers to me. “I thought you didn't want this to be a date.” I swallow hard and twist my finger in the hem of my shirt, sure that my cheeks match the flowers. “If it were up to me, it
would
be.”

I take a shaky breath, inhaling too much of the bouquet's perfume, drunk off nerves. “You said that I would just have to say the word and you'd be all over me.” I speak carefully, like I'm in a verbal minefield. The ceiling lights suddenly beam down on me like strobe lights. But rather than let my resolve melt, I steady the hitch in my breath. “What word is it that I need to say?”

The corners of his mouth twitch up as he leans in until our noses practically touch. The flowers press against my chest. I want to look away but can't. “Why do you want to know?” There's laughter and heat in his voice.

“Oh, just for future reference.” I shrug a shoulder and breeze on, “You know, so that I don't say it by accident.” I can't help smiling like a fool.

The warmth rolls off him. With his free hand he reaches toward me, coiling a strand of my hair around his finger, brushing my shoulder with his arm. “I lied before. It's not just a word but a sentence.” His eyes twinkle mischievously.

“Okay, what is this magic sentence?” I fight to stop my gaze from traveling to his lips.

He tugs my hair lightly. “You have to say, ‘Sam, I want you to be my boyfriend.' And then
poof
, I'll do the rest.”

I withdraw. His hand drops away from me. “Sam, I—I don't have boyfriends. I told you that.” I look down at my bare feet, wishing I had at least put socks on. With socks on I wouldn't feel so exposed.

His lips form a perfect O shape. “Stella, I'm telling you I want you. I—I'm in
love
with you. I've always been.”

For some reason my chin trembles as he says it. I don't know why it sounds so terrifying to me. Dad tells me he loves me all the time. Mom says it when we talk on the phone. Even Zoey tells me. But coming from Sam's mouth, the words turn me into something wild and skittish.

“That's what you say now, but Sam, you won't. You'll get tired of me and being my . . .
you know
.”

He closes his eyes and shakes his head. “I haven't gotten tired of you for as long as I've known you.” His voice gets deeper, huskier. “I won't be someone who leaves you. I'm not your mom. I'm not your dad. I'm not Jeanie. I won't go.”

I blink up at him. If anyone else said those things, I'd probably scream bloody murder in response. Sam's right, though, I've lost a lot
of people. I keep everyone at a distance except for Zoey, and that's only because it's too hard to tell where I stop and she begins.

“Are you hungry?” he asks suddenly, the flush in his cheeks receding. I remember the grocery bag still in his arms and nod, grateful for something easy I have the answer to. “Great. I'm not as good a cook as my mom, but my specialty is pasta and turkey meatballs.” He slips around me and moves toward the kitchen. From behind there's no sign that he's been rejected. I follow after a few moments of nerves paralyze me. When I do, Sam's already unpacked the bag of groceries and is searching through drawers of cooking utensils.

“Hey, tell me what you remembered yesterday. If you're up for it,” he says, bumping through the cabinets.

I stow the flowers in a vase I snag to stall for time. I'm not eager to fill Sam's head with the nightmarish memories I recovered. When that's done, I twiddle my fingers on the counter, playing an imaginary keyboard. “How was work?” I ask.

He shrugs, hunched over a giant sauté pan. “It was okay. I remembered to take off the red vest this time.” One brown eye winks at me, and he turns back to cooking.

I jump up to sit on the counter and dive into rehashing the ugly things I remembered. I start with the ladybugs in Jeanie's front yard.

Sam stops washing mushrooms to listen, and when I'm done, barely skipping a beat, he says, “In the dream, you knew Jeanie was afraid of something, but that's because you're not six anymore. You might not have understood what you were seeing while it was happening.” Then more firmly, “You're not to blame.”

I grip the countertop and nod. What he says makes sense, it just doesn't make me feel as innocent as it should. I start telling him about the disfigured hand twined in Jeanie's hair. Obviously, I spare him the parts where I was up close and personal with Taylor.

I stare at the lines on my palms. “You don't think what happened to Jane Doe's head happened to Jeanie, too?” A shudder runs through me. “Her scalp, I mean.”

Sam stands at the chopping block, studiously slicing an onion. He smiles ruefully at me. “I wish I could tell you no, but I can't. None of the other little girls' bodies were found either, and they all had red hair. There's a connection there. The scalp injuries . . . the red hair. What did Zoey say about what you remembered?”

“Umm . . . I didn't tell her. She took off with one of the lacrosse boys she hooks up with, and I didn't get a chance.” He raises an eyebrow over the lemon he's zesting.

“Why were you holding your breath underwater? Didn't anyone ever tell you that oxygen deprivation and alcohol don't mix?” He dumps the chopped onions in the pan, and they hiss in the hot oil.

“I was with Taylor,” I admit as quietly as possible. Maybe he just won't hear? The knife he's washing in the sink slips from his hands and clatters against the other dirty dishes. “I didn't invite him, Zoey did.” I'm flustered. “I was underwater to escape him. And it wasn't just Taylor but other guys at the cove too.” I've made it sound like a party Sam wasn't invited to; that's the case, though, isn't it? All of high school there's been an impassable line between us, albeit one I helped create. I'm trying to vault over it, when what I wish I could do is erase it. I'm
indignant for Sam; he is so much
more
than boys like Taylor.

Sam leaves the knife where it lies in the sink and adjusts the stovetop. He fiddles with the onions and adds meatballs he rolls between his palms. The silence is earsplitting. I sound too defensive when I say, “Nothing happened with Taylor. Sure, he would have liked it to, but I'm not interested in him. I made that clear.”

Sam turns abruptly to me. “You don't need to explain.” His smile is slow and sweet. We don't speak again until we sit down to eat. He grins at me over our food and takes a gigantic bite of spaghetti.

“Your dad won't mind if I'm here when he gets home?” he asks midway through dinner.

I scrunch my nose up. “My dad isn't that kind of dad. He probably wouldn't even care if you slept over.” I blush once the words have left my mouth.

Sam chuckles them off. “Good to know.”

“I just mean he trusts me to make my own decisions. It's nice to be treated like that, most of the time.” I twirl my fork in the pasta. “Will your mom care that you're out late?”

He covers his mouth with a napkin. “No, once she heard that I was coming here she didn't even give me a curfew. I'll have to use you as cover every time I go out.”

I stab a meatball with my fork. “I missed your mom.”

“I think she missed you,” he says with a full mouth, smiling with bits and pieces of food in his teeth.

“Oh, sooo hot.” I throw my napkin at his face, laughing. “What about Daniel? Did you call him?”

“I texted him what we found at the library and cemetery and finally got a text back saying he was crashing with his dad. He was vague, but I guess the police questioned him and then sent him home. He said he'd call tomorrow.”

I nod. “I've been thinking a lot about Jeanie,” I admit absently. “I can't remember what she was like, and all I really know is what Zoey says.”

“You want to know what I remember?” he offers. I swallow and nod. He leans back in his chair. “She was funny. She kind of wobbled everywhere, like she was dancing rather than walking. That really got me at six.” He laughs under his breath. “She had a lisp, and she loved rattling off in gibberish. I'm not sure if she made up her own language or what, but she'd dissolve into giggles after a few sentences of nonsense.” I stare into the middle distance of my kitchen, like I might be able to look back in time and see what Sam does. “She always wanted to play outside . . . always in the front yard or the woods.” We don't speak for a long time.

“Do you think I'd be friends with her now?”

He blinks at me carefully; he can probably see how thinly veiled my guilt over the imagined answer has become. “Who knows? Everything could be different if she were here.”

I know exactly what he means. Who would I be without the disappearance sending ripples through me? If Jeanie were a person with laughter and habits rather than a diamond or dull penny to me, who would I be? In an alternate universe, where Zoey made me choose between herself and Jeanie, might I have chosen Jeanie?
Would we be in orchestra? Would we date best friends who took us to the Cineplex every Friday night? I like the idea of three alternate realities for me to exist in: one where I've chosen Zoey, one with Sam, and one with Jeanie. Perhaps that's because Sam is right: I shouldn't have chosen. Jeanie shouldn't be dead. We're all disembodied from the way it
should
be.

Sam rises to clear the plates. I dump them in the dishwasher once he's rinsed. “Thanks for making dinner. Do you want to watch a movie or something?”

Sam heads to the front room. “You don't have to do that. It's okay if you want me to leave,” he says, stooping for his keys on the coffee table.

I watch helplessly as he walks toward the front door and pulls it open. He'll leave, travel into the darkness between our two houses, accept that I won't say the magic words to make him mine, convince himself that I don't want him, and this moment will be gone forever, snatched away from me like the gust of wind from the open door is scattering the pages of my time line to the floor.

Before he gets any farther, before I lose him, I blurt out, “For the last hundred years a secret group has been sacrificing animals every time something horrible happens in Savage.”

Y
ou remember those heaps of dirt at Mrs. Griever's? Well”—I wave for him to follow me into the living room—“I think they're buried animals. I don't know if that means that she's one of the people sacrificing them, or the only one, or that she's cleaning up after them and hiding the evidence. But I found a pattern—well, most of a pattern, since the online library archives are incomplete.”

I hand him the notes, and his eyes skim rapidly back and forth. “See.” I point to the first page. “We know that none of the missing girls from the thirties are in the online archives yet, but in December of 1938 there was an article about ten dogs going missing. That's only months after Betty Balco disappeared and a few years after the others in the articles you found.” I flip to the second page. “In 1956 the town's first cannery burned down, trapping and killing three men who worked there. They burned alive. Four people reported missing dogs in the month after.” I thumb through the pages and put another
on top of the stack for Sam to read. “The
Savage Bee
burned down in 1972. The paper's secretary was killed in the fire. Two weeks later, three families reported their dogs and cats missing.”

I try to stay calm, but my palms break into a cold sweat. “In the summer of 1960 a houseboat sank in Blackdog Lake, killing the family who was vacationing on it; in 1980 two hikers were mauled by a bear; in 1984 a school bus collided with a delivery van, killing a teacher and two students; and eleven years ago, Jeanie Talcott disappeared while playing in her front yard.” I take a second to catch my breath after the grim list. “Since the newspaper began reporting in 1910, there have been twenty-one disasters or accidents that have happened in Savage. Those are just what showed up in the online archives and don't include the disappearances we know about in the thirties. Do you know what seventeen out of twenty-one of them have in common?”

Sam drops the stack of papers on the coffee table and tucks a frenzied wisp of hair behind my ear. His mouth sets into a gloomy line. “There's a bunch of animal disappearances afterward,” he supplies.

“Right,” I say, waving my finger in the air. “As few as one and as many as ten have been reported missing in the weeks after these bad things. I could only find the one article from 1938 talking about a rash of lost dogs, and people just figured there was a large animal hunting in the woods.”

“But you don't think so?” Sam asks.

“No,” I say fiercely. “Those animals had the same end as the cat
from the cemetery today. I wish it weren't true, but I know it. Sacrificed on a makeshift altar by some sicko who thinks they're making an offering to stop the horrible things from happening.”

“Making a sacrifice to who, though?” Sam motions skyward. “To the gods? This isn't ancient Greece. Accidents happen. It's horrible that all those people died, but fires burn down buildings, people die in accidents. Nothing's causing those things to happen but terrible luck.”

“I know that and you know that, but whoever is doing this thinks they're not accidents. I get that it's padded-room-worthy, but whoever these people are, they think someone or something is causing all of it.”

Sam chews the inside of his cheek. “So you're saying that you don't think whoever killed Jane Doe, Jeanie, and her mom killed the tabby cat?”