The Possession Page 21

  “Nothing on specific spells, symbols, any of that?”

  He laughed briefly. “Absolutely not.”

  “Did you direct the students toward further reading, where they could have picked up that kind of thing?”

  “There’s a whole internet out there, Kristy. Thirty seconds on Google would reveal more than you ever need to know, even if most of it would be wrong.”

  Kristy switched tack. “Gina Wright—tell me about her.”

  “A good teacher. The students like her. Married, no children. Her husband seems nice. I doubt she has any interest in witches whatsoever.”

  “It’s not that. I had a weird confrontation with her this morning. She seemed to think somebody was attacking her online. Any idea who that might be, or why?”

  The principal looked concerned. “No.”

  “Final thing.” Kristy got out her phone. “This was the last picture taken of Alaina before she disappeared.”

  “Kristy—Alaina’s back. I’m at a loss to understand why you’re still chasing this stick.”

  The principal put on reading glasses. Kristy altered position so she could watch his face carefully as he looked at the picture. “When she reappeared, she was wearing a coat.”

  “That’s odd.” His expression was that of a man who’d been confronted with something that didn’t make sense but wasn’t of any real interest. Nothing more.

  Kristy decided she may as well say it out loud. “I was going to ask if you had any idea how that could have happened.”

  The principal removed his glasses and slotted them neatly back in his shirt pocket. This was a man who was used to modulating his voice when dealing with both students and teachers, to subduing emotion in pursuit of calm and productive communication: nonetheless, when he spoke, despite a carefully flat tone, it was clear he was angry.

  “I assume you’re asking if I gave it to her. Or if I was somehow involved in her disappearance, or played a role in her time away. The answer to all questions is no. And I’m becoming extremely tired of the implication.”

  “Okay, look, I’m sorry. I’m really just trying to work out what happened.”

  “For whose sake?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I didn’t tell you this, but I harbored desires to be a journalist myself once. Even edited the college newspaper. Unfortunately, I discovered I can’t write dispassionately. I wound up being too front and center in anything I wrote.”

  “Meaning?”

  He opened the door, letting a cold wind into the building. “I get the sense this story is actually all about you, Kristy. So perhaps you should stop trying to pretend it’s for anybody else.”

  Kristy checked her watch when she got back to the main street. She should head to the Tap to meet the others. She knew she was in a bad enough mood that it wasn’t a great idea. And the worst of it was she was pissed because she knew the principal was right.

  So she turned left and headed up the highway instead. She’d missed her run again. Maybe a brisk walk would help. The sky was dark gray and so low it felt as though she should be able to reach up and touch it. It was drizzling, faint speckles against the mist. The river sounded loud and the forest felt intrusive, as though it was trying to encroach upon the road.

  She knew what she had in mind was probably a bad idea. Confronting Bryan Hixon with evidence that his daughter hadn’t been alone in the woods was unlikely to be popular. He’d made it clear in the hospital that so far as he was concerned, this was over—and like the rest of town, he seemed oddly keen to keep it that way. He’d probably also be unwilling to confront the idea that if a man had given Alaina the coat, they might have interacted in other ways—ways she appeared to want to keep secret.

  Kristy slowed. Yeah, this was a dumb thing to do.

  As Nolan would sometimes say, no good would come of it. Even if Hixon listened, all she’d be doing was dropping a bomb into lives she’d be leaving soon. The quest for truth is all very well, but sometimes it simply isn’t what people want to know—and there comes an age where you realize that other people’s comfort may be more important than winning another small and bitter victory for facts.

  So she should turn the hell around. Help look for Pierre, who—as Molly pointed out—was the one now actually missing. Smooth things over with her, too. And with Nolan, who she’d been pushing away since she got here.

  Stop feeling she had to be right. Nobody cared.

  As she turned to walk back to town, however, she noticed something ahead on the side of the road.

  Olsen’s looked bigger in the mist, more abandoned. It was even harder to imagine that it had once been a place where people came to have fun, to flirt, get drunk—undertake assignations of a type every town pretends don’t happen.

  Kristy left the highway and walked along the front of the building. The front door was securely locked, boarded over. No broken windows, all dusty, opaque and boarded over from the inside. She tried each of the sills. They’d all been securely fastened from the inside or nailed shut. Trying them reminded her that she’d still had no response from Val to the news that they’d broken the back door to her storage last night. Which was odd. But, whatever.

  She walked around the end of the building. A door there also showed clear signs of having been shut for many years. And so then around the back. A third door. The same. Further windows, the same as the front.

  But there, low down: a service hatch.

  Kristy squatted next to it. An opening through which deliveries had been made into the building, presumably. Barrels of beer, bottles of wine, boxes of frozen Simplot Classic Fries. The wood was old and weathered. There was a D-loop to secure it at the front. The padlock looked a lot newer than the ones on the other doors.

  And it wasn’t closed.

  Interesting.

  Kristy removed it. Lifted the hatch cautiously, keeping her head back—she didn’t want to surprise a raccoon or rats or any other brand of furry thing with teeth. When she was confident that wasn’t going to happen, she opened it all the way. The smell of damp earth. She turned her phone light on and directed it into the space. A rusted metal ladder.

  She was going to take a look, of course. But she’d seen enough horror movies to know how this shit worked, so she put the padlock in her pocket to make sure her next plot point wasn’t finding herself trapped in the cellar by a psycho, or psychos, unknown. Or, zombies. She climbed down.

  The ceiling was low. The floor was earthen but the walls were of old wood, and looked like they’d been patched many times. The space was only about twenty feet deep by twelve, nowhere near the dimensions of the structure as a whole. There were three old-looking barstools in one corner. Next to them, someone had dug a small hole in the ground. There was a flat, rusted metal box in it, open and empty.

  Another metal ladder at the other end. Kristy climbed the first two rungs of it and reached to push the trapdoor above. It resisted for a moment—wood warped by years of damp—but opened.

  She pushed hard enough to flip it over: jumping at the sound of it slamming down on the floor above. Motes of dust fell around her, sparkling in the light from her phone. They seemed very bright—enough to make her blink and turn away.

  She climbed. When her head was up through the hole she stopped and panned the light around. A smallish room previously used for storage. She climbed up into it. Bare shelves and cupboards. A chest freezer. Empty.

  A door in the side gave onto a small kitchen area. Someone had done a reasonable job of mothballing it when the business shut, but it was still dark and smelled of rust and rancid cooking oil.

  She went into the corridor. To the left was a bar area. A few glasses hung still from racks. Tables, chairs. The smell of mouse droppings and disuse.

  She went right, into a larger space. There was a small bar on the side of this room, too, but it seemed like it had been more of a dining area. Not much furniture. The old rock fireplace at the end. The space looked old, and cold, in the pale a
nd muted late afternoon light coming through cracks in the boarded windows. She blinked again—her eyes still hadn’t recovered from the bright dust below.

  A wooden staircase led up one wall, opposite the front door. Kristy took a look at it from underneath, decided it looked stable enough. Walked carefully up.

  The higher level was structured around a corridor that ran the length of the building. As she’d expected from the window distribution from outside, there were two rooms on each side of the staircase. She went right first. Both held wooden double beds with bare, mildewed mattresses, and damp-looking rugs on the floor. Sinks in the corner. An invisible pall of old sex and subterfuge.

  A further door at the end of the corridor revealed a small toilet witha tiny shower cubicle. She went back the other way. The third bedroom was the same.

  And so was the fourth. Except that odd curling symbols had been written on the walls. And except for the fact that there was a sleeping bag on the bed, a small kerosene stove in the corner, a line of empty plastic bottles, a backpack, what looked like an old journal, and an untidy pile of clothes.

  Kristy moved the pile with her foot, turning over the dark item on top. It was a Birchlake School hoodie.

  She went downstairs. There were a lot of questions still to be answered, but one thing was clear. She’d been right. For what that was worth. The only question was what she did with the information. Actually, she realized, as she wandered into the restaurant area, there were others. First of all, why?

  Why would a teenage girl disappear herself, letting everybody think she was dead (or worse). And why would she then come back? Kristy knew the answer to the initial question—how widely her discovery should be shared—depended on the answer to these others. That meant talking to Alaina.

  And she was already halfway to her house.

  She was on her way to the storage room and the way out when she heard a sound. Footsteps.

  From above.

  Chapter

  ​40

  The door to the Hardaker house was opened by Nadja.

  “There’s only us here,” she said. “Dad and Mom are staying down in San Jose tonight.”

  “That’s okay. It’s you we want to talk to.”

  “Dad’s zero-tolerance about us letting people in the house when he’s not around.”

  Maddy appeared behind her. “My friend Ryder found your show online. The comments section is a dumpster fire.”

  “Critical response is mixed,” I admitted. “But—”

  “We’re not doing it,” Nadja said. She seemed fidgety and distracted. “And you should go.”

  “We just need a couple minutes.”

  Maddy put her hands on hips. “You heard what she said.”

  “We did,” Ken said. “And that’s a good point.” He pointed at the house next door. Then the one on the other side. Turned, a couple on the opposite side of the street.

  “What are you doing, weirdo?”

  “Just showing how many people are in earshot.”

  “So?”

  “Ken’s not always clear,” I said, raising my voice. “But I think the point he’s making is if we start talking loud, the neighbors are going to hear everything.”

  “So?” Maddy sneered. “They’ll call the cops.”

  “Maybe,” Ken said, very loudly. “Maybe not. You know what people are like. They might get all intrigued.”

  “What’s that even supposed to mean?”

  He dropped his voice. “What it’s even supposed to mean, love, is we know what you did. And we can talk about it here, or inside.”

  They led us into the living room. Nadja’s eye seemed to be caught by something in the back yard, but both already seemed jumpy and I didn’t want them distracted. “Was it your idea?”

  “No,” Maddy said. “It really wasn’t.”

  “I didn’t think so,” I said. “And I don’t think anybody needs to know about it. But my ex-wife is a journalist, and she’s very good, and extremely persistent. She’s all over this. If I can tell her what happened and she realizes it’s no big deal, we can all walk away and let life go on as normal.”

  “How did you know it was us?”

  “We didn’t,” Ken said. “Until you let us in.”

  The twins looked at each other. “Fuck,” Maddy said.

  “Not for sure,” I said, “but you were the last people to see Alaina before she disappeared.”

  “But we didn’t know then,” Nadja said. “She disappeared in the woods. For real. And then we were caught in it and couldn’t tell anyone.”

  “So tell us now,” Ken said.

  The girls looked at each other again. Nadja nodded.

  “Okay, so looking back,” Maddy said, quietly, “Alaina had been…unusually weird. For weeks. I mean, face it, she’s always been pretty extra, especially since her mom died, but I don’t know. It was different.”

  “She was super-intense,” Nadja said. “Sitting off by herself at recess, drawing weird stuff.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “Symbols. Diagrams. Things she’d found in some old book. She set up a second Insta account and had us do dumb blank comments on her post.”

  “I saw that. Why?”

  “I have no idea. She said it was a ritual, but it seemed kinda random to me. She was being odd all over, so we thought she was just making shit up. She’d be staring off into space in class. Super sad for no reason. We even wondered whether we should talk to Gina about it, because Alaina seemed like she was genuinely depressed.”

  “And she’s emo enough to actually do something about it,” Nadja added.

  “Right. But then…she seemed okay again. Not happy, or sad. Just focused. We figured, okay, she’s over it.”

  “Then that day we went walking,” Nadja said. “Something we’ve done fifty times. Except she wanders off and doesn’t come back. We looked. We looked hard.”

  “So that part was true,” I said. “You couldn’t find her. You came back, told your dad, he called the cops.”

  “We were freaked out of our minds. For three days. We went on all the searches. And everybody’s, like, how come you two are here and she’s not?”

  “Did anybody actually say that?”

  “No. But you could tell. It was horrible.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “One afternoon after school we were in here doing homework,” Maddy said. “Dad was down in San Jose as usual. Mom was at work. And…” She gestured out at the back yard.

  “The door’s open again,” Nadja said. She said it quietly, and just to her sister. I glanced out into the yard. The gate in the back fence was ajar.

  Maddy didn’t turn to look. “I know.”

  “We need to lock it.”

  “I did,” Maddy said. It seemed like she really didn’t want to think about it. “It makes no difference.”

  “What were you saying?” Ken said, trying to keep them on track. “Alaina turned up in your garden?”

  “Yes. Just standing there. So we went running out, like, so fucking happy to see her. She was freezing cold. Covered in mud. But she wouldn’t come inside. And she said…”

  “What?”

  “She said she was Lilith now, and could talk to demons.”

  Ken and I stared at her.

  “Well, right,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you go straight to the cops? She’d been missing. She was clearly having…an episode. Why not get her indoors and call the police, or hospital?”

  “We tried,” Nadja said. “But she wouldn’t. She said she met someone out in the woods. A man who wasn’t there.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Ken said.

  “I know. But she said he taught her stuff,” Maddy said. “No, not like that. He’d told her where to find some old journals of her mom’s that she’d buried somewhere. We still tried to get her to come inside. And then she…”

  “What?”

  The girls looked at each other again. “My mo
m leaves her purse lying around,” Maddy said. “It is not unknown for us to take advantage of that fact.”

  “Not much,” Nadja said, quickly. “Not often. But, yeah. And Alaina knows. She threatened to tell our dad.”

  “Unless?”

  “We helped her.”

  “By doing what?”

  “Not telling anybody. She’d been in the forest for two days and nights. She was freezing and starving hungry. She said she needed a little more time, and then she’d come back properly. She promised it would be one more night, two at most.”

  “So…we gave her food from the cupboard. And one of dad’s old coats. And camping stuff from the garage.”

  “Seriously?” I said. “Even though you knew what people in town were going through? And her father?”

  “You don’t have to worry about him,” Maddy said. “He’s the reason she bailed in the first place.”

  “He’s not,” Nadja said. “Not like that, anyway.”

  “Whatever. Yes, we did it. And then we’d done it. And once we’d known about it for a day and not told anybody, people were going to crucify us anyway. So what difference to wait a day or two more?”

  “I get it,” I said. “The first lie you tell traps you into more lies. It happens to everyone.”

  Nadja nodded, looking grateful.

  “Where was she hiding out?”

  “She wouldn’t say,” Maddy said. “And it was ‘just one more night’ each time. Until then one day she didn’t appear.”

  “Or the next,” Nadja said. “We were really scared. We thought something bad had finally happened to her. But then she came back. For real. And we thought it was over.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No. She’s…she’s being really weird now. Weird and kind of scary.”

  “Did she get you to take the picture of Gina a couple days ago?”

  Maddy’s eyes widened. “Shit—you know about that, too?”

  “We do now. Why?”

  “We don’t know. She just wanted it.”