Circle of Secrets (11 page)

C
HAPTER
N
INE

I
TRY TO THINK OF SOMETHIN’ THEY WANT.
“Y
OU MEAN LIKE
the time I yelled at my grandmother when she made me do the dishes for a month straight?”

“Why’d you have to do dishes for a whole month?”

“Talking back about chores and rules, stuff like that.”

“Not
near
bad enough,” Tara says. “That happens every day in my family.”

Alyson’s forehead wrinkles. “Tell us about your swamp witch mamma. Does she have a black cauldron in the backyard?”

I snort. “No! That’s just stupid.”

“Hey, watch who you’re calling stupid,” Tara says.

“Didn’t mean nothin’ by it,” I mutter. My heart is
pounding so hard the sound whooshes inside my ears, making me feel dizzy.

“I know,” Tara says, snapping her finger. “Let’s give her a Dare instead. She has to make a choice. Bring us back her Mamma’s spell box — or jump off the end of the pier.”

“Hey, Tara,” T-Beau says. “We never made nobody else jump off the pier their first day.”

Tara looks me up and down and gives me a sweetly sly smile. “But Shelby’s real brave, don’t you think?”

My hands close into fists and sweat breaks out on my forehead. No way I’m messing with Mirage’s spell box, let alone taking it out of the house. I’d get in trouble for the rest of my life. And no way I’m jumping off that pier into deep water with gators.

“Seeing a witch’s spell book would be great,” Alyson says. “We could try a potion, turn Ambrose into a frog or somethin’.”

Ambrose chortles with laughter, and his stomach jumps up and down. “I’ll make you a toad, Alyson,” he shoots back. “Or a cockroach.”

“I won’t settle for nothin’ less than a frog princess, Ambrose Guidry,” Alyson says, almost like she’s flirting. I wonder if she secretly likes him.

I don’t make a single peep, hoping they’ll forget about the dare
and
the truth they’re asking. The charms of the bracelet cluster against my fingers, as though trying to comfort me. I hold them tight against my palm, trying to figure out what to do. That girl Larissa was right. I shouldn’t have come out here. My whole body feels tense, just waiting for something bad to happen.

“Oh, look,” Tara says, pointing at me. “New girl’s got a charm bracelet. Hey, let me see it.”

The whopping in my ears goes a hundred miles an hour now. “It’s my mamma’s,” I say weakly, holding my hand against my chest.

“Even better!” she exclaims, getting up from her wooden plank seat and jumping from the piling back to the bridge. I’m shocked at how easily she does that. Having long legs has advantages.

“Let me put it on.” She grabs my hand and uncurls my fingers.

Instantly, Alyson leaps up and back onto the bridge to hold my other arm so I can’t fight off either one of them. Her fingers curled tight around my arm hurt and leave red marks.

Tara is good. And fast. In two seconds, she unclasps the bracelet and holds it up, fingering each of the little charms,
the silver chain dangling dangerously over the water. I think about that bracelet being passed through so many generations, almost two hundred years old, and feel sick through and through.

“Please give it back,” I plead. “It’s actually an heirloom.”

“An heirloom? Don’t you sound like a city girl?” Tara laughs and her pretty white teeth sparkle in the sunlight. She seems to take delight in my agony. She couldn’t care less about making friends or my bracelet or me drowning right in front of her eyes.

Tara tosses the bracelet back and forth between her palms and any minute now I’m gonna hurl. “Please, please,
please
don’t drop it in the water!”

I’d taken that bracelet and worn it against Mirage’s orders. If I lost it, she was gonna hate me forever. ’Course, why’d I care about her feelings now? I’d been hating her all year long myself.

Standing there on that broken bridge, all them kids staring at me, it hits me hard that I like that old-fashioned bracelet. I want it to be mine for keeps next year on my twelfth birthday. I want to keep it forever and put my own charms on it someday.

“Here’s the deal. You get your
heirloom
back as soon as you take the dare and jump in the water,” Tara says. “We’ll count
to ten and T-Beau will fish you out. That’s a better deal than anybody else ever had.”

I think about Larissa and start really wondering what happened to her. Wonder about that awful scar. Wonder about the truth.

“Never took swimming lessons,” I say, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “What if my head cracks on all them rotted planks?”

Then I glance down, trying to hide the tears, and make eye contact with Jett, who suddenly glances away.

“Aw, come on, Tara,” Jett says, not looking at me. “That dumb bracelet might be worth some money. What if the police come and arrest us for stealin’ the dern thing? Let’s go back to shore and go wadin’ instead.”

Tara lays the charm bracelet across her legs, and I almost throw up as it slips and slides across her shorts, nearly falling right into the muddy water. Tara looks up at Jett, and the expression on her face wavers. Obviously, he has influence over her.

That’s when it hits me. This is my chance.

Do it, do it, do it,
my brain chants. Before I lose my nerve, I scoop the bracelet off Tara’s lap, jump to my feet, and tear straight down the middle of the bridge, trying not to fall over the edge as the wooden planks shudder and shake.

Leaping over the steps to the soft muddy banks, I keep running. Straight up the slope, down the road, until I reach the cemetery wall. Hoping no one’s following me, I race along the perimeter of the graveyard until I run smack into the gates. A graveyard’s gotta be the perfect place to hide out for a while. Nobody’ll think I’ve come here.

Quick as I can, I dart inside and fall to the ground, gasping like I’m gonna pass out for sure. Overhead, the clouds jump and whirl, my eyes go dark, and then clear again as I gulp in air.

Catching my breath, I lie there in the prickly grass listening, hoping nobody saw where I ran to, prayin’ hard as I can that they’ll think I’d never have the guts to actually go inside the cemetery. I stare up into the big old oaks and watch the flat green leaves whisper back and forth in the breeze. It’s quiet and peaceful and my heart quits jumpin’ so crazy. It’s for certain that a cemetery, even an old scary one, is nowhere near as bad as getting pushed off that bridge.

Finally, I roll over and kneel at the old stone wall, dark green with moss. I peek over the edge and see that the road is clear. No voices or kids. Not even any cars in sight. Am I safe? Was Larissa tellin’ the truth after all? Is the bridge where she got that terrible ugly scar?

I imagine her falling into the water, the long rusted nails
tearing at her face as she hits those slimy boards. I picture Larissa bleeding, rushed to the hospital.

The drops of blood on the pier.
Maybe that blood is actually hers. Maybe that whole story of the girl who got struck by lightning is just something they made up to scare me. Scare all the new kids while they try to get you to jump in or fall in. Scare you forever just so they can keep a hold on you. Like they did to Larissa. She’s still afraid of them, all this time later.

I lean against the rough stone wall and slowly unclench my fingers holding the charm bracelet tight in my fist. I count the charms, all eight of them. Safe, the silver clasps intact.

Can’t help shuddering, thinking about how close I came to losing it. What would Mirage have done if her antique family bracelet had sunk to the bottom of the bayou? She’d send me away forever, maybe to an orphanage or somewhere horrible until my daddy got back. Maybe she’d pretend I never existed or tell Daddy I’d run away.

It could happen. She left me once already. I take a swipe at my eyes, thinking about how I may not be worth as much as a charm bracelet, especially an antique heirloom from the Civil War.

I hold the silver loops up to the sunlight and study the charms, thinking about how I should have left it at home like
I was supposed to. If Mirage knew I’d secretly worn it, she’d probably hide it away permanently. Keep it hers forever and I’d never get it.

The sunlight moves, catching the blue bottle just right. My heart does a handstand, backflip, and somersault all at the same time inside my chest.

The little blue bottle charm has something inside.

It takes a minute to get the miniature piece of cork out, but finally I do and lay it carefully on the stone wall so I don’t lose it in the grass. The tiniest piece of paper has been rolled tight, tight, tight inside. Someone was very careful when they rolled it perfectly round, perfectly snug, so it would fit.

Carefully, I unroll the paper and suck in my breath. The black ink writing is intact, not even smudged. All my fears of being chased by the kids from school, of falling in the bayou, getting eaten by a gator, fly right out of my head.

The note is terrifying.

She’s dead. She’s dead! I’ll never forgive myself long as I live.

C
HAPTER
T
EN

S
URE AS HECK MY EYES ARE
NOT
PLAYING TRICKS ON ME.

“She’s dead?” I whisper, reading the words. My voice seems to echo over and over again in the silent graveyard.

Who wrote this? It sounded like
they
killed her.

I’ll never forgive myself long as I live.

This charm bracelet belonged to Mirage. Did she put the note inside the tiny blue bottle? I can’t picture her writing this. Maybe it was written by my swamp witch
grand-mère
and not by Mirage at all. If that was true, this spooky note would have been inside the blue bottle charm for decades.

No, that can’t be right at all. Mirage told me that my
grand-mère
put away her own charms when she gave Mirage the bracelet. All the charms on the bracelet right
now
belong to Mirage.

Plus the rolled-up piece of paper wasn’t faded and falling apart like it was sixty years old. Maybe the blue bottle charm
came with the note.
Maybe it was put there by someone else.

The afternoon is so muggy it’s like the air is sweating, but I feel cold.

Now I wonder … is the blue bottle
charm
note connected to the blue bottle
tree
notes? I’m pretty sure this tiny, rolled-up note is in the same handwriting as the second bottle note I found. I can’t wait to get home to double-check. But why did someone put notes in the blue bottles in the first place? Is there a secret story behind them?

Guess I could ask Mirage … but she’s not the kind of person who would put notes in a bottle. Besides, who’d she be writing to? Nobody else lives near Cypress Cove. All them notes were
meant
to be read by someone. They were heartfelt, like someone afraid or heartbroken. Mirage couldn’t have written them since she didn’t have many heartfelt feelings of her own. If she did, she wouldn’t have left me and my daddy. She would have stayed in New Iberia with us. With me. She would have told Grandmother Phoebe that
she
was the
mamma, and not let her run everything. She wouldn’t have disappeared into her bedroom soon as she got home. She wouldn’t have stopped talking to everyone, or acted like she was irritated and angry all the time.

All them months before Mirage ran away from home, she did it all wrong. Even if Grand-mère
was
sick. Kids ran away from home, not mammas.

My eyes feel hot and scratchy. When I glance up, all of a sudden I can’t see too good.

Most of all, Mirage should have wanted me more than she did.

I take a gulp, trying to hold it all in. Maybe I’m thinking too much because my head hurts. My heart hurts. And now my whole body does, too.

Mirage should have taken Daddy and me with her. She could have asked us to run away with her. And my daddy should have gone after her and stopped her car from driving away instead of locking himself in his room for a week.

My chest gets a funny sharp pain, right under my ribs, and I press my fingers against the spot. I’m in a graveyard wanting to cry my eyes out, but I feel stupid. And I want my pillow.

Falling back to the grass, I press the little blue bottle charm
note to my chest and hold the bracelet against my eyes, wondering who the
she
is that died, wondering where she’s buried. Right here in this graveyard?

The grass tickles my neck and I roll over, spooked, as I look out over all them graves. Where are
her
bones — the
she
from the note? How long has she been underneath the earth in her coffin?

I lurch to my feet, feeling dizzy, and chew on the fat, hard blister inside my cheek that always hurts. Wiping the dew on my palms across my jeans, I glance around and try to get my bearings.

The cemetery sits inside a low stone wall, but there are rows and rows of headstones, angels, stone slabs, small markers, and big family granite plots with names engraved in fancy lettering.

Now that it’s past noon, it’s not so spooky. The trees rustle overhead like they’re chattering back and forth with one another.

In the back of the graveyard, the cut grass slopes downward and I’m pretty sure there’s a little creek inside the cypress cluster at the bottom of the cemetery. Somebody mowed recently.

I roll the small note up tight and slide it back into the blue bottle charm. After stuffing in the cork, I clasp
the bracelet around my wrist again. The charms make a tinkling sound as I walk up and down the rows, checking out names.

Ten minutes later, I come on a newer grave. The grass is growing back in clumps, and the marker is small and made of wood, like somebody who don’t have much money. Simple block letters with the name A
NNIE
C
HAISSON
and a recent death date.

A peculiar emotion rushes up to my heart and closes up my throat. That’s my
grand-mère.
Small and insignificant. ’Course she’d be buried in Bayou Bridge Cemetery. I’d missed the funeral. Grandmother Phoebe wouldn’t let me play hooky from school for it. I wonder how much Mirage cried when her mamma passed, after taking care of her all them months. I wonder if she misses her. I wonder if she was mad I didn’t come to the funeral. Now I wonder if anybody came to it besides Daddy and the priest.