Deadwood (5 page)

The dull red and gold earrings Hannah wore now were the same ones she got that first Christmas—a reward for following instructions, turning her earrings constantly and dousing the wounds with hydrogen peroxide. Waverly's lobes had gotten infected and swollen, but that hadn't stopped her from amassing a wardrobe of earrings that filled a rack, pair by sparkling pair.

Hannah thought Waverly would be mad at her after their phone argument, but she had found a stream of apologetic voice mails on the family's machine. The first time stamp was from before she had even gotten to the Spirit Tree. Each message pitched more desperate than the last, Waverly begging for forgiveness for leaving Hannah to do something by herself. Thank goodness. Placating Waverly was one thing Hannah didn't want to worry about this morning.

“Do you believe in curses, Dr. Wiggins?” Hannah kept peeking over her shoulder, but the only thing she saw behind them was the front wheel of her bike spinning in the bike rack whenever the SUV went over a bump.

“I'm not proud of it, but words slip out now and then when somebody cuts me off in traffic,” he said.

“Not that kind of curse. Bad luck and eternal misery—that sort of thing.”

“Don't tell me you girls have been experimenting with that stuff,” he said. His glasses glinted at her in the rearview mirror. “A lot of girls went through that witchy phase when I was young, but it's a waste of time.”

“Please, Dad,” Waverly interrupted. “We have better things to do.”

Hannah ignored her. “How do you know witchcraft is a waste of time?”

Dr. Wiggins laughed. “Well, if anybody had been trying out love potions on me, I would have had an easier time getting a date to the senior prom.”

“Come on, Dad,” Waverly said. Dr. Wiggins pulled the SUV into the Lower Brynwood Middle School drop-off line. Not that this line of questioning was going anywhere. Dr. Wiggins wasn't a witch doctor—he was an optometrist. He often joked that he only believed what he could see with his own two eyes. Hannah felt the same way, but she had experienced something crazy at the Spirit Tree herself, and she barely believed it.

“You know, Hannah, I'd be happy to pick you up at your house,” he said as he detached the bright pink bike from the car's rack.

“I don't want to be any trouble. Besides, I need my bike to get home after soccer practice.”

“Then why don't you just ride your bike all the way to school? You were only in the car for three blocks.”

Waverly shook her head. “If she did that, we wouldn't be able to walk into school together.” Hannah shrugged. She had never noticed that, for an only child, Waverly sure hated to be alone.

“Silly me,” said Dr. Wiggins, climbing back into the driver's seat. He knew better than to hug Waverly goodbye in front of the school. Hannah raised her hand when she caught him waving out the window, but if Waverly saw him, she didn't show any sign. Instead she just slouched by the bike rack as Hannah threaded the lock around the steel tubes.

A bus disgorged a flow of kids. Waverly didn't bother to move, but Hannah thought she spied Martin, pushed along in the human tide. She halfway lifted her hand to wave, but he was gone, if he had been there at all.

At the beginning of social studies she realized she was on the receiving end of the silent treatment, and she didn't like it. Martin was ignoring her. She'd never fully registered his presence in class before, but he sat just a few rows from her. He wouldn't look at her, just sat with his iPod on, doodling some kind of hideous tree demon in his notebook. He whipped off his earbuds before Mr. Michaelson came through the door. As usual, Martin never raised his hand during class—no wonder. They were in the middle of a unit on state and local history, and there was no way Martin could be prepared. Hannah's hand shot into the air at nearly every question, but Mr. Michaelson only called on her whenever no one else seemed to know the answer.

“Can anyone explain our town's original name?” His eyes flicked over the class, which looked half-asleep. “Hannah?”

“The town was named for the first mayor, Thomas Brynwood, who had been a garrison officer for George Washington and owned land in the area,” she said.

Mr. Michaelson shook his head and looked at her over his rimless glasses. “That's true, but this area has only been called Brynwood since 1897. I was talking about the
original
name. Anyone else?”

“Millville,” Martin said, as if it had just occurred to him out of the blue. “I saw it on one of those green history signs in the park. I guess it was named for a mill.”

“That's right. Millville was known for production of flour in Thomas Brynwood's time, as well as gunpowder and textiles. The town was renamed in the charter-holder's honor during the one-hundredth anniversary of its incorporation after the war,” said Mr. Michaelson. “Next time, raise your hand, Mr. Cruz.”

Hannah turned to stare down Martin, annoyed that he'd answered the question she missed. Now he finally looked at her, sideways, with a little smile. Was he mocking her? They were supposed to be in this together. She decided to look on the bright side. At least he wasn't as clueless as she'd first thought.

The day passed way too slowly, and yet Hannah deliberately sidled through the west exit doors fifteen minutes after the final bell rang. Martin stood next to her bike, his iPod on and his hands jammed into his pockets.

“I wasn't sure you were coming,” he said, his eyes narrowed in the bright September sunshine as he popped his earbuds out.

“I keep my word. It took a while to lose Waverly. Usually we hang out if I don't have soccer practice, but I'm not sure she's ready for, well, this situation.”

“Like you were ready,” Martin snorted.

“True. I haven't spent as much time as you pretending to be an elf and talking to trees.” She glared at him, and neither of them blinked. At last Hannah sighed and said, “Ready or not, we should head back to the Spirit Tree and see what we can find out.”

“Great. We can interrogate the tree,” Martin said. “If the tree can send messages, maybe it can answer them, too.”

Hannah gave him a dismissive look as she secured her messenger bag to the back of the bike. “You ask the questions. In the meantime, there are plenty of clues right in the carvings. We don't need any magic for that—just observation and logic.”

“Yeah, I'm sure there's an instruction manual written on the bark.”

Hannah concentrated on unlocking her bike to avoid another staring contest. “We've got to use whatever we've got,” she said through gritted teeth. “If the tree has an operator standing by, we'll ask questions. Otherwise, we'll look at the clues carved in the bark.”

“Fair enough.”

Hannah heaved her bike from the rack and started to walk beside it, but Martin threw his second backpack strap over his shoulder. “You can ride,” he said. “I'll run.”

“It's pretty far.”

“I'm pretty fast.”

“Fine.” Hannah swung a leg over the seat and pushed off first, but Martin accelerated more quickly and caught up. She could already hear Martin breathing next to her—not winded, just the rhythmic exhalations of a practiced runner, his sinewy arms pumping in time. He had put his earbuds in and grasped the iPod in his left hand. A little rude, she thought, but she liked music when she ran, too. He seemed to be in his own world, staring straight ahead, but she kept stealing glances over at him, wanting to say something. After all, they were supposed to be together. At last she couldn't stand the silence.

“How much do you run, anyway?” she asked, loudly so he could hear her over whatever he was listening to.

He didn't look at her. “Forty or fifty miles a week.”

Hannah whistled.

Martin grinned, the same little sudden smile he had flashed her in social studies. She couldn't help smiling back.

“I'm training,” Martin huffed, “for a marathon…with my mom.”

“Your mom? But I thought…”

“She's in Afghanistan. She trains on a treadmill—the roads are too dangerous there. But when she gets back, we're going to run a race together.”

“Which one?” Hannah shifted gears and pedaled a little harder as they hit an incline.

Martin didn't slow down at the hill, but loud breaths punctuated his speech. “Don't know…started training for a 5k…then a 10k…then a half-marathon…didn't get to do them…but now we're ready…for the big one…whenever she comes back.”

Hannah's mother was barely ready for a walk around the block these days. Sometimes she embarrassed her daughter with her ever-expanding butt, but Hannah couldn't imagine not seeing her for months—even years.

“And you don't have to shout,” he said. “I can hear you just fine.”

The streets of the Brynwood Estates passed underneath them, winding in circles and dead-end cul-de-sacs.

“Stop.” Hannah's brakes squealed, and Martin ran into her back tire. “The witch's house.” She pointed. “You're supposed to stop here and count as high as you can until you get scared. Waverly and I used to dare each other, but now I just like to look at it.”

From the street, the first floor of the brownstone cottage was barely visible behind the thicket of tumbling blue and purple asters and fountains of yellow maiden grass. The grand wrought-iron gate stood open, tall enough to reach the second floor of the cottage, but a tangle of bittersweet and honeysuckle had made a trellis of the rusted swirls. The thickness of the vines proved the gates hadn't swung shut in many years. The driveway between them was cracked asphalt, lined on either side with granite blocks, continuing past the cottage and ending in a pile of rubble at the willow fence that demarcated the back garden. Once, Hannah knew, the road must have continued for nearly a half-mile to Brynwood Hall, the old mansion where Thomas Brynwood himself had lived after the Revolutionary War, when he was a rich old man and the town's founder. Now the only thing back there was the high-school athletic fields.

“That's Jenna Blitzer's place,” Martin said.

“What?” Hannah slid off the seat and put her feet flat on the pavement.

“I thought you knew everything about this town.”

“I do. Everybody calls this the witch's house, like Hansel and Gretel.”

“I thought you didn't believe in magic.” He bent over and rested his hands on his knees, still breathing heavily—proof that he was human, and not a robot after all.

“I don't!” She could feel her face getting hot and hoped she wasn't as red as Martin. “Nobody believes she's a witch—well, nobody over the age of eight.”

“My Aunt Michelle would bulldoze the whole place under if she could. Jenna's exempt from the Brynwood Estates Community Association rules.”

Hannah considered the house, twisting the ruby in her right ear. “It's spooky, but I always liked it.”

“Me, too,” said Martin, grinning. “I like anything that drives Aunt Michelle crazy.”

8

Wood Fall

T
he trail through Brynwood Park ran parallel to Mill Creek, the shallow run that had carved the valley and once powered Thomas Brynwood's mill, according to the sign at the park entrance. The running path, uneven from erosion, seemed steeper to Martin today, now that he was walking instead of running. He noticed flattened soda cans and plastic bags caught in the brush and wished he were alone instead of with a bossy girl.

“I'm going to run the rest of the way,” he said, and took off. He felt like a ranger again, running through the trees, practically leaping from trunk to trunk like a squirrel. The place was magical. Dark magic, light magic—it didn't matter.

The water gurgled musically over the flat rocks, and as Martin climbed he imagined himself flowing up as the water flowed down. The saplings growing on either side of the creek stretched upward, nearly meeting at the center as they reached for the sun, away from the dappled shadow of the canopy sixty feet above them. And there was the Spirit Tree before him, its branches spread open like the fingers of a skeletal hand grasping at the sky.

The woods seemed less ominous under blue skies, but Martin still worried about what he'd find—more glowing messages, maybe. But he didn't expect the scene before him. The ground around the Spirit Tree was littered with broken branches, from twigs to heavy limbs. The tree had nearly shattered since they had been there.

He tore through the debris, tripping through the tangle of brush to get to the beech. He had barely touched the trunk when he heard Hannah behind him. She moved faster than he thought she would; he had forgotten she was a soccer player.

“I guess the lightning did more damage than we thought,” Hannah said. She picked up a fallen branch, gently stroking the yellowing leaves as if they were cat's ears. She looked up, and Martin followed her gaze. Most of the leaves overhead were still green, but straw-colored leaves flagged some of the branches.