Gallows Hill (13 page)

When she entered her room, she found Kyra seated on the second of the twin beds, painting her toenails. Her radio was installed on the dresser where Sarah's tape player usually sat and was tuned as usual to a country-western station.

"Your filthy cat has been sleeping on my bed again," Kyra said by way of greeting. "It got hairs all over my pillow." She paused. "So how did it go tonight?"

"Awful," Sarah said.

"How could it have been awful?" Kyra demanded. "All that juicy info I gave you should have blown them away."

"That was hurtful stuff," Sarah said. "Where on earth did you get it?"

"My mom knows a lot of sensational stuff about the parishioners," Kyra said. "She's church secretary. It goes with the territory."

"Your mother told you all that? What a vicious creature she must be!" For the first time ever, Sarah felt some sympathy for Ted, who had lived for almost twenty years with a woman whose mind was a garbage bin.

"It's not like she volunteered it," Kyra said defensively. "I had to pump her to get it. With no husband to talk to, Mom talks a lot to me. And of course she had no idea what we were going to do with it. Eric told me he wanted personal stuff that would stun people. It's going to piss him off if you refuse to use it."

"I already told him I'm done with this," Sarah said. "If the two of you want to keep doing this, you can find yourselves another soothsayer."

"Suits me," Kyra said with a shrug. "This wasn't my idea. I only went along with it because Eric asked me to. He does things like this to let off steam."

"What do you mean, 'does things like this'?" Sarah asked her.

"Eric does a lot of things people don't know about," Kyra said. "He's got this double image, like two sides of a coin. One side is what his father wants him to be—straight-arrow, A-student, class president, captain of the debate team—the kind of guy who gets accepted at Harvard. The other side is... the other side."

"Meaning what?" Sarah prodded.

"Once in a while he's got to do something to prove to himself that he's his own person," Kyra said. "So he lives on the edge a little. I understand it. I've always understood Eric. He and I are soul mates."

"You're welcome to each other," Sarah said. "I must have been out of my mind to have gotten involved with this. Back home I had a friend named Jon who was a little bit on the wild side, but he never made me feel manipulated. Eric Garrett is something else entirely."

She got into bed and, realising that sleep was impossible until Kyra was ready to turn off the light and the music, picked up the library book and continued reading where she had left off:

Warrants were issued against Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and the slave Tituba, and on March 1, 1692, a trial was held at the meetinghouse. The magistrates sat at a table in front of the pulpit, with the audience facing them and the afflicted children in the front row. The prisoners stood in a line between the magistrates and the children.

All the prisoners firmly attested that they were not guilty. Sarah Good was examined first.

"Sarah Good, what evil spirit have you familiarity with?" Judge Hathorne asked her.

"None," she replied.

"Then why do you hurt these children?"

"I do not hurt them," Sarah Good insisted.

"Children, look here on Sarah Good and tell if she is the person who hurts you," the judge said.

Ann Putnam screamed and hurled herself to the floor, and the other girls followed suit, shouting that Sarah Good's spirit was scratching and biting them. Betty Parris looked confused and frightened, but when she realized that everyone was watching her expectantly, she started to scream also.

Sarah Osburn and Tituba were presented in the same manner, and the girls denounced them as well. All three women were found guilty of practicing witchcraft and sentenced to be hanged on Gallows Hill.

Sarah closed the book in a state of stunned bewilderment. That scene was the one she had dreamed about three nights earlier! The memory of the dream came surging back to her, and with a shudder of horror she recalled what had led her to scream.

The faces of the three women condemned to death had been those of Cindy Morris, Debbie Rice, and Misty Lamb.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

When Kyra got to school the following Monday, she was startled to find Cindy Morris waiting to intercept her out by the flagpole.

"Our group needs to talk with you privately, Kyra," Cindy said. "We've got a really bad problem, and we need your input."

Kyra was flattered and also a bit apprehensive. In keeping with her status as both a senior and the head cheerleader, Cindy devoted little of her time and attention to juniors. It had always been Kyra's secret dream to be a cheerleader, but she had never even had the nerve to try out for the squad. It wasn't enough to be cute and peppy and to know all the cheers; cheerleaders were also expected to be glamorous, long-legged, and sexy-looking. Kyra had long since accepted the fact that she had none of those attributes. Regrettably she, like Brian, bore a physical resemblance to their father rather than their mother.

"What's going on?" Kyra asked now, trying to sound as if exchanges like this one were everyday occurrences.

"We need to talk privately," Cindy repeated. "I've called a meeting at noon in the girls' dressing room at the back of the gym. Nobody will be there during lunch hour, so we'll have it to ourselves."

"What's this all about—?" Kyra started to ask, but Cindy silenced her with a wave of her hand.

"We'll tell you about it then. This is highly confidential, so don't tell anybody about the meeting. And be sure to be there. It is very, very important."

Kyra's curiosity continued to build steadily throughout a seemingly endless morning that was extended even farther by the fact that the last class ran late because the teacher had waited too long to start handing back papers. Then two girls accosted her in the hall to ask her to have lunch at their table so that they could discuss plans for a cookie sale to raise money to purchase new hymnals for the church youth choir. By the time Kyra had disentangled herself from her friends with the excuse that she had to make a phone call, and had dashed down the hall and across the back courtyard to the gym, she was running ten minutes late for her meeting with the cheerleaders. She was brimming with fear that they might have grown impatient and left.

However, when she entered the dressing room, she found all seven members of the squad assembled there waiting for her. As her eyes flicked from one gorgeous, clear-complected face to another, and took in the long, shiny manes of straight, glossy hair—all of which, except for Debbie's, were an identical shade of blond—she was uncomfortably conscious of her own orange, flyaway curls; the masses of freckles on her nose; and worse still, the zit that had erupted overnight on her chin.

"So, what's up?" she asked nervously, resisting the urge to cover her chin with her hand.

"Shut the door," Cindy said. "We need privacy. It's about Sarah Zoltanne."

"About Sarah?" Kyra exclaimed in surprise. This was the last thing she had expected.

"We need to know some things about her," Cindy said. "And since you're her... her..." She left the sentence unfinished, obviously at a loss as to the appropriate term to use.

"I'm not her anything," Kyra said firmly. "My father's going out with her mother. That's my only connection with her."

"From what I hear, they're not just dating," Cindy said. "They live together, don't they?"

"My parents are separated, and Dad has his own apartment," Kyra said carefully. "Mrs. Zoltanne and Sarah are renting a house, and my father spends time there."

"And you spend time there with them," Leanne Bush said, making it a statement rather than a question.

"Yes, sometimes. But that doesn't mean that Sarah and I are friends."

"We know that," Cindy said. "It's obvious to everybody that you hate each other. And that's understandable. And it's why we feel that we can ask you some personal things about her. But before we do, we need your promise of confidentiality. Anything that you tell us and that we tell you stops right here. Because we think we may be on to something very serious."

"Like what?" Kyra asked.

"First, we need your promise that nothing that gets said here ever goes out of here."

"I promise," Kyra said immediately.

"Good. Then here's what we want to know. It's no secret that you sometimes sleep over at the Zoltanne house, and that you and Sarah share a bedroom. So what does she do at night? I mean, after you're both in bed. Does she say her prayers?"

"I've never heard her do that," Kyra said.

"Not to anybody? Not to God or... to... anybody?"

"No," Kyra said. "At least she doesn't do it out loud." She thought that a rather odd question. Who else did people pray to if not to God?

"Is there anything strange that she does do at night when she's in bed?"

"Well..." Kyra searched her mind. "She does seem to have a lot of nightmares."

"What makes you think that?"

"She cries out in her sleep a lot. She moans and sobs and jabbers stuff. It's impossible to get a good night's sleep in that room, especially when my pillow's always covered with cat hair."

"Cat hair?" Leanne Bush repeated eagerly, pouncing on the comment. "You mean Sarah Zoltanne owns a cat? I don't suppose it happens to be black, does it?"

"Well, actually, yes," Kyra said. "That's why it's so nasty when it sheds on a pink bedspread."

"A familiar!" Leanne cried triumphantly. "Witches all have familiars, usually cats and birds!"

"She told my little sister, Amy, that she was sending a big bird to her bedroom at night," Jennifer Albritton said with a shudder. "Amy repeated that to Mom. Amy thought Sarah was talking about her night-light, but Mom's pretty sharp. She guessed right off that something wasn't right about Sarah. I mean, how could she know that Amy's a Sesame Street freak?"

"What else does she do in her room that seems unusual?" Cindy asked.

Kyra thought a moment and then said, "She plays weird music. There aren't any melodies, and the only vocals are chanting."

"I wonder what she does in that house when you aren't there," Jennifer said. "The cat and the bird thing is scary, especially if she's sending them in little children's windows. Maybe I ought to ask Danny and his friends to stake out the house just to see what kind of visitors come and go at night."

"You said Sarah talks in the night," Leanne said to Kyra. "Do you think she casts spells?"

"I don't know," Kyra said. "I can't understand her. But she and her mother sure put some sort of spell on my father. He's a whole different person from what he used to be. My mother is making herself sick, she's so upset about it."

"She's not making herself sick," Debbie Rice said with certainty. "What's more likely is that Sarah's put a curse on her."

"A curse?" Kyra repeated in bewilderment.

"Sarah's been doing something I don't think you know about," Cindy said. "We haven't any of us wanted to talk to you about it, because we know how she and her mother have destroyed your family, and we knew it would hurt you to have to discuss her with people you don't know well. But the time has come when we can't keep silent any longer. Sarah has been doing something evil, and I'm ashamed to say that all of us here have been her victims." She paused for effect. "Sarah has been telling fortunes."

"You mean at the carnival?" Kyra asked carefully.

"Well, of course she did it there, and almost all of us got our fortunes told. We thought it was just a game, like all the other booths. But the fortunes she told—they weren't your normal, carnival kind of fun thing. She told us things that she had no way of knowing. She even told me the name of the baby doll I had when I was little."

"That is pretty creepy," Kyra conceded, grateful that no one had pegged her as the source of the private information.

"But that's not the half of it," Cindy went on. "The thing is, later she started up a fortune-telling business, with Eric Garrett as her manager. When I asked Eric about it, he told me she talked him into it by letting him think the proceeds were going into the class treasury. A few members of our group who didn't get fortunes told at the carnival had heard about what she'd done there and—well, naturally they got curious. So, against their better judgment, they made appointments. Just for a lark. And of course for the good of the class. And where do you think she was doing this?"

"I can't imagine," Kyra said.

"It was at your dad's apartment on Barn Street! Mrs. Zoltanne probably agreed to keep him occupied so that Sarah could use his place. I don't know how Sarah got the key. Maybe she didn't need one. Maybe she has the ability to walk through locked doors. The fortunes she told at your dad's place were worse than the ones at the carnival. She actually put curses on people."

"What do you mean?" Kyra asked, startled.

"Do you want to begin?" Cindy asked, turning to Debbie.

"She told me she was going to force my sister to steal my boyfriend," Debbie said. "You know how crazy I was about Buzz Tyson. I've never even looked at any other guy."

"Not even Bucky?" Leanne asked suspiciously.

"Never! Leanne, he's your boyfriend! I'd never even think about stealing a guy from a fellow cheerleader!"

Leanne remained silent and lifted an eyebrow.

"She said she was going to make Grace hit on Buzz," Debbie continued. "She was going to put a spell on them so that they'd go so wild about each other, they'd lose control and run off together. She looked in her crystal ball and saw them eloping! Of course I didn't believe her. I knew how crazy Buzz was about me, and he and Grace hardly knew each other. But when I got home that night, Grace wasn't there. And when I phoned Buzz's place, he wasn't there!

"Later that week Grace phoned us from Florida. She and Buzz were married by a justice of the peace—they didn't have the nerve to go to Reverend Morris—and they're living in a one-room walk-up with roaches. The only job Buzz could get was ushering in a movie theater, and Grace is a waitress at a diner. She says it was the mistake of her life and she doesn't know what got into her. Neither of them knows. It's just like some unseen force shoved them onto that bus." She paused, then said, "That unseen force was Sarah Zoltanne!"

"But how could she—?" Kyra began.

"It wasn't just them. Just wait till you hear what she did to Misty's mother!"

"I got my fortune told last Friday," Misty said. "The only reason I went was because I'd heard so much about her that I wanted to see for myself. She looked in the ball and told me that my mother was alone in a kitchen with a yellow linoleum floor. How could she know the color of our kitchen floor?"

"I don't know," Kyra said in honest confusion. That was not part of the information she had given Sarah. She herself had never been in the Lamb home, and Misty seldom, if ever, invited people over.

"She said she saw my mother arranging leaves in a vase," Misty went on. "And then my mother dropped the vase, and it broke. There was water all over the floor, and Mom slipped in it and fell. When I heard that, I ran out of there and drove home like a bat out of hell. I raced into the house, and there was Mom, on the kitchen floor, just like Sarah said she'd be. She'd hit her head on the edge of the sink when she fell. I dialed nine-one-one and they sent an ambulance. If I hadn't gotten there in time, she probably would have died!"