Malice (15 page)

Lysander was running the moment his feet hit the ground. Sam sprinted alongside him, sucking in greedy lungfuls of air. They skittered to a stop only when the cemetery faded from view. Lysander perched his hands on the tops of his knees, his chest expanding and contracting. His hand went inside his pocket and his fingers walked over the strange object he had found.

“What happened to you back there?” Sam asked angrily.

“I’m not really sure,” was all he could say in reply.

“Your ‘not really sure’ nearly got us killed.”

Lysander’s hand came out with the object. His voice was unsteady as he said, “I saw that woman burn to death tonight. All those years ago, but it felt as close to me as you are right now.”

She took the object from him and examined it. “Looks like a clump of shit to me.”

“There’s something underneath. I’ve just got to clean it away.”

Sam’s eyes stayed fixed on him. “You’re worrying me. This whole thing is getting out of hand.”

The turn for her street was up ahead. She would have to go home now. Sweaty and breathing like Marion Jones after the hundred meter. Not an easy thing to explain to the head of the Gestapo, Herr Crow.

Lysander pleaded with her. “We’re getting closer. It’s crazy, I know, but I feel it. Feel it so much stronger now than I did before.”

They parted not long after, Lysander still busy with his new discovery.

As he walked, he began to see something appear beneath the layers of dirt. He stopped on a hill and stood under the dim light of a lamppost, trying to make out exactly what he was seeing. Could it be the same locket that Rebecca Goodman had worn? Lysander’s heart began to race. He brushed a finger over its worn surface until a metallic gleam stared back at him. All at once, he was sure. In his hands was the locket he had seen around the witch’s neck, three hundred years ago.

The voice to his left seemed to come out of nowhere. The fright sent an electric charge pulsing through his whole body.

Reverend Small’s wrinkled face was hard to make out through the gloom inside the car. The passenger-side window slid all the way down. “What on earth are you doing, son? Don’t you have school tomorrow?”

“I’m heading home.”

Small looked at the road ahead and then back at Lysander. “Go on, get in. Wouldn’t be neighborly of me to just leave you.” A big smile filled his face.

Lysander thought about the other night, when he had seen the reverend hitting that dog. Part of him wondered if getting in this car meant he was next.

If he tries anything I’ll beat him down
, Lysander thought with over-inflated bravado and got in.

The car started up. His breathing had just begun to settle when the reverend spoke.

“What have you got there?” The old guy was eyeing the locket in Lysander’s hand. He had still been polishing its worn metal surface without thinking. A dull shine was coming back.

Small stretched out a hand. The silver ring with the fish on it winked at him from a passing streetlight. “Mind if I see?”

Lysander hesitated.

Small let his hand fall to his lap. “That’s all right, then. Where’d you find that old thing anyhow? Looks like the kinda broach my mother used to wear. Carried her heart on her sleeve for everyone to see. Bit of a cliché I suppose, but in her case it was true.”

“I found it lying on the ground,” Lysander said, hating the stupidity of his lie, but not feeling an ounce of guilt for having told it.

They came to a red light. “The one my mother owned had two pictures inside,” Reverend Small offered, “one of her and one of myself.”

Lysander fingered the lump of darkened metal in his hands, finding it surprisingly thin and light. He inspected it more closely. There was a small slit down the side, but no real way of prying it open without using something that would surely wreck it. He dug the edge of his nail into the slit and jimmied it until he heard a popping sound. As the locket opened, Reverend Small looked on with keen interest. The light turned green, but he didn’t move. The light in his eyes had changed too. When he saw Lysander looking out at the streetlight, he started up the car again.

“What do you see, Lysander?”

Lysander strained to make it out. There was so much sediment, he wondered if someone at a museum wasn’t better suited to handle this.

“Looks like an expensive piece,” Small said. “I’m sure someone’s missing it. Someone who may very well belong to our congregation. I’ll bet I could find them in a jiffy.”

They pulled into Lysander’s lane and Small stopped the car and held out his hand. It was fleshy and smelled of discount aftershave.

Lysander knew full well he wasn’t looking for a farewell shake. The honest expression on the old man’s face made Lysander feel he had done something terribly wrong by digging the locket up. Regardless of everything that had happened, it didn’t belong to him. But another voice was telling him he should keep it. The time wasn’t right to give it up yet.

The locket hovered over Small’s hand between Lysander’s index finger and his thumb. Then suddenly he snapped it away. “I think I’m gonna hold on to it for a bit,” he said.

Disappointment registered on the reverend’s face, as though Lysander had failed some significant test. “Well, let me know if you have a change of heart,” was about all the old man said. “I’m sure I could find the right home for it.”

Lysander got out of the car, barely aware as the reverend backed his car up and drove away. He was still looking at the locket. There were two portraits inside. Barely visible. The first of a man, the second a woman. Perhaps they were married. Rebecca Goodman and her husband. Looking at the locket, Lysander realized the reverend had been right. The locket did look old and expensive. But there was something else the old man said that was making the skin on Lysander’s scalp feel like it was crawling with insects. Whoever lost an heirloom this precious would be looking for it. Whoever lost it would want it back.

Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord.

—Romans 12:19

Sam came home from her doctor’s appointment to a dark and gloomy house. She found her father sitting in a pool of dim light. He glanced up from the newspaper he was reading and then fell back into it.

His lackadaisical manner infuriated her. Just a few minutes ago, she had been freezing her ass off waiting for a lift and where was he? Out on some important police business? Of course not. He was at home reading the goddamn newspaper.

She went up to him with the intention of laying into her father for something he had been guilty of more than once. But when she looked down at the article he was reading she stopped dead in her tracks. Today was the fiftieth anniversary of Millingham High. On the front page was a picture taken on the day of the school’s founding. Two men standing out in front of a pristine-looking high school. James McMurphy was one of them. A chill ran up her back. She had seen this picture before. The one that had fallen out of McMurphy’s journal. The man beside McMurphy was smiling, but that picture had been different before. McMurphy had had a shotgun in his mouth and the other man…the other man had seemed so proud of himself. She glanced down at the caption. It spoke of the dedication ceremony and the two men who had made it happen. McMurphy was one. The other, she didn’t recognize, not from such an old picture, but she knew the name.

“Samantha? For God’s sake, what is it?” Samantha could hear her father’s voice calling from far away.

She tore the paper from his hands. “I need this.”

“Jesus Christ!” he shouted, eyes wide with bewilderment, a thin strip of paper remaining in his clenched fist. Samantha did not remain to see the look that darkened her father’s face. She raced up to her room to get ready for the Halloween party, leaving her father alone to mutter to himself. She picked up the phone and called Lysander’s house. The small and tired voice that answered belonged to Lysander’s mother, a weary woman set to deliver any day now. Too bad. What she had in her hands was a matter of life or death. His mother told her Lysander was at work and from there he was going straight to Jason Gibb’s party. Samantha started getting ready. There wasn’t a second to lose.

***

By the time Lysander got to the costume party, the sky was a deep shade of purple. He stood on the street outside and fixed his costume. Inside, masses of people were crowding every window. At the last minute he had decided that his costume would be alienation. He had dug up a huge curly wig from his mother’s closet, drew deep lines under his eyes—complements of her Maybelline mascara—and sported the rattiest old clothes he could find. In truth, he looked more like a bag lady, but he was unrecognizable and he figured at the very least, he’d have himself a good laugh or two.

Lysander put a hand up to his face to check his breath. He knew Summer would be here tonight, and the thought made him feel warm inside. Then he remembered that Chad and his friends were likely to show up as well. Just as quickly that fuzzy feeling withered away and died.

The front door swung open, and someone wearing a skin-colored body suit and a strap-on dildo stood staring at him. The boy was Tim Appleby from Mr. Bennett’s English class. Lysander guessed by the looks of things that Tim was supposed to be horniness or something equally as crass. Either way, he didn’t want to ask Tim where he got the strap-on dildo in case it had come from his mother’s top drawer, which in all likelihood it had.

Tim stepped back and then doubled over, cackling. “Oh, I get it, you’re Cher.” Tim put a hand on his shoulder. “There’s a keg in the kitchen, little buddy. Go help yourself.”

Lysander waded through a sea of bodies. When he finally made it into the kitchen, he thought about the decision he had made earlier today. The decision to make a play for Summer tonight. A surge of fear and self-doubt about that idea nearly convinced him he was making a big mistake. Lysander fought off the feelings of inadequacy. He would go through with it no matter what, he told himself.

Lysander grabbed a plastic cup and poured himself a beer. He kicked the keg and it moved slightly.
Already half empty
, he thought. Something caught his eye at the other end of the room. Summer was wearing a flowing white gown, a halo and a pair of ivory-colored wings. The whole setup seemed a bit overdone, but she looked amazing nevertheless. To his best guess she was dressed as “angelic perfection,” or something similar. She was flanked on either side by two boys Lysander didn’t recognize; one in a gold suit with glasses and an oversized dollar sign necklace, his pockets bulging with fake hundred-dollar bills; the other tall and slim, hunched over with a snickering face and long fingernails—greed and envy.

Summer’s eyes met his and she stared at him quizzically. Lysander threw off his wig, and a broad smile filled her face. Her eyes sparkled. She raised her drink and he raised his own in return. Lysander threw his wig back on and mumbled to himself amid a growing torrent of butterflies:
Carpe diem
. Seize the day.

Samantha arrived at the party to a keg that was almost empty. She knew because of the ease with which it moved when she tilted it to one side. Tom Logan had picked her up at home in his parents’ Suburban—a car far too imposing for such a skinny guy. That was her initial impression, seeing him pull into the driveway. He had been pestering her to go with him to Gibb’s Halloween party since nearly the first day of school.

Someone put on Godsmack’s “Speak” and the place exploded. But the feeling sweeping over Samantha just then was far from elation. She felt coldness seeping through her clothes and onto her skin, as though death had laid a long skeletal finger upon her. And then another sensation came, the feeling that a pair of glowing red eyes had fixed her in their sights. She could feel them burrowing into the soft flesh at her temples, tunneling into her mind …

She turned on her heels and saw Tom Logan, smiling obligingly behind her. The creeping began to fade, and she let go of it, for now.

In the corner, a boy dressed as a giant dollar bill was making out with a blonde girl in red. Stenciled on her shirt was the Soviet hammer and sickle. Communism and Capitalism. Hmm, so good to see the world coming together, Samantha thought wryly. The couple kissing triggered another thought. The very reason she had been so anxious to get here tonight in the first place. She had spent the better part of the way here being so annoyed with Tom Logan that it had actually slipped from her mind.

She scanned the party for Lysander, biting her inner lip.

He was probably the only one she knew who didn’t want anything to do with cell phones. Yet another reason he was a Luddite. Finding Lysander was going to be more challenging than she initially thought. Jason Gibb’s place wasn’t enormous, but with everyone decked out in costumes it was difficult to tell one person from another. If she knew Lysander at all, he was wearing some unusual homemade concoction, thrown together at the last minute.

She started to leave the room, ready to search somewhere else when something, or better yet someone, caught her eye. In the corner of the room was a man dressed as a clown. The kind of clown you’d expect at a child’s birthday party. He was bent over at the waist, with his back to her, but he didn’t seem to be picking anything up. The costume seemed weird too, out of place somehow. As if a wraith had slipped in among them, ready to …