Mercy (2 page)

Haley switched the camera over to black-and-white. Now the image in the viewscreen looked eerie. She stopped the
exposure down to darken it a little. A scene from an old horror movie. All it needed was a werewolf to come around the corner.

“So why did they think she was a vampire? And dig her up and everything?” Mel had perched on another headstone to wait.

Haley took the second photo and then backed up to get a wider shot, including the stone wall, the old graves surrounding Mercy's, a willow, bare of leaves, leaning as if it were cold, turning away from the wind.

“They didn't dig her up. She wasn't buried yet. She was in that crypt over there.” The crypt was against the far wall of the cemetery, a low stone building with brush hanging over the sloping roof. It looked as if it had been dug into a hill rather than built up from the ground. “And they did it because people were dying.” Haley clicked the shutter, took a step, clicked again. “Tuberculosis. Consumption, that's what they called it.”

“Consumption. That sounds so romantic.” Mel laid the back of her hand across her forehead and sighed. “Beautiful ladies, wasting away, leaving their heartbroken lovers behind . . . ”

“Coughing up little bits of their lungs,” Haley said without looking up from the camera. She switched it back to color. She wanted a wide-angle shot. All those gravestones.

She heard the toughness in her own voice as she answered Mel. Like it didn't bother her at all, the thought of somebody dying like that.

Nineteen. Mercy had only been five years older than Haley. Four years younger than . . .

All those gravestones. The picture in her viewscreen wobbled a little.

“It's not romantic,” she said sharply, lowering the camera without taking the shot. “Mercy's mom and her older sister died of it before she did.”

The graves of Mercy's mother, Mary, and Mary's oldest daughter, Grace, were close by. This spot in the cemetery was
full of Browns. The headstones went back more than a century. None of them were big and elaborate. Elsewhere in the cemetery there were crypts, carved tombs, statues of angels, cherubs. But the Browns just had names and dates. The most you could say for Haley's ancestors was that there were a lot of them. And that they stayed put. There had been Browns in Rhode Island for hundreds of years.

“Yeah, I know.” Mel gave Haley an apologetic look. “I just—”

“And then her little brother got sick too.” Haley knew she shouldn't snap at Mel. She tried to get some lightness back in her voice. “Of course, that was the problem.”

“What was?”

“That her brother got sick. Right after she died.” Haley turned off the camera and stuffed it back in the pocket of her red fleece jacket. “That's why they took her out of the crypt. And cut her open.”

Tough
, Haley told herself.
Like it doesn't matter. Like you don't care
. Anything to make Mel stop with that look. That “I'm sorry,” look. That “I understand, you're dealing with so much,” look.

This time Mel made a sound like
erck
.

“And when they found fresh blood in her heart, that was it. They decided she was a vampire.”

“That's really disgusting.”

“Not as disgusting as what they did with the ashes of her heart.”

“What?”

“You don't want to know. It's too disgusting.”

“Ha-ley!”

“Okay, okay.”
A joke. It's all a joke
. “They mixed the ashes with water or something and gave it to her little brother to drink.”

“That is so
disgusting
!”

“I told you.”

With the camera back in her pocket, Haley began to feel nervousness creep over her. It started in her feet. Restless, they wanted to move. Then it began to sneak up her spine. Without the distraction of a picture to arrange—light and shadow, shape and angle, color and pattern aligning themselves in the viewscreen—the quiet of the cemetery began to press in on her. With all those trees and bushes and clumps of straggly grass, you'd think there would be crows cawing, squirrels chattering, little things rustling in the dry dead leaves. But there was nothing, not even traffic on the road that ran by the gate.

“So did it work?”

“Work?”

Mel rolled her eyes. “The
ashes
. Did it work? Did her brother get better?”

“Of course he didn't.” Now the restlessness had moved to Haley's hands. She rubbed at her short red hair, scratched the back of her neck. Then she shoved her hands into her pockets. Her fingers curled around the little metal box of her camera, cool and solid. It felt good to have something to hold. “He had tuberculosis. He needed antibiotics, not the ashes of his sister's heart. His grave's right over there.”

Mel hopped up and went over to look at the small headstone. Strands of her dark brown hair slipped loose from her braid to fall around her thoughtful face. “Edwin Brown. Haley, look. He was just a kid.”

“I know. He was eight. Come on, Mel, let's go. I've got everything I need.”

But Mel, crouched on her heels before the grave, didn't get up. She reached out a hand to lightly touch the shallow letters of Edwin's name, blurred by time. “That's so sad.”

“Mel, come
on
.”

“What's with you?”

“Nothing. I'm fine.” She was fine. Except the sun was dipping down toward the tops of the trees. The late afternoon light was the best for photography; that was why the two of them were here now. But it meant that sunset was closer than Haley felt comfortable with when she was surrounded by graves. And
that
was why she'd asked Mel to come with her.

Like a little kid
, Haley told herself scornfully.
Scared to go to a cemetery alone. Scared of the dark
.

She was relieved when Mel got up. But when her friend started walking, it was in the wrong direction. Away from the gate.

Haley bit back a groan and followed her.

A few minutes later, Mel had found what she was looking for. She stood over a grave, much more recent than Mercy's, and pulled something out of her pocket: a little plastic package of soup crackers. She opened it, crumbled the crackers in her hand, and let the crumbs drift down over the grass.

Haley stared at her.

“Gran loved birds,” Mel said, crunching up her second handful of crackers. “I always bring something for the birds when I come to visit her.”

“Oh. Okay.” Haley hadn't known that. She hadn't known that Mel liked to visit her grandmother's grave at all.

How long had it been? Three years ago? Haley had come to the funeral. She remembered Mel's white, pinched face, and the way Mel's mother had looked as if she were sleepwalking. As if grief had made her too tired to stand.

“She could even tell the different kinds of sparrows apart. Not many people can do that.”

“Uh-huh.” Haley watched the bits of cracker falling, like snow, from Mel's hand. You couldn't exactly say, “Hurry up, could you?” to a friend at her grandmother's graveside, but still. Still. The sunlight was starting to fade.

Even though Haley was very carefully and very patiently not saying anything at all, Mel looked over at her quizzically.

“I'm fine,” Haley said quickly. “I just—this place creeps me out. A little.”

“Really?” Mel brushed crumbs off her hands. Then, to Haley's relief, she started walking at last. “It doesn't bother me,” she went on. “I mean, it's sad, kind of, but it's—ow!”

Mel's foot had caught on a thin, orange nylon rope, snaking through the grass. It had been pegged down at four corners to make a neat rectangle at the end of a row of graves.

Haley looked down on it. A new one. Someone was going to come here and dig a new grave.

“Peaceful,” Mel finished, shaking her foot loose. “You know? Like everybody's sleeping.”

A new one. A fresh grave. One more to add to the hundreds and hundreds already here.

“Let's just go, okay?” Haley's voice was brittle as thin ice.

Mel's face said
Sure, whatever
.

Peaceful
, Haley thought angrily. Walking as quickly as she could without looking like she was trying to walk quickly, she made her way between rows of graves back toward the gate. That was the kind of stupid word people used about cemeteries. People who didn't want to admit what a place like this actually was.

Even Mel didn't understand. She could look at all those graves, at her own
grandmother's
grave, and think
peaceful
. As if she didn't know that every stone stood for a death.

Stood for somebody gone. A life taken away. And now there would be a new grave, and somebody else would be lowered into it, covered with dirt, weighed down, trapped. Forever.

“It's funny, though,” Mel said, breaking into Haley's thoughts.

“Hysterical,” Haley agreed. The gate was right over there. “I'll have Samuelson rolling in the aisles.”

“Don't be stupid. I mean, fresh blood in her heart?” For a minute, Mel looked as spooked as she had in the days when she'd slept over at Haley's and Haley would insist on reading ghost stories out loud once the house was dark and quiet. After a while her mom had confiscated all her spooky books. “I mean, how could that happen? She'd been dead for, like, months? Right?”

“Well, it didn't happen because she was coming back from the dead to suck the life out of her little brother!” Haley snapped.

“I
know
. It's just creepy, don't you think?”

“I really don't.” Ten more feet. Five. Haley let out a silent breath of relief as they stepped under the wrought-iron gateway.

“You're so going to get an A on this project. It's not fair.” Mel bent over to fiddle with the lock on her bike. “Samuelson should think before he gives these assignments out. I mean, not everybody has an interesting ancestor.”

“You've got a Civil War veteran,” Haley pointed out.

But it was true.
Samuelson better be impressed with this project
, she thought to herself. After all, how many kids in his American history class could claim a real, live—maybe she should say real, dead—vampire in their family trees?

And Haley needed a good grade. If she brought home a D or an F for the semester, even her dad and Elaine would probably notice. This “Research an Ancestor” project could save her GPA. She had to show Samuelson she was trying.

He'd talked to her after that last test. Was she having trouble studying? Could he help with any of the material? Did she want to see the counselor?

He'd been concerned. Nice. Everybody was nice lately. It was starting to drive Haley crazy. She would rather Samuelson
had yelled. If he'd been mean, she could have gotten angry, and anger helped these days. Nice just brought her perilously close to tears.

“Let's go into town,” Mel proposed, pulling on her bright orange gloves. “We can get a hot chocolate or something.”

“Can't.”

“Oh, come on, Haley. You couldn't do anything last weekend and now—”

Haley shook her head. “Can't. I have to go see Jake.”

W
hen Haley opened the door to Jake's apartment, a whirlwind of golden fur nearly knocked her down. Jake's golden retriever whined and barked, leaped up to put her two front paws on Haley's chest, then flung herself away to dash around the room, bouncing from wall to wall in a frenzy of pleasure.

“Well, we know who the popular one around here is.” Jake's friend Liam looked up from his handful of cards. “Hey, Haley.” He waved a hand at her and the cigarette tucked between his fingers trailed a thin line of smoke through the air.

“Take her out, take her out.” Jake was sprawled in the big armchair by the window, feet propped up on a footstool. “Or she might go right through a wall.”

Haley carefully avoided looking at Liam as she mumbled hello and grabbed Sunny's leash from the hook by the door. He was too good-looking, blond and tall with his soul patch and his dark-rimmed glasses and his air of disdainful amusement, as if the world were a mildly entertaining joke. Mel got giggly around him, but Haley tried to avoid talking to him directly. He made her feel shy and stupid and extremely young.