Mercy (9 page)

“I
f untreated, tuberculosis, or consumption, which is what people called it back then, had a death rate of fifty percent. It, um, it had killed two people in the Brown family before Mercy.” Haley stopped to clear her throat. “It was, it was . . .” She glanced hurriedly down at her notes. “It was sad. It was tragic. But it wasn't supernatural or anything.”
Or anything; great, Haley, that sounds really sophisticated
. From the back of the room, Mr. Samuelson gave her a quick smile and nodded encouragingly, which only rattled her further. If he thought she needed encouragement, she must be doing badly.

“Not everyone at the time believed in this old New England superstition. Not even everybody in Mercy's family did. Umm . . .” Her eyes skittered down over her notes, found the right place. “A reporter wrote an article for a newspaper right after it happened. This is what he said. ‘The husband and father of the deceased has, from the first, disclaimed any faith in the vampire theory, but being urged, he allowed other, if not wiser, counsel to prevail.' ” Thank goodness for Aunt Brown's newspaper. It really made her report sound historical.

“Everybody was looking for somebody to blame, and they picked Mercy. It was like a trial by mob. Only Mercy didn't really get to defend herself. Since she was, um, dead.” The few people who were listening laughed. “Superstition and ignorance made a natural tragedy into something worse,” Haley said in a rush, then gathered up her notes and sat down so they'd all stop looking at her.

Mr. Samuelson led the brief round of applause. “Very colorful, Haley, thank you. All right—that's the last report for today. Chelsea, you're up first tomorrow. Remember, by the end of the week you should be finished with chapter eleven and—” The bell rang, cutting off his words.

Haley shoveled her laptop and her notes into her backpack. Mel leaned over her desk. “Haley, that was really good.”

“I got nervous.” Haley made a face.

“I couldn't tell.”

Haley knew Mel was just being nice, but wasn't that what best friends did? She grinned, comforted, as she got up. It was too bad every school project seemed to involve writing something. Reports definitely weren't her best area. But if she could just get graded on the display . . .

Haley looked up at her poster board. Her captions, maybe, were brief compared to some of the others ranged along the blackboard. Annie Lewis's display was almost completely covered in pages of neatly typed text. But what did you need words for when that photo of Mercy's gravestone was in the center? Dead at nineteen. Dead, demonized, blamed for something she could never have done. A victim of ugly superstition as much as of a fatal disease.

“I vant to suck your bloooood,” moaned a voice in Haley's ear. She jumped. Papers and pens spilled out of her open backpack to the floor and her laptop nearly followed.

“Knock it off, Jaffe.”

Thomas Jaffe laughed ghoulishly and widened his eyes. “Hey, Lady Dracula, want to bite me? I'll show you where—”

“Shut up, Thomas, you're disgusting.” Mel glared at him, hugging her books tighter over her chest. As Haley bent over to pick up her belongings, Thomas closed his hands lightly around her neck from behind.

“Get off!” Standing up quickly, Haley jammed her elbow back into Thomas's ribs.

“Hey, ow!” Thomas let go. “I was just kidding!”

“You were just stupid,” Haley snapped.

“Check her out, she's scary.”

“Watch out, biting might run in the family.”

“Maybe she wants to bite
all
of us . . . ”

Haley felt her stomach tighten. She clutched her backpack closer. Even though it was just Thomas and his friends, Andy Chen and Kevin Christianson, acting like idiots as usual. What was she so tense about? What could they possibly do to her in the middle of a brightly lit classroom, with Mr. Samuelson right outside the door, yelling at some kid to stop running in the hall?

“Come on, Haley.” Mel's voice dripped disdain. “Let's go.”

But Thomas blocked Haley's path, rubbing his ribs. She glared. He didn't move.

“Haley, you dropped this.”

The voice was quiet. Haley turned to look at Alan O'Neil, holding out a page of her notes. She hadn't even heard him come up behind her.

“That was really interesting,” he said calmly, and eased past Haley in the narrow aisle between the desks. Pausing, he waited for Thomas to move. He looked as if the possibility of Thomas doing anything else had never crossed his mind.

Thomas fell back a few paces and turned, heading for the door. Andy and Kevin followed.

Haley felt ridiculously relieved, almost shaky. “Thanks.”

“For what?” Alan looked back. “Picking up your notes?”

“Yeah.” Haley tried to remember if she'd ever talked to Alan O'Neil before, beyond “Excuse me,” and “What chapter are we supposed to read?” Didn't he play basketball? Or hockey? Or something? She couldn't imagine why he'd come to her rescue, but she thought she was even more grateful to him for pretending there'd been nothing to rescue her from than for making Thomas Jaffe back off. “Yeah, for picking up my notes. Thanks.”

“No problem.”

She expected Alan to drift off once they reached the hallway and she caught up with Mel, but somehow the three of them stayed together into the cafeteria and through the line past pizza, chicken sandwiches, and the salad bar. Haley, her slice of pepperoni cooling on her plate, flicked quick glances at Alan's face after they'd all found seats at one of the little round tables. He'd photograph well, that fair skin against the black of his eyes and eyebrows and shaggy, loose hair. All that contrast. Alan and Mel were talking about Lucy Williams's great-great-grandmother, who'd survived the
Titanic
. Haley's fingers itched for her camera.

“Haley, what do you think? The Chicago fire or the San Francisco earthquake?”

“What?”

Mel rolled her eyes. “What disaster would you rather have an ancestor live through?”

“I don't—I don't know. As long as they live, who cares?”

“The practical approach,” Alan said thoughtfully. He disdainfully removed the lettuce from his sandwich. “Efficient, but a little lacking in nuance.”

“So if you're not paying the least bit of attention to what we're saying,” Mel inquired, poking around for the bits of ham in her salad, “what are you spending your lunchtime thinking about?”

“Mercy, I guess.” Which was better than saying out loud that she'd been thinking about the dark lines of Alan's eyebrows and the way his jaw moved when he chewed.

Mel sighed. “Haley, your project's done. You definitely got an A. Relax, can't you?”

Haley looked down, surprised to find half of her pizza gone. She didn't remember taking a bite. “I know. It's just . . . it's just . . . I don't get it, really.”

“Get what?” Mel asked patiently.

“How people could do that. I mean, they
knew
her. Exeter was a really small town back then.” Haley hadn't actually been thinking about this, but now that she'd started talking, it was as if it had been in her mind all along. “We're talking about people who knew her when she was a little girl, people she went to school with. Her
family
. How could they have thought she was evil?” Actually evil, like some monster out of a horror movie. Fresh, warm blood in her dead, cold heart.

Haley blinked hard to get that image out of her brain and went on talking. “How could her
father
have thought so?”

“Well, he didn't think so,” Mel pointed out. “You said. Other people talked him into it.”

“But he let them. He agreed. How could anybody do that?”

Blood so wet and fresh that it glistened. Like those red stains on Mercy's glove.

“That's easy. Fear.”

Haley looked over at Alan. He shrugged and took a huge bite of his sandwich.

“You said it all yourself, Haley.” He swallowed. “Tuberculosis had a fifty percent death rate. There were, what, six people in Mercy's family? And four of them died?” He really had been paying attention to her report. Haley was surprised. She'd assumed that most people, except for Mr. Samuelson (who got paid to listen) had been dozing or daydreaming or thinking
about their own reports. “People were scared,” Alan went on. “You can't blame them, really. When people get scared, they just get stupid. And they look around for somebody to blame.”

“That's no excuse,” Haley snapped. She looked down at her plate, smeared with greasy red tomato sauce, and her stomach heaved. She had to swallow hard. “I don't care how scared they were. Her father could have stuck to reason, at least. If he'd loved her at all, he would have.”

“He was worried about his son, though,” Mel pointed out, looking at Haley a little oddly. “What was his name—Edwin? Hey, is Eddie named after him?”

“Eddie's Edward. He's named after Elaine's dad.” Haley peeled clingy plastic wrap away from a brownie, hoping a bite of that would get the sour taste out of her mouth. “All that proves is that Mercy's dad loved Edwin more than her. Typical. For that time. Loving the son more.”

“The son was still alive,” Alan said quietly. “I mean, Mercy was already—Haley? You okay?”

Haley dropped the brownie on the table.

“If you really love somebody, you don't stop just because they're dead,” she said coldly. She got to her feet, snatched up her tray, and went to dump the rest of her lunch in the trash.

Suddenly she hated school. Hated the bright, loud cafeteria, hated the talking and laughing and shouting that battered at her ears. Hated the smells of steamed food and salt and grease. Hated the hallways with their shiny linoleum, full of jerks like Thomas Jaffe, full of people like Mel and now, maybe, Alan who were supposed to be her friends but who just didn't get it. They didn't even get that there was something they couldn't understand.

So she did something she had never done in all of her years at school. She walked out.

It was ridiculous, how easy it was. She just went to her locker, stuffed her laptop and a few books into her backpack, grabbed her jacket, and left by the front door. Nobody stopped her. Nobody asked where she was going. Maybe they thought she was sick, or assumed she had a doctor's appointment. Maybe they just didn't care.

Haley set off quickly down the street. She wanted to see the one person she could count on to understand death and dying.

J
ake, stretched out with a book in his armchair, glanced at the clock when Haley opened his door. But that was all. He must have known she was cutting class, but he didn't say a word about the time.

“You brought your laptop?” he asked, eyeing her backpack. “You got some new photos to show me?”

The tightness inside Haley's chest eased a little. And she felt herself relaxing more when she took a second look at her cousin. Jake looked better. His voice was firmer. His eyes were alert.

Haley grinned to herself as she flipped open her computer and turned it on. Maia meant well, but she wasn't a doctor. She didn't know everything. Setting the laptop on the table by Jake's chair, she nudged aside the black ashtray. It had a half-smoked cigarette in it. Liam must have been by to visit, even though it wasn't Saturday. Haley turned off the tall floor lamp so nothing would reflect off the screen.

“See, those are the ones for my history project. The gravestone and the cemetery . . .” She tilted the laptop so that Jake could see and tapped the touchpad to move through the images.

“That's good. The one with the tree leaning toward the grave. And the black-and-white. Strong. Go back, I want to see that one of the stone wall again.”

Most people—even Mel, even her dad and Elaine—flipped through photos like the goal was to get to the end as quickly as possible. Jake really looked.