Second Verse (12 page)

When I lay across my bed and turn the page, my heart skips.

“Lange?” Mom calls from upstairs.

I sigh without getting up. “Yeah?”

“Can you give me a hand up here for a minute?”

Dropping the book on my pillow, I reach for my fleece. It’s freezing up there.

When I get to the top of the stairs I see she’s pushed half the boxes to the far end of the room. Against the wall is an enormous mirror. It’s at least five feet tall and twice as wide, the glass itself a bit warped near the bottom of the frame. It looks like it weighs a ton. Mom leans against its gilded edge, breathing heavy.

“There’s no way we’re getting that downstairs.” I watch my reflection as I step closer. It’s almost like a trick mirror, making me shorter and taller as I move from one side to the other.

“I know that. It was hard enough to get it this far.” She huffs. “I just need you to help me move it over there.” She chin nods to the furthest end of the attic. “I want to stand it up, out of my way. I’m not sure how it’s survived this long without getting broken.”

“Well let’s get it done. I’m sort of in the middle of something.” I shift it from the wall and am almost toppled by its weight. “Holy crap. This thing is even heavier than it looks.”

“Isn’t it?” She squats down with her hands cupped around the bottom corner. “Okay, push.” She grunts and I lean into the frame, pushing it toward her. With a maximum amount of effort, we finally move it across the room, tilting it just enough to keep it upright.

“Okay?” I move from foot to foot, impatient to get back downstairs.

“What’s the rush?” She eyes me suspiciously. “Is it that boy again?”

I roll my eyes. “No. I’m working on my drawing.”

Still out of breath, she shrugs and fans her face. “Suit yourself.”

Behind her, something moves, disappears behind a box. I barely catch it out of the corner of my eye, but hear a faint giggle like a child playing hide and seek. Goosebumps flash across my skin.

I shiver, wanting nothing more than to get out of the attic. “Let me know if you need any more help.”

“You okay?” She raises her brows.

“Yeah, fine. Just thought I saw something. Must be a dust bunny or something.”

She shakes her head. “You never know. I myself have felt some strange energies up here from time to time.”

I force my shaking hands in my pockets. “Nah. Just my over-active imagination.”

“Are you sure? Because after what happened to you the other night up here, if you feel like you need to talk to the doctor again, he can definitely help you work it out, and you know, with the way the moon is nearly full, and it being, of course, October, it’s no wonder you’re feeling psychologically off balance. I mean,
you know we’re in touch with the otherworldly more than other people, and sometimes it helps to talk—”

She’s getting that dazed look. I have to get out of here.

“I’m fine, Mom. Seriously. I have things to do.” I inch toward the stairs.

“Fine,” she says with a sigh. “Don’t listen to me. What do I know? Hey, I have an idea. You know, I’m going to that photo convention this weekend. On the way back we can stop and see Berta if you think it would help. I don’t mind you tagging along.”

Oh God. Berta Ramirez. My old
doctor
-slash-spiritual-advisor.

“Um, no. Sorry. I have plans. Here. Last weekend before the Hunt and I told my friends … ”

She shrugs. “Well, okay. But the offer stands. Anyway, before you go, take this. I found it earlier. Thought you’d like it.” She holds out an antique hair comb with a row of beads and a large gilded bird across the top.

“Pretty,” I say, trying to ignore the thrumming in my ears. When I take it from her, my fingers feel numb as I trace the sharp edge of the bird’s wings. “Thanks.”

I’m halfway down the stairs when I hear her. “Huh. What do you know?”

She isn’t talking to me, but curiosity gets the best of me and I skip back up the stairs. She’s on her knees in front of the mirror, holding what looks like an index card.

“What’s that?”

She waves the card in the air. “I guess it’s who owned the mirror at some point. It was taped to the back. Too bad there’s no year on it. I’d love to know how old this thing is.”

Standing to dust herself off, she mumbles, “Actually, I bet it’s worth money. We should call one of those antique dealers in town.” She drops the card on the box by my feet and I half turn to walk downstairs.

“I’ll be in my room,” I say, waving over my shoulder even though her attention is already somewhere across the room. But the handwriting on the card catches my eye.

Edith Sellers. Shady Springs, Pennsylvania
.

“I’m ordering pizza later,” Mom says, her head halfway in a box.

“Sounds good,” I mutter. As a last thought, I tuck the card into my pocket and walk down the stairs, anxious to get back to the diary.

I
T’S INCREDIBLY LATE
by the time I get through the first part of the diary. The entries are sporadic at best. Sometimes Ginny writes daily, sometimes every few months. She chronicles everything from the mundane class schedules and what her mother cooked for dinner to the intimate details of her family’s life on the farm. But finally, at almost midnight, I get to the juicy part. The place where the letters left off, mere weeks before her murder.

August 12, 1934

Ah, well, my love is back here in Shady Springs, where he belongs. Oh thank the Lord too. I was starting to go a bit loony. His first day back was one of the best we’ve ever had. We walked around Pike’s, just like he said we would. And then back here, we had a picnic lunch out back and no one bothered us, except of course Mr. Whiskers. That love bug of a cat won’t leave my side for anything. We lay on a blanket, out behind the barn, and we read all our sappy letters from the last month to each other. We promised to always keep them. I’ll store them with this diary, hidden in my secret closet compartment, like I always do. He says we’ll use them as proof, someday when our children and grandchildren don’t believe that the bald old man and stooped lady had passion, well, we’ll show them! Oh, I’m so happy I could burst—just burst!

P.S. Although I don’t dare say the words out loud, we’ve agreed about September. We’re going. Mother will be unhappy as she refuses that at 18
I’m ready for any big steps like this, but it’s not in her hands. I’m an adult now, after all!

August 16, 1934

Well, boys can be so absolutely, unbelievably silly. What can I say to explain my love showing up on my porch with a fresh apple pie, warm from his mother’s oven? But it’s your favorite! He said when I insisted he take it right back home. Can you imagine, snatching a pie right from his family’s kitchen table? But oh, how I laughed. Your cheeks, he said as we climbed into his truck. You should see how pink they are. That’s worth all the trouble of a million pies. And more. You don’t steal a pie to make someone’s cheeks pink! I tried to argue, but I know him, there is no talking sense when his mind is set. Get ready, he replied, because I’m gonna do a whole lifetime of worse things if it means I’ll hear you laugh. And oh well, what could I say? He tickles me, that boy. Right down to my toes
.

The shock of what I know is coming for Ginny turns me so inside out I’m raw. Yet I can’t help thinking of that old phrase about loving and losing and how I’d give almost anything for just a fraction of what Ginny wrote about in these pages.

I bet Vaughn would understand. I bet it would inspire him.

Vaughn.

Thoughts of him seep into every part of me. There’s nothing I’d rather do than be with him. Just sitting across from him in the cafeteria makes me feel like I’ve fallen into some place I finally belong.

I shake my head and stare at the pictures on my dresser. Mom and me on our old porch in New Jersey, and another one when we lived down at Virginia Beach a few years ago. There’s one of my dad. I’m little, probably seven or so. It was taken a few years before he died. It’s a Christmas morning picture and the smiles on our faces don’t tell the truth. From this picture,
you’d think we were a happy father-daughter pair, not a girl and some dad who was never around.

The memory of his death is still strong. It had been some weird, freak-accident—he’d been bear hunting with his friends in northwest New Jersey and his buddy’s gun misfired. I was only ten and Mom hounded me for months, worried I hadn’t grieved properly. Because I hadn’t really grieved at all. How can you grieve for someone you really didn’t know in the first place? If I was upset about anything, it’s the childhood I never had with him, not over his stupid death, which I was too young to understand, even as I helped her dump his ashes into the ocean, performing one of her weird new age rituals. But still, she’d dragged me to that wacky shrink constantly and she never stopped talking about it, even at home.

The picture blurs in my vision but I blink away the few tears that have gathered there. He’s not worth it.

I turn back to the diary in my hands.

In my peripheral, the curtain moves. I reach toward it, expecting the breeze on my arm, but the window is closed. A soft whimper, the faint, barely there sound of children crying carries on the still air.

Tingles race up and down my spine.

The pages flutter in my hand and I stare at them without seeing, straining to hear. It’s completely silent. No wind outside, no sounds upstairs, not even the tick of a clock. Definitely no crying. No giggling hide and seek children.

Breathe, Lange
.

Back to the diary.

August 20, 1934

I had bad thoughts today. Mother says I listen to too many news reports. But I’ve heard all about that Texas murderer who they can’t catch. Between those two families he killed and that girl in Maryland who may also be his
doing, you can never be too careful. That’s what I say. Mother wants to see the world as if nothing bad will ever happen. Not me. I don’t trust a soul—not a stranger anyway. And now she’s calling, so off I go again!

August 25, 1934

There were five dead rabbits in the grass this morning. Right under my window, in a line. Mother blames Jester and his tomcat friends. Ever since Margie started feeding them, it’s like we’ve got more cats than kids here, after all. But cats don’t line up their kills that way. Do they?

The tension in her entry makes my skin crawl. This was written five days before her death. Five days. Five rabbits.

I shudder.

It’s almost two in the morning, but I can’t stop reading. I’ll read one more entry. Just one more.

August 25, 1934

I am a bit embarrassed to put this down on paper, but I just can’t help it. God forbid anyone ever reads this. Mother would kill me. But today, in the barn, we laid side by side. We had a blanket spread in one of the back stalls and the sun was just right, my hair warm with it, the air thick with late summer. He ran his hands up and down my body. And I let him. I let him touch my bare stomach, let him kiss every inch of my neck. The way he touched me was slow and sweet. I never knew kissing an ear could be an all afternoon event. And the things he whispered. Ah, my life is so complete. I don’t see how it could get better. I suspect my life is going to be what dreams are made of. I’m sure it won’t always be barn-kisses good, but I know I’ll laugh. He can be so silly. In the midst of all this, he eased the collar of my shirt down, exposing my bare skin. My collarbones felt so bare, I had to shiver with the air. But I let him. Oh I’d let him do almost anything, I suppose. And would you believe what he said to me? Well he looked at me with a face as plain as he was gonna kiss his grandmother and he said he was going to take up a new hobby. Of course I didn’t have a clue what he meant.
You don’t have hobbies, I said! You want to work with people and be a detective and solve all these big, important crimes. And you like to fish, and watch baseball, and be with me and your friends. But what hobbies have you ever had? Well, he said with a solemn face, I think I’ll take up the violin. Can you imagine! The violin! I shrieked with laughter so loud he had to cover my mouth with his hand and remind me that we could be overheard. So I quieted some, but kept on laughing until he nudged my shirt down again and kissed me there, one gentle kiss after another. With his finger, he traced my birthmark and said, “if this isn’t the exact shape of a violin, I don’t know what is. And I, my love, will play this forever.” I don’t need to say what happened after that because it was a whole lot of lips on lips and I don’t kiss and tell, even to my own diary, but can you believe what a silly thing he can be?

My pulse plays double time in my temples.

A violin
.

Precisely what Vaughn said to me, that day he saw my birthmark.

A violin
.

This can’t be coincidence. But I can’t force the pieces to line up in any logical way.

I rush to the mirror, pulling down my shirt to stare at the birthmark, the one I always thought of as Africa-shaped, the one Vaughn said looked like a violin. Did Ginny really have a birthmark like this too? Could Beau have really called hers the same thing—a violin?

At my desk, I rifle through my bag until I find my Transformations project and the photo of Ginny. I think of how crazy old Mrs. McDermott thought I was Ginny. We look nothing alike, but still. Why
had
she said that? And Mr. Murphy, saying it was a self-portrait.

I study Transformations. At Ginny as a child and then a young woman. And the third version of her, the shorter girl, spinning away and looking back.

Is that me?

I
HAVE NO
idea what to say to Vaughn. All night I think about it, and all the way to school.

But right now, I have a much bigger problem. Stace is waiting at my locker. I see her as soon as I turn into the dreary, gray hall. It’s crowded and I have to push through students milling by lockers, friends talking and laughing, sharing secrets and gossip and theories about The Hunt.