Second Verse (17 page)

And the fourth picture.

That’s the one that fills my lungs with liquid steel. It’s Mom, asleep in her bed. It’s a close up, too. Really close, the gloved hand from photo number three outstretched as if to choke her. On the back, words are printed in the same scrolling script:

I watch. I listen. The slightest move, I’ll see
.

It’s a blatant threat.

Under the table, Vaughn’s hand is a dead weight on my thigh. He breathes through his nose, absently drumming the corner of his notebook.

“We obviously can’t tell anyone,” I say. “At this point, calling the cops would be scarier than not calling them. Whoever wrote this made that clear.”

“Obviously. We need another plan.” His hands slide over my cold ones like mittens. “I don’t want you there. Sleeping there, where someone can get to you.”

A chill washes through me, his words reverberating through this life and my last.

“Your mom either. Think how messed up this is. She doesn’t even know what’s going on, and it’s right under her—”

“I can’t tell her! Who knows what they’ll do.”

“I’m not saying you should. I’m just saying. Shit, Lange. I don’t know. I wish I could stay with you. Or you could stay with me.” He shakes his head, balling his fists in frustration.

“I have an idea. It’s not much, but …” I yank a cuticle from my thumb, barely noticing the pain. “We have an alarm system. It’s not activated, but it
is
installed. I was thinking of calling the company and seeing how we can set it up. Fast, like today.”

“What about your mom?”

“I don’t know. I’ll make something up that I heard at school about break-ins and tell her how scared I am.”

He looks skeptical.

“What? It could work. It
will
work. And it won’t be an act. I
am
terrified.” Hot tears brim in my eyes.

“It’s a start,” he says. “But we have to work harder and faster to find out who’s messing with us. The sooner we catch them, the sooner this ends.” His voice is firm and I want to believe him. I
so
want to believe him. But when Ginny believed Beau, where did it get her?

Whatever. Obsessing isn’t going to help us. I pull the pack of stapled sheets from my bag.

“Anyway, here’s all the Edith Sellers I found. There are forty-one in the U.S. and thirty-two internationally. And that’s if she didn’t get married and change her name. Or die.”

He shakes a chunky lock of hair from his eyes and gives the pages one of his
can’t climb that mountain
looks.

I flip through them. “I’m going to start calling them today. Shady Springs is small enough. If we find an Edith that’s heard of it, she’s our girl. If not, we’ll keep going. I can’t make international calls though, so let’s hope she’s one of these.” I skate my finger down the first page.

“Good plan. We’ll look for her here too.” He waves to the pile of books.

I realize for the first time just how many books and papers he’s piled on the table. I pick up the leather-bound volume in front of me, etched with gold letters: P
RESTON
A
CADEMY.
“Yearbooks?”

“Yep. From 1930-1934. We find Beau, we can find what happened to him and hopefully, we’ll finally get some better answers. I’ve Googled every combination of Beau and Shady Springs and Beau and Pennsylvania. Hardly any Beaus from the
entire state, and none even remotely connected to Shady Springs. But it was a long time ago. There may not be an online record of it. But we’ll find him.” He pats the yearbooks.

“And Hank Griffin?”

He nods to his laptop, a look of disgust on his face. “We’ll see if we can get more on him too.”

I nod, looking toward the librarian’s desk. “Did she ask why you wanted the yearbooks? I don’t want anyone knowing what we’re researching. You never know.” With shaking hands, I thumb through the yearbook.

“She doesn’t know anything.” He pries it from me and kisses the palm of my hand.

“They were in my house,” I whisper. “In my mother’s room!”

He rubs his hand in circles on my back, calming like he’s putting me to sleep. But when I twist away from him, I see the creases of worry on his forehead before he can hide them.

“All the more reason for us to focus now,” he says. “We have a lot to do and only two periods to do it. Let’s get started.”

We pore over the yearbooks, finding each of the appropriate Chopain portraits. Ginny is in each of the four books, Robert in the later three and Helen as a freshman in Ginny’s senior year. I let my fingers linger on their faces.

It’s surreal and weird and draining all at once.

We keep looking. Every class of every year. No Edith Sellers, which I expect. Anyone owning a mirror like that would likely not be a high school student. But, even more importantly, we don’t find Beau. Apparently Preston used to be a regular school and they had sports and clubs and all the things normal non-art schools have. Even after the class pictures come up empty, we study every sport and activity. Every single club. But he isn’t there.

Utterly defeated, we sit back in our chairs. I don’t think either of us expected a dead end on this one.

“What now?” I rub my eyes.

“Well, now that I’m thinking about it … Did any of the letters say they went to the same school?”

I rack my brain. “I’m not sure. But, no, now that you mention it, I don’t think so.”

“Or, did she ever say his age? Maybe we should get some older yearbooks? Maybe he graduated before her?”

I shake my head. “No, I don’t think so. The plans for September they were always talking about. I’m pretty sure they had both just graduated that year.”

Vaughn stares blankly at the bookcase in front of us, a muscle twitching in his clenched jaw. His eyes widen and he snaps his fingers. “Mrs. McDermott!”

“Huh?”

“Mrs. McDermott. She knew them right? She was Ginny’s best friend. She’ll know where we can find info on Beau, or at least his last name. Who knows, maybe he went to a different school. In any case, she’s our only link to their past. We’ll go see her again.”

That connection, both of my lives meeting in one central place? It freaks me out. But he’s right, she probably does have at least
some
answers.

He lowers his voice. “What if it has to do with what Ginny wrote? He was investigating those murders and acting strange about it.” He mouths the word
Sweeney
.

I swallow.

His eyes plead with me. “Today, okay? After school?”

“Fine,” I mumble. “Now let’s just focus on this.”

We change gears, searching in a different direction. Beau may have come up as a dead end, but there’s plenty of info about Hank.

Hank Griffin. Up until now, we’d only known his name. It had been in all the newspaper accounts of course, but that was all we’d known. The friend of the family who murdered them all.

But a quick Google search on Hank tells us a lot more. It pulls up all kinds of old articles about the murders. Many of them rehash what we already know, though searching by Hank’s name pulls up some new ones. One such article is a profile of him.

“Hmm,” Vaughn says, pointing to the screen. I lean in closer to read along, starting with the paragraph where he points.

The killer, who committed suicide immediately after the heinous crime of six murders, was not a total surprise. Although he was well known to the community and quite close to the oldest of the murdered children, he was known to have a “dark side.” Sources close to him say he had grown obsessive in the weeks before the murder and talked often of “dark things.”

“Quite close with the oldest children? Wait a minute. He was friends with them?” Something dawns on me as I reopen the 1934 yearbook. I flip through the pages quickly, my eyes darting across the names: Gable, Gentry, Gharrity, Gilbert. Griffin! “There, there he is.”

Hank Griffin.

He smiles in his senior picture, looking at the camera with a lazy grin. His hair is cropped short, with a casual side part. He’s got a baby face, smooth and clean-shaven. His eyes are wide set and appear amused. I wonder what’s behind them.

The eyes of a killer.

Digging deep in my memory, I try and recall his face, anything about him. It’s pointless, I don’t know how to recover past life memories. But I can’t help trying. Unless it’s my imagination, something stirs in me, something familiar.

“Stop.” Vaughn nudges me. “I know what you’re thinking. But why would you want to remember anything about this guy?” He studies the yearbook for only a second before slamming it closed.

He’s right, but it’s like a car accident you can’t look away from. You know you shouldn’t crane your neck to see the details, but you do. You look. And you’re always sorry. That’s how I feel about Hank. I need to know who he was, what caused him to kill the Chopains.

Vaughn closes the laptop. “God, reading this stuff makes me sick. Knowing who he was. Who took Ginny from Beau.”

Nausea swirls and sputters in my stomach.

When he turns to me, eyes shining, a look of determination hardens his features. “There’s only one thing left,” he says, pointing to a stack of papers. I consider them warily, as if they might bite me.

Vaughn rips open a package of Twinkies and gives me an ironic smile. “The Sweeney Murders.”

Great. More murder, more blood. More horror. Just what we need.

But it’ll be worth it in the end if we can put Ginny’s past behind her and live the future she never had.

A
FTER SCHOOL, WE
drive in silence to Mrs. McDermott’s house. My mind whirls, gory details crowding there like monsters under a bed.

The Sweeney murders, perpetrated by Jackson Sweeney of Florida and his wife, Katherine, went on for several years. The number of deaths attributed to them, both solved and unsolved, isn’t fully known. There were two families just outside of Dallas, where the Sweeneys originally lived, along with a couple in Florida, three in Georgia and a single woman in Maryland. These murders, investigated over the course of 1925-1934, were eventually tied to the Sweeneys. When police attempted to capture them, Jackson and Katherine committed suicide in their Texas home before the authorities reached them.

It’s beyond sick, and I have no idea how it fits in with Ginny and Beau. But even weirder, something about the details feels sickly familiar. I know they shouldn’t. I know Sharon says we have no memories, but I can’t shake it, even if it’s impossible.

“So Beau was reading about these murders?” Vaughn taps absently on the steering wheel.

“I think so. She said he wanted to be a detective, remember? But what could he have possibly known that the cops didn’t? These people were wanted by everyone.”

He shakes his head. “And even more, what did it have to do with Ginny? And how does Hank play into it? Or does he? Maybe the two are unrelated?”

“Anything’s possible, I guess. Do you think the Sweeneys could’ve killed the Chopains? Their near-capture suicide was just a month after the Chopains were killed.”

He frowns, looking into his rearview to change lanes. “I don’t know, but I’m sure the cops looked into it. Wouldn’t every murder have been considered as one of theirs back then? Besides, the murders don’t line up. The Sweeneys shot their victims in the head, execution style. They were clean and calculated with fast getaways. The Chopains.” He pauses. “Well, you know…”

“Stop.” I push the bloody images from my mind and focus on the world rushing by outside.

“Sorry. I don’t mean to sound cold about it.”

“Moot point anyway. Hank was the Chopain killer. The whole murder-suicide thing seems to be the only definite fact in this whole mess.” I close my eyes, instantly conjuring Hank’s yearbook picture and have to fight the urge to vomit.

Counting my breaths, I consider what’s next, but I guess that all depends on what Mrs. McDermott tells us. During Creative Hour, I called at least half the domestic Edith Sellers with no luck. If I have the same luck with the second half, we’ll be back to square one with the first part of the séance message.
Sell. Her
.

It’s one brick wall after another. A frustrated scream inches up my throat.

When we turn onto Mrs. McDermott’s street, my stomach flops. I wipe my sweaty palms on the seat as we drive up her driveway.

But then I’m confused.

Because Mrs. McDermott’s house?

It’s gone.

W
E STAND AT
the edge of the pit of ash.

All around us, remnants of the house’s frame—beams and wood pieces, broken glass, half buried cabinets and ribbons of melted carpet—float like islands in the charred remains.

“What the hell?” Vaughn’s voice is uneven.

I squat for a better look. Twisted metal that was probably once a picture frame lies next to a blackened heap of a bed pillow. Broken curtain rods stick out from a fuzzy mound of a stuffed animal, its plastic eyes cracked, most of its fur burned away.

When I look up, Vaughn’s face has taken on the now-familiar look of determination.

“Come on,” he says, reaching down. “We have to find out what happened.”

“How’re we gonna do that?”

Gripping my hand tightly, he looks down the road. “Neighbors,” he says. “No one knows more than neighbors.”

Confused, I walk to the car. The only neighbors Mrs. McDermott had are a car ride away.

“P
LACE BURNT CLEAR
on down to the ground!” The old man spits over his porch railing into bright red bushes. He stretches, and then rubs his stomach in a way that makes me think he hasn’t stood up for quite a while before we knocked on his door.

“How did it start?” Vaughn watches the old man intently.

“They ain’t tell us nothing. I runned down there just as soon as I seen the flames. I could see it clear down here and we’s at least a mile away. Now, I seen some blazers in my life, but that little house shot up something awful. It was just like when we used to light up our leaves in fall time with gasoline. But bigger!”

Gasoline.

“And? Has anyone given any other details at all?” Vaughn’s voice is strained, his fingers twisting in his sleeve. I place a hand on his arm. This isn’t easy for me either, but what good are either of us if we lose it?