The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (100 page)

CHAPTER 38

Phoebe

JUNE 13, PRESENT DAY

“E
vie!” Phoebe said as they hurried back down the steps of the library. “Is Evie Teilo?”

Lisa giggled vacantly.

“Evie’s pretty clever, but I somehow doubt she was able to make Lisa pregnant,” Sam said.

“Then who?”

“I don’t know. But whoever it is, Evie’s protecting him. She’s deep into this and has been all along. Agoraphobic my ass.”

Phoebe couldn’t believe she’d let herself be fooled. She’d felt sorry for Evie, tried to help her. She’d even confided in her about the pregnancy! “We’ve gotta go talk to her,” Phoebe said.

They jumped back in the car and pulled away. Phoebe looked out the window as they drove past an auto repair shop, the back side of a run-down apartment building, where an old woman in a turquoise sunhat was sitting in a plastic lawn chair, sipping from a forty-ounce bottle of beer. She stuck her tongue down inside the bottle neck each time she took a gulp. Phoebe’s stomach churned. She remembered the old woman at the cabin, could almost hear her chortling refrain:
And we’ll be jolly friends, forever more.

The old woman who turned out to be Sammy’s childhood friend, Becca, who was convinced Teilo was going to take away her son. Becca, who told her Sam had been in the woods that night.
There are things he hasn’t told you.

“What did you see, Sam?” Phoebe asked, thinking the question, saying it out loud without meaning to.

“I didn’t say anything, Bee.”

“No.
See.
What did you see, that night in the woods? The night Lisa disappeared?”

“I wasn’t in the woods,” he said. “I was home. In bed.”

Lisa laughed again, said happily, like it was a game, “Time to tell the truth, Sammy!”

“I’d say it’s long past time,” Phoebe said. “Becca said she saw you in the woods that night. She told me to ask you how you got your scar. Now please, Sam, tell me what really happened that night.”

He gave a deep sigh. “Okay, but it won’t help. I didn’t see what happened to Lisa or anything.” His words were crisp and defensive.

“Start at the beginning,” Phoebe said. “When did you go into the woods?”

“Just after Lisa gave me her charm bracelet and left my room. I got up and went after her. I mean, how could I not? She made me promise not to, but she said she was leaving forever. Crossing over to the goddamn fairy world.” He stopped, looking at Lisa in the rearview mirror and biting his lip.

“So you went after her,” Phoebe said, encouraging him to continue. He’d kept this story secret for fifteen years—now that he’d started, she was going to do everything she could to get him to tell it through to the end.

“I thought I could stop her.” His voice cracked and faltered. He shook his head. “It was stupid, really. Me thinking I had that kind of power.”

Phoebe put her hand on his arm. “You were ten, Sam. You did the best you could. What happened once you went into the woods?”

He nodded, continuing, his voice more hesitant now. “I spotted her by the brook. She was wearing her red hoodie.” He pinched his lips together tightly, as if he was trying to keep the rest of the story in.

“Did she see you?” Phoebe asked.

“Yeah. She took off running. I chased her for fifteen minutes, crisscrossing through the woods, going farther and farther from home, from Reliance. It was pitch-black. Darker than dark. I don’t remember ever being afraid of the woods like I was that night. I felt like . . . like the whole forest was against me somehow, helping to protect Lisa. I got snagged on trees, tripped, fell over things, got all banged up. When I finally caught up with her, she turned and swung at me.” Sam clenched his jaw, still staring straight ahead, like he could see the whole scene through the windshield. “Then I saw she had a knife.”

“What?”

Sam nodded. When he continued, his words moved quickly, running together. “I jumped back but not fast enough. She got me with the tip of it, right over my collarbone.” He flinched a little, as if his body remembered the shock of the blade cutting into him.

He let go of the steering wheel with his right hand and moved his fingers under the neckline of his T-shirt, reaching in to touch his scar.

“Lisa stabbed you? I don’t get it.”

“Yeah, neither did I.” He took in a breath, and Phoebe watched as his face, his whole body actually, changed. He didn’t look like a scared guy with his defenses down anymore. He looked furious. His face colored; every muscle in his body seemed to tighten as he gripped the steering wheel so hard Phoebe was sure he could break it. “Then I saw that it wasn’t Lisa at all. It was Evie.” He spat out the name like it had left an acid burn on his tongue.

“Evie?”

“Yeah. But she was dressed like Lisa. She had on a wig and everything.”

“But why would Evie want to hurt you?”

“She was mad. Furious. ‘It’s only you!’ she said. She was wheezing real bad, just sucking at the air. Could barely talk. With her asthma, it must have nearly killed her to run as hard and fast as we had that night.”

“But why was she dressed like Lisa? And why run from you, then stab you?”

“I asked her what the hell she was doing, and she said, ‘Saving Lisa.’ She told me I’d ruined everything. ‘If Lisa’s gone forever, it’s your fault, Sammy!’ she said.”

“So you didn’t see Teilo?” Phoebe asked.

Sam laughed an are-you-kidding laugh. “No. I didn’t even believe there was a Teilo back then. Shit, Bee, I thought Evie and Lisa were nuts. And I didn’t trust Evie. I thought maybe Lisa had talked her into dressing up, leading me on some wild-goose chase.”

“But why?”

Sam’s body relaxed again, and he sank down low in his seat, so low that he looked like a little kid peering out over the top of the steering wheel at the road before them. He bit his lip, which trembled a little. “I guess I always thought she really wanted to leave. And Evie helped her.” He rubbed his eyes with the palm of his hand. “We weren’t enough for her, Bee. We’d all failed her in this really profound way. My father with his suicide, me not believing her, Evie betraying her, Mom and Hazel acting crazy. She chose another life.”

Phoebe remembered the little boy in the Superman shirt who had gazed down at her through his bedroom window with such absolute sorrow. She saw that same face now as he drove, his eyes focused on some unnameable place in the distance. “What happened next, after Evie stabbed you?”

Sam sat up straight and glanced at Lisa in the rearview mirror. She was holding very still, listening. “Evie ran down to the cellar hole, and I followed her, but there was no one there. No Fairy King. No Lisa. Just me and Evie. ‘We’re too late!’ Evie said. She was crying, frantic, screaming Lisa’s name over and over. Lisa! Lisa! Lisa!” His voice rose and fell. “We should have stayed. We should have woken up the whole neighborhood, searched the woods. But we didn’t. I didn’t, anyway. I thought Evie was hamming it up, still trying to trick me. Do you know what I did? I went back home to take care of my stupid cut. It wasn’t even all that deep. I washed it out, put a bandage on. Then I went back to my room and tossed and turned all night. I think part of me knew she was really gone, knew what a fucking coward I was.”

They were silent for a long moment. Phoebe thought of a dozen things to say to offer comfort, but they all seemed empty and useless.

“There’s one thing I still don’t get,” she said at last. “How did Pinkie know you were in the woods that night?”

“I saw her when I was coming out.” Sam’s voice was evening out, sounding more like matter-of-fact Sam. “She and Gerald were going in. They saw I was hurt, but I didn’t tell them what happened.”

“And where was Evie?”

“She stayed in the woods, looking for Lisa. I heard her sneak back into the house just before dawn.”

“And you never told anyone else you were in the woods that night? Your mom? The police? You never said anything about Evie stabbing you?”

Sam shook his head. “The next morning, when it was pretty clear Lisa was really gone, Evie and I talked it over. She convinced me that it wouldn’t do any good to tell. That it would just make us both look like we were involved in some way—that we knew more than we were saying.”

Sam looked over at Phoebe, blew out a long breath. “I know it sounds crazy, and to this day I can’t say exactly why I went along with her. I mean, this was the girl who’d just stabbed me! On some level, I believed what Evie said that night—that it was somehow my fault that Lisa was gone. I felt guilty. I thought admitting that I’d been in the woods would make me seem even guiltier.” He shook his head as if at his own stupidity.

“Jesus, Sam, you were only ten years old, a little boy! Your sister had disappeared, your dad was dying, and you were scared shitless. Of course you went along with whatever she said.”

Sam didn’t reply. Phoebe could tell from his face that the guilt had stayed with him—he’d been carrying it around for fifteen years, wondering if Lisa might still be here if he’d done things differently that night. Phoebe leaned over and gave him a hug, kissed his cheek. “Thank you,” she said, “for telling me what happened.”

“I should have done it ages ago. It’s just, when you keep a secret for so long . . . it just gets stronger, you know? Harder to tell.”

Phoebe kissed him again. “I know exactly what you mean.”

They were on the Barre-Montpelier Road, passing Kinney Drugs and Blockbuster. The McDonald’s Phoebe snuck off to for her quarter-pounder with cheese fix. Her stomach growled. She opened the glove compartment and found some stale saltines, and gobbled them gratefully.

“What if she was telling the truth?” Phoebe said, mouth full of crackers.

“Huh?” Sam said.

“What if Evie was really trying to save Lisa? Maybe that’s why she showed the book to people. She wanted to get everyone’s attention because she knew something bad was happening and she wanted to stop it.”

“We’ll be jolly friends, forever more,” Lisa sang.

Sam shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know, Bee. Why was she dressed up like Lisa that night?”

Phoebe thought a minute. “A decoy. So they’d take her instead. That’s why she had the knife out. She thought you were Teilo grabbing her, thinking she was Lisa.”

Lisa giggled. “Eeny, meeny, miney, moe,” she said.

“E
vie?” Phoebe called, but as soon as she stepped inside, she knew the house was empty.

They’d found the front door of their house wide open, Teilo’s sign painted on it.

On the floor of the living room was Evie’s key necklace, the chain broken. She bent down and picked it up, remembered Evie saying,
I thought you didn’t believe in magic.

She didn’t, did she?

Phoebe picked up the key and went to the aquariums. Orville and Wilbur were sleeping. The hedgehog was nibbling on a nugget of food. The snake stared out at her with his one milky eye.

“What did you see?” she asked him. “Where did Evie go?”

Phoebe’s head was pounding.

“Evie!” Sam called.

Phoebe found Sam and Lisa in the kitchen. There was a dirty cereal bowl and coffee cup in the sink, which seemed to be the only proof that Evie had been there at all.

Sam put his hand on Phoebe’s shoulder. “She’s not here, Bee.”

Now the question was, did she go on her own or was she taken? Phoebe clasped the old skeleton key in her hand. She didn’t think Evie would have left it behind. Unless she wanted them to think she’d been abducted.

Phoebe ran a hand through her hair.
Think
, she told herself.
You like puzzles; you should be able to figure this out.
But the clues she had made no sense: Who was the six-fingered man? What was his relationship to Evie? And why had Evie introduced Teilo to Pinkie and Gerald, whom she hated?

She thought of Becca’s warning and shivered:
You don’t know what this guy is capable of.

She wondered if it was possible that they were truly up against some dark, child-stealing, shape-shifting being.

Right
, Phoebe told herself.
And next thing you’ll be thinking is that he comes out of trapdoors under kids’ beds.

“Lisa?” Sam said, his voice as gentle as he could make it. “Do you know where Evie is? Where have they gone?”

“Don’t you see?” Lisa said. She still smiled vacantly, but for the moment, at least, she seemed to be addressing Sam directly, like a real person, not a figment of her imagination. “There’s nothing you can do to stop it. I tried. I thought if I came here, I’d be safe. I thought we could save the baby.”

“It’s not too late,” Sam said.

“My baby, yours—they were promised. The firstborn, Sammy. Don’t you remember?”

Sam’s face twitched. His eyes looked wild with panic. And for the first time since all this began, Phoebe truly understood.

“Oh my God,” Phoebe said. “You believe.”

Sam shook his head, slowly, gently, the smallest of gestures that betrayed the truth.

“This is why you didn’t want children, isn’t it? You didn’t want Teilo to take your firstborn like he took Lisa. You’ve believed all along, even if you tried to convince yourself it wasn’t possible, that there’s no such thing as fairies.”

“No,” he muttered.

“I found the bag of papers in the office, Sam. I know what you’ve been reading up on. I saw the notes about your dreams. The Dark Man, Sam? It’s Teilo, isn’t it?”

“They’re just dreams.”

“Maybe,” Phoebe said. “But what if they’re not?”

And maybe the shadow man I met when I was a kid was real. Maybe he’s watching me still.

A nightmarish thought occurred to her then: Teilo had chosen her too; picked her, for whatever reason, to deliver Sam’s firstborn. Maybe it was Teilo who orchestrated their meeting, bringing Sam and her together.

“It’s not possible,” he said.

“Yeah, and just last week you said Lisa coming back was impossible, but here she is. What if there is a King of the Fairies, Sam, and he’s like those fairies in those notes you took? A shape-shifting, immortal, evil son-of-a-bitch who wants our baby next?”