Unraveling Isobel (22 page)

I shoved him and nearly fell out of the tree from the effort. He laughed and grabbed me to make sure I didn't fall. I gripped the trunk harder. “Have you heard about the party coming up at Tara Cove?”

“Yeah.”

“Nicole wants me to make sure you go. She's planning to make her move.”

“Then I won't go. It's not really my kind of scene anyway.”

“Sooner or later it's going to be an issue.” I picked at the bark on the trunk. “Are we going to keep this hidden all year?” I hoped he wouldn't ask me what I meant by “this.” I wasn't sure how to define our relationship, but I was sure that any definition I came up with wouldn't include Nicole slobbering all over him.

“What do you want to do?”

“Our parents will freak if it comes out that we … you know …” I was glad it was dark so he couldn't see how much I was blushing.

“You mean if it comes out that we like each other?”

I shrugged. Nate put his finger under my chin and tilted my face so that I was looking at him. “I don't care who it bothers. The only reason to hide it now is to keep people from trying to separate us.”

We leaned toward each other. There was enough space separating us that I wasn't sure we could stretch without falling. I closed my eyes and felt his breath on my face an instant before his lips brushed mine. His mouth was warm. He pulled back and flashed me a half smile that made me want to yank my shirt off. Who knew a smile could be so sexy? He should be forced to have a permit for that smile.

“Did you bring me out here to make out in the trees or to tell me to watch out for Nicole?”

“Neither, but the making out part has been nice.”

“Nice? That was my A game.”

“Don't get me wrong, it wasn't bad.” It was amazing, but I didn't say that. “If you need to practice, I'm willing to make some time for you.”

“You're so selfless.”

“A girl with a heart, that's how they describe me.”

“I bet people have some very interesting ways to describe you.” He leaned forward to kiss me again.

I put a hand up. If there was any more kissing, I was going to forget what I wanted to ask him. “I did bring you out to talk about something. I need your help.”

“Sure.”

“You might want to hear what it is first.” I pulled on my lower lip. “I have sort of a project thing I need to do.”

“For school?”

“No. It's more personal. I want to see if I can figure out what's going on around here, the strange stuff.”

Nate pulled back. “I don't know if it's a good idea.”

“Why?”

Nate jumped out of the tree, laced his fingers behind his head, and walked a few steps away. I leaned over. It seemed a long way to jump. I rolled over so that the branch was pressed into my stomach and then slid down until I was hanging by my hands before dropping to the ground. I landed on a rotting apple. It gave a soft squish under my foot. I scraped my shoe on
the ground and then stood behind Nate, waiting for him to say something.

“You don't know what you're messing with. Maybe some things are best left alone.”

“What if they're not? What if there is stuff we shouldn't be ignoring?” I looked him in the eye. “Do you think the whole thing is in my mind?”

“No, but that's not the same as believing this is all real, either. Maybe there's a ghost, or maybe the stuff you're seeing is just your mind making sense of information.”

I felt a flare of annoyance. “My mind making sense of things? That sounds like you do think it is in my head.”

“All I'm saying is sometimes our mind has a way of twisting things.” Nate held up a hand to stop me from talking. “It's just as possible—heck, more possible—that a lot of this is stuff my dad has done to make sure he's got your mom's undivided attention.”

“But that's the whole point. I shouldn't be sitting back and waiting to see what happens next. What I want to do is take back control, figure out what is going on. If it's your dad, I need to protect myself, and if your sister is trying to get a message to us, shouldn't we pay attention?”

Nate turned to face me. ”Maybe some things are better left unknown.”

Chapter 30

I
n the end, Nate reluctantly agreed to help me. I understood his hesitance. It wasn't that I wanted to muck about with possible ghosts. I am generally in favor of segregation of the dead and the living. However, I was in a situation where either I was crazy and doing these things without knowing it, my new stepdad was trying to make me look crazy, or there was a ghost. While I was willing to admit one of the defining characteristics of crazy people is that they don't know they're crazy, I couldn't accept that I had gone from sane to fully delusional in a matter of weeks. My mom always complains that I don't do anything fast, so why would this be any different? What I wasn't going to do was sit back and wait for Dick or Evelyn to make the next move. I was going to take Dr. Mike's suggestion and take control.

Nate offered to give me a ride, but I could tell he was less
than thrilled to be seen in public asking the kinds of questions I wanted to ask, so I told him to wait at home and I'd ride my bike. Personally, I felt pretty safe. Librarians are like priests. You can tell them you want information on just about any subject and they never look at you weird. It's like a rule or something. I figured even in a small town like this, my question wouldn't be the strangest one the librarian had heard. I didn't know if librarians had any sort of official privacy code, but I was counting on confidence. They're not big talkers. It comes from being forced to be quiet all the time. Besides, I was starting to trust Mandy. I wouldn't go as far as to say we were friends, but I didn't have many people on this island I felt comfortable around.

I pulled open the door to the library. The older librarian was checking out books for a young mother who looked like she was about to lose it. The mother was holding a baby, had a stroller with what looked like twin girls around three, and had a five-year-old boy who was running around the shelves with his finger shoved up his nose. I considered warning him that if he fell, he would poke his brain out, but it struck me that losing intelligence was not something he was worried about. Either this woman had never heard of birth control or she was a masochist.

I didn't see Mandy anywhere, so I faked an interest in the New Books section while I waited. The heavy breeder was still getting organized, trying to get the books she'd taken out to fit into the shelf under the stroller. She would shove a book in, and then something, a juice cup, a Binky, or one disturbing Barbie-doll
head, would fall out the other side. She would shove that back in, and then something else would leak out the other side. Her stroller was like a poorly designed clown car. I did my best to avoid sighing dramatically. This woman had enough problems.

I went over and helped. It was a good thing spatial relations were a strength of mine, because it required the geometry skills of Newton to get everything slotted into place. I even held the baby (who smelled like spoiled milk and stale Cheerios) so that the woman could corral the five-year-old, who was now in full meltdown mode. This kid had clearly never heard of the value of the inside voice.

By the time she left, I saw Mandy standing in the stacks. She was smiling. “Nice of you to help. Do you like kids?”

“Only with barbecue sauce.”

At first I thought she was going to think I was serious, but then I saw the corners of her mouth twitch. Another bonus point in her favor—she got my sense of humor.

“So are you looking for cookbooks today?”

“No.” My eyes slid away from her. I took a deep breath before I could lose my resolve and end up asking for a book on art history and running for the door. “I need some research materials.”

“Another school project?”

“No, this one is a more personal interest.”

“Go on.”

I looked around the library to confirm the other librarian
wasn't listening in and no one else had come in. The last thing I needed was to discover someone like Nicole lurking behind a shelf. “I need some books on ghosts.”

It was hard to tell, librarians being the bookish indoor type and not typically known for their dark tans, but it seemed like Mandy went pale.

“You mean ghost stories? Something like Poe or Stephen King?”

“No. I mean books about ghosts. How to find them, stuff like that.”

“I see.” Her fingers brushed nonexistent dust off the shelf closest to us. “You want something on the study of paranormal activity.”

“Exactly.”

She opened her mouth, and I waited for her to ask me the next question, but after a beat she closed it again and walked to the back corner of the library. I trailed after her. She began pointing at books as we went.
Real Life Haunting, Ghosts of the Pacific Northwest, Paranormal Investigator.
After she pointed out the first two, I realized that she never even bothered to look anything up on the computer. She was like a homing device for books. I wondered if she had a photographic memory of where every book could be found in the library or if this was a subject that enough people requested that she had no trouble finding it.

“Thanks.” I sat at the closest table so I could look through the stack.

“Do you need anything else?”

I flipped through the top book and answered without even glancing up. “Nope. This is great.” I turned a few more pages before I realized that she hadn't left. I looked up. She was still standing next to the shelf, watching me. Her eyebrows were scrunched together. I closed the book and met her eyes.

“Do you mind if I ask why you're interested?”

I paused. There really isn't a good way to tell a relative stranger that you think dead people are trying to tell you something. It's personal information. It's like telling someone you just met that you have a yeast infection. It might be true, but it's not the kind of thing people want to know about you. Plus, you know that every time they see you after that it will be the first thing they think about:
There she is, the girl with the yeast infection/ghost problem
. On the other hand, maybe she could help me. She was a librarian after all. They know all kinds of things.

“Lots of people think where I live, Morrigan, is haunted,” I said.

“Have you seen anything?”

My eyes slid away from hers. “It's an old house. It's the kind of place where it's easy to freak yourself out.” Talk about an understatement.

Mandy sat down at the table next to me. “I want to tell you something. I should have said something when you were here last time, but I sometimes forget people who haven't lived on the island their entire lives don't know all the details. It can
be nice to meet someone who doesn't know everything about you.” She gave me a half smile. “It lets people see you in a way others can't.”

“I get that.”

“When you looked through the historical records, do you remember the story about the girls who disappeared?”

“They said they were going out to Morrigan to look for ghosts.” I wondered if I was about to get a lecture on how teens shouldn't mess around with things like paranormal activity.

Mandy took a deep breath. “I knew them.”

Suddenly I felt guilty, as if I were the one who had done something to her friends. Like my connection to the house made me complicit in what happened. “I'm sorry,” I mumbled.

Mandy leaned closer, and I sensed she wanted to give me a hug, but she pulled back. “It's okay. It's been a long time now. You remind me of one of them a little. Not the way you look, but your attitude. Both of you are too big for this island. Big dreams. Big plans.”

“You don't think she just left the island, then?”

“No.” Mandy brushed her hair out of her face. “She wanted to move off the island, but she never would have left without saying something. They made a big thing out of the fights she had with her parents, but those didn't mean anything. They were simply the fights kids have with their parents.”

“I fight with my mom all the time.”

“She wanted to be independent, but she loved her family.
Something happened to her.” She met my eyes. “Something happened to those girls at that house.”

I took a deep breath. “When I told you that the house was just old and kind of creepy, that wasn't the whole truth. I have seen things. Things have happened. The thing is, I don't know if it's supernatural or something someone is doing, trying to make me think it's supernatural.” I looked down at the table. “Does that sound crazy?”

Mandy ran her hands over the stack of books on the table. “People read these in an effort to make sense of things. Make sense of things that have no explanation. But you know, I'm a bit of an unofficial expert on ghosts after what happened to me.”