Don't Breathe a Word (4 page)

Chapter 3

Phoebe

June 4, Present Day

T
hey had pan-fried trout with baby arugula salad and roasted corn for dinner. Evie and Elliot were excellent cooks, especially compared to Phoebe, who had the unique talent of being able to burn spaghetti. Phoebe had a glass of wine and it went straight to her head. It was pink and sweet, with a caramelized raspberry flavor. But there was something bitter underneath, something that made Phoebe’s tongue feel dry and shrunken in her mouth.

“Some friends of ours make it,” Evie explained.

Phoebe didn’t drink any more, but everyone else polished off the bottle. Then another. They were working on their third when Sam lit the fire. Phoebe was drifting in and out, straining to pay attention to the conversation, but she felt exhausted and on information overload. She wanted to go to bed. To get under the covers and snuggle up to Sam.

All evening she’d been telling herself it wasn’t possible—she couldn’t be pregnant. But still, the worry nagged at her, chewing away like an old dog with a bone. She was pretty sure she’d had her period on her friend Franny’s birthday, which was at the end of April. Well over a month ago.

“But if we imagined it, I mean, if it wasn’t real, then how do you explain the book?” Evie asked. She was leaning toward Sam, her wine-flushed face only inches away from his. Phoebe opened her eyes wider. Was Evie flirting with Sam? Or was this just how cousins behaved? She’d never been close with any of her cousins. Couldn’t even remember any of their names now, just little facts, like that one of them was pregnant at thirteen, another liked to start fires. The cream of the crop, her people. So she guessed she wasn’t much of an authority on cousins, or family in general. But still, something about Evie ruffled her feathers, told her to be on guard.

Elliot seemed unfazed. He sat in a deep easy chair, paring his fingernails with a small jackknife that had come from one of the many pockets of his vest. A magician needs a vest like that, Phoebe had thought: over the course of the evening he’d pulled out matches, a corkscrew, a cell phone, a digital camera, a GPS unit, breath mints, toothpicks in a little silver holder, a pack of menthol cigarettes, even a mini first-aid kit to get a Band-Aid when Evie cut herself cleaning the fish. He had more in his vest than Phoebe ever carried in her purse, which usually had a cell phone, lipstick, a spiral-bound memo book or two, and a pocket-size word puzzle book with a stubby golf pencil.

“And what about the little gifts he left her?” Evie asked. “The ones she stuck on the charm bracelet?”

“I don’t know,” Sam admitted, his shoulders slouching as he sunk down in the chair, looking smaller, little-boyish. Phoebe reached over and took his hand.

Elliot, who’d been nearly silent, stood up, stretched, poured himself more wine, then walked over to the window next to the front door. He opened the window, pulled out of a pack of cigarettes, and lit one, carefully blowing the smoke out the window.

“I never heard about a charm bracelet,” Phoebe said sleepily, but then again, she’d never heard a lot of the story. Not from Sam anyway. All she had was what she herself remembered and what she’d gleaned by sneaking off to the library and rereading the old newspaper stories. She was sure none of them had mentioned a bracelet. But cops did that, didn’t they? Kept certain details to themselves so they’d know who had real information and who was just looking for their fifteen minutes of fame.

“God, she loved that thing,” Evie said. “It was silver and she had a charm with her name on it. And one of a starfish she’d gotten earlier that summer up in Cape Cod. But then, the fairies started leaving gifts and she put them on the bracelet.”

“What kinds of gifts?” Phoebe asked, sitting forward and stretching out her legs. She was looking at Sam but knew the question would be answered by Evie.

“Let’s see. There was an old Indian head penny polished to a shine. A Catholic medal, too. Saint Christopher, I think. Was there anything else, Sammy?”

“I don’t think so,” Sam said. He had shrunk down even farther into the seat, looking like he was trying to disappear altogether.

“So whatever happened to the bracelet?” Phoebe asked.

“I’m not sure,” Sam said, casting his eyes down in a way that made Phoebe wonder if he was lying.

P
hoebe didn’t realize who Sam was until they’d been dating for three months and Sam took her home to meet his mother. As they came into town and passed the Lord’s Prayer rock, Phoebe gave an involuntary shiver. She all but gasped when he pulled up in front of the rambling house on Spruce Street that she herself once stood in front of, lost in a crowd of gawkers.

Are you here to see the fairies?

“This is your house?” Phoebe asked, forcing the words through her rapidly constricting throat.

“Yup.”

“I mean, you actually grew up here? You didn’t move when you were in high school or something?”

“It’s our house, Bee. My great-grandfather built it. Now come on in. My mom’s dying to meet you.”

She followed Sam to the front door, stopping to look up at the leftmost window on the second floor, remembering the little boy with the Superman shirt. The little boy she was destined to meet one day, by random chance, when he walked into the clinic where she worked, carrying a wounded owl wrapped in a flannel shirt. The man she’d fall in love with. It was almost too much, to think that she’d glimpsed him back when he was only ten, that she had somehow been witness to his worst moments.

She decided, as she followed Sam into the house (which was now freshly painted, the porch repaired, bright pansies in flower boxes), that she wouldn’t tell him about being in the crowd on the street the week Lisa disappeared. What good would it do? Even later, when she took the time to make a list, the cons of telling him far outweighed the pros.

“What a lovely home you have,” she said as she shook Phyllis’s hand in the bright kitchen, determined to make a good first impression. “And what a charming little town. I think I’ve driven through it, but never stopped.”

S
am threw another log on the fire. Elliot finished his cigarette, flinging the butt out the window into the darkness, then closing the window. Phoebe drifted. She wondered how Evie kept her lipstick so perfect while she sipped wine. Was she not letting her lips touch the glass? Was she even drinking the wine or just pretending?

“Did you bring the book?” Evie finally asked, and Sam nodded. Phoebe sat up with a start, felt her heart quicken at the thought that they were finally about to open the book that had been left for Lisa in an abandoned foundation in a ghost town: a book supposedly written by the King of the Fairies, a book with instructions Lisa followed to cross over.

“We’ll look at it in the morning,” Evie said, leaning back to stretch, her hand landing on Elliot’s shoulder, “when our heads are a little more clear. It’s getting late now.” She looked at her watch.

Phoebe leaned to look at Sam’s watch: nearly midnight.

“But before we go to bed, I want to show you something,” Evie said. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a folded piece of paper. She passed it over to Sam, who sat up straight to receive it. He unfolded it and smoothed it flat. Notepaper. In the upper left corner, a reproduction of an old botanical print. Lily of the valley. Tiny flowers with sleepy, nodding, bell-shaped heads. Beneath it were lines of small black script. Phoebe leaned in to get a better view of the writing.

I am back from the land of the fairies.

I’ll be seeing you soon.

Lisa

“How did you get this?” Sam asked.

“It was left in my mailbox last week. Just before I called you.” She waited a minute while Sam studied it, then asked, “Do you think it’s really her? I mean, could it be? After all these years?”

“It’s not possible,” Sam said. His face was stony, and in it Phoebe read the same line Sam had been reciting for years:
Lisa’s gone, taken, and there’s nothing we can do but get on with our lives.

Practical Sam. This was one of the things Phoebe admired most about him—his ability to put the past behind him and move on.

“But it looks sort of like her writing, doesn’t it?” Evie asked. “I went to the police with it, but they think it’s someone playing a prank. They didn’t take it very seriously.”

Sam shook his head, not ready to believe.

“Tell me the truth, Sammy,” Evie said, leaning toward him. “You didn’t just happen to find the fairy book in the attic after all these years, did you?”

“No,” Sam admitted. “We got a call. From a girl.”

“A girl?”

“Yeah,” Sam explained. “Phoebe talked to her. She told us where to find the book.”

“Did she say anything else?” Evie asked, looking at Phoebe. Her face was worried, pleading.

“No,” Phoebe said.

“How did she sound?” Evie asked.

“Scared,” Phoebe admitted. “She sounded scared.”

All four of them, it seemed, were holding their breath while Sam traced the words on the note with a trembling finger.

I am back from the land of the fairies. I’ll be seeing you soon.

The silence was destroyed by a loud rap at the door.

Everyone froze and stared wild-eyed at one another, each of them, Phoebe knew, thinking the same impossible thought:
It’s Lisa. She’s found us.

Chapter 4

Lisa

June 6, Fifteen Years Ago

“T
ell me a story,” Evie begged. “P-l-eee-se!” She was in her sleeping bag on the floor beside Lisa’s bed, thrashing restlessly from side to side like someone trying to escape a straitjacket. The crack of light coming in from under the door gave her face a jack-o’-lantern glow. Her head looked too big, her eyes black hollows.

Tucked under Evie’s pillow was her big hunting knife. Lisa could see the edge of the leather sheath. Who exactly was Evie expecting when she hid the knife under her pillow each night?

Evie told people that the knife had belonged to her father, which was a complete load of crap—Evie had never known her father or even had a clue who he might have been. She’d found the knife in an old box of fishing tackle in her basement. Hazel, Evie’s mom, was a packrat and the knife could have come from anywhere—Hazel frequented flea markets and yard sales and seemed to have a strange addiction to buying things she’d never have any use for. The more Evie told the story of how the knife had belonged to her father, the more she herself seemed to believe it was true. Lisa never argued with her about it; she understood that Evie deserved some solid thing to hold on to that tied her to her dad, even if it was made up.

Next to her pillow were her sketchbook and pens. Evie was often making scribbling drawings in it—quick sketches of gangly limbed cartoon people with long faces and dark circles under their eyes. Everything she sketched looked like something a seven-year-old had done—a very creepy seven-year-old who made everyone look like a vampire.

“Pretty please,” Evie moaned again.

Lisa turned in her bed so that her back was to Evie, her nose inches from the wall. Above her hung the map of Middle Earth she’d made while reading
The Lord of the Rings
. She knew it was kind of geeky, that other girls in her class had cute movie stars and singers thumbtacked to their walls while hers were covered with maps of imaginary places, unicorns, and a drawing her father had done for her of the troll under the bridge in “Three Billy Goats Gruff”—it was pen and ink and had always terrified her. What scared her wasn’t the sharp teeth or ragged claws of the troll but the hungriness in his eyes.

“With a cherry on top,” Evie said.

Lisa pulled the covers up over her head. “I’ll tell a story if you admit what we saw in Reliance.”

Since they’d been home, whenever Lisa brought up the bells and the lights, Evie changed the subject, pretended she was totally over it. She scribbled in her sketchbook, not even making any real drawings—just spirals,
x
’s, and smudges. She pressed so hard with her pen that the paper tore.

“What is it I’m supposed to admit?” Evie wheezed.

“That it was fairies. You know it was, so why don’t you just say it?”

Lisa was suffocating under the covers, but she had these little tests she gave herself—to see how long she could do uncomfortable, unpleasant things: holding her breath in the bathtub, touching raw chicken livers, roasting under covers. When it felt like she was out of air, she gave in and lifted the sheet and blanket off her face.

The dark room seemed suddenly bright. She rolled back to look at Evie, who was kicking her legs spasmodically inside the sleeping bag, her breath making a whistling sound.

Across the room was Lisa’s desk. Next to it was the bookcase, full of fairy tales and fantasy stories.

“People see what they want to see,” Sammy had told her earlier, when she was trying to convince Evie and him that the lights in the cellar hole had been fairies.

Maybe Sammy was right—maybe Lisa thought it was fairies because that’s just what she wanted it to be, what she’d been waiting her whole life for.

But what if it worked the other way around?

What if things happened to you—special, magic things—because you’d been preparing for them? What if by believing, you opened a door?

“Say you know it was fairies and I’ll tell a story. A real special one. And I’ll give you a gift to go along with it—a magic talisman.”

“What kind of talisman?” Evie asked.

“You’ll see,” Lisa promised.

It felt a little mean, manipulating Evie like this. But the truth was, Evie was being mean too. She’d been acting like a total freak since they got back from the woods, pretending nothing out of the ordinary had happened. But her twitching body showed she was thinking about it, that she was all nerved up and wheezy. And Lisa could fix all those bad feelings. She could put Evie right to sleep with her own kind of magic medicine.

Evie loved Lisa’s stories. When she was worried or upset, they calmed her. When she was tossing and turning, they lulled her to sleep. Even when she was having the worst asthma attack ever, if Lisa pulled her close and whispered “Once upon a time” into her ear, Evie’s lungs would open, her body would go limp against Lisa’s like a giant doll. Last summer, Evie even taped Lisa telling stories so she could bring them home, play them when Lisa wasn’t around. Evie had this fantasy that someday, when they were grown up, they’d make a book together—Lisa would write down all her stories and Evie would illustrate them.

“Okay,” Evie said, finally holding still inside the sleeping bag. “You’re right.”

“Right about what?” Lisa asked. She was going to make her go all the way—say the words out loud.

Evie groaned. “Okay, okay! I think there are fairies in Reliance. Now do the story and show me the gift, okay? A deal’s a deal.”

Lisa smiled, put her head back on the pillow, closed her eyes. Storytelling wasn’t about making things up. It was more like inviting the stories to come through her, let themselves be told.

“Make it a good one,” Evie said.

“Mmm,” Lisa said, taking in a breath, then starting with the four magic words that began every story.

“Once upon a time,” she said, pausing, waiting, “there were two sisters, one light, one dark.”

“Uh huh,” Evie said, the words a soft approving sigh. Already her breath had slowed and lost some of its raspiness.

“They lived in a castle that had been enchanted by an evil witch. The castle was dark and gloomy. Everyone who set foot inside the castle, everyone but the two sisters, went mad. Their mother had hanged herself. And their father walked the halls muttering to himself and didn’t seem to notice his daughters. He looked right through them, like they were ghosts.”

Evie made a low
mmmm
sound and turned onto her side in the sleeping bag.

“This went on for so long that they began to wonder if maybe they
were
ghosts. If maybe they’d gone mad too, and were locked up in some deep dungeon, having a delusional dream about being sane.

“ ‘There’s only one thing we can do,’ said the fair-haired sister, ‘we’ve got to leave this place.’

“ ‘Where will we go?’ asked the raven-haired sister.

“ ‘Away. We’ll look for someone or something that can help us break the spell on our castle.’ ”

Lisa stopped, listened to Evie’s breathing, which was slow and deep—she was almost asleep.

“And so it was decided,” Lisa continued. “They left the castle that night, under cover of darkness on horseback. They took a sack of bread, cheese, and fruit. The dark sister carried her father’s sword. The light one carried a bow and silver arrows. And they took the one possession they had of their mother’s: a small silver key she had treasured—she never told them what lock the key might fit, but promised only that one day it would save them.”

Lisa rose from the bed, stepped carefully over Evie, and went to the desk. She pulled open the drawer and felt around until she found it. Then she crept over to Evie and opened her hand.

“What’s this?” Evie asked, half asleep.

“The gift I promised. Your own magic key.” It was an old skeleton key Lisa had found way back in the drawer of the table in the front hall, mixed in with dead batteries, dried-up pens, a bent screwdriver, and other keys abandoned because no one could remember what locks they had once fit. The skeleton key was tarnished silver and had a large tooth with several notches taken out.

Evie gripped the key tightly and smiled. “Will it save me one day?”

“Definitely,” Lisa said. “It’ll save both of us.”

L
isa was on the back of the horse from the story, her fingers gripping its silvery-white mane. She leaned down, smelled the warm musky scent of its coat. The horse moved gently, gracefully, without making a sound. She thought for sure Evie would be there behind her, but she was alone.

The horse carried her to the edge of the yard, then into the woods. They went down the hill, across the brook. Only the brook seemed deeper, wider. The horse had to swim. Lisa thought she should be frightened, but she wasn’t.

“Aren’t dreams lovely?” she said out loud.

“Yes, they are,” the horse told her. “Shh,” the horse whispered. “You sleep now.”

When she woke up at first light, she was back in her own bed, but the dark, musky smell of the horse was all around her. A shadow moved across the corner of her vision, then was gone. The door creaked shut and she was sure she heard the sound of feet padding down the hall.

“Hello?” she said.

Evie was snoring softly on the floor beside her, the knife under her pillow and the old key clenched in her hand.

A dream. Only a dream.

Aren’t dreams lovely?

Yes, they are.

She turned and saw that there on the pillow beside her was a small green velvet bag tied with a ribbon of gold.

Her heart jumped up into her throat.

Her fingers trembled as they untied the ribbon and reached inside. She pulled out three plain stones. Only when she turned on the light, she saw they weren’t stones. They were large teeth: molars, brown and worn.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, and Evie bolted up like a jack-in-the-box looking for a fight.

“Where is he?” Evie asked, reaching under the pillow for her knife.

“Who?” Lisa asked.

Evie looked around, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “Forget it,” she said, setting the knife in her lap.

“S
ome kind of ruminant maybe,” Sammy said when they shook him awake to show him the teeth. “Like a cow,” he guessed, turning one of the teeth in his hand. “Or a horse.”

Lisa got a cold chill, which Evie always said meant someone was walking over your grave.

“And you just woke up and found them?” Evie asked, her brow furrowed.

“I’ve told you a hundred times already,” Lisa said. “They were there on my pillow.”

Evie scowled.

“You think it’s the fairies?” Lisa asked.

“I thought the tooth fairy was supposed to take teeth, not leave them,” Sammy said.

“The tooth fairy’s made up,” Lisa said.

Sammy laughed, dropped the teeth back into the bag, and tied it closed. “Right. And all the other fairies are just so totally real.”