I shuddered, hard, so sad, so angry . . .
Come to me.
Come to me.
Come to me.
Come to me.
Come to me.
The ice pick. We were tied down. Deep into the center of our foreheads. She dunked me in the bath. She hated me.
He set us on fire.
Come to me.
Come to me.
Come to me.
Come to me.
I was shaking.
“God,” I whispered. “Celia, did he do it? Did he start that fire and lock them in?”
TWENTY-THREE
possessions: him
My love is like a red red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
My love is like the melodie
That’s sweetly play’d in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in love am I;
And I will love thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:
And I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.
And fare thee weel, my only love,
And fare thee weel a while!
And I will come again, my love,
Thou’ it were ten thousand mile.
—Robert Burns, “A Red, Red Rose”
I WAS RATTLED, and frightened, and I cried for a long time, but it wasn’t enough. Maybe grief was Celia’s unfinished business—that a guy she had loved so much had left her to die in that fire. Belle’s response was rage, and an unquenched need for revenge. Except Belle was venting her fury on the wrong person—a fellow victim. If I was right. If David Abernathy really was the one to blame.
I staggered back to Grose, and retrieved my cell phone out of my pocket. Both a text message and a voicemail had come through.
“Hey, it’s Troy. I found out some more stuff. Meet me tonight? Old library?”
Before I met up with Troy, I had to get through a day filled with question marks. Mandy was nowhere to be seen. And Miles—where had he gone, and had he been in the woods all along?
Julie was claiming to be under the weather, but I knew she didn’t want to face the world so soon after what had happened. Rose had a hangover, but she didn’t remember her possession. No one ever did, except me, and maybe Mandy.
Then I was summoned to a visit with Dr. Melton. I could barely drag myself to the admin building. Ms. Shelley was photocopying a flyer for the Valentine’s Day dance, featuring a pen-and-ink drawing of a laughing cupid being pelted with stars and hearts by three girls in Grecian robes. I pictured Mandy slow-dancing with Troy, and turned away. I wondered if anyone knew that Valentine’s Day was also my birthday. No more sweet sixteen. My mom used to say my face was heart-shaped because I’d gotten a kiss from Cupid, and that I was the best Valentine’s Day present she had ever received.
I wondered if there was a statue of Cupid in the god-and-goddess garden.
“Lindsay?” It was Dr. Melton.
He escorted me into his office. It was warm and inviting; there were Ansel Adams photographs of the redwoods on the walls, along with several framed diplomas. He had gone to Princeton. On his desk a miniature waterfall trickled water over polished gray stones. He had a fish tank, too. Dr. Yaeger had also had a fish tank. Maybe it was a thing with psychiatrists.
“Everything good?” he asked, as I settled into an oversized padded chair. My feet didn’t quite touch the carpeted floor. There was a vase of red roses on a bookshelf, probably silk, and I remembered the song David Abernathy had sung to the two girls who had died in a fire.
I nodded. “Super. Great.” I sounded too eager, and he looked penetratingly at me. “Except for right now,” I added, and he grinned.
“I will take my therapist hat off.” He pantomimed doing so, tossing his invisible hat across the room. But I knew therapists. They never stopped checking you out. Mental health-wise.
“I’m thinking we should look at universities that are attracted to free spirits,” he began, and I started. “Reed, Oberlin, places like that.”
I didn’t know those names. I hadn’t done any research on higher education; all I knew was that my mom went to UC San Diego and my dad graduated from the University of Maryland.
I was planning to ask him what he meant by “places like that.” Instead, I said in a rush, “Why did you talk to me about schizophrenia?”
He didn’t blink. “Did that bother you?”
“Yeah,” I retorted, as in duh. “You know I had a breakdown—”
“Oh.” He smiled and waved his hand. “No, no, no. I’m so sorry, Lindsay. I didn’t mean to give you the impression that I was referring to you.”
I met his “oh” and raised him one. In the ensuing silence, I replayed our original conversation. “You meant Shayna.”
He gave his head a discreet little shake.
My lips parted. I got it.
“Kiyoko?”
“I must honor patient confidentiality,” he said slowly, as if giving me time to catch up, in the event that I needed it. Basically, he was saying yes. Kiyoko had been schizophrenic. And he was telling me that why? To explain away anything she might have told me before she died? Did he know that the sordid past had possession of Dr. Ehrlenbach’s fancy rich-girl school?
And if so, would he fully enlighten me as to what precisely had occurred here?
“Let’s move on.” His tone was firm but pleasant. “Oberlin.”
OBERLIN is fifty thousand dollars a year, I thought, as I made my way to the old library after dinner. Two hundred thousand for four years.
Now that was scary.
But I could no longer distract myself with thoughts of colleges. I was standing outside the library again. By the bluish light of the battery-operated lantern Troy had left for me in the hall, I knew he was already in the reading room.
I shook my head, unable to go inside. How was I supposed to take charge of my survival when I couldn’t even walk down the hall?
“Lindsay?” he called, unaware that he might summon the dead if he spoke aloud in a haunted house.
“Yeah,” I said. “Coming.”
I shut my eyes tightly and took a breath. Then I flicked on my flashlight and surveyed the doorway. I turned quickly around, staring at the waving trees, listening to the wind as it pinched my earlobes.
I tottered down the hall as if I were drunk, and turned into the reading room. Troy was kneeling on a blanket the he’d spread over a section of the carpet, and there were piles of rotting books all around him. They stank. Another lantern sat on a small stack of books that were in much better condition.
Troy smiled up at me and patted the blanket, gesturing for me to sit with him.
“Here’s the ledger book,” he said. “I have to warn you. It’s gruesome.”
I sat down on the blanket, and coldness seeped into my bones. I felt as if my spine and ribcage were made of ice cubes, strung together on brittle silver wires. Troy handed me the book. The cover was black and charred; he pulled a flashlight from his jacket, angling it downward as I carefully opened the burned cover with both hands and turned to the first page. It was dark, with a small light-colored square pasted in the middle. A lit candle was burning on top of a skull.
Semper Curatio
Ex Libris
David Abernathy, M.D.
“It means something like, “Always attentive. This book belongs to David Abernathy, M.D.”
“With a candle burning on top of a skull,” I said. Then I turned the page of the ledger book, or journal, or whatever it was.
“Oh my God,” I whispered. In a faded black-and-white photograph in an oval black cut-out frame, the eyes of Belle Johnson stared malevolently out at me. The fury in her expression took my breath away and I didn’t move, didn’t speak.
Then I turned to the next page. In tiny, elaborate handwriting, on a
page with brittle, curled edges, was a list of girls’ names; it started at the top of the page and extended all the way to the bottom. My mouth dropped open.
“A hundred and twelve. I counted them.” Troy pointed to the topmost name. There was a date beside it: January 4, 1889. Different day, different year, same calendar month. Coincidence?
I dropped my gaze to the last seven names. There they—there we were:
Belle Johnson
Lydia Jenkins
Anna Gomez
Martha St. Pierre
Pearl Magnusen
Henrietta Fortescu
Celia Reaves
None of them had dates after their names.
I waited for a reaction from Celia, for something inside me to snap. None came. Trying to contain my dread, I began to turn the page. Troy put a hand over mine, and my skin tingled.
“I have to warn you, there are drawings and some old photographs. And I-I think that some of the girls in the pictures are dead. And others have been . . . butchered. Lindsay, you were right. Dr. David Abernathy performed lobotomies on the girls here at Marlwood. It’s creepy—you can’t find any evidence online or in the Marlwood or Lakewood archives. It’s Marlwood’s dark secret.”
Troy’s voice shook a little. I looked up at him. His expression was grim. “The operation didn’t always work. Especially at first. He had to practice. A lot.” He gestured to the book. “He treated them like lab specimens. Like experimental things whose brains he dissected.”
I studied their names. I traced Celia Reaves with my fingertip. Why was there no date? No date on any of the seven? Had they been spared?
I smelled smoke. I felt heat. I looked down at the book and saw the charred edges smoldering, glowing red embers releasing sparks that flared toward Troy’s chin. He was unaware of them . . . or else, I was imagining them.
Or Celia is making me see it? I thought, as the coldness lay across the back of my neck. The pages curled in the flames as I leaped up, dropping the book on the ground. Then I moved away, crossing my arms, and turned my back. I began to shake so hard I was afraid I was going to throw up.
“Are you okay?” Troy asked me.
I shrugged, unsure how to answer. “It’s just . . . horrible.”
“It is,” he agreed. “First he drilled holes in their foreheads and dug around with knives . . . ”
I shut my eyes as the ground whirled around me.
“Later, he changed his method. He’d take an ice pick and a hammer . . . ”
Everything began to melt—the library in front of me, the sky, the trees . . . and Troy’s face. They bubbled into globules like wax, like soured milk, like a bad dream, a hallucination, like I was losing my mind.
“I did some research,” he went on, unaware of my panic. “There’s no information in any medical literature about lobotomies until around 1935. So he was just making it all up as he went along.”
“Save me, David,” Celia whispered inside me. “For the love of God . . . ”
Troy fell silent. There was a beat. Then he said, “Lindsay? Did you just say something?”
Don’t. Stop it. Please, I silently begged her. Troy will help. Don’t scare him away.
My head throbbed.
“Linz, I’m sorry. I know it’s gross. I shouldn’t have shown it to you.”
Troy bent over me, draping himself around me as he tried to lift me to my feet. I was a mess, boneless, limp, in shock. Then, as he lifted me in his arms, I fought hard not to cling to him, and scream and scream and scream . . .
Instead, I kissed him. He kissed me back. He kept kissing me, too much, too long. We both wanted to move on to other things and I knew it; we were panting and clinging and pressing and touching; his hair was soft and his skin was warm and everywhere he touched me I felt alive again; and we began to go too far. I gasped, and he jerked away.
“I’m sorry,” he said, the perfect gentleman. The dimples on either side of his mouth deepened. “I didn’t mean to do that. I know you . . . ” He blushed and took my hand. “Things should be nicer than this, for you.”
He knows I’m a virgin, I thought. I didn’t know how I felt about that. Embarrassed, I supposed. Very shy.
“Hey.” He lifted my chin. “In my world, we grow up fast.”
Mine too, I thought. I had to grow up when my mom got sick.
“I’d like . . . I’d really like . . . to slow down.” The lamplight danced in his hair. His eyes gleamed with genuine kindness as he bent forward and kissed my forehead. “Let’s take our time. Okay?” He took my hand, turned it over, and his forehead wrinkled. “You’re shaking. I’m so sorry.”
I swallowed. I didn’t know how to explain, where to begin. It wasn’t him.
Mostly.
“Listen, I know things are . . . strange. I’m going to make things right.” He took my hand and waggled it. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
“After this, I can’t come over for the rest of the week,” he said, then guffawed at how that must sound—making things right. “I’m on our baseball team and we’ve got stuff to do.” He took a breath. “But, uh, there’s a dance coming up. Here, at Marlwood. Valentine’s Day.”
My stomach did a flip. I forced myself not to betray any emotion as I waited for him to go on.
He put his arms around me and hugged me. “There’s this spa resort, Pine Meadow. Near here. They’ve got a nice restaurant. I thought maybe we could go there before the dance for dinner.”
Before I could stop myself, I smiled. A date! He was asking me on a date, and on my birthday, even though he didn’t know it. What about the dance? I almost said, but I played it cool.
“Sure,” I said. “Great.”
He smiled back. “Let’s get real dressed up,” he said. “I’ll get a sweet car.”
“You have a sweet car,” I replied. “Just ask my dad.”
“Even sweeter.” He looked really happy. Until we heard a light thump overhead. I held still, listened. Troy gave me a questioning look, and I pointed upward.
“I heard something,” I murmured.
“The stairs are this way,” Troy said quietly, pointing to the right. “I’ll go look.”
No, I thought. Don’t go up there. Ever. I shook my head. “Let’s just go.”
“But if someone’s here . . . ” His face clouded. “If it’s Miles . . . ”
“It’s dark, and it’s late,” I said, as icy fingers tiptoed up my spine. “And maybe . . . maybe I didn’t hear anything.”
He looked unconvinced. “Mandy told me about those birds, and those slash marks . . . ”
And the cats. And we were supposed to go everywhere with a buddy . . .
He trotted off, and I let him. I told myself I could handle being in the room alone for a few minutes. I was sure I could.
I looked over at the little stack of books beneath the lantern. Lifting up the light, I held the top book in its glow. The Dybbuk: A Classic of Yiddish Theater, said the cover. My heart skipped a beat as I examined the spine. BM call letters, then numbers, and a sticker with the Marlwood crest. It had been checked out from our new library. By Shayna.
I looked from it to the rest of the stack. There were two more books from our library: Exorcism Rituals from Around the World and Jewish Folktales and Legends.
I settled back down cross-legged and put them in my lap. I opened each one in turn, looking at the titles, the section headers, some of them in Hebrew. Did dybbuks only possess Jewish people? Maybe Shayna had been all wrong.
Someone was watching me. I lifted up my head, expecting Troy; and I exhaled very slowly. Celia’s face was reflected back at me from the surface of the glass front of the center bookshelf across the room. Black eyes, slack face . . . but her mouth was moving.
Dizzy, I got up and walked toward her.
“Don’t trust him,” she said. “Don’t trust Troy.”
“Why not?” I whispered. “He’s not like David Abernathy, if that’s what you’re worried about.” But I pau
sed. Could he become David Abernathy?
“Did you find something else?” Troy asked me, coming back into the room.
I stared at Celia. She stared back. He didn’t see her. Then she faded away, leaving me with no clue what to do or say next.
“Linz?” he said. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” I came to the blanket and sat back down. He joined me. My chest was tight as he took my hand again, smiling quizzically. I felt his warm skin on mine. Solid, human, normal, wonderful. He smelled like soap and cotton. Good smells.
“No one there. All clear. Find anything else down here?” he asked, indicating the books in my lap.
“Yeah, maybe,” I hedged. “What else do you have?”
He picked up another book. “First Lessons in Female Comportment,” he read. “There’s a zillion ones like that. They even had lessons on how to hold your fan. After a while, they all look the same. The books, I mean.”
He turned my hand over and traced my palm. It tickled. “Let me see vat I see,” he said in a singsong fake German accent. “Oh, Fraulein, youz is cuckoo.”
“Ja, ja,” I replied, trying to match his light tone.
I glanced over my shoulder at the glass cabinets. The merest whisper of Celia’s white face stared back at me, and I shuddered, suddenly very cold.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“I know.” He tapped my palm with his finger. “We have to go back.”
I didn’t argue. We both got up, he lifting up the lantern. I was still holding Shayna’s books and he didn’t seem to care or notice as he led the way back into the hall. Light bounced off spiderwebs and skittering insects in bulging, off-kilter circles.
Celia’s warning irked me.
“I really do have to go,” I said.
He looked at the ceiling. Then he sighed as he gave in. “I’ll walk you back to the main part of the campus. As close as we can get without Dr. E’s guards catching us anyway.”
Taking my hand, he began walking me out the front door. Once we were outside, he studied the windows, his jaw clenched, his eyes narrowed. His face changed. Hardened.