Accidental Evil (3 page)

After the end of the fence, her side of the road squeezed down and she was forced to walk on the pavement. Cars accelerating out of the sleepy part of town veered around her as their engines whined. She could have switched to the other side of the road, but she was in no mood to make accommodations for Summer People. They could give her some space for once.

Sarah turned towards the flashing “OPEN” sign on the KLV Video store as she walked by. So many of the little summer camps were lucky to have power, let alone cable or internet. Renting a DVD was the only entertainment option for a lot of them unless they wanted to drive thirty minutes to the nearest movie theater. That was one advantage the locals had. Their houses were close to the main road. They had all the utilities, and they needed them in the dead of winter. Cable and internet were the only things that kept families sane in the dead of Maine winter.

“Hey,” a voice said.
 

Sarah nearly jumped out of her shoes.

It was her friend, Lily Hazard. She was back on her bike and still sounded out of breath. “Did you find your brother?”

Sarah nodded. “He just left. He’s going south.”

“That sucks,” Lily said.

Sarah frowned and nodded. She felt tears pressing at the back of her eyes, but she wasn’t going to cry in front of Lily. She bit her tongue, just to regain control of herself.

“Now I’m stuck with that damn Shari. At least with Jeffrey around, she kept her distance.”

Sarah looked uncomfortable straddling her bicycle. Her toes barely touched the ground. She pulled out a pack of gum and started popping pieces into her mouth.

“You want to come over?” Lily asked.

“No,” Sarah said. “I’m going to head home. Maybe I’ll get lucky and beat Shari there. Then I can hide in my room.” She knew it wasn’t true. Shari always beat her back to the house. But the last thing she wanted to deal with was Lily’s perfect little house. It was too much of a reminder that her own family was so messed up.

“Come over if you want later. You know, if you don’t want to be there,” Lily said.

“Thanks.”

[ Balance ]

L
ILY
GOT
SOME
DECENT
speed before she bounced over the expansion joint between the pavement and the bridge. The jolt caught her off guard and she inhaled her gum. A perfect picture flashed in her head—they would find her blue-faced body lying in the grass next to the dam after she choked to death on the wad of gum.

When the bike bounced back down to the pavement from the bridge, the image went from a possibility to a certainty. The gum was lodged in her windpipe and it wasn’t going to come out. She took a hand off the handlebars and punched herself fruitlessly in the gut. The gum seemed to wedge even tighter in there.
 

Little flashes of white appeared in her vision. Lily steered her bike off the road and the tires crackled in the gravel and then sang in the grass. The front tire wobbled. She looked up and saw Ricky at the ice cream stand. She waved at him for help. He was sweeping the walkway and took one hand from the broom to wave back. He must have thought she was waving “Hi,” but she was using the last of her consciousness to beg for help.

Concern fell over Ricky’s face as she wobbled. It looked like he was whispering something.

The gum shot from her mouth and her bike straightened out. Lily drew in sweet air and steered back towards the road.

“You okay?” Ricky yelled.
 

She waved casually and smiled, playing off the whole thing. She wondered if he had seen her spit out the gum and blushed as she rode. It took her half the trip home to catch her breath again. She left her bike alongside the garage and ducked under the hanging laundry. She smiled when she saw the basket on the back porch. Trina would be inside. That meant dinner on the porch, and light and fresh cooking.
 

She still wore the smile as she let the screen door bang shut behind her.

Trina wasn’t there. Her mom and dad were having a conference at the stove—never a good sign. They were likely trying to diagnose what had gone wrong with a recipe. All the recipes that grabbed her parents’ fancy were written in French, and her parents barely understood French.

“Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad,” Lily said.

“Oh good, you’re home,” her mom said. Her father turned and pushed his glasses up, like he had forgotten what she looked like and wanted to get a fresh perspective. Her mom wiped her hands on a towel and moved away from the stove. Her father turned down the burner and followed. They cornered her at the kitchen table and motioned for her to sit down.

Lily tried to guess what they wanted to tell her. Were they getting a divorce? No—they would never do that with Elizabeth abroad. Besides, her parents were fused together. They barely made up one complete person with both of them combined.
 

When they were all sitting, their attention naturally focused on Lily’s mom.

“What do you think of Barcelona?” her mother asked.

Lily shrugged. She remembered that wad of gum that had nearly choked her. She wondered what was about to be shoved down her throat in its place.

“You studied Spanish, correct?” her father asked.

“Latin,” Lily said. “You said it was the…”

“It’s the basis of all Romance languages,” her father said with a big smile. “Perfect!”

“I’ve only had one year,” Lily said.

“You’ll pick it up like water,” her mother said with a hand wave.

Lily chewed on her lower lip for a second. “What are you guys talking about?”

“We’re going to meet up with your sister and stay for the summer,” her mother said. “You’ll love everything about it.”

“The weather there is perfect,” her father said.

“It’s very hot,” her mother said, shooting him a look. “We’ll have to find a place with a good sea breeze.”

“Of course,” her father said.

“But Elizabeth is in Rome,” Lily said.

“Not for long,” her mother said. “Her host family is going to Barcelona for the summer and we’ve got some business there too. We’re all going to meet up there.”

“I thought the point of a year abroad was for her to get away from family.”

“We won’t interfere,” her father said. “The point is for you to experience a different culture. You’ll still be doing that.”

Lily shook her head. For the first time, she was supposed to have a summer to do what she wanted. Elizabeth was out of the country, and Lily wouldn’t be forced to go along with whatever summer plans her older sister cooked up. There wouldn’t be gymnastics camp or sailing camp. Lily was going to ride her leased horse every day, go to events, and hang out with her friends. Now she was supposed to drop everything and go to Barcelona? The idea was enraging.

“My passport!” Lily said. The revelation made her heart soar. “My passport is expired. You remember how long it took to get Elizabeth’s.”

They had planned on Elizabeth’s departure for months, and procuring the passport renewal had taken every minute of that time. There was some complication with the way they had obtained the passports when they were kids. Some shortcut from before had nearly ruined Elizabeth’s year abroad before it had even started.

Her parents exchanged a worried glance.

“I’ll check on it in the morning,” her father said.

“Call Frank,” her mother said. “He’ll know what to do.”

They nodded to each other and then turned back to Lily.

“We’ll figure it out,” her mother said.

“Or,” Lily said. She dragged out the word like her mother did when she was trying to talk the kids into a more palatable option. The kids would tell their mother that they wanted to go down and jump off the dam with the other kids. Wendy would say, “Or… I’ll get Trina to
drive
you to the
Point
and you can swim out to the float and jump off that.” Only Summer People swam down at Foster’s Point. The locals—their friends—swam down at the dam or out behind Dawn’s.
 

Lily had learned the approach well. Now she was using it against her parents. “Or… I could stay at Renny’s bunkhouse and ride my horse this summer like you said I could.”

“Honey, they have perfectly lovely horses in Spain. Imagine yourself riding through the countryside where Hemingway wandered and Murillo painted.”

“My events are here,” Lily said. “I need to get my points here.”

“It will just be a couple of months,” her father said. “You’ll hardly miss any school.”

“I have to miss school? You can’t be serious.”

“We don’t have much of a choice,” her mother said. “We can’t exactly leave you here to fend for yourself.”

“Why not? I could stay with the Cormiers. You could give Mr. Cormier an allowance for me to stay there. He would certainly appreciate it. He’s always complaining about town taxes. He must need the money.”

Her parents exchanged another look. “We couldn’t do that.”
 

Lily knew what they were thinking about. Years before, when Lily and Sarah had just become friends, her parents had hired Wayne Cormier to do some work at the house. Everything had gone fine until it came time to pay him for the work. They had attempted to pay him more than the bill, and an argument had ensued. Since then, her parents didn’t associate with Sarah’s father. In fact, even their relationship with Sarah Cormier had grown stiff.

Still, Lily could sense a softening of her parents’ resolve. They were at least considering other options that didn’t involve dragging her halfway across the world and disrupting her entire life.

“What about Trina?” Lily asked. “She’s practically here every day, and she lives alone now. Why don’t you see if she’ll house sit while you’re away. I could live here with her.” It frightened Lily to say this aloud. It was, in fact, her secret dream. She worried that her parents would hear the longing in the request and understand that Lily loved Trina more than them.
 

Instead of getting angry at her betrayal, they actually brightened at the idea.

“Do you think she would mind that responsibility?” her mother asked her father.

“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to ask. It would certainly alleviate that passport issue. She has sat house before, and remarked that she felt right at home.”

She might as well have felt right at home—another branch of Trina’s family had actually owned the Hazard house in the past. Trina lived in a tiny trailer on a sliver of property next to a woodlot. The little dog house out in Trina’s yard housed the well pump. Inside that dog house was a lightbulb that Trina had to check each winter night so her water line didn’t freeze. Of course she would want to house sit. Lily’s house sat right on the edge of the lake and had a perfect view of every beautiful sunset. Who wouldn’t trade a trailer for that?

“I’ll talk to Trina,” her mother said, “and you check into the passport. We’ll cover both bases.”

Lily prayed silently to herself.

[ Night ]

Lily woke up in a tangle of sheets. She freed her legs one at a time—slowly, so she didn’t make any noise—and tried to remember the dream that had woken her up. It had scared her deeply, leaving a burning hole in her chest and a fluttering heart. Adults never seemed so frightened by things like bad dreams. Did they use up all their fear of the unknown when they were kids? Did the pure repetition of day after day without being caught by the monsters leave them jaded?

Lily rolled over and blinked until her eyes cleared.

It was still pretty dark out, but the sky was growing lighter in the east. This time of year, that meant it was still very early. The sun practically
jumped
into the sky at the beginning of summer. She propped her chin on her pillow and looked through the top of the window.
 

The sky flashed with distant lightning. A few seconds later, she heard the thunder rolling across the lake.

Two years earlier, she had lobbied hard for a loft in her room. She was still glad that she had done it. Yes, it was a little scary sometimes when she woke up close to the edge, but how often did people fall out of bed? If she hadn’t fallen out of her normal-height bed in years, there was no reason to fear a loft.

The benefits to her loft seemed unending. She had extra space below for her desk and a chair, and she could actually
see
things through her window. Before, when she was lying in bed she could have only looked up at the sky. Now she could see down the street towards town.

Hers was the only bedroom with an east-facing window. Elizabeth and her parents all had views of the lake. Lily liked looking at the road. In the summer, the early sunrise drove her out to greet the day. In the winter, she was warmed by the winter glow while her sister had to get out of bed in the dark.

Lily froze. She remembered part of the dream—it was the fall and Elizabeth was coming home. What her sister didn’t know was that everyone in the town was dead. They had all been turned into some kind of zombies and they were hiding in basements and at the bottom of the lake. Elizabeth was walking into a big trap, and Lily was one of the bad people who was going to end Elizabeth’s life. Elizabeth put her suitcases down on the front porch, knocked on the locked door, and looked around helplessly as the sun began to set.

Lily shivered at the memory.
 

She recoiled at how pleased she had been at the notion of eating her own sister. Some part of her still yearned to rip her sister to shreds and feast on the fresh meat. Lily was disgusted by the memory of her own blood lust.

She thought of the horrible terror on Elizabeth’s face as her sister realized her fate.

Lily pulled her sheet over her head and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to forget the awful vision.

It was just a bad dream. Someday she would be an adult and she would laugh about silly nightmares. Nothing affected adults—neither fear nor joy. They simply plodded along, dismissing anything they couldn’t understand.

Lily heard a scrape from outside. It sounded like that time the squirrel had climbed up the side of the house and had clung to her screen. She pulled down the sheet, expecting to see a little furry body attached to the other side of her screen.