Deadly Little Voices (19 page)

“How?” I asked, wishing I’d stayed quiet. Because the next thing I knew, there was a weird grin across your face. It exposed the hole in your smile: a small gap right beside your incisor where the flesh of your tongue poked through. I hadn’t noticed that about your smile before, and now it gave me the chills.

You put the car in reverse and began to back out through the tunnel of trees.

I looked away again, out the fog-covered window, telling myself to relax. But then you started whistling a tune. “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Eventually you added words, but they were the wrong words: “Jack and Jill ran up the hill to fetch a pail of water,” you sang. “Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after.”

“It’s a nursery rhyme, not a song,” I said, correcting you, without thinking better of it.

You told me how much you loved nursery rhymes, saying that they had a soothing quality, bringing one back to the simplicity of childhood. “’Jack and Jill’ just happens to be my favorite,” you told me. “I like how in sync the two of them are, working together. They’re partners forever.”

Somehow I nodded, trying to play it cool. Meanwhile, bile coated the inside of my mouth. I swallowed it down, just as you told me to have another drink. You motioned to the cooler in the backseat.

I know it may sound naive, but I’d been so nervous when you handed me that first bottle of lemonade that I didn’t even notice it’d been spiked. There’s a reason that people become victims. And by that point, I knew I had become one of them.

…

WES SMACKS HIS HAND down against the steering wheel several more times on our drive back to Freetown. “You definitely think he knew that we were following him?” I ask.

He pulls up in front of Knead. “At first I didn’t, but then it seemed kind of obvious, like he was trying to get away.”

“So, why didn’t you stop? Why didn’t we turn around?”

“I’m sorry,” he says, putting the car in park. “I got a little carried away. I tend to do that sometimes.” He nods toward the backseat, where he’s got a pair of binoculars, his camera bag, and a fresh box of latex gloves.

“So, what now?” I ask.

“I don’t know, but it might be a good idea to discuss all of this with Ben…just in case.”

“In case what? What does Ben have to with any of this?”

“Why don’t you ask
him
? He
was
at the Press & Grind, after all. So maybe he’s more involved than you think.”

“Not just
maybe
,” I say, in light of the most recent Ben-and-Danica sightings (in the library and the cafeteria, and now, allegedly, at the Press & Grind). “
Probably.
”

“So, he can
probably
help you. I mean, you have to admit, the guy’s saved your life four times now.”

“Since when are you Team Ben?”

“Correction: I’m Team Camelia.” Wes lets out a sigh and looks away, more flustered than I’ve ever seen him before.

“The danger is directed at Danica,” I remind him. “Not at me. I’m just trying to help her—the way I helped Adam.”

“You had your whole head sticking out the window at one point, Camelia.”

“So?” I swallow hard.

“So, if he saw you, and if he saw that we were following him, you can bet he’s going to find out who you are.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do,” he says, looking back at me. His dark brown eyes are sullen and serious.

“And how are you so sure?” I ask, remembering how this isn’t the first time that the guy saw me—how he peeled out down the street when he spotted me in front of Danica’s house.

“I’m just looking out for your best interests.”

“And what’s
in
my best interest?” I ask him. “To end things right now? To ignore the fact that Danica’s in trouble?”

To my surprise, Wes shakes his head. “It’s too late. You’re already involved. Maybe that’s what the ‘
there are two
’ clue is all about. Maybe there are two potential victims here: Danica and someone else.”

“Someone else…meaning me?” I ask, trying to catch on.

“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “But if I were the psycho in question, and I found out that some girl was having premonitions about what I was up to and then started following me—”

“How’s he going to find out I’m having premonitions?”

“Have you told anyone else about them?”

I clench my teeth, thinking about Adam.

“I have to assume that I’m involved, too,” Wes says, thinking out loud. “For all I know, he saw my license plate.”

I want to reassure him that everything will be okay, but I have no idea if it will—if either of us should feel reassured about anything. “I have to go,” I say, suddenly feeling sick.

“Yeah,” he says. “Me, too.”

I get out of his car, forgetting to thank him for all his help. I turn back to flag him down, but he has already pulled away from the curb and turned onto another street.

AS SOON AS I WALK INTO KNEAD, Svetlana practically pounces on me. It seems several of the adults want to try the wheel and Svetlana can barely get them past the centering stage. I spend several minutes explaining the steps of throwing a bowl, but a couple of the women want to see me do it for real.

“Please,” Svetlana insists, proceeding to tell me that one of the women asked to get her money back when she found out that Spencer wasn’t going to be teaching tonight.

I take a seat at the wheel, anxious about what may happen once I start to sculpt. And so I re-explain the steps, adding more details about posture, pressure, and moisture. By the time I finally touch fingertips to clay, the moment feels so completely clinical that I’m almost sure nothing weird will happen.

As soon as I get the students going on their bowls, I move over to my work in progress, eager to have another look. I remove the tarp and focus hard on my vaselike bowl, reminded once again of Ben, and of that moment when he was in the hospital—when I held his hand and he woke up, and then when he asked me never to let go.

“Would you mind giving me a little help?” a woman asks, jolting me out of my reverie.

The woman—one of the older students—stands at my table holding a ball of clay. “I have arthritis,” she explains. “Would you mind lending me a hand with wedging?” She sets the clay down in front of me, complaining that she signed up for this class to paint, not to sculpt.

“Why not paint this?” I ask, turning away to grab one of the already-fired humping bunnies from a shelf. I place it on a tray along with a few jars of paint.

“Thank you, but I’d like it wedged out anyway,” she insists. “Maybe I’ll poke a finger into the center and call it abstract art.”

“Sure.” I smile, proceeding to smack her clay ball against my board, trying not to think about anything in particular.

“And what are
you
working on?” She takes a seat, swipes my spatula, and uses it to point at my bowl.

I gaze at some other students two tables over, wondering why she doesn’t join them instead.

“Cat got your tongue?” She makes a sucking sound with her own tongue.

Eventually I cave, and end up rambling on about my project—how I’m not really sure where I’m going with it, but how I’m determined to get it to where it needs to be.

The woman listens, using my spatula to scratch behind her ear. Finally, it seems I’ve bored her, and she resumes her work, sponging the clay dust off the humping bunny figurine as if I’m no longer even there.

I continue to wedge out her clay, working all the air bubbles out, until she interrupts me again. She leans across the table in my direction and whispers something about “following her.”

“Excuse me?” I ask, feeling my face scrunching up.

Her lips peel open, exposing a gap in her teeth where her tongue pokes through. “Stop following me,” she snaps.

Before I can say anything else, she spins her tray around to show me her work. Instead of a face on her bunny figurine, she’s painted the letters
DM
.

“
DM
?” I ask.

“Die much?” she says, with a menacing grin. She lets out a giggle, and her tongue waggles out through the hole in her teeth, as if this is all part of one big joke.

I shake my head, completely confused. But no one else in the studio seems to notice her.

I get up and move away from the table, toward the others, as the woman continues to laugh at me.

I glance at Svetlana, who’s dumped an entire tray full of bunnies onto the floor. Only, I don’t hear the crash, just the old woman’s laughter. Her voice plugs up my ears and fills my head with more whispering. The letters
DM
repeat inside my brain and knock me to the floor.

LYING ON MY BACK, with my eyes closed, I feel someone take my hand.

“Ben?” I whisper. My eyes are still closed, but I’d know his touch anywhere.

People are speaking in hushed tones, evidently wondering what just happened. I’m relieved to be able to hear them—that the laughter has finally stopped, and that there are no longer any voices inside my head.

I open my eyes and try to sit up. The fluorescent studio lights overhead nearly blind me, reminding me of the camera flashes from my premonitions.

A moment later, I see Ben’s face. It’s hovering right above mine now.

“What are you doing here?” I ask him.

Ben takes off his coat and pulls his sweatshirt off over his head. He drapes the sweatshirt over my shoulders and then helps me to sit up.

“Thanks,” I say, noticing the people standing around me. I try to assure them I’m fine, making excuses about how the heat from the kiln room, coupled with an empty stomach, no doubt did me in.

But then I spot the older woman, using my spatula to scratch behind her ear again.

“We were having such a pleasant time,” she says. “You told me about your vase…and you were helping me wedge my clay. The next thing I knew…”

“What?” I ask, anxious to hear how things happened.

“You don’t remember?” Her lips fall open, and I see her teeth—there’s no gap to speak of, no tongue sticking out.

The woman looks away when I don’t answer, pretending to resume her work in progress.

I get to my feet and rotate her tray, desperate to see the bunny’s face.

But it’s blank. The letters
DM
are no longer there. They were probably part of a hallucination.

“Camelia?” Ben asks, taking my hand again.

Meanwhile, Svetlana comes and gives me a paper towel for my sweaty face.

“DM,”
I whisper, still focused on the woman.

“What does it mean?” the woman asks. She gazes at my work station, and it suddenly dawns on me that I’d been working on something, too, wedging out a mound of clay. Only now it’s no longer a mound at all.

The letters
DM
, carved into the clay, stare up at me from my work board.