One Hundred Candles [2] (8 page)

eight

By the second week of February, I had successfully shed my sling, shared pizza with Harris on our first real date and definitively debunked the story of Lincoln High’s demon dog. And while I was feeling pleased with myself, others did not share my sense of satisfaction.

After Harris asked me out, I was more anxious than ever to have my sling removed. I begged my parents to take me to see a doctor.

“You still have one week left,” Dad pointed out.

“Six days,” I corrected. “Please?”

Dad wanted to wait, but once I went to Mom and told her about my upcoming date, she relented. “We’ll see what the doctor says,” she told me. That was as good as a yes, in my mind. At my appointment the next day, I was practically bouncing in the waiting room, and when my name was called, I stumbled as I raced to meet the doctor, an older woman with blond hair and funky red glasses.

“You say this happened when you dropped a camera?” she asked, frowning at my medical records.

“We were up north for Christmas. I slipped on some ice.”

The doctor removed the sling and slowly turned my arm. “Tell me if this hurts.” It didn’t, but having someone touch my arm, even if that person was a doctor, made me flinch. A memory of Marcus stung my mind. Those black eyes, that inhuman voice.
There is a price to be paid.

“Do you feel safe at home?” the doctor asked.

I snapped out of it. “Yes!”

She placed my arm in my lap as if she was handling a piece of porcelain. “I don’t mean to offend you, Charlotte, but I’m required to ask.” She jotted something down in my chart. “Your injury isn’t consistent with the story you told.”

“It wasn’t a story. It was the truth.” I felt only a slight twinge of guilt for so blatantly lying.

After the doctor finished her examination, she concluded that my arm had healed enough that I no longer required the awful sling. “But no weight lifting for a while, okay?” She smiled at her own joke, but I knew she was still suspicious, something I told my mom about on the ride home.

“She was just doing her job,” Mom assured me. “Really, I’d be concerned if she hadn’t asked you anything.”

“I know,” I grumbled. The doctor’s questions had felt intrusive. I wanted that miserable incident to be over, and the doctor’s suspicions made me worry that there might be more follow-up.

Happily, I didn’t have time to dwell on it. The sling was off, the weekend was approaching, and Avery had promised to come over for a little girl-time and pre-date preparation. Right before she came over, Shane called me into the living room.

“Thought you’d like to know more about your demon dog,” he said.

I pulled a chair next to him so we were both facing the same monitor. “It’s not my dog. What’d you find?”

“I had Trish take a look, as well,” Shane said as he started playing the tape. “She’s got a good eye. Watch this.” He used a pencil to point to the corner of the screen. “See it?”

“No.” I leaned closer. Shane rewound the tape and pointed again. This time, I saw a thin ray of light coming from the bottom corner. It reached all the way to the image of the white dog.

“What is that?”

“The light from a projector beam.”

Just as I had first suspected. “So this is all a hoax.”

“Yep.” Shane paused the tape. “Which means someone went to your school after midnight, set up a projector—an old one at that—and shone the image onto the wall through the glass doors. They’re lucky the school’s security system is so ancient. If the picture had been clearer, it would be obvious.”

“But it’s just grainy enough that you can’t tell right away,” I murmured. “What about the cafeteria footage? Same thing?”

“Yep, although it’s slightly more high tech. Someone could have set up a laptop instead of a projector, hidden it across the room somewhere.”

“Like on top of a vending machine?”

“Sure. Case closed,” Shane announced. “Now you can put an end to the rumors.”

“Yeah, well, easier said than done.” I was trying to figure out who would pull this kind of prank, especially one that played off Harris’s story about his grandmother’s dog. Something like this would take planning, and the incident had occurred the day after the party. The white poodle was not a coincidence. Someone wanted the school to believe that the stories told around the candles were coming true.

When Avery arrived, I told her about what Shane and Trish had discovered.

“So how do we convince the entire school it was all a prank?” I asked her as I sat on my bed. She was surveying my floor, which was dotted with lopsided mountains of clothes.

“I think a better question is, how do we convince you to actually use your closet?”

I pretended to pout. “I use my closet.”

Avery held up a wrinkled shirt. “Not for clothes.” She tossed the shirt in my direction and I caught it. “Looks like you’re still using the floor system.”

“It works, doesn’t it?” I pointed to several piles near the bed. “Those are clean, those are dirty, and those are—” I paused. “Actually, I don’t know what those are.”

“Hand me your clean stuff. I’ll fold.”

Avery always insisted on picking up clothes when she was over, which I think was one of the subconscious reasons I liked having her in my room. She was a neat-freak, an obsession I both respected and marveled at. I knew hanging my skirts and folding my jeans wasn’t the chore to her that it was to me. She had told me once that it was therapeutic for her to transform a messy space into a clean one. So really, I reasoned, I was helping her out.

“About the ghost dog,” she began as she folded T-shirts into precise squares. “I’m glad you figured out it was a hoax, but I don’t know if everyone at school is going to accept that.”

“Why wouldn’t they accept the truth?”

“Because they
like
the idea that the school is haunted. It’s dramatic.” She held up a red shirt. “This would be perfect for tomorrow, I think.” She folded the shirt and handed it to me.

“Are you saying that I shouldn’t tell people it was all made up?”

“Not at all. But I want you to be prepared when people choose not to believe you. They’ll say it’s because your parents are debunkers, and so are you.”

I smoothed out the red shirt. It would be great for my date with Harris, I thought, remembering how Annalise had once told me that I looked “long and lean” in it. “I don’t know how much of a debunker I am anymore,” I said. “I can’t get over what happened in Charleston. It was real, I know it was. And if that was real, there have to be other things that are real, too, right?”

Avery came over and sat next to me on the bed. “Yeah. I saw the lights, too. I know it was real. But that doesn’t mean everything is.”

I wasn’t talking about the lights, but that was okay. It was enough to know that we agreed, that we had both experienced something that night.

“Okay,” I said. “Enough of that. Time for the real question. Which jeans should I wear?”

Avery plucked a pair of dark-wash jeans from my clean pile. “These. You want to look sleek for a Valentine’s date.”

“It’s not a Valentine’s date if we’re getting together the day before Valentine’s Day,” I pointed out.

Avery shook her head. “But if the holiday falls on the weekend and you go out at any time during that weekend, it counts as a Valentine’s date.”

“Did I miss some secret meeting regarding the rules of dating?” I joked. Avery was an authority on all the things I was not, though. And at school on Friday, I had watched with more than a little jealousy as girls paraded through the hallways clutching bright flowers or plump teddy bears. Even Gwyn, who I’d never seen with a guy, was cradling an armful of red roses to each class.

I wasn’t expecting anything, exactly, but part of me had hoped Harris might surprise me with something simple. I barely saw him at all during the day. My sling had come off on Thursday and he hadn’t been around much on Friday. I worried that he had decided to no longer walk me to class, or was planning on breaking our date, but then he called me after school to explain that he’d been running errands all day for his dad. “He needs me right now,” Harris said. “We’re way behind on a major landscaping project. And why pay for extra help when you can make your son do it?”

I felt better. And my minor disappointment at not receiving a gift at school dissolved when Harris showed up for our date holding a single white rose tied with a red ribbon. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” he said. It was a sweet, simple gesture, and I loved it. I also loved the way he looked in a white button-down shirt and jeans. We looked good together, I thought, silently thanking Avery for her fashion sense.

Twenty minutes into our date we were sitting in a cozy booth at Giuseppe’s, silently studying our menus. After chatting about school and teachers and people we both knew, we seemed to run out of things to say, and I wondered if Harris was feeling as uncomfortable about it as I was. I pretended to scan the menu, but I was really trying to think of something remotely interesting to talk about. When the waitress came to take our orders I panicked and forgot what I wanted, so I got the same thing as Harris, hoping he hadn’t ordered anchovies.

“I haven’t been here in a while,” Harris said after the waitress had left. Now that we no longer had menus to read, we were left looking at each other. “It never changes, though. Always smells like garlic.”

“Yeah. I love that smell.”

There was another long pause. I couldn’t understand why this was so difficult. Harris and I never had trouble talking to one another at school. Of course, we were always walking together somewhere and our conversations had never been forced to last more than the four minutes it took to get to class.

“So,” I began in an effort to wipe away the awkwardness. “I think the demon dog has been debunked.”

“Really?” He leaned forward, obviously interested. I described the light beam in the corner of the video and how someone just had to press an old projector against the glass door to make the dog appear.

“Pretty low-tech stuff,” I said. “But I can’t figure out why someone would want to make people think your story was coming true.”

“Me neither.” Harris tapped his fingers on the table. “I was talking to a friend the other day about the stories,” he said. “I wanted to know about the things people were saying before we got there.”

Now I leaned forward. “And?”

“Nothing too crazy. Strange shadows, footsteps, people hearing voices in empty rooms. But one story freaked everyone out, I guess.”

It was one of the first ghost tales shared around the candles, but Harris didn’t know who had told it. It took place in a gymnasium at another school, where legend had it that a freshman girl had choked to death at a basketball game. The crowd around her was watching the game so intensely that no one noticed the girl needed help until it was too late. She died in the bleachers with her hands clasped around her neck.

“That’s horrible,” I said.

Harris nodded. “So now people claim to see the ghost of a white-haired girl standing in the middle of the basketball court, trying to get someone’s attention.”

“White hair? Interesting detail.”

“You don’t believe it.”

I couldn’t tell whether or not Harris was let down by my lack of belief. “There’s no real specifics except for the hair,” I said. “It sounds to me like one of those urban legends that get passed around. Maybe it did happen—although I think a girl choked but probably didn’t die—but it’s too general to be authentic.”

A guy approached our table and set down our meals. I was happy to discover that Harris had ordered meatball calzones. I immediately began cutting mine in half, then realized that the server was still standing next to our booth.

“Jared!”

“Hey, Charlotte.” He nodded at Harris. “Hey.”

“I didn’t know you worked here.” He was wearing a maroon apron over his jeans and T-shirt. A smudge of white flour was streaked across the front.

“I started a few weeks ago,” Jared said. “I need to earn a little money for something I’m working on.”

Adam’s memorial, I thought. I didn’t say it aloud, though, because I didn’t know if it was public knowledge. We heard a faint buzzing sound, and Harris pulled out his cell phone. “My dad,” he said after he looked at the screen. “I have to take this. Back in a minute.”

Harris left to take his call outside and Jared slid into the booth. “I saw you guys come in. I was thinking about the last time you were here.”

“I thought about that, too.”

A group of us, including my mom, Shane, Avery, Noah and Jared, had come here to try and contact Adam’s spirit. We weren’t sure what happened, but our equipment showed crazy readings before going dead, suggesting that we had contacted something.

“Your mom was really great to me,” Jared continued. “Shane, too. They helped me out a lot.”

“I’m glad to hear it. So…” I hesitated. “Are you really planning a memorial?”

Jared smiled. “Yes. In fact, I want you to be the first person to see it.”

I was surprised. “Me? Why not Avery?”

“I want your reaction first. Then maybe you can tell me what Avery will think.”

Harris returned to the booth and Jared stood up. “Back to the ovens,” he said. “See you guys later.”

“Everything okay with your dad?” I asked Harris.

He looked out of sorts, like he was mulling over bad news. “Uh, yeah. It’s just, he needs me back home soon. I’m sorry, I guess we have to cut our date short.”

I should have felt more disappointed, but I didn’t. We ate our calzones, talked a little more and then he drove me home. As we stood on my front porch, I had a flashback of Noah dropping me off after the Masquerade Ball, the way he had simply said good-night and left. But Harris stood very close to me, our noses almost touching, and pulled me in for a kiss.

“I’m sorry I have to go,” he said softly. “I’ll make it up to you.”

“One more kiss and we’ll call it even,” I murmured back.

He placed his hand on the back of my head and pulled me in.

We were even.

nine

Seventeen years of participating in paranormal investigations had taught me something that the average person probably didn’t know: ghosts loved stairs. Forget the cemetery or cellar or creepy, dilapidated barn. Nine times out of ten, people reported seeing full-body apparitions on staircases. These apparitions either stood at the very top, sadly looking downward, or descended gracefully a single slow step at a time, or simply stood there, one pale hand resting on the banister. They were often dressed in Victorian clothes, for some reason, and were either translucent-white or bright green or shadowy dark.

“How many is this?” I asked Shane as I helped him unroll cable.

“What makes you think I’ve been keeping track?”

“Because you do stuff like that.”

Shane laughed. “I guess.” He made sure the cable was off to the side, against the wall so it wouldn’t be conspicuous when we began filming. “I don’t know about stairway spirits. Too many to count. At least a few every year.”

I followed Shane back to his pile of equipment and helped him go through the checklist Dad had prepared earlier. We’d been setting up for two hours and were ahead of schedule. The drive west to the historic mansion had taken less time than we had anticipated, and we’d been able to get right in. The owner wasn’t very talkative, just superstitious. She had inherited the property from a distant relative and heard enough local stories about it that she refused to live in the house until we could prove that she would be the only occupant. Dad was thrilled that someone actually wanted us to disprove ghosts rather than verify them. Of course, he used the term
ghosts
with a roll of his eyes. We often referred to energy that way simply because it was easier.

Shane checked an item off his list. “Almost done,” he murmured. He looked over to the sitting room, where Mom and Dad were interviewing the fidgety owner. The property was one hundred and fifty years old and the original horse stable still stood in a backyard choked with kudzu.

“So how are things with the new boyfriend?” Shane asked.

“He’s not my boyfriend, exactly,” I mumbled. My love life was not a topic I wanted to talk about with Shane. He was too much like an uncle, and I doubted nieces had deep relationship discussions with their uncles.

“That’s not what Noah says.”

“You asked Noah about me?” I was mortified.

Shane shrugged. “It just came up. He said something about flowers?”

I knew exactly what he was referring to. After our abbreviated date the previous Saturday, Harris had mentioned that he would make it up to me. And he did.

On Tuesday, Mr. Morley had announced that I had a delivery. I looked up from my monitor, where Noah and I had been splicing footage for Wednesday’s school news about new lab equipment. Standing inside the door was a girl holding a dozen dark red roses.

“These are for you,” she said, thrusting the bouquet at me. “Is it your birthday?”

“No.” I was completely surprised. Harris was sending me roses? It was official: we were definitely moving toward couple status.

I carried the roses back to my station, breathing in their rich scent as I walked. They were such a deep shade of red that they were almost black. Something about the color was exotic, way better than typical red roses surrounded by baby’s breath.

“Is it your birthday or something?” Noah asked.

I laughed. “My birthday’s in June.” I sat down and searched for the card, but there wasn’t one.

“Huh.” Noah was staring at my flowers. “Looks like you got a baker’s dozen.”

“What?”

“There’s thirteen roses there, not twelve.”

I did a quick count and, sure enough, there were thirteen roses. “An extra rose? Lucky me.”

“So you and Harris are a couple now, or what?” Noah’s voice sounded funny, as if he was asking about a foul odor.

I fingered the silky soft petals of one of my roses. “We went out last weekend,” I said, ignoring his tone. “We’re not a couple, exactly.”

“But you’re headed that way.”

Even though it was a statement and not a question, I answered him. “Maybe.”

I set the roses aside and returned to my work. On the monitor, Bliss was pointing to new Bunsen burners. I barely heard her voice, though. I was too happy, too wrapped up in my flowers and Harris and that one word:

Maybe.

Later, Harris downplayed the bouquet, saying it wasn’t a big deal. In fact, he seemed mystified that I was so happy about the delivery. He asked me out again, but I told him I couldn’t because I’d already agreed to help my parents. For a split second I thought about weaseling out of the investigation, but I really wanted to go. I needed to see my parents at work together. I needed to know that things were going to return to normal, and that outweighed everything else. Including a date with Harris.

Four days later, the memory of the thirteen roses still brought a smile to my face, which of course Shane noticed.

“I won’t pry,” he said. “But tell me this. Does he treat you well?”

The roses were starting to wilt in their vase on my nightstand, but I didn’t think I’d ever throw them away. “Yes,” I told Shane. “He treats me very well. But please, don’t talk to Noah about it, okay? It’s awkward.”

“Fair enough. I probably won’t see him for a while, anyways. Your dad’s keeping me busy editing the Zelden stuff and planning our next few projects.” He shook his head. “The caseload is crazy right now. Your mom wants to hire an assistant to weed through the emails.”

I’d heard Mom mention that to Dad. The brief conversation had stood out to me because they had gone from yelling to almost completely ignoring each other unless something was directly related to their work. I almost preferred the yelling. The loaded silence was harder to take.

“I wanted to run an idea by you,” said Shane. “What would you think if Trish was our assistant? Would that be cool with you?”

I knelt on the floor next to him. “Well, yeah, I guess. Why are you asking me, though?”

He set aside his checklist and smiled. “Because, Charlotte, we haven’t had a new member on the team in seventeen years.” He winked. “You were the last one to join.”

I felt a rush of affection for Shane. We may not have been related by blood, but he was as much a family member to me as Annalise. I knew what he was really asking. He wanted Trish to become a permanent member of the Silver team.

“Are you sure?” I asked him. “Don’t get me wrong, I really like her, but you’ve only been dating for a couple months.”

“Which is why this is important to me.” He shifted his weight. “If Trish and I have a real future, I need to know if she can be part of what I do, you know? Let’s face it—this job is my life. It’s a huge piece of who I am. If she can appreciate that and be a part of that, then I think we have a shot at forever.” He blushed. “That was too much, I know.”

I gave him a playful punch on the arm. “I’m happy for you, I really am.”

“Thanks, kid.”

It was nice to see Shane so giddy in love, but his happiness reminded me how different he and Trisha were when compared with my parents. I hoped that collaborating on a routine investigation together would remind them of how well they worked together and how, as Shane had put it, we were still a team. Of course, if Trisha ended up joining our team, it would mean seeing more of Noah, as well.

“You realize you still need to pass the scrutiny of Noah and his two older brothers,” I said.

“I’m working on it. They’re a tough crowd, though. Noah especially.”

“He’s very protective of his mom.”

“Yeah, well, so am I.”

The owner of the house emerged from the sitting room, clutching a tissue. “I can’t sleep,” she sniffed.

My parents followed her to the front door. “We’ll do a thorough investigation,” Dad promised. “We’ll be here all weekend.”

I looked up at this last statement. No one had said anything to me about spending the entire weekend in a moldy old mansion. I had given up plans with Harris for this. And if my parents thought I was going to spend the night somewhere without a change of clothes, my own pillow and a toothbrush, they were so, so wrong.

After the owner left, I went up to Dad. “What did you mean about staying here all weekend?”

Dad was checking his cell phone. “You know it takes at least forty-eight hours to do a decent job.”

“No one told me we’d be here that long! I have homework to do.”

Dad closed his phone. “I never said
you
were staying all weekend. Shane and I are conducting this one with help from a local paranormal group.” He looked over me toward the front window. “They should be here any minute now.”

“Well, how am I getting home?” Were my parents actually going to let me drive their car? I started to get excited.

Mom walked up behind me. “You’re coming back with me. We’ll leave in half an hour.”

This was absolutely unheard of. My parents always worked together. One might film upstairs while one stayed downstairs, but never, ever had only one of them worked on a project without the other. Dad read the confusion in my face.

“Your mother did the interview, and we’ll get some footage of her later,” he said. “We don’t expect to find anything, and we thought we’d give this local group a shot at it.”

He walked away and I returned to Shane, who was pretending to study his completed checklist.

“You knew about this, didn’t you?”

He folded his list. “Sorry, kid.”

“How long is this going to last?”

“I wish I knew.”

And I wished Annalise was with us. I had tried repeatedly to get ahold of her, but we were playing a perpetual game of phone tag, leaving quick voice-mail messages for one another at strange hours. I’d sent text messages, too, but I didn’t know her class schedule, and even when we agreed on a time to talk, something always seemed to come up. It was aggravating. What was the point of having an amazing cell phone and access to state-of-the-art technology when you couldn’t communicate with the one person you absolutely needed to speak with?

The local paranormal group arrived. They wore matching gray T-shirts and eager smiles and they gushed on and on about how honored they were to be working with the renowned Silver family. My parents acted like there was nothing wrong. Mom went so far as to kiss Dad’s cheek, and Dad insisted on giving her a quick hug before she and I left for what Mom told everyone was a “mother-daughter shopping trip.”

I was steaming mad when Mom and I got in the car to head home. I was irritated that I’d had to make the drive and spend my morning rolling out cables when I wasn’t going to help with the investigation. I was angry that Shane knew more about what was going on in my family than I did. I was infuriated that my parents were acting completely phony and dragging out their little war rather than fixing the problem. And, as I stared out the car window and watched the landscape flash by, I was annoyed that Mom was driving in the wrong direction.

“We’re supposed to be heading south,” I informed her.

“No, we’re not.”

“Home is south.”

“We’re not going home yet.” Mom merged right onto another state route, taking us even farther from where we were supposed to be. She didn’t offer any more information, and I felt my anger grow.

“Okay, I give. Where are we going?”

Mom smiled. “Someplace where we can get answers.”