Promise Not to Tell: A Novel (8 page)

School would be letting out in another month or so, and already I was imagining a summer spent in the fields, root cellar, and leaning cabin. Del might let me ride her pony. Maybe I’d meet the person who gave her the tattoo. I’d keep her entertained by telling wild stories about New Hope. I’d take her spying. Maybe show her Doe breast-feeding Raven right on the porch of the big barn. Bring her pieces of Lazy Elk’s jewelry and sing Zack’s songs about revolution. She’d call me Desert Rose and teach me to blow smoke rings. I’d perfect my aim with Nicky’s BB gun and learn to throw the knife with the plastic bone handle into the dart board on the wall. And maybe, just maybe, Nicky would ask me to be his girlfriend and tell me what his big secret was, and once I’d heard it, it wouldn’t be so bad. It would just make me like him more.

“Race you to the pigs,” Del called out, pulling me out of my daydreams. She’d already started running. “Catch me if you can!”

And I took off running, but as always, she got there first. I never could catch her.

M
AGPIE DISAPPEARED MY THIRD DAY BACK
. The cat had been the one constant in my mother’s life—she never forgot Magpie’s name and never failed to be soothed by her mere presence, even at her most agitated.

We looked all through the house, then walked around New Hope calling her name in high, pleading voices. We searched the big barn, where Gabriel joined us, pushing aside old furniture thick with dust and cobwebs.

“How’s Opal doing?” I asked him.

“Holding her own I guess. Raven says she’s not sleeping well. Nightmares. She’s made an appointment with a child psychiatrist.”

I nodded. “That sounds like the best thing. She went through a hell of shock.”

“Maybe you should talk to her,” Gabriel said. “You went through a similar thing with the Griswold girl, didn’t you?”

I shook my head. “It wasn’t the same. We weren’t very close.”

He looked at me like he knew I was lying. Good old Gabriel still had the ability to see right into your soul.

W
HAT
I
NEGLECTED TO TELL
Gabriel was that I’d already tried to talk to Opal, the morning after the murder. I went over to the big barn with my mother after our pancakes and heard all the gory details about the murder from Raven. Opal staggered out of her room and joined us at the table.

“You should sleep, sweetie,” Raven said.

“I can’t,” Opal said. Then she turned to me and asked, without missing a beat, “Do you believe in the Potato Girl?”

Raven drew in a breath. My mother let out a soft chuckle.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I told her. “Del Griswold was a girl made of flesh and blood, the same as you and I.”

“So you don’t believe people can come back? Once they’re dead, I mean.”

“No, I don’t.”

“What if I told you I’ve seen her?” Opal’s eyes were desperate.

“Sweetie, I thought we were through with this,” Raven said.

Opal ignored her and kept staring at me, waiting for an answer.

“If you told me you’d seen her, I’d take you seriously,” I said, answering as carefully as I could.

Opal nodded at me, then got up from the table and went back to her room, shuffling her feet like a zombie.

“She thinks the ghost killed her friend,” Raven whispered, her hands trembling a little as she gripped her coffee cup tighter. “Last night, she even said she believed the Potato Girl was after her. That it was
her
she meant to kill, not Tori.”

I nodded sympathetically.

“She’s lost a lot, Kate. First, all of her things burned up in the fire. All her books and airplane models. Now this. I don’t think…I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t say or do anything to encourage these ghost…fantasies.” Raven looked up at me coldly. “Okay?”

I nodded again, feeling stupid. “Of course not,” I said.

My mother abruptly barked out a laugh, which startled Raven, who spilled her coffee and hissed, “Shit! Shit! Shit!” until she got up from the table and threw her empty cup in the sink. She stood with her back to us, crying but pretending not to.

G
ABRIEL, MY MOTHER
, and I walked past the mud oven, dissolved to a sad lump of clay and bricks, and over to the charred remains of the tepee, calling, “Magpie!” in a chorus of desperate voices. I kicked at the cold black coals and realized it was a miracle my mother got out at all. I again found myself wondering how the fire started; if it was just a simple case of my mother trying to light a lamp, or if it was more sinister than that—if she set the match to the canvas deliberately.

Upon seeing the burned tepee, my mother began to sob.

“MAGPIE!” she cried, falling to her knees. It was as if she’d found the cat’s small bones among the ruins. Gabriel led my mother back into the barn and fixed a pot of tea while I continued my search.

I walked through the gardens, overgrown with thick, dried weeds—thistle, witch grass, burdock. At the north edge of the gardens, brambles encroached: raspberry and blackberry canes formed an impenetrable fence between the garden and the small pasture and barn that once housed goats, chickens, and sheep. Behind this I saw the shack Bryan and Lizzy had called home before moving on to start a community of their own in Hawaii shortly after I left for college. The roof dipped deeply in the center, the rusted metal chimney leaning at a forty-five-degree angle against the edge of the crater. Another victim of the Big Bad Wolf of time.

On the west side of the gardens, the greenhouse lay in a flattened heap.
I’ll huff and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your greenhouse in.
I got down on my knees and called to the cat, trying to peer under the ruins. I pulled a splintered board out of the way to get a better look underneath and tore the sleeve of my shirt on a rusty nail. Upon further investigation, I saw I was bleeding, too.

“Shit,” I mumbled, trying to recall the date of my last tetanus shot. “You owe me forty bucks, Magpie. And if I get lockjaw…”

I scrambled to my feet. Beyond the remains of the greenhouse stood the eight-sided log hogan Doe and Shawn had lived in. It seemed in good enough shape and I wondered why Raven had chosen to live in the tepee and not her childhood home built by her mother’s hands. I guess we all sought independence in our own way.

There was no sign of Magpie anywhere. I was making my way toward the big barn when I saw the old path leading into the woods and down to the Griswolds’. Someone was coming up it. I blinked, not quite believing what I was seeing. It was a girl. A girl carrying a long stick that she was using to poke through the dry grass. She was bent over, peering at the ground intently, parting the dead weeds one way and then the other. She was a skinny girl with untidy hair and rumpled clothes. And for a second, just a second, I held my breath and thought,
It can’t be…

And no, it wasn’t. I saw when she lifted up her head that it was only Opal. I walked over to meet her and she threw down the stick guiltily.

“Lose something?” I asked.

She looked flustered. I wondered if it was a good idea for her to be out roaming the woods where her friend was murdered.

“Just looking for Magpie,” she said.

It was a strange way to look for a lost cat—a lost hamster, maybe—but I didn’t say so.

“So no sign of her, then?” I asked.

“Who?” she asked.

“Magpie. The cat?”

“No. No sign.”

“Well then, let’s go back to the big barn and have some tea. I think Gabriel’s got a pot on.” I touched her arm lightly to lead her back to the safety of the barn, but she didn’t budge.

“Hey,” I said. “Did you get the plane? Was it the right one?”

I’d gone to the hobby shop in Barre the day before and bought a Curtiss Jenny biplane model to replace the one that had been burned in the fire. I figured a little model making might be therapeutic. The owner gave me an odd look when I asked if he had any tiny plastic women who might be the right size to walk on the wing, but he showed me a collection of people in the same scale and I picked a woman in jeans in a walking pose.

“God, yeah, I’m sorry,” Opal said. “Thank you
so
much. I love the wing walker. It’s all perfect. I started it last night.”

“The guy at the store picked out the paints and glue.”

“They’re perfect. Really. It’s gonna be way better than the one I had before. It was really sweet of you. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. It was my pleasure.”

“Kate, can I ask you something?”

Uh oh,
I thought, knowing it wasn’t going to be any airplane model advice.
Here we go.

“Of course.”

“You knew Del Griswold, right?”

“A little.”

“Did she know my mom?”

“Your mother was a baby when Del died,” I told her.

She considered this, and then: “Can you think why Del would want to hurt me?”

I took a deep breath. “What makes you think she would want to hurt you?”

“If I tell you a secret, do you promise not to tell?” Opal asked.

I thought I knew where this was going. Maybe I should’ve stopped it—after all, Raven had specifically asked me not to encourage this Potato Girl nonsense. Opal was fragile, damaged maybe, and I didn’t want to make things worse. But she needed someone to confide in, someone who would let her tell her tale. She felt drawn to me because I had known Del, maybe even because I’d been the one to take care of Opal when she was hurt two years ago. I remembered running to her as she screamed, writhing on the ground beside the pile of mattresses, how small and frightened she’d seemed.
Someone’s up there,
she moaned. And when I looked, didn’t I think I saw something, too? Just the edge of a shadow, pulling away from the open door to the loft. When I held her there on the ground, wasn’t it true that both our hearts were pounding?

Whatever Opal’s reasons for wanting to share secrets with me now, I couldn’t turn her away.

I thought back to my first meeting with Del.

Okay, if I show you my secret, you gotta promise not to tell. You gotta swear. Cross your heart and hope to die.

“I promise,” I said.

Opal squinted up at me. It occurred to me then that she was the exact same age Del was when I met her. She looked a little like her, too. More than a little. Or was it just my imagination?

Jesus,
I thought,
just don’t tell me you’ve got a tattoo.

“The Potato Girl came for me that afternoon. Before I met Tori and the guys in the woods.”

“Came for you?”

“Yeah, I was in my room and I saw her. She was standing there, looking right at me. Then she opened her mouth to say something, but no sound came out. Just this cold, moist air. Like from a cave.”

I said nothing. I only nodded and tried not to look too much like a disbeliever.

“It wasn’t the first time I’ve seen her. It’s been awhile though—almost two years. I used to see her all the time when I was a little kid. Sometimes, I’d just catch little glimpses out of the corner of my eye, nothing I could be sure of. But once in a while, I’d be riding my bike or walking in the woods, and there she’d be, right out in the open, just watching me with this real creepy smile on her face. Like she knew something I didn’t.

“The older I got, the less I saw her. I kind of thought she’d gone away completely until that day in the loft. Remember? When I broke my arm? And you helped me?”

“I remember,” I said, thinking,
I was only just recalling it, in fact.

Opal leaned against the big boulder Del and I had hidden behind all those years ago. She looked over in the direction of the ruined bread oven, but I could tell she wasn’t seeing a thing.

“That day? I was about to do my jump, like right on the edge, crouched over, ready—and then I saw her, right there, just a couple of feet away, totally…
real,
you know? Not like a ghost would look, but like a real girl. She reached for me, with both hands, quick, and I freaked out. Lost my balance. Totally missed my landing pad.” She shook her head ruefully, still mad about a failed stunt. If one of her much loved lady wing walkers had made such a mistake it would have meant much worse than a broken arm.

“Here’s the thing, Kate: I think Del’s out to get me. I’m pretty sure it was me she was after, not Tori. But what I don’t get is
why
. I was hoping you could help me with that part. That maybe if you told me about her I’d be able to figure out what it is she wants with me.”

“Why do you think you were the target?” I asked, keeping my voice level, nonjudgmental.

“Here’s the part you have to swear not to tell, okay? It was the jacket. Tori was wearing
my
jacket. One I borrowed from my mom. But no one knows—not the police or anybody.”

“How could they not know?”

“I kinda…took it back after she was killed. I didn’t want to get in trouble.” She rolled her eyes. “I know, how lame, huh? Worrying about a
jacket
. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I think maybe the jacket made her look like me, in the dark. I mean, I wear it all the time, and it’s got all this fringe on it, and it’s just very
noticeable
”—her voice was spiraling up toward hysteria—“and both me and Tori are
blond
—” I put my hand on her arm and she fell silent. I thought she would cry, but she didn’t.

“And I saw something in the woods when I went back for the jacket.”

“What?”

“The Potato Girl. She was hiding behind a tree, watching. She was wearing this long white dress, and she just kind of floated away.”

“Opal, listen to me. What happened to Tori is horrible, unreal. Of course you want to understand it, explain it, maybe even blame yourself. That’s normal. There’s even a name for it: survivor’s guilt. But you have to understand that you had nothing to do with what happened to Tori. And neither did Del.”

When Opal spoke again, she was whispering: “I don’t believe you. I know what I saw.”

I sighed deeply. So much for Psych 101.

“Let’s just say that Del could come back—setting aside for the moment that she
can’t
. There is no reason in the world that Del Griswold would want to hurt you. I’m sure there are plenty of other people she’d go after first.”

“Like who?”

“Like me. Like everyone we went to school with,” I said.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because we weren’t very nice to her,” I said.
To put it mildly.

“Hey, did you know you’re bleeding?” Opal asked and I saw the cut on my arm had opened up and blood had soaked through my torn sleeve.

W
E MADE OUR WAY
back to the big barn, where I washed the cut on my arm in the bathroom sink while Opal grilled me with questions about Del. Opal’s face was flushed and she seemed thrilled with any little tidbit I offered. She was looking less like Del now that we were inside and she had her color back, which was a great relief. I was beginning to wonder if I were the one seeing ghosts.