“Well how am I supposed to know?”
B-E-I-N-F-O-R-M-E-D, the Ouija board said. Joan squeaked in terror, pulling her hands away from the pointer and jerking back like she’d been pushed. Hand on her chest, she tried to suck in calming breaths, but every inhale was a ragged mess, accompanied by an equally shaky exhale.
Julianne smiled. “It’s ready,” she breathed and nodded to Joan who reluctantly reassumed her position in the circle.
“Spirits—Did the Seymore brothers have anything to do with Kitty May’s disappearance?” she asked, going right in for the kill.
The little pointer trembled for a moment under our fingers, then swung up to the YES at the top of the board so fast that it made us all jump back, snatching our fingers away from the haunted thing.
Julianne, as spooked as the rest of us, slammed the lid shut and locked it tight. Her hands shook as she slid the board back into its velvet bag, binding it so tight that her knuckles glowed chalk white with each tie.
“There,” she said, her voice trembling. “Now we know.”
“They killed her,” Joan said numbly. “They killed her whole family.”
Macy jumped up and slammed the light switch, flooding the room with yellow light. “Ugh,” she said, shuddering all the way down to her toes. “Don’t say that, Joan. It didn’t say they killed her and her family, it just said that they had something to do with them disappearing.”
Joan hugged her knees to her chest and rested her chin on them. “What else could it mean?” she asked rhetorically. “Kitty May is gone, her house is empty—and the Seymore brothers are responsible. Besides, you heard Julianne. They’ve already gotten away with murder once.”
“They won’t get away with it twice,” Julianne said grimly. Her lips, which were usually red and full and glossy, were pressed into a thin, furious line. “We’ll make their lives hell for what they’ve done.”
Renard slapped his hands over his ears. “Plausible deniability, plausible deniability,” he chanted.
Renard’s father was a lawyer, in case you couldn’t tell.
Julianne rolled her eyes. “Oh, shut up, Renard. If you didn’t want to know you didn’t have to come.”
He lifted his chin defiantly and pulled his hands away from his ears. “I just wanted to know if you really had Grandmother Bird’s Ouija board. I can’t believe she let you bring that to camp, do you know how much that thing’s worth?”
Julianne shrugged. “’Let’ is a strong word,” she hedged. “I borrowed it because she’s taking some time off. She won’t need it until after we get home tomorrow.”
I shook my head at her in admiration and a little bit of awe.
“Ballsy,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to get on that woman’s bad side, even if I was her favorite grandkid.”
Julianne grinned at me slyly. “That’s why I’m her favorite.”
It made sense. Grandmother Bird wasn’t exactly your conventional grandmother. She was pure white with raven hair and eyes to match. Her lips were always done in black, and she only wore black eyeshadow.
She always looked like she’d stepped right out of an old black-and-white horror movie, whether she was baking cookies or running a séance.
The only resemblance I saw between her and Julianne was their porcelain skin and the shape of their faces—sharp, with high cheekbones and a pronounced widow’s peak. Julianne’s light green eyes and blonde hair were purely her mother’s.
Joan wrapped her arms around herself and gave an exaggerated shiver, looking pointedly at Stew, who pretended not to notice.
“So what do we do with this?” I asked. “I don’t really think the cops will take us seriously, not without proof.”
“You saw the pointer,” Julianne said. “That’s proof enough for me.”
“It’s not proof enough for a jury,” Renard said. “Hell, it’s not even proof enough for a cop.”
“We don’t need cops and juries,” Julianne said impatiently. “We just need them to know that we’re onto them, that’s all. Give them hell when school starts next week. Let them know that we are not to be fucked with. Get it?”
I grinned, leaning against the solid wood bunk at my back. “So—same as every other year, then?”
Chapter Two
My dreams were full of guilt that night.
I was the villain in a dozen different nightmares—tripping kids, stealing ice-cream, dumping my mom’s expensive makeup all over the bathroom and blaming the dog.
I watched people get punished for my crimes and felt horrible about it, but I couldn’t seem to stop.
The dreams lost coherency as I began to resurface, eroding and smearing into vague pictures, but the guilt wasn’t taken with them when they faded.
It stayed, sharp and heavy in my gut.
Imagined guilt for imagined crimes, I thought.
I tried to ignore it through my shower, but it was still there at breakfast.
The camp had gone all-out on the buffet-style breakfast this morning. It smelled good and it looked better. Even then, I couldn’t seem to stuff a single bite past the tightness in my throat.
“Ugh, I know,” Julianne said, flipping her hair as she sat down across the split-log table from me.
The benches we sat on were also split logs, matching pairs lining each of the long tables, giving the impression that small trees had divided in half to birth the big ones. It sort of creeped me out, just like the antlers on the walls did.
“They always go overboard with the fat and sugar on the last day,” Julianne continued. “They pretend it’s to send us off with good memories, but I think they’re really just celebrating our departure. Or trying to use up all the sugar in the kitchen so the ants don’t get it before next year.”
She wrinkled her nose at the syrup-drenched waffles on her plate.
“There’s no law that says you have to have waffles,” I pointed out as I forced myself to swallow a bite.
She slid a guilty look at me, then took a quick bite.
“I know,” she said, then lowered her voice. “If I try to eat this at home, mom will have a fit. But, like—I don’t really want people to think I enjoy it, you know.”
“Of course not,” I said solemnly. I only rolled my eyes on the inside.
It wasn’t like anybody was paying attention to what Julianne was or was not shoving into her mouth.
The dining hall was crowded, but not uncomfortably so. The camp never quite filled to capacity—it could be because there weren’t that many families who could afford it, but I thought it was more likely that they kept the numbers down to cultivate an air of exclusivity.
Either way, there was nobody close enough to take any interest in the contents of her plate, and there was enough noise that nobody would be paying attention to her complaints.
I kept picking at my breakfast, trying to figure out why I still felt bad.
The dreams had already faded so much that I couldn’t remember any details, but the guilt spiked in irregular waves.
Maybe it had something to do with the Ouija board?
“Are you sure your grandma won’t be upset about the Ouija board?” I asked quietly. As I said the words, I realized that, no, that wasn’t it—it was close, I could tell, but that wasn’t the reason I felt like shit.