“I’m fine. Not a scratch.”
“You thought someone was in your house the other night too.”
“There wasn’t.”
“It seems odd that you thought there was, and then a few days later … there was.”
It was worse than odd, but I didn’t say so, and when I didn’t, Jenn moved on. One of the things I liked about her—she didn’t dwell.
“I heard Detective Hot Stuff shot the guy. Bang, bang, straight through the heart.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Where do you think?”
Dumb question. There’d been more people at the scene than emergency services. Pretty much anyone in town who could come out to watch, had. They’d have heard things; they’d have shared them.
“What was it like?” Jenn asked.
I remembered the fear, the shots, the huge knife just missing my head.
“Huh.” Had Henry done that or had I?
“All you can say is huh? This is the most exciting stuff to happen in this town in years.”
“I’d rather our excitement didn’t involve murder.”
“Attempted murder.”
“Tell it to Anne McKenna.”
“Dead lady in the alley?”
“Yeah.”
“I heard she was the witch’s niece.”
I’d been reaching over to change the radio station, which was yammering some advertisement for a hayride and pumpkin festival, but let my hand fall to my lap. My fingers suddenly felt as cold as the ones Anne McKenna’s ghost had wrapped around my wrist. Had that only been yesterday? I still had the bruises.
“What witch?”
“Oh, that’s just what me and my brothers called Mrs. Noita.”
Jenn had two brothers—big bruisers, who’d played offensive line for New Bergin High, then gone on to Wisconsin, where they’d cracked heads for the Badgers and been paid with a full ride. A lot of people believed that football players were stupid—and I had to say that some who got hit in the head a few too many times—Brett Favre—did stupid things.
However, attending the University of Wisconsin Madison in any form meant you weren’t an idiot. The academic requirements were extremely high. To stay in school, and keep up the ridiculous schedule that went along with a Big Ten sport, meant that the athletes didn’t just excel on the field. Jenn’s older brother was an electrical engineer and the younger one had just been admitted to law school.
“Your parents’ neighbor is the dead woman’s aunt?”
“That’s the word on the street.”
“And she’s a witch.” Why hadn’t I heard of it?
“She was nasty. To be fair, when we were little we probably drove her nuts. Baseballs smacking against her house. Footballs in her herb garden. Tom once threw my favorite Barbie on her roof, then threw Ken, as well as the back porch of the Barbie Dream House, up there too. When she’d come screaming out the front door her hair seemed to stand on end. My mom called her a witch after the Barbie incident, and it stuck.”
“You never told me this.”
“It was a family joke, not a community-wide opinion. Although she did keep to herself and everyone thought she was strange. Didn’t you?”
To be honest, I’d never thought of the woman at all. I could count on two hands the times I’d seen her in my lifetime. Which was odd right there.
Jenn turned into the parking lot, already half full with teachers’ cars. “I asked her for help once.”
“What kind of help?”
“Remember The Sixth Sense?”
As I was still living it …
“How could I forget?”
We’d been too young to see it at the theater, but there’d been one rainy Friday evening in high school when we’d indulged in the DVD.
“I couldn’t go to the bathroom alone in the night after that.” Jenn shuddered. “Kept seeing my breath. Was afraid to turn around. Didn’t it bother you?”
I shrugged. I was always afraid to turn around. You got used to it. “Why did you ask Mrs. Noita for help?”
“If she was a witch I figured she knew a way to get rid of the ghosts or at least keep them at a distance.”
“Since when are witches and ghosts in any way related?”
Since last night? my mind whispered. When you met a ghostly witch?
“I figured weird calls to weird,” she said. “It wasn’t as if I had anyone else to ask.”
“What about the Internet?”
“Because I was going to buy something funky off the Internet? And give out my address to the nut who was selling it? That’s how kids disappear.”
“Well, at least you had the sense to know that.” I was kind of annoyed she hadn’t confided in me. Though what would I have done? Confessed that I saw ghosts too?
She cast me a narrow glare. “Don’t you understand? I was scared shitless.”
I did understand. More than I could, or would, ever say.
“Did she help?”
“She did.”
I straightened, intrigued. I’d read every book, searched every Web site, tried a lot of things. None of them helped.
“How?”
“She gave me some rosemary and slammed the door in my face.”