Dead River

Chapter Twenty-One



“What are you doing?” I shout at her, but she doesn’t listen. She grabs handfuls of greasy green hair and begins to drag my lifeless body through the mud. She’s so tiny, but when I reach for her, her elbow jabs between my ribs. It doesn’t hurt, but the little girl’s force shocks me. Her eyes narrow to slits. She opens her mouth only a sliver, and black filth drizzles out. I know that if she could, she’d be hissing at me to get away. I put my hand on hers, trying to pry her fingers up, but the hair is wound tightly through them. All I can manage to do is pull up a few strawlike strands that break apart in my hands. I grab the hair closer to the scalp and yank in the other direction. A whole lock of hair at the crown of the head rips free in a series of sickening pops, like a seam splitting, leaving a pinkish-gray bald spot there. That’s me, I think, wincing at the bloody clump of hair in my hands, and am so shocked for the moment that I’m not prepared for what comes next. She lunges at me, throwing me on my back and knocking all the air out of my lungs. When I recover from the shock, she’s straddling my waist and holding a finger up to her muddy lips. Quiet.

I struggle to move, but it’s useless. I’m pinned to the ground. This little girl, not four feet tall, has pinned me to the ground. She looks over her shoulder and before I can form another plan of escape, I hear the swish of feet along the grass. Someone is coming. I strain to see over the little girl’s shoulder, but can only make out a faint glow. Jack. I swallow when I hear his voice. “I’m going to wring that little brat’s neck.” He stops, points his head to the sky, and shouts, so loud it nearly shakes the trees, “Do you hear that? I’m going to wring your neck!” And then he continues on. Once he’s moved on, I exhale. She moves off of me and bends over the body again.

“Wait,” I say, finally understanding. “You want my body to be found so that my mother can’t bring me back to life. You don’t want Jack to become ruler, either, do you?”

She wrinkles her nose and shakes her head.

I lean over and press my eyes into my knees. “All right. I’m totally confused.”

There’s another sound, nothing more than the crack of a branch in the distance, but Vi startles like a doe, stilling, her eyes filling once more with fear. She looks around and grabs a branch, then begins to scrawl something in the soft dirt. I watch each letter as it’s produced, eager to find some answer to the mystery, but what she writes makes no sense, even when it’s right in front of me, etched in mud.

Not Jack.

“What?” I shrug. “Then who?”

She stands and moves close to me, and for a moment I’m afraid, and the next moment I’m embarrassed for feeling that way in front of an eight-year-old. But I can still feel her inexplicably enormous weight on my waist pushing my back into the ground. When she grabs my hand, not at all gently, I don’t know what to expect. Suddenly the world dims and I’m floating through a blur. When the world comes into focus, after a moment, things look strangely muted again, like they did when I was alive. My body is gone. Vi is gone, although, oddly, I can feel the intense pressure of her hand on mine. I swivel my head around and at once it’s obvious I’m not in the same place I’d been in a second ago. The pines are gone, and now I’m surrounded mostly by leafy trees. The ground is no longer covered in pine needles; instead, I’m up to my ankles in muddy water. There is a smell in the air, like burning coal from a grill. Each way I turn, I see nothing but trees.

Before I can panic, a voice greets my ears. Out of nowhere. I see the girl, Vi, coming down the path, skipping. This time, she’s different. Her pink dress is clean and unwrinkled, her shoes are unscuffed. She is singing a nursery rhyme about a man who lived in the moon, and I know right away that I have slipped into one of my visions. But what a vision! Unlike before, it is so real, I feel I can almost reach out and touch her. She even smiles at me, like she can see me there. But suddenly there is another voice. Angry. “You took them from me!”

Another person comes into view. Lannie, wearing the familiar white dress, but what is unfamiliar is the way her lip curls in hate as she storms after Vi. Vi turns, her eyes wide with fear. “I’ll give them to you,” she says in a voice I don’t recognize. I realize I don’t recognize it because I’ve never heard it, but it’s sweet, soft, and so full of fear I want to grab her and hug her to me. Protect her. She bends over and begins to roll her sock down as Lannie says, “They’re silk stockings, you know. For women. They’re not kneesocks, like babies like you wear.”

I stare at Lannie. I remember how she taunted me before, when we played, but it was always good-natured. It was always just fun, wasn’t it? She’d never done anything horrible to me. Not at all. Then I turn in time to see Vi lift her foot out of her white shoe. She loses her balance and her foot touches the dirty forest floor.

“Look what you’re doing! You’re getting them all muddy! And I just bought them!”

After some more struggling, Vi manages to take both stockings off. She slips her bare feet into her knee-highs and shoes and holds the white stockings out to her sister. Lannie takes a step forward, and for a glimmer of a second before she reaches out, I see the fear in Vi’s face morph into defiance. Vi throws the stockings to the ground and grinds them into the mud with the sole of her shoe. She smiles triumphantly, but it only lasts for a single instant before Lannie begins shrieking loudly enough to pierce eardrums. She lunges at Vi, screaming, “You brat! You’re always in my things!” and it doesn’t help when she reaches for the stockings and slips in the mud. Vi makes the mistake of laughing. I know it is a mistake and yet there is nothing I can do to stop it. I know the outcome.

They struggle in the mud. The little girl is small and bony, not strong and nearly fully grown like Lannie. It’s not long before Lannie has handfuls of her little sister’s long brown hair. They both fall to the ground in a heap of mud and grunts and once-crisp Sunday clothing. Vi presses her muddy palm against her sister’s face, flattening her nose, trying to push her away, but it’s no use. Lannie grabs her by the back of the neck and pushes her down against the forest floor. Harder, harder …

Then she straightens and, blinking away mud, her sister’s handprint still upon her face, picks up the stockings. The forest is grave-quiet as she stands, and at first I want to run when she turns to me, but it’s the same as with Justin and Angela: she doesn’t see me. She walks through me, swiping a stray lock of hair behind her ear. I stare at the motionless body whose face I cannot see—so tiny, so vulnerable—tears welling in my eyes. But before they can spill over, something moves behind the trees. I wipe my eyes and strain to see a figure in the dark canopy of leaves, but I already know very well who it is. Trey.

He’s the one. Get him.

It wasn’t a boy who said that. It was a young woman. Lannie. She said it to Jack. She made him kill Trey, because of what he witnessed. Because he witnessed this.

Lannie did this.

I pull away from Vi’s hand and I’m shuddering. “Oh my God. It’s Lannie. Lannie is my relation? She’s the one in line to become Mistress of the Waters?”

Vi nods.

“She had Jack kill Trey … and then what?” I ask, but I already know. I hear the sound perfectly—sleesh … sleesh … sleesh—and the next words come to me right away. I did everything you asked of me. That was Jack.

I can see the whole scene so perfectly now. Jack, poor, gangly little Jack, whose pants never fit quite right and who never had any real friends, let alone girlfriends. Lannie was the first girl who’d taken any interest in him. He was easily her servant. I could see him, begging in the moonlight, begging the girl he worshipped for his life. Please don’t. I did everything you asked of me. “But you are not a real man,” Lannie spat at him. “You were going to tell everyone our secret. You couldn’t keep your mouth shut.” And she brought that ax down. She brought it down and killed him, too. I could see the blood coursing over his forehead, his eyes staring up through the tree branches, at the silver moon.

You become what you wanted most when you were alive. Of course. Now I know exactly why I was attracted to Jack. After being humiliated by women all his life, the one thing he wanted was to be adored by them.

“What happened to Lannie? She was caught?”

Vi strings up a pretend noose and makes like she’s hanging herself.

I think of the bruises on Lannie’s neck, of how I found her hanging from trees whenever we played hide-and-seek. All this time, it’s been Lannie. But does it even matter? Whether it’s Lannie or Jack, neither of them can become ruler. And I can’t destroy an entire kingdom over my mistakes. Vi’s right. We need to drag my body back to the Outfitters. We need it to be found.