I knew that Ruby, my own sister—she’d done this.
When something big happens, you don’t immediately point the finger at one person. A bridge collapses, and maybe that’s what people call an act of God, not of the little girl in the backseat of a passing car wishing something would happen to keep her from having to stay the weekend with her creepy uncle. A plane loses its propellers and crash-lands on water, and no one blames the guy sitting in 13B who can’t get a date and wants to die over it and doesn’t care if he takes the whole damn plane with him.
No human being could take credit for changing fate.
Except for Ruby.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I’LL TELL YOU
I’ll tell you what happened if you want,” London said. She’d taken a few steps from the group and was lying on the ground just outside the stone platform of the mausoleum, playing with the grass surrounding an unvisited grave.
“Okay,” I said. I stretched out, too, and let the setting sun warm my face. I kicked off Ruby’s boots and put my toes in the cool grass.
“I don’t remember any ambulance. But I do remember these really weird things.” She hesitated. “I think it’s all right to tell you. Ruby said I shouldn’t tell anyone, but . . .”
“Ruby said?”
That’s when we heard yelling. It had been so slow, the afternoon gone in a haze, but now there was commotion on top of the hill. Stomping. Shrieking. A heady, musty scent billowing out from somewhere up above.
Asha called down an explanation. “Laurence kicked that tomb thing open. There’s a whole room inside!”
Soon we were all up there, pushing in to see for ourselves, and just as soon, we were vacating the small, dark space filled with cobwebs and reeking of mildew, nothing worth stealing that anyone could find. But it was then, as I was the last to leave, that I saw the words etched on the inner wall.
Dust tried to hide them from me, but I could still make them out.
Beloved Mayor of Olive, the words seemed to say, the dates below showing 1851–1912. The name itself was partly crumbled out, some letters lost to the years, but when I carefully dusted it clean, this is what it read: W lt r Winchell
Rest in Peace
Mayor Winchell, the last mayor of Olive before the town got itself drowned, according to Ruby. Now his name was known for marking a streetlight.
I returned to one word, putting my finger to it to wipe decades of grime away, tracing the O and the live, the name of the town I’d never pictured existing above the surface, though it had, before the reservoir wiped it away. Ruby had said so, but now I knew for sure: The person in this tomb had lived in it.
I was rubbing at my eyes, wondering if I’d smoked too much, how even if I hadn’t, it must’ve seeped into my brain anyway, that I’d breathed it, that all along I’d been breathing it, because now I was hallucinating. My mind was carving words into the walls and my eyes were duped into reading meaning into them.
I touched the words once more and noticed London hovering in the tomb’s doorway.
She moved slowly through the dusty air like it was thicker than it felt, a plodding, ceaseless bobbing nearer and nearer to me. And once she stood beside me, as near as I let her get, I felt the chill of her, the creeping cold radiating from deep inside her icy bones.
I remembered how she looked at me at the bottom of the pool. How she wanted me to know just what she was made of.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, though she had to know, she had to. Now her long, thin finger was tracing the name of the town the way mine had. Her finger was bitter cold, stinging my hand before I moved it away.
She read the word and didn’t blink.
“That’s the town,” I found myself telling her. “The one at the bottom of the reservoir that Ruby always talks about.”
“I know,” she said.
“You do?”