The phone shrilled and vibrated in Fiona’s lap, making her jump. She didn’t recognize the number, but it was local. She answered. “Hello?”
“Okay, fine.” The words were brisk, not bothering with a greeting. Fiona recognized the voice only because she’d just heard it twenty minutes ago—it was Cathy. “Aunt Sairy’s napping, and she can’t hear me, so I guess I’ll tell you. But you have to promise she won’t get in trouble.”
Fiona felt her heart stutter in her chest, the back of her neck prickling. “What do you mean, get in trouble?”
“She had good intentions,” Cathy said. “You have to understand that Aunt Sairy has a good heart. She meant well. She’s been paranoid ever since she did it. That’s why she didn’t tell you. But she’s getting old now, and we’re going to get rid of the house soon. She’s moving in with me. We might as well tell you as anyone.”
“Cathy.” Fiona was sitting up in the driver’s seat now, her mouth dry. “What are you talking about?”
“The records,” Cathy said. “From the school. She took them, the last day. They were going to destroy them—sixty years of records. There was nowhere to put them, nowhere to store them. No one wanted them. The Christophers had bought the land and were going to put the records in the landfill. So Aunt Sairy volunteered to take the records to the dump, but instead she brought them home.”
“Home?”
“In the shed out back,” Cathy said. “They’re all there. They’ve been there since 1979. We’ll have to get rid of them when we sell the house. Give me a few days to talk Aunt Sairy into it, and you can come and get them. Hell, they’re worthless. You can have every single one of them for all I care.”
Chapter 11
Katie
Barrons, Vermont
October 1950
Katie had never been to Special Detention before, not even when she got into a fistfight with Charlotte Kankle. That fight had been broken up by Sally D’Allessandro, the dorm monitor for Floor Three before she’d left Idlewild and nosy Susan Brady had been appointed instead. Sally had had an oddly languid manner for a dorm monitor, and she’d never sent anyone to Special Detention—she’d just halfheartedly dressed them down as she’d stood in front of them with her droopy posture and bony arms. Hey, just stop it, okay?
Katie followed Mrs. Peabody across the courtyard, her hands still jittering in nervous fear. What had just happened? Had that been real? The door banging open? The voice? She hadn’t heard the words exactly, but she’d heard something. High-pitched, plaintive. The other girls had looked as scared as she was. Katie watched Mrs. Peabody’s polyester-clad back, looking for a sign, a reaction, anything from a grown-up. All she saw was the teacher’s furiously angry stride, the swish of her dress loud in the silence.
Mrs. Peabody led her to a room on the first floor at the end of the teachers’ dorm. She pointed to a stack of Latin textbooks, accompanied by blank paper and a pen. “The conjugation exercises,” she said succinctly. “Do them until the detention is finished. I will be checking your work.”
Katie stared balefully at the stack of books. “The exercises from which one?” she asked.
“All of them,” Mrs. Peabody replied. “Think twice before you talk back to me and you pull a prank like that again.”
“It wasn’t a prank,” Katie protested. How was that even possible? How could she have made the door slam open?
But in an angry flash of understanding, she knew it didn’t matter. Because Mrs. Peabody already knew. This was all a fiction to make the teacher feel better. “It was Mary,” she said to the older woman, the truth hard and satisfying as she watched Mrs. Peabody recoil. “It was Mary—”
Mrs. Peabody lunged forward and grabbed Katie’s arm so fast, so hard, that Katie cried out. “I will hear no more of this nonsense!” she hissed, her face so close Katie could smell sugary peppermint on her breath. Her eyes were hard with fear. She shook Katie once, her fingers digging into her arm. “Conjugation exercises. One hour.” She let her go and left, shutting the door with a click.
“It wasn’t a prank!” Katie screamed at the closed door, as loud as she could. “It was Mary!”
There was no response.
Stupid, stupid. She was still shaking. Time to get herself together. Katie did a circuit of the room. A dusty chalkboard; a grimy window looking out toward the woods; a stack of old local newspapers, mostly rotted; a single desk and chair, the desk stacked with the books, papers, and pen. Katie tried the door; it was locked. She yanked at the window, but got a shower of old paint flakes in her hair for the effort. She got on her stockinged knees and inspected the desk, looking at all the initials carved by girls locked in Special Detention over the years. Disappointing—she didn’t recognize any of the initials, nor had anyone carved anything good into the hard wood. A riffle through the blank notepaper showed nothing there, either.
Then she looked at the stack of textbooks. Books that stayed permanently in this room.
Teachers are so stupid.
She sat in the hard ladder-back chair and leafed open the top book. The verb conjugation answers were written in the margins; doing the exercises would be easy. The book was full of other messages left over the years, including an entire story about a unicorn written in pencil over the empty back pages, complete with drawings. The story started innocently, and got progressively dirtier, until the final illustration was so rude even Katie had to laugh. Whoever the author was—the story was unsigned—Katie approved of her heartily. There were other messages in the book’s margins, some of them barely literate, some of them rude, some of them potentially useful.
Mrs. Patton pretends she has a husband but she doesn’t. Interesting. Mrs. Patton was Idlewild’s headmistress, often spoken of but rarely seen. Katie filed this tidbit away.
Mary Hand walks on Old Barrons Road at night. She sucks blood. Maybe true, probably not, and not very interesting either way.
There is a baby buried in the garden.
Katie had heard this one before. It was one of Idlewild’s myths, though she had no idea if it was true. Everyone hated the garden, which they were all forced to use in weekly sessions called Weekly Gardening. There was no one reason the garden was so hated, though the strangely slimy soil and the pervasive chill created by the shadows of the two buildings that bordered it were part of it. The garden never drained properly, and it always had an odor of rotting vegetables to it, mixed with something more pungent. Every once in a while someone resurrected the dead baby story, probably to scare the freshman girls.
Katie looked up when she noticed movement on the wall. A spider was crawling down from the ceiling, its legs rippling gracefully, its body fat and black. Katie stared at it for a long minute, transfixed and shuddering. Idlewild had a lot of spiders—and mice, and beetles, and bats under the eaves outside the locker rooms. But the spiders were the worst. If she killed it with her shoe, she’d be stuck looking at its dead black smear for the rest of Special Detention. Reluctantly, she looked down at the books again.
The next textbook had other bits of wisdom: If you call for Mary Hand at dusk under a new moon, she rises from the grave.
Beneath this, a different girl had written in bold, black pen: Tried it not true
The conversation was continued by a third girl, writing along the bottom of the page: She is real. Died in 1907 after miscarriage. It is in the records.
A debater chimed in: Idlewild was not opened until 1919 stupid
To which was returned: This house was here then look it up. Her baby is buried in the garden