bag of frozen peas and carrots harder to her forehead.
Jennica sighed. “Well, number one, I don’t have money for a vacation right now, and two, I don’t think the place is what you’re thinking. It’s in
Kirstin pouted. “California boys,” she said longingly.
Jenn rolled her eyes and laughed, picked up her mail and started toward her bedroom. “You’re incorrigible.”
“Could you bring me the aspirin?” Kirstin called weakly. “And water?”
They stayed in that night, and Jennica went to bed early. Before she slept, though, she pulled out Meredith’s journal and read a few more pages of the old woman’s careful, thin and slanted scrawl. She turned to a page more wrinkled and watermarked than the others in the first part of the book and realized how it had probably gotten so damaged: It was a recipe of some kind. Meredith must have kept it open on the counter as she cooked.
But, what was it a recipe for? And what were the words? There was no explanation or title. Meredith’s book was all like that; her aunt would go on for a few paragraphs and tell a story, and then suddenly would appear a poem, or a recipe, or a spell. There were hand-drawn maps with stars and circles, and geometric patterns woven into a lattice that looked both ornate and fraught with deeper meaning. And there were pages folded, pages ripped out. The whole thing was like a map of her days, a concrete representation of life’s unpredictable left turns and sudden turnabouts. You never knew where the pages would go next.
Something about this diary attracted her as much as its ridiculous talk of “magic” repelled her. It was like being given a free pass to someone’s most secret, if insane, thoughts. You’d never spy without permission, but . . . well, the book was hers now. Wasn’t that permission enough?
Jennica closed the book and turned off the light. In moments, she was asleep.
Or was she? She was in her aunt’s kitchen. Only, it looked brighter, newer than the room she had inherited. But she wasn’t there alone. An old woman stood near the sink and smiled, her lips parting ever so slightly. She shook her head, holding out her hand, palm up. “Not now,” she said to someone unseen.
Turning, the woman picked up a large knife and began chopping something on the counter. Jennica couldn’t see what she was chopping because, suddenly, in a transition that only dreams can have, she now looked through the woman’s eyes, and the woman was looking out her kitchen window at blue skies and broad fields of brown grass. There were no other houses in sight, though nearby a well-kept garden interrupted the wild stretch of prairie grass. Jennica could see red tomatoes hung in thick bunches from staked vines, and just beyond was a pumpkin patch where dozens of orange globes lay on their sides or stood up straight.
On the counter to her left, a pumpkin was split in half, glistening seeds dripping like hard creamy tears into the sink.
The chopping stopped. Jennica looked down and saw blood on the old woman’s gnarled hands. But it wasn’t her blood. On the wooden chopping block lay the quartered remains of a blackbird, its feathers darkened further by the spray of its own blood. The woman lifted pieces of its head, feet and chest and dropped them into a black pot that gasped heavy steam.
Then Jennica was outside the woman again, suddenly staring at her eye to eye, and the old woman reached into the steaming pot with a long wooden spoon and brought out a sample of the pieces. She held out the black and orange gruel for Jennica to taste, grinning and pushing the spoon toward her lips—
“No!” Jennica sat bolt upright in her bed. Her heart pounded as she glanced around and saw the faint gleam of moonlight pushing through the familiar curtains, and the pile of dirty laundry she’d left next to her dresser on the floor. This was her room, not the kitchen of a witch, but somehow that knowledge didn’t give comfort. She felt as if an old woman still lurked in the shadows, waiting to feed her the blood of a raven.
Slowly she lay back, but it was a long time before she slept again.
The next morning, after ignoring the light slanting across her face for a couple hours, Jennica finally rolled out from under the sheets and stepped out of bed. She moved slowly, but there was no reason to hurry. It was Sunday, and she hadn’t set an alarm.
Her feet felt something sticky on the floor, and she stepped quickly to the side—only to come down on something hard and squishy.
“What the . . . ?” she began, and leaped away from the bed. Dropping to a crouch, she found three small orange triangles at the foot of her bed. The sticky thing she’d first stepped on was a strand of slimy pulp that she’d ground into the throw rug with her heel.
Pumpkins. The triangles were pumpkin pieces.
The hair on the back of her neck stood up. She lifted a cold pumpkin wedge and stepped into the hall. “Kirstin?” she called, but her voice echoed and died without answer. “Why are there bits of pumpkin in my room?”
She crept down the narrow hall, but the apartment remained silent. Her roommate had apparently already left. Looking behind every door and in every closet, Jennica walked the apartment until she was sure it was empty. She checked the lock on the front door, which was bolted. They had found pumpkin pieces in her dad’s apartment— that was about all the cops had told her. And, of course, she had found one herself, lodged against a baseboard.
She stared at the orange triangle, rolling it over in her hand. Where did you even get pumpkins in the springtime, she thought. Then she set it on the table and washed her hands. But the warmth of the water couldn’t take away the chill she felt. Someone had been here. In her house. Standing at the foot of her bed. The thought of someone standing there, in her room, staring at her as she slept . . .
“Oh God,” she whispered.
What if the Holy Name parents were right and the killer was coming for her, too?
CHAPTER
FIVE
The knife moved with great speed. It cut easily through the man’s thick skin, carving a precise line through the flesh. The carver sniffed, and a moment later sniffed again with obvious irritation. He had a chronic nasal problem that made his detailed carving work ever more challenging. But he kept on without stopping, not losing a beat as he wiped the dampness from his nose and upper lip with the back of his shirtsleeve, never looking down, struggling not to break focus.
He reached out to pull one of the subject’s eyelids open. It held that way, the white orb beneath swiveling crazily, pupil wide and black. The face wore a look of abject terror. The earlier disengagement of the model’s vocal cords kept the carving room quiet, however, as the carver preferred to work in silence. He could brook no distractions at this stage if he was to capture the essence of the man with his knives before the man’s life fled. So
