She circled the wilderness of the orchard, though, and repeated her walk up the drive. The red door still stood open. Her footprints were still in the tile of the front hall.
When she stepped into the house, the oppressive silence almost smothered her. She almost couldn’t make herself look up at the landing. A few panes were gone in the stained glass now, like someone had picked the petals off a flower. Pink glass crunched under her feet when she made herself go up the stairs, stand in the spot where she’d seen the shadow.
Nothing there. Nothing to spook her except a lot of cobwebs and a really, really dead bird that had clearly flown into the house some years ago and made its final resting place on the sill.
Jo blew out a puff of the stale house air and felt like the world’s biggest idiot. She’d actually been scared, standing down there in the entry.
Letting light and shadow fool you wasn’t very punk rock. Jo wiped sweat off her face and watched it fall to the filthy floor.
Another set of footprints sat in the dust, next to the scuffs of her shoes. Precise, pointed toe and square heel. No scuffs. Standing still.
The sun snuffed out behind a high bank of anvil-shaped thunderheads, bloody pink through the lens of the window. A puff of wind blew the red door wide, hinges shrieking.
A voice spoke into Jo’s left ear, very close and clear. “
Jo took a step, tangled her feet, and went down hard. The same hand Drew Powell had covered in grease twisted under her, sharp and hot as driving a nail through her palm.
When she looked up, she saw the shape. Saw it wasn’t a shape, but a figure. The weak, yellow stormlight spilling from outside passed through him, and dust motes danced from her fall, silvered as if they were falling through a projector light.
The figure stretched out his hand. “
Thunder cracked the heavens open. Rain cascaded from the sky, a thousand leaks sprouting in the ceiling of Ash House.
Jo managed to get up. She thought the figure might have reached for her, his hand drifting through the fabric of her tank top. His face, she noticed with that snapshot clarity that comes with panic, was very young, close to her age. Hair dark as ink swept back in a style at least seventy years out of date. Dapper suit and tie.
And dead. Dead, dead, dead.
Jo didn’t know how the thought came to her that the boy on the stairs was dead. Not a hallucination or heatstroke, but a departed. When it did come, though, she ran. Ran from the house through the wide open door, out into the thunderstorm that rolled from one side of the hollow to the other, into rain that was colder than putting ice cubes on bare skin. Ran until she couldn’t go any further, and collapsed under the Route 7 overpass, which was where Drew Powell found her after the rain stopped, when he came rattling along in his barely functioning ’71 Nova. He took her with him to buy belts and a new air filter and then drove her home.
He never asked what she was doing on the road in the first place.
3. September
Jo hadn’t intended to start her junior year with her arm in a sling, but at least it got her out of PE for a few weeks. By the time Drew had gotten her home that afternoon, her hand was twice its normal size, and she couldn’t bend her wrist without her eyes watering.
The doctor had diagnosed two broken fingers and a severe sprain. Jo told her mother she fell doing a stage dive. Mel muttered something about that Deirdre girl and bad influences, and drove her to the urgent care clinic in Pittsfield.
She didn’t tell Drew her “ghost story,” as Ani insisted on calling it. Jo would have argued that just because she saw a boy the light cut straight through, who appeared out of nowhere, that didn’t make the boy a ghost. Even if that ugly coffin-heavy word had dropped into her head when they “touched.”
At least it gave Ani something to talk about, and it was better than her endless chatter about Deirdre, who was back at her pretentious private art school in New York.
Ani should be the one in a private school, Jo thought. Ani was talented—the drawing, the guitar playing, singing, anything she turned her hands and voice to. Jo had never been jealous of it until Deirdre showed up. Before her, they were Ani and Jo—Jo got decent grades and wrote songs, Ani got detention and wrote the music.
During the free period that should have been PE, she wandered behind the outbuilding that housed the mowers and the thing that painted lines on the football field. Smokers went there, and occasionally you came upon a couple who just couldn’t hold it together until final bell.
She thought it would be deserted, and maybe she could nap in the sun. The dreams were worse and sleeping at home wasn’t happening that often.
She never should have gone back in that house. She saw it almost every night in her dreams—but not ruined, like it really was, but whole and inhabited, every window glowing with yellow lamplight. Apple trees thrashing in wind, shedding their ripe, red crop all over the ground. And the thorns, winding around and around her legs, blood running over her skin and slicking across her thighs.
Drew Powell leaned against the shed when she came around the corner. His hair was a little longer now, the high-and-tight he’d come home with mussed on top. Drew had been in military school all of last year. Jo figured that was a polite way of saying juvie—Drew didn’t look like structure and marching were his thing.
“Hey,” he said. He was smoking the end of a cigarette, holding it pinched tight between two fingers like James Dean.
Jo gave him a nod, crouched against the wall, and tilted her face into the sun.
“You didn’t tell me you broke your hand doing B&E,” Drew said. Jo cracked her eye open.
“It’s not B&E if the door’s open.”
Drew threw his cigarette down and stomped on it. “Why poke around that place? Nothing there.”
Jo bit her tongue. Oh, there was something there. Just not what Drew was thinking of. “It was a dare,” she said.
“Oh yeah?” Drew perked up, and he slid down to sit next to her. “You do that a lot? Truth or dare?”
Jo shook her head. She knew he was fishing for her to say something so he’d know whether she was a slut or not, whether the vintage Cure shirt and short imitation-leather skirt and ripped up tights meant she gave it up, or if she just wasn’t into American Eagle and pastels, like the rest of the girls at Hawthorn High. Drew Powell wasn’t the most subtle guy who’d ever hit on her.
“Just the one time,” she said. “And I broke my hand, so there you go.”
She stood up. She might as well go try and squint at her homework until next period. Besides, if faculty caught her out here with Drew, who clearly didn’t have an excuse to be wandering hither and yon and sparking up cigarettes, she’d get bounced to detention, and she could put off having
“My brother went down there once,” Drew said. “He said it was pretty crazy inside.”
“He on a dare too?” Jo shouldered her bag. She’d thrown out her backpack—she couldn’t get the smell out, the musty, dirty graveyard smell of dry rot and small, dead animals it had picked up in Ash House. The new bag was made of recycled seat belts, and she’d let Ani spray-paint some designs on it.
“Nah, him and his buddies were drinking after graduation,” Drew said. “They got wasted and decided to go have a séance. There was a murder there, you know.”
“Sure,” Jo said, wondering if it was the same one Deirdre had been babbling about. But she didn’t ask. Being too interested would give Drew his in. “I should be going. I have calc seventh period.”
“Or we could go get some beer and ride out to the quarry,” Drew said. He suggested it the same way other guys would suggest soda and slices at O’Reilly’s Pizza Explosion. “I rebuilt the engine on the Nova. It’s smooth. And I cleaned it out some since I gave you that first ride.”
“No thanks,” Jo said. She felt as if she were in a PSA—say no to drugs, skipping school, and guys with blue eyes and Chevy Novas.
Drew shrugged. “Your loss.”
