Prophecy (2 page)

A man scoffed. “They’re filthy rich? Why not move someplace better than Ohio?”

The voices lifted into the air, tossing out information faster than I could follow.

“What better place to hide than here?”

“I heard he’s a baron.”

The comments went round and round as adults picked food from mostly empty plates and I marveled. If even half the rumors were true, the Hale family was one to avoid. Not good news for me since I lived next door.

“I hope they have sons. We could use some ruthless players this season.” A barrel-chested man with a whistle necklace mumbled around his mouthful of burger.

“They have two.” A hush fell over the room and the woman blushed.

Allison elbowed me. “Peewee players?”

The woman covered her mouth with a napkin and shook her head, dashing platinum bobbed hair against her cheeks. The other moms broke into laughter.

Another woman smiled ruefully. “Terry jogs past the Hale place every morning. She got a look at the boys moving boxes inside.”

The women laughed again and the men stared.

Terry averted her eyes and dug into her sparse remains of salad with renewed vigor. “They weren’t peewee players.”

“Not peewee players.” Allison raised an eyebrow. “Can I please give you a ride home tonight?”

I smiled.

The crowd kept us busy until Buddy turned the CLOSED sign over in the window and let us out. The night air was brisk and smelled of fresh rain and earth. I pulled in another deep breath. Tendrils of wood smoke lifted from nearby chimneys and gravel crunched under our feet on the way to Allison’s car. A full moon hung low in the sky, and a colony of bats flew past in a beautiful swooping formation. Illogically, I looked for the crows. How many crows constituted a murder? Who chose murder as the term for a group of crows? The classification gave me chills.

I kicked stones. “Do you think any of the gossip’s true?” I didn’t have to explain what I meant. Allison and I had been friends since kindergarten. Sometimes I thought she could read my mind.

“I hope so.”

I gaped. “Which part? The part where they’re insane, their death house is haunted or they fled Europe when they could no longer cover all their crimes?”

Allison beeped the doors of her red hatchback open and I climbed inside.

She slid behind the wheel and gunned the little engine to life. “Hot brothers. Duh. I hope they registered for community college.”

“What if they’re dangerous?”

“What if they’re gorgeous?” Allison flicked her signal on at the second light and turned onto my street. “You think they’re outside?”

“At night in this weather? No.” I made a show of pointing to the streetlights. Replica gas lamps lined the residential roads, illuminating the road in varied shades of grey. “Besides I can barely see the sidewalk.”

“Darn.” Allison idled at the curb. Not a soul in sight. She craned her neck to get a better look, but the effort was futile until morning.

I glanced at the creepy old manor next door. Moonlight bathed the ancient home, giving it a gothic look it didn’t need. Ghost stories and age alone had kept me away from the house in broad daylight. While other kids dared one another to climb the front steps or ring the bell, I stayed across the street, on my bike, one foot on the pedal. I’d never been brave enough to get involved in their game. I definitely wasn’t ringing the bell. When Mom announced she’d rented the old farmhouse next door, I nearly swallowed my tongue. Hale Manor was more than a legend; it was alive and watching.

Maybe having inhabitants would reduce its creep factor.

Allison repositioned her hands on the wheel and shifter. “Text me if they come over to borrow a cup of sugar or something.”

I made my best sarcastic face and crossed my fingers without enthusiasm. “Definitely.” Allison drove away at a turtle’s pace as I climbed our front steps.

Mom rocked slowly in the porch swing beside the front door, bundled in a blanket and sipping hot coffee from her favorite mug. “I guess you heard the news.”

Of all the features I loved at our new home, the wide-planked wraparound porch was my favorite, followed closely by the swing. I was tempted to join her, but if I sat, I might not get up again.

I opened the front door and she followed me inside. “Hasn’t everyone?”

The shaggy mop sprawled on our kitchen floor rolled to life. “Woof.”

“Hey, Chester.” I squatted to pat his fluffy sheep doggie head. “Did you meet the neighbors?”

“Woof.” His halfhearted response warmed me. If Chester wasn’t concerned, neither was I.

“Did you eat?” Mom was dressed in blue scrubs and white sneakers. Her bag sat at the foot of the stairs, ready to go. I barely saw her on nights we both worked. She hated it, but after taking seventeen years off to raise a daughter, she’d accepted the only available shift without argument. She couldn’t be picky and she couldn’t stay with Dad. You cheat. You lose.

“Yep.” I rubbed my tummy, pretending it wasn’t filled with fizzing nerves after all the wild stories I’d heard tonight.

Mom sloughed out of the blanket and threaded both arms through her coat. She wrestled her hair free from the collar and smiled. Her brown eyes sparkled. “They have sons.”

I laughed. “You in the market again?”

“No, but you are.” She lifted her bag over one shoulder.

“I’m not.” Never again in this town.

“Kirk was a jerk.” Her smile widened. “It’s probably not even a coincidence that rhymes.”

I averted my eyes, choosing to focus on the house across the cornfield, which normally was dark with shadows but now seemed illuminated by a hundred indoor lights. “I’m waiting for college. Zoar’s a small town. Dating here is complicated.”

Mom moved toward the door, pity in her voice. “They aren’t all the same. Men, I mean.”

“I know.” I didn’t. I actually wondered daily how many people
weren’t
liars instead of the other way around.

“The boys are cute.” She opened the door and stopped to look at me.

“I heard they fled here to escape all the charges against them.”

She made a sour face.

“And they’re criminally insane, insanely rich… And generally insane in a variety of other ways.” I ticked off the insanes on my fingers.

Chester ambled to the door and tugged on his leash dangling from the coat rack. “Woof.”

“Lock up after your walk and stay in until morning. A storm’s coming.” Mom gripped my chin and kissed my cheek. “No wild parties.”

I crossed my heart and hooked Chester onto his leash.

Mom jogged down the steps to her Bronco, throwing one last kiss over her shoulder and gripping the coat to her chest.

I wiped inevitable lip prints off my face with the back of one hand.

“Come on, Chester.” Wind whipped leaves and dirt into tiny hurricanes on the sidewalk as we rounded the house to the backyard. “Make it fast, mister.”

Chester and I jogged through the grass to the decrepit cemetery where he liked to do his business. The cemetery was older than most things in town, which was to say
old
. The crumbling headstones and rusted iron gates charmed me, like living history books. I’d made rubbings of the stones during walks with my dad when I was in grade school, had my first kiss under the willow in the back, and cried my eyes dry on the broken stone wall when I learned my dad did the deed—the ultimate betrayal—and we were leaving. To others, it didn’t make sense to fear the sight of an old home and yet wander comfortably in a cemetery. It made perfect sense to me. The cemetery, I knew. I understood. I had hundreds of memories there. Happy ones. The house was a mystery cloaked in hearsay and dark tales. I peered at the tall gables in the distance. Hale Manor stared balefully back over the top of the small cornfield where a spinning scarecrow creaked on its post, thanks to building winds.

“Woof.” Chester barked at a pair of black squirrels playing chase in the trees.

I traced the unusual symbol on a headstone with my fingertips. The symbol was my favorite mystery of the ancient grounds. I leaned against a replica of the winged goddess Nike. She stood sentinel near the center of the graves. For years, I’d assumed Nike was an angel who’d lost her marble head to a storm or age. Mom corrected me. She’d pointed the “angel” out to me in one of her mythology books when I was in grade school. Nike was the goddess of victory. A strange thought when surrounded by the dead. The company she kept didn’t seem victorious to me.

The symbol beside Nike’s gown-covered feet matched many, but not all, of the headstones and markers in the Hale family’s resting grounds. Mom couldn’t explain the symbol. She said she hadn’t seen it, but she didn’t pay much attention to details the way I did. A family crest was her best guess. The explanation would’ve made more sense if every stone bore the symbol. The mark consumed my thoughts in middle school. I wrote a paper on it in eighth grade wherein I hypothesized the symbol stood for male superiority. My evidence: the symbol never appeared on a stone bearing a woman’s name. The theory had holes because the oldest stones were sometimes illegible, crumbled and a few were written in a script I didn’t recognize as English. Still, I made rubbings of two dozen stones to support my argument and earned an A on the paper, mostly for my enthusiasm. The smooth symbols never showed up in the rubbings.

A sprinkling of raindrops hit my face, jerking me back to reality. “Time to go home.”

We meandered through the darkness, light drizzle, and cold. Our last walk of the night was like that. I didn’t want woken in the wee hours because Chester didn’t pee when he was supposed to, so I took baby steps and he sniffed each blade of grass individually. My focus jumped to Hale Manor a thousand times. All the lights inside bothered me. Who were these people and what brought them here?

Back in my yard, I dared one last look behind me. Over the tops of the corn, a curtain slid shut in an upstairs window, leaving the silhouette of a person staring down at me. I imagined they stared, anyway. It was possible the person had their back to me, though it seemed less likely. The light behind them shone like a beacon in the night.

“Come on, Chester.” I ran the rest of the way to the front door and locked up, twisting the dead bolt for good measure.

Chester shook water over me and the floor before running through the rooms, sliding and rampaging the way he did when he was wet. I toweled up the mess, toweled down the dog, and hit the shower before homework and bed. I left my door open so Chester would sleep in my room and patrol the house while I slept. Falling asleep wasn’t easy with my head buzzing from questions and rumors. What kind of people would move to Hale Manor? Didn’t they know the home’s history? Didn’t it bother them?

By midnight, the rhythm of rain on our roof had washed the worries from my mind and lulled my anxious body to sleep.

I shot upright an hour later, gripping sheets to my chin and looking for Chester. “Did you hear that?” The soft green glow of numbers on my alarm clock teased a thought just outside my memory’s reach. One AM. I pressed a palm to my chest, certain my heart would break my ribs. “I heard a woman scream.”

Chester lifted his head, ears perked. “Woof.”

I stared out the darkened window toward the enormous home separated from me by one small field, and I patted my pillow until Chester curled up on it. I laid my head on him and gripped my phone to my chest, waiting impatiently for daylight.

I woke with the dull drumming headache of a restless sleep. The radio played below me in the kitchen. Mom never went to bed until I left for school, though she got home from work an hour before my alarm went off most mornings. Chester was gone, likely standing sentinel at the counter while she prepared breakfast. I helped around the house since she’d gone back to work, but meals were her thing, the one task she wouldn’t give up. A nurse through and through, she claimed nutrition was the best gift she could ever give me and so long as I lived with her, nutrition was exactly what I’d get.

I stretched my arms and legs thoroughly before shoving the soft down comforter away and inching out of my toasty warm bed. A chill covered my skin in goose bumps as I rolled my head against each shoulder and shuffled to the bathroom for a shower, tooth and hair brushing plus obligatory makeup when what I wanted was more sleep.

I showered with the speed of a garden slug, hoping the hot water would rejuvenate my mind and muscles. It didn’t. I wrung water from my hair and wrapped one towel around my head before securing another around my body. A white cloud of steam coated the bathroom mirror. I rubbed a clear spot through the fog with the side of one fist and sighed. My eyelids hung at half-mast, begging for sleep until I remembered why my night was so restless. Adrenaline replaced fatigue with a burst. The woman’s scream had seemed so real, almost familiar, but I wasn’t sure. Chester hadn’t seemed worried about it and I’d never heard another sound. Which reminded me… The mysterious and possibly evil neighbor kids might be at school today. Allison hoped they were registered at the community college, but we had no idea how old they were.

Suddenly the hair dryer couldn’t work fast enough. I wrestled my old brush through the length of my dark brown hair, smoothing the places where random waves popped up. My hair was sixty percent straight, forty percent rodeo clown. Mom’s Greek and Italian ancestry left her hair an unruly perfection, which managed to look sexy and windblown on her. I had no idea where my crazy hair came from, but it required patience. I carefully coerced the few wild waves into submission with the help of a flat iron. I tapped my foot, more anxious for school each minute. What if the Hale boys were my new classmates? What if they were dangerous?

Mom called up the staircase as I opened the bathroom door. “Callie.”

“Yeah?” I leaned my head into the hallway, lip gloss in hand.

Before she answered, footfalls hammered against the steps. A moment later, Allison bobbed around the corner. Her hair looked amazing. She’d rolled and tied a silk scarf around her head like a headband, hiding the bow under the length of her hair. The ends of the scarf lay over her shoulders, coordinating seamlessly with her jade green blouse, jeans, and fringed bag.