Deadwood (23 page)

What really scared her were the trees themselves. Could they sense her, like the Spirit Tree did? Were they like drones, like the hemlock outside her window, serving the tree itself? Did all trees have their own wills—their own motives? She didn't want to find out.

She sniffed, and caught a whiff of caramel that set her mouth watering. Was she imagining it? Another breath and she smelled an acrid undertone, like a s'more too burnt to eat. When Hannah stepped clear of the treeline she saw smoke, a lot of it, choking and thick, coiling like a black snake from the town center. A distant fire siren blared, then a closer one, and Hannah walked faster. She thought of Martin's mom, caught in an explosion in a war zone. Was this what life was like for her? Like the world could burn down or implode at any minute? Hannah felt like the earth could collapse under her feet, or she could be sucked into oblivion by some giant, swirling vortex at any moment.

She was relieved to see the light of the TV flickering through the window when she finally got home. Hannah's father muted the sound.

“I was worried—I tried to reach you,” he said.

She pulled her phone out of her pocket. Finally she had airtime, but she had never turned the phone on. She hadn't wanted anyone to reach her. “Sorry.”

“The point of that gizmo isn't so you can text Waverly all day,” he said. Hannah cringed, because he was so wrong about what she had been doing. “It's so I know you're safe.”

“I'm sorry. I'm sorry about everything,” she said, her voice sticking in her throat.

“Look, Hannah, what happened with my job isn't your responsibility. I'm a grown man. I make my own decisions. One of them is to be proud of you. You played great today on the soccer field, but what you're trying to do with the community history project…that's bigger than the game. It's real.”

She gave a half-smile, her shoulders still hunched, and glanced at the TV behind her dad. The screen churned with smoke, flame, and plumes of water evaporating into spray. She could still smell smoke in her nostrils, as if the fire were in the room with them.

“What's going on?” she said. “I heard the sirens.”

Her dad shrugged. “The Happy Elf Bakery is burning down—five alarms. The blaze started hours ago, but they can't stop it. Looks like the place got hit by a bomb—all that old sugar and flour is pretty flammable, I guess.”

“Oh, no. That's awful.”

“No great loss. Some of the guys in the city planning office hoped they could bring another manufacturer in. Some of them thought we'd attract a developer to turn it into lofts, get some hip young people to live downtown. I knew none of that would ever happen in Lower Brynwood. Might as well burn it down.”

Hannah had never heard her father sound so negative. Is that what the curse did? Destroy businesses, buildings, opportunities, lives, hope? What was happening to this town? To her family? Hannah's father looked at her, brightening slightly, as if he'd forgotten she was there for a moment.

“There's pizza in the kitchen,” he said. “Just the cheapie frozen kind tonight, but it's not bad. Grab a few slices, kiddo, and don't forget to drink your milk.”

Hannah balanced her dinner next to the kitchen computer, plugged in her phone charger, and pulled out the Spirit Tree notebook.

She'd always thought that being decisive was the right way to operate—choose, then commit right away. Don't overthink things, since first instincts were usually right. That worked on the soccer field, but this wasn't a game. This was real life.

She shook her head. She had started out wanting to save the tree and hopefully help her brother win some football games. But now the fate of the whole town rested on her, even if no one knew it. She couldn't eliminate any clues or suspects yet—not even Jenna. What did they really know about her motives? And maybe they shouldn't cross off Jake yet, but there were other people she and Martin hadn't even considered. Hannah started cross-referencing any recognizable names with the two yearbooks.

Margie Riley is EZ
. Margie, a freshman in 1989, stared out at her from page sixty-seven, looking startled beneath a stand of hair so big it could have been electrified. Poor Margie. Hannah looked her up on Facebook. So, good old Margie had gotten married at some point—three kids and a husband, living out in Montana, where probably no one knew she used to be EZ.

Margie Riley didn't look like someone who would curse a tree, but then, what would that look like? Probably not like foxy Mark Caputo, who wasn't in the yearbook but was on Facebook, or Diane Papapian and Mike Foley, who had been voted cutest couple in 1990 but didn't seem to exist in the digital world.

She launched the computer's clunky old photo program and scrolled through the digital photos—there were hundreds of them. She'd snapped away, circling the trunk, capturing images of every inch of bark from the roots up. Hannah noticed that one carving practically circled the whole trunk, the letters wide and flattened, so big that it had been intersected by other carvings. Hannah clicked on the thumbnail, and the photo sharpened.
To Brynwood 1997
, she read silently. Well, whoop-dee-doo. To Brynwood. To life.

Then she squinted. The other carvings seemed to have been made over the top of this one, but how was that possible? One of them said 1990 and one was 1994. Older carvings should have been
under
the 1997 carving, not on top. So,
To Brynwood 1997
had been written first, but how?

Hannah zoomed in close. Her eyes widened. She had read the letters wrong—a flat hatch mark wasn't part of the bark's texture, but an additional letter that had nearly faded with time. She had read the date wrong, too—she had expected it to read 1997, but that wasn't what the carving really said.

Tho. Brynwood 1797
.

1797. With a shock she recognized the name and date—Thomas Brynwood, who had founded the town after the Revolutionary War. Could the carving really be that old?

Hannah flipped through the yearbook to find the business card Jenna had given her. She attached the digital file to an email.

Dr. Blitzer, please take a look. You said you thought the tree was over 250 years old. The park used to be the site of the old mill during and after the Revolutionary War. Do you think this arborglyph was really made by Thomas Brynwood?

Hannah hit send, but felt like kicking herself. If she had misread that carving, what else had she missed? She pulled up the photo of the six sigmas and zoomed in, one hundred fifty percent, then two hundred percent, then four hundred percent. There, in the third row of Greek letters, running into another carving that read
Saligia rules
, she could now make out another faded letter.

There were seven characters on the tree, not six.

Seven sigmas. Time to Google.

Only one exact match—Wikipedia.

S
EVEN
S
IGMA
IS
A
SHORTHAND
EXPRESSION
FOR
“T
HE
S
EVEN
H
ABITS
OF
H
IGHLY
S
UCCESSFUL
E
XECUTIVES,”
A
SELF-HELP
METHODOLOGY
THAT
EMERGED
IN
THE
1980s
AND
1990s.

T
HIS
ARTICLE
IS
A
STUB
. Y
OU
CAN
HELP
W
IKIPEDIA
BY
EXPANDING
IT
.

Well, gosh, thanks
, she thought.
If I find anything more, I'll be sure to let Wikipedia know. In the meantime, if there are Seven Habits of Highly Successful Executives, I'd sure as heck like to know what they are
.

Her phone rang. Waverly.

She sighed. She didn't have time to patch up her oldest friendship tonight. But the longer she waited, the worse she felt. And Hannah figured a highly successful executive would take the call, so that's what she did.

Waverly's familiar voice rushed at her. “I didn't mean to hurt you, Hannah. Honest—Libby told me you'd like it. She said we'd be working on the same project. I'm sorry if I took all the glory.”

“Is that what you think I'm mad about?” Hannah asked. “You taking the credit?”

“What else?”

“Waverly, didn't you realize that Martin and I are trying to save the tree? And you're trying to destroy it?”

No answer, and Hannah could hear tinny music in the background, as if she were on hold. Then Waverly said, “Noooo. I'm trying to preserve it—like you. Coach Laughlin told us the tree's good as dead. If we polyurethane all the messages, they'll live on for posterity. And we're building a stadium for the town. Just think—when we're in high school, you'll play soccer there.”

Hannah didn't know what to say. Waverly really had been trying to help. She'd never told her best friend what she was really doing. She hadn't trusted her enough. Hannah was to blame, not Waverly.

She took a deep breath. “Listen for a sec. I know you don't understand why I'm mad, but it's okay. I'm not mad anymore. I should have told you how I felt from the beginning.”

“Well, duh. But you've been spending all your time with Mar-tin,” she said, pronouncing all the letters in his name in a singsong, as if she was about to launch a verse of “Hannah and Martin Sitting in a Tree.”

“It's not like that. We're just partners on the project. Or we were,” Hannah said, wondering if she was telling the truth. She didn't know how she felt about Martin anymore. Or how she felt about anything. “I'll explain everything soon.”

“Are you coming to my house tomorrow before school? When you didn't show up this morning, I think my dad missed you more than he'd miss me. I didn't tell him we were fighting because I knew he'd take your side.”

Good old Dr. Wiggins. “I'll be there.”

So, the Spirit Tree was doomed, her dad was jobless, Jenna was about to lose her land, the Happy Elf Bakery was toast, Martin's mom, Nick, even Coach Schmidt were hurt. She didn't even want to think about Mr. Richardson and Mrs. Quillen. At least she had smoothed things over with Waverly.

Nick came into the room, his hair wet from the shower.

“Hey, I heard you had a good game,” he said.

“You should've seen it,” she answered. He grabbed a carton of orange juice from the fridge and stood behind her chair. She turned to look at him. “I guess you
would
have seen it, if you wanted to. Didn't have practice today, did you?”

He gulped from the carton, then shook his head. “Coach Laughlin said I can resume drills Wednesday. I was too busy moping around here to realize I should have been there, Hannah. You never miss my games—I probably owe you about a hundred by now.”

“More than that.”

“I never thought it mattered as much to you.”

“Why? Because I'm a girl?” Hannah crossed her arms in front of her.

“No, ‘cause you're good at everything you do. You're the family superstar, even if you don't know it. Face facts. I'm not getting into any decent school unless it's because of football. But you could do anything, Banana.”

“You could, too. You can go to college if you really want to. You and A.J. both.”

He turned his back and put the carton away. “Now you sound like Coach and his Seven Habits of Highly Successful Executives again.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Something about how the answer to all your problems is that you just need to ask for what you want, and the universe supplies it. You want it enough, you've got it. Some garbage like that. At this point, the universe owes me even more than
I
owe you.”

Ha. The universe owed Hannah some answers. And she was hoping Jake would be the one to supply them. He might not be the leader of whatever crazy mojo cursed the Spirit Tree, but he probably knew who was.

31

The Spirit Tree

T
he greed of the bad one would never be satisfied. The stolen life that surged through the tree was tainted now by death and destruction. The tree could feel the incessant suck and drain through its branches and roots. The bad one wouldn't stop until the tree was dead, poisoned by despair, crumbled into dust for the bad one to consume.

The boy and girl had come again. The tree sensed their comfort and anger as energy the bad one couldn't steal, a small core of light and heat the vampire couldn't touch. It felt their light and heat even now, brightness through the fog of despair, pure energy carried as waves on the wind, anger and compassion vibrating through the earth, life force transmitted by roots that crisscrossed and tangled beneath the ground.

The tree felt closer to death, yet stronger than it had since the day the bad one's blade scarred its bark.

It hoped it was strong enough.

32

Seven Habits of Highly Successful Executives

M
artin watched Hannah stroll into social studies with Waverly, their heads bent together as if nothing had happened. As if Waverly weren't in league with their worst enemy. As if Martin no longer existed.

Martin wished he had his iPod to protect himself from being alone. Well, from
looking
alone. But Hannah knew that it was broken and always had been. She'd probably laughed over it with Waverly. She'd gone to their side, where she belonged.

Last night, after he had talked to his mom, the only other person he'd wanted was Hannah. When she showed up on his doorstep, he'd driven her away. Just as well.

It had been a mistake to get involved here in Lower Brynwood, tree or no. Wild sylvans, dryads, serewoods—none of them could be trusted. Why would the Spirit Tree be any different? Why would Hannah? She was the real sorceress, but he had been wrong about one thing. They weren't a team. Real life was like a multiplayer RPG, after all—even in a guild, everyone was in it for themselves.