Page 4 of The Pawn

Tanner says, "Talk about the ghost.” He grins, white teeth flashing against tanned brown skin. “Dead Martha Hayes and the wolves are all anyone pays attention to on the tour, and you know it.”

“But I was just about to show them to the boys’ dorms.” Lukas seems like the type to hate disruption or messiness; he has a distinct frown on his face. But Tanner’s insistent cajoling gets him to cave. “Fine. I suppose a little detour past the old chapel won’t add any time to the tour. But we can’t go inside—it’s not structurally stable.”

“Whatever ya say, Mom.”

Tanner bumps into Lukas’s shoulder, drawing more grumbling from his general direction, and what might be a French swear word muttered under his breath. I watch them, wondering what might tear their friendship apart, make them turn on each other as viciously as they turned on Silas, a complete stranger.

I want to know what it feels like to see them ripped into shreds until there’s nothing left. I want to destroy everything they have, including their friendship.

I ache at the very sight of their bond.

It reminds me of how Silas and I were briefly, when we were old enough to stop pulling each other’s hair, before he grew tall enough that Dad started to hit him but not me. As well as we got along before he died, it was nothing compared to those halcyon days when we were arm-in-arm on the playground, roughhousing in the backyard, and speaking our own language.

We were born together.

We should’ve died together.

“The legend goes,” Lukas starts, ignorant of my angry, bitter gaze on him as he leads us down a winding path lined with old Red Oak trees, “that Martha Hayes, a student here in the sixties, was in the chapel late at night when a fire started. She tried to escape—”

“Tell them why she was there,” Tanner chimes in.

“I was trying to tell the story in an interesting way.” Lukas sounds irritated with him in the way siblings frequently are.

My mom speaks up for the first time since we left the visitors center. “I think it’s a positively spooky story.”

I glance over at her. “You know it?”

“I looked into the school before...” She trails off abruptly, voice suddenly soft. “I had to know where my baby was going.”

It’s not me she’s talking about. My chest aches at the reminder that before I fraudulently enrolled here, Silas was excited about coming—so excited he was willing to risk Daddy’s wrath and Momma’s sadness by going away forever.

For years I’ve thought of my mom as a distant, uninvolved mother. It never occurred to me that she worried about Silas too, in her own quiet way.

“The story you can read online is one thing, but there are details you don’t really get to see except in person. Part of that, of course, is the chapel—it’s not open right now, but it’s still beautiful to look at. Here it is, right around the corner.”

The path Lukas leads us down reveals a modest white chapel with a wide deck out front, its wooden clapboard siding faded and covered in ivy that climbs up to the gabled roof. There’s a steeple in the middle of the roof that’s half-destroyed, fresh construction underway. A thick rope stretches across the path, while another blocks off the deck, which sags in the middle.

It looks like a peaceful place, the kind of small, modest sanctuary someone could come to hear their own thoughts.

“Martha Hayes liked to come here in the evening after dinner with her sketchbook. She must’ve enjoyed the peace and quiet.” Lukas’s words echo my own thoughts. “Apparently, she didn’t get along with the other girls at Rosalind Hall, which had just been opened to welcome in a new, expanded class of female students. The other girls thought she was strange, and they bullied her.”

Tanner chimes in, “They put dog shit in her hair while she was asleep.”

I feel sick.

We’ve reached the end of the path, where the rope blocks off everything else. The temptation to push past it, to go inside, is overwhelming. If Silas were here, he would jump the thing and drag me after him, but without him I feel stymied, like half a person. I have plenty of bitterness to spare, but I lost my courage the day he died.

“It was all very unpleasant, what they did to little Martha Hayes.” Lukas speaks in a detached voice, head tilted up to stare at the steeple that’s under construction. “So she came here in the evenings to draw and write. Eventually, things got so bad that she even stashed a pillow and blanket behind one of the pews and slept here at night instead of going back to the dorms to face her tormentors.”

A pang of sympathy for Martha goes through me, even as the fire inside me whispers that she should’ve faced them, gotten her revenge, pushed their faces in the dirt and shown them she could give back what they gave her.

“One night, a fire started in the back of the chapel. Inspectors decided that Martha, to ward off the cold, lit the candles at the altar and fell asleep. One of the candles tipped over, and...”

Lukas trails off, and Tanner chimes in again. “She was burned to death in her sleep. Well,” he amends, “she probably woke up before the last of it.”

Finishing the inevitable story, I add, “And now she haunts the places and says boo and stuff.”

“Something like that. This world is cruel to those who have no power.” Lukas eyes my mom, who looks a little pale, and apparently decides to wind down the creepy part of the tour. “We should probably move on to the dorms now. You’ll be wanting to see where you’ll sleep. Hey, wait, don’t—”

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