Page 41 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
Maybe we simply didn’t have time for ghost stories; we had Wolverines.
Or maybe it was that Lucy Vale had finally found her place at Woodward. She had locked into orbit at a small but meaningful distance from us where we could observe her in peace, as we did all the Echelon girls. Slowly we accumulated a mental tally of her habits, likes, and quirks, a drift of information that familiarized her in the mental landscape of our lives. We got used to the way she sat in class, with one leg tucked beneath her, picking at the frayed cuff of her jeans. We got used to the way she waved, keeping her hand close to her hip with a sudden explosive flurry of her fingers. The more familiar Lucy Vale became, the harder it was to imagine her living inside a mystery, much less as a protagonist.
Maybe it was because we trusted Akash, and Akash trusted Lucy, even after she became a Strut Girl.
Whatever the reason, day by day Lucy Vale’s house had molted its association with the Faradays, peeling away from the legend like an old sticker losing adhesive.
Then, in mid-October, came a plot twist.
Four
Rachel
In retrospect, Rachel should have expected intruders. The Faraday House was, after all, a sort of tourist location, frequently listed on “Indiana’s Top Ten Most Haunted Places.” On some websites, the house even gained national notoriety. Even before they’d left Michigan, Lucy had tracked down YouTube videos, some of them with thousands of views, on accounts with names like Ghost Hunter and Urban Explorer. Typically the videos were filmed at night, sweeping an eerie luminescence across the yard and porch. (One creator even filmed himself breaking in through an open window and tagging an upstairs wall, where Rachel and Lucy subsequently discovered it; when they repainted, Lucy joked they should start a home renovation channel of their own.) And, of course, the owner Wendy Adams had warned them about the problems with squatters over the years and recommended a new security system, maybe some cameras at the gates.
That was all on Rachel’s list. She just hadn’t gotten around to any of it yet. But she hadn’t failed to notice the unusual quantity of traffic on the quiet dead-end street—from cars that wheeled around slowly in the cul-de-sac, to bikers that unaccountably required long rests when they drew close to the gates, to kids slurping along the service road with iPhones held high like miniature idols. But that’s who she’d assumedthey were for the most part: kids. Teenagers, friends of Akash’s, high school students with nothing better to do than trade in gossip.
Lucy didn’t seem concerned about the attention. She even found it funny. Already a Halloween enthusiast, Lucy had elaborate plans for decorating the house. She’d made a Pinterest board full of fake skeletons, plaster tombstones, ghoulish-looking mannequins, and oversize spiders perched in feathery cotton webs.We might as well lean in to our reputation,she’d said, a little gleefully.If it’s a haunted house they want ...She trailed off, leaving the provocation unfinished. So they went on a rare shopping spree while Rachel tallied the expenses carefully against her budget, too enchanted with Lucy’s vision, her enthusiasm, to say no.
Then came the strangers in the middle of the night.
It was a Sunday. Rachel had gone to bed late, just before midnight. She’d started working again in the evenings, after Lucy was fast asleep in her attic room and all the other houses had darkened their windows. When she finally crawled into bed, she was still thinking of Nina Faraday’s cell phone pinging off a tower not far from the state park forest several hours after she’d sent her last text:I know you want me out of your life. I’m leaving for a while. Don’t look for me.It was so on the nose, so dramatic. Almost formal. Surely she knew that Tommy Swift would immediately alert someone—his parents, her mother, or even the police. Surely the text made it more likely that Tommy would start searching for her. Maybe that was even the point.
But he hadn’t. As far as anyone knew, Tommy Swift hadn’t told a soul about Nina’s final cryptic message—not until several days later when it became clear that she wasn’t coming home.
Why?
She was thinking of Nina and Tommy Swift; then she was standing in the middle of a river full of eels. Alan was angry at her for something; she had lost her earrings in the water because she’d been distracted with work. She didn’t want to tell him about the eels, threshing the water with their slippery, dark bodies, or about her certainty that the earring was gone, lost for good in the current. She was afraid to move, and therehe was pacing the bank, shouting at her. Lucy too.Mom,she was saying.What are you doing? Mom!
“Mom, get up.”
She startled awake. A wheel of light through the window briefly touched Lucy’s face, her hair wild, her eyes huge in the dark.
“Get up,” she said again, breathless. “Someone’s trying to get in the house.”
“What?” Rachel was shocked alert. Suddenly the room, and reality, came rushing at her. The light had vanished from the window, but she could hear laughter and muffled conversation from outside the house. “What do you mean, someone’s trying to get in the house?”
“There are people outside. They must have climbed the gate.” Lucy was rocketing from the room. “Call the police.”
“Lucy, stop!” Rachel could hear Lucy pounding down the stairs, shouting. She bolted out of bed, doubled back and snatched her cell phone. “Lucy! Get back here!”
It was too late. By the time Rachel got downstairs, Lucy was flinging open the door, brandishing what looked like a bicycle pump and one of her flip-flops.
“Lucy!” Rachel nearly pitched off her feet at the end of the living room where Lucy had gutted the storage closet looking for a weapon. She was punching 9-1-1 and calling for Lucy to get inside, and suddenly she heard a high scream, so sharp it seemed to bring down the night. Seconds later, as she reached the door, she saw lights blink on in windows along the street.
“Lucy!” She wheeled outside, ignoring the dispatcher on the other end of the telephone indifferently requesting her place of emergency.
“It’s okay, Mom.” Lucy was carved into silhouette by the blazing light set up behind her. “She was just scared.”
Rachel’s mind stuttered over the scene: the four strangers, one of them still trembling next to her daughter. The audio recording equipment. The shovels. The case of beer. And mounds of earth overturnedin the garden, now rutted with holes. She couldn’t make sense of it; for a second she wondered if she was still dreaming.
“Ma’am, are you there?” The dispatcher’s voice was still piping from the cell phone in her hand. “Ma’am?”
The stranger standing next to Lucy sniffled. Lucy reached out and placed a hand on her arm, comforting her. She turned back to look at her mother.
“She thought I was a ghost,” Lucy said simply.
Five
