Page 47 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

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She wondered why Nina had lingered at school so long on that final day. She’d had no practice. No tutoring session. No after-school club. No one had seen her at all—not until Woody spotted her crossing toward the new Aquatics Center, still barely architected, ostensibly closed to students. Only an hour later, she had texted her mother that she was on her way home, and Tommy that she was running away.

So what had happened in that hour? What had Nina Faraday seen, or done, or chosen that had upended her life, sent it leaping from its tracks?

And more importantly—who else had seen Nina Faraday?

Two

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As we nudged closer to Halloween, a steady stream of tragedy tourists began their pilgrimages to 88 Lily Lane. It happened every year but not to this degree; the break-in at the Vales’ house winched interest in Nina Faraday’s cold case to a record high. Akash reported out-of-state license plates on Lily Lane almost every day; he even saw an overzealous YouTuber trying to scale the fence one morning when he walked out to catch the bus.

That was around the time that people started whispering that Lucy Vale and her mother practiced witchcraft.

In a way, it felt inevitable. We still had no solid explanation for why the Vales had chosen to live in the Faraday House. And the Vales’ response to their intruders—the fact that they’d offered to take the podcasters on a tour of the house, and even into Nina’s old bedroom—struck some people as odd.

Even worse, Rachel Vale wasn’t looking for a church. That was practically unheard of in southern Indiana. With the exception of the Kornsteins and Akash’s family, everyone we knew had a church, even the families that barely went. Church was part of life in southern Indiana—like going fishing in the summer, or buying a Christmas tree from ACRES Lawn & Garden right after Thanksgiving, or loving the Sharks.

We initially tried to downplay the rumors of midnight sabbaths and blood rituals. Sure, maybe the fact that Lucy Vale linked a countdown to Halloween on her socials was a little extra. Maybe Lucy’s insistence that she and her mom spend weeks decorating for the big night was a little weird. But we dismissed the throwback picture of Lucy and Rachel Vale costumed identically as witches as coincidence. Just like the fact that she’d posted it on a Friday that happened to be the thirteenth.

Or maybe it was a message. A clue. A hint. A wink in the direction of the rumor.

The question was: Which direction?

Things escalated once Lucy Vale brought an H.P. Lovecraft book to school and soon afterward posted to social media professing a love for Cthulhu. Part of the problem was that we didn’t know who H.P. Lovecraft was and initially misidentified Cthulhu as a pagan deity, thanks to Allan Meeks. According to him, H.P. Lovecraft was a necromancer who, along with Nikola Tesla, had been indoctrinated into an occult secret society known as the Council of Eleven, devoted entirely to the resurrection of the dead.

It turned out that Meeks’s information was entirely ripped from a vast wiki dedicated to a cult Japanese manga and subsequent RPG community. But by the time we separated fact from fiction—to the extent that we could—the damage was done.

Suspicions of occultism cast an obscuring cloud over the Vales’ motivations and seemed to touch Lucy with a special, awesome, unseen power.

@badprincess:Does anyone know if Lucy and her mom did a séance to try and contact Lydia Faraday?

@hannahbanana:omg. I think I did that in sixth grade

@hannahbanana:With a ouija board

@hannahbanana:Do you remember that @ktcakes888?

@ktcakes888:I remember your mom threw out my Ouija board