Page 55 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
If she’d done it.
If she’d picked a rope.
We weren’t conscious of it then—not yet—but a new element had forced its way into the old ghost story. The Faraday tragedy was aliveagain and spawning—birthing strangers who came in the middle of the night, YouTube videos and theories that took shape in their comments, questions that pointed to something unfinished, unnoticed, unexamined.
Holes. The Faraday case was full of holes.
And for the first time ever, we were full of doubt.
We entered the house together.
Eight
We
Inside 88 Lily Lane for the first time, we felt strangely oppressed, like the oxygen was thinning. A skeletal family was arranged in front of the television, and the way they’d been posed—as if rotted in their chairs—gave us all a bad feeling.
If the Vales were, in part, poking fun at the house’s reputation, we were outside the joke. To us, the curtains drawn against the sunlight and fake cobwebs veined over the furniture felt ominous, like a staged reproduction of the Faradays’ history, our history. The deep shadows and the atmosphere of quiet, the strangers wandering room to room in silence, reminded us of a memorial service.
We wandered into the kitchen aimlessly and picked through Halloween candy on the table where Nina Faraday had eaten her last breakfast. We drifted into the den, now full of the Vales’ books, where Nina and her mom used to watch TV. We paused in front of the windows Nina had passed on her way out the door, peering out through the lattice panes that cut the outside world into a neat geometry.
Nick Topornycky was the first to suggest we duck the rope blocking off the staircase so we could get to the attic where Nina had slept. Alex Spinnaker tried to claim the idea as his own, and Meeks seconded him. The argument quickly devolved into old grievances about Topornycky’srejection of his former Dungeons & Dragons group. Olivia Howard suggested that it would be nice to meet Lucy’s cat, Maybe, who was probably hiding upstairs. Akash firmly reminded us that we were all invited guests. Sofia Young pointed out that we’d technically never been invited.
Someone said the wordpolice, and again it was repeated. Alarmed and guilty, it took us a minute to understand that someone had called the sheriff’s department to complain about all the cars in the road.
Then Lucy Vale was there, pushing past us, muttering something about her neighbors. We sprang away from the staircase as if she could read our intentions by the proximity. She latched on to Akash, and we saw the way she squeezed his hand, as if for reassurance, and briefly smiled up at him.
We were envious, and afraid for Akash.
We followed Lucy onto the porch and watched her maneuver toward the road to join her mother by the police car, passing through the long clutch of afternoon shadows. We recognized both deputies: Nate Stern’s cousin, confusingly dressed as a firefighter, and Deputy Martinez, a Boy Scout troop leader and organist at the Episcopal church.
We stood there with our hands in our pockets to keep our fingers from bloating in the cold, watching the exchange from a distance.
Akash wagered that it was the Hollands at number 66 who had called the sheriff. They hated the Vales.
Why?We wanted to know.
Akash only shrugged.
“They’re different,” he said.
The cars had thickened on both sides of Lily Lane and formed a natural runway for the procession of new arrivals. We saw the Strut Girls coming up the street in a group with Alec Nye, JJ Hammill, Ryan Hawthorne, and Jeremiah Greene. To our disappointment, Noah Landry wasn’t with them. Meanwhile, departing families slowly thinned toward their cars. Mr. Henderson herded his children through the gates, pausing to say goodbye to the Vales and offer his paw to the deputies.We couldn’t hear what he said, but one of the deputies laughed, and Lucy Vale cracked a smile that flushed her whole face beneath the pancake makeup.
She was beautiful, especially for a ghost.
Suddenly a sharp wailing erupted in the garden. A little girl in a unicorn costume stood motionless beneath the apple tree, only a few feet from where the dummy was noosed to the branches, clutching her ratty rainbow tail in both fists and howling open-mouthed. Two older kids were just scampering off down the garden path when we turned around to look, and we caught the faint whisper of their giggles as they disappeared around the garden.
A gigantic fairy came flapping across the yard to enfold the girl in her arms. We figured it was the girl’s mother. Still, the child kept wailing, so loudly that several other trick-or-treaters plugged their ears.
Then Rachel Vale was hurrying back from the street, looking harassed. Up close, we could see faint lines etching her forehead and the corners of her mouth. Still, she was beautiful. Her eyes were a vivid blue, the kind of color that people tried to reproduce with tinted contact lenses, and her hair was practically the color of pitch.
We had to admit, visually speaking, she made for a very convincing witch.
“Unbelievable,” we heard her say as she came up the porch steps. Her eyes barely skimmed over us until they landed on Akash. “Kash, run and grab the ladder from the garage, will you?”
Akash peeled away wordlessly.
“It’ll be easier just to take the whole thing down,” Rachel said.
