How to Hang a Witch Page 10

  “I don’t get it. This place has been abandoned for a long time, right? Shouldn’t there be graffiti or garbage or something?”

  “Maybe we’re the first people to find it.”

  I don’t buy it. “Let’s just go upstairs and get this over with.”

  There is a narrow hallway to the left of the room. And in it, the bottom steps of a staircase are shadowed in dim light. Jaxon heads for it and I stay close behind him, gripping his hand and trying to steady myself. The stairs groan under our feet. Jaxon stops.

  “What?” I ask reflexively.

  “Nothing—just a broken stair. Be careful.”

  Behind me, a step creaks. “Did you hear that?” I ask as we maneuver around the broken stair. “The steps creaking when we were standing still?”

  “Sam, it’s an old house. They make noises.”

  I’m not convinced. I look over my shoulder every two seconds. I don’t know what I’m expecting to see, but whatever it is, I don’t want to see it.

  Reaching the top of the staircase, we find ourselves in another small hallway. There are two doors to choose from. Jaxon drops my hand and heads for the one on the left. He opens it.

  “It’s too small for the master bedroom,” I say from the hallway, not wanting to go in if I don’t have to.

  Jaxon walks past me and toward the second door. The wood whines as he opens it, and I wrinkle my nose at the dusty, stagnant air. It’s larger than the first room and has a broken rope bed frame and a few pieces of decrepit furniture.

  Jaxon smiles optimistically. “At least there’s only one window in here. Makes it easy to figure out where to look.”

  I approach the shattered diamond-shaped panes. “And it also makes it dark.”

  “Look.” Jaxon points to the wall behind the rope bed. “Your name.”

  My muscles tighten. What did he just say? I leave the window. As I get closer to him, I notice the walls are covered floor to ceiling with writing, blurred under a layer of dirt. Near Jaxon’s finger are written Charles and Samantha. All the blood drains from my face.

  “That’s not funny. Charles is my dad’s name.” I knew I shouldn’t have come here.

  Jaxon gestures at the room. “Sam, did you see these walls? They’re covered with names and crazy stuff. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.”

  “How do you explain that our names are together?”

  “They’re both really common names. I thought it’d make you feel better. This is the graffiti you were missing downstairs.”

  I look at the writing more closely. “No, this looks like the rants of a psychotic person who was locked in here for years. Let’s find that hanging spot and get outta here.”

  I walk back to the window, my skin crawling. I want out of this place. The windowsill has carvings that look like bird feathers. I can’t help but think about Jaxon’s ridiculous story.

  Jaxon joins me. “Okay, definitely wasn’t expecting that,” he says as he takes in the view. Over the tops of the trees there’s a small hill way in the distance just behind the Walgreens.

  Walgreens? “No. No way. That’s crazy.”

  He nods. “It’s the only hill in sight. Everything else’s flat. If the letter you found was right and you can see the hill from this window, that’s the place.”

  I lean forward to get a better view of the forest, and place my hand against the weathered frame. A woman sobs, a deep rib-cracking wail. I whip around. My heartbeat pounds in my ears. “What was that? Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “A woman crying.”

  Jaxon puts his hand on my lower back, and I jump. The walls with their writing feel claustrophobic. I can’t stay here. I head for the exit, not waiting for him. As my feet hit the hallway, the door at the end of it slams shut. I lunge for the staircase.

  “Sam, it’s just the wind,” Jaxon says as he tries to keep up with me. I can hear him grinning.

  I jump over the broken stair. “So not okay.”

  I’m moving so fast, I’m positive I’m going to trip. I sprint through the room with the fireplace and swing the front door open. An amused Jaxon follows me out. I shake my hands in front of me, trying to get the feeling of the house off me.

  “Honestly,” I say, speed-walking away from the awful place, “you didn’t hear that?”

  “Sam, it was a bird.”

  I slow down a little and look at him. “Maybe.”

  “Definitely.”

  “Let’s just get out of these woods. Worst place ever,” I say.

  “Yeah, you’re officially off date location duty.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  * * *

  Death Records

  Jaxon and I walk up my redbrick driveway as the last bit of light leaves the horizon. Under the overhang of the doorway stands Elijah. Did he find something?

  “I’m gonna go over to Dillon’s house in a bit. He’s having a couple of people over. You should come,” says Jaxon.

  I stop a few feet away from the overhang.

  “She will be otherwise engaged,” says Elijah.

  I glare at him before I catch myself. “Actually, I need to get up early in the morning. We’re driving to Boston to see my dad.”

  Jaxon moves closer to me. “I’ll text you tomorrow, then.”

  “Say farewell or I will for you,” says Elijah.

  In any other circumstance I would tell him where to stick it, but I just made up with Jaxon and I don’t need to look crazy again.

  “Sounds good,” I say, and turn toward my door just as Jaxon leans forward.

  Jaxon lingers for a few seconds before turning toward his house. I push my door open and close it before Elijah can follow. It doesn’t matter, though, because he walks right through the wall.

  “What the hell, Elijah? Are you trying to embarrass me?”

  “Who’s Elijah?” Vivian asks, entering the foyer. She’s in a particularly good mood.

  I look down at the mail on the table, trying to act casual.

  “You succeed artfully in embarrassment without any help from me,” Elijah says.

  “No one important,” I say to Vivian. “A boy at school.”

  Vivian’s eyebrows push together. “Then why were you talking to him in our foyer?”

  “I wasn’t. I was talking to myself.”

  “Right.” Her look of worry turns to a smile. “Are you hungry? I thought we might go out for a change. Celebrate your father’s transfer.”

  “No thanks. I grabbed some food with Jaxon on my way home.”

  “Suit yourself,” she says.

  I walk past her and up to my room, Elijah by my side.

  “Don’t do that!” I whisper, and close my bedroom door behind me.

  “I do not enjoy waiting,” he says flatly, his wavy hair brushing against his cheek.

  “Then why didn’t you come find me?”

  “I have no intention of searching all of Salem for you.”

  I scowl. “I was trying to find the hanging location. Which I could’ve just asked you for and saved myself a lot of trouble, if you didn’t disappear last night.”

  “It is behind the Walgreens.”

  “I know!” I snap, although I wasn’t convinced until he confirmed it.

  “I have made sense of the death records.”

  “Really?” Curiosity replaces my annoyance.

  He picks up a few sheets of paper from my window seat and sits down. The handwriting on them is in old-fashioned cursive. I sit down next to him, and for just a second I swear he smells like freshly cut grass.

  “At first glance, the clustering of death tolls follows no discernible pattern.”

  He speaks with his old-world accent. His eyelashes are long, longer than mine, and his eyebrows are perfectly shaped. It seems unfair that they’re on a guy, especially a dead one.

  “I looked for medical causes, but there was nothing out of the ordinary during the years your grandmother dog-eared. In fact, the rest of Salem’s popu
lation was birthing and dying at a perfectly consistent rate.”

  “Is there something different about the Witch Trials’ families?”

  “Kindly do not interrupt me,” he says with anything but kindness.

  Kindly I will smack you in your perfect face.

  “After a few false starts, I mapped out the approximate population size of the Witch Trials’ families. My efforts showed that there was a significant increase in the number of descendants living in Salem around years with more deaths. And, more important, there were members from each of the major families in Salem itself. In years when there were not, everything was status quo.”

  “So it has to do with the number of descendants in Salem? I’m not following.”

  “The deaths appear to start when critical mass is reached,” he says.

  “Elijah! What does that mean?”

  “Stay in school, Samantha.”

  You arrogant SOB.

  “At least one descendant from each major family must be present in Salem. The moment they are, the deaths start.”

  My thoughts go straight to my dad. “What about now? Are there descendants from all the families in Salem?”

  “Yes.”

  My stomach drops. “Are you sure?”

  “By the proportionately largest number to date.”

  My mouth is dry. I know the answer to this question, but like a moth drawn to a flame, I feel compelled to ask it. “Have there been any descendant deaths?”

  “Seven. All since you moved here. You were the only missing lineage.”

  And John’s great-grandfather was one of them. “Seven? Maybe it’s over?”

  “Unlikely, if you compare the numbers to previous years. If I had to guess, I would say there are a lot more coming.”

  It’s hard to breathe. I look at his papers to make sense of the figures he’s written out. But when I see the death count at twenty-five for a previous year, I wish I hadn’t. Please don’t let my dad be one of them. Please.

  “So there is definitely a curse. You see that, right?” I start pacing. We actually moved my dad closer to Salem from New York. Does that make it worse? Can we transfer him back?

  “I do not know.”

  “But you admit that it’s more than a coincidence?”

  “It is unusual, yes.”

  “How are you so calm?”

  “I am already dead.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  * * *

  You’ll Never Be Alone

  “Room ten-twenty-seven is that way,” says the nurse, and points down the hospital corridor.

  I don’t wait for her to finish her sentence before I take off running. A surprised visitor jumps out of my way as my feet pound down the hall. I swing my dad’s door open and let out my breath. His face is covered with tubes, but I’m used to that.

  His blankets are neatly tucked around him. They’re a different shade of blue from the last hospital’s. I touch his arm, the one without the IV and heart monitor.

  Vivian clicks into the room and shuts the door behind her. “You almost knocked that man over.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say, without paying attention.

  I sit on my dad’s bed and hold his hand. Without thinking, I trace the cooking scar on his pointer finger. He looks the same. I examine the streaks of white around his temples. Maybe a little thinner than last time I saw him, but not too different.

  “We moved to Salem,” I say. “After all those times I bugged you to take me there, we’re living in Grandma’s house. It’s enormous. I can’t believe you grew up in that place. I get lost trying to find the bathroom….I’m using your bedroom. The one you had as a kid, with different furniture, though.

  “Mrs. Meriwether fixed it up for me. She told me you guys were best friends when you were little.” I laugh. “You never told me about her. She’s kinda great. And, holy moly, her cooking is out of control.”

  I examine his palm. “When you wake up, maybe you can tell me about Grandma—” I stop short. His heart monitor alarm wails.

  “Why is it doing that?” I ask Vivian.

  She steps forward, examining the display of his vitals, and shakes her head. “Did you knock the monitor off his finger?”

  “No.” I run to the door. But by the time I get there, a nurse comes in.

  She feels his pulse, and presses a button on the intercom. “I need two nurses in ten-twenty-seven now.”

  My hands shake. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

  Two men in scrubs enter. “I’m gonna need you to leave the room,” the first one says.

  “Let’s give them some room to work, Sam,” says Vivian, heading for the door.

  “No!” I yell. My dad’s heartbeat flatlines. “Dad! Please. You can’t. I don’t know….Please, Dad. I need you!”

  One of the male nurses catches me before I reach the hospital bed. The first nurse pulls out a set of defibrillators. They open my dad’s gown.

  “It’s okay,” the male nurse tells me. “I’m gonna take you out of here.”

  I can’t get my breath. I try, but there’s only wheezing. The room spins.

  The nurse guides me toward a chair in the hallway.

  “Breathe, Sam,” says Vivian.

  I can barely hear her. This isn’t happening. My dad isn’t dying. Minutes pass. I don’t know how many. I close my eyes and attempt to breathe.

  I pulled my knees closer and my back pressed into the cold steps outside my apartment building as my dad’s town car pulled up.

  “Sam?” He didn’t say his usual goodbye and thank you to his driver. He knew why I was perched outside in the dark against the railing.

  I held up a few jagged pieces of hair hanging above my shoulder. “They cut my braid off.”

  He sat down next to me and forced a smile. “That’s just because they knew how pretty you’d look with short hair.”

  My lip trembled as I held up my one remaining long braid to show him how bad my situation was. “They laughed.” A few tears fell onto my cheeks.

  He grabbed my hand and easily hoisted me from my sitting position. “Come on.”

  I let him lead me into our well-lit lobby, with its big chandelier. He headed straight for the doorman’s desk and grabbed a pair of scissors. Without any hesitation, he cut off a big chunk of his own black hair right from the front.

  I was so shocked that I stopped crying.

  “There. Now we’re the same. You’ll never be alone, Samantha. As long as I am in this world, I’ll be there with you. What do I always tell you?”

  “Fall down seven times, stand up eight.”

  “And what are you going to do?”

  “Stand up.”

  “That’s my girl. Now, should we go show Vivian our new haircuts? Maybe she’ll want one.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. The thought of Vivian cutting her own hair was too ridiculous. I leaned into my dad’s side, and he held me while we waited for the elevator.

  The first nurse comes out of my dad’s room. She approaches Vivian. “He’s stable,” she says, and my chest releases its grip on my lungs. “He may have had a heart attack, but it’s hard to tell until the doctor sees him.”

  “Will he be alright?” Vivian asks, and I stand.

  “For now, yes,” says the nurse. “I would wait a couple of days before visiting again. He just transferred here, and sometimes patients have a bad reaction to moving. I would give us a few days to monitor him. We’ll be in touch if anything changes.”

  “Can I see him?” I ask.

  “I would let him rest, Sam,” says Vivian. “We’ll come back when he’s more stable.”

  “Why don’t we just wait here until he’s more stable?”

  The nurse interjects. “I really think it best you go home.”

  “Thank you. We’ll do that,” says Vivian.

  “Please, can I say goodbye?” I ask.

  The nurse looks unsure. “Just be quick.”

  I run into his room before anyone can objec
t. His tubes are back in place, and except for his disrupted bedsheets, you would never know anything happened. I kiss him on the forehead.

  “I promise I’ll fix this,” I whisper. “I won’t let anything happen to you. I love you.”

  The nurse opens the door, and I back away, taking a mental picture of him as I go.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  * * *

  Way to Say Goodbye

  “We should transfer him back to New York,” I say to Vivian as we turn down our street. This is the most I’ve spoken since we left the hospital.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You heard what that nurse said about travel being hard on patients. It could be bad for him.”

  “I don’t trust it here. He’d be better off in New York.”

  “Where you couldn’t see him?”

  “I’d take the bus.”

  Vivian shakes her head. “We’ll talk about this when you’ve calmed down.”

  “I am calm,” I say as we bounce into our driveway.

  “Sam, you seem really unsettled lately. Agitated, even. I know this move has been stressful. Maybe it’s best if you talk to someone about it.” She puts the car in park and turns toward me, dropping her jeweled wrist from the steering wheel.

  “You mean therapy.”

  “Well, you haven’t been sleeping, and you’ve been seeing things. I just think it’s worth thinking about. I have a few errands to run, but maybe we can chat about it when I get home.”

  I get out of the car, shaking. “I’m not going to therapy and I’m not seeing things. My dad is in a coma. Just because you can sleep doesn’t mean I can.”

  “Well, that’s more than a little unfair.”

  I slam the car door.

  She speeds away in reverse. The back bumper of her car scratches against the dip at the mouth of the driveway. How did we wind up like this, where we fight more than not? I unlock the side door, and the heaviness of my situation presses down on me with a steel hand.

  I only make it to the middle of the foyer before I sit on the floor. I fold over and put my forehead on the wood. My back shakes and tears fall down my cheeks.