Brent gave me a tentative smile. “You’re right.”
But my nerves didn’t fade; if anything they grew more intense. I wanted to trust in the cure and believe that our dealings with the Clutch were over, but deep inside, I knew better.
Chapter Seventeen
I had just returned to my room after class, when I heard a knock at my door. Actually it was more like a tap. I headed toward it but before I could turn the knob, Sophia appeared in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. She stood there smiling. The sight of her still made me tense up a bit but the warm look in her eyes made it loosen. I had almost forgotten that Cherie had de-jeweled that mirror.
“Hey,” I said to her. “It worked.”
“I knew it would.” She gave me an appraising look. “Will you keep up your end of the bargain?”
To my shame, I hesitated for a moment.
She noticed and her smile tightened. “I’m ready to be freed.”
“Of course.” I walked over to my chest of drawers and rummaged through my sock drawer until I found the plastic tube that held the concoction my grandma had made for her. It looked and smelled like Italian salad dressing to me. I tuned back to her and found she looked scared. “Are you alright? I don’t think this will hurt.”
“I’ve felt my husband’s presence here more than I have in years.” Her light brown eyes shone with tears. “I’m afraid once I step out of the mirror I’ll cross over and lose this peaceful feeling.”
I poured some of the liquid into my hand and slid it over the glass. “Maybe he’ll be waiting for you.”
“He won’t be. The last time I saw him was in the hospital. I said horrible things to him. I told him I never wanted to see him again. Then he died. I waited for his spirit to visit me, but he never did.”
I smoothed more of the basil and oregano scented solution along the mirror. “What did he tell you that left you so angry?”
“That he was the reason Evan had gone crazy. That is why I broke up with him you know. He had become violent, with horrible mood swings. He was an addict with a rotting brain. The pankurem had done it to him.”
“Oh, that’s awful.” I poured more of the liquid into my hand.
“I wish I could have explained to him that I said those things out of fear for my son, Lee, not out of anger about Evan. After I really thought about it, I realized the exposure had been very small. I had only taken it for a few weeks, because I hated the way it altered my prophecy dreams. It jumbled them together and I couldn’t understand them. So I stopped. I went to the hospital the next day to apologize but he had died. He died thinking that I hated him.”
“And that was the last time you saw him?” I spread the mixture to the edges of the mirror. “You said you never saw a glimpse of his spirit?”
She didn’t have to answer; her stricken expression said enough.
“That was a long time ago. I’m sure he’s had time to think about things. I’m sure he understands.”
Her brown eyes shone with a timid hope. “You do?”
I nodded. “My boyfriend and I had a huge fight recently. And we hurt each other, with our words and our actions, but after some time, we both came to understand each other better. We had both made assumptions based on fear in the moment. We talked it out and realized we were both sorry, that we still loved each other.”
“Truly?”
“Yes, and we’re together now.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe he’s been waiting for me all these years. Maybe he understands how much I love him.”
I placed my hand against the slick mirror. Sophia did the same and my fingers dipped into the mirror and connected with her ghostly ones. I murmured the words Vovó had taught me, tugged, and she stepped from her prison.
She pulled me into a hug. “Thank you.”
Her eyes were bright with tears as she pulled away. Her image rippled and then vanished. I could still smell her Jasmine perfume and the warmth of her hug. I didn’t know if she had crossed or simply disappeared but I did know I had helped and it felt wonderful.
v
“You’ll never guess what I found today,” Cherie said as she and Audrey came into our room a few weeks later.
“What?”
“The original blueprints to the school. They were misfiled. Someone sent a request to the Historical Society months ago, asking if they had a copy, but no one could find them. Apparently the city’s copies of it are missing and they were hoping we’d have one. I’ve seen the request; it was from Mr. Crosby. So when I found them, I didn’t tell anyone. If he wants them so much there has to be a reason. Now we can study them before the Clutch has a chance.”
“You think they’re trying to figure out what the key unlocks?” I asked.
Audrey sat on Cherie’s bed. “I thought you said the kids who stole the key tried it on every door on campus and it didn’t open any of them. So why are we looking at blueprints of the school?”
“I’m guessing it opens one very special door. One that only Christopher knew about. Which means it would probably only be shown on the original blueprints.”
“Like a secret room?” Audrey asked.
“Yep.” Cherie started unrolling the prints. “I also brought the most recent prints so we could compare.”
“That is going to take hours,” I said.
Cherie nodded.
“But what good will it do to know what the door opens if you don’t have the key?” Audrey asked.
“Well,” Cherie said reasonably, “we’re eventually going to get the key and we’ll need to know where to use it.”
For the next few hours we all pored over the plans, and I told them about freeing Sophia from the mirror.
“Sophia was smart to break it off with Evan. He died broke, jobless, and in some serious debt. The only reason the school didn’t go under is Christopher left it to his grandson and not his son.”
“Grandson?”
Cherie nodded. “Yeah. Jesse never got married, but Evan got married about a year after he and Sophia broke up and had a couple of kids. Evan and Jesse were both kicked out of their respective colleges after their grades went from straight A’s to failing. I’m not exactly sure what happened, but people started avoiding the Pendrell boys, like they were afraid of them. They had complaints filed against them from faculty and students. Sadly for Evan’s wife and kids, no one would hire him. The same went for Jesse.”
“Wow.” I closed my eyes but still saw the outline of building plans behind my darkened lids. “Sounds like they lost their ability to control people, huh?”
“That’s what I thought,” Cherie said. “It gets more grim. They started becoming paranoid and insane. Evan was killed running into traffic, screaming like a mad man, and Jesse died weeks later, after he jumped from a moving train, yelling about being followed.”
“It all fits really. My grandma told me that if people ingested pankurem it was like a poison for the mind.” I crossed my legs. “We already know they sabotaged the car in the Grand Avenue race to win bets. What did they need all that money for? They’d already taken a lot of their dad’s.”
Audrey spoke up. “Well it’s never cheap to get things from other countries. Maybe they needed the money to support their habit. Especially if their dad had cut them off.”
“You’re probably right,” I said. “A telepathic steroid must have cost a lot of money. Thomas and Sophia made it sound like they had been researching other things too. According to Thomas, that’s why Christopher was haunting the Clutch, to get them to stop trying to continue the research.”
“You know.” Cherie rolled out the kinks in her neck. “I’m still upset that I never realized the old sports house was rumored to be haunted before the fire. I’m usually better at catching details than that. In my defense I—”
“Cherie,” I cut her off. “You solved the curse. I think you did great. Better, actually. Amazing.”
Cherie bowed her head. “Well, I am amazing. Anyway, if Chri
stopher was really against the Clutch doing whatever experiments they were conducting, it would make sense that his ghost hung around. Your grandma says if a soul is really concerned about something, then it can prevent them from passing on, right?”
I nodded. So Thomas was telling the truth about that. Who knew what else?
“The Clutch used to meet in the old sports house, before Thomas murdered his first two victims there and started the curse. But the school reported that the room was having technical difficulties before that; lights breaking, the pool floor moving, etc.”
“Those can be signs of a haunting.” I nodded. “And Thomas said something about Christopher trying to scare them off by playing with the wiring. You think it was Christopher who used to haunt the old pool room, to scare off the Clutch?”
“Yes. I had something I wanted your opinion on. I meant to talk to you about it awhile ago.” Cherie got up and went to her desk and started flipping through her papers. She pulled out the picture of the key she had and handed it to me. “I was doing some research on Howard Lovell.”
“Who?” Audrey asked.
“The guy who made the keys.” Cherie pointed at the picture. “Look at the head of the key. It almost looks like there’s an image engraved, right?”
I squinted, but the photograph was from an old, grainy newspaper. It did look like something, but I couldn’t tell what.
“I was thinking it might be this. What do you think?” Cherie held up another picture, this one of Howard Lovell’s tombstone. Beside his name was a carving of two birds floating on a wave. “Does that look like it might be it?”
I looked between the two pictures. “Yeah, I think they are the same thing.”
Cherie pursed her lips. “I thought so. The birds look familiar too. I’ve seen it somewhere.”
I had too. I looked at it again and it hit me. “Cherie! Those are swans! The same as in the mural in the old pool room, right behind the diving board. And in the changing rooms.”
Cherie plopped down, crinkling the blueprints. “The old pool room? The one Christopher was haunting?” Cherie jumped off the plans and dug through them until she had the detail drawings of both the old and new set showing the old sports house. She swiveled her head back and forth, keeping a finger on each set as she looked for anything missing.
“I found it!” Cherie’s left hand was pointing to a small room under the stairs that didn’t appear on the new set of prints. It was behind the diving board in the pool room. “Here.”
“The room wasn’t recorded on the newer plans?” Audrey asked.
“No. I bet Christopher changed the plans, so no one would know about it.”
“So when Christopher was haunting the pool he wasn’t just trying to scare the Clutch straight, he was trying to keep them from his secret place.”
Like a light being flipped on, I suddenly understood what she had discovered. “So when the students stole the key and tried every door they unintentionally missed one. Because no one knew it existed.”
“Exactly!” Cherie broke out her happy dance and pulled Audrey and me to our feet to join her.
“So what’s the plan?” Audrey asked swinging her hips to the non-existent music.
Cherie rolled the newer set of blue prints into a tight bunch. “Do we go for the door or wait until we have the key?”
“If we go after it without the key all we’ll accomplish is tipping our hand to the Clutch.”
“Don’t you know how to pick a lock?” Audrey asked Cherie.
Cherie put her hand over her heart. “I’m so flattered you asked me that. I can, but my gut tells me this one won’t be that easy.”
“DJ won’t give us his key. That means we have to find the other one.”
“But you said it would be with him forever.” Audrey gulped. “That sounds like it’s buried with him.”
“I hate graveyards.” Cherie twitched, like just thinking of them gave her the willies.
“How can someone so obsessed with ghosts be afraid of graveyards?” I asked her. Cherie lifted and dropped her shoulders in don’t-ask-me sort of way.
Audrey paled. “You don’t mean we’re going to dig up a body do you?”
“Of course not.” Cherie reached out and patted Audrey’s hand. “It’d be a waste of our time. That’s the first thing the Clutch would have done.”
Cherie shrugged at Audrey’s incredulous stare.
“Not to mention Sophia smirked when she said it,” I pointed out. “It was meant to be misleading.”
Cherie braided her long, blonde hair wearing her I’m-solving-a-mystery face. “I’ve got more research to do.”
v
During the next few weeks Cherie and I made a valiant attempt to search out every portrait and monument made in Christopher’s honor, although it became increasingly difficult to stay focused as prom season grew closer. Cherie and I wasted several hours of our research time looking through fashion magazines and websites, trying to find the perfect dress. The Waker guilt tugged at me, and I felt relieved when I finally ordered my dress and the task of searching resumed.
“I must be missing something,” Cherie said. She kicked the base of the Christopher statue and plopped down on the stairs.
“I really had hoped that maybe the statue was wearing the key,” Cherie said.
I tried not to laugh. Cherie seemed to believe that we could lift the chain from around his neck and walk off with it. She had pulled at it until she seemed satisfied it hadn’t been spray painted and hot glued on. She let out a frustrated grunt as she flipped through the print-outs of every portrait and monument of Christopher she had found.
But I noticed something. “He’s wearing both of the keys in some of them.”
Cherie brought once of the pictures closer to her face. “I know. Until he married Sophia, he wore both of them and after, unless he was at school, she wore the other.”
She tapped the corner of one of the pictures against the tip of her nose. “I had this crazy idea that maybe they’d been hidden on the statue or on one of the pictures of him, you know, so it would be with some memorial of him forever. But it’s turned into a dead end. I’m not sure where to search next.”
I leaned against the statue. “Well if you’re having this hard of a time, the Clutch probably is too.”
Cherie stuck her nose up in the air. “I don’t care about them. Oh, all right I do.” She pulled her hair out to the side and stuck her tongue out. “It’s driving me crazy not being able to figure this out.”
“I think you’re concentrating on it so hard you’re missing something. I bet if you put it on the back burner and work on something else, it’ll come to you.”
“Maybe you’re right.” She rested her chin in her hands. “It’s only that recently I keep hitting dead ends. I can’t find Lee. It’s like the kid vanished. I did find two cousins of Sophia named Doris. One had a daughter named Vicky. The other one I haven’t been able to find any other information on.” She let out a grunt of frustration as she looked at her watch and sighed. “I really need to study.”
I held out my hand to help her up. “Let’s go grab our books and I’ll quiz you.”
“I’m not giving up on this.”
“I know, you’re just bringing your sleuthing skills to a slow boil.”
“Exactly,” she said. She turned and kicked the statue once more for good measure before heading to our room.
v
By the time April rolled around, Cherie had brought her grades up and Brent seemed like he’d never been sick.
It was Prom night and it felt like everything was perfect.
I rolled down the windows in my car as soon as we turned onto the Pacific Coast Highway. Salt-infused air and the steady pounding of the waves hitting the shore slid inside the cocoon of the car. I breathed in deeply and tried to ignore the sudden knot inside my stomach. It was the ocean, not the pool. I was safe. I was with Brent. I had noticed in the last month or two that I had become less frightened o
f water. I let out the held breath and the tension sailed along with it.
“We won’t go near the water,” Brent assured me. I loved how he seemed to understand my unspoken words.
“Thank you. I’m sorry.” I rubbed my free hand across the shimmery red fabric of my dress, drying my palms. I could smell the corsage on my wrist. The red roses he had chosen were still in tight buds.
“Don’t apologize for something that’s not your fault,” he said. He reached over and threaded his fingers through mine.
Statements like that not only made my heart flip over in happiness but made me fall even more in love with him. Brent had packed the car with my favorite snacks. He made sure I had Skittles with the green ones already picked out. Those were his favorites so it worked out well. It was our thing and it made me smile.
I knew it bothered Brent that I had to drive, but the doctors still hadn’t cleared him to drive yet. To make it up for him, I let him pick the music in the car. I had expected his usual choices, but instead, he’d picked up some sultry jazz. Smart boy.
“Stay there,” Brent ordered when we pulled into the parking lot. I rolled up the windows and shut off the car.
He jumped out ran around to my side, opened the door for me, and extended his hand. I placed my palm in his and the feel of his, so warm against mine, made me blush. We had held hands thousands of times but his touch still made me heart race and my insides melt like wax.
This night, though, it felt more intimate, like it meant more than usual. Maybe it was because he had insisted on driving separately from Cherie and Steve, maybe it because we were all dressed up, or maybe it simply boiled down to years of little girls’ dreams about Senior Prom.
Whatever the reason, as he brushed his warm lips against my knuckles, my knees turned to pudding and I leaned against him so I didn’t fall. He closed the door behind me before sliding his arm around my waist. He held me like that for a minute and I listened to the steady thumping of his heart, and just like the day I had met him, our hearts beat in unison.
Finally he turned me toward the beach and sand. Safe and secure in Brent’s arms I admired the beauty of it; the sun had just begun to set, painting the sky the color of pink cotton candy with splatters of purple and deep red swirled in. I rested against Brent, taking comfort in his strength.