“What is it?” I whispered. “Why have you brought me here?”
The flame gave me no additional clue. It had to be the Playhouse, right? There was nothing else around here. I took a step forward, and then immediately tripped over something. Pure instinct made me protect the candle, and I held it aloft over me even as I sprawled face first into the earthy scent of moss and fallen leaves. The fall knocked the breath right out of me, and for a moment all I could do was lay there, gasping until my lungs started cooperating again. Still sucking in shallow breaths, I sat up gingerly and stared around for what I had tripped over. It was a boot. There was a black boot jutting out from under a nearby bush.
The boot was not empty.
I held my candle aloft, training the light lower to the ground so that I could get a better view. There was a pair of boots, heavy and black, laced high through shiny silver grommets, and from those boots stuck out a pair of long, slender legs encased in fishnet stockings under a pair of shredded jean shorts, and beside the shorts a slim hand, fingers outstretched.
Every cell in my body was telling me to run, but I stayed rooted to the spot, staring at the legs, at the hand, willing the owner to make some kind of movement; but all was terribly still. Even as I screamed inside my head that I didn’t want to look, I held the candle out further, and bent down under the bush.
A tangle of dark hair half-hid the person’s face, but I knew it the moment I saw it. With shaking fingers, I forced myself to reach out and feel for a pulse against the pale wrist, and felt nothing at all.
Jess Ballard lay underneath the bush, her eyes closed, her face peaceful. She was dead.
9
The world seemed to stop—the sound of the ocean, the flicker of the candle, all of it shifted into stasis as my mind struggled to wrap itself around what I was seeing. She was dead. The woman who had brought me the grimoire, who we were so sure would hold answers for the many questions we needed to unravel, was dead. I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t make sense of it. She was alive two days ago. I’d sat with her—spoken to her. And now she was just… cold. Lifeless.
I had to get help. I pulled my hand back from her wrist, and saw something caught beneath it— an intricately knotted bracelet, rather like a friendship bracelet, lay among the leaves. I picked it up and stared at it. Something had sliced it clean through, and it didn’t take me long to realize what it was; a small pocketknife lay open in the dirt, the blade still extended. I moved the candle closer to the knife, expecting to see blood, but the blade was clean. Scrambling back to my feet, I stumbled toward the edge of the woods and out into the far edge of the parking lot, to the theater. My legs barely held me as I ran, stumbling and sobbing, toward the theater itself.
There was no sign of anyone near the main entrance of the building, but I knew the security would be concentrating on the back side. I beganto call for help as I jogged around the south side of the building. Within moments, a Sedgwick Cove police officer came running out from around the back, following the sound of my cracked and terrified voice. I recognized her as one of Zale’s older cousins. I thought her name might be Maeve.
“What’s wrong? Who are you, what—oh!” the young woman stopped at the sight of me, eyes wide. “It’s Wren, right? Wren Vesper?”
“Yeah,” I said, panting. “I… something’s happened. There’s a girl over in the… I think she’s d-dead,” I replied, the words barely forcing their way past my chattering teeth.
“Whoa, who, slow down,” the woman said, reaching out as I swayed, and supporting me at the elbow. “What do you mean? Who’s dead?”
“This… this girl. She… I recognize her. She’s lying in the… the bushes over there, but—” I gasped against a sob, and more tears gushed down my cheeks.
“Okay, okay, calm down,” she said soothingly, even as she pulled her walkie talkie off her belt. “This is MacFayden, requesting backup and an ambulance to Sedgwick Cove Playhouse.” Then she returned the radio and said in a very calm voice, “Why don’t you show me where you saw her, okay?”
Together we walked back toward the trees, she asking questions I couldn’t answer, and me, too busy sobbing to say anything else coherent. My body went into fight or flight as we approached the tree line, and I froze where I stood, utterly incapable of getting any closer. I didn’t want to see her again, the terrible stillness of her. Officer MacFayden turned back to me, her expression sympathetic, but also urgent.
“Can you show me where she is? You don’t have to go in there, just… just point, okay?” she said soothingly.
I nodded, and then pointed a violently trembling finger to the clump of bushes right at the edge of the tree line. “She’s right under there,” I said, the words little more than a strangled whisper.
It was enough. Officer MacFayden nodded. “Did you see anyone else?”
I shook my head in reply.
“And you sayyou know her?”
“Y-yes. I only met her a couple of days ago. Her name is Jess Ballard.
Officer MacFayden crept forward, weapon drawn, crossing the last few feet of the grass and right up to the bushes. She disappeared behind them, and for a moment all I could do was hold my breath and wait. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Officer MacFayden would reappear any second with Jess beside her, looking disheveled and disoriented, but otherwise unharmed. I found myself rolling the broken friendship bracelet between my fingers, like a talisman for good luck, hoping…
Officer MacFayden reappeared, and her grim expression shattered whatever fragile threads of hope I’d managed to spin in her absence. My knees gave way, and I sank into the grass. Everything felt dim and muffled, like I was watching it all from underwater. Officer MacFayden helped me to my feet and walked me over to her car, which was parked over in the corner of the theater parking lot. She sat me down in the back seat, and turned on the car so that the heater was blowing—I didn’t realize until I tried to say thank you that my teeth were chattering like she’d just pulled me out of a frozen lake. Was I in shock? Probably. I’d never seen a dead body before outside of the very controlled atmosphere of a funeral home, and accidentally stumbling upon one, especially one I recognized, was not at all the same thing.
I watched through a kind of haze as more police lights blazed into the parking lot, followed by an ambulance. Then my mom’s old Subaru swung into the lot as well.
Damn it. I should have realized they’d call my mom.
She jumped out of the car, leaving the door hanging open, and ran over to the small crowd of people gathered near the bushes, which someone was now cordoning off with yellow emergency tape. She spoke with one of the officers, who turned around and pointed right at the car where I was sitting. My mom came running over, her face starkly white, and opened the door.
“Oh, Wren, honey. Are you okay?”
I tried to nod. I wanted to be okay. But I wasn’t. And so instead I burst into tears, and let my mother hold me like a child just woken up from anightmare. She didn’t ask any more questions at first, just shushing me and whispering soothing placations, until I had finally cried myself out and regained some control.
