“A girl,” he said at last. “A little girl with dark hair and eyes. She was wearing a white dress or a nightgown? She grabbed my leg. She was pulling me down.”
As I listened to Ryan, part of me was floating in the pool with my sister, eyes wide open, terrified of what I might see.
“It sounds crazy, I know, like I made it up, but I swear it was real.”
“I don’t think it sounds crazy,” I said. But then I added the practiced words I’d been telling myself my whole life. “The water down there is so black.”
Keep telling yourself that, Jax.
Ryan said, “Later that night, when I was back at home, underneath the three scratches on my ankle, there was a bruise. My ankle turned black and blue from whatever grabbed me in that water.”
Something’s in the water.
“Do you think I’m nuts?”
I shook my head. “If you are, then I guess I am, too.” I blew out a breath. Thought for a few seconds about how carefully guarded I’d become. The only person I was truly upfront and open with was my therapist, and even then, I didn’t tell her everything. I thought of what Diane had said, about how our family was: If we didn’t talk about something, it was like it didn’t happen. And look where it had gotten us all. I was a social worker. I knew how secrets could fester, bloom into something much bigger, much more powerful and frightening. I knew the importance of facing things, getting them out in the open, talking through them. I knew all of this, yet had been pretty lousy at applying it to my own life.
But it wasn’t too late.
“When I was a kid,” I began, forcing myself to say the words quickly,before I lost my nerve, “not long after your episode in the pool, I went out there at night, alone. And I saw something.Someone. A girl in the pool.”
“With dark hair? A white nightgown?” He looked hopeful but frightened.
“No. She had long blond hair and a blue dress. I think… I think it was Martha.”
“Who’s Martha?”
“My aunt Rita’s imaginary friend. The little girl who lived at the bottom of the pool but came out sometimes.”
“Jesus!” he yelped.
“And the girl you saw.” I swallowed, couldn’t believe what I was about to say. “I think that was Rita.”
He pushed back in his chair, balancing on the two back legs, rocking slightly.
“Martha was a real person once,” I said. “At least, I think so. A little girl named Martha Woodcock drowned in the springs back in 1929. Lexie had been doing all this research, learning about the history of the springs. I found a list she’d made of names of people who had drowned in them.”
“So the girls we saw both drowned in the springs.” Ryan rubbed his face hard. “Now I’m thinking about other things Lexie said. Other stuff that I wrote off—things I wasn’t ready to hear because I was too freaked out. She saw someone in the pool, too.”
“One of the girls?”
“No. A pale, dark-haired woman.”
The woman from Lexie’s sketchbook.
“Lexie said she came from the water. She said there were others down there, too. She’d seen them. But she thought maybe they were all one…thing.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“I know. Neither did I. She was talking so fast, one of those famous Lexie tangents. She said for every life it took, it just grew stronger. That’s what gave the pool its strength—to heal people and grant wishes and stuff. And the water, it used those people, kept hold of them somehow. Like everyone who drowned became a part of it. It sounded like such crazy nonsense to me at the time.” He shook his head.
“Ryan, all this is—” What? Impossible? Just another clear example of Lexie’s delusional thinking?
“Your father, when he put Lexie’s ashes in, he said she told him to, right?” He was talking fast, like things were clicking in his brain. “What if that’s true? But what if what he’s seeing isn’t Lexie, but some twisted version of her? Acting on behalf of whatever’sreallydown in that water?”
How many times had my sister gotten other people to go along on the magic carpet ride of her mania, against their better judgment? Even though she was dead, she was working on me now. Clearly Ryan was caught up in it, too.
He rubbed his face with his hands. “Crazy,” he said again, quieter this time. Then, “Jackie, whatever the truth is, it might not be safe for you to keep staying at Sparrow Crest.” He looked genuinely worried. Like the young Ryan who’d run away from the pool that day. “You and your dad should pack up and stay at Diane’s for the next couple days. Or you can come stay at my place. I’ve got a spare room. Get out of that house—away from that pool—as soon as possible.”
