Light as a Feather, Silent as the Grave

Chapter 23

"Hold on Candace," I mumbled. "There's something going on here."

The noise that she was streaming into my earbuds was nonsensical. It just sounded like a bunch of chit chat between train conductors. They passed back and forth tidbits about settings on a train, although they made no mention of which line they were on or where they were headed.

"Trey!" I hissed from where I stood at the window. "What are you doing?"

With his left hand, not visible to his mother on the computer screen, he motioned for me to come a little closer. His eyes never left the computer screen as he addressed his mother. "It doesn't matter where I am, and I would be an idiot to think for a second that there aren't cops crawling all over the house right now."

"There aren't-" Mrs. Emory interjected, but she had to be lying.

"Don't lie, Mom," Trey snapped. "I didn't reach out to you to apologize. You said something on the news last night about how I'm going to pay the ultimate price. What did you mean?"

Mrs. Emory flinched. She seemed as if she were consciously trying to avoid looking over to her left, where presumably a police officer was standing next to the family computer in the Emorys' living room. Her eyes kept veering in that direction before snapping back to the camera on the laptop. "I just meant... I just meant that you think you can run from this mess you've made, and you can't. The right thing to do is to come home, Trey. Walter and I will stand by you as we sort this out."

Trey cackled. Under different circumstances I would have thought his reaction to his mom's plea was insensitive, but considering what he'd undergone in the last six months, it was appropriate. "You cannot expect me to believe that, Mom. I don't care who's standing in the room with you right now. I need to know what will happen when McKenna and I accomplish our goal."

"Trey!" I exclaimed, alarmed that he had mentioned my name. It didn't help us that he'd just confirmed for the police that we were traveling together. It only got him in more hot water, considering that the physical form of McKenna Brady temporarily gone.

Candace mumbled something into my earbuds, but I was too absorbed by Trey's conversation with his mother to listen. Mrs. Emory sat up straighter, quite obviously concerned that Trey was talking too freely about a topic she considered dangerous. Her reaction confirmed Trey's hunch that the police were present at the Emorys' home, making note of every word Trey uttered.

"Uh," Mrs. Emory stammered, presumably trying to form a response that would answer Trey's question without making her sound like a witchcraft-obsessed nut to the eavesdropping cops. "Bad things tend to happen in threes under certain circumstances, Trey. Surely you've learned that by now, or are in contact with people who can tell you more about that."

"I'm listening," Trey said.

"Right after you were born, my father was killed in a car accident. And your grandmother died little more than two weeks later in an accident."

"How?" Trey demanded.

Mrs. Emory seemed quite uncomfortable as she replied, "She was electrocuted. But listen, Trey. That was two bad things in a row. They were..." she hesitated before looking upward to her left as if making eye contact with a police officer standing right next to her, off-screen. "Warnings, I think. Maybe I'm just being superstitious. Even if I am, my sister felt safer in Osh Kosh, far away from town. But..."

"If I succeed, I'll be third?" Trey answered for her when she trailed off.

In response, Mrs. Emory solemnly nodded.

Suddenly, the noise in my earbuds became clearer. I turned up the volume. "...Arkadelphia around six-fifteen," a male voice was saying.

"Copy," another voice replied.

If I was remembering the schedule of the Amtrak Texas Eagle correctly, which ran on the same railroad tracks as every freight train to cross this part of Arkansas, then we could expect the train to pass through Gurdon around 6:35 that evening. There was a chance it wouldn't stop, but we'd have to figure out how to get ourselves on board when the time came. Maybe we'd even be wise to find a way to backtrack to Arkadelphia to board the train like civilized humans while it was stopped. I'd become a serious skeptic since September. If jumping aboard a moving train in Gurdon, Arkansas seemed like it would be a piece of cake, then perhaps the evil spirits that were doing a very suspicious job of safeguarding their curse intended for us to die horrible, bloody deaths in some kind of railway accident.

The first voice continued to describe the train's current speed and the number of axles on it but none of that meant anything of value to me. "Thank you, Candace!" I said aloud, hoping she'd hear that I'd learned what I needed.

"Well, you're wrong, Mom," Trey said in a challenging tone. "I have no intention of dying because of something stupid you did. Why don't you explain all about that to the police standing in the living room right now?"

The bell rang in the hallway, startling us both. We only had seconds to vacate the teachers' lounge before some cranky middle-aged educator discovered our presence in there. Trey immediately tapped the mouse to close the browser window in which the video chat was taking place. I tore the earbuds from my ears and tossed my iPod back into my purse. We both took three steps toward the door before I remembered Laura's phone. Once the police in Weeping Willow, Wisconsin traced the video chat to the high school in Gurdon, Arkansas, and Laura's phone was discovered in the teachers' lounge, that would have given investigators a great deal of dangerous material to consider in relation to our disappearance (considering that Laura worked in an occult bookshop and her employer had just vanished under mysterious circumstances). Leaving the phone in Gurdon would have been a bad, bad move.

We brazenly stepped into the busy hallway and the door of the teachers' lounge clicked behind us.

"Where should we meet if we get separated?" I asked Trey. Even though kids in the hallway were in a rush to get to their next class, it seemed impossible to me that we'd go unnoticed as strangers in such a tiny school.

"The bank, I guess," Trey said. He lifted the hoodie of his sweatshirt over his head and we made our way back down the hall toward the open door through which we'd entered.

"Yo, who's that girl?" I heard a male voice ask after I passed a group of guys congregated around a locker. "Does she go here? She looks like a supermodel!"

I resisted the urge to bask in flattery and hastened my pace.

Outside, the morning had become windy. We didn't risk being seen by walking back to the highway along the road. Even though we knew it was unlikely that we'd be apprehended in Gurdon, there was still a realistic chance that the police in Weeping Willow would be able to trace the IP address from Trey's video chat back to the school and alert the school's authorities to our presence. So instead, we stepped into the woods that lined the road and walked the distance from the school back to the highway in the mud. I immediately wished that we'd timed our adventure within the walls of Gurdon High School more strategically to have allowed for a bathroom visit.

"So, do you believe what your mom said about your death if we break the curse?" I asked once we heard the bell starting the next class period ring from a distance through the trees.

Trey continued walking. He wasn't ignoring my question, but rather thinking through his response. "I'm not sure. It's too much to figure out. But one thing's pretty clear. If I die, then I can't inherit any money from the Simmons family, so it's understandable that she wants me to stay alive."