Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble

Chapter 4

"I don't know about you guys, but I could use some Christmas music and a damn piece of pie," Mischa finally said. I burst out laughing, surprising even myself. Mischa rarely cursed, but we'd just driven around rural Wisconsin with a ghost for fifteen minutes. The strangeness and tension of the last hour of our lives melted away. It was, after all, Christmas Eve. We'd accomplished what we'd set out to do, and we were all overdue for a holiday indulgence. We had been as victorious as possible, given the circumstances.

"Word," Trey concurred in a rare instance of solidarity with Mischa.

"That was crazy," Mischa said, this time a little more softly than her original declaration of relief.

Trey reached for my hand and squeezed it. "Are you okay?" he asked me.

"I'm fine," I assured him. He pecked me on the cheek. "I'm better than fine." I was. Despite the fact that we had, obviously, some very unpleasant tasks in our immediate future in dealing with Violet, it was a huge relief to know that Jennie was with me, as she had said, always. I felt both terrified that Mischa still had a death sentence and guiltily happy that I'd been able to speak with Jennie. I wished I could have shared the experience with my mom, who would have cherished the idea of Jennie's spirit flourishing around us. But the mere thought of telling my mom that the three of us had sneaked out of our respective homes on Christmas Eve to go ghost hunting upstate was madness.

When we gathered the courage to turn around and face the car again, thankfully the bloody stains had disappeared, just as we had expected.  Mischa resumed her place behind the driving wheel, and I traded places with Trey, buckling myself into the back. As soon as Mischa started the car's engine, she switched on the satellite radio and the rich, comforting voice of Bing Crosby surrounded us. Silver bells, silver bells. It's Christmastime in the city... It suddenly seemed like Christmas again, just like that, which was dangerous, at least for us. We could enjoy the holiday sentiment briefly, but couldn't be lulled into a sense of safety and inactivity for long. Just as the ghost had told us, our work was far from done.

We were silent on the drive back to Willow, knowing that once we got to Bobby's, the only restaurant in our small town that was open twenty-four hours a day, we'd have to start discussing next steps. Not surprisingly, the parking lot at Bobby's was nearly empty. A truck driver sat at the counter eating a patty melt, and an elderly couple sat at a table in the corner drinking coffee. The restaurant had been decorated excessively for the holiday, with tinsel lining the edge of the counter and colorful Christmas lights blinking in every window. A surge of love for my small town filled me. It was followed quickly by homesickness, because I knew that not only was my time at home limited, but also that much of what I loved about Willow was in serious danger. As we entered the restaurant and shook off the cold, I thought as I watched Mischa take off her hat that if her prediction from Violet were to come true like the others had, I wouldn't be able to bear to come back to this place.

"Table for three?" the middle-age waitress who greeted us asked, already holding three menus in her hands. The waitress wore a red felt Santa hat, which was kind of sad given that she was stuck working on Christmas Eve.

We nodded and followed her to the back, each of us grateful not only that the restaurant was relatively empty, but also that Christmas music was playing. Music would muffle the odd conversation we were about to have from any eavesdroppers. Since Trey and I had become relative celebrities in town a month earlier, it was probably best that there were not many witnesses to our outing with Mischa that night. Our pictures had been on the front page of the Willow Gazette more than once, and every parent in town considered us to be volatile, corrupting influences on their innocent children. In a town where there were rarely even burglaries, for two teenagers to engage the cops from Weeping Willow and Ortonville in a cross-county car chase was pretty... major. Presumably unaware of the significance of the booth to which she led us, the waitress seated us where Trey and I had sat with Cheryl, Erica, and Kelly the night we'd gone to Winnebago Days together. That had been the night before Candace's flight to Hawaii, the trip on which she had drowned, just as Violet had predicted she would.