Sunlight filtered through the ceiling of the basement. After an assessment of the amount of dust that had piled high in the basement and a timid investigation of the staircase leading back up to the first floor, Henry had deduced that the high winds must have caused a partial collapse of the floors of the rectory that sat above ground. As a group we had decided, primarily at Father Fahey's insistence, that although it was morbid to hang out with a corpse until help arrived, we'd be wise to sit tight and wait for the fire department rather than taking the risk that the entire structure might cave in on us. So there we sat for hours in the basement of the rectory at St. Monica's at card tables usually used for Sunday night bingo games, surrounded by old leaflets intended for recycling.
Trey and I had sat together throughout the afternoon in the dark basement with our hands locked together, both envisioning identical scenarios of what would happen when the fire department finally dug through the first and second levelled floors of the structure and found us down there with the body of a man who'd been quite obviously murdered. It was an easy assumption that we'd be separated immediately and probably hauled off to prison—adult prison. By that point, we'd surely exhausted Judge Roberts' patience with our juvenile antics, and being accused of shooting a prominent businessman was a heck of a lot more serious than leading cops on a cross-county joyride. We didn't exchange words. We both believed that the hours we spent waiting to be rescued from the basement might be the last we'd ever spend together.
Although there weren't any casualties directly caused by the tornados, the damage done in town was significant enough to serve as an effective distraction to the Weeping Willow police force who found us almost eight hours after the tornados touched down. By that point, the sun had set. Mr. Simmons' dead body had already begun jerking as rigor mortis set in, which caused all of us to flinch in horror every single time we heard noise coming from the room where we'd left him.
However, the cops and fire department who found me, Trey, Violet, Father Fahey, Henry and Laura in the basement of St. Monica's rectory were so exhausted and stressed-out by that evening that they considered finding us alive to be some kind of miracle. "Well, look what we have here," Officer Marshall said upon seeing me and Trey in the shadows. "We've been looking all over for you two. I'm sure you're aware that you're both in a bit of trouble." He turned his attention toward Mischa. "And you, young lady. I'm not at all surprised to see you here, considering your habit of going missing."
Mischa, for once, held her tongue. She didn't know it yet, but her mother had called the police when Amanda had reported her missing from afternoon gymnastics practice the day before. An international search had already been launched for the Olympic hopeful with news broadcasts expressing concern that the young woman, whose peers claimed had been acting strangely, might have been a danger to herself. It didn't reflect well on Mischa that police from all over Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota had searched all over tarnation for her during the winter when we'd entrusted Bachitar Preet to hide her from evil.
"Actually, Jeff," Father Fahey interjected. He placed a hand on Officer Marshall's shoulder. "I'm fully responsible for this. The boy was being abused at his boarding school and came to me for help when he was able to break free. I've been sheltering him here for the last few days while trying to figure out the best way to deal with the situation."
If it were anyone other than a priest admitting to harboring a runaway with a criminal past under any circumstances other than the aftermath of a natural disaster, I'm sure that things would have gone down differently. But because Father Fahey was a priest and a tornado had just devastated our town, Officer Marshall frowned at me and Trey for a long moment before saying, "We're going to call your parents and deal with this tomorrow."
"There's more," Father Fahey said just as the other police opened the door to the paneled room and found Mr. Simmons' body. "Michael Simmons, the father of the young woman who this boy was convicted of harassing last fall, discovered that he was staying here under my care and showed up just before the storm waving a gun around."
"You don't say," Officer Marshall said with an eyebrow raised.
Another police officer poked his head out of the paneled room and said, "Hey, Marshall. You might want to come have a look at this."
Officer Marshall maintained eye contact with Father Fahey for a long moment before replying, "Just a second."
Father Fahey trailed after the uniformed police officer while gesticulating wildly to explain his version of how Mr. Simmons had ended up dead of a shotgun wound in the rectory basement. I didn't hear his full recap of the events, but managed to catch, "a struggle for the gun," "a shot was fired," and "terrible accident."
The interrogations about Mr. Simmons' untimely death were put on hold until we were all escorted by construction workers up to the rectory parking lot, where my mother, Glen, the Richmonds, and Trey's parents were waiting. The cool night air smelled like burning leaves and I realized it was because clean-up crews were already burning wreckage all over town. My mother broke into tears and a strangled scream escaped from her as soon as she saw me, but police on the scene prevented her from running toward me. Before there could be joyful reunions, the cops wanted a lot of answers to their questions.
When interviewed separately about his involvement, Henry told the police that Mr. Simmons had been in contact with him about his obsession with making sure that Trey and I weren't escaping justice. Henry considered Mr. Simmons to be a little mentally disturbed, and had a very bad suspicion that the man had something to do with my disappearance from the airport. Officer Marshall took notes as Henry explained that Mr. Simmons had abducted me from the airport intending to use me as bait to lure Trey out of hiding.
By some element of good fortune or magic, Henry's incredulous story supported the one being told by Father Fahey. The priest was continuing his insistence that Mr. Simmons had been funding Trey's physical abuse at the Northern Reserve, and that Violet's father had seemed obsessed with Trey's punishment. In a very low, secretive voice, he informed the police that he had reason to believe that Michael Simmons was, in fact, Trey Emory's biological father. Officer Marshall hesitated thoughtfully before jotting down this note; paternity suits were game-changers.
A few feet away, talking to other police officers, Henry claimed that he'd received a text from me earlier that morning stating that Mr. Simmons had shown up at the rectory fully intent on shooting Trey, and Henry had raced over in the hope of diffusing the situation, since it was (after all) his sister who had died in the first place. He said that he and his friend Laura had arrived at the rectory shortly before Father Fahey had shot Mr. Simmons; they'd witnessed the struggle for the gun and were willing to testify in a court of law about what they'd seen.
Mrs. Portnoy was raising holy hell with the police who wouldn't let her speak with Mischa. By that point even Matt had shown up and was trying to calm Mrs. Portnoy down. The search investigation that Mrs. Portnoy had raised had already caused a media buzz, so the police wanted Mischa to speak with the FBI before accompanying her mother home. If it weren't for the fact that Weeping Willow had been blocked off to incoming traffic earlier in the day because of downed power lines, the scene outside St. Monica's would probably have been overrun with news crews. But it was fortunate for us in every way that our moment in the spotlight was coming to an end without much fanfare.
Violet howled as firemen pulled her father's body out of the wreckage of the building on a stretcher covered with a sheet. Her emotional response served as the perfect distraction as the police were starting to pose tougher questions to Henry and Father Fahey—questions that would have unraveled the whole web of lies they'd just spun. It struck me as odd that no one had called Mrs. Simmons to the scene, but it was entirely possible given what I knew about Violet's mother that the woman had been called and was simply too emotionally fragile to handle such a tumultuous scene. I didn't know it that night, but watching police gently place Violet in the back seat of one of their cars to drive her home would be the last time I'd ever see the girl with the aquamarine eyes. By fall, she and her mother would sell their mansion on the outskirts of town and return to the suburbs of Chicago, where Violet would graduate with honors from her private high school.
After two hours of the police asking us repetitive questions, it became pretty clear the FBI was not going to show up that night. Mischa was allowed to reunite with her mother. Before ducking under the stream of yellow police tape that had been hung between trees to keep our parents from rushing toward us, Mischa shrugged at me and Trey. "I guess... thank you?" she said. "I don't know if this is really over or not, but I do know that I'm tired as hell and I can't wait to sleep in my own bed tonight."
"Thank you," I corrected her. "Thank you for trusting us enough to come back to Willow to put an end to this."
Mischa stole a glimpse at her mom over her shoulder. "I guess I'll probably be in town for a few days. Call me when you get a new phone and we'll go to Bobby's."
I had a feeling that my friendship with Mischa was going to be different now after everything we'd had to go through to enlist her cooperation, but I was hopeful that one day things would be the same as they'd been between us in the fall. I'd sacrificed my future to save her life, and as she waved at me over her shoulder before being tackled by her mother, I got the distinct sense that she knew it.
"Do you think there's any chance that the police are going to notice at some point tonight that there are a lot of discrepancies in our stories?" Trey asked Father Fahey quietly when the old man made his way back over to the two of us.
Father Fahey shook his head. "It's a lucky, lucky thing that there's too much damage around town for them to have brought us into the station for a proper questioning tonight. Their notes are scattered and they keep getting interrupted by transmissions on their radios announcing new injuries and collapsed buildings."
"What if they bring is in for questioning tomorrow?" I asked fearfully. Even just a few hours after we played Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board with Mr. Simmons, I wasn't positive that I could retell the story of what had actually happened in perfect clarity. Remembering the details of elaborate lies was going to be even harder after a long night's restorative sleep.
"Anything they question us about tomorrow will be inadmissible in court," Father Fahey assured us as we all watched the police wrap things up with Henry and Laura a few feet away. "We'll be able to say we were exhausted and confused by the stress of the events." He looked up to the cloudy sky and added, "It was a very lucky thing, this storm. I'd go so far as to say it was divine intervention."
The highlight of Laura's entire adventure with us that spring must have been getting to spend the night at the Richmonds' house. The last train to Chicago had already departed by the time the police were finished asking us questions, so Henry insisted that she crash at his parents' place for the night. "Keep in touch, McKenna," she told me after squeezing me in a temporary farewell embrace. "And put this somewhere safe." She handed me the bottle in which she'd captured the evil she had extracted from Mischa. "Somewhere where it will never, ever be opened." It made me nervous to accept the responsibility of preventing that evil from escaping. Even as I stood there alongside Trey in the parking lot, I knew that tossing the bottle into White Ridge Lake wasn't a secure enough plan.
"Thank you so much for everything," I whispered to her. "I'll never be able to repay you for all that you've done." It was hard to believe that anything other than pure luck had caused our paths to cross with hers the day that we stepped into the store where she worked back in January, and yet we never would have been able to save Mischa's life and stop the senseless killing without her assistance.
"Oh, don't say that," Laura teased. She threw her arms around me and kissed me on the cheek. "I have a feeling that very soon, you're going to realize what an extraordinary gift you have, and when you do, there will be plenty of ways in which you'll be able to help me."
For the first time since she'd handed me one of her friends' business cards in the occult book shop, I remembered that she'd mentioned something to me about refining my gifts. Since the winter, I hadn't really dared to think too far into the future to consider formally developing the paranormal powers that Laura believed I had, but if the curse were really broken, suddenly I had to think about what I wanted to do with my life after surviving high school in Florida.
"Keep in touch, will you?" Laura asked. "Sooner rather than later you're going to realize that with the abilities you have comes a responsibility. My skills aren't anywhere near as extraordinary as yours, McKenna. But I hope that the example I've set helps you see that you always have a choice. When someone comes to you for help, you can oblige them or look the other way. For people like us, looking the other way is particularly cruel."
It was kind of awkward saying farewell to Henry. "Don't go flying back to France without stopping by," I said, fully aware of how tightly Trey was holding my hand.
"Like the police would let me leave the country that easily," Henry joked. "I'll see you guys tomorrow. Get some sleep." He turned to walk toward his parents and on second thought, he said, "It's finally over. Can't you feel it? We really ended it."
It didn't feel over to me. I suppose whenever anyone endures hardship over a prolonged period of time it's hard to accept when it's finally over. Trey's mother threw her arms around him and shook with sobs as she embraced him, and I couldn't tell if she was performing for the benefit of the police or if she was genuinely happy that he'd made it out of the rectory basement alive. She'd known we were down there all afternoon since she'd confronted us in the parking lot that morning, and must have panicked when she saw that the building had collapsed in on us.
My own mother squeezed me so hard I thought I might suffocate right in the St. Monica's parking lot. "I give up, McKenna," she said into my hair as she held me close. "I just don't know what to do with you anymore."
"You don't have to do anything. There won't be any more problems. Just please don't ask me any questions tonight," I begged on the car ride home. The Emory's Civic followed us all the way through town, past Federico's Pizza and Rudy's Ice Cream Shop to the nostalgic right turn onto Martha Road that delivered all of us home. "I'll tell you whatever you want in the morning, but right now I just want to take a proper shower and get some sleep."
I was too tired as I washed my hair and scrubbed in between my toes to even consider what I might tell my mother in the morning when she asked what had happened in the days that had passed since she'd dropped me off at the airport. But as I entered my bedroom I began to believe for the first time that we really and truly had been successful in breaking the curse. It seemed entirely possible that I might sleep through the night without a disturbance from the underworld. The cool carpeting beneath my feet felt like a cherished memory. My pajamas smelled like lilac-scented dryer sheets. A photograph of me, Olivia, Candace and Mischa taken the morning of Olivia's sixteenth birthday as we posed around her brand new red car had been tucked into the mirror over my dresser, and my heart felt too big to fit inside my chest as I looked at it from across the room.
I'd done right by my friends, I believed. I'd risked everything I had to lose in life, and had won against immeasurable forces of evil.
And when I turned off my overhead bedroom light, through my window I saw that the light was on in Trey's bedroom across the gap of lawn that separated our houses. His familiar silhouette waved goodnight to me and I felt as close to him as if we were holding hands. Then and only then did I believe that the curse was broken.