There was still the possibility that we'd be greeted by law officials when we landed at O'Hare airport, but for the next hour aboard our flight, we were free to talk openly while the other passengers on our sparsely populated flight watched television and listened to music with their headsets on.
"Why Chicago?" I asked Trey, wondering how he'd selected his destination when booking a flight with Coach Stirling's credit card (which he confirmed he had copied onto a piece of scrap paper when he'd found it in her glove compartment while working on her Cadillac during auto shop class). "I mean, if Michael Simmons is really trying to kill you, wouldn't it make sense to get further away from home?"
"Chicago's just a layover. You can't really get a direct flight out of Green Bay to anywhere good," he told me.
"Then, where next?" I asked.
"I was thinking about Alaska," he told me, surprising me in a way that made me feel a little bad. "This guy I met at Northern said he's going there after he turns eighteen. You can make decent money working on a fishing boat there, you know? It's dangerous, but if you're young and willing to work hard, it's okay."
I avoided making eye contact with the flight attendant as she walked past us down the aisle checking to see if anyone wanted water or coffee, and returned my attention to Trey. "You were seriously going to disappear to Alaska and not even tell me?" I asked.
Trey squirmed. "No! I mean, yes. But I was going to get in touch with you once I got there. I mean, do you have any better ideas?"
I remained silent, suddenly furious with him. He had really been planning to go all the way across the country without telling me. A few minutes passed, enough for him to know that he had hurt my feelings, before I said, "No. I don't have any ideas."
It was true. The future might as well have been a blank chalkboard. It didn't seem realistic for us to try to get to California somehow, to—what? Try and confront Mischa? I'd believed that the last advice we'd gotten from my sister's spirit on how to break the curse that Violet had cast on us was foolproof, and now I had no other leads. Even if Mischa was willing to cooperate with us (which I already knew was not the case), I wouldn't know what to try next. Our ignorant dabbling with magic had pretty much made the entire situation worse.
As it turned out, I didn't need any ideas. The universe had already decided our fate. When our plane landed and we de-boarded with our hearts in our throats, I turned my phone back on to text my father and let him know I'd arrived safely in Chicago. To my great surprise, I had a text message waiting for me. This was particularly impressive because theonly people with whom I'd shared this temporary number were my parents andHenry."
TODAY 2:17 PM
312-555-9722
Hi McKenna this is laura I don't know if you remember me.
TODAY 2:17 PM
312-555-9722
You came into the store where I work a few months ago. Anyway I texted your friend Henry because
TODAY 2:18 PM
312-555-9722
I had a feeling you would be in town at some point today and I'm downstairs by Baggage Claim C
"Hey!" I exclaimed to catch Trey's attention. "You're not going to believe this, but someone's here to pick us up."
Trey looked at me and with a deadpan expression said, "You're correct. I don't believe you."
I explained to him how Mischa, Henry and I had met Laura at the occult book store on Chicago's North Side when we'd been digging into Mrs. Simmons' past back in January after Trey had been sent back to school. It had irked me a few days ago when Henry mentioned that he and Laura had kept in touch, but now I was grateful that they had. Henry had said that the mirrors we used to contact all of Violet's past victims had continued to essentially broadcast messages from the dead, showing Laura images of trees on a regular basis. Maybe Laura was more invested in our little ghostly plight than anyone in their right mind should have been, but I didn't care; at least there was someone with a warm car waiting for us.
"Okay," Trey said, shoving his hands in his coat pockets. "How do we know this chick is cool and isn't going to call the cops on us the second we aren't paying attention?"
I thought of my first impression upon seeing Laura when we'd entered the book shop over the winter. She had comically red hair, full-sleeve arm tattoos, and wacky glasses. "I really do not think this girl would call the police on us," I said. "First of all, who else in the world knows where I am right now other than my mom and dad? And she understands what we've been going through since September. She took one look at Mischa and could tell that she'd played the game and was next in line to die."
He didn't have an answer, but his arms remained crossed over his chest. We had walked toward the top of the escalator leading down to the baggage claim area, and we were facing the same problem we'd had back in Green Bay: once we left the secure area of the airport, we were stuck in Chicago with little chance of being able to get out, at least by air. O'Hare Airport was, by comparison to Austin Straubel, a lot bigger and busier. The chances that someone was going to recognize us—especially because all of the restaurants we'd passed had television sets tuned in to the news—were pretty good.
"Look, Trey," I said, fearful that we were going to make a stupid decision and get ourselves caught if I wasn't able to talk him into trusting me. "I'm afraid we might not have any other options. Your picture is running on the news. They're saying you might be dangerous. You probably haven't slept well in two days and I have eighteen dollars in my wallet. That's not going to get us to Alaska." It was a change of pace for the universe instead of evil spirits to be placing obstacles in front of us, but not a better one.
He shifted his weight and looked down the escalator. "Well, what happens if we get all the way to baggage claim and this lady's not even there? Then where will we go? Don't you think it's safer for us to hang out here and see if there's maybe another way?"
I didn't want to argue with him. We'd never really had a fight, since we'd hardly had a typical high school romance, and not agreeing on what we should do next was making my stomach start to feel weird. The dark circles under his eyes suggested to me that he was too exhausted to be thinking clearly, but if I'd learned anything from being enrolled in the same high school as Trey Emory it was that he didn't like being told what to do. "Like what?" I asked, trying my hardest to be open-minded.
Trey nodded in the direction of the windows at the nearest gate and started walking toward them. I took that as my hint to follow him. In silence, his eyes scanned the tarmac as planes pulled up to gates further down the terminal, and slowly rolled toward runways. "There," he said. A FedEx plane was taxying toward an area of the tarmac where several other private aircrafts were parked. "Maybe we could find a way to get onto one of those, you know? A UPS or FedEx flight bound for somewhere far away. That would be the perfect escape. No witnesses, no paper trail."
My phone buzzed in my bag with another text message but I didn't reach for it. Trey and I had already managed to get ourselves to Chicago and I was terrified of us parting ways at this point because of a disagreement, but lurking around the airport until we figured out a way to stow ourselves on a FedEx plane was downright insane. Possibly even more insane than attempting to avenge my friends' deaths by taking on a quintet of evil spirits. "Did you maybe dream about Alaska? I mean, do you know for sure that's where we're supposed to go next?" I asked gently, wondering and kind of hoping that his intuition had already shed some light on the course of travels we should take.
With his blue eyes still focused on the plane across the snowy wet tarmac, he shook his head. "No. My dreams haven't been about my own life for a while now."
"Well, maybe..." I began, hoping that the suggestion I was about to make wouldn't backfire on me. "Is there anything you can think of that Laura could do to prove she can be trusted? Like a question for her, or something?"
Surprising me a little (I was kind of expecting him to simply roll his eyes), he thought for a moment before replying, "Ask her to tell us what Olivia thinks we should do."
My first impulse was to tell him he was totally crazy. How could Laura possibly reach out to Olivia's ghost to ask her for guidance while standing in the baggage claim area of a busy airport? But instead, I said, "Okay," and reached for my phone. Trey had stuck with me since the fall when he'd unfairly been pulled into Violet's curse; I owed it to him to at least entertain his request.
TODAY 2:23 PM
Hi Laura. I am a little nervous about these circumstances. Could you ask Olivia Richmond what she thinks I should do?
I hit send, and shrugged at Trey. As unrealistic as it was to expect Laura to be able to request contact from a ghost on command, I was really hopeful that she'd somehow come through. The alternative, if she didn't, was possibly freezing to death while hiding in the fuselage of a plane not really intended for human passengers.
TODAY 2:26 PM
312-555-9722
Um ok
A few minutes passed without another reply from Laura. Trey grew restless, and straightened up his posture when he noticed two guys wearing heavy winter coats with FedEx logos on them driving a vehicle piled high with boxes toward one of the service's planes in the distance. "Look at that," Trey said. "Usually the last FedEx pick-up at drop-off locations is around six o'clock, right? I bet all those boxes get sorted and brought here, and probably a ton of flights take off around eight or nine."
Yes, I thought to myself, but by eight or nine o'clock, every police officer in Chicago will be scouring this airport for me. Before Trey had a chance to develop his plan further, my phone buzzed. This time, Laura hadn't written a message. She'd sent a picture instead.
"Holy..." I mumbled when the picture opened on my phone's screen. It was a picture that Laura had taken of the mirror in her face powder compact. Her hand was in the shot, making it clear that she'd taken the photo with her right hand while holding the compact with her left. And in the mirror itself was a hazy photo of me and Trey sitting on a brown couch. On Trey's left was a window through which I could see a fire escape lightly covered with snow. The photo was followed by a text message:
TODAY 2:29 PM
312-555-9722
That's my apartment BTW
I handed my phone to Trey for his review. His expression changed and I took that to mean he considered Laura to have passed his test. "Why has this lady been keeping in touch with Henry again?" he asked.
"I think she's trying to get with him," I said. It was true. Henry had to be younger than Laura at least by a year or two, but she'd practically thrown herself at him the day we met her in the store.
Just as she said she'd be, Laura was pacing around Baggage Claim C. Her hair was no longer bright red, but instead was an electric shade of teal. "Is that her?" Trey asked as soon as Laura spotted me and waved.
"That's her," I confirmed.
"God, what would a woman like that want from Henry Richmond?" Trey joked, sounding like himself for the first time since I ran into him back at the airport in Wisconsin.
It was odd to see Laura again, especially in an airport. When I'd left the occult bookstore where she worked back in January, I certainly didn't expect to encounter her again even though she'd taken a keen interest in my knack for handling a pendulum. Yet here she was again, in the flesh, wearing a strange fake fur coat and a pair of vintage granny boots. "Hi," she said to me while looking at Trey.
"Surprise!" I hadn't mentioned that Trey was with me while texting with her and quite obviously if the ghosts of Olivia and Candace truly had told her to come to the airport to pick me up, they'd omitted his presence, too. "Two for the price of one."
"And who's this?" Laura asked, surveying Trey up and down.
"It might be best to do introductions elsewhere," Trey said. A police officer was standing not far from us in line to buy coffee at a nearby newsstand.
"Ah," Laura surmised. "I thought you looked familiar."
Laura led us through the parking structure. "Are you missing work right now?" I asked. It was a Monday afternoon, and reasonable to expect that she would have otherwise been at the bookstore.
"Yes," Laura admitted, "But it's okay. My boss was the one who told me I'd better drive over here and pick you up. She wants to meet you. Ever since you guys came into the store back in January and we cast that spell, the energy has been unbalanced and weird shit's been happening. She thinks you may have a lot more psychic power than you realize. More to the point, she thinks she might need your help closing all the portals that we opened in the store so that life can get back to normal."
Trey reached for my hand and squeezed it. I wasn't sure how to feel about that. The last time I'd tinkered around with the pendulum Laura had sold to Henry for me, I'd almost gotten all of us busted by the police in Michigan. Whatever ability I had to channel energy from the "other side," I was hardly in control of it, and I'd been happy to abstain from messing with it the entire time I'd been at my Dad's in Florida.
We finally reached Laura's VW Bug and Trey climbed into the back seat. I buckled myself into the front passenger seat, and Laura started the engine. "Are you guys hungry or anything?"
"Yes," I answered on Trey's behalf.
We stopped at a drive-thru and Laura insisted on paying for burgers. My father called me and I ignored the ringing of my phone, figuring that it was already too late for me to change my mind and head back to the airport to catch my connecting flight to Florida. The course of my life had already dramatically changed and it was pointless to rethink that decision. Laura was already putting herself in quite a bit of danger for our benefit by even driving us around, a point I didn't dare make, not even by wrapping it in a suggestion that she drive extra-safely to avoid being pulled over. She tapped some buttons on her dashboard and the car filled with an old remix of a New Order song.
I was so busy worrying about what my father's reaction would be in a few hours when I didn't arrive in Florida that I didn't pay attention to where we were driving. Obviously I'd been to downtown Chicago before, and not even too long ago. After our detour to get food for Trey, Laura had gotten on the toll road instead of the freeway. She'd skipped all of the exits that would have dropped us into inner-city traffic. The first time I bothered noticing the exit signs, we were already much further north than the bookstore. Lightning-quick panic flashed through me... what if Trey had been right about Laura and she was driving us to a police department? Olivia may have shown a picture of me and Trey sitting on a sofa in Laura's apartment, but I hadn't asked Laura where her apartment was located. I'd perhaps mistakenly assumed that she lived close to the store, but we were clearly not headed anywhere near there.
It was up to me to say something, I knew. Trey didn't know his way around Chicago at all, and probably had no idea where we were going and how long it should take for us to get there. And yet I didn't know what to do; I'd assured Trey that we could trust Laura, and now we were speeding along a highway buckled into a car we'd entered via our own free will.
When we exited the toll road at Deerfield Road in Highland Park, I was fully alert. Laura drove through a quaint town square bustling with mid-afternoon shoppers, past lush green parks, and then turned right on a heavily wooded residential street lined with enormous homes. We were definitely not in a neighborhood where your average twenty-year-old bookstore clerk could afford to own a home of her own.
"Um, where are we headed?" I found the nerve to ask.
"Oh," Laura said in a weak attempt to make it sound like she didn't realize she hadn't announced our destination yet. "If it's okay with you guys, I thought we'd go straight to my boss's house."
This immediately put me on edge and without even looking at Trey over my shoulder I could sense his alarm rising, too. I'd never met the boss. She had been in London the day Mischa, Henry and I had visited the bookstore in January. My increased discomfort wasn't so much due to fearing Laura's boss, but that Laura had waited until we were practically there to tell us. As if she had known all along that we would have objected if she'd said, "I'm taking you to my boss's house" when we'd first gotten into the car.
"Um, I don't know how I feel about that," I said, wishing I had the guts to say what I felt like saying, which was no thanks, just drop us off right here, right now.
It was a little too late; Laura turned left slowly into the driveway of a large house with grey shutters and a peaked roof with an enclosed porch off on one side. The house was oddly normal-looking, like a house that a happy suburban family would occupy instead of Laura's boss, who I presumed to be a totally weird old lady obsessed with evil and magic. The front of the house had been landscaped with tall bushes, and three small cement statues of deer in various positions decorated the path to the doorway.
"She's expecting us," Laura said, her tone expressing that she didn't want me to feel afraid. "We already closed the store early today. This is the safest place for you guys, if you think about it. She'll have better ideas for you about what to do than I will, that's for sure. Esther's smart. You'll like her."
Laura shut off the engine and got out of the car. Trey and I remained idle, neither of us making a move to unbuckle our seatbelts.
"What do you think?" Trey asked me from the back seat.
I was examining every detail of the house's bland façade, trying to find some fault with it that would justify my uneasiness about stepping inside. "I have a weird feeling about this. I trust Laura, but I don't know anything about this other lady."
"Well," Trey said, "we've come this far. Our options are to either go inside and deal with whatever that entails, or walk all the way back into that town center and look for a place to crash tonight. And it doesn't make me feel very good about our prospects if we take off now and that girl with the blue hair knows we're in town."
"Right," I murmured. Laura had knocked on the house's front door and after a moment, it opened. A beautiful gray Weimaraner excitably greeted Laura, hopping up and dancing around her, wigging its tail and nuzzling her legs with its head.
"A happy dog is a good sign, right?" Trey said, suddenly sounding a little more open to the idea of going inside. "Evil people don't have happy dogs."
He got out of the back seat and slammed the door before I had a chance to consider whether there was any truth to his assumption. I couldn't help but feel like we were mice being placed ever-so-gently into a loaded trap. Trey began walking up the cement path to the house, and as I unbuckled my seatbelt, a figure appeared in the doorway.
I didn't know it at that moment, but we were about to meet the first person we would ever encounter who had legitimate potential to combat Violet's evil spirits. A petite middle-aged woman with wavy blond hair smiled at me as I cautiously made my way up the cement walkway toward the house. She was pretty, I'd say practically even glamorous, and not at all dressed like a woman who owned an occult book shop. As I took in the details of her outfit—a white silk blouse, an ikat-print scarf around her neck, black trousers—I overlooked the transformation of the cement deer. Laura's dropped jaw was my first indication that something extremely out of the ordinary was happening. Her dramatic change in expression was followed immediately by loud, angry barking from the Weimaraner.
"Jesus," Laura muttered, her eyes enormously oversized.
A real-life fawn approached me on wobbly legs with fear in its eyes. Two other fawns lingered behind their curious friend, themselves too timid to get closer to me. Only as I slowly extended a hand toward the fawn did I realize that these were the cement deer, and they'd come to life. I had no clue how that had happened, but now there was no denying that they were living, breathing deer. The inquisitive one closest to me blinked at me with inky black eyes. I could smell its slightly musky fur, and then felt the wet tip of its velvety cold nose graze my fingertips before all three fawns darted away across the driveway and into the trees that separated the house we were visiting from the property next door.
On the stoop, Trey and Laura had watched this unfold in silent horror. Trey was looking at me as if I was Frankenstein's monster, and if I wasn't mistaken, I saw jealousy in Laura's eyes. The blond woman who stood in between them said, "And this must be McKenna. My, you're more of a magnet for evil than I thought. Stay right where you are. I want to cleanse you before you get any closer to my sanctuary."