It’s 3 a.m.
The chill that’s threaded itself into the kitchen floor permeates the thin soles of her slippers. She stands, her hips pressing into the countertop’s cold edge. It is the only thing keeping her upright as greyscale images from last night flash through her mind. Madison Caldwell. Sari Simons. And Libby Lucas. Their faces all scribbled out.
She will tell Marnie—she has to. But how do you bring up to your best friend the fact that your daughter—who might not be dead, after all—might be hunting hers?
After yesterday, Marnie is all she has left. Without her, Rowan is as alone as the day she first arrived in Black Harbor. She can’t bear the thought of Marnie abandoning her, and yet, she will have to risk it. If someone had known something bad was going to happen to Chloe before it did, she would have wanted them to tell her. Maybe then she could have protected her.
Unless Axel is right.
No. No, it’s all wrong. Chloe didn’t do it. She couldn’t have, and yet … no one has touched that room since Thursday night, when police conducted their search of it. Rowan reviews the mutilations in her mind. The teeth, the eyes, the word carved into Madison’s lip. If Axel is right about Madison and Sari starting the rumor, then what was Libby’s crime?
She hasn’t decided what to do about the yearbook, but something tells her it’s best to keep quiet about it for now.
A noise outside stirs Rowan from her reverie. Slowly, she slides a kitchen drawer open and grabs the largest knife she has—the one she uses for cutting watermelon in the summer. If those teenage menaces are back, she’ll give them a scare they’ll never forget.
The house is still pitch dark but her eyes have adjusted. Rowan creeps toward her porch, staring intensely out the skinny windows that bookend the front door. The white pumpkin she kicked off the dummy lies on its side, grimacing at the concrete. Rowan crouches, watching, as suddenly, a hand reaches for it. Knuckles glow white as the fingers flex to grip the gourd like a basketball. Rowan freezes, watching as the Pumpkin Lady cradles it in her arms, deposits it in her stroller, and begins to walk away.
When she is a good thirty feet from the driveway, Rowan stands. She grabs her jacket from the hook on the wall, and slowly unlocks the door.
The air still smells like night: dew freezing into frost, leaves sweet and curling as they decompose into the earth. The waves crash against the pier and she imagines them crawling up the shore, wanting to sweep her by the feet and pull her in. But she moves in the opposite direction. She still has her knife, she realizes, and it isn’t a bad thing. Nothing good ever happens after midnight, yeah? It’s an unwritten rule that Rowan has seen proven true over and over again. Pulling her coat tightly around her, Rowan follows in the wake of the Pumpkin Lady, careful not to get too close.
Black Harbor post-midnight might as well be The Purge. The name of the game is murder and all bets are off. People like her and Axel are called to clean up the mess afterward.
She is stealthy enough in the dark, the moonlight not bright enough behind a gauzy cloud to pull a shadow over her. The Pumpkin Lady stops at two more houses along the way, grinchily scooping up their glowing jack-o’-lanterns and plopping them in her stroller. Then she approaches the end of Belgrave Circle and turns left onto Main Street. Rowan follows, past a rusted fence and an overgrown asphalt lot.
They take another left into the cemetery. The path is nicer here, fresh black asphalt. A breeze comes and shakes red and orange leaves from the trees. They swirl around Rowan, creating an almost magical effect, as though she’s wandered into a new world from the other side of a wardrobe.
The Pumpkin Lady pushes the stroller to an area beneath an aspen tree, and Rowan sees it. Piled high like skulls on a crypt are jack-o’-lanterns. There must be dozens of them, grinning and grimacing, their faces no longer glowing.
The Pumpkin Lady takes the pumpkins from her stroller and adds them to the shrine. When she’s finished, she kneels and presses her forehead to the tombstone. Her lips move, whispering a prayer. It sounds like a different language. French, perhaps? She hasn’t spoken to Axel since he went to find the Pumpkin Lady at the house on Winslow Street. He didn’t mention anything she said or whether or not she even spoke English.
Rowan creeps closer. A twig snaps beneath her foot.
The Pumpkin Lady doesn’t startle. She turns her head, leisurely, and side-eyes Rowan.
“I’m sorry, I was just curious…” Rowan cautions a step, squinting to read the name on the grave. When she does, her heart plummets.
Jack Peter Cyzon
Beloved son
October 14, 2008 to April 21, 2016
Rowan closes her hand over her mouth. “Your son?” she asks.
The Pumpkin Lady nods.
To the left of his name, she reads another.
Celeste Lucille Cyzon
Loving mother to Jack
August 26, 1979 to _
“How?” Rowan asks.
Celeste stretches her arms out, fists closed as though holding an invisible steering wheel. “Auto,” she says.
“An auto accident?”
She nods. A frayed knit hat comes down over her forehead. It’s oversized on her, like everything else she wears. Either her hair is all tucked up under her hat, or she doesn’t have any.
“I’m so sorry.” Silence hangs in the air. “My daughter is gone, too. Not…” What? Not dead? It would be the first time she’s admitted it to anyone but herself. Chloe is not dead. She just isn’t here.
Celeste reaches toward the tombstone again, her bony fingers tracing the letters of her son’s name.
“I see Jack just had a birthday,” says Rowan.
Celeste nods. “Les citrouille-lanternes,” she says. “Jack-o’-lantern. He loved.” She makes a carving motion with her hand. “So, I bring.” From where she stands six feet away, Rowan sees a tear glisten on the woman’s cheek. It slides down her ruddy face then, disappearing into her rags.
Rowan feels her heart split open. The Pumpkin Lady isn’t an urban legend like the neighborhood watch posts make her out to be. She’s a real person, who once had a family—a child, at least. Now that he’s dead, she wanders Black Harbor like a ghost in purgatory, bringing jack-o’-lanterns to his grave every year for his birthday.
She’s a grieving mother.
Rowan’s eyes fall to the space between them. There’s no wall, not even a fault line separating her and this woman. How easily madness strips us of who and what we once were. It changes us into something we don’t know how to navigate.
Suddenly, her phone rings in her pocket. Her heart jumps into her throat. Axel! Rowan grabs for it clumsily.
The caller comes up as UNKNOWN. He could be calling from the death phone.
“Hello,” she answers breathlessly.
“Rowan.” The voice does not belong to Axel, but to Kole. “I’m out at Forge Bridge.”
“We’ve got a jumper?”
“We’ve got a problem.”