Chapter 19

October 15

“Marnie!”

I jumped up from my pre-calc homework, pulling off my earbuds.

“What?” I demanded.

Noah was in my doorway. He’d probably heard me singing along to Florence and the Machine, but it had likely embarrassed him as much as it did me.

“There’s someone here for you,” he said.

“Someone?”

Noah was already headed back down the hallway. “He’s on the front steps.”

I knew who it was.

“Hey, Marnie,” Matt said when I got to the door. “Can I come in? I want to show you something.”

I tried to remember just how messy the kitchen was. Had the breakfast dishes made it into the dishwasher yet?

“I guess,” I said reluctantly. “Your mom let you have another mental health day?”

Matt ignored my question and shoved his phone into my hands. “I got another email. It’s getting kind of crazy.”

It was from an address similar to the one from before—a string of numbers and letters—but this one started with a three, not an eight. So it was a different address, though I guessed created by the same person.

Are you stupid???

I can’t take this anymore.

The body is probably behind the tracks. But didn’t you already know that???

“Jesus,” I said. I gave him back his phone. My hand felt clammy.

“Told you. Crazy.”

“Matt, I think you need to tell the police about this. They’ll want to know someone is harassing you about a body. That’s cruel. And tracks? What tracks? What’s the closest train to Colesbury? New Haven?”

Matt just shook his head. He looked tired. Purplish circles ringed his eyes. I led him into the kitchen.

“They’re messing with you,” I said. “They’re cruel. Whoever they are. And you can’t let them keep doing that. They’ll do it until you take the bait.”

I offered Matt one of our kitchen chairs.

“You hungry?” I asked.

“No,” Matt said. He kept staring at his phone. At least it kept him from taking in our broken cabinet and our crusty linoleum. Or our ancient cookie jar shaped like a fat lady, with one of her eyes and half her nose ghoulishly chipped away. “I need to know if this is real.”

“I’d think the police would want to know that as much as you.”

He looked up sharply. “Can you cool it on the police for just a few minutes?”

“Who else is gonna help you, if someone is stalking you and giving you shit like this?”

Matt took a breath and put down his phone. “Was kind of hoping you would.”

“Me?”

“Give me a reading, Marnie,” he said softly.

“Matt,” I said. I thought about how to say what I wanted to tell him without offending him. “I think these last emails have really upset you.”

Matt stared at me. “Yeah?”

“And I don’t think a teacup can tell you anything that’s going to help you with that. Like, why don’t you start with the basic questions instead? For example, who would be able to get ahold of our email addresses?”

“Our email addresses?” Matt repeated, frowning.

“I mean . . .” I hesitated. “Your email address.”

“I already explained that, remember?”

He wouldn’t stop staring at me, his dark eyes sad but determined. Yes, maybe the whole Andrea thing had made him a little bit crazy. And it occurred to me that I could hardly blame him for that. What if Carson disappeared one day? What if he’d tried to call me that same day, and I hadn’t answered? I would probably do even crazier things than ask a two-bit high school fortune-teller for help.

“Marnie,” Matt whispered. “Something happens when you look into a teacup. I’m pretty sure.”

I turned away. “What happens is I look for pictures.”

“I’ve hardly ever been able to make out the pictures you say you see,” Matt said. “Sometimes, I think you’re full of shit with that part.”

I was startled by his bluntness; it felt like a slap in the face. “Then why—”

“I don’t think it has anything to do with the tea leaves. I think something happens to you. Cecilia and I were talking about it at the party, when you were outside. Something happens to you, and it seems like you know things.”

“I know things,” I echoed dumbly, though my heart was beginning to race. I was supposed to be the “diviner,” and Matt and Cecilia the “seekers.” And yet they’d both picked up on something I hadn’t been willing to acknowledge myself.

“Yes,” Matt said. “You do.”

If I gave in and did a reading for him, maybe I could avoid finishing this conversation. I picked up G. Clara’s teakettle.

“Let’s get this over with, then,” I said, filling the kettle under the tap and then setting it on the back burner. “What’s the point of this reading going to be? Deciding whether you should trust this mysterious email writer? Trying to figure out who, specifically, it is?”

Matt shrugged, putting his phone back in his pocket. “We’ll just see what comes up.”

“I’m doing this reading for you on one condition,” I told him.

“Which is?”

“You forward me those emails.”

“Why?” Matt asked.

“I want to study them a little closer,” I lied. “Don’t you think it will help me to . . . know things?”

Matt considered this.

“And as a show of good faith,” I added. “Do you want the reading or not? I never ask for anything in return. You can do this small thing, right?”

To my surprise, Matt shrugged and took out his phone. “What’s the address?”

I gave it to him.

“Doing it now,” he said, tapping it. “And done.” He showed me his phone. “There’s my Sent file, see?”

I nodded. He gave me a “so there” kind of smile, and we both turned to the teakettle, which wasn’t yet boiling. I took cups out of the overhead cabinet in one quick and careful motion. The quicker I did it, the less chance moths would fly out. Less chance a panicked daddy longlegs would dance into view.

While I rinsed the cups, Matt said, “I like this kitchen. It’s cozy. You can imagine people sitting around the table with their coffee on a Saturday. Like, a few generations, around this table.”

“I guess,” I said. “Carson says hanging out at my house makes him feel closer to the earth.”

“That guy’s an asshat,” Matt said.

I turned off the faucet. “He’s also my best friend.”

“Then he shouldn’t say that stuff to you.”

“He’s allowed,” I said. “Because his house used to be the same way.”

Carson’s family owned the biggest house on Maple Street—a giant Victorian with a little tower in the front. It was even creepier than ours before his family moved in and remodeled the place at great cost. He always said he missed the way it was when he first saw it.

I could hear the kettle begin to rumble against the heat of the electric burner. Good. Soon the water would boil, and we’d have something else to talk about.

After I’d poured the tea and we’d let it sit for a couple of minutes, I rustled around in the packages on the counter, looking for something to serve with it that wasn’t stale. Behind me, Matt gulped from his cup.

“Done,” he said, earlier than I expected, and flipped his cup over.

As I sat down, I thought I heard a noise in the dining room.

“Noah?” I said. I stepped into the dining room, but there was no one there.

“Did you hear that, Matt?” I said.

Matt shook his head. “I think you were hearing me turn my cup.”

I nodded as I sat at the table with him. He tapped his cup three times.

“Why do we do that, anyway?” he asked. “Tap the teacup?”

“Two reasons,” I said. “To let any last loose leaves fall out or fall into place. The more superstitious reason is that it’s like knocking on a door. Like, ‘Spirit of the cup, can I come in?’”

Matt glanced at his cup skeptically.

“Never mind,” I said, grabbing the cup from his hand. “Just give me the stupid cup. You asked.”

I looked at the leaves. “Umm . . . I see birds.”

“And what do birds mean?”

“Depends. Like, a hawk is danger. A parrot is gossip. A stork is probably a baby on the way.”

“Get that stork one out of your head, Marnie Wells. What kind of birds do you see?”

I took a deep breath. When I wasn’t really concentrating, most tea leaves looked like birds to me. So I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, I focused on a big clumped mass of leaves at the bottom of the cup.

“Great big blob at the bottom,” I told Matt. “Maybe a big, dark cloud, I don’t know. But around the sides, some more delicate images. I’m going to focus on those, for now.”

“Okay. Go for it.”

Finally, an image came into focus.

“I see a horse,” I said.

“A horse,” Matt repeated. “What does that usually mean?”

“Usually it means strength, but . . .” I held the cup closer to me face. “This maybe isn’t a real horse. I think it’s like a merry-go-round horse.”

“How do you tell the difference?”

“Because it’s got a pole sticking out of its back . . . see?”

I pointed into the cup, showing Matt where I meant.

“Huh,” Matt said. “A merry-go-round.”

We were both quiet for a moment.

“A carnival?” I said. “Maybe what I’m supposed to be telling you is that this thing with the messages you’ve been getting is, like, a carnival. A fun house or a house of mirrors. Someone messing with your mind.”

Matt gave me a bored look. “You’re going to read any symbol that way. Because that’s all you want to think about it.”

I stared at the merry-go-round horse again, determined to come up with some other interpretation, just to prove him wrong.

“You ever go to Forest Wonderland when you were a kid?” I asked, blurting out the first thing that came to my head.

Forest Wonderland was an amusement park in the next-door town of Mixville. It had closed down when I was about ten, but parts of it were still standing, the land basically abandoned. Apparently no one had bought the property or wanted to turn it into anything else. I’d heard that its rickety old roller coaster was still there. It was called the Mindbender, and it was legendary back when the park was open—not for how fun it was, but for how dangerous it seemed due to its age. I remembered G. Clara calling it the Spinebender, because it was just a matter of time before it collapsed and everyone on it broke their necks.

Forest Wonderland was also the first place I’d ever been on a merry-go-round.

So maybe this interpretation of the leaves was more about me than Matt. I glanced at Matt to see his reaction. He’d pulled his hands into fists and buried them in his lap. He seemed to be avoiding my gaze.

“Did you ever?” I said. “You know, it has a little trolley for kids, around the back of the park. The tracks went into the woods a little bit.”

“Once,” he answered. “I went once. Not as a little kid. Recently.”

“It’s pretty creepy now,” I said. “That’s what I hear, anyway.”

“I know,” Matt said. “We went there on Halloween last year, right after I got my license. Andrea and me and a few other kids. It was Andrea’s idea.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Just a scary place to go.” Matt paused. “But the rumor is that drug dealers hang out there.”

That sounded like a Colesbury urban legend to me: drug dealers skulking around an abandoned fun park. “But what would drug dealers do there, exactly? Sell to the ghosts of carnies past? Dare each other to climb the old haunted roller coaster? Sell each other dime bags at the old ring-toss booth?”

Matt stood up and stuck his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know, Marnie. It’s a place to go where you won’t be seen, anyway. And if Andrea . . .” He didn’t finish the thought.

He started to pace around our kitchen.

“You need a bathroom or something?” I asked.

“No, no,” he muttered, opening our fridge.

“You hungry?” I said, surprised. I’m not exactly an etiquette expert, but I would never open someone else’s fridge. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“No. I just have a feeling you’re right.” Matt’s voice was low now. “It’s a place she knew. Maybe she went there again for some reason, and something happened. Or maybe she went with Jimmy. Or that Sullivan guy.”

“And that mystery emailer is writing to you for what reason, Matt?”

He was quiet. And in the quiet, I thought I heard a floorboard creak in the living room. Matt didn’t seem to notice.

“I’m going there,” he said. “I’m going there right now.”

“Where?” I asked.

I already knew the answer.

“Forest Wonderland.”

“What do you think—?” I stopped, hearing the tremor in my voice. I tried again, attempting to steady it. “What do you think you’re gonna find there?”

“Don’t you believe in the power of your own reading, Marnie?”

I sucked in a breath. I realized that I did. More than ever. Which made the idea of going to Forest Wonderland ourselves more scary than ridiculous. Even though I’d been trying to play it differently.

“Show the police the note,” I said softly. “Tell them you think it means there’s something near the trolley at Forest Wonderland. Tell them you think that’s what the tracks thing is in the note.”

“Based on what, Marnie?” Matt stood up and put on his jacket. “Based on tea leaves? Yeah. Let’s waltz into the police department and tell them that. Are you going with me or not?”

I stood up, wishing I could physically stop Matt.

I picked up the teacup and stared into it, turning it every which way, hoping I could see something else besides a carousel horse. But there wasn’t much aside from that dark, thick mass of leaves.

“You can’t take it back,” Matt said. “I know that’s what you saw. So are you coming with me, or no?”

“What’re you gonna do, man?” I practically shouted. “Bring a shovel and start digging?”

When I said that, Matt turned white. I gulped. I’d forgotten for a moment that this was his best friend we were talking about.

“Matt,” I said, trying not to plead now. “Listen. I know how hard—”

“I’ll call you later,” Matt said.

“Wait,” I called. “I’m going with you.”