The Resurrected Compendium Read online

  “Not until we see the face.”

  Reluctantly, Emma agreed to move away from the ladder to look for it. Maddy took her hand again, not so much to offer comfort as to make sure Emma didn’t decide to run away. They moved through the water, looking, until Emma hung back, refusing to go further into the darker part of the basement.

  “No way. It’s too dark. And dangerous,” Emma said. “There’s all sorts of equipment and stuff down here!”

  “Yeah, and bits and pieces of that man’s head,” Maddy said gleefully.

  Emma started to cry.

  Maddy and Emma had been best friends since kindergarten, when Emma had fallen at the bus stop and skinned her knees, and Maddy had given her a couple of adhesive bandages from her book bag. Maddy almost always had stuff like that, because you never knew when someone was going to bleed.

  “Stop it,” Maddy said. “Shut up, Emma.”

  “I’m leaving! My mom said I had to be home for dinner!”

  Maddy had put up with a lot from Emma over the years. She whined a lot. She was a scaredy cat. She could only watch monster movies through the shield of her fingers, and she had nightmares for weeks, after. She puked on roller coasters. She was allergic to cats, dogs and hamsters, and when her fishes died, she always cried. Always.

  “Not until we see the face!” There was no face, and Maddy knew it, but Emma didn’t. That she could keep insisting on leaving before they even looked…well.

  Emma really ought to know better.

  When Maddy pushed Emma, she did it hard. Both hands hands shoved her into the water, then grabbed her up again to shake her. Emma cried and flailed, but it didn’t matter. Maddy was bigger, and Maddy was stronger, and Maddy was always going to get her way.

  Maddy dragged her friend toward the back of the basement where there was an alcove, almost pitch black. Several saw-horses with wood laid across them half-blocked the entrance. On top of the wood were a couple of cinder blocks.

  “I don’t want to see the face! I don’t want to see the face!” Emma screamed.

  So Maddy hit her in the face with a chunk of broken cinder block.

  Emma stopped screaming.

  She went face down into the water. Her hair floated. She didn’t get up.

  Maddy watched her for a few minutes, noting when the bubbles stopped. She let the piece of cinder block fall into the water — it would dissolve or wash away her fingerprints, or…something, anyway.

  In the yard outside, her shoes stuck in the mud. Thick, gooey, gloppy. She’d have loved it in bare feet, but it clung to her sneakers and weighed her down. They were her favorite sneakers, and they were dirty. Worse, it wouldn’t wash off in a puddle or when she rubbed it against the wet grass. She had to walk all the way home with her feet encased in mud. Her shoes, ruined. When she got home, she took off her shoes and put them in the garage before her mom could even see.

  In the kitchen, her mom was waiting. “Emma’s mom called, she wanted to know where you were.”

  “I don’t know,” Maddy said. “She wasn’t with me.”

  Later, when she tried to clean them, the mud wouldn’t come off even with the hose. She’d had to throw the sneakers away, and that’s why Maddy was crying into her pillow. Not because Emma had been missing for four days.

  That’s what her mom thought, though, when she came in to stroke Maddy’s hair and tell her it would be okay. “Shh, honey. I’m sure Emma will come home.”

  But when the phone rang, Mom’s face went white. She sat on the edge of Maddy’s bed and rubbed at the bedspread with her fingers, over and over along the pattern of squares and circles as she listened to whoever was on the other end.

  “Maddy,” her mom said quietly. “Where you and Emma playing together at the end of Willow Cove Street?”

  “No, Mom.”

  Maddy’s mom didn’t say anything for a few minutes. She cried a little, her eyes red, and had to blow her nose with a tissue from Maddy’s night stand. “Are you sure?”

  “No, Mom. I told you.” Maddy dried her own tears, this news about Emma more interesting than the thought of her ruined shoes. You could always get a new pair of shoes. A new best friend would be a little harder. Only a little. “Is she dead?”

  “Why would you say that?” Mom’s voice was short and sharp, kind of like a bark. She gripped Maddy’s shoulder hard enough to leave a bruise that Maddy would admire in the mirror for a couple weeks. “Why would you think that, Madison?”

  “Because when kids go missing, it’s always because of the man in the white van, the one who asks if you want candy or if you want to help him find his puppy.”

  Mom went very still. She pulled Maddy closer, closer, almost nose to nose. She had dark eyes, not like Maddy’s, which were blue like Dad’s. Mom’s dark eyes were rimmed with red. Her breath smelled a little like flowers, because she liked to spritz her mouth with breath spray to cover up the smell of wine.

  “There was a man in a van?”

  Maddy was creative. Maddy told lies. Maddy made up stories. Maddy said, “oh, yes, Mama. He came by the school and asked Emma if she wanted to see a funny video on his laptop, and she said yes.”

  “Oh, God. Oh, my God.”

  “Not in a van,” Maddy said, suddenly inspired. “It was a pickup truck with a cap on the back. He had a nice smile. He asked me if I wanted to go with them, but I knew you wouldn’t want me to. I really wanted some ice cream, though. Do you think he gave Emma ice cream?”

  Mom didn’t say anything. She got up from the bed and went down to the kitchen. Maddy crept to the top of the stairs to listen to her mom call her dad on the phone. She couldn’t hear everything her mom said, because Mom was crying, but it must’ve convinced Dad to get home, fast.

  Then the police came, and they asked Maddy all kinds of questions. She had answers to most of them, too. The same answers, she was careful about that. Because if they asked you something and then used different words to ask the same thing, you had to be sure you answered them the same way. Otherwise, they wouldn’t believe you.

  Everyone believed her.

  Well. Maybe not Mom, because after that not even the breath spray did very much to cover up that smell of wine, and the bottles piled up in the recycling bin, and Ev once came home from school to find her passed out on the kitchen floor. After that, Mom went away for awhile, and when she came back, she smiled a lot more than she used to. She didn’t laugh, because that would’ve meant she thought something was funny. She smiled at everything, but she never laughed.

  Only once more did she ever ask Maddy what had happened, and it was late at night in the dark. She crept into Maddy’s room. She stood over her bed, watching her while Maddy pretended to sleep.

  “I know you’re awake, Madison.”

  Maddy didn’t move or say anything. She didn’t open her eyes. She waited for her mom to go away.

  “What did you do to her, Madison? What did you do to that little girl? Is it the same thing you did to Patches?”

  Patches was their puppy, the one who’d peed on Maddy’s favorite doll when she was seven.

  “Was it the same thing you did to baby Jameson?”

  That’s when Maddy opened her eyes and sat up. “No.”

  Mom let out a long, shaking noise, like something was caught in her throat and she was trying to get it out. It went on and on, not like a cough, but it wasn’t until she turned her face so the light from the window could shine on it that Maddy saw what she was doing. She was laughing.

  “It wasn’t quite the same,” Maddy said. “I hit her in the head, first.”

  Mom said nothing after that.

  Nothing about it ever again.

  45

  She lay by the road for a long time. When the men came and stood over her, she wanted to get up but something kept her down. A puppet with strings, that’s all she’d become, waiting for the hand to make her move.

  When night fell and the blistering sun went away, she lifted her head. Salt and sand crusted