Chapter Twenty-Three
TWENTY-THREE
DEATH. DEATH. DEATH.
I can’t get the image of the last tarot card out of my head.
Or the way Daisy’s face paled when she pulled it.
I don’t care if she needs more practice or if she claims that it wasn’t accurate, the entire weekend I’ve felt like something dark has been hovering over me.
That increasingly incessant voice always mumbling unintelligibly.
I wonder sometimes if it’s the stars finally calling to me.
That night I went back to the chapel, this time making sure no one was following me. I used bobby pins according to the wikiHow article, and after some trial and error, the door creaked open slowly, an overwhelming but strangely familiar plume of rotting, mildewy stench hitting me in the face.
Past the threshold of the door was a set of stairs. But when I leaned over the railing, the light from my phone illuminating the dark, I peered down into the depths of the stairwell only to find a seemingly endless spiral of steps. It was a void like an optical illusion.
I’m not an idiot. Every horror movie ever tells me that going down there is exactly how I die. That, or it’s how I find out this school is run by some ancient cult sacrificing students to an eldritch beast… and then I die.
But when I left the chapel, I swear I saw the reflection of eyes in the distance. Heard the shuffle of a second set of feet as I walked. Now I’m in the café, waiting on Missy to show for once. She’s ghosted our last three attempts at meeting up.
In history class Dr. Rogers has assigned our midterm: a research paper dissecting historical events specific to Western North Carolina.
I flip through the pages of a few nonfiction books I borrowed from the library while I wait, but mostly my eyes just glaze over as my mind drifts to the night before, when I finally visited the observation deck on the roof of Maxwell.
It was eerie being up there all alone, my view of the mountain unobstructed. When I tilted the telescope toward the sky, I found myself breathless at the enormity of the universe. The stars glittering and luminous against the boundless dark.
This close, maybe I could finally see what Gigi was always going on about. I listened for them. Speak to me, I tried to project in their direction, but the only thing I got in return was an annoyed huff whispering at the back of my mind.
When I finally tore myself away from the stars, I saw her again, in the distance, watching me.
A ghostly white blur among the forest trees.
I’ve chewed the skin around my thumbnail raw by the time I sense Missy walk through the doors, the other students sitting a little straighter, their heads on a swivel in her direction.
It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad—the way other students’ eyebrows pinch together in confusion when she heads straight for my table and takes a seat.
I flick the book in front of me closed and shove it to the end of the table.
“Nice of you to finally make it,” I mumble beneath my breath, but it’s no use, she hears me anyway.
“You’re welcome,” she sneers, pulling her laptop out of her bag and turning the screen toward me. On it, in baby pink and red and white, are bolded words in bubble letters that twinkle on the edges. She’s made a Canva presentation.
MISSING: FIONA BEAUMONT
“Oh!” I say, my voice pitching higher in surprise. “This is new.”
She clicks the right arrow button.
“Would you prefer that I bring in a bulletin board and red string? This is a lot easier to carry.”
“No!” I say, holding out my hands and taking out a pen for notes. “Go on.”
“Fiona Amelia Beaumont was a junior-year transfer from some podunk South Carolina town about an hour south of Charlotte. She was a foster child most of her life, moving from house to house with nothing more than a half-full trash bag and a high school class picture of her piece-of-shit addict mom, and no idea who her daddy was.”
My eyes widen with every detail. I don’t know what kind of picture I’d painted in my mind of this girl since I first saw the missing-person flyer outside Dawson’s, but this certainly wasn’t it.
“So how did she end up here?” I interrupt.
Missy levels me with a glare before turning to the next slide. “Please save all questions for the end of the presentation.”
I seal my lips shut and tuck my hands beneath my thighs.
“Her sophomore year of high school, she came home to her newest placement only to find a letter with her name on it sitting on the front porch. Now, this wasn’t the first time she’d heard of Black Mountain Academy—no, she was well acquainted.”
Missy clicks over to the next slide, and it’s like someone has doused me in ice-cold water.
On the screen, against an aggressively pink background, is a cell phone photo of a wallet-sized photograph. In it, the girl has brown hair that falls to her shoulders in soft curls and raven-lined, smoky eyes so dark, they almost look black.
Her brown skin is sallow, and the circles under her eyes drag down her whole face.
She looks sick. Black clips hold her hair back on either side.
And on the lapel at her chest, a crest I’ve come to know very well.
At the bottom of the photo, blue ink in block lettering: Black Mountain Academy Class of ’90.
“I—she—”
“Yes, Fiona was a legacy student,” Missy says, pressing a button that triggers a picture of Fiona to pop up next to the one of her mom. It’s amazing to see them side by side. Two completely different aesthetics but remarkably similar faces.
I’m starting to feel sick to my stomach. How is it possible that this girl’s story seems to mirror so much of my own? And where the hell did she go?
“Do you know what was in the letter?”
“As far as I know, it was an invitation for her to attend the school. They wanted to recruit her for the girl’s field hockey team and were willing to give her a full ride.”
“Did she not think it was weird? This school from her mom’s past reaching out randomly like that? Or did she apply?”
Missy shakes her head. “She didn’t apply, so of course she thought it was weird. But they said they always follow up with the descendants of alumni, and they felt a particular responsibility toward Fiona after everything that happened with her mom…”
Oh god.
“W—what is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know all the details, but when I was looking into Fiona, trying to figure out what happened, I found this.”
She cuts to the next slide, and my fingertips start to sting. There’s an unnatural breeze lifting the hairs at the back of my neck. I look around to see if anyone else notices, but it seems like it’s just me. Always just me.
On the screen is a screenshot of a picture of a newspaper from 1989, the title in big, bold letters.
LOCAL PRIVATE ACADEMY SEARCHES FOR MISSING PREGNANT TEEN
“How… what… I—”
“I know.” Her look cuts straight through to my core.
“Fiona didn’t talk about her time with her mom much.
From what I gathered they were always on the move, never staying in the same place for more than a few weeks.
Her mom had mental health issues, always felt like the end of the world was coming.
She said her mom left her though. Went out to work her shift at Waffle House and then just…
never came back. Wasn’t long before CPS picked Fiona up.
“It seems like maybe her mom ran from the school and had her baby and then just… stayed gone… until the trouble finally caught up with her.”
I shake my head. This piece of the puzzle, it doesn’t feel like it fits.
“What a coincidence though, for them both to go missing.”
“Is it?” she asks, and I rear my head back.
“What are you trying to say?”
“You tell me.”
I couldn’t tell her even if I wanted to. I don’t know anything, and every time I think I might be starting to know something, the rug gets pulled out from under me yet again.
I shrug. “I have no idea. It’s just… it’s sad.”
Her mouth pulls down in a slight frown, but she displays no other visible emotion as she hits the next slide.
“Anyway, she got her foster family to agree to send her here, and she packed up her trash bag and came to the mountains in search of her mother.”
“Why would she think her mom would be here?” I ask. I think back to her blog posts. She said she never missed her mother. So who was she lying to? Missy, or herself?
On the new slide is a candid picture of Fiona looking up at the bell tower of Lee Chapel, her hair blown into her face and her lips bent into a smile.
“Why does anybody do or think anything stupid? Because the reality—that her shitty mom is probably dead in a ditch somewhere—was too painful for her to bear. So she was grasping at straws. Chasing her own tail.”
Is that what I’m doing? Grasping at straws?
I draw spirals like cryptid appendages around my notes. “What happened once she got to campus?”
She appears so happy in the photo, it’s hard to look at her and see anything troubling about her backstory. It’s impossible to tell that only months later, she would drop off the face of the earth.
Missy adjusts in her chair, her eyes trained on the floor.
“I wasn’t so sure about her when she first got here… we were roommates.”
I raise my eyebrows.
She rolls her eyes. “Not everyone is a nepo baby and gets their own room, Harper.”
I mouth the words nepo baby in confusion.
“We were both scholarship students, and we liked some of the same things. The field hockey team and the cheer squad practiced on the same field, and I had a, uh, friend on the team, so we hung out in the same circles as well. Eventually we became friendly.
“There were things about me that no one else here seemed to understand, but she did. She didn’t shy away from me like so many people do just because I’m not afraid to speak my mind…,” she trails off, and I can tell that wherever she is, it’s not here. Her eyes are distant and cold.
“So then what happened? How did she go missing?” I press.
She snaps out of it, taking in a deep, slow breath before blowing it out against the curtain bangs framing her forehead.