When I next opened my eyes, it was 1:25 PM.

It took a few minutes for the fog of sleep to roll out of my head. Outside the window of the train over Trey’s shoulder, suburbia whipped past in a blur. Rooftops and swing sets peeked up over fences and tree branches whizzed by. I checked the train schedule to get an idea of approximately where we were, and it was reasonable to assume that we were already close to Springfield, the capital of the state we were in. My seat was cozy and the sound of Trey lightly snoring next to me made the idea of drifting back off very tempting, but two things occurred to me that made me instead sit upright at full attention.

The first was that Esther had demanded that we call her promptly at one. I’d slept right through the deadline and even worse, it hadn’t even crossed my mind to set my phone’s alarm clock before I nodded off. I wasn’t just a few minutes late; I was really late in calling. Late enough to make her suspect the trick that Laura had played on her; late enough that maybe she’d already revoked the glamour spell on me and I already looked like my plain old self again. The second was that there was a text message waiting for me from Henry when I pulled my phone out of my bag.

TODAY 10:12 AM

HENRY

Where are you? Are you safe?

Even just the sight of words that Henry had typed into his phone made me feel more secure, like everything was going to be okay. I wondered if he’d sent the message before boarding his return flight to France or if there was a possibility he’d remained in Wisconsin, but I’d have to wait until I dealt with Esther. Using my camera phone as a mirror, I checked my reflection and was startled but relieved to see that I still looked like an Olivia-esque version of myself. Since I didn’t have Esther’s phone number, I reached across Trey and fumbled around until I felt Laura’s purse tucked underneath his elbow. He stirred when I yanked it out from underneath him, but he was so soundly asleep that he settled back into position right away. His eyelids fluttered with activity; he must have been having a pretty vivid dream.

Laura was really some kind of organizational genius, because she’d disabled the passcode on her iPhone before casting a spell on herself and Trey to make this trip possible. As much as I was surprised to find Laura’s phone unlocked, I was more surprised to find that she had a text message from Henry’s cell phone number. He must have texted her immediately after texting me.

TODAY 10:14 AM

920-555-1801

Hey, what’s up? I’m going to be in town longer than planned. Let’s hang out.

For a stunned second, my eyes narrowed with suspicion. Henry was supposed to be on my side, so why was he trying to meet up with Laura? But my fury passed as quickly as it appeared: I’d given him ample reason to think that I was in danger because of Laura with the text I’d sent him. He was most likely conducting a highly sensitive investigation out of concern for me.

“Hello?” I’d found Esther’s name in the Contacts list of Laura’s phone, but even after I heard someone answer on the other end, no one spoke. “Hello?” I asked again, hoping that Esther wasn’t using some kind of baffling para-psychology to somehow see me and Trey on the train.

“You’re late,” a cold voice finally replied.

“I’m sorry. We fell asleep,” I stammered, wondering if there would be some kind of punishment. This woman was powerful enough to make me look completely unrecognizable, even to myself. If she could do that then surely she could probably cause me to spontaneously have a heart attack with the snap of her fingers, or ignite a fire somewhere on the train sure to attract attention to me and Trey.

“Where’s Laura? Why are you calling?” Esther asked, answering my unasked question as to whether she could distinguish my voice from Laura’s.

“She’s right here,” I lied, looking down to my right at dozing Trey. “She’s asleep.”

I sent a swift prayer to heaven that Esther wouldn’t insist on speaking with Laura, because it was pretty darn unlikely that I was going to be able to do a convincing fake voice. There was another long pause before Esther sternly said, “Call me again in six hours. And don’t be late again.”

The line went dead.

“Whatever,” I muttered at the phone in my hands. Despite my annoyance, I mentally did the math and set a reminder on my own phone instead of Laura’s to call her at seven o’clock.

Trey sprang to life in the seat next to me with an epic yawn-stretch-howl. When he saw two phones in my hands, he worriedly asked, “Were you just on the phone?”

“I had to call Laura’s boss. It’s been six hours,” I said defensively.

“Did you use your phone? Or Laura’s?” Trey asked, his voice still kind of crusty with sleep. “Because if police are looking for you, they might be tracing your phone, and it will definitely be a disaster if they find me with a girl who looks the way you do right now and all your stuff.”

Trey was right. I didn’t even have to use my phone for police to trace it; the Find My Phone app would enable them to locate me anyway. A hot, sickening panic overcame me. What a stupid oversight on my part! If police had been looking for me since I didn’t arrive in Florida when I was supposed to, then they probably knew that I’d been waylaid in Highland Park, Illinois overnight. Momentarily I indulged in a fantasy of uniformed police officers gathered together in some kind of high-security office facility, tracking my phone’s southbound journey across Illinois and Missouri on a computer screen. It was practically a miracle that cops hadn’t swept through the train when we’d stopped in Pontiac, Normal, and St. Louis, searching for me.

“Trey. Police can probably track my phone whether I’m using it or not,” I said in a shaky voice.

Trouble brewed in his ice blue eyes. “Have you used it?”

I shook my head, which was untruthful, but I couldn’t bring myself to actually say words to him that were outright lies. I had used my phone to text Henry at the train station. I sank my teeth into my lower lip. But rather than getting angry, which wasn’t really Trey’s style, he popped the back lid off my phone and withdrew the SIM card. “Can I dispose of this?” he asked me. Permitting Trey to destroy my SIM card meant serious complications in trying to maintain contact with Henry, but I couldn’t exactly tell Trey that. So instead of objecting, I nodded. Trey motioned for me to let him step into the aisle. He inched past my knees and ascended the three small stairs at the end of the train car just as the conductor announced that we were pulling into the Springfield station. A few minutes later, after the train slowed to a stop and the doors on all cars opened, Trey returned to our row and I got up from my seat so that he could sit by the window again.

“All done,” he said, pleased with himself. “Maybe the police will spend a few days searching Springfield, Illinois.”

“If they’re not already boarding the train right now with hunting dogs to sniff us out.”

We locked hands and waited in silence with our heads hung until the passengers who boarded in Springfield got settled in their seats on our car, and the train lurched its enormous weight back into strained momentum.  “Were you having a bad dream?” I dared to ask once we were back on our way toward California.

“Sort of,” he said gruffly. All the months that he’d been away at Northern Reserve, I’d feared that his nightmares of suicide scenarios would become irresistibly tempting. “Just a weird dream about jumping off this train.”

My eyes widened in surprise. “This train? While it was moving?”

Trey nodded with a bashful smile. “Yeah. Crazy, right? Don’t worry. I’m not the least bit tempted to hurl myself off a train traveling seventy-five miles an hour.”

I reached over to run my knuckle along the sharp stubble on his head; it had probably been a month since his hair had last been shaved off at his school, and he had about half an inch of dark growth. “I’m sorry,” I apologized. Even though he’d just told me at the airport that the strange dreams he’d been having his whole life had recently stopped—those promising an overwhelming feeling of peace if he’d kill himself—I wondered if he’d withheld the truth from me to prevent me from worrying.

Outside Trey’s window, the flat farmlands of Missouri stretched on for miles. At least another hour passed before Trey squirmed in his seat and said quietly, “I’m starving.”

I had to admit; I was starving, too. We had a crinkled five and a ten-dollar bill leftover from the twenty we’d found in Laura’s purse, and two fives and eight crisp singles of my own. That wasn’t going to buy us much. According to the dining car menus tucked into the pockets on the backs of the seats in front of us, all of our money would barely buy us both our own plates of the least expensive option on the grown-up menu, which was spaghetti. And even if we were hungry enough to splurge so extravagantly despite knowing we’d be on the train another two days, there was no choice other than for one of us to venture into the dining car to place the order. Spending even five minutes apart was a risk that we both acknowledged; anything could happen during those five minutes and probably would.

Trey sighed in defeat. “Maybe there’s a vending machine or something on one of the cars.”

A laminated card in the pocket of the seat in front of me that we’d previous overlooked suggested that there were vending machines in the second car from the front of the train. My stomach growled; I wasn’t sure that a packet of smoke almonds or stale gummy worms was really going to cut it, but I was certain that I didn’t want to leave Trey in our seats long enough to order spaghetti and wait for it to cook.

“Let’s see how much change I have,” I said, unzipping my purse. Before I even had a chance to paw through all of the crap in my bag, the folded piece of paper that Violet had handed to me in the grocery store back in Willow popped up. It was the letter from Mrs. Harold J. Simmons to Mary Jane Svensson, Trey’s mom, signed by Mrs. Simmons’ attorney, Marcus Ekdahl.

“What’s that?” Trey asked as if his spidey sense had just kicked in.

Since I’d run into him in the airport, I hadn’t mentioned Violet’s sudden insistence that Trey sue her father for half of her inheritance. There really hadn’t been time, and I still hadn’t figured out what her angle was, so it seemed pointless to trouble him about it. But now it was as if the paper had jumped out of my bag purposefully to catch his attention. “This,” I said, withdrawing the piece of paper and unfolding it, “is something Violet found in her grandmother’s office.”

I gave him a moment to digest the letter’s meaning. Trey’s eyes scanned the letter word for word, line for line, and then returned to the top so that he could read it a second time. “I didn’t know they’d paid her so much,” he said, pretty impressed by the figure of one hundred thousand dollars. “You know, she never mentioned anything about paying it back. I guess maybe he just let it go once he found out I was running around Weeping Willow.”

“Letting something go does not seem like something a Simmons would do,” I stated. “Look, the terms of the contract required her to provide them with proof that she actually terminated the pregnancy. Violet didn’t find anything like that. At least, I don’t think she did. Your mom probably never even got the money, if that was the one condition.”

Trey kept staring at the paper in his hands as if it contained a secret code that would reveal itself if he just stared at it long enough. Finally, he said, “My mom’s parents used to live in the unincorporated part of town. You pass the turn-off to what used to be their street when you start out on the drive to Green Bay from Martha Road. It doesn’t even have a name, it’s just a rural route. It’s like, three, maybe four blocks before you make the right turn to get to State Street.”

I nodded, listening, trying to visualize that part of our small hometown, but Front Street, the road that led from our neighborhood toward State Street, where our town’s small shopping center was located, was just surrounded by overgrown weeds and trees on both sides.  

“The house is still there,” Trey said, “Even though my mom’s parents both died right after I was born.”

A chill blew through the train and made me shiver even though golden late afternoon sunlight streamed in through the car’s windows. Both of Trey’s grandparents dying shortly after his birth seemed like too much of a coincidence to go unnoticed, the kind of ironic coincidence that seemed to happen far too often in our town. “I used to hang out there sometimes with Roy Needham and his older brother when we were kids. You know? It’s just like, an abandoned house. There’s spray paint on the walls and stuff. We used to find, like, burned out campfires and beer cans and stuff. I think vagrants maybe crash there from time to time. I haven’t actually gone inside in years, but—

“Why would your mom let the house she grew up in fall into ruin like that?” I interrupted him. “Why didn’t she just sell it when her parents died?”

Trey shrugged as if he agreed with my line of questioning. “Well, first of all, it’d probably be easier to sell ice in Alaska than it would be to sell a house in our shitty town. Second of all, it was already in pretty bad shape. Third, my aunt was already married and settled up in Osh Kosh when I came along, so it’s not like she gave a crap what my mom did with it. I don’t think my grandparents were jumping for joy when my mom dropped out of college and needed a place to stay because she was knocked up, you know? I don’t think they welcomed her back with open—

“Wait a second. Exactly when did your mom get together with Walter?” I asked, trying to understand how a girl in a town as small as ours could convince a guy to marry her when he knew she was already pregnant with some other dude’s kid. Everyone knew everything about everyone else in our town. “My dad said they were already married when my parents moved in down the street.”

“Right around that time, okay? She knew Walter from high school,” Trey said, pretending to be exasperated with me but clearly happy that I was showing an interest in his story. “Anyway,” he said with an antagonistic smile to tease me for my constant interruptions. It made my heart swell to hear his flirtatious tone of voice; it was almost like the old Trey was back, the Trey I fell in love with before boarding school zapped the delinquent spirit out of him. “Anyway. The house is basically, like, decrepit. All the tile’s ripped up inside, floorboards are coming up, half the roof is missing. From the street you can barely even see it because the grass is so overgrown along the road. But outside, in what used to be the back yard, there’s this crazy rosebush. It’s, like, perfect. There are big huge white roses in the spring.”

“Stop,” I commanded. I wasn’t sure where he was going with this, but it sounded like he was about to postulate a theory. And it certainly was starting to sound like it involved an element of supernatural energy. “You are freaking me out.”

Unfazed by my request that he stop, Trey continued. “When I was a kid, there were always roses on our dining room table in the spring. Obviously I was an idiot then and probably assumed that Walter bought them for my mom. But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Walter isn’t exactly the kind of gentleman who brings flowers home for his wife.”

The mere thought of Walter Emory—his pot belly hanging over his belt buckle and a permanent scowl etched across his face—strolling into a florist shop was enough to make me giggle. My dad was the kind of romantic who brought flowers home for Rhonda. He even used to bring them home for my mom when I was a kid, now that I thought about it. Of course, my dad was also the kind of nerd who memorized love poems by Neruda and Rimbaud to impress women at dinner parties. Even just the fleeting thought of my dad made my throat ache; I wondered when I’d ever see him again. “So, you think your mother would drive back to her childhood home and cut roses?”

“Yes!” Trey exclaimed as if this proved some kind of point.

“You’ve lost me,” I admitted. “Maybe she just likes roses. Most women like roses.”

“You’re not considering the bigger picture,” he said slowly. “Think about it. How did Violet’s grandmother cast a spell so that her daughter-in-law could have a baby?”

With a solemn frown, I stared at Trey in disbelief for a very long time before replying. I could see the comparison he was drawing, but feared what he was implying. “She had Violet’s father plant trees.”

“Right. Put yourself in my mother’s position for a second,” he instructed me. “You’re young, you’re in love with some older rich guy who makes promises to you. You find out you’re pregnant and you’re probably happy at first, thinking that you’re going to get married and live some super fancy city life as the wife of a college professor. But then when it all gets too real for him, he says not only is he going to stay with his wife but he has his mother’s attorneys try to clean up the mess he made. Would money make you feel better?”

Despite my stomach’s rumbling and an itchy discomfort burning in my chest, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Trey’s. For as long as I looked at him, I sensed the despair his mother must have felt so intensely that I almost started crying. She must have been deeply humiliated, angry, and terrified to have to show up on her parents’ doorstep and admit to them that she’d wasted the college tuition they’d paid. Especially if they were in financial dire straits and were displeased to learn they’d soon have another mouth to feed. “No,” I finally said. Money would not have made me feel better. And then I understood where Trey’s line of thinking was leading:

The only thing that would have made Mary Jane Svenssen feel better was revenge.