CHAPTER 12

I’d hoped to get right to my first meeting of the Paranormal Management Society, but on the way home that afternoon, Romy informed me that for “budgetary reasons,” they could only meet every other week, which meant there wouldn’t be another meeting until the next Thursday. That gave me nearly ten days to wait, which was a lot longer than I’d wanted—the sooner I got this case over with, the better—but in the end, I was kind of grateful for the time.

For one thing, school was tougher than I’d expected. English was good. We were reading Macbeth, and while I’d never read Shakespeare before, any story that involved witches, ghosts, and a bunch of violence seemed right up my alley. History was also okay, and I was holding my own in chemistry, but geometry was one of the more evil foes I’d ever faced. I hadn’t really thought much about balancing ghost busting with math problems, so it was nice to let the case take a backseat for a little bit.

In addition to giving me time to figure out homework, those ten days let me get closer to Romy and Dex. I still hadn’t met the mysterious Anderson. He drove to school himself, and since he was a junior, we didn’t have any of the same classes. But I sat with Romy and Dex on the bus every day, and by the time the first PMS meeting had rolled around, I felt like I was already one of the group. I wondered if all kids made friends this quickly, or if this was just unique to Dex and Romy.

PMS was holding its meeting in one of the portable classrooms behind the school, and when the last bell rang on Thursday afternoon, Romy and I made our way out there. “The state outlawed these like a million years ago,” Romy told me as we walked into what was basically a trailer, “but a few schools keep them around for art classrooms or yearbook offices.” She snorted. “You know, classes that don’t really matter, according to the fine state of Mississippi.”

This particular trailer wasn’t being used this year. It smelled like erasers and damp carpet, but it had a big whiteboard and a few desks that weren’t covered in scratched obscenities, so it met all of Romy’s requirements. “We used to meet in the lunchroom, but the janitors were always rushing us.” Romy turned to the whiteboard, picked up a blue dry-erase marker, and scrawled 1st point: Izzy.

“So how long have you been running this thing?” I asked her as she wrote, 2nd point: Gym Weirdness/Beth/Doll.

“I tried to start a chapter back in junior high, but a couple of parents complained. Apparently, investigating the paranormal is the first step on the road to devil worship or something. But when we got to high school I was ready.”

Once she’d written 3rd point: Tonight? Romy turned to me with a broad smile. “I explained to Mr. Owens—he’s our principal—that it wasn’t, like, an occult thing.” She raised her thumb, ticking off. “It’s science. They study parapsychology at Duke, for heaven’s sake. And” —she raised her index finger—“a few years back, Mary Evans High had a forensics club that studied old-timey murders. That is way more twisted than ghost hunting. And last but not least”—a third finger went up—“investigating popular ghost stories from this area increases our knowledge of local folklore and regionalism.”

I sat on top of one of the desks, crossing my legs. “Wow. You really wanted to—I mean, to make this club.” The door banged open, and a lanky boy, even taller than Dex, loped in. He had blond hair that fell nearly to his shoulders, and while he had a few acne scars and wasn’t as handsome as Dex, he was still a pretty good-looking guy. Then his eyes landed on Romy, and his whole face seemed to light up.

“Hey, Rome,” he said, his voice surprisingly deep. Then his eyes landed on me. “Oh. Hi.”

I gave a little wave. “Hi.”

“Anderson, this is Izzy,” Romy said, and I noticed her face was kind of glowy, too. “She’s gonna be in the club now, but we’ll go over that when everyone gets here.”

“Sounds good,” he said affably, sitting on top of the desk closest to Romy.

“Everyone” turned out to be Dex. He arrived about five minutes later, sliding into the desk next to mine. “So, Izzy,” he asked, turning those blue eyes on me, “suitably impressed by our headquarters?”

Romy tossed the dry-erase marker at him. “Okay, now that we’re all here, I’m calling this meeting of the Paranormal Management Society to order. First point”—she gestured to the whiteboard—“is to welcome our newest member, Izzy Brannick. Izzy has only been at Mary Evans for about two weeks, but has already proven herself awesome by permanently crippling Ben McCrary.”

“Whoa,” Anderson said, looking at me with respect even as I said, “I just hit him with a dodgeball.”

“I’ve had dreams about that,” Anderson replied. “Could you describe what happened in really precise detail?”

“Later,” Romy answered for me. “We have a lot to cover today.”

Reaching into her backpack, she pulled out a laptop. “Now, as you know, there have been several odd happenings around here lately. Today, Izzy and I observed something especially weird.” Romy perched on the desk opposite from me, balancing the computer on her crossed legs. “Beth Tanner found a Barbie doll, dressed to look like her and seriously jacked up, hanging in her locker.”

Anderson leaned forward in his desk. “Like Mr. Snyder and the frog,” he said, eyes going wide.

“Possibly,” Romy said, turning her computer so that we could all see it. There was a little folder on the desktop titled MARY EVANS, and Romy clicked on it. “Okay, so it’s been common knowledge that Mary has haunted this place ever since she died.”

“Forever condemned to high school,” Dex said with a little shudder. “That would make me homicidal, too.”

Romy didn’t lift her eyes from the screen, but she frowned. “Why is she homicidal, though? I mean, over a hundred years, and up until a few months ago, the only ghostly activity was an occasional locker door opening, or things disappearing and showing up someplace weird.” Clicking on an icon, Romy pulled up a document with EVIDENCE typed in bold letters on the top. Several bullet points were listed below, including things like LOCKERS and CHALK.

When I asked what that meant, Romy closed the document, saying, “About ten years ago, an entire history class saw a piece of chalk float in midair for thirty seconds. But that’s it.”

Now I frowned. That did seem like quite a leap from floating chalk to dismembering frogs. It was really rare for a ghost to have that kind of control over its surroundings. If this was Mary Evans’s doing, the sooner I got rid of her, the better.

Next to me, Anderson tapped a pencil against his braces. “If Mary left that doll for Beth, that kind of blows our whole teacher theory out of the water.” He glanced over at me, cheeks reddening slightly. “We figured she went after Mr. Snyder because he was, you know, a teacher, and it was a teacher who, um…who, like—”

Sighing, Dex turned in his seat and propped his feet up on the desk next to him. “Got her in the family way.”

As far as theories went, it wasn’t a bad one, and I nodded. But Anderson was right: Why Beth now?

“Is there any connection between Beth and Mr. Snyder?” I asked, trying to look innocent. “Any reason the same thing that was after him would go after her?”

Romy sat on a desk, pulling her knees up and staring into space. “Nothing I can think of. Beth didn’t even have biology this semester.”

Silence fell over the trailer, the only sound Anderson’s tapping at his teeth and the occasional car going by. Then Dex dropped his feet to the floor and proclaimed, “Look, I’m just going to say what everyone is thinking. Maybe history is repeating itself here. Maybe Beth and Mr. Snyder had a thing, like Mary and Mr. Gross Teacher.”

Romy, Anderson, and I screwed up our faces at that, but I had to admit, it was a solid idea, and it did point even more to Mary Evans’s being the actual culprit. And all I needed to know to make this place ghost-free was the “who.”

Romy had clicked on something else now, a picture. It showed several people all dressed in clothes from the turn of the twentieth century. They were standing on a big lawn, and a few of the boys were holding tennis rackets. In the back, there was a girl with light hair and big eyes, a red circle drawn around her face. “That’s Mary,” Romy said, tapping the screen.

Dex leaned over my desk to get a better look, and I caught a whiff of some nice, woodsy scent. “She was pretty,” he observed. “If I were her, I’d be chilling out in heaven, hitting on hot dead guys. Not hanging around here accosting chemistry teachers.”

“She feels tied to this place,” Anderson said, pointing his pencil at the laptop. “Until she gets some kind of justice, she’s always going to hang around here.”

It was very hard to bite my tongue on that, but I managed. Just like the rumors surrounding vampires, there’s all kinds of wrong information about ghosts. If Mary Evans was stuck in this place, all the justice in the world wouldn’t make her leave. She’d keep hanging around until someone put her to rest.

Romy shut down the computer. “So I’m thinking séance?”

My head shot up. “Wait, what?”

“We can contact Mary Evans through a séance,” Anderson said. He nodded to the corner of the room, where a Ouija board, still in its box, sat on one of the desks. “See if we can talk to her, figure out if she’s here. Maybe this weekend?”

Crap. I didn’t know who invented Ouija boards, but whoever that guy was, he was a jerk. This place already had one dangerous spirit floating around; it didn’t need something else called forth from a Ouija board.

“Are you guys sure that’s the best idea? I mean, Ouija boards don’t work, right?”

Anderson looked like I’d just insulted his grand-mother. “Of course they work. I mean, we’ve never tried one before, but on TV—”

“On TV, EMP readers work,” Dex threw in. “And in reality, yours just has a lot of blinky lights.”

“I’ve only had it for a few weeks, so we don’t really know what the blinky lights do yet,” Anderson replied, and Dex raised his hands in surrender.

“Boys.” Romy sighed with a weariness that told me this wasn’t the first time she’d stopped their squabbling. “Anderson’s EMP reader is awesome and a very valuable tool for this club. And so is that Ouija board. So. As soon as I can find a free night when I don’t have to babysit my brothers, we are going to get our séance on.”

Dex snorted. “So will be doing the séance next summer, then?” To me, he added, “Romy is forever babysitting her little monsters.”

He said it so easily, but most Prodigium I knew hate the term “monster.” They find it offensive, and would never use it in casual conversation. Once again, I wondered just what the heck Dex was.

Sighing, he sat up and thumped his feet to the ground. “I for one cannot wait to hear the thrilling story behind why Mary Evans decided to upgrade from opening locker doors to attempted murder.”

Romy ignored him and held up her hand for a high five. “So, Izzy Brannick, are you ready for your first experience with the paranormal?”

I slapped her palm, not sure whether I should laugh or cry. “As I’ll ever be.”