The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,62

his pool. The sounds of normalcy were right next door, but the wooden fence between that life and her own felt miles thick and unfathomably high.

The crickets had started up again without Laurel noticing; the night buzz was back in full force. Gold light spilled from the house as Thalia slipped inside, then it vanished as she closed the door behind her. Thalia was gone, Jeffrey was underwater, and the rest of the neighborhood was sleeping, but Laurel sensed that she was not alone.

She could feel the beginnings of that tug of energy again. Her fingers still rested on the planchette, and it was drawing something from her.

She knew how the game worked. She had seen Thalia play it with her friends. She should ask a question. Back in high school, Thalia’s friends had asked which boys liked them and who was a slut and who was still a virgin. The spirits always knew because Thalia knew, and Thalia ran the board.

But Thalia wasn’t here now.

Laurel pulled the planchette back to the middle, resting it in the plain space under the curved alphabet. She took a deep breath, and then she set her other hand on the opposite side.

She felt the connection close, like something clicking shut. The planchette came alive under her hands, waiting, but she didn’t know what to ask. She was too tired to formulate a proper question.

Finally, she said quietly, “That night when you died, Molly— I hope to God this is you. Tell me what I need to know about that night. Tell me what I need to know to protect Shelby.”

The planchette was moving before she’d said the last word. She wasn’t moving it. Her fingers rested lightly on it, and the felted pads of its feet skated over the board so quickly that she had to hurry to keep her hands from slipping off.

Six times it moved, to six letters, and then Laurel jerked away her hands.

“That’s not true,” she said.

The board sat dumb, the planchette dead again. She scooted out from behind the table and stood, then picked up the planchette. She dropped it onto the gazebo’s single wooden step, and then she stamped on it. Four times she brought her foot down, until the base was in shards, the needle lost, and the lens had skittered off into the grass. She picked up the board and methodically snapped it in half over her knee. She threw the pieces in the yard and then walked around the gazebo once, blowing out the candles. The ring of light got smaller and smaller, until she was almost in total darkness. The last candle she kept, picking it up by the cool bottom of its pottery base. She used it to light her way back to the house.

She would believe what Thalia had said before she believed what the planchette had spelled. It wasn’t possible or true, and she would never think on it again.

Six letters. She would go upstairs and lie down and close her eyes, and sleep would wipe them from her mind. She would wake up tomorrow innocent of them, unknowing. She could do that. God knew she’d seen Mother do it often enough.

She had asked what she needed to know about that night, to protect Shelby. She meant from Stan Webelow, or from an ugly truth about Bunny, or from Thalia, or even from herself. But this was closer to what that hateful detective had been angling after, pestering at Shelby. It could not be.

Shelby had not been the moving shadow. Shelby had not been out in the night with Molly when she died. Laurel would not let it be so, and she would not ever again think on or remember those six small letters that the planchette had given her. What do I need to know to protect Shelby? she had asked.

The planchette had spelled two words for her:

She saw.

CHAPTER 11

Morning pressed against her closed eyelids, but even with her eyes shut, she could feel the absence of David. He must have already fled the Thalia-infested house for his office, but she wasn’t alone in her bed. A slight weight dented the mattress, and she smelled her sister’s gingery shampoo.

“Are you awake, Miss Possum?” Thalia asked.

“No,” Laurel answered, her voice grainy with sleep.

She cracked an eye and looked at the bedside clock. It was past ten-thirty. Not surprising. Last night she’d crept in beside David’s sleeping body and stared at the ceiling until the crickets had packed it in for