Watch for me by Moonlight E-Book

Jacquelyn Mitchard

• Herausgeber: Story Hill Publishing
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Book Three of the Midnight Twins Series
“Dark, powerful, and mysterious.” -Karin Slaughter, author of Pretty Girls
Psychic Twins Unravel Secrets of Ghostly First Love in this Haunting Paranormal Tale
Identical twins Mallory and Meredith Brynn share a supernatural gift—Mallory can see glimpses of the future while Meredith can see into the past. In their small town, the sisters use their powers to expose hidden secrets and prevent evil events. As they turn fifteen, the twins hope for a drama-free year, but mystery soon finds them.
Ominous visions lead Mallory to suspect danger around their baby brother Owen's health, while Meredith encounters a ghostly boy named Ben who captivates her. As Meredith and Ben's electric spiritual connection rapidly intensifies, Meredith believes he's her one true love returned from the past. However, Ben's evasiveness about his origins troubles Mallory.
The twins must attend a local funeral that may unlock Ben's secrets. Meredith and Ben's mystical romance progresses alongside escalating incidents of Owen's unexplained illness. Mallory takes on the role of protector, striving to anchor her sister firmly in the living world while unraveling the mystery of ghostly Ben.
In their supernatural small town, events and visions converge to reinforce the sisters' destiny as seers. With help from their clairvoyant grandmother, Mallory and Meredith discover their family's long untold history of prophetic women. Their unique twin bond is tested like never before as deceit, danger, and supernatural love threaten to divide them.
Drawing on psychic intuition, sisterly devotion, and lessons of the past, the twins seek to expose the truth and defend against unseen forces threatening their family and future in this haunting paranormal tale.
 

Leseprobe

Jacquelyn Mitchard

Watch for Me by Moonlight

ISBN: 978-1-947635-69-2

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Jacquelyn Mitchard

Watch for Me by Moonlight

Jacquelyn Mitchard

Copyright

© 2018 Jacquelyn Mitchard

This book is licensed for personal use only. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes) prior written agreement must be obtained by contacting the author. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

Publisher’s Note

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Yvette, Marta, and Aunt Anna

THE LAST SWEET TIME

“You need to listen, Drew. My house is full of strangers,” Mallory Brynn told her boyfriend, Drew Vaughn, who was hoping for a few minutes to kiss his girl instead of a nice stressful little chat. He thought, you know, the world might be better off if a girl never again said the words: “We have to talk.” Nothing ever came of it but more talk and far less making out. The thing to do was to nip it in the bud.

“I know,” Drew said, pulling Mallory closer. “It must stink.”

But she wasn’t having any.

“Drew listen! Everywhere I turn I bump into somebody else. Grandma on Saturday and Monday, not that she’s a stranger, but you can’t act like yourself around her. You have to be nicer. Big Carla on Fridays and Wednesdays. Sasha two mornings a week and … and now Luna! Luna is going to put me over the edge.”

“Luna … Luna Verdgris? She’s a semi-nice person, Brynn. Aren’t you being kind of judgmental?” Drew knew that Mallory, who had only recently given up wearing Drew’s old T-shirts as ordinary clothing and started dressing like a girl, hated it when people judged anyone on their appearance. So he drew his hole card. “What, are you bent out of shape because she wears black? Well, black over black with black accessories?”

“Of course not! It’s not that. She’s a psychic! Can you imagine that part?” Mally asked. “For me?”

Drew gently framed Mallory’s face with his hands and turned her chin up to his lips. They were standing in a foot of snow, bundled in parkas, Mallory in sheepskin boots up to her knees, Drew in brown Wellingtons. But they didn’t feel the cold. Not only were they together and tucked out of the wind, but, despite it being home and therefore boring by its very nature, it was hard to ignore the clean winter beauty all around them. The caps and runnels of snow that decorated the hills of upstate New York made the tiny town of Ridgeline feel like being in the center of a frosted funnel cake.

However, the romantic setting was not on Drew’s side.

Mally’s next shove nearly knocked him over. It came at him packed with every bit of oomph that thirty guy pushups a day could give a ninety-pound girl. She said, “Just leave it! I’m talking! My house is like a train station. And everyone there annoys the hell out of me except Grandma and Sasha.”

“Sasha’s pretty,” Drew said. “Really pretty.”

“So go and lick her face!” Mallory snapped. “You won’t pay any civilized attention to me. We used to talk all the time before we were going out.”

“That’s because talking was the extent of it,” Drew told her reasonably. “Now we have better things to do.”

“Well, you can go do those better things with someone else,” Mallory said. “I need a friend right now … not a … goldfish who keeps globbing his lips at me!”

“That’s harsh!” Drew said, pulling his knitted headband down over his eyebrows.

“I’m sorry,” Mallory said, giving him a hug. “I’m really sorry. I’m just disturbed. I mean stirred up, not mentally disturbed. Although … I probably am mentally disturbed.”

“You can say that again,” Drew muttered.

“Today particularly. I’m edgy,” Mally said. She turned her back but leaned into Drew’s arms, looking up at the strong wooden walls of her ninety-year-old house. “I don’t know why,” she said. “I should feel lucky. Great guy. Great friends. No scholastic hell. Only sixteen fun-filled weeks until school ends.”

Winter in Ridgeline was about to give up its last gust and surrender to spring. There had been a big snowfall, and the runnels in the storm drains from a brief January thaw had not yet done much to make a dent in the drifts, still dusted with sugar. A month after Christmas, the town’s lighted stars and spangled snowflakes were still shining on down from the lampposts onto unblemished snow. There hadn’t been time to get them taken down during the two warm days, and townspeople rather liked the warm, non-denominational glow from the street corners. For Mallory and Drew, it was a beauty that they had to remind themselves to appreciate. But for other people, it was a novelty—a little place lifted out of time. Ridgeline was becoming more popular by the year. Until the past several years, no one had ever moved to a tiny place like Ridgeline, population 2,000. But as cities became increasingly expensive and difficult for families, towns like Ridgeline, only an hour or so from New York City, became big-time destinations. Each year, a dozen or so new families moved to Ridgeline, to the huge new housing developments of mini-mansions built on old farmland beyond Mountain Rest Cemetery or into one of the old original Victorians or Foursquares arrayed along lanes that rose like streets and trees in a model-train village. The houses sat along pavement that unfurled like a Mobius strip from the little town square, from the huge bronze statue of one of the pioneer wives from England or Wales—the first residents of the town.

The twins, Mallory and Meredith, lived in one of the oldest houses on Pilgrim Street, where four generations of their family had grown up. The Brynns’ great-great-grandfather had been one of the first settlers of Ridgeline and was among the men who built the first five houses, of which theirs was one. It had been a mining town then, home to rough-handed men and their patient wives. Now, mining was a dreamy history, and newcomers cooed over Ridgeline as though it were a puppy. They loved the stationery shop and the Mountain Beanery Coffee Shop and the fact that the old flower shop, Bloomers, and the new funeral parlor sat amicably side by side.

All those “transplants” were, as the twins’ grandfather, Arthur Brynn said, “running away from the lives they wanted in the first place.” Little towns such as Ridgeline were getting to be what Grandpa referred to as “boutique” communities for urban refugees.

“You can walk downtown and see a dozen people you’ve never even met these days!” he complained.

Better than anyone except the police, the twins knew that although Ridgeline might look like a storybook hometown, it wasn’t. Not always. To them, Ridgeline had become an invisible veil, through which they could see the secrets of people all around them. And they’d known most of those people all their lives. Drew brought up that very fact now.

“You’d think you’d be happy to have something normal to worry about,” Drew pointed out, irritated that they were wasting the only time they could touch each other all day—the school’s policy on “PDA-beyond-hand-holding” made by people who had either never been in love or were too old to remember it. “No insult intended, life at your house fits into a pretty broad definition of what regular people would call ‘normal.’”

Mallory couldn’t disagree.

Although no one except Drew knew it, Mally and her sister Meredith weren’t the typical girls next door—and the fact that they were identical mirror-image twins wasn’t the half of it.

While reading each other’s thoughts and speaking in their own language were second nature for them, two years earlier, when they turned thirteen, everything changed. After a fire that nearly killed both of them, their “twin” telepathy became total telepathy—dark, scary, and tuned in to whatever evil dwelt at the roots of Ridgeline. In daydreams and nightmares, they saw bits of things and had to fit them together to make any sense of them at all. What they found out turned their relatively happy lives inside out—like the first time, when they learned that David Jellico, the older brother of Merry’s best friend Kim, was actually a budding psychopath hunting for a girl to torture.

As they soon realized, they had the same power in two different flavors.

Meredith was born a minute before midnight on New Year’s Eve, and Mallory born a minute after.

Merry could only see the past—from the recent past to long ago.

Mallory could only see the future, what would or what might happen—although she had no idea when.

What was clear from the first minute was that they were meant to try to stop whoever—or whatever—was doing wrong. But the lines of the battle were never clear. In visions, they received pieces of a puzzle, never a whole map. And the very search caused them as much frustration and fear as whatever they found at the end.

Even when the twins found what they were seeking, they weren’t always successful. Just last year, the twins learned that Mallory’s best friend, Eden, an older girl on Mally’s soccer team, was the embodiment of an ancient Cree Indian legend. A shape-shifter, Eden was her tribe’s medicine woman, destined to live her life alone, partly as a great, buff-colored mountain lion. When she rebelled and tried to run from her destiny, even the twins’ combined knowledge couldn’t save her.

For Mally and Merry, while “the gift” was nothing freaky (scary, yes, but spooky, no) and was as natural to them as Mally being a lefty and Meredith right-handed, they would have willingly given it up in exchange for a bad case of acne any day of the week.

But after “the gift” first emerged in all its awful glory, their grandmother Gwenny told them the truth about it. They would be this way not for a while but forever. All the female twins on their father’s side of the family (and there were no male twins) back as far as anyone knew had the second sight.

Mallory and Merry’s great-great-grandmother and her mother had written hints of it in spidery entries in their family bibles. In letters and diaries now vanished, events that described “the sight” probably showed up much further back than that. Their great-grandmother could virtually “see,” with her mind, through the walls of houses. Even as a tiny child, she knew who was happy and safe. Their great-aunt was the other side of that coin: She could “see” through the walls of people who acted very pious and pure but actually had sad and violent secrets.

Mallory and Merry’s own grandmother could foresee healthy babies before their birth and recovery from illness; but her twin sister, Vera, who died as a child, could foresee only stillbirths and death. Mally and Merry’s power was the distilled essence of all those generations before them. None but they had such a powerful sight, with the ability to intervene in destiny instead of just perceive it. Mallory could perceive things before they happened; Merry could confirm that those things had happened. Together they could try to prevent them from happening again or getting worse. Grandma Gwenny—whose own gift meant only that she could see who would live and be healthy while her sister, Vera, saw only who would die—tried her best to convince the girls that their power was a force for good.

For Merry and Mallory, though, the only good thing that had happened over time was that slowly, they seemed to be learning how to turn the power on when they needed it—although they could never completely turn it off.

That winter day, Drew was about to point out that nothing had called “the gift” out in nearly a year. It was almost a month since the twins had turned fifteen. For them, a birthday was a renewal. A new year. A new age. A kind of pencil-sharpening time for the future.

“And you’re complaining,” he told Mallory.

“It’s just that … since my mother went to medical school … it’s like a home invasion. I don’t even know these people. At first it was just Grandma Gwenny and Big Carla…”

“Big Carla?”

“That nurse’s aide from the hospital who helps take care of Adam and Owen,” said Mallory. “Like everyone else in town does now! You’d know that if you paid attention to anything about me for the past four months!”

Adam and Owen were Mallory and Meredith’s younger brothers. At twelve, Adam was able to take care of himself most of the time—especially in Ridgeline, where crimes were about as rare as unicorns. But Owen was still a baby, barely able to stand. It still amazed the twins that their mother, Campbell—at forty-four years old!—had picked last fall to start medical school, as if being head nurse of the ER at Ridgeline Memorial Hospital weren’t enough. Either she should have had the baby or the new career, but not both! “You’ve met Carla. She moved here a couple of years ago? She’s this big woman with red hair, not fat, but she’s got to be a body-builder or something. She looks like a wrestler? She named her daughter Carla, too… “

“I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure of meeting her. And her daughter is Carla Two, like Carla Two, the movie?”

“Carla also, I meant,” Mallory said and threw up her hands. “Oh, Drew! Why bother? You’re just going to make a joke out of it!”

“I’m not,” Drew said softly. He stroked Mally’s hair and kissed the top of her head. “You smell like spring even in the middle of winter.” Mallory relaxed a bit. Soon, it would be spring. Things were quiet and peaceful—at least on the psychic front if not the home front. Mally was making much out of nothing: She did need to settle down.

“You know, Drew, it’s not that my mother shouldn’t do what she wants. But these people have disrupted our whole lives! We quit choir this year ‘for the family,’ but even that wasn’t enough. It’s like you need a flow chart to know who’s going to be there when you walk into the kitchen in your T-shirt and boxers to get peanut butter toast.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing that,” Drew said.

“I didn’t used to mind you seeing me dressed like that before we were together,” Mallory said.

“Weird that you mind now.”

“Yeah,” Mallory said and reached up to kiss Drew. However, midkiss, she was suddenly limp in his arms, clinging to his neck. Drew knew what this meant. In a few moments, Mally’s eyes would snap back to their customary river-gray brightness, and she would either tell him or not tell him that she’d had a “vision” about something. It would be something crazy that was either going to happen or which she was going to try to stop from happening—that either would or would not involve Drew’s boss at Pizza Papa yelling at him in Italian for being late to work because Mallory needed a ride to interrupt some kind of nuts mayhem no one but she and Drew and her twin sister would ever know about.

He sighed and held her close.

Mallory saw girls, six or seven girls, under a canopy of trees in new leaf. Spring. The future. Around a fire, they danced with six or seven other girls. And they were … well, they were wearing capes or long tunics made of gauzy black or silver stuff that left nothing to the imagination. Mallory could see right through, and there were no clothes underneath. And then, leaning forward with her open hands, one of them began to drop tiny, blond curls into the fire … one by one, as the other nudies raised their arms in some kind of celebration. A few of the other girls whirled and dipped closer to the fire. The girl holding the hair—who was it?—she was familiar in some way. She had a slim, pretty body, but some of the others should have invested in Spandex body stockings…

“I just saw girls naked in the grove!” Mallory told Drew. “I mean, they will be naked in the grove in the spring. There were leaves on the trees.”

“Well, uh, how about that,” Drew said. “That’s a real shocker. Whoever they were, they wouldn’t be the first. Ow!” Mallory punched him again. The grove, near Mountain Home Cemetery, had been a make-out spot for generations.

“But … none of them was with a guy! And one of them was … like … What were they doing? They were, like, dancing,” Mally said. “One of them put some … hair in the fire. And I could tell it was a baby’s hair, not someone with tight curls. It was silky blond baby hair. And then when it started to burn, they danced faster.”

“With each other?”

“Yes, but not like dancing regular people do. And they weren’t naked-naked, but they had on these things you could see right through. And there were other girls, too, with really big … “

“Describe it in detail,” Drew said. “Leave nothing out.”

“Rear ends,” said Mallory. “That’s what I was going to say. I hate myself when I tell you anything serious.”

“That’s why I opt for kissing rather than talking. Be reasonable,” Drew said. Mallory kissed Drew again. And then, again, her eyes rolled back. Drew gasped. A double-header! This was unprecedented. “Mallory! Mallory? Brynn, come on. What’s wrong?”

Just seconds later, Mallory said softly, “It’s Owen. Something’s wrong with Owen.”

“What? What could be wrong? He’s in the house with the sitter. It is Carla today, right?” Drew said.

“Carla? She creeps me out, anyhow. What if she slapped him or left him alone or something?”

Suddenly, both Drew and Mally heard the whoop of the fire engine. Pilgrim Street was one of the four roads that extended out from the downtown square like spokes of a wheel. It was only four miles to the ends of the roads—except the one that led out to Deptford and the mall. It was only four miles from the fire station.

Closer, they could hear it come. And closer.

Then the huge red truck flashed past, followed by an ambulance, lurching to a stop in front of Mallory’s house. Mally took off at a run without a backward glance. “Let it not be anything bad! I take back everything I said about my house.”

Mallory burst through the door just after the paramedics.

Big Carla hunched in the rocking chair while a paramedic worked over Owen, who lay on his back on a blanket on the floor. Even before she got inside, Mallory could hear her twin, Meredith, crying, as well as one side of a telephone conversation that Carla was apparently having on her cell phone with the twins’ mother, who was working at the hospital.

“Campbell, I don’t think he had a fever when I got here,” Carla said. “Sasha said he was just fine all morning when he was with her.”

Mallory looked down at Owen’s little face with its tiny clefted chin. He was pale, nearly gray, and while he was breathing, it was in small gasps, the way he did when he finished his bottle and drifted off to sleep. His eyes were open only a slit, revealing the whites, like a cracked hard-boiled egg. “He didn’t feel hot or even warm. He simply began to vomit,” Carla added. “Oh, Jesus help him. Oh, merciful Lord! He looks like Ellie did. So closed and blue . . .” To the twins’ surprise, tears began to course down Big Carla’s rough-hewn face and her shoulders shook. “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

“You didn’t mean to hurt him?” Mallory said sharply. “What happened?”

“I mean, I didn’t mean for him to get sick… I should have protected him. I should have protected Ellie.” Carla seemed to be on the verge of collapse, but suddenly, and with a big effort, she got control of herself. She wiped away the tears and spoke calmly to the medics.

“He was sick all day,” Merry whispered to Mallory. She added the words for “she’s silly,” in ancient twin language, “Folamish due, ‘Ster. He just passed out a few minutes ago. I freaked out when I couldn’t see anything after that and cut out of practice. Sasha brought me home.”

Sasha Avery, one of the other sitters, was a transfer student to Ridgeline, starting over at a new school senior year—which was hard on anyone. She was from Texas and had joined the work-study program. Merry knew her better than Mallory did because she’d also been an immediate sensation on the cheerleading squad, elevated to varsity in week one with a special tryout. But no one knew very much about Sasha. She didn’t talk about it, but her parents had apparently died pretty recently. And her older sister was in college. According to the older girls on the squad, she lived part of the time with an aunt over in Deptford and part of the time with another family she worked for. That made Merry feel sorry for Sasha, who was so nice that Meredith, even though she was fiercely protective of her role on the team, didn’t mind Sasha being the star for a while.

Sasha had had a sad life.

And, Merry reasoned, worse come to worst, Sasha was not going to dominate anyone on the squad for long: She was going to graduate in a few months anyhow and that would be that.

Sasha had started working for the Brynns in August when Campbell began medical school, caring for Owen two mornings a week for her Child Development credit and working two mornings with Campbell at the hospital, for her Professional Experience segment.

At practice that day, when Merry said her brother was ill, Sasha was so concerned about Owen that she had driven Merry home from practice in her little beat-up car, the one she’d driven all the way from Texas to Ridgeline, New York. Even though Sasha had to run to get to her evening job, she made Meredith promise to call her the minute they knew what was up with the baby she called “Little Fella.”

As he did with everyone, Owen had stolen Sasha’s heart in just a few months. Sasha hadn’t asked any questions about how Merry knew Owen was sick, a lucky thing to Merry’s way of thinking. The twins never stopped worrying that “the gift” would be found out.

Kneeling in the kitchen, Merry still wore her cheerleading warmups and her letter jacket. She hustled on hands and knees over to the place where the medics were starting an intravenous line of what both girls knew was basically sugar water, in case they had to give Owen medicine through a vein later. Owen’s arm was so little, like a doll’s, his skin so soft and translucent that the twins and Drew, who had crowded into the kitchen, were glad he probably couldn’t feel the paramedic prodding for one of his threadlike little veins. “I saw him throwing up all day in school,” Meredith said a second time.

Neither had to explain to the other how it was that Merry could have seen her infant brother throw up six hours earlier. But she could not have seen what would come next. Only Mally could see the future, the emergency, and one contradictory complication of “the gift” was that if the person in trouble was someone super close to the twins, such as Owen, Mally was somehow prevented from seeing the urgency until the last moment—if at all. The visions weren’t like home movies, in which every movement was clear. They were more like those blurry slide shows that biology students were forced to watch.

Suddenly, Mallory slumped down beside her sister.

Drew started toward her, recognizing the tiny trance that usually accompanied a daytime vision. But Mallory was already awakening. No one else had seen.

“Siow,” Mallory told Merry in twin language, their word for “hurt” or “worry.” She had seen a hand wiping baby Owen’s chin as he vomited so profusely that he finally lost consciousness. For some reason, the sensation that accompanied this gentle gesture felt sinister.

On top of it, Owen’s vomiting spell had already happened!

Mallory’s vision was telling her it was going to happen again.

She was about to confide more about it to Merry when the female paramedic spoke up.

“He’s coming around,” the paramedic said quietly. “We’re going to take him in.”

Merry and Mally exchanged looks.

Each of them could hear an echo from her sister’s thoughts. Each was wondering if Owen’s faint meant that he had some horrible legacy from them. Worse, did he just have a touch of flu, this little baby who came along so late in their mother’s life that they expected to feel like his aunts instead of his sisters? Or did he have some grotesque disease that would take him away forever? Neither the twins nor Adam had expected to love Owen with such a total love it was almost crazy. But Owen was a heart-stealer, and every one of them competed to be his favorite.

“I’ll come too,” said Carla, pulling on her orange jacket from Alley Cats Bowlerama over in Deptford. She sniffed at the sleeve. “Darn it! Smells like smoke. Wish the girls at work who smoke would hang their coats somewhere else after they go outside and light up.” Mally took a long breath of relief. At least Carla wasn’t smoking around their house, unless she was trying to cover it up. Both of them had believed they smelled cigarette smoke on her before and wondered if she left Owen alone to sneak outside for a butt.

“Wait up!” Merry said as Carla found her purse and prepared to leave with the paramedics. “He’s my brother.”

“But what can you do?” Carla asked reasonably, all professional now. “You weren’t here when he got sick. You can’t describe for your mother or the doctors how it was. And are you going to leave Adam here alone?”

“I guess not,” Mallory said. “You’re right.”

“I just feel it should be one of us,” Merry said.

“One person can come,” said the lead medic, as they covered Owen up and lifted him gently on a flat blue plastic board with straps that bound him at the chest and hips.

“Sisssa!” he cried, now fully awake and spotting the girls. It was his interchangeable name for them. Owen sobbed, but no tears came. He struggled to sit up.

“Go ‘bye bye to see Mama, Owen,” Merry said. “Go ‘bye bye with Carla in the car to Mama.”

“So he’s that dehydrated?” Carla asked the paramedic. “So much he can’t cry?”

“I do think he is, and that he’ll probably have to be on IV fluids overnight,” the medic said softly.

“I wondered why he didn’t wet his diaper,” Carla said. “Huh.”

“You wondered?” Merry asked. “Didn’t you know?”

“You don’t go jumping to conclusions over everything with a sick baby. They can be fine one minute and terribly sick the next. You watch. That’s what you do. I noticed, and I kept track of how many diapers he wet. But there were no other obvious signs of dehydration. I am trained!” Carla said bluntly.

“Well, sorry,” Merry said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Carla,” Mallory said. “Will you call us?”

“I guess,” Carla said. “Well. Maybe your mom better do that. She said he’d probably be okay.”

“That’s a comfort … probably,” Mallory said. Carla was about as with it as a snail.

Now, looking like some kind of trucker in her big buckle boots and orange coat, Carla shrugged. “There are no guarantees with little kids. They get better from things that should kill them, and things that they should live through take them away.” She sighed and looked down at a charm on her keychain that seemed to enclose a picture neither of the girls could see plainly. “Life goes on.”

“Sayso nay,” Merry said, twin language for “what’s she talking about?”

“What about your car?” Mally said.

“I took the bus over. No reason to waste gas. I’ll just take it home too from the hospital.” And they watched as the paramedics gently loaded Owen into the ambulance and Carla clambered in behind him, without so much as a goodbye to them or Adam. Through the window of the ambulance, the girls could see Carla stroking Owen’s head. It looked like she was crying again.

“Do you think there’s any chance that Carla did something wrong?” Merry asked. “What did she mean with all that stuff?”

“Who’s Ellie?” Drew asked, breaking his silence for the first time since the crisis had begun.

“No idea,” Mallory said. “Maybe her … no, her daughter’s named after her.”

Merry said, “Well, I guess whoever Ellie is, what Carla says is actually good news. If even Mom thinks he’s going to be fine, he will be. You know how she is.”

Mallory’s stress slipped down a few degrees. She had to agree that their mother was the most overprotective woman, if not the most overprotective human being, in the galaxy. When Merry and Mallory began to have the tiny fainting spells, tied to their visions—they were now adept at concealing them by lying down or sitting—Campbell had them screened for everything from Lyme disease to epilepsy. And when nothing showed up, their mother seemed almost disappointed—or so the twins thought.

A moment later, before the truck was even out of sight, Meredith’s phone rang.

“It’s Luna Verdgris,” said a soft voice from the other end of the phone. “I sense an atmosphere of trouble. I’m getting bad vibes.”

“Slow night on the police band?” asked Merry.

The twins knew how Luna “sensed” most things in Ridgeline.

Her mother, Bettina, spent her days in a dark room reading tarot cards for locals and tourists—or monitoring her state-of-the-art police-band radio. Luna had heard from her mom that the ambulance was called to the Brynns’ house. Bettina used the radio in other ways. She was able to tell her wealthy clients that the son who’d gotten four speeding tickets in a row was “basically good” and would “straighten himself out.”

It was harder for Luna to be an individual given how … individualistic her mother was. She tried hard to look as weird as possible, dressing entirely in black with at least six scarves draped around her neck at all times. She described herself as a “wiccan.” She was also a top-notch babysitter who had a job every night of the week (because she was pure magic with kids) and a Sunday school teacher at the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church. Luna (whose real name, the twins learned from Luna’s little sister, was Laura) probably wouldn’t have been so annoying if she hadn’t insisted on grabbing the twins’ left palms, which were identical but opposite—Merry’s right hand was still scarred from the fire—and “reading” their futures once or twice a week.

She had predicted that Meredith would become involved with a young, brown-haired guy, which described half the guys in New York state.

She had “predicted” that Mally would find happiness with a red-haired thin boy, which described 100 percent of the boys who lived next door to the Brynns.

“Owen’s sick,” Merry admitted.

“Was he rushed to the hospital?” Luna asked. “Was that who went?”

“Yes,” Merry said.

“Mer, I’m really sorry. I hope he’s okay. Can I help you guys any way?”

“No, Luna. We’re steady here.”

“Let me know, huh?” Luna asked.

“You bet,” Merry said.

“Let me talk to her for a minute,” Mallory said. Merry handed her twin the telephone. “Luna, this is going to sound weird. But do you ever have, like, a meeting … in the grove?”

“I know how you heard this,” Luna said in disgust. “And it sucks the tailpipe. It’s Corey Gilbertson. Her mother made her quit even though Wicca is totally a nature religion. She said we were Satanists. And it’s not naked, it’s called ‘sky clad,’ and it’s not a sex thing and I’m not gay…”

“Whoa!” Mally said. “That’s way more information than I need. I never thought you were a Satanist. Are you?” Drew, about to leave, made a throat-cutting motion with his hand. Mallory could be way too blunt, which she admitted every time she realized she’ll been way too blunt.

“Are you nuts? I’m a Lutheran!” Luna said. “It’s just interesting, is all. Ridgeline! You might as well wear a T-shirt that says everything you do to save people the trouble of finding out! We only did it twice, last year at the fall and spring … whatever … the equinox. Mallory. It’s an interesting thing. So-called witches are always persecuted. They’ve been persecuted since the beginning of time. Anyone with any healing ability or visions is always persecuted and called evil.”

“I totally agree,” Mallory said.

“You totally agree?”

“Yeah,” Mallory said.

“I’m … I’m going to put a spell on Corey Gilbertson. Don’t worry. I can’t do really bad spells. But maybe something in an itch . . .”

“Oh leave her be, Luna,” Mally said. “She didn’t tell me.”

“Then who did?”

“I saw it in a vision.”

“Don’t make fun of me, Mallory!” Luna said.

“I’m not.”

“I just wanted to know about Owen. Geez!” Luna hung up.

“What was that about?” Merry asked.

“Luna was dancing naked in the grove with some other witches,” Mallory said.

“Oh,” Merry said. “Here I was thinking that it was something weird.”

Just then, Mallory’s cell phone rang. It was Grandma Gwenny, calling from her yoga class. She was out of breath because the whole class had been struggling with their cobras.

“I want you girls to know that Owen will be just fine!’’ Grandma Gwenny said. “He just needs fluids.”

“How did you know? Did Dad call?” Mally asked.

“Well, actually he didn’t,” Grandma said.

“It’s bad enough for us to be like this,” Mally said, trying to joke with a thin will for it. “Having a nutty adult in the family is too much.”

“Of course, you don’t mean me!” Grandma exclaimed with a dry little laugh. “I know you’re worried, so I’m coming over to drive you and Adam to the hospital. In fact, I’m already heading for the car.” She wondered aloud what people at the hospital would make of an “old gal” such as herself in her bright yellow tie-dyed yoga duds.

“You’re something else, Grandma,” Mallory said.

“I’m a hip chick,” Grandma Gwenny said, and Mallory smiled for the first time all day.

Drew had to get to work, so he gave Merry a shoulder hug and kissed Mallory on the nose.

“You know where I am if you need me,” he said.

They did know. Except for Papa himself, Drew held the lifelong continuous work record at Pizza Papa, where he’d thrown his first pie (on the floor) at fourteen. He’d been fired twice (both times for Brynn-related issues, as he often reminded the twins) and rehired when Papa Ernie couldn’t make it without him. He now made about thirteen dollars an hour, executive wages for a kid in Ridgeline. Drew loped to the door, late as he so often was, ducking the auburn mop that topped off his six feet under the door frame of the old house.

Merry pulled her brother Adam from the corner of the kitchen, where he was standing gnawing on his thumbnail. “Come on, Ant. Grandma’s coming. We’ll go over and see the Big O. But you have to stop looking so scared. He’s fine. Babies are very resourceful.”

“You mean resilient,” Mallory said with a sigh.

“I know what I meant, word goddess,” Merry protested.

Mallory’s cell toned with two bells. A text. “Dad’s on his way to the hospital, too,” she said. For the first time, she really noticed her other younger brother and how freaked out he still was. “Adam, do you want some fish sticks or something? Owen’s going to be fine, good as new, just like our sister, the genius, just said. Grandma thinks so, too.”

“I know,” said Adam, not appearing convinced.

“Major truth. He’s totally already better than when I came in,” Merry said. “C’mon. How about I make you a grilled cheese all burny like you li…ke, okay?”

Table of contents

Watch for Me by Moonlight

Copyright

THE LAST SWEET TIME

CALM BEFORE THE STORM

THE BOY IN THE BROWN LEATHER JACKET

STRANGER AT THE DANCE

SNOWFLAKES AND MOONLIGHT

DREAM SPACE

PREDATOR

THOUGH HELL SHOULD BAR THE WAY

SOMEBODY’S SON

EVIL WORK

CLOSING IN

VISIONS AND BAD PIZZA

REAL OR FATE?

TWICE IN A LIFETIME

THE SECRET OF BEN

STEAL AWAY HOME

TO BE? OR NOT TO BE?

IN THINGS UNSEEN

A PROMISE GIVEN

THE GOODBYE BOY

FOR THIS ONE DAY

A MATTER OF TRUST

FOR LOVE OF BEN

THE LOVE BEFORE MY LIFE

THE PERFECT GIRL

LOVED TO DEATH

BEHIND THE MASK

THE GHOST WHO LOVED ME

WATCH FOR ME BY MOONLIGHT

RESCUE

THE TRUTH ABOUT PERFECT

A STOLEN LIFE

SAFETY

BEYOND THIS NIGHT

EVER AFTER

THE ANCESTORS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS