Crescendo Read online

Page 18

  “I’ll pick you up Sunday night. Bring fake ID. ” His eyebrows arched, and he graced me with an egotistical, mocking smile.

  “No problem,” I said, trying to keep my expression ho-hum.

  Technically, I’d be eating my words if I went out with Scott again, but I wasn’t going to stand here and let him call me boring. And I definitely wasn’t going to let him call me a redhead. “What should I wear?”

  “As little as legally all owable. ”

  I nearly choked. “I didn’t know you were big into bands,” I said, once I’d recovered my breath.

  “I played bass back in Portland for a band called Geezer. I’m hoping to get picked up by someone local. The plan is to scout talent Sunday night. ”

  “Sounds like fun,” I lied. “Count me in. ” I could always back out later. A quick text would take care of it. All I cared about currently was not allowing Scott to call me an anal-retentive wimp to my face.

  Scott and I parted ways, and I found Vee waiting at our table, half my doughnut eaten.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said, watching my eyes travel to my doughnut. “What did Scotty want?”

  “He invited me to battle of the bands. ”

  “Oh boy. ”

  “For the last time, I’m not on the rebound. ”

  “Whatever you say. ”

  “Nora Grey?”

  Vee and I looked up to find one of the bakery employees standing over our table. Her work uniform consisted of a lavender polo and a matching lavender name tag that read MADELINE. “Excuse me, are you Nora Grey?” she asked me a second time.

  “Yes,” I said, trying to figure out how she knew my name.

  She was clutching a manila envelope to her chest, and now she held it out to me. “This is for you. ”

  “What is it?” I asked, accepting the envelope.

  She shrugged. “A guy just came in and asked me to give it to you. ”

  “What guy?” Vee asked, craning her neck around the bakery.

  “He already left. He said it was important that Nora get the envelope. I thought maybe he was your boyfriend. One time a guy had flowers delivered here and told us to give them to his girlfriend. She was at the table in the back corner. ” She pointed and smiled. “I still remember. ”

  I slid my finger under the seal and glanced inside. There was a sheet of paper, along with a large ring. Nothing else.

  I looked up at Madeline, who had a dusting of flour smeared across her cheek. “Are you sure this is for me?”

  “The guy pointed right at you and said, ‘Give this to Nora Grey. ’ You’re Nora Grey, aren’t you?”

  I started to reach inside the envelope, but Vee put her hand on mine. “No offense,” she told Madeline, “but we’d like a little privacy. ”

  “Who do you think it’s from?” I asked Vee, once Madeline was out of earshot.

  “I don’t know, but I got goose bumps when she gave it to you. ”

  At Vee’s words, cold fingers walked down my spine too. “Do you think it was Scott?”

  “I don’t know. What’s inside the envelope?” She slid into the chair directly beside mine for a closer look.

  I pulled the ring out, and we inspected it in silence. I could tell just by looking at it that it would be loose on my thumb

  —definitely a man’s ring. It was made of iron, and the crown of the ring, where the stone typically sat, had a raised stamp of a hand. The hand was squeezed into a tight, menacing fist. The crown of the ring was charred black and appeared to have been lit on fire at some point.

  “What the—,” Vee began.

  She stopped when I pulled out the paper. Scrawled in black Sharpie was a note:

  THIS RING BELONGS TO THE BLACK HAND. HE KILLED YOUR DAD.

  CHAPTER 8

  VEE WAS OUT OF HER CHAIR FIRST.

  I chased her to the bakery doors, where we rushed out to blinding sunshine. Shielding our eyes, we looked both ways down the boardwalk. We jogged down to the sand and did the same thing. People were scattered all over the beach, but I didn’t see one familiar face.

  My heart was pounding, and I asked Vee, “Do you think it was a joke?”

  “I’m not laughing. ”

  “Was it Scott?”

  “Maybe. He was just here, after all. ”

  “Or Marcie?” Marcie was the only other person I could think of who might be thoughtless enough to carry this out.

  Vee looked sharply at me. “As a prank? Maybe. ” But was Marcie that cruel? And would she even go to the trouble? This was a lot more involved than a hurtful comment in passing. The note, the ring—even the delivery. That took planning. Marcie seemed like the kind of person who got bored after five minutes of planning.

  “Let’s get to the bottom of this,” Vee said, walking back toward the bakery doors. Once inside, she singled out Madeline. “We need to talk. What did the guy look like? Short?

  Tall? Brown hair? Blond?”

  “He was wearing a hat and sunglasses,” Madeline answered, casting furtive glances at the other bakery workers, who were beginning to pay Vee some attention. “Why? What was in the envelope?”

  “You’re going to have to do better than that,” Vee said. “What exactly was he wearing? Was there a team logo on his hat?

  Did he have facial hair?”

  “I don’t remember,” Madeline stammered. “A black hat. Or maybe brown. I think he was wearing jeans. ”

  “You think?”

  “Come on,” I said, tugging Vee’s arm. “She doesn’t remember. ” I flicked my eyes to Madeline’s. “Thanks for your help. ”

  “Help?” Vee said. “She wasn’t helpful. She can’t go accepting envelopes from strange guys and not remember what they look like!”

  “She thought he was my boyfriend,” I said.

  Madeline nodded vigorously. “I did! I’m so sorry! I thought it was a present! Was something bad in the envelope? Do you want me to call the police?”

  “We want you to remember what the psychopath looked like,” Vee shot back.

  “Black jeans!” Madeline blurted suddenly. “I remember he was wearing black jeans. I mean, I’m almost positive he was. ”

  “Almost positive?” Vee said.

  I hauled her outside and down the boardwalk. After she’d had enough time to cool down, she said, “Babe, I’m so sorry about that. I should have looked in the envelope first. People are stupid. And whoever gave you that envelope is the stupidest of all. I’d happily ninja-star them, if I could. ” I knew she was trying to lighten the mood, but my thoughts were five steps ahead. I wasn’t thinking about my dad’s death anymore. We’d come to a narrow divide between shops, and I pulled her off the walk, wedging us between buildings. “Listen, I need to talk to you. Yesterday I thought I saw my dad. Here, at the pier. ”

  Vee stared at me, but said nothing.

  “It was him, Vee. It was him. ”

  “Babe—,” she began skeptically.

  “I think he’s still alive. ” My dad’s funeral had been closed casket. Maybe there’d been a mistake, a misunderstanding, and it wasn’t my dad who’d died that night. Maybe he was suffering from amnesia, and that’s why he hadn’t come home.

  Maybe something else was preventing him. Or someone …

  “I don’t know how to say this,” Vee said, looking up, down, everywhere but at me. “But he’s not coming back. ”

  “Then how do you explain what I saw?” I said defensively, hurt that she of all people didn’t believe me. Tears stung my eyes, and I quickly brushed them away.

  “It was somebody else. Some other guy who looks like your dad. ”

  “You weren’t there. I saw him!” I didn’t mean to snap. But I wasn’t going to resign myself to the facts. Not after everything I’d been through. Two months ago I’d flung myself off the gym rafters at school. I knew I’d died. I couldn’t deny what I remembered about that night. And yet.

  And yet I was alive today
.

  There was a chance my dad was alive too. Yesterday I’d seen him. I had. Maybe he was trying to communicate with me, send me a message. He wanted me to know he was still alive.

  He didn’t want me to give up on him.

  Vee shook her head. “Don’t do this. ”

  “I’m not giving up on him. Not until I know the truth. I have to find out what happened that night. ”

  “No, you don’t,” Vee said firmly. “Lay your dad’s ghost to rest.

  Digging this up isn’t going to change the past—it’s going to make you relive it. ”

  Lay my dad’s ghost to rest? What about me? How was I supposed to rest until I knew the truth? Vee didn’t understand.

  She wasn’t the one whose father had been unexplainably and violently ripped away. Her family wasn’t shattered. She still had everything.

  The only thing I had left was hope.

  I spent Sunday afternoon at Enzo’s Bistro in the company of the periodic table of the elements, throwing all my concentration into homework, attempting to crowd out any thought of my dad or the envelope I’d received telling me the Black Hand was responsible for his death. It had to be a prank. The envelope, the ring, the note—it was all someone’s idea of a cruel joke.

  Maybe Scott, maybe Marcie. But in all honesty, I didn’t think it was either of them. Scott had sounded sincere when he’d offered his condolences to me and my mom. And Marcie’s cruelty was almost always immature and spontaneous.

  Since I was seated at a computer and already logged in, I ran an Internet search for the Black Hand. I wanted to prove to myself there was no validity in the note. Probably someone had found the ring at a secondhand store, come up with the clever name of the Black Hand, followed me to the boardwalk, and asked Madeline to hand the envelope to me. Looking back, it didn’t even matter that Madeline couldn’t remember what the guy looked like, because mostly likely, he wasn’t the person behind the prank. That person had probably stopped a random guy on the boardwalk and paid him a few dollars to deliver the envelope. That’s what I would have done. If I were a sick, twisted person who got off on hurting other people.

  A page of links for the Black Hand popped up on the monitor.

  The first link was for a secret society that had reportedly assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1914, catapulting the world into World War I. The next link was for a rock band. The Black Hand was also the name of a group of vampires in a role-playing game. Finally, in the early 1900s, an Italian gang dubbed the Black Hand took New York by storm.

  Not one link mentioned Maine. Not one image showed an iron ring stamped with a fist.

  See? I told myself. A prank.

  Realizing I’d strayed to the very topic I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about, I pinned my eyes back on the homework spread out before me. I needed to get a grip on chemical formulas and calculating atomic mass. My first chemistry lab was coming up, and with Marcie as my partner, I was preparing for the worst by putting in extra hours outside of school to drag along her dead weight. I punched a few numbers into my calculator, then carefully transcribed my answer onto the open page of my notebook, repeating the answer loudly in my head, to block out thoughts of the Black Hand.