For one wonderful moment, Alex was dead sure that here was the proof that Mary MacLane’s book still held sway at Brookhants, even after all their troubles with it. And now, Libbie would be unable to refute it, herself having just witnessed two of their so few remaining students walk a copy out of the woods.

  But alas, as she looked down Alex saw that she held Richard Marsh’s novel The Beetle, a vivid, color illustration of that ugly insect crawling across its front. It was a lurid tale of horror. But it was not The Story of Mary MacLane.

  “It’s The Beetle,” Camille said, speaking not to Alex, but to Libbie. “I’ve read it so many times.”

  “It’s very scary,” Josephine added stupidly.

  Alex turned the book over in her hands. It did look like it had been read many times, its binding stained and marred. There was also a slip of paper wedged between its pages, a few inches sticking out the top. Perhaps it was only a bookmark but it flicked at some vague core of dread inside her.

  “I’m not sure it’s wise to work so diligently to frighten yourselves, girls,” Libbie said. “But I have heard that if that’s the result you’re after, then you’ve landed upon the novel to do it.”

  “Oh, it’s deliciously awful,” Camille said. “It’s one of my favorites because it’s so gruesome.”

  Alex had been about to look at that sandwiched piece of paper, to make certain it wasn’t something it should not be, but Camille’s comment rekindled her anger and she thrust the novel back at the girl, asking, “Why would you choose to fill your minds with fresh horrors? Haven’t we had quite enough of those here, without also seeking them out in books?”

  “They’ve already set the tables, girls,” Libbie said, interrupting with false cheer, “so you’d best hurry.”

  Camille and Josephine did not wait for additional instruction. They scooted around Alex like she was a panting tiger on a short leash.

  “I’m told there’s gingerbread for dessert,” Libbie added. “Will one of you see about saving me a piece for tomorrow?”

  “I will, Principal Brookhants,” Josephine said as both girls reattached themselves to each other. They even waved at Caspar and fawned over the horses as they went.

  But once they reached the Main Hall steps, Alex, who was still stopped in the snow, watched as Camille turned and looked right at her in order to grin like a devil—the girl’s mouth mirroring nothing so much as the mirthless stretch of lips Alex had seen earlier in the stereoscope image, as if Camille now had fish bones jammed between her cheeks. It was the same awful smile. Camille turned to follow Josephine inside and Alex shuddered.

  Libbie had been waiting to mount the carriage, unhappily watching Alex watch the girls. “Was any of that necessary?” she now asked her. “Did you get what you were after?”

  Alex, still stunned by Camille’s smile, took a few moments to process Libbie’s displeasure. Then she said, “They were coming from the woods on the orchard path.” She felt that should be more than enough to explain.

  “Well if that isn’t cause for a scene.”

  “It’s very suitable cause for a scene,” Alex said, feeling, as was often the case now, that she needed to defend herself. “They’ve been told not to go into the woods. More than once, they’ve been told. And those two are no good for each other, anyway. Not so long ago you would have agreed with me about that.”

  “It feels long ago,” Libbie said, taking Caspar’s hand as she mounted the carriage.

  “Yes, it does,” Alex said. “That we agree on.” Her stockings were now sopping and there was so much snow in her boots she could curl her toes around it. She felt additionally displeased when Caspar did not hold out his hand to assist her into the carriage and instead moved himself back into the driver’s seat. This was almost certainly because Alex had refused his assistance so many times before, but no matter: today his lack of deference rankled her. It was her right to refuse but he should nonetheless offer.

  As Alex heaved herself into the carriage, Libbie said, sounding very defeated, “This really can’t go on.”

  “It won’t,” Alex said simply. She meant it.

  Road Apples

  Audrey did not want to be in an SUV on the way to a strip mall in Tiverton. They were now six days into filming—six messy, not particularly successful days, if you asked her—and tomorrow both she and Harper had five A.M. call times.

  And yet here she was: in an SUV on the way to a strip mall in Tiverton. With Merritt along, too.

  Only Merritt did not have a five A.M. call time. She would likely wander onto set the next day whenever (and if ever) she felt like it. From what Audrey could tell, and to Bo’s annoyance, thus far Merritt had spent about half of her time at Brookhants in front of her laptop. The night before, in fact, when she’d been brushing her teeth for bed, Audrey had looked out the open window of her tiny house and through the window into Merritt’s. Her cottage was dark except for the cool wash of light from her laptop screen, which was wrapped around her like a private fog. If Audrey listened for it (and silenced her electric toothbrush) she could even hear the tap-tap-tap of Merritt’s hands over her keyboard. Audrey had wished for binoculars so she might read the screen.

  She should ask Bo for a pair. If she did, she felt certain they’d show up on the counter in her cottage, probably with a little note attached. Just now there was yet another little note from him on her phone screen in the form of a text:

  Something coming up ahead in the road. Get out of the car to look.

  It was dusk, and Carl Eckhart was driving them through the woods surrounding Brookhants on a dirt road reopened by production only days before. There was tree canopy above and they were enclosed on either side by tall trunks and looming dark, some patches deeper than others.

  Audrey was in the seat Bo wanted her in, left side behind the driver. Harper was up front with Carl, because of course she was—the two of them having apparently already attained their mutual ride-or-die status—and Merritt was next to Audrey. Audrey happened to know that this particular Range Rover was rigged with cameras and microphones aplenty. (And she was wearing her own concealed mic.) Bo had been sending her rushed texts about blocking, about how best to incorporate this or that when she played this scene. Because that’s what it was, for Audrey: a scene. One that had come up earlier, apparently, than Bo had been planning for, but he was capitalizing on the opportunity.

  For Harper and Merritt, it was a spontaneous trip, happening only because Harper had said she was craving a Cherry Coke slushee and some greasy pizza and Carl had overheard and said he knew where there was a convenience store in Tiverton with an Icee machine.* And it happened to be in the same strip mall with a, as Carl put it, “pizza joint.”

  “So Caspar and Hanna were what, your great-great-grandparents? Great-great-great?” Harper was now asking Carl. “I can’t ever do family math right.”

  “Not grandparents,” Merritt said, her face in her phone, but not missing a word. “Can’t be. Max and Adelaide didn’t ever have children. Remember, Hanna—”

  “My relation to them is a lot more distant than that,” Carl said.

  Audrey smiled at Carl not caring whether he cut Merritt off.

  “Well, you got the last name anyway,” Harper said. “That’s what matters.”

  A fresh text from Bo landed on Audrey’s phone: Get in there! Ask him about what he knows about the curse. Something!

  Her heart rate ticked up. She played out a few options in her head, thought them each stupid, and decided to go with what she hoped was the least stupid. She took a breath, leaned forward a notch, and asked, “Carl, does your family believe in any of the curse stuff? I mean, did you, like, grow up thinking of it as real?”

  She thought she sensed an eye roll from Merritt, but to be fair, it was only a sensation. And this Merritt, the one who had shown up with Elaine in that green convertible, was notably changed from the Merritt Audrey had met back at Bo’s bungalow of horrors. She wasn’t kind, exactly. But she wasn’t outwardly cruel and needling, either. (At least not yet.)

  Carl scratched at the back of his hairline, pushing up his Red Sox baseball cap as he did so that it now sat crooked atop his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “Me and my sister would sometimes scare each other about things we pretended to see in the woods that we didn’t. Least I didn’t.”

  “Like what?” Harper asked. She appeared to revel in this line of inquiry.

  “Oh, like witches around their cauldrons, I guess. Or ghosts. One time I told Sue, that’s my little sister, that I’d found a skeleton buried by the hot springs. She didn’t quite believe me, but she still came with me to see it. I waited until she was bent over looking for it and then pushed her in.”

  “Sounds like you were a jerk,” Harper said. “Does Sue even still speak to you?”

  “She does, in fact,” Carl said. “She’s a better human than I am.”

  “Not hard,” Harper said.

  And it seemed like that was it, they were moving on from the topic of cursed Brookhants as it pertained to Carl Eckhart. Audrey waited for somebody to ask something else, except everyone but Carl had their eyes on their phones; it was again quiet enough to make out the seventies soft rock playing on the satellite radio station.

  She had to be the one to do it. Again.

  “But did you ever talk about, like, the girls who died?” Audrey asked, again leaning forward in her seat so that Carl would be certain she was speaking to him. “Or anything about the curse—I mean, in specific?”

  She felt so obvious, desperate. She wasn’t any good at this.

  “I can’t honestly sit here and tell you that it came up a whole lot,” he said. “But you’re right—somebody must have told me some of the history at some point, because I know it now.”

  “Maybe other kids?” Merritt said. “I interviewed some locals for the book and most of them had at least one Brookhants story that they thought was better than their friends’ one Brookhants story.”

  “That could be,” Carl said, looking for her in the rearview, but Merritt’s face was still tilted down to her phone, so he found Audrey’s instead. “Probably my friends knew some of it better than I did. I was never into that stuff.” He winked at her. “Not the answer you were looking for, huh?”

  Audrey responded quickly, “No, it’s—I didn’t have one I was looking for. I just wondered what you thought of all this. I mean since it’s the reason we’re making this movie and you’re connected to it personally.”

  “I think they’re paying me too much money to drive you three around, so I’m fine with it.”

  “Not the hero we want but maybe the one we need,” Harper said.

  Another text from Bo: Keep it on this track.

  Audrey did not have anything else to ask on this track. Nothing. She was tired. This was dumb and she was bad at it. Plus, she had a real scene, a Clara Broward scene that would ask a lot of her, the following morning. That’s what she should be thinking about now. Not this.

  They’d been rounding a bend in the narrow road, the trees so clogged and heavy around them that they formed a kind of tunnel. And as soon as the road straightened again, there was something in the middle of it.

  “Shit!” Carl’s sudden braking lurched them forward with enough force to be snagged by their seat belts and jerked back. Audrey’s phone flew out of her hands and into the front of the SUV, where it smacked hard against the windshield. Merritt shrieked and the four of them, to a person, rubbed their necks at the whiplash.

  “Everybody alright?” Carl asked. They were now fully stopped in the road.

  “Not so much!” This from Merritt. “What was that?” She made a can you believe this guy? face at Audrey.

  “There’s something in the road,” Harper said. She had already undone her seat belt and now popped open her door to climb out.

  “What’s in the road?” Merritt asked, leaning forward to better see out the windshield.

  “Bunch of boxes of something,” Harper said.

  “I’ll go look,” Carl said. He opened his own door. “You stay—all I need is to be the one who gets you run over.”

  “Oh c’mon,” Harper said. “Who’s gonna run us over? This road didn’t even exist until, like, yesterday.” She hopped down to join him even though he kept arguing with her about it.

  Audrey stretched between the front seats in order to reach her phone where it had dropped onto the floor. As soon as she touched it, she could tell that its screen was shattered.

  “Was that your phone that flew past my face?” Merritt asked.

  “Yeah,” Audrey said as she sat back and looked at it: it wasn’t working, like shards of glass popped from its spiderweb black screen not working. “Unfortunately, I think Carl just killed it.” She tilted it at Merritt so she could see the shattered screen.

  “Fuck,” Merritt said. She’d been charging her own phone and now she handed the cord to Audrey. “Maybe try this?”

  A piece of glass fell from the phone’s screen even as Audrey plugged it in. Nothing happened.

  “I’m sorry,” Merritt said, watching the screen stay dead. “Tell Carl he has to buy you a new one.”

  Outside, Harper and Carl laughed together at something.

  “So are you participating in this inanity?” Merritt asked.

  This was Audrey’s moment, but how to play it without Bo on her phone? “I guess so” is what she went with. She opened her door but didn’t move.

  “OK. Let’s forgo all reason and get out of the car here in the darkest part of the woods to look at the thing in the road that’s not supposed to be there.” I bet you know, Readers, exactly how Merritt said this. But she did undo her seat belt and open her door.

  Outside they were submerged in the green light from the leaves overhead. The dense mugginess added to the feeling of being underwater in a pond. Or a scummy fountain.

  Audrey joined Merritt in front of the SUV and they walked together. Carl and Harper were blocking their view of the things in the road. And then Harper bent over them. She was already using her phone to take a video of whatever it was.

  Carl turned as he heard them approach. “Apples,” he said, as if he didn’t know the meaning of the word he’d just used. “I got nothing.”

  Merritt and Audrey peeled apart, moved around Carl and Harper to see what he meant.

  Apples is what he meant: three antique wooden crates of Black Oxford apples, two placed side by side and one centered on top of them to form a small pyramid there in the middle of the road. A few yellow jackets made lazy swoops above and around these crates, and now around the four of them as well, though not enough to pay much attention to. It was a reasonable, even expected, number of yellow jackets for autumn and crates of apples.

  “I have no idea what these are doing here,” Carl said.

  “Well, obviously somebody put them here,” Merritt said. “They didn’t bounce out the back of a truck into this nice stack of three.”

  “Or what if they did?” Harper said. With her nonvideoing hand, she took an apple from the crate atop the pyramid and held it up to her phone’s camera lens. Then she situated her face into the frame and took a bite.

  “Harper!” Merritt said, though even she seemed surprised by the force of her reaction. She regained her detached voice to add, “That seems ill advised given that you don’t know how these road apples came to be.”

  “Road apples are what you call horse droppings,” Carl said.

  “I did not use the term by accident, Carl,” Merritt said.

  “It also seems ill advised given every fairy tale ever,” Audrey said. This comment earned her a nod from Merritt, which pleased her a stupid amount.

  “It’s a good apple,” Harper said, chewing as loudly as possible for her video. She then took another large bite, because of course she did. “Like, really good.”

  “I mean, they have to be from Brookhants, right, Carl?” Audrey asked. She had to stop saying right, Carl after every question, but this was what came from making her be the screenwriter, too. She wondered how they were even filming this. External cameras on the SUV, or drones? Or did Bo have a crew camouflaged somewhere nearby in the woods?

  “Could be, I guess,” Carl said. “This is what’s in the orchard, but nobody I know uses these kinda crates anymore. And we haven’t picked ours yet, either. It’s still too early.”

  “Spooky,” Harper said, midbite. She seemed to be done with her video, her phone no longer held aloft.

  “Is it?” Merritt said. “Seems like someone’s idea of a prank. One that’s too enigmatic to mean much of anything.”

  “I think she looks like Mary MacLane,” Audrey said. She kneeled to examine the smiling lady holding the apple on the crate’s paper label, Black Oxford printed in script over the image’s bottom. Audrey did actually think this, but she also knew it was the kind of thing Bo would want her to say.

  “Oh shit,” Harper said, kneeling, too. “Yeah, she does.” She looked up at Merritt for confirmation.

  “I mean, she doesn’t not look like her,” Merritt said. “Her style is from the right era, anyway.”

  “So do we bring them with us or just move them to the side of the road?” Carl asked.

  “Bring them,” Harper said.

  “Side of the road,” Merritt and Audrey said exactly together.

  “You’re outnumbered,” Carl said to Harper.

  “Not if you make it a tie.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I’m also for side of the road.”

  “Nerd,” Harper said, but she slipped her phone into her back pocket, tossed her apple core into the woods, and bent to lift the top crate. Carl went for the one nearest to him, but Merritt got to it sooner, and before he could reach the crate in front of Audrey, she had bent over and lifted it, too.