"A ghost?" Cassie said, startled.
"Sure. If you believe in them at all, some of them like to hang out where murders are committed."
Deborah spoke up eagerly. "Yeah, like the Wailing Woman of Beverly, that lady in black that appears when somebody is going to die by violence."
"Or that phantom ship in Kennybunk-the Isidore. The one that comes and shows you your coffin if you're going to die at sea," Adam said, looking thoughtful.
Cassie was confused. She'd assumed it was the dark energy they were tracking-but who could tell? "It did end up in the cemetery," she said slowly. "Which seems like a logical place for a ghost. But if it wasn't the dark energy that killed Jeffrey, who was it? Who would want to kill him?"
Even as she asked, she knew the answer. Vividly, in her mind, she saw Jeffrey standing between two girls: one tall, dark, and disturbingly beautiful; the other small and wiry, with rusty hair and a pugnacious face.
"Faye or Sally," she whispered. "They were both jealous tonight. But-oh, look, even if they were mad enough to kill him, neither of them could have actually done it! Jeffrey was an athlete."
"A witch could have done it," Deborah said matter-of-factly. "Faye could've made him do it to himself."
"And Sally's got friends on the football team," Nick added dryly. "That's how she got herself voted Homecoming Queen. If they strangled him first, and then strung him up..."
Adam was looking disturbed at this coldblooded discussion. "You don't actually believe that."
"Hey, a woman scorned, you know?" Nick said. "I'm not saying either of them did it. I'm saying either of them could have."
"Well, we won't figure it out by standing here," Cassie said, shivering. Adam's jacket had slipped off when she went over the fence. "Maybe if we could try to trace it again-"
It was then she realized she wasn't holding the crystal.
"It's gone," she said. "Melanie's crystal. I must have dropped it when that thing rushed us. It should be right here on the ground, then. It's got to be," she said.
But it wasn't. They all stooped to look, and Cassie combed through the sparse, withered grass with her fingers, but none of them could find it.
Somehow, this final disaster, incredibly tiny in comparison to everything that had happened that night, brought Cassie close to tears.
"It's been in Melanie's family for generations," she said, blinking hard.
"Melanie will understand," Adam told her gently. He put a hand on her shoulder, not easily but carefully, as if keenly aware that they were in front of witnesses.
"It's true, though; there's no point in standing around here," he said to the others. "Let's get back to school. Maybe they've found out something about Jeffrey there."
As Cassie walked, the Cinderella shoes hurting her feet and Laurel's silvery dress streaked with dirt, she found herself looking straight into the Blood Moon. It was hovering over New Salem like the Angel of Death, she thought.
Normally, on the night of the full moon, the Circle would meet and celebrate. But on the day after Jeffrey's murder Diana was still sick, Faye was refusing to speak to anyone, and no one else had the heart to call a meeting.
Cassie spent the day feeling wretched. Last night at the high school the police had found no leads as to Jeffrey's killer. They hadn't said if he'd been strangled first and then hung, or if he'd just been hung. They weren't saying much of anything, and they didn't like questions.
Melanie had been kind about the necklace, but Cassie still felt guilty. She'd used it to go off on what turned out to be a wild-goose chase, and then she'd lost it. But far worse was the feeling of guilt over Jeffrey.
If she hadn't danced with him, maybe Faye and Sally wouldn't have been so angry. If she hadn't let Faye have the skull, then the dark energy wouldn't have been released. However she looked at it, she felt responsible, and she hadn't slept all night for thinking about it.
"Do you want to talk?" her grandmother said, looking up from the table where she was cutting ginger root. The archaic kitchen which had seemed so bewildering to Cassie when she'd first come to New Salem was now a sort of haven. There was always something to do here, cutting or drying or preserving the herbs from her grandmother's garden, and there was often a fire in the hearth. It was a cheerful, homey place.
"Oh, Grandma," Cassie said, then stopped. She wanted to talk, yes, but how could she?
She stared at her grandmother's wrinkled hands spreading the root in a wooden rack for drying.
"You know, Cassie, that I'm always here for you-and so is your mother," her grandmother went on. She threw a sudden sharp glance up at the kitchen doorway, and Cassie saw that her mother was standing there.
Mrs. Blake's large dark eyes were fixed on Cassie, and Cassie thought there was something sad in them. Ever since they'd come on this "vacation" to Massachusetts, her mother had looked troubled, but these days there was a kind of tired wistfulness in her face that puzzled Cassie. Her mother was so beautiful, and so young-looking, and the new helplessness in her expression made her seem even younger than ever.
"And you know, Cassie, that if you're truly unhappy here-" her mother began, with a kind of defiance in her gaze.
Cassie's grandmother had stiffened, and her hands stopped spreading the root.
"-we don't have to stay," her mother finished.
Cassie was astounded. After all she'd been through those first weeks in New Salem, after all those nights she'd wanted to die from homesickness-now her mother said they could go? But even stranger was the way Cassie's grandmother was glaring.