My heart beat so hard it choked me.
For a moment, Ida looked like she was about to cry, but when she turned to me her face hardened. “She hasn’t been leaving these notes for us to find. Has she.” It wasn’t a question, so nobody answered. “Mandy didn’t put the notes anywhere.” Ida’s voice was loud; people around us paused to listen with teacups raised partway to their mouths. “Deena’s the one who’s been leaving them. Leading us around. Mysteriously finding pristine letters in bizarre places—how were we so stupid?” She threw the letter across the table and it fluttered on top of our plates, our uneaten sandwiches, our cups of tea.
“I knew it was impossible,” Finn whispered, mostly to himself. The three of them faced me with deep hurt in their eyes.
Cale shook her head very slowly. “Why didn’t you just tell us, Deena? I was honestly starting to think it was magic. All this talk of ghosts . . . You could have told us. You know we’d have followed you anyway.”
“I didn’t put them there,” I said, my voice a tiny vanishing thing.
“How can you expect us to believe that?” Ida cried. “For all we know, you wrote these. For all we know, it was never Mandy at all. Whose handwriting is this really? Is it yours?”
“It could be,” said Finn. “It’s similar. Like she’s disguised it.”
My voice was going. My voice was half gone. “It’s Mandy’s handwriting. It was Mandy all along.”
“But—” said Cale.
Ida cut her off. “Why are we here, Deena? Really? To walk back through your family tree? You know all this already. Obviously.”
“I don’t.” My words were strangled. I didn’t know anything. “I don’t know. I just know that I have to break the curse. Find Mandy.”
“None of this is even real, Deena,” Ida said.
“Okay,” said Finn with a single clap of his hands, all business. “Maybe it’s time to bring this road trip to a close.”
“But we’re not there yet!” I cried. “We haven’t found Mandy. We haven’t broken the curse. The banshees are still following us. Look at my arms, my neck. Look! You’ve felt them. You’ve all heard them. You know what that means.”
Right then all I could feel was our ragtag group unraveling at the seams.
Finn pulled gently at my sleeve. “Time to go, Deena.”
“No.”
“Deena,” Cale said.
“No.” I couldn’t leave. “I don’t have time for this bullshit. I have to go. You can come with me or you can leave. That’s your choice. This is my journey.”
The letter was sprinkled with crumbs when I grabbed it and shoved it back into my hoodie pocket with the others. What did it matter who left them where? All that mattered was that this was my family tree, branch by fragile branch, reaching back through a weathered trunk to the very beginning, to the casting of the curse, to the key to being free of the banshees forever. To finding my eldest sister, if I still had a sister to be found.
“We’ve come all this way,” I said.
Finn’s voice was gentle, in contrast to the fire in Ida’s eyes. “And now it’s time to go home.”
“I didn’t ask you to follow me.” I only realized I’d shouted when the coffee shop fell silent. “I never said I needed any of you. You just latched on, came along. You did the cider and haunted houses bit, gold stars for you. This is serious. For me. For my family. I never asked any of you to follow me.”
Quiet settled on the room.
“Okay,” said Finn. “Okay, Deena. We’ll stop following. We’ll leave you alone if that’s what you want.”
“But really,” Ida continued his sentence as if it’d been hers all along, “you should probably just go home. Your sister’s obviously worried about you. And honestly, I think she should be.”
“I called her,” said Finn slowly. “I told her where you are. She’s on her way. It’s over, Deena.”
My head shook, spun me dizzy. He’d called my sister. My so-called friends were abandoning me, safe in the knowledge that Rachel was coming to fetch me. They’d seen me safely here, so now they were free to leave. They’d promised to look out for me, but now they were disappearing too.
Finn took Ida’s bags and her hand and they walked away without turning once. At the door, Cale looked back and gave me a strange, sad smile. She half waved and walked out.
I didn’t follow.
* * *
—
It didn’t matter that my friends were right. That I didn’t tell them about the letters. There was enough to tell already. They were enough, I thought: Mandy’s words written by my hand. Mandy’s work, pulled together, pieced together, dropped like bread crumbs across the country. Everything in those letters was true.
Mandy believed there was a curse on our family, but for the longest time she didn’t think to break it. The first she heard of it was rumors. Whispers at infrequent family events. Our mother’s family, the MacLachlans, were a tight but judgmental clan, more concerned with appearances than affection. In families like that, gossip is like air: constant, intangible. Impossible to know where each rumor came from or if it was true.
Family rumor spoke of the Rys bad apples, a tree full of them, rotten almost to the core. (Our father, obviously, had avoided being given that particular label.) Family tattle said that at seventeen bad things happened to Rys women who deviated from the family tree. Family gossip said they always deserved what they got.
“It’s a curse,” Mandy said to Rachel.
“Nonsense,” her sister replied.
But Mandy’s interest was piqued. She poked and pried, finally got out of our extended family members that there was a connection with the Ryses and Sligo. She spent three weeks traveling around the county, following town gossip and local history, until a tenuous lead brought her to a long-abandoned cottage in an overgrown orchard.
In the middle of the burnt-out ruins was the huge gleaming skull of a bull. Inside its jaws was Mary Ellen’s story.
Maybe Mandy had found Lizzie’s diary, where she wrote every story her sister had told her about the home, where she had pieced together the details of Mary Ellen’s life from letters her grandmother had hidden in the barn with the bull. Maybe that’s where Lizzie left her diary after Julia died: safe and hidden in the skeleton jaws of her sister’s prize bull.
Or maybe the bull came back to life, opened his mouth and spoke.
Mandy had a name now, an idea of where our family history began. She took the bull skull for protection and kept researching, digging through our family’s past, reconstructing its history, drawing the roots of its scraggly tree. Piece by piece she put it together, but it wasn’t until the day she left, the day of my seventeenth birthday, when she’d put the final branches in place, that she had a hunch: had suddenly considered that there might be a way to break the curse.