“You know I will. You don’t even have to ask.”
She squeezed my hands tightly. “Think hard about this, Shelby. I’m not saying be her friend. You’re already her friend. This is a very different kind of responsibility. And I know you’re likely to have your hands full with Tom.”
“Don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about anything except your fight. Focus on what you need to focus on. I’ll always be there for Anna. There’s never a question about that.”
If I didn’t know Trina as well as I did, I would have sworn that I saw tears in her eyes. She didn’t say anything more. With a cracked smile of gratitude, she waved me toward Jeremiah’s small bedroom. I walked down there, but Trina stayed in the hallway behind me. I understood that she couldn’t go inside. I tapped the door gently with my knuckles to alert Anna that I was coming in.
It was a boy’s room, painted midnight blue with posters of dinosaurs taped on the walls. The floor was messy with metal race cars and rainbow-colored Legos scattered around like land mines for bare feet. Jeremiah had dirty underwear and socks piled in the corner, and they had the slightly rancid smell of a boy who didn’t shower as often as he should. I saw an open can of yellow Wilson shuttlecocks tipped over on his dresser. It was easy to imagine Jeremiah in the campground, whacking one of those shuttlecocks with his badminton racket and chasing after it.
His bed was unmade. He had Jurassic Park sheets twisted into knots. Anna sat on the bed with her legs crossed. She had a pile of rocks in a plastic ice cream bucket in front of her that she was building into a column on top of a hardcover copy of a Rick Riordan book. The rocks were a shiny mixture of flat beach stones, all smooth as if they’d been polished and rounded by water.
I pulled a plastic chair over toward the bed and sat down in it. Anna didn’t look at me. She kept stacking rocks with a quiet intensity, choosing them carefully so they went one on top of the other. The tower in front of her was almost a foot tall. She had a look about her that said nothing in the world was more important than what she was doing at that moment.
“Hey, Anna,” I said softly.
“Hey, Shelby.”
“What are you doing?”
“This is a Karen.”
“A what?”
“A Karen. Last fall we went on a field trip. The teacher showed us how the Indians made Karens in honor of their ancestors by stacking stones together. Jeremiah and I thought it was cool.”
I smiled. “Oh, a cairn. Okay. So why are you making a cairn?”
The girl picked up each stone as if it were sacred. “They’re for dead people.”
“Are you talking about Jeremiah?”
“Yes.”
“Anna, we don’t know that Jeremiah is dead. You shouldn’t think that. We all hope he’s fine and will be back home really soon.”
Anna placed another rock, and she was careful and precise about it. When she was done, she shook her head. “No, he’s dead.”
“Why do you think that?”
“He told me.”
I glanced at the open door to the bedroom. I wanted to make sure no one else in the house had come upstairs to hear any of this. “Jeremiah told you he was dead? How did he do that?”
“He came to visit me when I was sleeping last night. He was all wet, like he’d been in the rain. He told me that he was dead but that it was okay and I shouldn’t feel bad. But I do. So I told him I would make a Karen for him.”
“Anna, that was just a dream.”
“No, Shelby. I saw him. He’s dead.”
She lifted one more stone out of the ice cream bucket and put it on top of the others, but her hand began to shake. This time, the tower of stones fell down over the book and onto the sheets. Anna frowned, and her lower lip trembled, but she didn’t cry. She picked up all of the rocks and put them back in the bucket, and then she chose two stones and started over.
“In your dream, did Jeremiah tell you what happened to him?”
“No. He didn’t talk about that.”
“Do you have any idea where he was?”
“In the woods.”
“Did you recognize the woods? Was it the national forest?”
Anna shook her head. “I don’t know. It was just somewhere in the woods.”
“Did you see anyone else? Was anyone with him?”
“No. He was alone, because he was dead. But there was a cross.”
“What?”
“A cross. He was standing next to a birch tree, and somebody had carved a big cross in the trunk of the tree, like with a knife or something.”
You may think I was crazy to ask her about these things, but there were worse places to look for answers than inside a child’s dream. Sometimes that’s how they share secrets when the real world is too scary for them. And I’ve always believed that dreams can carry clues, too. No matter what had happened between them, Anna and Jeremiah had been best friends. If he was going to find a way to send a message through anyone, it was her.
“Thank you for telling me about this, Anna, but how about we keep your dream between us. Okay? Can you do that? I think it would upset people to hear you talking about Jeremiah being dead.”
“I understand.”
“But it’s good that you told me. That’s the right thing to do. Remember what I said in the cemetery on Friday? You can tell me anything. It doesn’t matter what it is. I’ll always protect you no matter what.”
Anna put down the stone she was holding. She stared into the bucket of rocks, and then she finally looked up. Our eyes met. “No, Shelby. You can’t protect me. He’s going to get me.”
“What are you talking about? Who’s going to get you?”
“The Ursulina.”
I reached out and stroked her hair. “Oh, honey. Oh, is that what you think? Anna, the Ursulina isn’t real. It’s just a story. You shouldn’t believe it, and you shouldn’t be scared of it.”
“No, you’re wrong. It’s real. It came after Jeremiah, and it got him. And now it’s going to come after me next.”
“Why do you think that?”
The girl rubbed one of the stones from the cairn between her fingers, but she didn’t answer me.
“Anna?”
“I can’t say anything about that. It’s a secret.”
“A secret? What kind of secret? Anna, I really need you to tell me.”
“No, I can’t. We swore we wouldn’t say anything.”
My heart started beating a little faster. “Was this a secret between you and Jeremiah?”
“Yes.”
“Does this secret have anything to do with why you and Jeremiah aren’t friends anymore?”
She bowed her head and nodded.
“Anna, what happened? Please tell me.”
But the girl shook her head vigorously and pressed her lips shut.
“Well, can you tell me when this happened?”
“It was months ago. I don’t know when. The leaves were all over the ground.”
The leaves were falling.
Autumn.
I remembered Jeannie Samper telling me that her son Matthew babysat Jeremiah one night the previous fall. And that Matthew had found Jeremiah sitting out on the deck below his bedroom, terrified by something he’d seen.
“Anna, I heard that Jeremiah sneaked out of his room one night last fall. Do you know anything about that?”
Her eyes got wide with surprise, and I knew I was right. We were talking about the same night.
“Where did he go?”
“The woods,” she said after a long pause. “He went into the woods behind his house.”
“Did you go with him?”
“No! No! I didn’t do anything, I swear, I didn’t do anything!”
“It’s okay. You’re not in any trouble. What was Jeremiah doing? Why did he sneak out?”