Page 2 of The Executioners Three
Freddie Gellar hadn’t meant to get half the student body of Fortin Prep boarding school arrested. It wasn’t like she’d woken up that morning and thought, You know what? I feel like ruining lives at the rival high school today.
Not at all. She’d simply heard shrieks coming from the woods near her house, so she’d called the cops. Like any normal human with a normal conscience would do.
Freddie stabbed her broom halfheartedly at a swarm of daddy longlegs who’d taken roost on the ladder inside the old schoolhouse. She was supposed to go into the cupola, with its broken bell, and string up fairy lights.
But so far, all she’d managed was to open the schoolhouse door, sweep around the benches that would soon get moved outside for the Lumberjack Pageant… and then cough dramatically at the gathered dust and cobwebs on the ladder.
The Fête du B?cheron was in a little over two weeks, and that meant every inch of City-on-the-Berme Village Historique had to be ready for a shindig the locals took Very Seriously Indeed.
Every year, the Village was open from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
Then, the Village reopened its gates one extra day for the locals to celebrate Halloween.
Not only was it a big fundraiser for the Village, but it was also the event of the year for a town that was as insular as it was festive.
Which meant it was Freddie’s mom’s most important event of the year.
Freddie and a handful of volunteers had already spent the last two weeks helping Mom deck everything in jack-o’-lanterns, scarecrows, and an unseemly number of hay bales.
La Maison Authentique du B?cheron (the Authentic Lumberjack Homestead, which was neither authentic nor a homestead) was now a haunted house, complete with skeletons, mirrors, and hiding places for her stepdad, Steve, in ghost makeup.
La Taverne now housed all the necessary accoutrements to sell heaps of hot apple cider and Mrs. Ferris’s famous jams, while La Marché d’été (the summer market) was all ready for the jack-o’-lantern contest (whoever won that got to put a banner on their house for the entire year).
Lastly, two portable toilets had been tucked behind the tavern that didn’t actually sell alcohol. No French placards for those. ( Port-A-Potty, it would seem, was not worth translating.)
Freddie sighed toward her best friend, Divya, who leaned at the school’s red clapboard entrance with all the cool poise of a runway model.
The fall wind had picked up outside, lifting leaves and adding a lovely autumn glow to Divya’s amber skin.
It also made Divya shiver while she frantically played Snake on her Nokia.
“It just seems,” Divya said now without looking up, “like a really hard mistake to make, Fred. I mean, surely you know what a bunch of rich kids drinking sounds like.”
“Not really,” Freddie admitted. “It’s not like I’ve ever been to a party. Have you?”
Divya flashed a laser glare—and a sound like digital snake death beeped out. “You know I haven’t. Unless you count our book club meet-ups with Abby and Tom. Those can get pretty rowdy sometimes.”
Freddie didn’t count those at all. A drunken teenage party was not the same thing as a spirited discussion of whatever novel Divya had insisted they read. (This month’s selection had been The Notebook, which Freddie had found a little too light on murder for her tastes.)
Freddie stabbed more forcefully at this nest of longlegs (or was it a swarm ?) blocking her from the schoolhouse bell twelve feet above. She really couldn’t go up there until these were gone. With hair as wild and dark as hers, all those arachnids would get lost in a heartbeat.
Divya, meanwhile, slunk into the shadows of the school and notably didn’t offer to help Freddie as she eased onto a bench.
After all, it wasn’t her mom who was head of the City-on-the-Berme Historical Society.
And no matter how many times Freddie pointed out to Mom that it was illegal to force her daughter to prepare for the fête every year, Mom just laughed and said, “Great. In that case, you can find somewhere else to live.”
Although, for all Freddie’s vocal complaints (she was very, very vocal), she secretly loved volunteering here.
City-on-the-Berme was her favorite place in the whole world.
Part tourist attraction, with its only moderately accurate French logging settlement, and part outdoor center, with the county park trails winding through the forest next door—you couldn’t get more autumn creeptastic than this place.
Which was likely why the fête was always the biggest event of the year for locals.
And also why Mom always put so much pressure on Freddie to help.
Last night, however, things had gone awry.
After Freddie had finished helping Mom with the hay bales, she’d left her scarf behind.
And seeing as it was her favorite scarf (and therefore crucial for the completion of any fall outfit), she’d set out for the City-on-the-Berme Village Historique on Steve’s rickety bike after dinner.
Freddie never made it to the Village—or found her scarf, for that matter. The trail had been dangerously foggy, her headlamp bouncing beams everywhere, and there’d been an awful stench like dead animals in the air. So strong, so overwhelming, that Freddie had actually thought she might gag.
It had forced her to stop her bike just so she could cover her mouth and try to breathe. The fog definitely hadn’t helped. Freddie’d had the horrifying sense it was alive and trying to climb inside her.
Then a bell had tolled from somewhere in the trees, even though there was only the one bell in City-on-the-Berme (currently over Freddie’s head) and it had no clapper so it couldn’t ring.
Freddie had not liked that sound. Nor the way she’d suddenly felt the fog tighten as if solid around her throat.
So the instant she had heard frantic shrieking from the woods nearby, she’d needed no urging whatsoever to turn around and pedal straight home again.
She had seen enough X-Files and read enough Goosebumps, thank you very much, to know how this sort of story would end.
Once home, she’d called the cops. Unfortunately, instead of finding a Person in Distress Being Slowly Dismembered in the old logging forests of City-on-the-Berme, Sheriff Bowman had found an unauthorized bonfire and a lot of underage drinking.
Divya kicked her legs onto the bench in front of her.
“Look, Fred, I’ll grudgingly accept that neither of us knows much about parties or partying or anything associated with the verb ‘to party,’ but surely you can tell the difference between someone screaming bloody murder and someone screaming for more beer. ”
“Can I, though?” Freddie asked. “Because it sounded like bloody murder to me. I mean, glass containers aren’t even allowed in City-on-the-Berme, Div.”
“Pretty sure the Fortin kids don’t care about that part. They’re also under twenty-one.” Divya gave a low whistle. “Oh boy, I hope they don’t know that it was you who called the cops on them.”
Freddie’s stomach flipped. She hadn’t thought of that. “How could they possibly know?”
Divya shrugged. “Dunno. But it’s a small town. People talk.”
Freddie winced. That phrase— It’s a small town, people talk —might as well have been the town motto for Berm, population 1,321. There were more deer here than people, and if the deer could talk, they probably would too.
Freddie’s only possible saving grace was that almost all of the students at Fortin Prep were from out of town, and the one thing Bermians hated more than a disruption to their beloved fête was out-of-towners.
They even said it that way— out-of-towners —like it was a dirty word, and tourists were only accepted as long as they didn’t stay for more than a long weekend during the summer.
When at last the daddy longlegs were vanquished from the ladder, Freddie retrieved the necessary fairy lights from a box by Divya’s bench. “Thanks for the help,” Freddie said with as much sarcasm as she could muster.
“Any time,” Divya murmured, once more playing Snake. “Can we go to the archives now?”
“No.” Freddie sniffed. “The agreement was that you’d help me clean up the old schoolhouse, and then I would take you to the archives.”
“But my paper is due Monday, Fred.” Divya finally shoved her phone into her pocket. “I can’t wait any longer.”
“Well, maybe you should have thought of that before you spent the last ten minutes playing Snake.” Freddie notched her chin high and sashayed away from Divya, a trail of lights dragging over the wooden planks behind her.
“I’ll help now.” Divya chased after.
“Too late.” Freddie reached the ladder, and with one handful of lights, she lumbered up.
“Please, Fred.” Divya hugged at the ladder below and shot dramatic puppy eyes upward. “Just tell me what to do. Pwetty pwease?” She fluttered her lashes. “I can plug in the lights… or… sweep?”
“I already swept.” Really, had her bestie been paying any attention? “You’re going to have to get more creative, Madame Srivastava. Think firstborn child or family inheritance. Then I might reconsider.”
Freddie reached the top of the ladder. Cold air billowed against her—and the Village Historique spanned beyond. Beautiful, vibe-y, and always right on the edge of falling apart because there never seemed to be enough funding.
Straight ahead was the Village Square, soon to be filled with the Lumberjack Pageant stage but currently only filled with hay bales and scarecrows, one of which appeared to be waving, thanks to the wind.
“New idea,” Divya called from below. “What if I lend you Lance?”
Oh, now we’re talking. “Two weeks,” Freddie replied as she unknotted fairy lights. “I want him two weeks.”
“One.”
“Two or I climb down and leave you stranded.”
“Ugh, fine. You can have him for two weeks.”
Huzzah . Freddie grinned at the bronze bell before her, with its green outer patina. I am so getting the better end of this bargain.