Page 7 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Six

We

T he Faraday House on Lily Lane was two hundred years old, scabbing paint, and losing ground daily to the steroidal growth of a famous garden gone feral, fifteen years untended.

It was missing shingles from its roof and one of the front windows.

If it were a dog, it would have fleas and visible scratch marks, patches of fur missing.

Inside it was no doubt a nirvana of mice, an orgy of spiderwebs, a wet dream for all termites.

Also: the Faraday House was haunted. Some of us claimed to have seen a phantom Nina Faraday wandering the rose garden, dressed in a long pageant gown, seemingly searching for something.

There were some people who passionately believed that Nina had never disappeared—at least not like her mom claimed.

Those people thought Lydia had gone crazy and killed her daughter in a fury of rage, or as a puritanical sacrifice, or just because she was psychotic.

Some people believed that all her subsequent ravings about the swim team, and Coach Steeler’s involvement, proved that she had gone around the bend.

Others thought that Nina had never left the house at all, that she was buried under the floor somewhere or in one of her mother’s flower beds.

Whether Nina’s ghost was still wandering the place or not, we couldn’t say for sure. We didn’t even know that Nina was dead. Plenty of us thought she’d run away, maybe to be with a secret boyfriend, one of the older guys she was rumored to have been seeing on the side.

But we knew that Lydia had never left. We’d seen her.

Everyone had. It was a known thing: Lydia Faraday’s tormented spirit hung forever in the apple tree, twisting around her madness.

As kids we’d dared one another to sneak up to the gates at dusk, press a palm to the cold iron, and summon Lydia to appear.

Nina, Nina, where did you go? Lydia, Lydia, what do you know?

Most of us had learned terror at those gates, as the shadows under the apple tree began to condense, thickening to the form of a woman with her neck crooked around a rope.

For years the house had been graying behind a thickening curtain of trees and growth. We assumed it would stay that way until the wilderness of vines and climbing ivy toppled it for good.

Who in their right mind would ever choose to live in a place like the Faraday House?

You’d have to be dumb, crazy—or a sucker.

We needed to know.

We needed Akash.

We needed him back on Discord.