Free Haunted by Joy Preble Page B

magic just like everything else. It is absolutely not real.
    “You’re not my mother,” I tell the person in the water. “You aren’t fooling me.” I can barely get the words out because my voice is shaking. All of me is shaking. It’s not real , I tell myself again.
    The woman with my mother’s face smiles sadly at me. Her thin shoulders sag just a little as she stands there, and I see her move to straighten her posture. The motion is familiar and intimate, something my mother does all the time, probably without thinking. It’s another habit she’s started again since last fall. Every time I see her do it, my heart twists a little.
    The woman who looks like my mother but isn’t backs up a little deeper. The pond water begins to fill her ankle boots as they disappear from view.
    “Don’t believe it,” Ethan says. His voice is steady, but still I can hear an edge of panic underneath. “It’s a trick.”
    “Foolish man,” the thing with my mother’s face tells him.
    Then she turns and wades into the deepest part of the pond so quickly that I barely see her slip under the water.
    “No!” I scream. I know it’s not real, and I can hear Tess yelling at me to stop, but I’m wading in after my mother anyway—wading up to my waist in the sludgy pond water before Ethan can grab me and pull me back. All I can see is the image of my mother disappearing in the water. It blends in my head with the image of Ben at the bottom of the pool. It doesn’t look like swimming. It looks like drowning.
    The rusalka resurfaces as suddenly as she went under, floating on her back, arms stretched out. Still as death. It’s really her again, the lilac gown sagging beneath her, wild black curls dipping this way and that in the current. For one brief second, she raises her head, opens her eyes, and looks at me. “Please,” she says. “Oh, please help me.” And then she’s gone.
    Ethan drags me up onto the grass. “It wasn’t real,” he says to me over and over.
    Tess just strokes my hair and tells me it will be okay.
    “I don’t know what she wants from me. I don’t know how to help her.” I realize I’m not sure which woman I really mean.
    So I do what I’ve wanted to do since I first saw Ethan this afternoon. I sit down in the grass, my wet denim skirt heavy against my legs, and cry.

Thursday, 6:12 pm
    Ethan
    I know. I know.” Anne has repeated this over and over as we walk back to the car. “It wasn’t really her. It’s fake. It’s magic. I get it. But why would she do that?”
    Anne settles herself in the front seat as Tess climbs into the back of the sedan. None of us has a towel, so Anne and I are both still soaked from the waist down. Pond water drips from us onto the seats and runs onto the carpet.
    “If she wants me to help her with something—whatever it is—why scare the crap out of me? Why show me my mother’s face? What sense does that make, Ethan? No sense at all.” She shivers.
    She isn’t crying anymore, but she wipes her nose with the back of her hand, dabs at her red eyes, then pulls down the visor and peers into the tiny mirror. “Wonderful. Now I can add looking like hell to my list of problems.”
    “You look fine.” Tess leans forward between us and pats Anne on the shoulder. “But this is totally creepy. I mean, if it can make itself look like anyone, why pick your mother? No offense to her or anything, but if the rusalka wanted you to follow her into the water, why not make herself look like Ben? What’s the deal? Only you would get a mermaid with some mother complex. If I’m going to be haunted, I want to be haunted by someone hot. And male.”
    “Thanks for the perspective.” Anne squeezes some more water out of her skirt. “Sorry,” she says to me. “Your car is going to smell like pond for a while.”
    I ignore the obvious. The state of my car is the least of our worries right now. “We just need to sort this all out, Anne. We need to slow this all down, go