A Grave Problem

14. The Hospital

Mia sat across from Anna and Carmine, her arms folded stubbornly across her chest. After their confrontation with Summer, the girls had gone back to Anna's to discuss their options. Mia had already formed an opinion, and she didn't see what there was to discuss. She thought it would be a quick conversation, but Carmine and Anna weren't quite as ready to dismiss what Summer'd said.

"If they tell everybody what we did, what would we do?" Carmine asked.

"What do you mean?" Mia asked. "We'll just deny it. They can't prove anything."

"They don't really have to." Anna pointed out. "All they have to do is get everyone to wonder."

That made Mia stop for a minute. As much as she hated to admit it, she knew it was true. Nobody had proven anything in her hometown, but that hadn't stopped people from screaming at her when they saw her. And the last thing she wanted was to have a repeat of that experience. She sighed. Maybe there really wasn't as much of a choice as she'd been pretending. It looked like they might actually have to come up with a plan to get rid of the banshees.

Anna sat neatly on the edge of her chair, looking anxious. Carmine sat on her right, her notebook resting on the arm of the couch. And Mia had seated herself across from the both of them. Of the three of them, only Carmine seemed relaxed, like somehow this wasn't that big a deal for her; she sat there looking for all the world as if she were just solving a simple puzzle. Mia thought grudgingly that Carmine looked a little too calm.

After a few minutes of silence, Anna spoke up. "I don't even know where to begin." she confessed, looking a little apologetic.

"Yeah," Mia replied. "And they're not being helpful at all."

Anna's eyes shifted down towards the table, and Mia wondered vaguely why.

"Well," Carmine said, getting down to business. "Banshees shouldn't be too hard to find...right?" She looked to each of her friends hopefully. Mia thought for a minute before finally speaking up.

"What are banshees?" she asked. She knew they were some sort of supernatural creature, but that was about it. What, exactly, did they do?

"Banshees are creatures that mourn the deaths of people about to die." Carmine told her authoritatively.

"Before they die?" Mia asked.

"When you hear a banshee's cry, someone you know will soon die." Anna said suddenly. Mia looked at her in surprise, and Anna shrugged, "When I was growing up, there as an Irish family who lived next door. They were terrified of banshees."

Carmine nodded, as if in agreement.

"So banshees cry when someone's going to die..." Mia mused. "So we should look in a place where someone's going to die."

"But how can we know if someone's going to die?" Anna asked. Anna seemed to genuinely ponder this. She didn't seem to be making any connections, but Mia suddenly knew exactly where this train of thought would lead, and she was determined to head it off.

"Oh, no." she said firmly. "There's only one place I know of full of sick and dying people, and I'm not going."

Anna continued to look mystified, but Carmine understood almost immediately.

"The hospital!" she exclaimed.

"Hospital?" Anna asked.

"Yes." Mia replied. "And I'm not going."

"But it's the best place to look for banshees." Carmine protested. "I mean, where else could we go where we'd be anywhere near as likely to find a banshee?"

Mia thought about it for a minute, but she really couldn't come up with anyplace better. True, sometimes people did die in other places, but Mia thought that was probably more the exception than the rule. Besides, if they did decide to look somewhere else, that still left the problem of knowing where someone would die beforehand. Mia tried to convince herself that going to the hospital wasn't so bad. So what if they were hideous, sterile places that seemed to have no life in them? Was that a reason to avoid the place? Mia thought it was, but apparently she was the only one.

She wanted to suggest they look around the neighborhood – after all, Mia was pretty sure she now knew the cause of that wailing outside her window just a few nights ago. But she knew that even if she wanted to look for banshees around her house instead of going to the hospital, she'd have to know who was going to die and where they lived to make sure they were in the right area. So, as terrible as it seemed, it looked like Mia and her friends would be staking out the local hospital in the near future.