Janie stood up. “Pool?”
“Sure.” I turned around to see Ben still sitting there, watching Lucy watch Netflix. He didn’t look up when we left. Janie must have turned to see me look toward Ben. “Just us, okay?” she asked.
“Of course. I mean, who else?”
She didn’t even bother to answer.
I followed Janie down the hall to her room. “You don’t actually have to ask your mom or anyone about Dr. Langsom,” she said, after shutting her bedroom door.
“But we all decided—”
“It just helps steer Lucy away from an anxiety attack.”
“I don’t understand.” Eager Janie who meekly sat listening to her older siblings had vanished. This Janie stood in front of me and looked as fearless as she did climbing onto a diving board.
“She just needs to feel like she’s in control. Otherwise it stresses her out. There’s nothing to do about all this. It’s a scary note. Nobody shoved an animal carcass through the mail slot.”
Hearing Janie dismiss our plans felt oddly deflating. I had bought into the whole secret agent vibe. It was exciting to join forces on something. I tried to find my footing again, to figure out what was real, what was less real. I reminded her, “It’s normal to be a little freaked out, though.”
She sighed. “Yeah. I am a little freaked out. But there’s no sense in alienating everyone in Glennon Heights over it.” She rummaged through her closet and calmly packed a small tote with a towel and a change of clothes. “On the other hand, it does feel weird to think it could be anyone. It makes you dissect the people around you and try to imagine someone else’s motive. I almost can’t help it,” Janie confessed. “It’s like a puzzle I need to put together. You know what I mean?”
I nodded. I knew exactly what she meant. After all, even before we played detective with Lucy and Ben, I had spent most of my morning run considering possible suspects.
But my list had been shorter and composed exclusively of Janie and her family.
Three days later, I was at the Donahue house when the second letter arrived.
It came through the mail slot. Whether it arrived with the rest of the mail or someone slipped it in afterward, we couldn’t tell. Janie and I found it lying on top of the rest, the same square of heavy white paper.
Of course, we knew what it was instantly. Janie saw it first, on our way down the stairs. My mom had offered to take us shopping for school supplies, so we might have been running. At least we were bounding fast enough that when Janie stopped so abruptly at the landing between the first and second floors, I crashed into her.
“Look,” she said.
We just stood there for a few seconds, staring down. Then Janie took the rest of the steps two at a time. Just as she was bending down to pick the letter up, I yelled, “Wait!” and whipped my phone out to take a picture.
“What are you doing?” Janie asked.
“Maybe for the police?”
“Should I not touch it?”
I shook my head, not to mean No but to mean Why should I decide?
Janie looked around the house, maybe hoping that her mom or sister would swoop in and take over. But it was just her and me. The white envelope on the floor seemed to dare us. We couldn’t walk by it.
She crouched down and snatched it up in one quick motion. I opened the door and checked the front porch, just in case whoever delivered it had hidden outside, waiting. Instead I spotted my mom down the street, climbing into her car.
I held up my hand, waving at her before I had the chance to formulate a plan. So I switched gears and called out, “Five minutes!” I shut the door and stood with my back bracing it closed as if she might shoulder her way through.
“My mom’s out there.”
Janie blinked. “Like on the porch?”
“No. In her car.” I realized what Janie meant. “She just went to her car. To drive us to the store. She didn’t leave the note.” I nodded to the envelope in her hand.
“Right.” Janie looked as panicked as I felt. “I didn’t mean that. Not really.” She glanced down at the envelope.
“Maybe it’s an apology.”
“Maybe.” But she didn’t sound convinced. “I’m just going to open it right now.” We both stared for a little while longer.
Then Janie tore open the letter. As soon as she read it, she sat back on the first step of the staircase behind her. It looked like the force of the letter’s message pushed her backward, the way a poltergeist might shove someone out of the blue.
“Is it bad?” I asked, which was dumb. It was an anonymous letter, left in her mail slot by a person who had earlier claimed that soon her house would smell like dead bodies. I sank down next to her and Janie handed over the note. The envelope was addressed the same as before: The Residents of 16 Olcott Place. I slid out the card.
Involuntarily, my eyes lifted to the ceiling. “No blood yet,” Janie commented dully. I shoved the card back into the envelope, trying to be careful but also rushing to hide the awful message as quickly as possible. The whole house looked eerie now. Afternoon shadows threw wide swaths of darkness over the living room. I heard creaking above us and even though I knew it must be Ben or Lucy moving around upstairs, I fought the urge to run.
“What should we do?” I asked.
She unzipped the front pocket of her knapsack and placed the card inside. She patted it after closing it back up, like it held a treasure she needed to keep safe. “We should go shopping for school supplies.”
“We should find your mom or dad. Or Ben or Lucy.” And then, even though I knew it would only complicate matters, I offered, “We could tell my mom, if you’d rather.”
“Nope.” Janie bent down to gather the rest of the mail and placed the pile on the small marble table. She took a deep breath. “It’s going to start everything back up again. I’ll tell them when we get home.”
So that’s what we did. We rode in the car with my mom and Janie answered questions cheerfully, as if she hadn’t just been threatened by some faceless sociopath. At Target, my mom went off to get groceries and Janie and I went to the school supply corner on our own. We filled our baskets with gel pens and academic planners. Janie put a tie-dyed lunch bag in with her stuff and I put it back.
“Everybody buys lunch,” I explained.
“Is the food good?”
“It’s all right,” I told her, thinking that was a difference between Janie and me. Had I said the cafeteria was awful, she would have brought her lunch each day. She wouldn’t have minded being the only one eating a meal from home.
First, she returned the bag to its shelf. Then, right after, she grabbed it and put it back in the basket. “Maybe we won’t stay.”
“What? Are you serious?”
“Olivia, we’re getting death threats.”
“They’re not exactly death threats,” I argued. Janie just stared at me. “Okay, fine. But you’d really leave? Where would you go?”
“Maybe back home.” She meant Massachusetts, I knew. “Or to stay with my grandparents.”
“Have you all discussed that?” Apparently, I hadn’t been included in every Donahue family meeting.
But Janie shook her head. “I’m just guessing.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t tell them.” I said it lightly, just a suggestion. “I mean, it’s ninety-nine percent likely it’s only a sick joke, right? So maybe the best thing to do is to ignore it.”
“What if I pull up the floorboards and there’s a dead body? What if this guy, this Sentry, breaks in at night?”
“The chances of that are—”
“Would you take that chance?” Janie demanded.
I held my hands up, trying to calm her. “Back at the house, you said you didn’t want to start the drama back up again. That’s all.” We wandered down the aisles in silence. Finally, I said, “Janie, you have to know I’m on your side here. I’m just giving you my honest opinion.”
“How about this? You sleep over tonight and se
e what you think tomorrow morning.”
“Sleep over at your house?”
“Yeah. My house. Or the Langsom house. Or the Sentry’s house. Whoever wants to claim it. You stay over and by tomorrow we decide if we should keep the second letter a secret.”
My mouth dried up and my tongue felt too big for my face. “Well, I run first thing in the mornings, so—”
“So tomorrow, you’ll run like a hundred yards farther. We won’t stay up all night, but it will still give us a chance to look around.”
“For what? What do you expect to find?” All of a sudden, I envisioned a secret room, in which a monstrous man sat writing on good stationery.
“I just need you to help me look.”
Truthfully, the prospect of it took the excitement away from back to school shopping. Especially because in the very next aisle, Target had already started displaying Halloween decorations. I gazed at the row of plastic and Styrofoam haunted houses. They were exclusively gray or neon green. They had skulls peeking through their windows and crows perched on the peaks of their roofs. They weren’t even slightly realistic. What made the Langsom house so scary was its loveliness, once you understood the trouble masked by its pretty facade. And its size, once you realized how long you’d have to search through its darkest corners before feeling certain of your own safety.
I asked my mom about sleeping over at Janie’s in the car ride home, with Janie sitting right there in the back seat. I knew I’d hear about that later; my mom’s deepest fear isn’t ghosts or intruders but being impolite. She wouldn’t risk offending Janie by implying that I shouldn’t stay the night. Instead Mom tried her best, saying, “You girls are welcome to stay at our place. Janie, I make awesome pancakes. Right, Olivia?” Her voice vibrated with unspoken aggravation.
“They are delicious.”
“Oh, thank you,” Janie said. “Maybe later in the week? I’m trying to get my room set up just right. Olivia said she’d help.”
“Wonderful,” Mom said. She didn’t mean it. “Mr. Danvers and I would love to see you girls at our place too. You can help with Liv’s room.” She laughed but not really.
Once we got home, Janie stood in our living room while I grabbed my toothbrush and a change of clothes. Dad walked in just as Mom and I were negotiating terms.
“Ping me,” Mom said.
“Of course.”
“Don’t of course me right now. We are going to have a discussion tomorrow.”
“Yeah, I know.” I looked from Mom to Janie. No contest. Mom would rebound; she wouldn’t feel permanently disappointed in me. I couldn’t count on that with Janie.
Janie followed me down the steps but she looked back up at the screen-in porch. “What’s going on with your mom?” she whispered.
“The whole scene the other night—she doesn’t really want me at your house.”
Janie and I walked through backyards. As we passed the houses between our own, Janie and I gazed up at the kitchen windows, the back bedrooms. Who knew what the three families inside fought about? It didn’t matter how many family meetings you sat in on. You didn’t really know someone until you’d heard her parents hiss at each other like they regretted ever meeting.
From the back, Janie’s house stood just as grand in size, but it lacked the eaves and the turret showcased in the front. It looked more institutional, like a tiny hospital or the dorm of a boarding school. Chokecherry trees lined the backyard, standing at attention like a formation of guards. In one spot though, right near the woodshed, a hole gaped in the row of shrubs. A wheelbarrow sat parked there, looking lonesome. The ground had been battened down a bit and we found a bunch of litter (two flattened soda cans, a cellophane wrapper, and an empty bag of chips) concentrated right in the gap.
I took out my phone and snapped some photos. “What are you doing?” Janie asked, and at first I didn’t want to tell her. But I knelt right in the spot and noticed that it afforded me a clear view of the house’s south windows. I also saw that the litter seemed to radiate out, except the cellophane, which hung caught on a nearby branch. “It looks like someone stands or sits here. A lot. Maybe the Sentry stands here. You know, watching.”
Inside we worked systematically but quietly so that no one else in her family would notice us. We took pictures of the woods from each of the back windows to see which had the clearest view from the worn spot in the yard. We watched YouTube tutorials on finding hollow passages in walls. We tapped on wood panels and closely examined the staircases. We tried to pry off the ornate carvings that snaked around the doorframes on the first floor. We felt behind all the mirrors in the bathrooms.
Nothing. In the living room, we stared at the enormous, floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelf and then each other.
“Maybe?” Janie asked.
I nodded. “It would be cool.” Up close, most of the books seemed old. The vast majority had leather covers. I didn’t recognize any of them from our summer reading list or anything. There were hundreds. “Are these your books? You brought them?”
She shook her head. “No way. These were here.”
So we started pulling them off the shelves. “Go slow.” Janie reminded me. “In the video, it triggered some kind of mechanism. If it’s old, it might be delicate.” Kneeling, we got through the first two shelves from the bottom, then the third. Halfway through the fourth, Janie’s dad came through the room, on his way to the kitchen. He was on his phone, so at first we thought maybe he wouldn’t notice. He entered the room and we froze. I stretched my body as widely as possible, trying to hide the books piled on the floor. Janie stood up and peered at the middle shelves, as if she was searching for a particular title.
“I’m telling you to recheck the numbers,” I heard him say. “No excuses.” It looked like he would just keep walking, but then just as he reached the arched doorway, he stopped. “Steve, hold on. You’re cutting out. The reception in this place is awful.” His roaming gaze seemed to settle on us. “Steve, just give me a second.” He spun around, holding the phone to his chest. “What is this?” Same clipped tone, but this time directed at Janie and me.
“Jane Louise. I asked a question.”
“We were just— I was going to reorganize some things. Do we want to keep these?”
Still squinting at us, he brought the phone back to his mouth. “Steve, one more minute. Please.” And then to Janie, “You have a beautiful room. Go reorganize the shelves there. This is not your space.”
“We were only trying to help, Mr. Donahue.”
He glared at me. “This is definitely not your space.”
My face burned.
“Dad!” Janie sounded outraged.
“I don’t have time for this, Jane. I don’t have the energy for this.” He waved his free hand around the room. “Clean it up before your mother comes home from her meeting with McGovern.”
“Ned McGovern?” I asked without thinking. Mr. Donahue looked at me in disbelief. I wished we had found a stupid trapdoor so I could have dropped through it. “It’s just that I know him,” I explained weakly.
“Well, that’s perfect,” Mr. Donahue declared. Then he pivoted, pulled the phone back up to his ear, and stormed out.
Janie looked down at me and shut her eyes, like she was trying to blot out reality. “I’m so sorry.”
“What did I do?”
“He’s just stressed out. And there’s something going on about the realtor. He hates the realtor.”
“Yeah, but also he seems to hate me.”
“He doesn’t, Liv. I’m so sorry. He just … he just hates everything right now, especially anything having to do with this town.”
“Glennon Heights?” I didn’t get it. No one hated Glennon Heights. That would have been like hating milk or Labor Day.
“It’s not what they expected, I guess. And then that letter came.” She buried her face in her hands. “God. The first letter, I mean. It’s just a mess.” For a second, I thought she might cry. Then Janie seemed to shake herse
lf out of it. She tied her long, dark hair into a ponytail, then turned back to the floor-to-ceiling wall of books. She worked quickly as she spoke, carefully lifting each book up and then pressing against the wood. “Why don’t you start putting the books on the lower shelves back in place?” We fell into a rhythm, with Janie standing above me. I didn’t feel much like talking. It made it tense and awkward to stand so close and stay silent, all the while listening for footsteps coming back into the room. “He’s not usually like that,” Janie said. “He’s just under so much pressure.”
“What do you mean?” I spoke grudgingly and felt her take a deep breath in the space right above me.
“I don’t know that we could truly afford this place.” She sounded like she was going to say more, but stopped herself. Instead, she lifted a maroon leather-bound book, we heard a decisive click, and the wall opened up.
We stood there gaping at a tiny room, about three feet deep. It had a cement floor, like a cellar. Wooden planks lined the walls.
“What’s over there, in the corner?” As I pointed to a shadowy figure, crouched in the corner, I saw my own finger tremble and felt a scream build in my throat. For a second I actually believed it was a person sitting hunched over.
Janie stepped forward and kicked it.
“Janie!” I gasped.
“It’s a sleeping bag.” But it wasn’t the nylon kind that you wanted with you on a camping trip. This was army green, thick canvas. When Janie kicked it, a plume of dust rose like smoke.
“Janie, this is really creepy. Someone’s been sleeping in here.”
“Not recently.” Janie rubbed her nose and sniffled. “All this dust—I bet it’s been sitting here rolled up for ages.” She picked it up with both hands and held it toward me. Before I could stop her, she buried her face in the flannel lining. “Smells old.” Wrinkling her nose, Janie dug into the sleeping bag’s folds. “Look—this was jammed in the corner.” She held up a spiral-bound paperback book: My Scouting Journal. On its cover, an eagle held an American flag in each talon.
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