Finally Greta slid into the driver’s seat, dropping her phone into the cup holder, and shifted the car into reverse. “Lazarus and Sadie are on their way,” she said. “I got ahold of Chief Rivera. She says she doesn’t know how you got out of the station, Zora, but she’s going to find Buster now. Are we all buckled in? Good.”
Her voice was neither gentle nor kind, and for once in my life I was happy for it. My home getting pushed off a cliff was not an occasion for kindness. It was a time for rage. Right now there was nothing for me to do. But Aunt Greta could do things. She could do a lot of things. And if she was angry for me, shit was going to get done.
Her eyes flashed up to meet mine in the rearview mirror. They looked just like ours—mine and Sadie’s and Mom’s—dark and furious. Intense. Those weren’t from the Novak side of the family. Those were Aberdeen through and through.
I looked away. Aberdeen, Novak, what did it matter? Our homes had met their end on the bluffs because of the people in this town. Artemis was right: I didn’t hate Addamsville enough to set it on fire. I didn’t hate Addamsville at all.
But Addamsville sure hated me.
26
“What are you looking at there, Zoo?”
Dad’s voice was soft, almost timid, as he came up behind the couch. I shoved the picture of Mom and Aunt Greta into my shirt. “Nothing.”
He came around the couch and sat down, his knees by my shoulders. I stayed kneeling in front of Greta’s glass-topped coffee table, my wet hair dripping on the carpet.
“Sadie’s asleep,” he said. “You should get to bed, too. Greta said you could stay with Artemis on the third floor.”
“Of course they have a third floor,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in it. The living room was warm and quiet and smelled like fresh laundry. My limbs ached, and every inch of me felt like it had been bruised or cut. I held my arm against my stomach to keep the picture in place and stood. “Sure. Bed.”
Dad reached out as if to grab me, then withdrew. “Zoo, wait.” My skin prickled. “Was that a picture of your mom? Where’d you get it?”
A clock ticked in the other room. Aunt Greta was in the kitchen, and Artemis had gone upstairs to get her room ready for me. I cleared my throat. Dad took my wrist in his hand, very gently, as if he was checking for a pulse. “Zoo, sit down.”
After a moment of hesitation, I did. Dad still wore his own clothes, and he hadn’t taken a shower yet, so he looked rumpled and tired. His eyes were red and puffy. He put his other hand on the other side of my wrist and held me there.
“I’m sorry for what I said the other day,” he said. “You were right on all counts. Pulling that scheme was irrational and selfish of me. I pride myself on thinking that I’m here to take care of you and your sister, but that just made things worse for both of you, and I’m still not sure what I can do to make up for it. And I shouldn’t have told you what to believe. That’s up to you and only you. It’s hard sometimes not to confuse belief with fact.”
I picked at the hem of Artemis’s shirt.
“Can I ask you something?” he said. “I promise I’m not trying to interrogate you.”
“What?”
“Why do you believe Mom’s still alive?”
“Because,” I said, “if I can believe she’s alive, why would I believe otherwise? Why would I choose to believe something that upsets me?”
Dad smiled and reached up to smooth back my blond sheaf of hair. “Can I ask more questions?”
“I thought this wasn’t an interrogation.”
“You’re allowed to say no.”
“Fine. What?”
“How many years has it been since she went missing?”
I knew it was a trap. “Five.”
“Five years. If she’s alive, why haven’t we heard from her in all that time? Why didn’t she come home? Why didn’t she tell us she was okay?”
Because she was hunting firestarters. Because there were secrets left out there for her to unravel.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. She had more important things to do.”
Dad squeezed my arm.
“I know you remember enough of her to know that she loved you and Sadie more than anything in the world,” he said. “There was nothing more important to her than you. Absolutely nothing, you understand? If she was alive, she wouldn’t have let me go on thinking she was dead, much less you two girls. I don’t know the truth of what happened to her out there—Lord knows I wish I did—so I have nothing to convince you. But I know she wouldn’t have left you this long on purpose.”
One of his hands moved to my elbow, the other to my face. “Zora, look at me. I’m not trying to hurt you again, not after everything, but I don’t think it’s good for you to keep doing this. This kind of hope isn’t the helpful kind. It eats at you. It makes you wait for something that won’t come, when you should be looking forward. We have to move on. You can believe she’s still alive because the alternative upsets you, but sometimes we have to be upset. It’s okay to be sad, and scared, and angry. I was scared, after she was gone. I didn’t know what to do without her. And that’s okay. We can figure it out.”
I pulled my face away from his hand. “Mom can’t be dead.”
His eyebrows furrowed. “Why not?”
“Because she—” A knot stuck in my throat.
“Because she what?”
I looked away.
“Zora.”
“Because she’s not here.”
He went quiet. His grip on my elbow tightened. “What does that mean?”
“She’s not here!”
I watched understanding light his eyes, swiftly overtaken by pity. “Zora . . .”
We never admit these things for a reason, but it was too late now.
“She’s not here. Everyone comes back here. It’s Addamsville; that’s what they do. That’s what they’re supposed to do. You die; you’re here. In the streets, in the high school, in the woods. If she was dead she’d be here, she’d be with us, and she’s not, she’s not fucking here, so she’s not fucking dead—”
When you’ve trained yourself not to cry, there’s nothing you can do to stop the release when the pressure becomes too great. Nothing to be done for the noise you make or the tears that pour from you like rain. Here is the overwhelming tide. Here it crashes down and carries you out to sea.
You have no choice but to let it, because you have been fighting it for so long you have no strength left to swim.
27
I was glad Dad was the one there for the release, because he was the one who understood it. He let me cry myself out without judgment. When I was done, I wanted to sleep. Just curl up on the carpet and sleep for days, knowing he’d be watching over me, keeping me safe. I thought maybe that was why Sadie had kept taking his side: even when she knew he’d done wrong, she didn’t stop seeing the parts of him that were good.
Dad tucked my hair behind my ears and pushed me up the long, curving staircase of Hillcroft House. The place really was beautiful on the inside. Small chandeliers hung from soaring ceilings, rich oak and mahogany paneled the walls, an actual rug covered the stairs instead of carpet. Aunt Greta had made sure everything was restored as it should be. A few ghosts—Hillcroft family servants, according to Artemis—stood in doorways or rocked in chairs, their faces turned away from me for once, used to Aberdeens living under their roof. At the top of the stairs, Dad took me down the second-floor hallway to another staircase at the end. The stairs creaked horribly.
At the top was the third floor. A crow’s nest of a bedroom, with windows on two sides, curtains closed over all but one of them. There was a tidy desk next to a bookshelf, a yoga mat rolled up in the corner, a large trunk at the end of a queen-sized bed, and a nightstand holding a tube of lip balm, a retainer case, and a picture of Artemis and her mother on a boat on Addams Lake. At the foot of the nightstand was a row of Artemis’s shoes, neatly lined up and standing at attention.
Artemis sat on the edge of the bed,
pretending to look through something on her phone.
“Knock knock,” Dad said. “Have space for one more?”
Artemis sprang up, throwing the phone onto the nightstand. “Yeah, of course. Zora, I didn’t know which side of the bed you prefer, so you can make yourself comfortable. Mom washed your clothes.” She motioned to where my clothes were neatly folded and stacked on the trunk at the end of the bed, my boots balanced on top. “Mom said I could take off school tomorrow, too, until all this gets figured out, and then you don’t have to stay here alone.”
“I’m good,” I said to Dad, who hesitated at the door for a moment before kissing me on the temple.
“Night, Zoo. Night, Artemis.”
“Good night, Uncle Lazarus.”
He disappeared back down the stairs. Artemis said, “You can close the door if you want.”
I did.
She scooted aside to give me room on the bed. I took it. My right hand ached. I pulled my remaining glove off and dropped it on the trunk next to my boots. Next came the prosthetics. Artemis watched as I flexed my hand and massaged the stumps, and I found I was too tired to care what she thought.
“Do they hurt?” she asked.
“Sometimes,” I said. “It’s kind of a dull pain. The prosthetics are cheap, so they don’t fit very well. You get used to it.”
She hugged her legs to her chest and stared at me over her knees.
“What?” I snapped.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without makeup on before.”
“So?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just interesting.”
I sniffed. “Whatever. I know I have acne.”
“You’re pretty both ways.”
“Thanks. I guess.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“The fact that I’m pretty?”
Artemis gave me a withering look.
“Come on,” I said, “you have to give me one bad joke.”
“Not even one.”
“No, I don’t want to talk about it.” Mom’s pictures and notes might right at this moment be washing into Addams Lake, and I could have saved them when I went into the trailer that last time, but I chose Dad’s axe instead. I hugged my legs to my chest, too, and we faced each other on the bed, our toes almost touching.
“What happened at the motel?” she said.
I told her. I could still smell the smoke, still feel the fire. I remembered exactly how disorienting it was to watch Ludwig’s form flicker in the heat haze, worse than the flickering edges of the ghosts. When I finished, she didn’t ask what we were going to do. I couldn’t think about hunting.
“I didn’t know you had a thing about neat shoes.” I motioned to the neat row of footwear.
“I don’t,” she said. “Salem does.”
I narrowed my eyes.
“Well, I don’t know that it’s Salem for certain,” she went on; talking had brought a little color back to her cheeks. “If I leave my shoes scattered around at night, when I wake up they’re neat like that. Same order, same place.”
“So your mom is doing it.”
Artemis shakes her head. “I’ve tested it. It happens even if I’m barely asleep, or for only a few minutes. It happens if I hide shoes where Mom wouldn’t know to look for them or wouldn’t be able to get them without making enough noise to wake me up. And did you hear those stairs? Anyone coming up here makes enough noise to wake me up.”
“You think Salem Hillcroft is rearranging your shoes.” I’d never seen an Addamsville ghost affect a physical object, but I was far from knowing all of Addamsville’s secrets.
“I think something is rearranging my shoes.”
“Have you tried asking?”
“Six times.”
“Cool, so I have to stay in the haunted room tonight.” It would make me feel better, to have at least one ghost around.
“You get to stay in the haunted room tonight. This is the best room in the house. You remember the third floor at Grimshaw House?” Artemis crawled to the edge of the bed and got up to push back the curtains on the other windows. Then she moved around to turn off her lights.
The entire basin of Addamsville was visible. The long line of Valleywine Road glittered in the night, stretching to the northeast until it disappeared on the horizon. There was Black Creek Woods. The radio tower with its red lights blinking. The looming shadow of Piper Mountain. The high school and its football stadium, town center, a bursting wealth of houses and streets. The sweep of the Goldmine, the trailer park, the junkyard in the distance. A partial cover of trees that trailed south to hide the mine and then, eventually, the bluffs. The shore of Addams Lake was visible. There was a straight line of sight into the third-floor room of Grimshaw House.
“Oh wow.”
“This was what Sylvester Hillcroft saw after he founded this place,” Artemis said, standing next to me. “From here he could survey the whole town as it grew.”
“Maybe he’s the one messing with your shoes.”
She shoved me with her elbow, then went to close the curtains again. She was smiling. “It’s really late.”
“Can we leave the curtains open?”
“Sure.”
I pulled back four layers of blankets and sheets on the bed and slid in. It was a firmer mattress than I was used to, but most mattresses would’ve felt firmer than the broken-down thing I’d slept on my whole life. Artemis got in on the other side and busied herself putting in her retainer.
“Don’t drool on me, okay?” I said.
“I won’t as long as you don’t snore,” she replied.
“I don’t snore.”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
She was asleep in minutes. I knew because she slept like Sadie; heavily, on her back, arms sprawling everywhere and mouth slightly open. I ran a finger down the bridge of her nose and she didn’t so much as twitch. Her stories about not waking up for the boots or footsteps on the stairs seemed dubious.
I laid back, pulled the covers up, and stared out at Addamsville.
Sometimes you have so many thoughts and feelings that your brain decides to ignore every single one of them. It hangs a Closed for Business sign and walks out. No more worrying whether you did right or wrong. No more flashes of the only home you’ve ever had reduced to beach wreckage. No more fear. No more anger. No more tears. You can’t look inward anymore, so you look out and see what’s left, and you’re happy to take it, no matter what it is. And if you’re lucky, you find exactly what you need.
You find lights in the darkness and a place to rest your head.
In the night, I woke.
My mouth was bone-dry, and the alarm clock was blurry. Artemis was a lump under the covers. The stairs creaked as I descended, though not as loudly as they’d seemed to on the way up. Hillcroft House was still awake.
I couldn’t remember where the bathroom was on the second floor, so I went all the way down to the first floor. I followed the path of moonlight on the hardwood, and after the bathroom took another couple of turns into the kitchen.
Of the whole house, the kitchen had been remodeled the most. Granite countertops. Refinished cabinets. Stainless-steel appliances. A big window over the sink looked to the northwest of town, over the woods at the mountain. A dark form obscured the view, her hip leaning on the edge of the sink, a mug in her hands. I stopped in the doorway, squinting. Her edges were solid. Aunt Greta glanced at me over her shoulder. Her hair was up in a messy bun and haloed by the moonlight coming through the window, her face shadowed.
“Sorry,” I said. My voice came out hoarse.
Without saying anything, she took a cup from a cabinet, filled it with water from the refrigerator, then held it out for me. The stark smell of black coffee wafted from her mug. We stood together by the window, watching the red lights of the radio tower blink on and off, a Piper Mountain lighthouse.
I cleared my throat and said, “Why did you show up at the
bluffs? You never cared about us before. A week ago you were accusing me of killing George Masrell and telling Chief Rivera to arrest me.”
“I never accused you of killing him,” she said. “I knew exactly what you were doing there, and I knew you were going to cause more trouble for yourself and our family by showing up. Dasree was the same way when she was younger. Couldn’t resist going to the ghosts, even if it got her in trouble. She eventually learned to hunt at night, when no one was watching, but even then people noticed.”
I stared at her, my brain blinking awake. “If you knew what I was doing, why didn’t you try to help?”
“I was,” she replied. “The day after Masrell, most of the town council wanted a witch hunt. I’ve spent all my time over the last week keeping the living in Addamsville from completely impeding your ability to track this firestarter down, and you can tell tonight I didn’t do a very good job.”
“You tried to keep Artemis from helping.”
“Artemis is . . .” She paused. Sipped. “She wanted to do it herself. Hunt this one. I knew if I grounded her, she would understand why that wasn’t a good idea, and she would go back to you. God forbid she listen to me when I say it in plain terms. Neither of you should be doing this alone. Artemis wants too much, and without someone there to pull her back, she goes too far. It was the same with Dasree.”
“Goes too far?”
“She wants to know the truth. So did Dasree. She wanted to solve every mystery, especially about what happened to us.
“Did she ever tell you that we had no memories from before the disappearance? We knew our names, and we knew we were sisters. To this day, no amount of therapy or medicine or meditation has helped me remember my childhood or the months we were gone. I still don’t know what happened to us. All I know is we came back different, and Dasree was furious about it.
“She thought she’d find the answers in Black Creek Woods. I didn’t; the woods still scare me. I only wanted to stop what happened to us from happening to anyone else. The older we got, the more concerned I became with keeping this town alive. Dasree convinced me that solving the mysteries would do that. So we agreed—she’d take care of the dead, and I’d take care of the living. It worked out well, because she didn’t care about her reputation, and I cared too much about mine. We didn’t spend much time together, in the last few years.”
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