“I figured. I’m getting some dark energy around her. I’ll help however I can.”
Stacey reminds herself that she doesn’t believe in this stuff. That everything Lisa said could apply to anyone who walked in off the street. But she can’t unsee the figure watching her in the night, or the wild-eyed man who called her Anna.
“So, dark energy . . . is it spirit energy, or human energy?” she asks.
“Both.”
“Stacey lives in a house where people were murdered,” Lennon says, “and the killer got away.”
“Ah, restless spirit—that explains the oppressive aura I’m getting.”
Stacey finds her voice and clears her throat. “Who’s the person I trust who’s hiding something from me? It’s not a ghost, right?”
“Spirit,” Lennon corrects her. “Not ghost.”
“I was asking her.” She inches away from him on the couch, wishing he’d remove his arm from her shoulders. It’s so . . . the opposite of comforting. Everything about this situation is the opposite of comforting.
“What if I believe there really is . . . spirit . . . haunting my house?” she asks Lisa. “I’m not saying that’s what’s—but let’s just say there was, and I believed it . . . what can I do about it?”
“You can tell it to leave the premises.”
“That’s it? Just say get out of here?”
“Not in those words. Be firm, but polite.”
“My little sister doesn’t leave my room when I ask her to, but an evil spirit will?” Stacey shakes her head.
“You need to tell, not ask, and I didn’t say evil spirit. Is that what you—”
“No, I don’t think there’s an evil spirit in my house. Or any spirit. Forget I even asked. Forget this whole—”
She starts to get up, but Lennon’s hand clamps her shoulder.
“It’s okay,” he says, like he’s soothing a frightened toddler. “Let’s just listen and see what our options are.”
Our options . . .
As if they’re in this together. As if he’s not a part of the problem.
“I can come and cleanse the house,” Lisa tells Stacey.
“Cleanse it?”
“I do it all the time. Open the windows, ring a bell, burn sage, convince spirit to move on.”
And probably charge a small fortune to remove a curse or some such nonsense.
“Yeah, thanks, but I don’t think that would go over very well with my parents, so . . .” Again, Stacey tries to rise. Again, Lennon presses her down.
I’ve got you, he’d said earlier, on the subway.
“Let go!” She pushes his hand off, jumps to her feet, and heads for the door. “I need to get out of here. Now.”
She rushes through the apartment, down the stairs, out the door. She can hear Lennon calling her name, and she’s certain he’s going to chase after her, but he doesn’t. She scurries through the crowded neighborhood, blindly turning right, left, left, right.
The warren of narrow streets gives way to one wide avenue, and then another. She slows her pace. There are chain stores and schools and churches, traffic and police cars, just in case . . .
Again, she checks over her shoulder. No Lennon. No watcher.
You don’t need the police. You just need to get home.
Needing a cigarette to calm her nerves, she sinks onto a low brick wall in front of an apartment building, and then . . .
No. Oh, no. How could she?
She’d left her backpack behind. No cigarettes. No wallet.
But she has her phone and a MetroCard in her pocket. She can use the map app to navigate to a subway, or a ride app to summon a car. She just needs to catch her breath. Her heart is racing and her chest aches.
She leans back. It’s not as though Lisa told her anything she didn’t already know, consciously or subconsciously. Nor does she believe the “messages” were delivered via supernatural forces . . . does she?
She’d dismiss the entire experience if it weren’t for the last few ominous statements.
Not everyone close to you is as truthful as you believe . . .
Someone in your life is hiding something . . .
Everyone has secrets. Everyone is hiding something.
If there’s anything to this stuff, anything at all, Lisa could have been talking about Piper, right? She’d spent a fortune on a leather jacket without telling Mom, and she’d snuck out to a party when she was supposed to be at a sleepover.
And what about Mom, with her surgically enhanced face and nose job and dyed hair and dental veneers? Dad, too, for that matter.
Stacey herself has her share of secrets, from her newly acquired smoking habit to her relationship with Lennon. It’s not like she tells him everything, either, so, yeah. People keep things to themselves. That’s not a psychic revelation, it’s just common sense, along with everything else Lisa—
“Stacey.”
Lennon is standing in front of her.
He has both their backpacks over his shoulders and is wearing sunglasses and a smile. It might be relieved, or it might be sarcastic. She can’t tell without seeing his eyes.
“How did you . . .”
He waves his phone at her.
Oh.
The damned tracking app. She should have known he didn’t need to chase her through the streets.
“I’m sorry I brought you there,” he says. “I thought Lisa would be able to reassure you.”
About what? That her house isn’t haunted? That it is, but the spirits aren’t evil? That whoever is watching her, and calling her by a dead girl’s name, is just some random lunatic?
Stacey shakes her head, tight-lipped.
“Are you okay?” Lennon sets their backpacks at his feet and opens his arms. “Come here.”
“Our bags—someone could steal—”
“No one’s going to steal them.” He pins the straps under his black Doc Martens and repeats, “Come here.”
She doesn’t feel like being close to him right now, yet she doesn’t want to be alone. She stands, and allows herself to be embraced.
“I was really worried about you,” he whispers against her hair.
“Because you think I’m in danger? And that somebody close to me is—”
“No! Because I think Lisa’s full of shit.”
“What? I thought you said she was—”
“I was wrong. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Forget it. I’m just glad I found you.”
“Yeah, you must be psychic,” she says, and her voice is as weak as her smile.
Jacob
The restaurant is so close Jacob can taste the kajmak and qofte. Just one more block.
Steeped in nostalgia, he reflects on the good old days as he walks.
Baba had been a good man in so many ways. A patient father, an affectionate husband, a good provider. Jacob loved him.
For Baba, he’d upended his own life and curtailed his studies to follow Anna to a college town fifty-odd miles north of the city. Posing as a student, he rented a room in a house full of perpetually drunken guys. They assumed he was one of them.