Candace said to Ruthie.
Fawn laughed and shook her head incredulously. “Ruthie doesn’t look anything like Mama.”
“That’s because Alice Washburne is not her mother.” Candace let her words drop like bombs, watching their faces as the dust settled.
“The O’Rourkes are my real parents,” Ruthie said quietly. It wasn’t a question. Her hand was resting on the blanket-covered gun.
She’d known the truth since she first saw the photo at Candace’s, hadn’t she? Felt it deep down.
It was funny, though—when she was a little kid, she used to have fantasies about Mom and Dad not being her real parents; she’d imagine a rich couple, a king and queen of some far-off country she’d never heard of, coming to claim her as their own and ferry her off into the life she was meant to be leading, a life that didn’t involve cleaning out the chicken coop and wearing hand-me-down clothes. But now that she had finally gotten her wish, it didn’t feel like a magical new beginning. It felt like a punch in the gut, hard and heavy.
“Like I said, you’re a smart girl.”
Fawn clutched Ruthie’s hand tighter.
“Which makes you … my aunt?” Ruthie wasn’t sure what else to say. Pleased to meet you, actual blood relative—that didn’t seem appropriate.
“I don’t get it,” Fawn whispered, looking from Ruthie to Candace.
“It’s confusing, isn’t it?” Candace said, giving Fawn a sympathetic look. “To explain, we’d have to go way back, to when Tommy and I were kids. We lived here, in this house. After Sara Harrison Shea died, the house was left to her niece, Amelia Larkin. It stayed in the family. Tommy and I are the great-great-grandchildren of Amelia.”
Ruthie took this in. She was a blood relative of Sara Harrison Shea. Whether Sara had been a madwoman or a mystic, there was a piece of her inside Ruthie.
“When we were kids, we found hiding places all over the house—the one in the hall closet, one in our parents’ bedroom floor, several here and there behind the walls, and one in the back of one of the kitchen cabinets, right over there,” she said, pointing at the cabinet that held the mugs and glasses. “That’s where we found the missing pages from Sara Harrison Shea’s diary, including instructions for how to make a sleeper walk again. She’d copied them from the letter Auntie had left for her.”
“What’s a sleeper?” Fawn asked.
Candace’s eyes grew big and wolfish. “A dead person brought back to life.”
Fawn bit her lip. “But that’s not real, right?” She looked at Ruthie.
“Of course not,” Ruthie said, but Fawn looked frightened, unconvinced.
“Like aliens?” Fawn asked.
“Yeah, like aliens,” Ruthie said, smiling what she hoped was a reassuring smile at Fawn. She turned to Candace. “So you had these missing pages all this time?”
Candace held up her hand. “Not so fast. Let me finish. We had the directions, but there was still a part missing,” she explained. “There was a map telling where to go to do the spell, and we couldn’t find it anywhere. Our parents had cleared so much out of the house, hauling off box after box to junk shops, wanting to rid themselves of everything associated with crazy Sara. So Tommy and I knew how to do it, but not where to do it. Sara’s papers said there was a portal somewhere close to the house, perhaps even in the house, and that, for the spell to work, you had to go to the portal. But without the map or a description, we were out of luck.”
“So what did you do with the pages you’d found?” Ruthie asked.
“We hid them away. Then, when we were adults, Tommy took charge of them. He promised they were worth a great deal of money, even without the map, and once he found a buyer, we would split the profits. He had a friend he’d met in college who dealt in antiquarian books and papers.…”
“Our father!” Ruthie said.
“Yes. James Washburne. Tom and Bridget arranged to meet James and his wife, Alice, here at the house one weekend, sixteen years ago. They were going to show them the diary pages and try one more time to find the portal. Then the pages would go up for auction, and we’d all be rich, according to Tommy.”
“So what happened?” Ruthie asked.
Candace shook her head, pursed her lips tight. “Tommy and Bridget were killed.”
“Killed?” Ruthie gasped. In just a few short minutes, she’d been given new parents, then had them taken away again. “How?”
“Alice and James claimed there was something in the woods that got them—a monster of some sort that dragged their bodies off.”
Fawn’s whole body went rigid.