Across the street, there’s faint yelping. Jerome. Mrs. Lao must have let him out to pee.
I turn to Lauren. “We’re just going out for a bit, okay? Please don’t tell your mom. You can stay in here, okay?”
She looks down at her toes. “I won’t.”
A bubble of relief. I exhale. Pull jeans on over my fleece PJ pants and throw on the jacket I left draped over my desk chair. The relief doesn’t last long when I see Lauren’s face. Crushed.
She gives me a halfhearted wave as I pop out my screen and climb up on my windowsill and awkwardly out the other side into the cold night air. I pull the window down behind me feeling like the shittiest person ever, but I have to get rid of my friends before they wake my stepmom up and everything goes to hell.
When I’m tucked in the back of Bailey’s Honda Civic, balled-up Taco Bell wrappers under my butt as I fumble for the seat belt, Jade says, “Is she gonna rat us out?”
“She won’t,” I say.
Bailey looks over her shoulder as she pulls away from the curb. Turns front and slams on the brakes, letting out a little yelp.
Lauren is standing in front of the car, her body illuminated by Bailey’s headlights. I nearly slide off my seat. She’s wearing her purple down jacket and she’s waving for us to stop. Bailey and I both lower our windows.
“Can I come?” Lauren wraps her arms around her waist. “I won’t say anything. I promise.”
My heart twists. Lauren coming along tonight is a bad idea in a million different ways. “You can come next time.”
Jerome starts to bark again, obviously forgotten in the backyard. A light flips on from Mrs. Lao’s back porch.
“Shit,” Bailey says.
My stomach twists. If Mrs. Lao sees us—“Just get in the car.”
Lauren looks at the house, then back at me. “Really?”
Bailey flips her headlights off, chanting shit, shit, shit under her breath. I lean over and throw open the back door for Lauren. “Yes! Just get in.”
Lauren ducks and climbs into the backseat next to me. “Ride it like you stole it!” Jade hollers.
Bailey accelerates, hitting the curve at the end of the cul-de-sac. My head knocks against the back window. Lauren’s breathless, like we’ve completed a heist.
Jade lowers her mirror. Warm brown eyes winged with black liner meet mine; she’s pissed, but what am I supposed to do? They’re the ones who decided to drag me out.
I feel the cold in my hands. The vents are pointed away from Lauren and me, concentrating all the heat in the front of the car. Bailey’s eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror. I hope she can read what I’m trying to communicate: It’s not too late. We can go back.
But she grips the steering wheel and looks straight ahead at the road. It’s covered in packed snow, the bare trees on each side bending eerily toward the center. Lauren pales when she sees where we are. “Where are we going?”
I hesitate. “Up to the barn. You still want to come?”
Lauren picks at the pills of fleece on her pants again. Lifts her head and nods.
Bailey stops at the foot of Sparrow Hill and cuts the engine. “Let’s do this.”
Lauren has my hand in a vise grip. We’re climbing Sparrow Hill, picking our way around the barren white spruces and trying not to slip on the icy patches of snow.
There was a time when my brand-new half sister was terrified of me. She’d sense me coming into a room and skitter out of it like a cat. Now I’m her sister. She won’t let anyone forget that, especially my stepbrother, Andrew. Her half brother.
Now she trusts me enough to bring her to the creepiest place in Broken Falls—Sparrow Kill. That’s what everyone calls it, because of what happened in the Leeds House before it burned down.
Jade, already several paces ahead, looks back at us, a pinch of concern on her forehead when she sees Lauren’s face. “If you’re scared, you can go back and wait in the car.”
“So she can get snatched by some creep?” Bailey says. Something rustles past our feet. “Shit! Something touched me.”
I feel Lauren’s hand tense in mine.
“It was probably just a chipmunk,” I say. I look down at my sister, drop my voice to a whisper. “You really don’t have to do this. We can walk home.”
She nods. I can see the wheels turning in her head. Keelie March wouldn’t be brave enough to climb Sparrow Kill. “I want to.”
My foot catches a slippery spot and the ground disappears from underneath me. I fall, taking Lauren down with me. Pain shoots up my tailbone.
Bailey and Jade whip their heads around. See us on our butts. Bailey starts to laugh—a full-on belly laugh that rises into the night, skimming the tops of the trees. I start to laugh too, and then so do Jade and Lauren. We laugh as loud as we want; the nearest house, the Strausses’, is more than half a mile away.
It’s okay, I tell myself. We’re laughing. Everything will be okay.
Jade extends a mittened hand and helps me up. Snow seeps into my socks, through the tops of my boots.
Without the moon to guide us, it’s too dark to spot the barn. Bailey reaches into her bag and digs out a flashlight—one of those small ones with the name of her dad’s plumbing company on it—and illuminates a shallow path for us. “I think it’s to the right.”
We move together, the crunch of our footsteps in sync. When Bailey stops short in front of me, I know she’s spotted it.
The barn has a face. They took the door off its hinges years ago, leaving a gaping hole for a mouth. Two windows, high up, form the eyes. Those are broken, too. I know it’s probably because of some kids who came up here to dick around, throw some rocks, but it’s still creepy.
The house is gone, but I’ve seen it in pictures. A red-and-white Scandinavian-style house set behind wrought-iron gates. The scalloped windows reminded me of the dollhouse in my mother’s baby pictures, the one my grandfather built her.
I never found out what happened to the dollhouse. Everyone knows what happened to the Leeds House, though: it burned down.
What no one knows for sure is who set the fire. By the time the fire marshal arrived on Sparrow Hill, there was nothing left of the house but ash and the gnarled bodies of the five children who lived there. Outside, sitting upright on a bench, was Hugh Leeds, the children’s father. There was a rifle next to his body and a single gunshot wound to his head.
His wife, Josephine, was never seen again.
The town fought for years to tear the barn down, clear the property and sell it, but without Josephine’s body, they couldn’t prove she was dead. So the barn stayed, belonging to the Leedses by law. They cleared the wreckage of the house and planted trees around the scorched earth.
Depending on who you ask, Josephine Leeds is still here, walking up and down Sparrow Kill, her white nightdress bloody and filthy at the hem. People call her the Red Woman, and they say she can only be spotted at night.
That’s why we’re here. To see for ourselves.
To scare the shit out of ourselves. Because what else is there to do during a Broken Falls winter?
“You first.” Bailey jabs me between my shoulder blades.