A cloud moved, and a sliver of moonlight flickered in. Chunks of plaster on the floor, a cushion on the piano stool, a heavy Rachmaninoff book of sheet music on the stand.
“Roman Luck must have played this piano sometimes.” I nodded at the music. “Can’t you just see him, sitting in this big house all by himself, playing dark Russian songs?”
“I can,” she said. “I really can.”
I set my backpack down on the floor. It held the rope, and another flashlight. I looked up at Wink, but she still hadn’t moved. She was staring at the spot right between the piano and the ratty green sofa.
“It was right there,” Wink whispered. “That’s right where I saw him.”
I DIDN’T DUST my skin with sugar this time. I needed something more powerful. I was wearing my acorn skirt, the one with the sand from the bottom of the Blue Twist sewn into the hem for protection.
I filled one of the pockets with dried, dusky green lentils, and the other with cinnamon sticks from a jar in Mim’s charm cupboard. I hung a key around my neck on a silver chain, the long skeleton one that the tiny lady in the black dress gave me when I stumbled upon her in the woods that one day. She said the key opened a golden box that contained the heart of a girl she’d killed years ago.
I knew I’d have to tell Midnight about the unforgivables now. I needed to warn him about how they feed on you if you’re not careful, how they’ll turn your heart into red dust and make you go hatter-mad.
“I WAS LITTLE,” Wink said, voice soft, eyes staring down at the rotting Roman Luck floorboards. “As little as Bee Lee. Leaf was the same age as the twins. We were playing in the woods, a game that Leaf made up called Follow the Screams. I was hiding in a dead tree trunk and listening, and that’s when I heard them, real screams, not Leaf-screams, coming from the Roman Luck house.”
We had some time before Poppy showed up. She wasn’t a ten-minute-early kind of girl. I was sitting on the green velveteen sofa, and Wink was sitting next to me, our knees touching. She was wearing a skirt with little acorns all over it. I held the flashlight in my hand, the light toward our toes.
The wind picked up outside. Branches scraped the broken windows and it sounded like someone’s fingernails clawing at the glass.
I slid closer to Wink, until our thighs were touching.
“Mim told me that a woman named Autumn used to live here. This was a long time ago, before Roman Luck. Autumn wasn’t right in the head. She married the handsomest man in town, a man named Martin Lind, and they had four children, two boys, two girls. But as time went on Autumn became paranoid and suspicious, and she accused her husband of being in love with another woman. She thought he was going to leave her.”
Wink paused. She was rubbing the hem of her skirt between two fingers, and not looking at me.
“And then one day Autumn stabbed Martin in the stomach with a kitchen knife and left him in the music room to die.”
I looked at Wink, looked at her innocent green eyes and her earnest, heart-shaped face. “Is that really true, Wink?”
She smiled suddenly, soft lips, cute ears. “You keep asking me that. Of course it’s true. All the strangest things are true. Autumn hanged for it, hanged by the neck until dead, and her children grew up with strangers, orphaned and alone like in one of my hayloft stories. The house went up for sale, and Roman Luck bought it. But Autumn’s bad thing, her unforgivable thing, had soaked into the floorboards, and creeped into the walls.”
“You told me Roman didn’t leave because of a ghost.”
She shrugged. “Mim said he didn’t. She read his cards sometimes, so she would know. Sometimes people just . . . leave.”
An owl hooted somewhere out in the night. The hoo-hooing swept right through the broken glass, right into my ears, like a whisper from Poppy.
“I was hiding and I heard the screams and I went closer to see. There was a man in this room, Midnight, and he was screaming, and bleeding. He was dying. He was handsome, and beautiful, like a prince in a fairy tale. He didn’t see me, not at first. I was little, and had to stand on my tiptoes, and I could still barely reach the windowsill. He was all in shadow and kept clutching his side and saying something, over and over.”
Wink was using her Putting the Orphans to Sleep voice. But I wasn’t getting sleepy this time.
“What?” I asked, when she didn’t continue. “What did he say?”
“Tell my children I love them. That’s what he said, again and again. And oh, Midnight, his voice was so raw and sad.”
I looked around the room, and then slammed my eyes shut, thinking that the ghost of Martin Lind was going to appear in front of me, bleeding and clutching and crying out in the dark.
Had Wink really seen that as a girl? What would that do to a little kid’s head?