I know you’re here. I’m going to help.
A second later, her dad—who it felt as though she hadn’t seen in weeks—was throwing open her door. She scrambled to push the Ouija board out of view, but he was too busy snatching her up by the arm to notice. Downstairs, the furniture was supposedly screwed up and the car was missing—a car that, somehow, magically reappeared as soon as their backs were turned. How did they do that? They. The people living within the walls. Jeff’s brood. She knew it was them. Positive. One hundred percent.
But the longer she waited for her dad to give her the go-ahead to return to her room, the more she was starting to suspect there was something more to this house than the ghosts that haunted it. There was something broken here. Something that didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the world. It was as though there had been a shift that had never quite managed to reset itself. Like switching the channel on the radio, where you could still hear the station you’d been searching for, but there would be another song playing ever so faintly beneath the first. Transference—it was how ghosts traveled from the real world to a place beyond the living. Either Jeff’s family was stuck in a constant state of travel or the house had somehow been stripped of the boundary between here and nowhere.
The officer didn’t say much, and because everything was back in order and the car was where it had always been parked, he couldn’t do much, either. When the cop finally pulled his cruiser out of the driveway, her dad waved his hand at the door as if dismissing the guy as a phony.
“Whatever,” he muttered, then turned around and gave Jeanie a defeated look. “Get your stuff.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
He shook his head at her. “I didn’t ask you what you want, kid. We’re going.”
Her only hope was to reason with him. She couldn’t possibly leave. Not now. Not with Jeffrey on the other side, waiting for her to reach out to him.
“If we leave, they win, Dad. They’re just trying to scare us.” If he wanted to believe in intruders, she’d let him. “I’m not going to Seattle . . . I’ll go back to New York to be with Mom before I move in with Uncle Mark.”
That statement brought a change to her father’s expression, as she knew it would. Even though he still loved Mom, the thing that would hurt her father the most was for Vivi to pick her mother over him. It was something he would never say, but she understood regardless.
“I want to stay here with you.” It was a lie. She didn’t give a damn about staying with him anymore, just as she didn’t care about being with her mom, either. As far as she was concerned, both her parents could disappear off the face of the earth; she’d be happy without them. After all, she was going to have a new family by then. A bigger family that understood, that actually cared. “You wanted to move here to work on your book,” she reminded him, “so that’s what you’re gonna do. Work on your book.”
“No, Jeanie.” Her dad’s shoulders fell, and for a second she thought he was going to cry. Jeanie. The name was so foreign, as though she hadn’t heard it in years. “It’s over,” he told her and looked away, as if considering something.
“No, Dad. It’s not over.” She walked over to him, determined to do whatever it took to get him to agree to stay, if only for one more night. She didn’t just want to reach Jeff, she needed to. He was dead, but she could still meet him. Jeff had said it himself when he had written “see you soon” on the back of the photo that was now pushpinned to her closet wall. And maybe that would take her dying like those other kids, maybe that’s why they had killed themselves . . . but why they had done it was beyond the point. If that’s what it took to be with Jeffrey Halcomb, perhaps death wasn’t as bad an idea as it initially seemed.
“Let’s call Echo, get her to stay here for a few nights,” she suggested. “That way you won’t be worried that people are breaking in. They wouldn’t dare break in if there are more people here, right? I’ll have someone to watch me, just like you want . . . and I’ll get to stay here, like I want. A compromise.” Echo would keep him busy if needed. Echo knew what Vivi had to do.
“A compromise,” he repeated.
“Exactly. How did I get so smart?” she asked him, feigning a silly grin—a smile she knew he loved. And while he still looked sad and worried and freaked-out, he couldn’t help but smile weakly in return. She felt a momentary pang of love for him, faint and fleeting, like the last chord of a song. That feeling vanished not a second later, vaporized beneath a succeeding thought:
It’s not you, it’s him.
Because if it hadn’t been for her father, her mother, her parents’ mutual failure, she could have been happy. She wasn’t going to let her second chance at happiness slip away.
49
* * *
WHEN LUCAS RETURNED to his study, it felt different. He felt different. All the anger he’d felt over the past few hours had drained out of him, and he was left feeling like a shell of himself—empty, tired, hardly able to put together what was going on. He sat at his desk and tried to make Jeanie proud by continuing his work, but he couldn’t concentrate. No matter how much coffee he choked down, his eyes refused to stay locked on his computer screen. His gaze constantly drifted to the pictures of Halcomb’s Faithful pinned to the corkboard.