Every corner of the room was frightening in its foreignness. The yard sale paintings that hung against a backdrop of yellow wallpaper brought a sour, almost fruity taste to the back of her throat. She felt that if she touched the wrong thing in this house that shouldn’t have been, she’d set off a chain reaction. She’d never be allowed back into the real world again.
She decided to focus her attention on the door that had shut behind her. It should have led out into the upstairs hall and to her dad’s ground-floor study. Some promise of the familiar. But all it did was give her the sense of being trapped in some impossible dream. She didn’t make a move for it. Escape wasn’t the point. She was here to meet her new family—one free of anger and yelling and negligence. A family that would finally make her feel part of something better, who knew what being forgotten felt like. Jeff will fix everything, she reminded herself, trying to keep her nerves in check. Jeff will make it better. You just have to have faith.
But that didn’t mean she wasn’t scared. The cross bit into her fingers while she held it against the front of her shirt, as if to fend off the devil himself. The rectangle of black paper beckoned her from the foot of the bed.
YES. NO. GOODBYE.
The coin she had been using as a makeshift planchette was missing, but she didn’t need it. The cross would work better than any coin could.
The thudding of her heart assured her that now, finally, all the pieces were in place. This was exactly what they wanted, exactly the way it was supposed to happen.
The cross is the answer.
She had no idea how it had gotten in her father’s desk drawer, didn’t know how he had gotten such an artifact. Had Echo brought it to him with the photographs? Had it been in the house all along? It didn’t matter. A trigger object, she thought, and with a sense of fearful conviction, she kneeled in front of her closet altar and slowly moved the cross away from her chest.
Being overtaken by such fear earlier had been confusing. Running away from the strange woman in the kitchen and into her father’s study had been reflexive, an instinct, a reaction that she knew was counterproductive, but she hadn’t been able to help herself. She wanted to meet the family, so why had she run? But the more she thought about it, the more it made sense. The woman in the kitchen had scared her on purpose. She’d done it so that Vivi would find that strange silver relic in her dad’s study. And then, in some inexplicable way, Jeffrey’s faithful had ushered her up the stairs and back into her room. Everything was happening for a reason. Every move was calculated. She was a puppet, and Jeff Halcomb was tugging her strings.
The Ouija board. The cross. This was what would truly bring Jeffrey back from the dead.
“Jeff . . .” She whispered the name into the silence of the room, into the stillness of the closet. “Are you here?” She laid the cross onto the black paper, her fingers just barely grazing its silver surface.
As she knelt there, the familiar sense of not being alone began to crawl across her skin. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled. She squeezed her eyes shut as the sensation grew. There was a whooping outside, like kids on a playground, reminding her of how she and her best friends had gallivanted around the neighborhood only weeks before. She opened her eyes, abandoned the makeshift board, crossed the room, and paused at the window.
A group of men and women ran together across the yard.
It took her a moment to realize that they were in pursuit of something. Someone. It took her even longer to realize that night had turned into day. But she lost those details when her gaze stopped on a man standing to the side of the stampede. Vivi’s heart skittered like a needle on an old record.
“Dad?” It came out as a whisper of disbelief. Was it really daytime? Had she been stuck inside her room all night? What was her dad doing out there? He wasn’t supposed to be there, not when she was so close to bringing Jeff back.
He’ll ruin everything.
She was ready to smack the palms of her hands against the glass in frustration—to yell at him to go back inside, to mind his own business—when that sensation of not being alone returned. Except this time, whoever was watching her wasn’t doing it from a distance. Someone was standing directly behind her, as though peering over her shoulder. She could hear breathing. The small barrier of electricity buzzed between them, like the sensation of just barely being grazed by a passing hand.
Her father’s attention didn’t return to the window. Whatever was happening amid the trees was far too interesting for him to break away. Because of course it was. A fresh pang of anger seized her heart. She knew her dad had seen her in the window. Their eyes had met. And yet, there was always something more pressing, someone more interesting, something more deserving of his attention.
But she didn’t move, her own trepidation cementing her in place. Afraid to confront whoever was standing behind her, she watched the group drag a captive out from the cherry grove. A blond pregnant girl thrashed madly as two guys and two girls carried her across the grass. She was choking on her sobs, her hair flying around her face.
Vivi recognized her from the photos she’d seen online. It was the girl that used to live here, the daughter of the dead congressman, Audra Snow.
The intake of air behind her was steady, unyielding. Something about its enduring rhythm convinced her that she could stand at that window for days, weeks, years, but the person behind her could stand there even longer.
She had to turn around, face her fear.
“Jeffrey?”
She whispered the name, hoping that it would illicit some sort of response. Or maybe she was dreaming, like she’d read about in her dad’s book.
One, two, three, four, five.
She counted out the fingers of her right hand, one by one.
One, two, three, four, five.
Still the same.
In dreams, you weren’t supposed to be able to perform the finger-counting trick more than once. Failure meant that you were asleep. But even on the third try, there were five digits on her right hand.
She was wide awake.
The breathing continued.