Somehow, in some impossible way, she had been in his study at the very same moment he’d been scrambling to get out.
Lucas squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head, refusing to believe it. “No,” he murmured. None of it made sense. None of it was fucking right. But nothing had ever been right here. His kid had grown distant, more defiant, the moment they had moved in. He had become more indifferent than ever, hardly able to think about anything but Halcomb, the book, the research—obsessed with the case. He’d pushed aside all his doubts and allowed a stranger into their lives, had snapped at his daughter and hissed through the phone at his best friend to leave him alone. Doors opened onto rooms that shouldn’t have existed. Dead people ran through the yard like a group of gallivanting kids. A man who had killed himself earlier that day was standing not ten feet away, looking three decades younger, twice as dashing as he did in photographs.
Faith.
Sometimes faith didn’t make sense. It simply was what it was. And yet Lucas couldn’t accept it.
“No,” he said again. “It isn’t possible.”
Halcomb gave him a thoughtful glance, that chilling smile crossing his lips again. “With men this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible.”
The shadows in the corners of the room began to shift. They stepped out of various parts of the room and into the dim light; Georgia Jansen with her long dark hair and her hardened features. Derrick Fink with his cowboy boots and mother-of-pearl snaps. Dead-eyed Chloe Sears. And the rest of them.
All save for the victim.
Audra Snow was missing.
And here was Jeanie at the foot of the stairs among Halcomb’s believers, as if to take Audra’s place.
Lucas seemed to be the only one disturbed by this unnatural reunion. He clawed at the front of his T-shirt, his fingernails scratching at well-worn cotton, trapped inside his own skin. When the Doors’ “Break on Through (To the Other Side)” came blasting out of the living room speakers, every nerve in his body buzzed with the electricity of a pent-up scream. He reeled around to see Echo having just put a vinyl record down on a player that didn’t belong to him. Because nothing in this house truly did—everything belonged to them. They were in their rightful place. It was Lucas who, somehow, was the intruder.
Echo began to sway back and forth, her mug of whatever it was she’d been drinking discarded. It was gentle at first, as she waited for the music to build. Then there was something terrible about her movement, unnatural, like a puppet with its strings yanked tight. She flailed her arms, her hair whipping right and left. Her eyes met his as she danced, flashing with an alarming eagerness.
Lucas couldn’t look. He turned away from her, his gaze tumbling across the room until it stopped on his daughter. Jeanie was swaying to the music on the opposite side of the room, her mouth turned up in a dreamy smile. Her eyes were closed, and her hair was longer than it should have been. Straighter, having grown a good six inches in the last ten seconds. Just as Jeff Halcomb appeared younger, there was something about Jeanie’s movements that promised Lucas his little girl wasn’t his anymore.
And when she looked up at him and gave him a coy smile, the air in his lungs vaporized to nothing. Jeanie’s eyes were no longer green. They were blue.
Blue like Audra Snow’s.
“Oh my God.” He twisted where he stood, grabbed Halcomb by the arms, only to shove him away, as though having grasped fire.
How can I touch him? How is he really here?
The culmination of three decades of Jeffrey’s intricate planning, of unwavering faith, had been set in motion. He was about to repeat the ritual, set what had been interrupted right after all this time. He needed another Audra, a vulnerable girl who was full of contradictory emotions. Love and hate and hurt and confusion. All the shit Lucas and Caroline had shoved into their now broken daughter with their fighting, their refusal to let either party win.
Echo’s dancing transformed into an erratic spasm. Lucas winced as she convulsed yet somehow stayed on her feet. Foam collected in the corners of her mouth. The eight ghosts that had stood throughout the room had shifted, and were now lying in the center of the room, convulsing in the form of a human star. Red plastic cups littered the ground next to them. Echo shook in the center of the formation, then crashed to her knees with a choking gasp, seizing in the center of the dead.
Lucas lunged for his daughter. Grabbing her by the arm, he yanked her toward him, ready to run, sure that if he was only able to make it out of the house Jeanie would come back to him. She would, by some miracle, be herself again. But rather than stumbling toward him, Jeanie stood still, stuck in place just as she had been upstairs in her room. She stared at him with blank, disbelieving eyes, unable to comprehend why he would deny her happiness. Why would he insist she continue living with his misery.
Don’t you want me to be happy?
All that came of Lucas’s seizure of her arms was Halcomb’s cross coming loose from her hand. She let go of it, and it transferred into his own grip. He stared at it—a token of the past brought into the present. Or was the present now the past? It was a beacon, the thing that had led Halcomb back to the house. Just as Lucas had agreed to live in Pier Pointe without so much as a second thought, he’d brought that cross into the house once more. Just as Jeff had expected him to. Just the way he wanted.