“You’ve seen them, haven’t you?” Echo asked, her question freezing Vee in her tracks. Echo paused her steps as well, turning to look back at the girl who was now standing statuesque upon the beach, and smiled. “Ah.” She nodded again. “Yeah, I had a feeling.”
“Y-you did?” Vee blinked at the strange woman before her. She didn’t want to come straight out and ask if Echo meant what Vee thought she meant. Maybe she was mistaken. Perhaps the moment she dropped the word ghost into the conversation, Echo would burst into a fit of laughter and ask her what in God’s name she was talking about. But Echo kept her gaze steady on Vee and nodded again.
“I knew you were the one from the first moment I saw you, Vivi.”
Vivi. That was new. She kind of liked it.
“The one?” Vee shook her head, not understanding what that meant. The one for what?
“You’re just like them, you know. Lost, wanting more than what you have, deserving of more than what you’re being given. Kids like you—that’s who Jeffrey loved the most. That’s why they turned to him, Vivi. He knew what they needed, and Jeff gave them everything he promised.”
Vee swallowed against the lump that had risen in her throat. Her thoughts drifted to the empty cardboard box shoved into the corner of her closet, the printed-out pictures she’d tacked to the wall behind it for no reason other than being compelled to do so by some ineffable force. That same force was what had kept Jeffrey Halcomb’s photo glowing bright on her laptop screen for the past day and a half. She had saved more than a dozen photographs of him onto her computer. When she considered closing them to shut down her system, she hesitated, backed down, as though closing them would somehow make the man who wasn’t present disappear. She’d spent hours staring into his eyes, wondering what he had been like, not once thinking about Tim or her friends or the old life she’d left behind. She wondered if, perhaps, those people had killed themselves not because Jeffrey Halcomb had been some terrible oppressor but because he had been wonderful enough to die for.
Echo placed a hand on Vee’s shoulder. “You’ll get to meet him soon,” she said. “He’s looking forward to it, Vivi. But you have to keep that a secret . . . you understand? Even after you meet him, whatever you do, don’t tell your father. Do you know why?”
Yeah, because he’d think Vee was crazy. Because the moment she told him she was seeing Jeffrey Halcomb, the house would be history. He’d move them out within hours. Then it would be endless therapy sessions to get her head examined. Her father would do whatever it took to convince her it was all in her head. No, it never happened. You just imagined it, Jeanie. You fell down the rabbit hole, did too much research, read too many articles, got all mixed up.
Jeanie. That name hardly felt like hers anymore. Virginia, even less so. Maybe, as a fresh start, Vivi was the girl she needed to become.
“Yes, I understand,” Vee said.
“Can you tell me why?” Echo asked, and while Vee didn’t know exactly what it was Echo wanted her to say, she murmured the first thing that came to mind.
“Because he’ll ruin everything.”
That’s all he ever did. Both her dad and her mom. They messed everything up and didn’t even care. But Vivi didn’t have parents. She could forget them, forget the past and the pain.
“Do you think I should try to help them?” she asked, her gaze flitting to Echo’s face. “The people in the house, I mean. Is that what they want, for me to help?”
Echo smiled, as though having expected that very question. “Oh, honey, don’t worry. You will help them,” she said. “That’s what being the one is all about. Look.” Drawing something out of her cross-body bag, Echo held a small photograph out for Vee to see. It was a picture of Jeff Halcomb—young and handsome. His smile was nothing short of dazzling in the light that dappled down onto his shoulders from between branches overhead. “Turn it over,” Echo told her. Vee did so, blinking at the handwritten note scrawled onto the back.
Dearest Vivi,
See you soon.
—J.
Vee’s eye went wide. “Is this . . . ?” She paused, flipping the photograph over again in her hand. “But how?”
Echo exhaled a quiet laugh and placed a hand against Vee’s back. “Magic,” she said. “And he’s waiting to show you his best trick, Vivi. Any time now. It’ll be soon.”
39
* * *
LUCAS SLID MARK’S Honda into park and leaned back in the driver’s seat of the car, his eyes fixed on Audra Snow’s old house. His mind reeled around the new information Marty had offered about Halcomb’s time in prison—the dead inmate, the guard who had killed his wife instead of taking her to a luau. Two hours of uninterrupted thinking had him feeling as though he’d dodged a bullet. Halcomb had spared him of something the moment he denied Lucas his interview.
Thank God, he thought. Because who knows what would have happened?
He didn’t like to think of himself as impressionable, but the proof was looming directly ahead of him. Halcomb had talked Lucas into moving. He had convinced a hardened criminal to commit suicide. He had, potentially, persuaded a prison guard to kill himself and his wife. What influence could he hold over those who willingly followed him? What about the people who sent him letters, the ones who loomed in the trees just beyond the orchard?