Sadie froze. She did not know why she didn’t want Mommy to see her out of her bedroom, but something—that beckoning voice perhaps—warned her not to get caught.
She stood perfectly still, only allowing her head to turn slowly toward the master bedroom door.
There was Mommy, on her hands and knees, scrubbing at a stubborn patch of dirt with a filthy rag. Like the other rooms, this one only had a few pieces of furniture and almost no decorations of any kind. It would not take Mommy long to clean it. If Sadie hoped to follow the sound to its source, she needed to move quickly.
Lifting up onto her tippy-toes, she crossed in staccato steps to the foot of a staircase. The stairs stretched up high above her. At the top was a landing painted in the same gold light that had cut a swath through the curtains in her bedroom.
Her small hand gripped the handrail. She let her palm slide across it as she ascended the stairs, and the scratchy wood scraped harmlessly at her flesh like the hairs on—
On Daddy’s head. When he shaved it that one time. Because you told him that he was going bald. And Daddy got mad. Daddy didn’t like being told that. Daddy didn’t want to be old. It made him sad. You made him sad.
The whispering voice grew louder, as if the connection had suddenly become more secure. But she still could not make out what it was saying. The voice was nothing more than waves lapping against rock.
Her hand bumped into the edge of the top post. She had climbed the entire staircase without realizing it.
Below, in the doorway to the master bedroom, there was no sign of Mommy. Not a shadow. Not even her voice calling out to make sure Sadie was okay.
Sadie was above now. On the second floor.
You shouldn’t be here, she thought.
But that didn’t make sense. This house was where they were going to live for the whole summer. This was their “get away” place. She had heard Mommy say that on the phone before they left, when she was talking to Miss Allison at Mommy’s office: “We just need to get away for a while.” So why should Sadie have to stay on the first floor? Mommy had never said she couldn’t come up here. The entire house was theirs.
But you’re being sneaky, she told herself. You’re sneaking and you don’t want Mommy to find out.
Knowing this made Sadie feel sad. But it wasn’t the regular kind of sad, like when she watched a movie where an animal died or read a book with a mean sister in it. This was a special kind of sad, as if a little part of her kind of enjoyed feeling this way. There was a word for this feeling. She had heard Mommy say it once when she was talking about how Daddy felt sometimes. Melon-something. Melon …
Collie. Like the dog. Like Mr. Brubaker’s dog when he brought it to Mommy’s work, that time it tangled with a porcupine. It had those thorny things in its nose. Miss Allison had to hold it down while Mommy plucked them out, one by one, with tweezers.
Mommy didn’t know that Sadie was listening to her talk to Miss Allison, but she was, and she heard Mommy say that word that sounded like “melon collie.” Mommy said that Daddy liked feeling that way because it made him seem romantic.
Sadie stood hesitantly on the landing and tapped the toe of her shoe against the floor’s uneven planks. Directly ahead of her was an archway constructed of knobby white wood, its pale bark dotted with dark, twisted knots. To Sadie, it looked as if two trees had bowed their heads to form a frame.
A picture frame.
But the picture inside was moving, like those paintings on the walls in Hogwarts, just the slightest hint of movement from the curtains flanking the windows along the north wall. One of the windows must have been open, because the curtains knocked softly in a breeze, shifting shadows around the room.
Through this magic tree-lined picture frame, Sadie started into a large rectangular room that appeared to be used mostly for storage. The larger items had been shoved to either side, creating a straight, narrow pathway to the far side of the room. The items were odds and ends, a random collection of things no longer wanted downstairs. Folding chairs. A mirror in a strange, twisty steel frame. The heads of animals—a wild cat, a deer with pointy horns—mounted on shiny wooden shields, their artificial black eyes glistening like marbles.
Sadie sucked in a frightened breath.
Suddenly the touch of an invisible finger was under her chin, lifting her head so that her line of sight was straight and level, so that she was peering directly to the far side of the room.
There was a small square door, no more than three feet by three feet. It was set into the wall on brass hinges. A sliding steel latch was mounted on the wall to one side. The bolt rested against the loops, not through them.
It was open, just an inch or two.
Inside that doorway was darkness.
Sadie stepped forward, through the archway, through the magic picture frame, her tiny form slicing narrow streaks of sunlight to send dust motes swirling away like ghostly fingers clawing at the air.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THIS IS YOUR mother’s room.
Kris clenched her jaw and pushed the thought away, as she had done a hundred times since entering the master bedroom. She focused on the work, on scrubbing at the grime-covered mirrors lining the closet doors. She put her weight into the damp rag and yet she could not seem to remove a stubborn patch of film from eye level.
Others had stayed here. She knew that. In the thirty years since she and her father had walked out the door, Mr. Hargrove had initially rented the house to who-knew-how-many summer people until her father abruptly ordered him to stop. The master bedroom would have been the first and most obvious choice for them to sleep, and so it belonged to everyone.
And yet the voice in her mind persisted.
The shadow voice. It reminded her, over and over, with more than a hint of pleasure: This is your mother’s room.
Kris knew it was right. Because her mother had been the only one to truly claim the room as her own, to claim it with her laughter, with her pain, with her tears, with her screams.
With her life. But most importantly, with her death.
There, the voice purred. In the bed. It’s right there. Beside you. Look at it.
Kris scrubbed harder, concentrating on that goddamn smudge that turned the reflection of her own face into a blurry blob. The rag in her hand was beginning to fray.
Look at it!
The voice’s shout was so loud, so sudden, that for a moment Kris was convinced she had actually heard it, not reverberating off the walls of her mind but off the hard wood planks lining the bedroom, its percussion echoing down the hallway like a shotgun blast.
Look at it.
This time it was her own voice. Soft. Patient. Comforting.
Look.
Kris took a long, slow breath—in through her nose, out through her mouth—and then she turned toward the bed.
There were no horrors waiting for her. Only a simple metal frame supporting a fabric-covered box spring that was worn through in multiple areas to reveal the wood beneath. Above this, a lumpy blue comforter was tucked over the queen-sized mattress. At the head of the bed, two mismatched pillows rested against the rustic headboard—the one in a yellow case was as thin as the comforter upon which it sat; the other, sporting a decorative slip covered in various types of fishing lures, as fat as the first was thin. Kris did not recognize the pillowcases or the comforter, but all would be stripped and replaced, just as she’d done to Sadie’s bed.