On my thirteenth birthday, I made one last attempt to convince my mother. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I hoped she’d believe me now that I was officially a teenager and no longer a child.
“Why do you insist on lying like this?” she snapped. “If they weren’t having an affair, why would your father have been there when James wasn’t home?”
Somewhere deep down inside, I knew the answer. Back then, it was only a collection of sounds and feelings. I couldn’t figure out how to interpret them. I couldn’t put what I knew into words.
My therapist told me that sometimes we invent stories we’d like to be true. It’s not lying, she said. It’s called wishful thinking. I must be pretty sick, I thought, to wish I’d seen the corpses of two people I loved. So, I tried making up nicer stories. None of them were true, but my therapist was thrilled with my progress. I didn’t dare tell her I still saw the bodies every hour of the day. A couple of years later, I discovered drugs that could turn off the slideshow inside my head. I raided my friends’ medicine cabinets for painkillers. I checked their parents’ nightstands for sleep aids. Before I went to bed at night, I’d pop a few painkillers and chug them down with wine from the bottle my mother always had open. And then I’d fall into a dark, dreamless oblivion as quiet and peaceful as a grave. The ghosts in my head never bothered me there.
Then one morning, a year before I arrived in Louth, I slept straight through my alarm. My mother’s maid, sent to shut the damn thing off, found me unresponsive. When I regained consciousness three days later, I was in the hospital. By the end of that week, I’d been shipped off to rehab.
* * *
—
In the storeroom below the manor, I finally opened my eyes. I felt nothing, the way I had when I’d woken up all alone on a cot in an unfamiliar rehab facility. I saw nothing, just the darkness all around me. I figured I’d slipped back down to the bottom of my hole, and this time I planned to stay. I’d crawled out once before, but I didn’t have the strength to do it again.
Then I heard something. Someone knocking on the storeroom door. Softly, but insistently. Whoever it was knew I was in there. Then I remembered where I was and how I’d gotten there. It had to be Sam, coming to check on me. I let the sound guide me to the door. When I opened it, there was no one standing outside. The knocking had been replaced by the patter of bare feet, and I caught a brief glimpse of a girl in a white satin dress running for the stairs.
I sprinted upstairs and came to a stop in the entrance hall, beneath the twinkling chandelier. I listened for footsteps but heard nothing. Outside the windows, the world had gone dark. Inside, the house looked deserted. But it wasn’t. Someone was there with me. I just couldn’t see her.
I didn’t need to pinch myself. I knew I was awake. This time, I couldn’t dismiss what I’d heard. It wasn’t a dream. There were three options to choose from: prankster, ghost, or hallucination. I didn’t like any of the choices, but the last scared me far more than the others.
“Who’s there?” I whispered. I got silence for an answer.
“Grace? Is that you?” It was worth a try.
“April?” I tried. Nothing. “Dahlia?”
“Please!” I begged. “Someone talk to me! Tell me I’m not going crazy!”
Then the doorbell tolled. It was deep and solemn—like the sound of an old church calling people to prayer.
I spun around to face the door. I couldn’t believe it. I’d called and she’d come. A Dead Girl could be waiting for me behind door number one. I glanced up at the stairs, half expecting Miriam or James to appear. Neither seemed to be home. I slid silently toward the door. The peephole was too high for me, and I had to lift myself up on my tiptoes. My eye was almost to the glass when the bell rang again. I stumbled backward, my heart beating wildly. It took so long for me to gather my wits that I was sure there would be no one there when I looked again. And yet, there was.
A tall figure stood with his back to the house, as though he was taking in the view from the manor’s front door. But it was dark out there. There was nothing to see. His black hair and dark coat blended into the night, and I couldn’t make out who it was. I watched until my feet ached from standing on tiptoe, but he didn’t move an inch. He seemed perfectly content to wait.
I wasn’t going to answer. I planned to slip away. Then, as I dropped down to my heels, the button on my jeans scraped against the door handle. It wasn’t loud. I didn’t think he could have heard. When I shot back up to my tiptoes to check, a face stared back at me from the other side. Under the blue outdoor lights, his skin appeared bloodless, and the fish-eye lens inside the peephole stretched the man’s smile into a Joker’s grin. I yelped and dropped down to my heels.
“Bram? That you?” Nolan called through the door.
I kept a hand pressed to my chest. It felt like my heart might burst right through my ribs.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded. “It’s the middle of the night.”
There was a pause, then laughter. “Middle of the night? Have you cracked the lock on the liquor cabinet? It’s not even seven o’clock.”
That threw me. I had to stop and repeat the last part to myself. I’d been certain it was the dead of night. “Show me your phone,” I ordered.
It was his turn to be confused. “What?”
“Your phone—hold it up to the peephole so I can see the time.”
“If you insist,” he said as though indulging a child.
I rose to my tiptoes and saw a lovely photo of a frozen lake surrounded by snowy mountains. The time at the top of the screen was 6:58. My face flushed with embarrassment, I cracked open the door.
“What are you doing here?”
“Nice to see you, too.” He seemed amused by my brusqueness, which annoyed me. I wondered if there was anything he didn’t find funny. “Your uncle and my father had to drive down to Manhattan. I came by to see if you’d like to have dinner.”
I opened the door wider. “Miriam probably has dinner waiting for me downstairs,” I told him. “I don’t want to be rude.”
“Your housekeeper has tonight off,” Nolan countered.
The hair stood up on the back of my neck. He’d come at a time when he’d known I’d be alone and I couldn’t help but think of Maisie’s warnings. “Who told you that?”
Nolan sighed wearily. “My father and your uncle work together, remember? Look, if you don’t want to eat, that’s okay by me.”
My stomach chose that very moment to rumble loudly. I had no idea what food was in the house—and no clue if any shops or restaurants would be open in town. There was also the matter of the girl in the white satin dress. Whether she was a human, ghost, or hallucination, I wasn’t sure I was ready to be all alone with her in the manor.