I sighed, then shoved my hands into my jacket pockets and followed her over eight feet of sticky linoleum tile and across the theater lobby toward the snack counter.

Jimmy Barnes was busy with a customer, but once he saw Emma waiting to talk to him, he rushed through the order so quickly he almost forgot to squirt butter on the popcorn. He had a bit of a crush on Emma.

He wasn’t the only one.

“Back already?” Jimmy nodded at me, then leaned with both plump arms on the glass countertop, staring at Em as if the meaning of life lay buried in her eyes. His fingers were stained yellow with butter-flavored oil and he smelled like popcorn and the root beer he’d dribbled down the front of his black apron.

“Can you tell Kaylee what Mike said?”

Jimmy’s goofy, puppy-love smile faded, and he stood, angling his body to face us both. “Creepiest thing I ever heard.” He reached below the counter to grab a plastic-wrapped stack of sixteen-ounce paper cups, and began refilling the dispenser as he spoke.

“You know Mike Powell, right?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I glanced at Emma with both brows raised in question, but she only nodded toward Jimmy, silently telling me to pay attention.

Jimmy pressed on an inverted stack of cups, which sank into a hole in the countertop to make room for more. “Mike took a shift at the snack bar at the Arlington branch today, filling in for some guy who got fired for spittin’ in someone’s Coke.”

“Hey, can I get some popcorn over here?”

I looked up to see a middle-aged man waiting in front of the cash register, flanked by a little girl with her thumb in her mouth and an older boy with his gaze—and his thumbs—glued to a PSP.

“Will that be a jumbo, sir?” Jimmy held up one just-a-minute finger for us and veered toward the closest of several popcorn machines while I dug my phone from my pocket to check the time. It was after nine and I was starving. And not exactly eager for whatever weird, creepy story Jimmy had to tell.

When the customers left with a cardboard tray full of junk food and soda, Jimmy turned back to us. “Anyway, Mike called about half an hour ago, totally freaked out. He said some girl died right in front of his register this afternoon. Just fell over dead, still holding her popcorn.”

Shock pinged through me, chilling me from the inside out. I glanced at Emma, and she gave me a single grim nod. As I turned back to Jimmy, a dark unease unfurled deep inside me, spiraling up my spine like tendrils of ice. “You’re serious?”

“Totally.” He twisted the end of the plastic sleeve around the remaining cups. “Mike said the whole thing was unreal. The ambulance took her away in a freakin’ body bag, and the manager closed the place down and handed out vouchers to all the customers. And the cops kept asking Mike questions, trying to figure out what happened.”

Emma watched me for my reaction, but I could only stare, my hands gripping the edge of the counter, unable to force my scattered thoughts into any logical order. The similarity to Heidi Anderson was obvious, but I had no concrete reason to connect the two deaths.

“Do they know how she died?” I asked finally, grasping at the first coherent thought to form.

Jimmy shrugged. “Mike said she was fine one minute, and flat on her back the next. No coughing, no choking, no grabbing her heart or her head.”

A vague, heavy dread was building inside me, a slow simmer of foreboding, compared to the rapid boil of panic I’d felt when I saw Heidi’s shadow-shroud. The deaths were connected. They had to be.

Emma was watching me again, and I must have looked as sick as I felt because she put one hand on my shoulder. “Thanks, Jimmy. See ya Wednesday.”

On the way home, Emma loosened her seat belt and twisted in the passenger seat to frown at me in the dark, her face a mask of grim fascination. “How weird was that? First you predict that girl’s death at Taboo. Then tonight, another girl falls down dead at the theater, just like last night.”

I flicked on my blinker to pass a car in the right lane. “They’re not the same,” I insisted, in spite of my own similar thoughts. “Heidi Anderson was drunk. She probably died of alcohol poisoning.”

“Nuh-uh.” Emma shook her head, blond hair bouncing in the corner of my vision. “The news said they tested her blood. She was drunk, but not that drunk.”

I shrugged, uncomfortable with the turn of the conversation. “So she passed out and hit her head when she fell.”

“If she did, don’t you think the cops would have figured that out by now?” When I didn’t answer, Emma continued, shielding her eyes from the glare of a passing highway light. “I don’t think they know what killed her. I bet that’s why they haven’t scheduled her funeral yet.”

My hands tightened on the wheel, and I glanced at her in surprise. “What are you, spying on the dead girl?”

She shrugged. “Just watching the news. I’m grounded—what else is there to do? Besides, this is the weirdest thing that ever happened around here. And the fact that you predicted one of them is beyond bizarre.”

I flicked on my blinker again and swerved off the highway at our exit, forcing my hand to relax around the wheel. I didn’t even want to think about my premonition anymore, much less talk about it. “You don’t know the deaths are connected. It’s not like they were murdered. At least not the girl in Arlington. Mike saw her die.”

“She could have been poisoned….” Emma insisted, but I continued, ignoring her as I slowed to make the turn onto her street.

“And even if they are connected, they have nothing to do with us.”

“You knew the first one was going to die.”

“Yeah, and I hope it never happens again.”

Emma frowned but let the subject go. After I dropped her off, I pulled into an empty lot down the street from her house and called Nash.

“Hello?” In the background, I heard gunfire and shouting, until he turned down the volume on his TV.

“Hey, it’s Kaylee. Are you busy?”

“Just avoiding homework. What’s up?”

I stared out the windshield at the dark parking lot, and my heart seemed to stumble over the next few beats while I worked up my nerve.

“Kaylee? You there?”

“Yeah.” I closed my eyes and forced the next words out before my throat froze up. “Can I use your computer? I need to look something up, but I can’t do it at home without Sophie snooping.” And I did not want my aunt to bring me laundry without knocking—as was her habit—and see what I was looking up online.

“No problem.”

But second thoughts came fast and hard. I should not be alone with Nash in his house—that whole willpower thing again.

He laughed as if he knew what I was thinking. Or heard it in my nervous silence. “Don’t worry. My mom’s here.”

Relief and disappointment came in equal parts, and I fought to let neither leak into my voice. “That’s fine.” I started the engine, my headlights carving arcs of light across the dark gravel lot. “You hungry?”

“I was about to nuke a pizza.”

“Interested in a burger?”

“Always.”

Twenty minutes later, I parked on the street in front of his house and got out of the car, a fast-food bag in one hand, drink tray in the other. Again, his mother’s Saab was in the driveway, but this time the door was closed.

I crossed the small, neat yard and stepped onto the porch, but Nash opened the front door before I could knock. “Hey, come on in.” He took the drinks and held the door open, and I stepped past him into a clean, sparsely decorated living room.

Nash set the cups on an end table and stuffed his hands in his pockets while I looked around. His mother’s furniture wasn’t new or as upscale as Aunt Val’s, but it looked much more comfortable. The hardwood floor was worn but spotless, and the entire house smelled like chocolate-chip cookies.

At first I assumed the scent was from a candle like the ones Aunt Val lit at Christmas, to give the impression that she knows how to bake. But then I heard an oven door creak open to the left of the living room, and that cookie-scent swelled. Mrs. Hudson was actually baking.