“Afraid how?”

“I just walk by their tents, and they come out and start yelling at me. Not the fake ones, but the real ones— the ones who aren’t just making stuff up.”

I didn’t want to ask what they yelled.

“They tell me Sarah is here and Sarah is angry and Sarah hates you. And they’re so scared; they just want me to go away. They get so upset.”

“Who’s Sarah?” I asked her.

“That’s what I want to know.”

I looked up at the house. It looked so serene from the outside.

“Whatever I felt in there,” Megan said, “it’s totally evil. Like bad evil, Alexis.”

She exhaled and started the car. As we drove down Whitley Street, away from the house, her face seemed to at least soften a little bit.

Where could we possibly go after that?

“We’re going to the library,” she said.

I nodded and leaned back in my seat. But as we neared the stop sign on the corner, something caught my eye. In the rearview mirror I could see our neighbor Mary guiding her gigantic grandma car into her driveway.

“Stop here,” I said, undoing my seat belt. “Park right around the corner and wait for me.” Before Megan could even ask where I was going, I was already out the door and cutting across the neighbors’ yards to Mary’s house.

I reached her as she was hoisting her trunk open. I gave her a bit of a scare, which made me nervous because she’s so old.

“Good heavens,” she said, looking at me. “Alexis, are you all right?”

“Yes, fine,” I lied.

“It’s not your father, is it?” she asked.

“No, no, nothing like that.”

I glanced at her trunkful of grocery bags.

“Do you want some help with these?” I asked, nodding toward them.

“Well, no…you’re all out of breath,” she protested, but I knew she didn’t mean it. I scooped three bags into my arms. Mary grabbed the small brown sack with the eggs in it and started up the front walk. How on earth did she ever manage to get all of her own groceries

inside? She must have had to make a separate trip for every single bag.

Up until a couple of years ago, I went to her house a few times a week and had lemonade and cookies while she asked me all about school and friends and life. She never ate any of the cookies, but she always had plenty around. They must have just been for me, and for Kasey, when I dragged her along. When was the last time I’d been there? I thought of a whole package of cookies going stale waiting for us to come visit.

It took two trips to get all the groceries inside.

Mary pulled a chair out from the kitchen table for me. “Would you like some lemonade?” she asked, making a move for the refrigerator.

“Actually, I can’t stay long,” I said. “I just have a question.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said. She let the fridge door slip shut and turned to me. “What’s your question?”

“You’ve lived here a long time, haven’t you?” I asked, even though I knew she had.

“Elvin and I moved here in 1972,” she said. Elvin was her husband. He died before we moved in, but I’d heard plenty about him over the years.

“Did you ever hear about anything weird happening in my house?”

Mary froze.

Aha.

Then she shook her head. “Maybe you’d better run along,” she said, suddenly very interested in the contents of one of the grocery bags.

“What was it, Mary?”

Now she looked right at me. “Perhaps when you’re a little older,” she said. “But I don’t feel right telling you now. Not when your father—not when you’ve got so much stress already.”

I wasn’t leaving that kitchen without names, dates, details. Everything she knew, I was going to know. I crossed my arms and looked back up at her. “I won’t tell my parents you told me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

She stared at the floor. I kept my eyes on her. The sunshine coming through the window silhouetted her puff of silvery curls.

“I need to know,” I said simply.

She turned away, but I knew I was breaking her down.

“Who’s Sarah?”

“Sarah?” she asked, spinning back, her eyebrows forming a deep V on her forehead. “I don’t know anything about a Sarah. Do you mean—”

She abruptly cut herself off.

“Mary, please, it’s so important.”

“No, Alexis, I just don’t…Oh, for heaven’s sake.

Let’s see…They moved in at the end of the summer, 1995.”

“Who?”

Mary paced and fidgeted for a moment, wiggled her fingers, stared out the window. “I…I don’t remember.”

A lie. We both sighed at the same time.

“Can’t you just give me a hint?”

“No. I can’t. I can’t say any more.”

“Just tell me, did someone get hurt?”

“I guess so…” She stared helplessly at the ceiling, gripping the cross that hung from a chain around her neck. “I don’t know if I would say hurt, but she did…die.”

I fell limply against the back of the chair. “In the house?”

“Goodness,” she said. “This was a mistake.” “No, wait—someone died in my house?” She sighed like she knew it was too late to stop now. “Yes, in your house.”

“From natural causes?” “No, dear,” she said. “What year?”

“Let’s see, it was 1996. October. The middle of October.”

“So…okay, wait—nobody lived there until we moved in?”

“No, an older couple moved in for a year, but they

moved out very quickly. They didn’t seem to like the neighborhood.”

“What was their name?”

“Oh, good heavens, I’m terrible with names….” She frowned in concentration, the corners of her eyes and lips turning downward. “Sawamura. Walter and Joan, they were Japanese. Not very outgoing.”

“And then it was vacant until my family moved in?”

“Vacant, yes,” she repeated.

Holy cow. I leaned back in my chair.

“Are you sure I can’t get you some lemonade?” she asked.

Then I remembered that Megan was waiting for me. “October 1996,” I said, jumping out of my seat. “Oh, Alexis, I hope you won’t think about it too much. It was just so awful, we hate to talk about it.” Well, obviously.

“Thanks, Mary,” I said. “You’ve been a big help.”

She nodded vaguely. “Just try to relax and get some rest. I know you’re worried about your father—”

“I’ll come by soon for some lemonade,” I told her, my hand on the doorknob.

Mary stood and sighed, then nodded. She looked tired. “You do that, dear,” she said, and then I was gone.

20

“I KNEW IT,” MEGAN SAID, for like the tenth time. “I knew it. If it wasn’t natural causes, that means it was murder— no wonder the house is so…” We were walking across the public library’s parking lot, and she was all worked up. She’d been talking nonstop since I got back in the car.

“Let’s find out some more details,” I said. “She could be wrong.”

“That’s not the kind of thing you just forget,” Megan said. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it until now.”

“Most of our neighbors have moved,” I said.

“I don’t blame them.”

“But what about what happened to you? What about the story? And my dream?”

She stopped just short of the stairs outside. “Maybe those were just a manifestation. Like how if you have a stressful day it gives you weird dreams. The ghost’s anger could be coming out as this bizarre fairy tale.”

“How do you know all this stuff?”

She shrugged. “I read a lot.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It felt so real.”

She held the door open for me. The smell washed over me—cold air, old books, floor wax—the scents of my childhood afternoons.

The head librarian, Miss Oliver, shot us a stern look over the top of her pearly pink reading glasses.

“Where do we start?” Megan asked in a low whisper. “The paranormal books are in special collections, behind the checkout desk.”

“I think we need to check the newspaper archives,” I whispered back.

“The online archives only go back to 1999,” Megan said. “We have to use the microfish.”