Was Uncle Mark comparing this house to the Amityville one? No way, she thought. Besides, the story about that house wasn’t real. She’d looked it up after she’d gotten home that night, after Tim had sworn up and down that the filmmaker based the movie on a true story. You’re full of crap, Tim! Heidi had yelled when Tim had warned his sister to sleep with one eye open. But that was Heidi’s way. She was a denier, while Vee was a seeker. Tell Heidi that there was a chance she’d get swallowed up by a demon and she’d scream for you to shut up. Tell Vee the same thing and she’d spend hours in front of her computer, researching the possibility. It was one of the undeniable traits she’d inherited from her dad.

But now the Amityville comparison threw her for a loop. Uncle Mark had to have a reason for suggesting there was a correlation between this house and the one in her home state of New York. Maybe the story hadn’t been a hoax like it said on the Internet. Maybe people just didn’t understand because they were afraid of the unknown. People didn’t want to believe in ghosts because it meant heaven might not be real. But if ghosts didn’t exist, how had Vee seen the girl in the mirror the day before? If there wasn’t some similarity between the house in Pier Pointe and the one in Amityville, why would Uncle Mark suggest that there was?

She did an about-face on the stairs and silently padded back to her room, unable to control the frenzied drumming of her heart. The Amityville haunting may have been a hoax—there was no concrete proof that any of the stuff the Lutz family had claimed actually happened—but the murders that had occurred there were real. Vee had read all about the DeFeos after watching the movie. She’d spent hours searching for family photographs on Google, unable to stanch her own morbid curiosity.

The truth of it was, Vee understood why her father wrote about the things he did. Stories about murder and darkness had a definite pull; they were alluring in how forbidden they were. But she’d never outright admit that her father’s influence reached further than her incessant research of the paranormal. She’d never tell a soul her thoughts regularly barreled toward worst-case scenarios. When she and Heidi had walked past a mangled bicycle surrounded by cops and paramedics one winter afternoon, Heidi had gasped and hoped that everyone was okay. But Vee couldn’t help imagining the moment of impact. The heavy thud of a body tumbling over a car hood. The whiplike crack of safety glass. Without so much as a shred of evidence, she convinced herself that the cyclist was dead.

Her mind had wandered in the same way the night police lit up her Briarwood street with their whirling lights a few weeks later. Vee had woken to a woman wailing as she ran into the mid-December snow. The next day, news broke that a high school freshman had hanged himself with a belt from the wooden dowel in his bedroom closet. The news anchors announced that fourteen-year-old Shawn Johnson had been on the honor roll and had run cross-country track. Vee had said hi to him a couple of times while walking past his house on her way to Heidi’s place. He had always struck her as reserved and quiet, far more delicate than the other neighborhood boys. After Shawn died, everyone talked about how tragic it was, how hard it must have been for his mother. But all Vee could think about was how it must have felt to know that death was inevitable, how much effort it had taken not to simply stand up. The news anchors failed to mention that Shawn had been a tall boy. Vee doubted his feet ever left the closet floor.

In November 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. had murdered his parents and four siblings at his home in Amityville, New York. That was an indisputable fact. There were bodies and autopsy reports and crime scene photos. Vee had found them online; pretty girls wearing bloody nightgowns, their faces crusted with gore. Whether the house they were killed in was haunted, however, was up for debate. But maybe . . .

The possibility rattled around inside her head. Because maybe, here in this house, nobody had summoned the girl in the mirror, after all. Maybe she was here because this was her home. Could there be something wrong with this house the same way there were rumors of the Amityville house being broken? How else could Vee explain what she’d seen in the living room—the strange furniture, the rug that didn’t belong, the pictures that she’d never seen before, the tap-tap-tapping of wooden beads against the wall?

Vee skidded into her room, quietly shut the door, and locked it behind her. Bounding for her mattress—which still rested on the floor—she grabbed her laptop and threw open the lid.

An email notification popped up in the right-hand corner of her screen as soon as she connected to the Internet. Subject: HELLO FROM ITALY! Vee minimized the email, not having the patience for forced niceties from her mother, and opened up her browser instead.

Searching Pier Pointe on its own didn’t bring up much, and Pier Pointe ghosts didn’t bring up anything at all.

But Pier Pointe murder was a different story.

Vee scrolled through an endless list of articles before clicking away from web search to image search instead. That was when she saw them—dated-looking photos of the house she was in now. A dark-haired guy standing in the front yard with a bunch of people. A girl with stringy blond hair smiling at the camera from beneath the floppy brim of a hat.

It’s her!

And the boy, too.

The boy with wide, saucerlike eyes who’d leered at her in the orchard before she’d heard that piercing scream.

Oh my god!

She typed the message into her phone, her fingers flying over the on-screen keyboard.

You’re never gonna believe this!

But she stopped short of hitting SEND. No, not yet. She wanted to tell Tim first, and before she told him anything, she had to investigate.

19

IT WAS LATE, nearly midnight, but Lucas continued to sit at his relic of a desk with his head in his hands. He’d checked up on Jeanie earlier, asked her if she was hungry, made a couple of turkey sandwiches, and left them in the fridge in case she decided to tear herself away from her computer and come downstairs. And then he’d shut himself up in his study the way Caroline had warned him not to, hoping to find comfort in the room’s warm tones of green and brown. He stared at a scrawled list of names, people who he may or may not be able to find, folks who either knew Jeffrey Halcomb or people who had once run in his circle. They were all soft leads, none of which offered what that mysterious and frequent prison visitor could. He had nearly called the prison to ask Josh Morales if he’d talked to Officer Eperson about Halcomb’s caller. But that was unlikely. Lucas had just been to Lambert Correctional that morning. He didn’t want to come off as demanding. Or desperate.

Up until now, he had been able to squelch his anxiety about the project with the knowledge that Jeffrey Halcomb had asked him to write this book. With Halcomb at Lucas’s disposal, the book seemed as though it could have written itself. Even Halcomb’s insane deadline seemed manageable. All Lucas had to do was ask the right questions and transcribe Halcomb’s answers. But now, with his main source inexplicably playing hard to get and time running out, Lucas felt on the verge of folding beneath his sudden lack of confidence. Jeff Halcomb hadn’t just broken his promise—he’d stolen the last of Lucas’s hope.

Book or no book, Caroline was going to leave him. He’d fight for custody, but he already knew that Caroline would use his biggest weakness against him. She’d tell the judge he didn’t make any money. The judge would then ask how Lucas expected to support a child when he could hardly do so for himself. Lucas would lose. And after a few years of seeing his kid on school breaks, Jeanie would decide visitation was a pain in the ass. She’d find a boyfriend, which would seal the deal on her not wanting to spend three months of her life on the West Coast. Suddenly, he wouldn’t know his kid anymore, his daughter opting to not hang out with a washed-up loser of a dad who didn’t understand her, who couldn’t relate, a man who had turned into some weird hermit surrounded by books about ax murderers and serial rapists while living on the rural Washington coast.