He’s looking forward to meeting you.

Another came after the first.

He can’t wait to meet you.

A third.

See you soon.

She dropped the phone onto the desk as it continued to chime, text after text blinking onto the screen. It was broken. It had to be. It was why her dad had left it downstairs, having abandoned it instead of taking it with him when he had gone to bed. Because he had to be in bed now, right? He was upstairs, sleeping. Where else could he be?

Suddenly, the idea of her father not being in the house at all turned her nerves electric with panic. What if he had finally seen the ghosts for himself? What if he had gotten so scared he had run out of the house without realizing he had left her behind?

“No, he would never do that,” she whispered. Except that he had left her mom, so why couldn’t he leave her, too? Was there really that big of a difference?

It’s not you, it’s him.

Her bottom lip quivered at the possibility. Her fingers tightened around the cross in her right hand. Maybe her dad really didn’t love her anymore. If he could stop loving Vivi’s mom, it meant he could stop loving anyone. And wasn’t that why she had been drawn to Jeff in the first place?

Why was she suddenly so scared?

Because it’s real, she thought. Because they’re here and they shouldn’t be. Because they’re dead and I’m alive and none of this should be possible.

And yet there she was, some strange woman waiting on the opposite side of the door, Jeff promising to come to Vivi the way she had hoped he would.

You’re getting what you want. So stop running away.

She turned and made her way to the door, scared to see the room that lay beyond it, terrified to see that woman standing there, smiling. Because maybe her eyes would roll into the back of her head. She’d open her mouth as if to scream and her mouth would only grow wider, so wide that she could hardly see her face at all. Or she’d start bleeding like the girl in the mirror had. That woman couldn’t be alive. She was one of them.

But she had to swallow her fear. She had to have faith.

With her hand on the doorknob, she sucked in air and turned her head away, as if looking in the opposite direction would somehow give her strength.

Vivi stepped into the living room that shouldn’t have existed, then bolted for the stairs. She took them two at a time, and yanked open her bedroom door, never looking back at who might have been right on her heels. But she stopped short of bolting inside, staring into the room that was supposed to be hers. The space she had come to know as her own was gone. Her red-and-black striped comforter and thumb-tacked band posters were replaced by a bed covered in an ugly brown blanket. A multicolored woven rug lay in the center of the room. A vase full of pine branches decorated the bedside table. The sweet scent of smoke filled her lungs.

But one item had been spared in the shift. The black paper rectangle of Vivi’s homemade Ouija board rested at the foot of the bed, waiting for her to continue what she had started before going downstairs.

She swallowed, tamping the butterflies that beat their wings against her insides. Everything about the room felt wrong. Reason told her to stay out, but she took two steps forward.

It was time to finish this.

It was time to meet Jeffrey Halcomb.

52

Saturday, November 20, 1982

Three Months, Twenty-Four Days Before the Sacrament

AUDRA’S BEST CHANCE was to convince Jeff that what he believed about her wasn’t true.

She hadn’t lost faith.

She still loved him.

She wanted to be with him forever.

“I dreamed about you last night.”

Jeffrey sat next to her, his eyes diverted, both of his hands holding hers as the rain pattered against the windows of his room. He didn’t look up when she spoke. He hardly looked at her at all anymore, as though seeing her swelling belly disgusted him, but she could tell he was listening. The muscles in his hands twitched just slightly, as though something about her statement had flipped a switch that had been off for far too long.

“I dreamed that I was walking through a field of wheat in the sunset, and there was a man in the distance silhouetted in gold. The closer I got, the more I knew I was in the presence of God, and even though I was scared, I kept moving forward because I wanted to see his face.”

Jeff finally looked up. His expression was thoughtful, hopeful.

“Imagine my surprise when I saw it was you.”

He said nothing. He only smiled. But something about his appearance made it hollow.

He didn’t believe her. He didn’t want her back. She was too far gone.

She was nothing but a vessel now.

She could see the rejection in his eyes.

53

IN THE LIVING room, Audra Snow’s things were gone. So was the dark figure that had stood in the corner. But Lucas knew Jeffrey Halcomb was still there.

There was a bang in the kitchen, like a pot hitting the countertop. Lucas vacillated in his open study door when something rushed past him, rushed right through him. He staggered back. The air left him in a gasp, squeezing out every last bit of oxygen from his lungs when the door slammed shut in his face, trapping him inside.

He stumbled away, the backs of his legs bumping into his desk. All at once, the drawers flew open. One fell to the floor, spilling its contents across the dull brown rug. What the hell was this, a poltergeist? Was stuff like that actually for real? He clamped his teeth together and shot a look at the door.

Jeanie, he thought. I’ve got to get Jeanie.

He shoved himself away from his desk, grabbed the doorknob, and twisted, but it didn’t budge. He tried again. The knob didn’t give, not even a little. He veered around, his eyes fixed on his chair. If he couldn’t go through the door, he’d smash the window, then work his way back inside to get his daughter. But his approach toward the chair was cut short. The door flew open again, rattling against the adjacent wall.

Lucas spun around. He hesitated at the now familiar sight of Audra Snow’s old furniture. It was as though the mere motion of the door opening and closing had transported him. The place was the same, but time had reversed itself by over thirty years.

He rushed past Audra’s old living room without giving himself a chance to think. Because if he did think, he’d have to consider how any of what was happening was possible. The people in the orchard. The laughter. The voices. The table. The furniture that had been stacked even after the house alarm had been installed.

Every conclusion seemed insurmountable. Every answer was nothing short of unreal.

That was when it dawned on him, a realization so unbalanced it stopped him short of Jeanie’s bedroom door. Jeffrey Halcomb had asked Lucas to move into this house knowing full well what was inside, what would happen. Halcomb had never intended to grant Lucas the interview he had promised, and Echo’s motives had never been to help Lucas with his book. She’d given him the photographs to keep him where he was, to root him to Pier Pointe.

Because there was something here.

Something no logic-minded person would ever consider real.

Something he himself had cast aside as weird fiction while, perhaps, Jeanie had taken the notion far more seriously.