“We need to have an important conversation,” Uncle Howie said. “In the next day or two. There are many things I need to tell you before the others arrive.”

Douglas smiled. He’s going to give me something and doesn’t want my cousins knowing about it. I knew I was his favorite.

“Sure thing, Uncle Howie,” Douglas said, walking beside the old man as he shuffled across the floor of his room toward the door. “Anytime you want. We’ll sit down and catch up.”

“Mm,” Howard Young said. “Catch up. I suppose you could call it that.”

Douglas escorted his uncle into the foyer, then turned and gave him a jaunty salute. They’d have some dinner once Douglas was cleaned up, Uncle Howard said. Douglas smiled, then hurried up the stairs to the room that he’d always considered his own.

It was the same room where he’d slept the night his father died in this house ten years ago.

He’d come down these very stairs to be met by his cousin Paula. She was crying. “Oh, Douglas,” she’d said, turning away.

And he’d known.

Known that his father had died during the night. He’d been trying to play a prank on his cousins, they said. A funny practical joke. And he had suffocated. It was a terrible accident, they told the sheriff.

Except that Dad didn’t play pranks. He wasn’t that kind of guy.

Douglas pushed the memory out of his mind as he rounded the top of the staircase. He passed a large plate-glass window on the top landing that looked out over the grounds toward the cliffs. Suddenly he was certain if he looked out he would see the woman in the white dress out there again. He hesitated, then turned to look. He peered outside into the bright sunshine.

She wasn’t there.

Of course she wasn’t. The woman wasn’t real. She was an illusion. A figment of Douglas’s imagination.

He headed down the hall to his room.

Chapter Five

Carolyn sat in the parlor with a mountain of books and papers spread out on the table in front of her.

He does not look like David, she thought to herself. Douglas Young did not look anything like the man she had loved so much, who had betrayed her so horribly. Douglas was blond; David was dark. Douglas’s skin was smooth and unlined; David had had a pink scar running down the side of his face. Douglas was her age or possibly even younger; David had been in his late thirties. But something had reminded her of David…

The dimples. It had been the dimples.

And the eyes. The way he flirted with her. The confidence in his appeal. The devil-may-care toss of his head…

Damn it, she said to herself, shaking her head. Thinking about David was the last thing she could afford to do at the moment.

Because the case at hand was like nothing she had encountered before.

The blood on the wall had been real. She had seen it, touched it. It had simply appeared-and during the time it took her run up the stairs to fetch her camera to take a picture of it, it had disappeared.

Now, of course, it could have been some kind of ingenious trick. For whatever purpose, maybe Mr. Young was making all of this up. Or someone else was playing a hideous game with him. That’s what Carolyn needed to determine first. She’d need to inspect that wall to see if there was some kind of device embedded in it. A screen perhaps. Or maybe the message in blood had been a hologram of some sort.

Except, as she reminded herself, holograms aren’t wet and sticky to the touch.

She had walked over to the wall and placed her finger directly into the blood. It was real. And so was the abject terror on Mr. Young’s face and the distress he’d felt afterward, which caused him to retreat to his room.

Carolyn sighed as she flipped through the death certificates in front of her. The blood on the wall might conceivably have been a trick, but there was no way that these documents weren’t real. To verify them, all Carolyn needed to do was troop over to the clerk’s office at the Youngsport town hall-which she certainly planned on doing. Still, every certificate was stamped with the clerk’s official seal. Her trained researcher’s eye told her these weren’t fakes. There were more than a dozen certificates, each from the first year of a decade, with the earliest dating back to 1930. The deaths came in ten-year intervals after that, one to a decade, except in those instances Mr. Young had called “slaughters”: when the family had defied the curse and either not sent anyone into the room or sent the wrong person.

The first such slaughter had been at the very beginning. Sixteen-year-old Jacob Young’s name had been drawn in the lottery. He had steeled himself to spend the night in the room. But his father-and Howard Young’s father as well-Desmond Young had insisted he take his son’s place. The result was even greater tragedy. Instead of one death, there had been four. Desmond died, but so did poor Jacob, as well as the two youngest and most innocent members of the family, thirteen-year-old Timothy and the infant Cynthia. Carolyn stared down at their death certificates now. On every one the cause of death was listed as “seizure.” Only the wealth and privilege of the Youngs could have staved off the kind of investigation four deaths in the same house on the same night would have prompted otherwise. Even, somehow, the grisly manner of Desmond’s death never made it to the official record. That could happen, Carolyn supposed, when a family had its own private graveyard.

The second slaughter came twenty years later, when the family decided to abandon the house and the lottery altogether. On three successive nights, in cities spread across the country, a Young family member died suddenly. Carolyn looked over their certificates now. Howard Young had assembled them all, providing a full record of his family’s enduring tragedy. The most recent slaughter had been in 1980. Ernest Young had skipped out on the lottery, breaking with his family and taking his wife and daughters to an undisclosed location. They’d even changed their names. But on the night that one of his cousins died in the basement room, Ernest and his immediate family were also wiped out, murdered savagely in their home. Carolyn felt as if she might cry looking at the death certificates of the little girls. Ann Marie was ten. Susie was seven.

She stood, overcome by all this death. Mr. Young had given her all the particulars. The family reunions every ten years. The lottery. The requirement that one member of the family be chosen to spend a night in the room-a room that had once been a servant’s quarters. The inevitable death that occurred during that night. The slaughters that took place if the ritual was not followed exactly, and by everyone.

She walked to the window and stared out at the cliffs and the whitecapped waves of the sea beyond. He had given her all of the particulars but one.

How the whole thing had started. And why.

“Who imposed this horrible thing on you?” Carolyn had asked, but the old man had just shook his head, seeming unable to tell her.

She had looked at him in disbelief.

“You mean to tell me,” she asked, “that this is the part you expect me to find out on my own?”

Howard Young had simply nodded, then headed to his room to lie down.

“It can’t be that he doesn’t know,” Carolyn said out loud to herself, still staring out over the cliffs. “He was here when it began. He would have been eighteen years old. He must know how this curse began. Either he isn’t telling me for some reason-or he can’t tell me. Perhaps he is somehow prevented from telling me.”

She turned around and looked up at a portrait that hung over the mantel. It was a young man in Edwardian-era clothing, with a high stiff collar and high-buttoned waistcoat. Carolyn suspected it might be Desmond, the father of Howard, who had gone into the room in an effort to save his son Jacob and died in the process.