If anyone was going to be able to communicate with Jeff’s fallen family still present in this house, it would be her. It was almost as though, rather than her father bringing her to Pier Pointe, it had been Vivi who had drawn him across the country instead. It was a crazy theory, an impossible thought, but she felt connected, in touch with her potential to reach into the netherworld more than she had ever been before. The shadows that lurked in that house were making her intuition stronger. They were silently, invisibly encouraging her to continue her search for answers. To not give up. To help them even if she didn’t know how.

We’ll show you how.

If she just kept pushing forward, they would lead her in the right direction. Pushing forward meant more research. The more she learned, the clearer her direction would become, and over the past week, Vivi had learned a lot.

Breaking out her new black stationery from its plastic wrap as soon as she and her dad had come home from the mall, she had written “BLOODY MARY” across the top of the page in silver ink, then powered up her laptop and began to surf.

There were a bunch of stories about Bloody Mary, but none of them could pinpoint exactly where the urban legend had come from. There was Mary Tudor, daughter of King Henry VIII—a woman who grew up watching beheadings, burned people at the stake, and was pregnant with a ghost baby that was never born. There were rumors that she bathed in blood to stay young, and that if you wanted to summon her, you had to whisper I stole your baby while staring into a dark mirror.

There were tales of Bloody Mary being an evil witch who drowned children for fun. Some said she was a sad mother who had lost her only child in a flood. Sometimes you had to lock the bathroom door for anything to happen. Other times, you needed a lit candle so you could see your own reflection. Or you were advised to spin around in a circle three times. But a few elements always remained constant: the bathroom, the darkness, the mirror, and the chanting of her name.

Vivi had shown those articles to Echo when she had come to visit, and Echo had smiled and nodded and suggested that, perhaps, a ritual was just what Vivi needed, that maybe the tales of conjuring Bloody Mary could lend inspiration on how to reach out to the spirits that lingered in the rooms of the Montlake house.

“But I haven’t seen anything in the past few days,” Vivi had confessed. “It’s like they’re gone. Except they can’t be, right? They can’t just disappear?”

Echo had shaken her head, agreeing that the ghosts that lived within that house couldn’t simply up and leave. “Maybe they’re waiting for something,” she’d remarked. “Perhaps they’re just being patient. It’ll be a lot easier to help them if you can ask them how. Open the door. Have faith and don’t be afraid.”

Don’t be afraid: that was easier said than done. It was true that over the past few days, the house had felt different, almost safe. And yet Vivi still avoided the blue room at all costs, not yet able to shake the image of the girl in the mirror, her eyes rolled back in her head, her mouth gaping wide and her ratty old sweater dripping with blood.

But she took Echo’s advice anyway and, over the next few days, came across a multitude of stuff she already knew. There was a bunch of stuff about channeling and being a medium. She read about trigger objects: an item that a spirit may be drawn to because they knew it in life, and consequently encourage them to communicate. But she didn’t have anything that could possibly lure Jeff’s family out of the shadows—at least not that she knew of. Maybe there was something somewhere in the house. Perhaps they wanted her to go on a treasure hunt, but that would be difficult to do without her dad raising his eyebrows. Would he even notice? She wasn’t sure. Her father had done exactly what her mom had predicted—he had locked himself away. Vivi had spent the last handful of days eating pizza and takeout. At first she had to ask her dad to order that stuff, but now his credit card was a permanent kitchen fixture, ready and waiting on the ugly orange counter.

Vivi had nearly skipped over the Ouija board stuff. She didn’t own one and it seemed like a waste of time reading about it. But tonight, one article stopped her in her tracks. The blue Google link read: MAKE YOUR OWN OUIJA BOARD—TALK TO SPIRITS, RAISE THE DEAD.

She looked up, allowed her gaze to drift, slow and deliberate, across the walls of her room. Was that the way they wanted her to reach out?

Ghosts don’t care whether your Ouija board is officially licensed by Hasbro, the article explained. If you have a spirit who wants to communicate, it’ll be satisfied with a homemade spirit board.

It was perfect. A ritual, just like Echo had suggested.

She chewed on a fingernail, then tore out the pages of notes she’d taken from her pad of black stationery paper. Turning the pad lengthwise, she stared at a picture of a homemade board glowing on her computer screen. She took a deep breath and began to copy it, her odd sense of anxiety growing with each letter carefully penned onto the page.

That’s when her door flew open and the overhead light blazed to life, nearly scaring her to death.

45

THE LIGHT CLICKED on just as it was supposed to. The power to the house hadn’t been cut. They must have removed the lightbulbs from the downstairs fixtures, Lucas thought. They must have done it to conceal themselves, so that I wouldn’t see them, because they’re still here in the goddamned house.

“Dad!” Jeanie gave him a glare. “What are you doing? Get out of my room!”

Lucas shot a look around the place, the high pitch of panic ringing in his ears. She’d been reading or writing or doing whatever she had been doing by nothing but the glow of her computer screen. She had jumped up like she was hiding something. But there was no time to ask what she had shoved beneath her bed the second he had barged in.

“Come with me,” he said, and grabbed her by the arm. There were strangers in the house. God only knew what they wanted, how demented they were, what they were capable of.

“Ow, Dad, stop!” Jeanie struggled to free herself, but Lucas refused to loosen his grip. They moved down the stairs, his kid nearly stumbling behind him. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Where are we going? Stop pulling me, Dad. I’m going to fall!”

Lucas avoided the living room, veered left into the foyer, and yanked open the front door without disarming the alarm. The system began to beep, warning them that if they didn’t punch in the correct code, the entire house was going to scream bloody murder in T-minus thirty seconds. He pushed Jeanie out the door and stopped, realizing he’d left his cell phone on his desk.

“Don’t move,” he told her.

“But—”

“Do what I say!”

Jeanie immediately stiffened at his tone, a soldier coming to attention.

He ran back inside the house. The furniture was still awry, still threatening to collapse to one side or the other and send the coffee table crashing into their flat-screen TV. Lucas darted into his study and snatched his phone off the desk. He stopped for only half a second, his stomach pitching once again. Every picture on his corkboard was hanging upside down, as if hammering home the point . . .

You’re not alone in here.

And maybe that was why he had snapped at Mark the way he had. Maybe he hadn’t been himself. Maybe . . .

Don’t be stupid.

He met Jeanie outside just as the house alarm began to wail. Jeanie slapped her hands over her ears, protecting herself from the mind-numbing pitch. Lucas caught her by the shoulder and directed her away from the house only to stop short.