Suddenly I didn’t want to come play.

It was wrong. It was dangerous. My parents wouldn’t be proud—they’d be horrified.

My hand felt along the wall for something to grab on to, to get the strength to pull myself back inside. I was distracted by the swirling roar of whispers in my head, scolding me and beseeching me to Come play, Come play, Come play….

What my hand found was a small piece of metal, tied with a loop of ribbon, hanging off a tiny nail in the wall.

I grabbed the metal, and the whispers went silent.

With a burst of strength I hauled myself back inside and shut the window, locking it, and climbed back into bed. In the moonlight I stared at the object in my hand— a flat silver heart, cut in half with a smoothed-over zigzag edge. There were letters on it, S, H, and half an A, and below them, M, E, and the round back of what could have been a Q or an 0. ..

Or a G .

When I woke up the next morning I would have thought the whole thing was a dream, except for the presence of the charm and ribbon, which I’d wrapped around and around my little hand and held on to like a talisman.

For years I slept with that heart under my pillow. I never really stopped to wonder where it came from or who it had belonged to. I liked it, on some deep level, and I thought, on the same deep level, that it liked me back. It was my lucky charm.

The whispers never bothered me again.

After eighth grade, when Beth and her mom moved away, I gave up on the concept of luck. If there was any such thing, I figured, I was getting the bad end of it. Better to reject the whole idea outright than to keep inviting bad luck to kick me around.

So I packed the charm in my treasure box of knick-knacks and forgot it existed.

To put it simply, our attic is an abomination.

Box after box of old clothes, worn-out bed linens, and faded, ripped towels. My childhood toys, passed on to Kasey and then hidden away and forgotten. A few pieces of furniture covered in white sheets that glowed in the moonlight like phantoms.

It’s like a graveyard for household goods. It’s intimidating even in daylight.

As I stepped off the ladder onto the creaking floorboards, I took a deep breath, flicked on the dim overhead light, and looked around.

Just had to find my treasure box.

Which was in the attic…somewhere.

It was clearly hopeless. In the two years since I’d stored it, approximately eight million more pieces of junk had been shoved in front of it.

I plowed all the way to the back wall and found nothing. I moved Kasey’s old pink clock radio out of the way and reached for a box behind it.

The radio turned on all by itself. I nearly jumped out of my skin until I realized where the music was coming from. Then I saw that the clock was on—red numbers and everything—and the radio was playing, and all the while I could see the cord neatly coiled up around it. Not plugged in.

I spun around to see if someone was in the room with me, but I was alone.

The tinny twang of a pop-country singer poured out of the speakers, occasionally fading out under a wave of static, and without thinking, I kept my hands held out in front of me, as if the clock was going to fly at me and I was going to block it.

“And though we may be apart, you’re always in my heart, so baby please come home….”

I stared down at the radio, afraid to touch it. What if I got a shock?

“Because home is where the heart is….”

The radio switched off.

I stepped back. Home is where the heart is.

All week that phrase kept popping up. Carter had said it to me in the car. It was in my fortune cookie. It was the title of the school librarian’s book. It was almost like someone was trying to tell me something.

Well…I was looking for a heart.

Home is where the heart is.

Home.

I looked around.

My eyes stopped on the old dollhouse, wedged between a bed frame and a stack of old boxes.

It was just a guess, a dumb hunch. I was embarrassed and a little irritated at myself for even considering it. But I walked over to the dollhouse anyway, and peered in the window.

My treasure box.

Home is where the heart is.

I knelt on the floor, the box lit up by a shaft of moonlight, and carefully lifted out each item until I came to a little velveteen coin purse. I loosened the smooth braided rope and held it upside down over my hand. The heart charm and its ribbon tumbled out and landed in my palm.

I went back down to my room and spent the next hour and a half staring at what had once been my most prized possession, trying to figure out how something I’d trusted so much as a little girl could be connected to someone who turned out to be so evil.

Mom’s car pulled into the garage at 11:50 p.m. When I heard her come up the stairs, I followed her into her room and closed the door.

I had a plan.

“Oh, Alexis,” she said, yawning, “what are you still doing up?”

“Can I sleep in here tonight?”

“Well…of course you can. Is everything all right?” “Yep,” I lied. “I just need to turn off my bedroom light.”

I closed the door behind me and went back to my room. The heart charm was right where I’d left it, on the dresser. I debated for a few seconds, then tucked it into my pocket, switched off the lamp, and went back into the hall.

I almost ran smack into my sister. She stood in the middle of the hall, her body angled toward Mom and Dad’s bedroom, eyes fixed on the doorknob.

I froze.

Slowly, slowly, she turned to face me.

“Hey, sis,” she said, her voice soft and casual.

“Kase…is it you?”

Her face looked angelic in the soft gold of the hall light. “Of course it’s me, Lexi.”

“What are you doing?”

She looked around, then shrugged. “Nothing, I guess.”

“Well…maybe you should go back to bed,” I said.

Her lips pressed together in a pout. “See?” she hissed. “This is why I had to find a better friend than you. My other friend never bosses me around.”

We stared into each other’s eyes.

“I just don’t want anyone else to get hurt,” I said at last.

“Then you should be more careful whose bedroom you snoop around in,” she said, turning on her heel and stalking back into her room.

The door closed behind her, all by itself.

23

A SUDDEN SHOCK OF BRIGHT LIGHT hit my eyelids, jerking me out of my sleep. For a moment I wondered where I was, and then I saw the pale blue floral of the bedspread and remembered.

Mom stood at the window, dressed and made up, her dirty-blond bob neatly turned under.

“Sorry,” she said. “That was brighter than I thought it would be.”

I looked at the clock—7:12.

“I’m going in early today,” she said. “You’ll be all right getting to school?”

“I’ll manage,” I said, sitting up and swinging my feet to the floor.

She kissed me on the top of my head and hurried out. I heard her knock on Kasey’s door and then call a goodbye from the hallway.

I waited until I felt the rumble of the garage door closing after her and went back to my own room. I grabbed a pair of jeans and a T-shirt (careful not to wear school colors again), then took the world’s fastest shower and ran down to the kitchen and swigged a cup of orange juice.

“Where’s the fire?” Kasey said darkly from the kitchen doorway.

I didn’t answer. For now she just seemed to be regular grumpy morning Kasey. I stuck my hand in my pocket and felt the smooth edge of the heart charm, suddenly wondering if it had been wise to bring it downstairs with me. If Kasey got too close to it, would she— would Shara —gain some evil power from it? Would she recognize it and demand it back?

What if it reminded her of Megan?