Taylor set out some plates and forks. “Meeting someone we don’t know is dangerous. We both know it. God, we’ve heard stories about the dumb girls who get in a car in a mall parking lot only to be dismembered a half hour later and ditched behind a Jack in the Box.”

“I think it was a Taco Bell,” Hayley said, correcting her sister. “That’s not going to happen to us. We’re smarter than those dim-witted girls.”

Taylor cut a slice of pie and arranged it on the plate. Apple pieces slid from inside the shell, and she frowned a little. “Those girls probably thought they were smart, too.”

“Okay,” Hayley agreed. “Look, we’re meeting in a public place—our home turf in the middle of the day. There are two of us. You know, like the ‘buddy system.’ Besides we’re not going anywhere with him. We’re not getting into his car or skeezy van.”

Taylor waffled. Deep down she wanted to settle things too, but she wasn’t certain if Text Creeper was going to help them or hurt them.

“I’m not sure,” she said, poking the edge of the pie crust with the tines of a fork.

“Too late,” Hayley said, pushing the Send button.

“Pretty flakey,” Taylor said.

Hayley looked at her sister. “Us or him?”

“The pie,” Taylor said, offering her sister a bite. “Pretty stupid of us, if you ask me.”

“Maybe.” Hayley took the fork. “We’ll see.”

IT WAS FIVE MINUTES BEFORE FOUR and both girls were feeling every bit of the angst that they expected would come with meeting Text Creeper.

Their dad was working on putting in an asparagus bed in the backyard. The twins had fibbed to him, claiming they were going to town to hang out for a little while.

Kevin was grateful for a reason to stop digging the trench. The heavy rains, cold weather, and hard-packed soil were making him sweat.

“All right,” he said. “Maybe you’ll be back in time to help me plant.”

“Okay, but don’t wait on us,” Taylor said.

“Yeah, you don’t want the roots to dry out,” Hayley added.

“I can cover them with a tarp so you don’t have to miss out,” he said, half joking and half serious.

Both girls loathed yard work—so much so that Colton did most of it around their place as a favor. And that was before he and Hayley had started dating.

The big green town water towers were about a hundred yards from their house. As the girls started down the picket-fenced sidewalk they could see the figure of a man standing on the corner. He wore a dark-blue coat and a baseball cap. He was in his fifties. Or maybe his mid-thirties. It was hard to tell. As they approached him, they saw he had dark eyes and wire-rimmed glasses fitted with transition lenses. Hayley tried to burn every detail of the man’s appearance into her memory.

Just in case a sketch artist was ever needed.

“I’m glad we could finally meet,” he said, crushing a cigarette butt in the gravel in the shadow of the water towers.

“Yeah. I guess,” Taylor said. She wanted to say that littering was against the rules in Port Gamble, but they had bigger issues to deal with than a cigarette butt.

“What do you want?” Hayley asked.

The man’s smoky breath pushed at them. “I want to talk to you. And you know about what, don’t you?”

Both girls stepped back, committed more than ever never to smoke.

“No, sir, I don’t,” Hayley said. “I don’t know what it is that you think you need to tell us.”

Taylor, taking a cue from Hayley, felt more emboldened. “Or why you keep harassing us.”

The man shook his head. “I didn’t think of it as harassing,” he said. “I thought of it more as getting your attention.”

“That’s what all stalkers say,” Taylor said, now on a roll. “People like you think your attention is wanted. It isn’t. It is wrong on every level.”

“It might even be against the law,” Hayley added.

“You seem quite agitated, Hayley,” he said.

Was it just a good guess? Hayley wondered. He did have a fifty-fifty chance, but even so, he said her name with such confidence that it was a little unnerving.

“I’m not agitated, and I’m Taylor, anyway,” she said.

Text Creeper studied her through his thick lenses, as if he knew that was a lie. But he didn’t call her on it.

“Why,” he asked, “did you consent to meet with me?”

“Maybe to get you off our backs,” Taylor said.

“Maybe because you’re curious about things, Hayley.” He said Hayley’s name tentatively, in a way that indicated he knew who he was talking to, yet playing along. A little game. That was fine with him.

Hayley noticed a gray van parked by the Dauntless Bookstore. Its engine was running. For a fleeting second, she felt a pang of nervousness reverberate through her body. She put her hand to her stomach to quell it. In doing so, she noticed she was trembling a little.

“Let’s not stand around here,” she said. “People are watching. Let’s walk the loop.”

Taylor looked at her sister. She wasn’t sure what she was getting at. She glanced down the street. No one was watching them. In fact, there wasn’t a soul out shopping, walking, or doing much of anything. Port Gamble was deader than dead.

The man agreed, and the three of them crossed the street, away from the van.

“You said you know who killed Olivia and that she deserved it,” Hayley blurted out.

The man didn’t answer right away. Maybe he hadn’t expected to be confronted so soon. Maybe he hadn’t expected to be confronted at all. If that had been the case, he clearly didn’t know as much as he thought he did about Taylor and Hayley Ryan.

“What are you talking about?” He grabbed hold of Hayley’s arm firmly, but not enough to hurt.

As his hand touched her skin, in that second, Hayley saw everything.

Rain. It was last year, right after Colton’s mom, Shania, had run over Moira Windsor, the newspaper reporter who had discovered their unusual abilities. A man in a dark-blue coat—Text Creeper. A woman screaming. It was Moira. Moira was hurt from the impact of Shania’s car and her fall over the embankment, but she was alive. She was still very much alive. Shania had not been responsible for her death after all.

“Moira, you idiot!” Text Creeper called out. “All you were supposed to do was get me information on the twins by pretending to write a story!” He shook her roughly by the water’s edge of Paradise Bay.

“But I tried!” Moira cried out. “I found the tape. Those girls aren’t normal. They can see things. But now . . . I’m sorry.” Moira coughed and bent over. “Help me, please. I’m hurt.”

Text Creeper hovered over her. “I’ll help you all right,” he said, pushing her face-down into the dark water. Moira’s leg twitched slowly at first, and then violently.

Then she stopped moving.

“Good night, Moira,” Text Creeper said. “You were a poor excuse for an assistant. Next time, I’ll do things on my own.”

“Hayley!” Taylor shouted, pulling her sister’s arm free and snapping her back to reality.

“This isn’t about Olivia, is it?” Hayley said to the man in front of them. “It’s about Moira. And us.”

Taylor gave her sister a nervous look.

“Yes, let’s focus on you,” Text Creeper said, his dark eyes flickering across their faces.

Hayley led him to the playground on the edge of town. It was out in the open, safe, by anyone’s standards. Moms in Port Gamble never worried about someone snatching their kids from that park because things like that never happened there.

“You aren’t the only ones like you,” he said. “There have been others.”

Just then, for the very first time, Hayley noticed the knife at Text Creeper’s waist. She looked at Taylor and lured her eyes to the glint of steel held in place by his belt. It looked like a sharp knife—the kind used to gut a deer.

Or maybe kill a teenage girl. Like them. Like Olivia.

Her mind flashed to Olivia. Halloween night. Brianna. Drew.