We have to get out of here.”
Claire’s eyes were hard with purpose, the way they got at home when she scolded Murphy for not wiping up puddles on the bathroom sink. Only, this was more serious than puddles.
Murder. Murders.
Murphy was absorbing everything Cathy had said. People had died at 2270 Laramie. Weren’t you supposed to be able to sense a thing like that? Shouldn’t Murphy have gotten a bad feeling walking around that house? The way people did in horror movies, when they stepped into a room, made a face, and said, “Something bad happened here.”
Murphy guessed her sixth sense was broken. Maybe it still was, because she didn’t see why Claire was upset, or why she’d rushed them out of the diner and been rude to the sheriff. She frowned at Claire’s back as her sister charged down the street.
“Hey, slow down, would you?” Murphy puffed. “We didn’t ask about a mechanic.”
“On purpose,” Claire said sharply. “They can’t know we were at that house. I don’t want people asking questions, or suspecting. We shouldn’t have come here.”
Murphy frowned. Coming to Rockport was an adventure. Their first and probably only sister road trip. How could Claire regret that?
“Weren’t you listening?” Murphy asked. “Those murders happened a long time ago.”
Claire spun around so fast that Murphy pinwheeled her arms to stay upright.
“Weren’t you listening? She said Mark Enright is coming back to town. He could be here now.”
Eileen had been trudging behind them in silence. Now she came to a stop by Murphy’s side, chewing a mouthful of bubblegum that smacked and clicked between her words.
“She said Mark might come back. Dunno if you caught this, Claire, but it was a little … conspiracy theory in there. You pointed it out yourself: Cathy was getting tons of details wrong. Who knows how much of that was reliable?”
“Yes, okay,” said Claire. “They were bound to get some things wrong. It’s been twenty years. But do you think Cathy made all that up? Everyone in there agreed the murders happened. And they agreed Mark Enright was the prime suspect—who, by the way, is another uncle we didn’t know existed.”
“What are you saying?” Eileen scoffed. “You really think this big, bad Mark Enright is gonna come back, Michael Myers style, and kill us?”
Claire threw up her hands. “I think there are a lot of unknowns at play here. Scary unknowns. Why are you being so chill?”
“Dunno, Claire,” said Eileen, “maybe I have less to lose.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’m not scared I’ll get arrested because I have to maintain a sterling reputation for my big, fancy, Ivy League college.”
Claire set her jaw. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, then why are you taking the word of a diner lady we just met? What, do you think this is actually true crime podcast world? Where a serial killer is on the loose in a sleepy, coastal town?”
“Oh my God. You’re being absurd.”
“Uh, no. I think that honor belongs to you.”
“You’re not evening listening—”
Murphy had heard enough. She edged around her sisters, leaving them to bicker, and kept heading down the street. She glanced back once to see that neither of them had figured out she was gone and, judging the coast to be clear, pulled out the Tupperware box from under her coat. That was the nice thing about puffer coats: You could hide turtles beneath them, and no one could tell.
“Siegfried?” Murphy whispered, tapping the container’s edge. “Hey, dude, you okay?”
Siegfried didn’t answer. He was dead. A tiny explosion of guilt went off in Murphy’s chest, and the cheese curds she’d inhaled felt leaden in her stomach. Their remnant taste was souring on her tongue.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to the plastic coffin. “I’m gonna find you a place to do a good burial. You deserve that. You—”
“MURPHY.”
She froze. At last her sisters had noticed. She shoved the coffin back into her coat and turned around.
“What?” she asked innocently.
Claire was storming up the sidewalk, Eileen unhurriedly following.
“You can’t keep doing that! If I lost you, Mom would kill me.”
“Nah.” Murphy shrugged. “It’d take her a while to notice. You could skip town before then.”
“Not funny.” Claire reached Murphy, planting her feet and folding her arms. “Maybe neither of you are taking this seriously”—she shot a pointed look at Eileen—“but I am. Don’t you get what it means, everything Cathy said? If Patrick is really our uncle, then—”
“Sure,” Murphy cut in. “It means that house is where Dad grew up.”
Claire blinked. “Well … yeah.” Then she seemed to board her former train of thought: “It also means we’re related to a murderer.”
Eileen said something under her breath, brusque and derisive. Claire ignored her and added, plaintively, “I don’t know why Mom wouldn’t tell us any of this.”
Murphy swallowed. She wasn’t exactly happy with Mom for leaving the family for Christmas. All the same, Murphy didn’t like to think of Mom as a liar. And something about this didn’t seem fair—questioning Mom when she wasn’t around to answer. She probably had a good explanation. For instance—
“Maybe she was trying to protect us.”
Claire parted her lips, but Murphy pressed ahead.
“Everyone gets it, right?” she said. “Dad was the oldest brother, John. Same name. He was away at college when it happened, and the murder probably freaked him out so bad he never came home and decided to lie about it, say his whole family was dead. He wanted a fresh start. That makes sense.”
Claire was glaring at the concrete, toeing a scraggly patch of grass. “Well, if that’s true, it’s another lie. Mom said Dad never went to college.”
Murphy thought about this. “I dunno if she ever said didn’t. She just never said did.”
“Come on. If he had a college degree, you think he’d settle down in freaking Emmet?”
“Maybe,” Murphy said, “Dad got so upset about the murders he didn’t graduate.”
“Whatever.” Claire threw up her hands. “This doesn’t matter. Mom’s not here, and Dad and Uncle Patrick are dead. The only one left is this Mark person, who probably killed our grandparents, and for all we know, he’s back in town.”
Claire scrunched her nose, and Murphy did too. She bet the others were thinking how weird what Claire had said sounded. Uncles. Grandparents. Murders. Those weren’t part of the Sullivan sisters’ lives.
“This is the plan,” said Claire. “Eileen, you’re going to try starting the van again. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, we call a mechanic, get the van fixed as quick as we can, and leave town. We forget this whole thing ever happened.”
Murphy gaped. “Forget about our inheritance?”
Murphy had reached a conclusion: Sure, the house had turned out to be a murder mansion, but it was her murder mansion. A third of it, anyway. There was magic in the place, and it had drawn the sisters together. It was the place to enact Operation Memory Making. She wasn’t ready to leave that yet.
“Of course not,” Claire told her. “But there’s nothing we can do about the inheritance part right now.”
While Claire had been laying out her master plan, the sisters had resumed their walk toward the bluff. This entire time, Eileen had stayed quiet. Murphy kept sneaking glances, trying to read her oldest sister’s face, with no success. Eileen’s eyes remained lightless, her lips drawn in a long, neutral line until, after the silence, she said, “I’m not ready to leave.”
“What do you think you’re going to find there?” Claire challenged. “Cathy already told us the deepest, darkest secret a family could have.”
“Or,” said Eileen, “she just scratched the surface. Maybe only the Enrights knew what really happened in that house. But we could know too. There could be something in there that tells us the whole story. Maybe even … stuff about Dad.”
“You can’t be serious.” Claire motioned at Murphy. “What about her? Maybe you’re fine being reckless with your own life, but Murphy’s a kid, and I’m not going to keep her here when there could be a killer in town.”
Red-hot indignation filled Murphy. A kid? That really was how Eileen and Claire thought of her: the kid, the nuisance, the baggage. The spare tire.
Well, this spare tire could talk.
“I’m fourteen,” she growled at Claire. “We’re both in high school. And I want to stay.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Uh, yeah it does.” Murphy raised her voice. “We’re a democracy, and it’s two against one.”
Claire laughed. “You think this is a democracy? News flash: I’m the one with the money. I pay for gas. If you want to get home, you’ll do what I say.”
“You have to get home too,” Murphy challenged. “You need Eileen’s van. I heard you say so yourself.”
Claire laughed again, like a rabid hyena. “I don’t need that van. I told you, I have money. Enough to get a ride back to Emmet.”
“Whoa,” said Murphy. “For a three-hour trip? That’s your college fund.”
“Much good it’s doing me,” Claire muttered.
“What does that mean?”
Claire’s eyes met Murphy’s. There was a flicker there in the blue—a possibility. Claire opened her mouth to speak. Then, she seemed to reconsider, shook her head, and walked on.
They’d been ascending the bluff through a drizzle, and the rain-slicked road had leveled out, revealing the topmost gables of the house. At the sight, goose bumps formed on Murphy’s arms—the weather’s doing, that was all. Still, for a moment, Murphy let herself wonder if this Mark Enright dude really was a murderer. If, maybe, he’d found out who had inherited his old house and if, maybe, he was mad about that.
Murphy didn’t know how a house could look scarier in the daylight than in the dark. This one did, though—its gables pointing up like teeth into a moody sky.
Blood all over those parlor walls.
Head bashed in like a cantaloupe.
What had really happened in this place?
Yes, it was an adventure. It was drama.
It was also terrifying.
But Murphy had made a point to tell Claire she wanted to stay. She couldn’t act scared, like a kid. Like they expected. This was a time for being brave. For making memories. For magic.
Murphy had been to a haunted house before, on a school trip to Oregon’s one and only amusement park, Enchanted Forest. It had been creepy, sure, and she’d screamed once when Derek Huggins had jumped out from behind a dark corner. But that had been for fun.
This was an actual haunted house. A place where people had been killed, for real.
Murphy reached into her coat pocket, grabbing hold of the rope trick she’d packed there. She didn’t care about forming a knot, just needed something to hold on to. She thought of the trick’s instructions: over, under, tug through and out. She repeated them to herself internally. A mantra. A bit of magic in the face of murder.