The next morning, Lily remembered only bits and pieces of what had happened in the night, as if it really had been a dream. But the pile of green-and-black-smeared paper towels in the dumpster did not lie. After breakfast she walked outside to the dented and ripped pool cage and stood over the still, thick, murky water. A green-black smear stretched from the water to the stairs, where her footprints were clearly visible.
It definitely wasn’t a dream.
Hands shaking, she brought a bowl of water from the kitchen and scrubbed the footprints away with more paper towels. Her parents never came out here, but she couldn’t take the risk.
That day books could not hold her attention, and wherever she went, she felt jumpy. Her mind was as dark and twisty as the pool water. Was she going crazy, or was there really a ghost—or two ghosts—haunting the new house? Neither answer was good. And thinking about it, trying to figure out which one was worse, was making her even crazier. Horrible thoughts spun through her head, thoughts of drowning or falling down the stairs or having her legs chopped off by the fan. She felt lost in her own life with no safe harbor and no one she could trust. She quietly murmured, “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice,” like in the musical, but no one showed up from the other side to offer helpful suggestions.
As a last-ditch effort to distract herself, she decided she needed something to do, if only to stop her hands from fidgeting and her imagination from taking her down terrifying paths.
Her mom was at work, so Lily decided to poke around. After all the cleaning, it had been a relief to spend a few days without putting on yellow gloves or touching garbage bags, but it occurred to her that no one had yet tackled the spare room downstairs. Her mother had taken one look, firmly closed the door, and said, “We’ve got the dumpster for a while yet. This can wait. Not like it’s going anywhere.”
Now Lily gathered up a pair of gloves and a roll of garbage bags, and for the first time she stepped into the room that was so horrible even her mother had shied away.
It was even more densely packed than the den had been, but it looked like everything shoved into the spare room had been important—to someone, at some time. This wasn’t regular garbage but the sort of stuff old people accumulated over a lifetime, things too special to throw away, but only special to them. Trunks, boxes, thick brown folders of files held together with twine. Somewhere under all of it, she could see a dresser and the wooden posts of an old bed.
Her mouth twitched up. This room might actually hold the clues to what had happened to Brian and Britney. Well, if the Ouija board was right, Brian had died because he’d neglected to take his medicine, but she still had no idea what had happened to Britney. It would be ridiculous if what she needed to know had been sitting in here all along. As a bonus, her parents would probably be really pleased with her for doing some cleaning on her own and making the house more livable.
She put on her gloves and stepped inside. Closest to the open door were boxes stacked and labeled with things like Photos and Taxes and Barbara’s China. Those boxes were too heavy for Lily to lift, so she slipped around them to see what else was on the bed and dresser.
The first interesting thing she found was an old photo album. There was no label on the outside of the book, but as she flipped through it, she could see notations in careful, faded handwriting. She stopped when one caught her eye. Brian holds Melissa for the first time, it read. The man in the picture was holding a baby wrapped in a pink blanket, smiling for the camera. The photo was old, like from the eighties.
“Brian,” Lily murmured to herself.
But who was Melissa?
The album showed Melissa going from a baby to ten years old, with pictures of her swimming in the ocean, or roller-skating, or learning to ride a bike as Brian ran behind her. Every now and then, rarely, a woman showed up in the pictures. She was younger than Brian, smiling and pretty. And then the book ended with Melissa at a restaurant for her tenth birthday party, with some creepy animatronic mouse looming behind her in striped overalls. The next album Lily found started with Melissa in a uniform, going to school. There was a Christmas picture, where Melissa got an old-fashioned Nintendo. And then there was a picture of crying Melissa hugging her mother, who was in a bed in the hospital. And then the album ended abruptly, leaving many empty pages.
Lily looked around for another album but didn’t find one. What had happened to the woman, and why were there no more pictures of Melissa? And where did Britney fit into the picture?
She focused on the box labeled Photos. It was full of paper, but she didn’t see any actual photos. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of Amazon packing slips. She used a nearby pencil to move the papers around, but the box was just too deep to see if there was anything interesting underneath, and she was still too skittish about the idea of roaches and spiders to dig around.
Oh well. Maybe if she cleaned up some of this junk, she would find more clues. She opened one of the black bags and began cleaning obvious garbage off the table. There were more receipts, plus stacks of magazines on fishing, hunting, and guns, with some old Highlights magazines mixed in. Under the table, she found boxes full of clothes, all for a little girl, in sizes six and seven. She thought about saving them for the donations bin, but they were faded and covered in roach eggs and mouse poop, so she carried them out to the dumpster. She threw away boxes of chewing tobacco and cigars, plastic bags filled with rags and paintbrushes rock-hard with yellow paint. She saved an old tool kit and a tackle box full of fishing stuff. She threw away broken toasters and plastic plates and a huge box full of old Christmas lights like the ones hanging around the pool cage. The ancient artificial tree went to the trash, too. She was getting lots of exercise, running to and from the dumpster again.
A little after noon, her mom showed up to grab her forgotten lunch. Apparently Lily had missed her text while she’d been cleaning, and she nearly had a heart attack when the front door opened. Lily didn’t want her mom to see the spare room until it was clean, so she shut the door and tiptoed in from the den. As they ate their sandwiches, Lily looked up and chose her words carefully.
“Mom, do you know when—”
With a snort, her mom interrupted her, which she didn’t do very often. “No, I don’t know when the storage container will get here. Believe me, it’s making us all crazy.”
So Lily tried a different tack. “Could you maybe unlock the internet on my phone? I’d at least like to look up the schools I might end up going to.”
Much to her surprise, her mom put her head in her hands and moaned. “Look, I know. I know I need to figure it out. I need to figure everything out. I’m trying, but it’s wearing me so thin. This place is getting to me.”
It felt like all noise ceased. That constant outdoor hum of bugs and birds went silent. The skin prickled up the back of Lily’s neck.
“Me too,” she said quietly.
Her mom looked up, worry in her eyes. “Yeah?”
“Nightmares,” Lily said, looking down. “Like, a lot. And Rachel.”
Her mom put a hand on her arm. “Honey, I told you. That wasn’t…She just slipped, okay? I saw the Ouija board at the top of the stairs. She slipped on it and fell. I’m sorry she’s not talking to you, but no one could blame you. You’re just a kid. It’s not your fault if she’s clumsy.”
“She’s not…I mean, that wasn’t what happened.”
Mom pulled away and gave her a bright-eyed look. “You’re at a confusing age. Your brain and body are changing—”
“Mom! Stop! Gross!”
“I just need to remind you that…it’s hard. I know it’s hard. It’s hard for everyone your age.”
Lily gulped down a hysterical laugh. Most kids her age weren’t waking up half drowned in abandoned swimming pools at midnight with no idea how they got there.
“It can make you feel cray, is all I’m saying. I definitely felt cray when I was your age.”
Lily rolled her eyes. “Mom. Seriously. Don’t say cray, okay?”
“Fine. Crazy. Out of control. Happy one second, angry the next. Crying for no reason. Insomnia, weird dreams, anxiety, depression, rage. Your body doesn’t feel like your body anymore. You feel out of control. It’s not just Florida—it’s just part of being your age. Part of being you. And after what happened last year—” She broke off and smiled, so soft and full of pity. “I just know you have a lot of feelings right now.”
Lily ignored that last bit and nervously picked the last chunk of her sandwich apart as she built up the nerve to ask her mom, “Do you believe in ghosts?”
But her mom just stood up to whisk the paper plates into the garbage. She was all work again, no nonsense.
“Of course not,” she said a little too harshly. “I believe that when creative kids get bored, their imaginations go wild and they look for drama where there is none. But news flash: Most of life is just boring.”
Lily got that deflated feeling she was becoming accustomed to each time she tried to confide in her parents and was completely written off. Her mom had basically blamed all the freaky stuff that had happened on puberty and boredom. Which was just insulting. Weird mood swings did not make a kid sleepwalk into the pool. But whatever. She had known from the start that her mom wouldn’t really hear what she had to say.
Mom went back to work, and Lily went back to the spare room to take her anger out on the junk taking up space in the house that was hers, whether she wanted it to be or not. She turned on the Hamilton soundtrack and got aggressive. She was not throwing away her shot, but she was throwing away pretty much everything else. At least most things were already in boxes that she could carry out to the dumpster. There were boxes of cloudy glass vases, boxes of used batteries dusted with acid powder, boxes of shoes so worn out that even the secondhand store couldn’t use them. None of it was useful. It felt good to hurl it into the dumpster and hear it thump against the metal walls.
She had uncovered the entire spare bedroom now. All that was left was Barbara’s china and the junk on the dresser. One thing caught her eye on the scarred, old wood, though: a set of keys with a mangy rabbit’s foot on the key ring. That might actually be useful. Dad had not made good on his promise to have more keys made for the house.
Lily took the keys to the front door. As she had surmised, the newest-looking silver key could lock and unlock it. There was also a car key, old and worn with a Toyota logo on it. One medium-sized key reminded her of the key for Rachel’s boat. That made sense—maybe they used to have a boat here, too. And then she saw a small, heavy brass key. One that might be just the right size to open the secret door that led under the stairs.
As she walked outside, she definitely felt more fear than hope. After all, you didn’t lock doors for no reason. She knelt, the gravel making dents in her knees as she considered the key and the lock.
Lily paused for a moment and took a deep breath. She had no idea what she would find behind the little door, but she suspected that it would not be good. Her neck tickled and her shoulders hunched with that now-familiar feeling of being watched, and she looked all around the yard. There was no one there that she could see—but there never was.
She swallowed her fear and put the key in the lock.
It fit perfectly.