MOVING THE DESK BACK AND TIDYING THE THINGS Carrie had shifted took barely five minutes, and then they were locking up the office and tiptoeing down the stairs, Carrie tucking the box in her shoulder bag as they went. There shouldn’t have been a need to tiptoe, but it was late, and Chris, at least, was beginning to feel drained as the adrenaline from chasing ghosts and actually losing the necklace and then finally finding the box faded.
Even Maddison—who presumably had had a much less stressful evening than Chris or Carrie because the stakes were so much lower for her—looked a little beat. Her customary bounce was so subdued it hardly made her ponytail sway. And the eerie feeling that they weren’t alone had returned tenfold.
“Lucky you found that box, though,” Maddison said as they trooped tiredly down the stairs. “Otherwise it might have been hidden away forever.”
“Aunt Elsie liked doing stuff like that,” Chris offered. They were crossing the front lobby, and their footsteps echoed loudly in the higher-ceilinged room. Maddison was glancing surreptitiously at her EMF meter. “She loved puzzles too, all kinds of codes—I’ll bet there’s some complicated code needed to open the lock on that box.”
“Or you could just gently take it apart at the seams and then put it back together,” Maddison suggested.
“Well, yeah,” Chris agreed, “but where’s the fun in that?” He paused at the front door to lock up, Carrie shifting uneasily from foot to foot. “And anyway,” Chris continued, more to chase away the prickle on the back of his neck than anything else, “Aunt Elsie likely gave the key to someone in the family a long time ago, disguised as a letter or a movie ticket or a bottle of grape soda . . . ”
“I’m still annoyed at you for that spilled bottle of grape soda,” Carrie said.
“It’s a long story,” Chris admitted to Maddison, who looked like she wanted to ask but was afraid she’d regret it. “And Carrie might kill you if I told you.”
“It was a white dress, Chris,” Carrie said, leading the way to the parking lot. She unlocked the car when they were still a few feet out, and it somehow seemed a necessary precaution. “A new white dress.”
“I said I was sorry!” The streetlight they had parked under was, by some piece of cosmic irony, the only one that was out, and Chris kicked it as he passed it. The creeping feeling of eyes on the back of his neck wasn’t going away, and it felt like an insult for the streetlight to stand there, tall and proud and not doing its job.
It was nearly midnight, and the night had cooled as the stars peeked out and a warm wind blew in. The parking lot was almost empty—there was a nondescript gray car parked near the entrance to the dentist’s office—and the working streetlights bathed it in dirty yellow light. This did nothing for Chris’s strange feeling of creeping dread, which did not go away as they pulled out of the parking lot and he almost ran a red light. Actually, Chris probably shouldn’t have been driving while feeling this unsettled, but the family rule was that if Carrie drove one way, Chris drove back.
“Is something wrong?” Carrie asked.
“I don’t think so,” Chris admitted. “But the hairs on the back of my neck have been standing up all night.”
There was a foreboding moment of silence while Carrie and Maddison exchanged a worried look. And, Chris wondered to himself, how had they developed shared worried looks already? But more to the point, why had they not included him in the development?
“Now that you mention it . . . ” Carrie said. “There’s been this prickle on my scalp all night.”
“Me too,” Maddison said.
Chris didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to.
“Did you guys bring a ghost home?” Carrie asked, only half joking.
“No,” Maddison said. “It doesn’t work that way. Ghosts are generally tied to one place, and that place is usually where they died—and although I never look up the history of a place before I go ghost hunting, it’s pretty unlikely anyone ever died horribly in the Archive. And anyway, the place was quiet as the grave.” She winced at her own choice of words. “I mean, we didn’t see or detect a thing. Um. Unless—”
“Unless what?” Carrie asked.
“We might have heard a ghost,” Chris offered. “We heard that door slam, remember?”
“Do ghosts slam doors?” Carrie asked.
“Sometimes,” Maddison said. “But there was no evidence to suggest it wasn’t the door jamb coming loose.”
“Except,” Carrie said slowly, “that Chris and I know the janitor at the Archive and Mr. Fitzgerald hammers those things in so tightly it takes three people to pry them out sometimes. The door might swing loose, but it would be a pretty odd coincidence.”
“See, this is why I usually investigate first and then look up the history of the place,” Maddison said. “No preconceived notions of what’s supposed to happen. It just doesn’t usually end up verifying a ghost.”
“So, now I’m thinking we really did almost catch a ghost,” Chris said. “And tonight just got a whole lot scarier, somehow.”
“What if,” Maddison started, then she bit her lip and stopped.
“What if what?” Carrie asked.
“What if it wasn’t a ghost?” Maddison said slowly. “Isn’t someone watching you supposed to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up—Chris, move!!”
The next few moments were forever a blur in Chris’s mind. He’d taken a driver’s education class, and been properly unimpressed by the instructor’s insistence that crashes happen in seconds and when you least expect them, and now, well. He knew that he registered, on some level, that there was a car about to crash into him, and that he acted on panicked instinct he hadn’t known he had, but how long it took and, for example, who screamed and who didn’t, all got lost in a moment of white noise and then his brain decided he didn’t need the memory.
He realized much later, after the adrenaline wore off, that they were lucky they’d been on a side street after dark. It meant that there were plenty of dark alleys for someone to come speeding out of unexpectedly, but it also meant that when Chris slammed on the gas pedal harder than he’d ever done in his life there was nobody in front of them to run into. The car that had come roaring out of the mouth of the alley missed crashing into them by inches—in fact it scraped the back bumper it was so close—before cutting its lights and speeding away.
“That was too close!” Maddison said, rolling the window down and leaning halfway out, the better to snap a picture of the fast-receding car. Chris pulled over and put the car he was driving in park, because he didn’t trust himself behind the wheel at the moment. “They almost hit us!” he gasped.
“They would have hit us if you hadn’t noticed them,” Carrie gasped. “What warned you they were there?”
Chris was staring at the dashboard clock, still slightly frozen in shock and wondering if this was what it felt like in the aftermath of an alien abduction. He’d lost a minute or two and wasn’t sure what he’d done in the interim.
“I—I saw headlights,” Maddison said, “unexpectedly. I just thought they weren’t paying attention. I didn’t expect—” She swallowed. “That car was aiming for us, wasn’t it?”
For a half second, Chris considered lying, but there didn’t seem to be a point. “I think they were,” he said.
“It was the car from the parking lot,” Carrie added.
“But why?” Maddison wailed. “Someone just tried to kill us! There isn’t a point to all this!”
Chris looked at Carrie, who shrugged, put an arm around Maddison’s shoulders, and said, “We don’t know, either. But, well, ever since Aunt Elsie died, things have been weird.”
“Weird how?” Maddison asked.
“Sketchy people at her funeral,” Carrie said.
“Not your family,” Chris added, and Maddison half smiled.
“That prickling feeling at the back of your neck,” Carrie continued. “And the Archive Board of Directors replacing her super-fast . . . ”
“And there was something off about the police report,” Maddison added. Chris stared. “Dad—Dad had a copy,” she added, which didn’t really explain anything. “I think he’s more worried about the Archive than he’s letting on.”
“Something might be . . . off, about how our aunt died,” Carrie admitted. “And it’s possible someone’s been following us ever since we packed up our aunt’s things at the Archive. But I had no idea someone would try to kill any of us.”
“The absolute last thing we wanted was to put you in danger,” Chris added, wondering in the meantime if McRae was responsible, and if so, had he known his daughter was in the car?
“She was pushed off the road,” Maddison said faintly. It took a second for Chris to realize that she was talking about Aunt Elsie. “Just like we almost were. So then the creeping feeling that we were being watched . . . ?”
“Oh ick, somebody was watching us!” Carrie exclaimed. “Probably the same person who went after Aunt Elsie—oh.” She froze. “I thought it seemed familiar.” When Chris and Maddison just blinked at her she swallowed hard and elaborated. “The—the car that almost hit us. I can’t be certain, but it looked familiar. I think—I think it might have been the same car that followed Chris and me home the other day.”
“Okay,” Maddison said. “Okay, I’m okay.” She didn’t sound okay. “Do you mind just dropping me off at home? This has been a long night.”
“Sure,” Chris said.
“And be careful about alleys?” Maddison added.
“Very careful,” Chris agreed, and not at all facetiously. But the rest of the drive passed perfectly quietly. There were no cars sitting in alleys with their lights off, or following uncomfortably close. There were no cars acting suspicious at all.
“They must have accidentally turned the headlights on when they started toward us,” Maddison said quietly, finally breaking their still-stunned silence.
“And I’ll bet that car you thought was following us last Friday was following us,” Carrie said to Chris, who shuddered.
Maddison’s father was at the door to meet her when they dropped her off. He was concerned by how late it was and by the fact that Maddison was pale and still shaking slightly, which was understandable for someone who had just survived a murder attempt, but less understandable for someone who had been helping a friend search for a piece of jewelry. He did not look like he had just tried to cause a fatal car crash, unless he was in the habit of doing so in his pajamas.
“He could have doubled back,” Chris said to Carrie as he pulled into his driveway ten minutes later. “If you had only let me get out and feel the hood of his car—”
“Because Maddison wouldn’t have found that suspicious at all,” Carrie sighed. “Chris, either this incident proves that Kevin McRae had nothing to do with Aunt Elsie’s death, or it proves that he is entirely willing to sacrifice his daughter for the sake of whatever is in this box. Either way, what is the last thing we should do?”
“Suggest in any way that we suspect him or know anything about Aunt Elsie’s secrets?”
“Yup,” Carrie said. Chris and Carrie shared a sigh. Then they climbed out of the car, locked it, and trooped inside Chris’s house, trying hard to act casual and as if they hadn’t found anything interesting at all in the office. The house was silent, and empty of all but the occasional bubbling of Chris’s dad’s aquarium. His parents were at a square-dancing competition and wouldn’t get back until the early morning hours. Possibly later if they made it to the final round.
This was, Chris thought with a pang, exactly the sort of night he used to spend with Aunt Elsie. For a few minutes, they just fidgeted around the kitchen, Carrie getting a can of soda out of the fridge and Chris absently picking at some grapes, but finally neither could take the suspense anymore.
“Well, you want to try opening the box?” Carrie asked.