I crept to the top of the stairs and listened with every bit of attention I could scrape together in my panicking mind.

A sound — a footstep? Or my heart again?

I closed my eyes and listened so hard it hurt.

No, I wasn’t imagining it. A footstep. Downstairs.

There was someone in the house.

“Reed?” I called. Maybe he’d forgotten something and come back inside.

But there was no answer.

My cell phone was downstairs, and the battery was dead anyway. I tried to recall what time Mom had texted about Jonathan driving back from Palm Springs.

Something moved in my field of view, practically giving me a heart attack. Looking down, I saw a thin stream of water moving forward like a snake, trailing ahead toward the end of the hall, almost as if the floor slanted downhill – which, of course, it didn’t.

I glanced back down the stairs, and as I did, the thought came automatically: Don’t be crazy, Willa.

But you know what? This wasn’t crazy. This was me trusting my instincts.

The water reached the end of the hall and seeped under the door to Jonathan’s office. I went on tiptoe, staying as close to the wall as I could, praying I wouldn’t step on any creaky floorboards.

Then, shattering the quiet, there came a cough from downstairs.

And a dragging sound, like someone was moving furniture around.

I kept going. With every agonizing step, I was sure I was going to give myself away. Somehow I made it to Jonathan’s office and opened the door.

When I saw the room, I gasped.

The whole room was covered in the same two words, repeated over and over:

GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT

The rose petals led to an open window. I deviated from the path just long enough to pick up the phone and hear the thick silence of a dead phone connection.

Someone had cut the line.

I no longer had the luxury of agonizing over whether I was overreacting.

I hurried to the window. The drop was at least sixteen feet, but there was a trellis bolted to the exterior wall below the window — where the jasmine bloomed so fragrantly at night. I didn’t have time to worry about whether it could support my weight. I swung my leg over and struggled to grip the tiny holes with my toes. By the time I got to the ground, my bare feet were full of splinters and cramped from holding on so tightly — but at least I was out.

I crept around the side of the house, pausing to peer into the front yard. Unfortunately, there was no way to get through the front gate without coming into easy view through the huge den window. If Jonathan was still in the house, I could run for it — but if he saw me, and chased me, he would almost certainly overtake me.

I saw the front door start to open and darted back to the rear of the house, where he wasn’t bothering to keep watch.

He didn’t have to. Because he knew, like I did, that the only way into and out of the property was through the front gate. The fences at the sides of the house were eight feet tall, with metal spikes on top and nothing to use as a foothold. Behind the citrus trees in the back, the hillside dropped off steeply into the ravine, littered with cactuses that had spines the size of sewing needles. Even if I made it down there, I wouldn’t make it more than five or ten feet — and then I’d be a sitting duck.

Why hadn’t I grabbed a pair of shoes?

He would have heard you. He would have known what you were planning to do.

I had to find someplace to hide — someplace where he wouldn’t look right away. The guest cottage sat silently, facing the pool, an impartial observer.

I looked down, and in front of me, a single rose petal fluttered to the tile. A few feet away, another one appeared. I followed the sparse path around the side of the guest cottage, where there were two windows hidden from view of the main house. If I broke one, would Jonathan hear the impact of a rock on the glass?

As I looked at the window, it swung open.

I overturned an old bucket that someone had stashed back there and used it to reach the window and crawl inside. I pulled the bucket in after me, then closed the window and locked it.

I looked around. The main room was small, with a kitchenette off to one side. The walls were cheap wood paneling, and the carpet beneath my feet was chocolate brown and mashed flat, sprinkled with dust and small white flecks fallen from the decaying popcorn ceiling. It felt strangely oily against my bare skin.

At some point in its history, this had been a cute, functional little guesthouse, but now it was a creepy, smelly hole of a place, packed with old furniture — a ragged, damp-looking sofa, a huge wood cabinet with a little rounded glass TV screen in it, a coffee table with crooked spindly wooden legs … Every imaginable surface was covered in junk, mostly cardboard boxes and bulging plastic trash bags.

The windows were all covered in brown paper, each one rimmed by a brilliant square of sunlight seeping in from behind the paper’s curled-up edges.

To my left was a door that led into a bathroom. Next to it was a set of shutter-like accordion doors — a closet?

As I stared at them, they opened with a creak.

Honestly, I don’t even know why I was surprised. Did I say a creepy, smelly hole of a place? Obviously, I meant a creepy, smelly, haunted hole of a place.

I walked over to the closet. Bonus — there were shoes in there, a lot of them. Fancy, high-heeled, vintage-y looking shoes, old enough to have belonged to Diana Del Mar — not the kind of thing you’d normally wear to hike through a ravine, but certainly better than nothing.

But when I tried to slide my foot inside one, I realized that Jonathan was right — movie stars did have tiny feet. I held one up and looked at the number on the sole. Size five and a half. I couldn’t even force the toes of my size-eight foot inside. It was a mathematical and physical impossibility.

Outside, a shadow passed in front of the papered-over door.

I knew he couldn’t see me, but the sight still turned my blood to ice.

I was standing motionless when a sound in the closet caught my attention. I looked over just as all of the clothes slipped off their hangers to the floor. Then the two dozen or so hangers began to swing, all at different speeds, making a horrible scraping sound on the ancient wood bar.

“Quiet!” I hissed, darting over to the closet. I was about to pull them all down — I might be trapped in here, but at least I could keep Paige from telegraphing my exact location to a murderer.

My plan was interrupted when I saw the hinge.

There was a hidden door disguised in the wood paneling of the closet wall.

When I gave it a push, it opened easily, revealing a small, dark space. I reached my hand inside and found a light switch, flipping it on.

A flight of stairs led down into absolute darkness.

A biting scent floated up and invaded my nose. I turned away, my nostrils stinging, and remembered what Leyta Fitzgeorge had asked me — what seemed like a weird question at the time — whether I ever smelled the strong smell of vinegar.

I did now.

Gently closing the door behind me, I crept down the steps, which opened into a room roughly the same size as the room upstairs.

On the far wall was a small pull-down movie screen, like the kind you use in classrooms with an overhead projector. A small olive-green leather sofa faced the screen, and a rolling cart directly behind the sofa held an old-fashioned film projector.

This must have been Diana Del Mar’s workroom. I remembered Paige’s blog entry about her — how she had wanted to make movies. In this room, Diana didn’t have to be a smiling starlet or box office poison. She got to be who she really wanted to be — a filmmaker.

Close to me there was a large table that looked like some ancient version of a computer, with a screen in the back, raised up like a monitor. On the flat part of the table was an array of buttons and control dials. There were also six big, flat turntable pieces. Two of the turntables held a film reel each, and the film wound through the spools on the machine from one to the other, connecting them.

It must have been an editing machine — the kind they used before everything was edited on computers.

Next to the table was a small rolling cart, with a metal rack that stood about five feet high. Curling pieces of film hung from the rack’s thin metal hooks like snakeskins.

I walked toward the desk on the side wall. It was sturdy, constructed of heavy steel. On it were a typewriter, a telephone, and a few piles of paper. There was a tray marked IN and one marked FILE and another one marked READ. I reached toward the typewriter and tapped out a series of letters on the dusty keys: q w e r t y

The e on the page was slightly lower than the rest of the letters, the t slightly raised.

This exact typewriter had been used by Diana Del Mar, more than seventy years ago — to write the script Paige had presented to me in the bathtub.

I picked up the phone to check for a signal, but the line was dead — it probably had been for decades.

In the corner of the room, there was a simple door, painted the same drab color as the walls. I tried the handle, but it was locked.

As I turned back to the stairs, the lights cut out.

I stood in perfect, horrific darkness for about three seconds, and then with a groan, the editing machine came to life behind me. The film reels began to spin, and a movie scene appeared on the screen.

It was a man and woman sitting at a dinner table set lavishly with flickering candles and a huge vase of roses. The woman was played by Diana Del Mar herself – there was no mistaking her radiant, heart-shaped face and her shining eyes. The man was played by an actor I didn’t recognize, a handsome man with dark hair.

There was no sound, but you could feel the tension between them. The camera slowly moved in on Diana as she took a sip of her wine. Then it cut to the man, watching her carefully. Diana was speaking. They conversed for a minute, and then the man spoke a single angry line.

The shot cut to Diana. She stared into her wine glass and said something quietly. And then her mouth moved in the shape of the words I’d know anywhere —

This is the kind of dream you don’t wake up from, Henry.

I’d known it was coming, but it still stopped me cold.

This was a scene from Diana’s movie. The one Paige had written about in her blog. I searched my memory for the film’s title. The Final Honeymoon.

On a shelf next to the table was a stack of empty film cans — the ones that had held the reels that were loaded on the editing table. I picked one up and looked at the label on its top.

It read: THE DINNER PARTY (WORKING TITLE ONLY)

I’d heard that name before … but where?

Then it hit me. From Reed. It was one of the movies he’d listed as his favorites. But it wasn’t even the real name of the movie. It was only a working title, one that even Paige hadn’t known.

Which meant … Reed had been down here. He’d seen this movie. He’d heard that line.

Suddenly, there was a jump in the action on the film. Diana’s character was standing up from the table, holding her wine glass. The camera was close on her dazed eyes. The glass slipped from her hand. She stumbled, trying to walk away from her chair, and made it almost all the way out of the dining room before collapsing to the ground. The man watched her with a small smile.

It was a murder scene. She was dying. Henry had poisoned her.

It was the scene I had seen references to in my vision. The one Paige had been meant to perform. It was supposed to be Paige’s murder, only something had changed — this wasn’t how Paige had died.

The film stopped with a jerk and rewound itself, then started playing, so I had to watch Diana recite that line again: This is the kind of dream you don’t wake up from, Henry.

It made me think of Marnie’s line, that she’d used so proudly. He’s no gentleman, see?

And just thinking that gave me an uncomfortable twinge. Like the one I’d had on the stairs earlier. That feeling of overlooking something important. Of a piece not fitting in the puzzle.

Weirdly, I thought of Reed. And it occurred to me … Why hadn’t he been surprised to see me? I mean, yes, he was surprised to find me carrying an alleged dead bird in a shoe box. But he shouldn’t have expected me to be at home. As far as anyone but Marnie, Wyatt, and I knew, I was at Marnie’s for the weekend.

Then my heart seemed to slow to a stop, as I remembered his words in the garage that morning.

I guess I’m no gentleman.

It was too similar to Marnie’s words: He’s no gentleman, see?

Had Reed been watching Detour?

Maybe Reed knew I wasn’t at Marnie’s because he knew Marnie wasn’t there, either.

I glanced back at the frame frozen on the editing machine, Diana Del Mar’s face in a stricken expression of regret and sorrow.

Reed called this one of his favorite movies.

What if those weren’t Jonathan’s files I’d found on the computer?

What if they were Reed’s?

And with that thought, the pieces came smashing together with a deafening, horrifying impact.

Reed was an insane psychotic killer….

He’d killed all those girls.

And now he was after me.