WHEN ELIZA WOKE IN the middle of that night, it wasn’t a coincidence.
She’d set her tablet to vibrate at 12:30 and slipped it underneath her pillow. But as it turned out, it wasn’t vibration that woke her. It was a crash of thunder.
Eliza jerked backward in bed. A flash of lightning bleached the turret windows. Rain hissed against the panes. She pulled out her tablet. 12:24. She hadn’t even needed to set the alarm.
Another smash of thunder shook the big brick building. The windows rattled. Raindrops pounded on the turret’s metal roof. In the other bed, her mother didn’t stir.
Eliza slipped out of the covers and darted across the room to the turret. The cushions of the encircling window seat were covered in threadbare velvet, like the seats in an old movie theater. Eliza knelt on the seat and pressed her face to the window. If she pressed hard enough and looked straight down, she could see the windows of the Carrolls’ apartment, as well as the shop below. All the lights were out. Except for the headlights of a rusty pickup truck coasting along the pavement, the entire street was dark.
This was her chance.
With the Spectral Translator in hand, Eliza raced out into the hall, down both flights of stairs, and into the deserted store.
By night, Carrolls’ Gardens looked even more like a patch of strange forest. Fronds and stems twisted through the dark. Flickers of lightning turned each plant to layers of black paper silhouettes. It was impossible to tell what was real and what was only a shadow.
Dodging the fluttering leaves, Eliza made her way to the counter. She reached for the spare keys.
Now the hook labeled BASEMENT was empty.
Something more like frustration than surprise whooshed through her. First the attic, and now the basement? Tommy must have decided to hide the key, to keep her from getting into the basement again. Well, that wasn’t going to stop her. Maybe she could remove the doorknob with a screwdriver; the greenhouse must have a few tools that could help. Maybe she could even pick the lock. The noise of the storm would provide the perfect cover.
With the Spectral Translator in one hand and a lock-picking paperclip from the counter drawers in her pocket, Eliza threaded through the rare plant room, avoiding thorns and stingers and sticky leaves. Fronds whispered around her. Thunder boomed, shaking the walls.
In the back hallway, hard rain spattered the windows. But now, beneath the noise, Eliza heard something else.
Voices.
Eliza halted.
Two voices. Men’s voices. One deep. One raspy and soft.
A flash of lightning bleached the hallway. By its light, Eliza could see that the basement door was standing wide open.
She rolled her head from side to side. She stretched both wrists. Then, her whole body zinging and ready, she inched closer to the open door.
Cold, wet air swirled up from below.
One of the voices spoke again. Eliza couldn’t make out its words. Could this be the same voice Mr. Carroll had heard in the attic years ago? Or were multiple ghosts haunting the rooms of Carrolls’ Gardens, just waiting for Eliza to discover them?
She tiptoed down the first two steps. She had expected the basement to be blindingly dark—but instead, from somewhere out of sight, there came a dim glow. What was going on down here?
With slightly shaky hands, Eliza held out the Translator. The spinner wobbled, stopping just above the angry face—but it could have been the breeze or her shaking that moved it.
She crept down the steps. The chill of the stone floor seeped through her socks like ice water. As Eliza hesitated, trying to trace the source of the breeze, a voice spoke.
And this time, Eliza recognized it.
“Any more?” said Mr. Carroll’s deep voice.
“A few,” rasped the other.
Eliza held her breath. Was Mr. Carroll speaking to the ghost?
She slunk past a sagging wooden shelf. Around its edge, she made out a burning lightbulb in a dirty glass fixture. Beside the light was a gap in the basement’s stone wall—a gap filled with another flight of stairs.
Eliza crept closer. More of the staircase slid into view. The steps led steeply upward, their wooden slats dripping with rain. At the top of the steps, Eliza could see an open cellar door leading out to the stormy backyard. And standing on the staircase, his back to her, was the broad, dark shape of Mr. Carroll.
Eliza halted again, her mind whirling. Was this the cold spot? Just a draft from an open doorway? And what was Mr. Carroll doing in it? She inched nearer. Damp wind struck her face, lifting the ends of her hair.
Mr. Carroll waited on the stairs. Rain pattered around him. As Eliza watched, a second figure—something dressed in a battered sweater and knit cap—appeared at the very top of the steps. Eliza couldn’t make out its face, but it looked too solid to be a ghost. Its tattoo-covered hands passed Mr. Carroll a bundle.
“That one’s heavy,” said the raspy voice. “Two more.”
“All right,” Mr. Carroll murmured back.
The other figure disappeared.
Mr. Carroll thumped down the steps. He set the bundle on the floor in a line of other bundles. Eliza squinted at them. The bundles varied widely in size, but each one was wrapped in burlap and shaped like a lumpy hourglass. Sticking out here and there through gaps in the fabric were bits of green.
Twigs. Leaves.
The bundles were full of plants.
For an instant, Eliza felt furious. She’d expected to find a ghost at last. Instead, she’d found a bunch of shrubs?
She let out a long, hot breath through her nose. She was about to turn away when a new thought plunged into her brain.
What kind of plants did people hand off at midnight, in a rainstorm, through a hidden basement door?
Eliza stopped.
Dangerous plants. Poisons. Drugs. Or something even worse. Frost spread through her body, fizzling the anger away. What kind of secret had she stumbled into?
This was the trouble with people. They had complicated, messy, confusing problems. She was interested in ghosts, not in real life. Whatever was happening here, with the Carrolls and the raspy-voiced stranger and the bundled plants, it wasn’t the kind of thing that belonged in Eliza’s paranormal research notebook. It didn’t belong there—and she didn’t belong here.
With her heart jammed in her windpipe, Eliza raced back toward the stairs. She climbed as carefully and quietly as she could, away from the dim gold basement light and deeper into the stormy blackness. By the time she reached the upper hall, her legs were shaking, and the darkness was so thick she was nearly blind.
She stopped for a moment in the hall, gasping, holding out a hand to make sure the path around her was clear. Another bolt of lightning flashed. It illuminated the deserted greenhouse and the rain-soaked backyard. It filled the hallway windows with white light. It flared on the face pressed against one of those windows—the face of someone, or something, waiting in the rainy yard. Something dark and hunched. Something cloaked in black.
Something that stared straight back at Eliza with a pair of blazing yellow eyes.
It didn’t matter how quietly she had climbed the basement steps.
Because now Eliza let out a quiet-shattering scream.
