Chapter 21

When we reach the driveway, Mila is sitting in her car, her face ashen, violently yanking at the ignition and slamming on the gas pedal. The car is still, lifeless. Kennedy drifts to her car as if in a trance, opens the door, and flicks at the headlights. Nothing happens. She slides the key into the ignition and turns it, then shakes her head. Both cars are dead, and Ryan's is gone.

"Holy shit," Chase murmurs under his breath. He tries his own car, with the same result.

"What does this mean?" I try to avoid looking at my car. There's something sinister about a dead car at a dark house. Like a warning. We should not be here. The headlights stare like lifeless eyes, like that shot in Psycho of the dead woman in the shower. I blink and turn away.

"Someone either drained the batteries or removed them," he says.

"Someone?" Kennedy gets out of the car. "Well, fuck Ryan and his horrible, no good, very bad year."

I glare at her. "There is zero evidence that this was him."

"There is plenty of evidence." She ticks the reasons off on her fingers. "He shows up and disappears. He stalls us with a note, allowing him to tamper with the lights and the cars without anyone noticing. He probably got that creepy book from Emily's room."

"Not necessarily," I say. "Emily wrote the last message. Which means it ended up in my hands."

Kennedy looks at me, irritated. "Well, did you do it? Because unlike you, Ryan has a motive: we didn't save his sister. According to him, we killed her with our own bare hands."

Chase cringes. "Come on. Negligence, maybe."

Kennedy stares at him. "I'm glad you're warming up to the idea."

"I'm not," he protests. "Just…" He looks uncomfortable. "You don't feel guilty at all?"

"Oh my god." Mila jumps out of the car, slamming the door behind her. "Emily died. It was a terrible accident, and granted, the circumstances don't look good for any of us. I don't even blame Ryan for being suspicious. We all have excuses for not knowing how the fire started. But they're not alibis. And Kennedy." Mila looks straight into her eyes. "I think you know more than you're saying, and I don't want to know what you're hiding." She whips her phone out of her pocket.

Kennedy sighs. "No cell service."

"Shit." Mila drops her hand to her side and looks to Chase desperately. "What do people do around here when their car breaks down?"

He scratches the back of his neck. "There's usually a landline. When it's busted, hike to the cell spot or walk to town. Preferably in the morning."

She shakes her head. "No way. Something is happening, and you know what? I'm the outsider here. I have the most unbiased perspective. And it could be any of you torturing us right now. Chelsea says she wants the truth. How far would she go to push her friends into confessing? Kennedy won't talk about what happened last year. Maybe she really does want to find out what we know and eliminate whoever knows too much. Chase—sorry, babe—you make mistakes, and you don't like to be called on them. What would you do to cover them up? And the elusive Ryan? He didn't even try to save Emily. Maybe we were never supposed to know about that. And now we're being punished for it." She shrugs. "It could be any of you. And I'm not going to be next. Two dead girls don't make a right. So I'm out." She walks toward us briskly, and I have to jump aside to avoid being knocked over. And then she walks right back into the house.

"Did she say out?" Kennedy's forehead creases.

I turn to Chase. "Do you know what she has that the rest of us lack?"

He stares at me, speechless.

"Spirit." I can't help it. I don't know why I am the way I am. I need to joke when I'm fizzing with fear. To smile sometimes when the world is crumbling. I need to silence the room. I wish I was a better person. But I'm not. I survive and let my friends fend for themselves.

Chase sighs and launches himself after her.

Kennedy pauses at my side, looking beaten down. "You can't even entertain the idea that it might be Ryan, can you?"

"I can entertain it. That's what makes me sure it's not him. He's our friend."

"What if he wasn't the person you thought he was?"

"You really believe he would do all of this? Trap me in the attic, kill the car batteries?"

She shoots me a wary look. "Do you really want to know what I think?" I study her. Kennedy wears a hard, polished exterior. But it isn't the real Kennedy. Not the one I fell in love with. I may have always been in love with Kennedy a little, but the summer between ninth and tenth grade was when I fell, and kept falling, and never really stopped. She'd been whispering about her secret crush for weeks, building it up to be the revelation of the year. And then one night after a fish fry, Kennedy and I took out a boat to watch fireworks, and out of the blue, she told me it was me all along. I was the secret. I was stunned, she was nervous. That made her so much cuter—she was carelessly oblivious to the fact that half of the class had a crush on her. I'd never kissed anyone before and I was too scared to do it, so we just agreed that we liked each other, and sat there awkwardly in the boat with all these explosions startling the fish and forcing us to shout at each other. You think, middle of the lake, starlight, fireworks, first kiss, how romantic. But it wasn't. It was scary and awkward and important.

But eventually we agreed that kissing is customary in these situations, so she promised not to laugh, and I squeezed my eyes shut and clambered over the emergency gear, and we found each other. It was too short. Every kiss with Kennedy was always too short. We kissed all weekend, in every private moment. She laughed every time. I always opened my eyes before the end.

But when summer was over, she showed up at my doorstep and said she wanted to make sure we were still best friends, and Emily too. And my heart shot itself to pieces, because I understood. Emily felt left out. And starting high school with a girlfriend would be "limiting" in a lot of ways. We were back together by the end of the year, but I was still devastated, and it stuck with me. It still does. Kennedy always held all the cards.

"I want to know what you don't recall," I say finally.

"You don't trust me," she says, looking disappointed.

"Like you trusted me when I told you I heard Emily's voice?"

She looks torn. "I do… but I can't believe in something I don't see. I just can't. And when I think about everything that's happening right now, it doesn't say revenge from beyond the grave. It doesn't even say random serial killer. It says guy with a grudge. Everything is too personal. The cards ending up in my purse. The words—one of us kissed a killer, one betrayed a friend, one killed a best friend. They're each obviously meant to refer to one of us."

"But there are four of us, and only three cards."

"I thought of that. But then I thought of something else. Mila wasn't invited."

I look at her in surprise. "Then you did send out the invites."

"No. But when we were discussing them at dinner, Mila said we all got one. But she also said maybe they were ordered off the internet or something, remember?"

I nod. I do remember her saying that.

"Mine was written out by hand," Kennedy emphasizes. "So was yours. She didn't realize her mistake until she saw your invitation."

"Shit." It was such a small moment, it flew right by me. But Kennedy's right. Mila's suggestion wouldn't have made sense if she'd actually gotten an invitation.

"So Mila isn't one of the three. And she's not the one behind all of this. She's the wild card—the one who wasn't supposed to be here. That narrows down the three to you, me, and Chase. Traitor, kisser, killer. Of the group, I've only kissed you, and Chase has only kissed Mila, and we know Mila isn't guilty. At least, it's pretty unlikely since she isn't connected to this whole clusterfuck. You, on the other hand, have kissed both me and Ryan."

"You're actually enjoying this, aren't you?"

"No!" Kennedy blushes. "If they're going to make us play games, at least let us choose the game, though. No one in this house is going to beat me in a logic puzzle. So look at the facts. None of the three of us has kissed Chase."

"You're going to argue that he's not the killer based on a logic puzzle?"

"I'm going to argue that none of us killed Emily, but you're not going to listen to that."

"Fine." I'm quiet for a moment. "Well, by that logic, Chase is the traitor and one of us is the killer."

She slow-claps. "That's what Ryan wants us to believe."

I shoot her a look.

Kennedy sighs. "What someone wants us to believe."

"Okay. Chase is the traitor. One step closer to the truth, I guess. The question is, what did he do?"

She pauses. "You don't know?"

I shake my head. "Should I?"

"Emily and Chase hooked up." Kennedy makes a lock-and-key symbol over her lips. "After he and Mila started dating."

I stare at her, stunned. "So which friend did he betray? Emily or Mila?"

She looks thoughtful. "That's a good question."

"Especially when one of them is dead and the other turned up uninvited to the weekend from hell." I pause. "If not both of them." I eye the front door nervously. The mist is settling in more thickly, and I'm cold. "Chase and Mila have been gone a while. Do you think they're okay?"

Kennedy pushes the door open cautiously. "Of course." But she sounds uncertain. I haven't heard a single sound from within the house while we've been outside talking. It's unnerving.

"So what if Emily did return? Do you think she could possibly be the one behind all this?"

She glances back over her shoulder at me. "That assumes ghosts exist."

"For once, can you just consider it?" I try not to think of the cellar. The door opening and slamming, the feeling of being trapped. That something was closing the door on me.

Kennedy steps inside the house and looks around slowly. "Okay. But even assuming ghosts exist, Emily hasn't risen from the grave to avenge her own death. Flaw number one—and I will die on this hill—her death was an accident."

"Okay, now I'll assume you're right. What if she thinks we did? Can't a ghost be wrong? Why would crossing over make a person omniscient?"

She considers. "If it were me you all left behind that night, I'd need more to go on than the fact that you were all there. That's just not enough to motivate me to concoct a psychological torture scheme against my own best friends. We were there to We killed her is a huge leap."

"But you'd believe Ryan would do this."

"Because he has a motive. He's always wanted to get between us."

"It would be seriously messed up to try to convince someone their girlfriend was a murderer just to win them back."

"Ex-girlfriend," Kennedy corrects. I think I hear sadness in her voice. But it might be wishful thinking. Our eyes connect for a moment, and it almost all comes rushing out. Even tonight, even in this house, there are a million things I need to say to her that have been kept beneath the surface for far too long.

She reaches for my shaking hand. "I wish we could go back in time." She looks into my eyes, and my heart rips down the middle. Two asymmetrical pieces, the larger one for her. It's automatic. We never had one of those fancy friendship necklaces with the charms. It's impossible to make three equal and identical pieces of a heart that fit together. And it wouldn't have been right to exclude Emily. She was the third. She mattered just as much. And it was everything in threes or nothing. When Kennedy and I were dating, for real this time, after the heirloom incident had been buried under six months of silence, I made her a secret heart. I spun it of yarn unwound from my favorite sweater, cotton candy from the carnival where she won me a purple elephant, starlight I scooped into a jar the night of our first kiss, and my own silver blood. I gave it to her on a scrap of paper and she swallowed it, and we shared that secret. Not that she and I were dating. Everyone knew that. But that I loved her. Love changes things. It redraws the map.

Kennedy never said it back. Now we stare into each other's eyes, and I will her to tell me. Say it, Kennedy. But instead, she glances up the stairs. "Chase?"

"Mila?" he calls back in a muffled voice.

"It's just us," I say, a bad feeling settling over me. He should have found her by now.

Kennedy looks at me, worried. "We'll finish this conversation later. I promise." I nod and she heads upstairs.

I glance out the front window at the cars, feeling strange, like I'm being watched.

My eyes travel around the living room. The single candle on the table is burned almost halfway down, and wax is pooling on the antique wood. Kennedy and her mother are going to have twin heart attacks. I retrieve a wet paper towel from the kitchen and try to wipe up the melted wax, but only succeed in burning my fingertips and somehow melding the towel into the wax. Shit. I flatten it against the table and pick up a candlestick.

And then, something catches my eye that makes my breath hitch in my throat. A third tarot card placed face-out on the bookshelf next to one of the candles. It's a dark-haired young man in a clearing, shadowed by a circle of foreboding pines, his hands folded around something that emits a bright, eerie glow. He has Chase's broad shoulders and amber eyes, and below is written King of Wands: keeper of secrets and lies. I know with one glance what it's supposed to be. Chase in the cell spot. I lunge for it and stuff it into my pocket, my hands shaking, as I hear Chase's and Kennedy's footsteps hurrying down the stairs. I could swear the card wasn't there moments ago, before we went outside. I wasn't looking for it, so I can't be sure. But that sinking feeling is back, the sensation that I'm falling through the floor, through wood and dirt, through solid ground, into a dangerous nowhere, an infinite lucid in-between, and it's more sinister than sleep because I am not alone. I turn to the others and try to make my voice work, to warn them, to let them know that something is stalking us, pushing us into the darkness, something enormous and heartless and real.

Kennedy tosses me a sweatshirt and pair of warm flannel pajama bottoms, and I take them gratefully. I've been shivering in Chase's dress-sized T-shirt half the night. "Suit up," she says, unsmiling.

"What's wrong?" I look back and forth between them as I change.

"Her things are missing," Chase says grimly. "Mila's gone."

"No one was supposed to leave," Kennedy says, pacing back and forth, biting her nails. "This is not good."

Chase shoots her a suspicious look. "What do you mean, ‘supposed to'?"

"I mean, splitting up is the worst possible thing we could do right now!" she shouts back, then composes herself. "No. Fighting is the worst thing. We need to stay calm. Stick together."

"No," I say suddenly. "We'll never get anything accomplished unless we split up. We have to find Mila."

Chase looks at me with relief. "Thank you."

Kennedy turns to me desperately. "Chelsea, don't."

But I do. It's time to trust me for once. To trust my plan. Because I think I know exactly where Mila went and why. "Kennedy, you stay here. In case she comes back."

She stares at me for a moment and then slowly nods. "Fine. I should be the one to stay here."

"Chase." I turn to him. "You and I are going to the cell spot."

Mila may not know what the cards are, but she's smart enough to know that they mean something. She saw the Kennedy card, and the Mila card was within eyeshot as she ran out to the driveway. But the Chase card—that was the one that would have scared her into trying to leave without him. The keeper of secrets and lies.

Chase opens the door and steps out into the growing fog, but Kennedy grabs my arm before I can follow.

"Please be careful," she whispers into my ear.

But it isn't the world outside that really scares me. It's what I'm walking away from.