Chapter 22

Alice

Someone's in my house.

My mouth goes dry, breath sticking to my ribs. My mind feels like a tornado.

I wave at Jinx to stop, but she ignores me and walks straight in. All I can do is follow.

My house is like a time capsule. A time capsule that's been tussled with a busy hand. It looks like it's been ransacked. Books have been pulled off the shelves, drawers left hanging open, cupboards disturbed, letters and papers scattered around. There's some sort of powder dusting just about every surface. I feel a flash of anger that the cops left it like this. Except it looks more violent than a regular search. Maybe it wasn't the cops at all.

Last year's Christmas tree is still up, but it's now just a shriveled skeleton. Dry and brittle pine needles are scattered across the floor, along with hand-painted Christmas decorations and cheap plastic baubles. One of the stockings hanging on the fireplace has fallen onto the hearth. There's something missing, and it takes me a minute to figure it out: the orchid my mom had on the mantel. It's gone. Did she move it? Or did someone take it?

I move on, through the kitchen where two wineglasses and a couple of plates sit on the drying rack, back to the living room, where my gaze snags on the painting of my family my mom hung on the wall. It always surprises me how much I look like my mother. I lift a hand to the tips of my hair. Even with my blunt-cut, messy bob, I still have her eyes, her jaw, the shape of her mouth.

In the painting, the four of us stand on a patch of bright autumn leaves, the lake stretching behind us to the setting sun. Mom, Dad, and I are to the left, and we're all smiling indulgently down at Ella, who's done something silly for attention, as she usually did.

And then I am crying, hot tears burning my cheeks. My family home is swollen with memories, ghosts swirling, clamoring for my attention. Mom and Dad and Ella and me decorating our gingerbread house on Christmas Eve and then promptly eating it, crumbs and icing scattering in our haste. Holding Ella's small hand as we roller-skate down the street in the summer. My funny little sister, ten going on sixteen, feisty, stubborn, silly, annoying.

I remember when my parents brought her home. I was completely unbothered at first, this mewling pink blob. But then she started walking and talking. She made me laugh, mimicked me, followed me around. When she cried, I was the one who could soothe her. She looked at me like I'd hung the moon. I'd never been loved the way Ella loved me. Not even by Mom and Dad.

I've always been fearful of so much, all the emotions churning inside me, overthinking anything and everything. But watching Ella, I felt strong. Safe. And now she isn't here and I feel unsteady and alone.

Suddenly, a creak comes from above. My gaze shoots to Jinx, panic unfurling in my chest. Someone's up there.

Jinx moves toward the stairs. I hiss at her to stop, but she ignores me. Again. She seems to do that a lot. It's annoying.

After a second's hesitation, I follow her up the stairs.

We look through my bedroom, then Ella's, but they're only filled with more memories. The painting of an orchid my mom did hanging over my bed. The doll perched against Ella's pillow.

I pick up the doll. Her blue eyes blink open. I remember when Ella turned three, I saved up all my money and bought it for her birthday. I'm not sure why, but she named her Lisa. It was a knockoff, cheap, but when you sat her up, her eyes opened, and when you laid her down, her eyes closed. Ella thought that was cool, but by the time she was five, she'd put Lisa on a shelf, too babyish for her bed. I'm surprised to find her propped against Ella's pillow like this.

I think of Ella when she was small, one arm hooked around the doll. I think of her playing the violin, her stuffed animals a captive audience. The Rubik's Cube she was trying to teach me. The Uno cards still sitting on my desk, one Wild card missing.

I think sometimes memories hide inside us. Like ghosts, we barely notice them until we look directly at them. Being here, it reminds me of all I had.

Of all I lost.

Memories hurt. At least if they're good enough. I guess I've been blocking them out, but only because the pain is so bad.

There's that sound again. A creak. It's coming from my parents' room. My pulse kicks, but Jinx goes straight down the hall and pushes the door open.

Both of us stare in shock at what we see.

Maya is bent over the bedside table on my dad's side. She whirls around when we enter, her face breaking into a relieved smile. "Oh, there you are."

"What the fuck are you doing here?" Jinx folds her arms over her chest, scowling.

I'm surprised by the animosity in her voice. Yesterday they were holding hands.

"Alice told me she was coming here to find her mom's diary."

Jinx turns to me. "Is that what you're looking for?"

"Yes," I say slowly. I don't actually remember telling Maya that, but we did talk on the phone last night. I think. I was pretty out of it from the Ativan.

"How did you get in?" I ask her.

"I used my mom's spare."

I frown. Did I know they had a spare key?

"I haven't found a diary, Alice. Sorry. I did find this, though." She points at something by the side of my father's bed. Jinx and I move to see what it is.

It looks like a couple of broken sticks, but it's only when I take a step closer that I recognize what it is.

I hear the shouts again, angry words, a horrible crash, the sound of wood cracking, the chair splintering. Seeing it now reminds me of my own secret. The one I never want to share.

"It's nothing," I lie. "Ella fell off the chair. My dad was going to fix it."

"What's upstairs?" Jinx asks. "I saw a cord hanging in the hall. Is there an attic?"

"It's my mom's painting studio."

"Maybe it's in there."

Jinx and Maya follow me into the hall. I grab the cord and pull the attic stairs down. A bare light bulb clicks on, a soft orange. Shadows scatter over the exposed steps, following us as we climb.

The attic was my mother's sanctuary. Converted by my dad when she decided to close down her art studio in town. He cleared out all the old boxes and cotton-thick spiderwebs, painted the sloped walls a bright white, and installed skylights on either side. Shards of light streak inside, gray and dirty. Paint-splattered tarps are scattered on the old floorboards; pots of paint and dried-up old brushes clutter her work desk.

This is where I feel my mom the most. Even now, I can faintly smell the scent of her body lotion: lilacs and vanilla.

Before she closed her studio in town, she painted pretty landscapes with abstract blobs of color and occasionally portraits, people emerging like ghosts from the curve of her fingertips. Once the studio shut down, she didn't paint as much, like it was too painful a reminder.

I move around the studio, looking at the paint-splattered easel, the dusty tarp thrown over the floorboards.

I feel an icy finger tapping down my spine, and there's a sound. I run to the steps and peer down, catching sight of someone rounding the corner downstairs, blonde hair, blue-and-white dress, and then my vision wobbles, and all around me it's black, shards of light breaking the periphery, a sound like rushing water filling my head.

"You all right?" Jinx asks.

And snap, like that, I'm back, my heart revving, my legs shivery. I swallow hard. Jinx and Maya are both giving me concerned looks.

"Yeah." I push past them. "I'll check the desk. Look behind the canvas paintings, the wooden easel, in the boxes of paint. Anywhere she could've hidden a diary."

We split up, searching the small attic space. I shuffle through the desk's drawers, through charcoal sketches and cups filled with paintbrushes. We don't find anything.

I examine each of the paintings. I riffle through a stack of canvas paintings leaning against one wall: Black Lake at sunset, the sea on a brilliant summer's morning, a cool autumn day in Killer's Grove, a river of fog winding through a deep chasm.

At the back is a new painting, one I've never seen before. It's different from my mom's usual abstract paintings but still distinctly her style. It's a self-portrait, Mom's face emerging from a whirl of black and vivid red. I pull the painting out. It's heavy. Large. I take a painting of Ella and me off the wall and awkwardly hang the self-portrait in its place. Jinx, Maya, and I examine it.

"That's dope AF," Jinx says. "It's total chaos."

"It's angry," Maya says.

"No." Jinx tilts her head. "It's sadness."

"Come on." Maya turns to head down the stairs. "Let's check your dad's office. Maybe the diary's there."

Jinx follows her, but I stay. When they're gone, I slide open the middle drawer in my mom's desk. I stick my pinkie nail into the edge and lift out the false bottom. I saw my mom the day she snuck upstairs with a handful of wine corks and a drill, saying she had work to do. She hadn't painted for months by then, and why would you need wine corks for painting?

So I followed her. That's just the type of person I am. Watchful. Observant. That ability to slip through the cracks has helped me in photography. I always get the best candid shots, the genuine, unposed moments. You have to be quick to catch people before they notice. That's what I'm good at.

I slipped up the steps on silent feet and watched as my mother built a false bottom inside her desk drawer. She used the corks as supports, gluing them into the corners of the drawer. As soon as she wasn't around, I looked. I am the cat called curiosity; of course I looked. But it was empty.

This time, however, when I use a small metal hook to wedge the thin piece of wood up, it isn't empty. No diary, but there are two other items.

An envelope addressed to someone called Theo Moriarty.

And a handful of pictures.

My head feels all floaty and weird as I stare at the first picture, like a balloon that will drift away into space. Or not space. It would only take an hour to drive to space, so it would have to be farther than that. Maybe Mars. Or Neptune.

The picture is of Ella and me at her school play last year, in front of the Alice in Wonderland poster featuring Ella's face. We have our arms wrapped around each other, grinning wildly. But just a little behind us is another girl photobombing the picture. She has cat ears on, and her face is painted into the huge grin of the Cheshire cat, her fingertips pressed together in the shape of a heart.

My heart thrashes wildly as I stare at the girl in the picture. Seven or eight years old. Blonde hair. Bright-blue eyes.

No Hello Kitty headband, but I recognize her just the same.

Isla. The girl I've been seeing.

"You remember me now, don't you?" Isla speaks from behind me.

"You were in the school play with Ella," I say.

"Yep."

"You're dead. It was all over the news." Connections are forming in my head, my gut twisting with nausea. "What do you want from me?"

I see Ella crying in her bedroom after the school announced Isla's death. She saw a counselor after, but it hit her hard. I cried with Ella more than once.

My vision narrows, and my chest seizes. I can't catch my breath. I feel like I'm on the verge of having a panic attack. Because now I have to admit it. I'm seeing a dead girl.

"Alice?" Jinx's voice drifts up the stairs.

I shove everything in my pocket and take a deep, steadying breath, then hurry downstairs to Jinx and Maya to finish searching for Mom's diary.

It's only later, as I'm letting myself into Mel and Jack's house, that I remember I never found the keys to my house. They weren't in my backpack. And it's then the thought crosses my mind: How did Maya really get inside my house? Because I'm sure her mom never had a spare key.

Which means Maya is lying.