“Lucky.” He hums the word, and I feel it radiate across my skin. “You’ve met Sadie.”
I sure have. “She’s…a lot.”
“Understatement,” he parrots, and I swear I can hear him smiling. “She didn’t always used to be like this. We actually used to be pretty close, but not anymore. She idolizes my mother to a sick degree, wants to walk and talk and act like her.”
“And Percy?”
“Remember how I said he was better than all of us?” he asks, his voice achingly soft. “My brother was kind, hardworking, talented, and perfect. I used to hate him for all that. So many times I used to daydream about him dying—horrible, I know. I was convinced that with him gone, I’d be useful for once. Now look at me. He’s disappeared, andall I can think about is getting him back. Not even as a brother but as a barrier between me and my family’s expectations.”
I don’t know what makes me do it, but I thread our fingers together for a single moment. I squeeze reassuringly.
“Sometimes I wonder if our séances always fall through because of me,” he confesses, his voice barely above a whisper. “That he knows all these treacherous thoughts in my head and doesn’t want to come back.”
“Where have you been conducting these séances?”
“His childhood bedroom at least five hundred times. The Winthrop music department. His old dorm room. We’ll be doing it here again tomorrow. All the places he loved and might linger in.”
I’m admittedly new to this supernatural world, but I know how it felt when I sawher. Emoree had been an electric current, my arms tingling with the sensation of lightning touching down in the distance.
Sitting in here now, I don’t feel anything particularlysupernatural. Nothing that would suggest a ghost was setting up camp in the vicinity.
He carries us back through the song, only this time in reverse. I clear my throat. “What are you playing?”
“A crab canon. Think of it as a musical palindrome. To get the full effect of the song, you have to play it in retrograde.” His chin grazes the soft flesh of my cheek, and I feel the heat of him on my back.
Retrograde.
“You’re tense,” Calvin accuses.
Neurons fire off all at once. How many times has my mother lost something and the first question out of my mouth was “Where were you last?”
“I think I have an idea.”
“About?” His question tickles my cheek.
“Tomorrow’s séance.”
13
Here’s an equation. Multiply “locked clock tower” by “Calvin not having the goddamn keys” and divide it by “Sadie being their mother’s favorite,” and you get the following: the three of us walking up to the headmistress’s home Wednesday evening, waiting to ask if we can go up to the locked upper wing of the clock tower and have a séance, pretty please.
The house is exactly what I’d expect of the Lockwell matriarch. It’sBetter Homes & Gardensmeets Plymouth Colony—a colonial clapboard monster on the edge of campus with a thin trim of greenery confined to the herringbone walkway. Everything is meticulous. Everything is perfect.
“I’ll do the talking,” Sadie establishes with a roll of her shoulders. Then, in case there were any questions, she clarifies to Calvin, “Because I’m the responsible one, for starters. I’m—”
“Humble, too,” he drawls. He’s dressed down from this morning in class, his tie loosened at his throat and his collar buttons undone.
She sneers, her Van Cleef bracelet stack winking in the porch light. “That’s another reason right there. I’m less of a smart-ass.”
He’s miraculously silent as she punches in the door code. “Mom’s running late, but she’ll meet us in her study.”
The inside foyer is wallpapered in vintage green floral. Painted ivycurls in every direction, dark leaves guiding us down a narrow hallway and to a private office room. Beneath our feet, the hardwood flooring is draped with a Persian rug, and somewhere in the distance, a grandfather clock chimes the hour.
It’s about as charming as being escorted into the depths of hell.
“Here we are,” Sadie says with a twist of an antique crystal knob.
The door yawns open and transports us to an era of candle smoke and parchment paper. A Tiffany floor lamp cuts through the gloom and casts a beacon down on a large mahogany desk in the center. It sits like a caged beast between a set of leather chairs, and Sadie’s quick to claim the one on our side.
