“It’s confusing, isn’t it?” Candace said, giving Fawn a sympathetic look. “To explain, we’d have to go way back, to when Tommyand I were kids. We lived here, in this house. After Sara Harrison Shea died, the house was left to her niece, Amelia Larkin. It stayed in the family. Tommy and I are the great-great-grandchildren of Amelia.”
Ruthie took this in. She was a blood relative of Sara Harrison Shea. Whether Sara had been a madwoman or a mystic, there was a piece of her inside Ruthie.
“When we were kids, we found hiding places all over the house—the one in the hall closet, one in our parents’ bedroom floor, several here and there behind the walls, and one in the back of one of the kitchen cabinets, right over there,” she said, pointing at the cabinet that held the mugs and glasses. “That’s where we found the missing pages from Sara Harrison Shea’s diary, including instructions for how to make a sleeper walk again. She’d copied them from the letter Auntie had left for her.”
“What’s a sleeper?” Fawn asked.
Candace’s eyes grew big and wolfish. “A dead person brought back to life.”
Fawn bit her lip. “But that’s not real, right?” She looked at Ruthie.
“Of course not,” Ruthie said, but Fawn looked frightened, unconvinced.
“Like aliens?” Fawn asked.
“Yeah, like aliens,” Ruthie said, smiling what she hoped was a reassuring smile at Fawn. She turned to Candace. “So you had these missing pages all this time?”
Candace held up her hand. “Not so fast. Let me finish. We had the directions, but there was still a part missing,” she explained. “There was a map telling where to go to do the spell, and we couldn’t find it anywhere. Our parents had cleared so much out of the house, hauling off box after box to junk shops, wanting to rid themselves of everything associated with crazy Sara. So Tommy and I knewhowto do it, but notwhereto do it. Sara’s papers said there was a portal somewhere close to the house, perhaps even in the house, and that, for the spell to work, you had to go to the portal. But without the map or a description, we were out of luck.”
“So what did you do with the pages you’d found?” Ruthie asked.
“We hid them away. Then, when we were adults, Tommy took charge of them. He promised they were worth a great deal of money, even without the map, and once he found a buyer, we would split the profits. He had a friend he’d met in college who dealt in antiquarian books and papers.…”
“Our father!” Ruthie said.
“Yes. James Washburne. Tom and Bridget arranged to meet James and his wife, Alice, here at the house one weekend, sixteen years ago. They were going to show them the diary pages and try one more time to find the portal. Then the pages would go up for auction, and we’d all be rich, according to Tommy.”
“So what happened?” Ruthie asked.
Candace shook her head, pursed her lips tight. “Tommy and Bridget were killed.”
“Killed?” Ruthie gasped. In just a few short minutes, she’d been given new parents, then had them taken away again. “How?”
“Alice and James claimed there wassomethingin the woods that got them—a monster of some sort that dragged their bodies off.”
Fawn’s whole body went rigid.
“There’s no such thing as monsters,” Ruthie said, taking her little sister’s hand firmly in hers and giving it a squeeze.
“I agree completely,” Candace said. “In the beginning, I was in such a state of shock that I accepted their story. I wasn’t exactly convinced that there was amonster, but I thought maybe there had been a terrible accident. But over the years, I’ve come to see the truth. I can’t believe how stupid, how naïve, I was.”
“The truth?” Ruthie said.
Candace nodded. “Isn’t it obvious? James and Alice murdered my brother and his wife to get the pages. They knew what they were worth and wanted them all for themselves.”
Ruthie shook her head vigorously. “My parents aren’t killers!” This idea was more absurd to her than the idea of a monster out in the woods.
“Think about it, Ruthie. Couldn’t anyone become a killer if the stakes were high enough?” She was silent for several seconds. “If you want proof, you don’t have to look far. Here I am, threatening twoyoung girls, one of whom is my long-lostniece, with agun, so that I can find those damn missing pages.”
“What do you want them so badly for?” Ruthie asked. “You don’t actually believe they work, do you?”
Candace laughed. “No. But there are plenty of other people out there whodobelieve. People willing to pay a great deal of money. Money that I, in turn, will pay the fanciest lawyer I can find to get my son back.”
Ruthie nodded. It made sense now and worried Ruthie—Candace was clearly an unstable woman with nothing left to lose and everything to gain. “So you really think my mother has these missing diary pages?”
“Yes, I believe so, though your parents always claimed the pages were lost the weekend that Tommy and Bridget were killed. But I’ve been waiting patiently over the years, sure the pages would surface one day—that your parents would try to sell them. Which is what I think might be happening now. I think that maybe, for some reason, your mother has finally decided the time is right. Maybe she’s already sold them. It’s possible she took the money and ran.”
Fawn shook her head. “She wouldn’t leave us.”
