Someone screamed, and someone else shouted, so I uncurled andpushed my way out of the water. I moved slowly, because I didn’t really want to leave. There was no hurry. Everything was going to be just fine.
I pushed off with my feet and rose to the surface, letting myself float. My hair swirled around my head. I kicked my feet, the movement languid in the water.
Finally, I broke the surface. It was dark out except for slices of moonlight through the window. I saw the moon, with clouds moving over it like they did in the movies, the kind where werewolves or vampires were about to come out. I was in my room, standing barefoot on the floor next to my bed. The bedside clock said it was 3 a.m. I was dry, and in the hallway a door banged open. Something smashed. Was that Lisette? She was screaming. Then Vail’s voice, anguished in a way that turned my blood cold. Vailneversounded like that.
I banged open my own door. Light shone up from the downstairs hall onto the stairway landing. The door to Ben’s bedroom was open, the light on inside. Lisette was helping Violet up from the floor of the hall. There was a thin line of a cut on Lisette’s cheek, leaking drops of blood. Vail’s bedroom door opened and he stood there fully dressed, swaying as if drunk, his eyes red. We all looked as if we’d just awoken from a nightmare; then I realized that we had.
I spoke to Lisette, who was brushing dust off of Violet with shaking hands. “What happened to you?” I asked her. When she gave me a look of confusion, I touched a finger to my cheek.
Lisette touched her face and looked at the blood on her fingers. “I broke a lamp.” She looked at the shards scattered around her bare feet. “She had Mom. She was grabbing her. She—” Lisette pulled in a ragged breath, and Violet put her hands on her shoulders.
“It’s all right,” she said softly. “She’s gone.”
Lisette’s gaze rose to meet Violet’s. “I saw her,” she whispered. “She was real.”
Violet’s expression shifted. I recognized that look. It was the look that said that someone was in very, very big trouble.
I glanced at Vail, but his gaze was unfocused. He barely seemed to be following.
I turned back to Lisette, keeping my voice calm. “Why were you in Ben’s room?”
“I saw him.” Lisette turned pleading eyes to her mother and spoke to her as if she’d asked the question. “I thought I did. He was in the hall. He told me to find him, and I went into the room, but he wasn’t there.”
Violet didn’t answer, and Vail still didn’t speak, so I explained to Lisette. “He liked to play hide-and-seek. It was one of his favorite games.”
Violet blinked as if waking up. She swiped her sleeve under her eyes. She still looked furious, and I knew it wasn’t at Lisette.
“Fucking Sister,” she said, her voice controlled.
I flinched back, steadying myself with a hand on the doorway. The voice I’d heard—Look closer. Look closer.The voice leading me to the water. She was here? Had she been here all our lives? How did Violet stand it?
Vail finally spoke. “She came to him in the middle of the night.” His voice was low, hoarse from shouting. “She held a lamp in her hand and shone it in his eyes in the darkness. She said,Wake up.”
The words on the wall downstairs. The words Vail had heard in his ear. The light he’d seen at night as a child, the figure he’d thought was an alien.
“She got him out of bed,” Vail continued. “They had started to build a cellar, but the hole they dug kept filling in with water. Nothing kept it dry, so they gave up. They couldn’t fill the hole in, so they left it there. They told Edward not to go near it, not to swim because it was dangerous.”
Water.My head spun. I thought I might be sick.
“Anne told him that she wanted to show him something,” Vail said.
“Ducks,” I said.
He turned toward me. Our gazes locked.
“Ducks,” Vail agreed.
“She led him out to it in his bare feet.” I finished the story. “She drowned him there.”
I watched Vail’s expression change, and I knew he was remembering what I’d told him of my nightmares about water. He bent and rested his palms on his knees. I had never seen my brother so undone before.
“It happened in this house,” he said. “It’s still happening in this house.”
Lisette’s gaze traveled from one of us to the other in turn. “Who was she?” she asked, her voice with an edge of shrill fear in it, barely contained. “Whoisshe?”
Again, it was me who answered. “Ben’s sister. Anne.”
Lisette stared at me, and I was struck that she was so young she could still be shocked. “His own sister killed him? Why would shedothat?”
