A smile passes over her face, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “Well, if you happen to find them…”
I nod.
Mom hesitates another moment, and then she’s gone.
The door shuts behind her with a softsnick. The old wiring flickers the lights, and I swear the room gets a little colder. Like the house is disappointed in me, too.
The silence hangs heavier than it did before, and a shiver rushes down my arms. Then I hear a whisper in my ear, so low I could mistake it for the floorboards creaking.
Find me.
It’s feminine and too young to be my mom or aunt. I lean over the edge of the bed. My gaze lands on the small rectangular vent on the floor in the corner. In such an old house, everything makes noise, and every noise carries. It isn’t the first time I’ve caught snatches of words I probably wasn’t meant to hear.
A handful of dust bunnies caught on the vent latch wiggle with the flow of air. Relief pulses through me, and I curse myself.
“Leave me alone, Margot,” I call down into the vent.
My aunt, cousin, and siblings are convinced the house is chock-full of paranormal activity, but I’ve never been a believer. I can’t be. Because if there are spirits of the lost floating around, I would have found Harper by now. But I haven’t.
She’s just gone.
Four
Moving boxes are strewn throughoutthe house, with the largest concentration in the living room. We didn’t bring any furniture, apart from the instruments when we moved, but the belongings of four more people were still worthy of a small moving van.
It’s unsettling to see your entire life in boxes and know it only took up half a truck.
“All right, that’s it,” Aunt Paige announces, planting her hands on her hips. “We’re never going to finish unpacking ifpeople”—she emphasizes the last word—“don’t stop moving things around or snagging them altogether. This is the third time I’ve had to put this lamp back.” She gestures to this god-awful lamp with a mosaic shade in a dozen different colors. It looks like a three-year-old made it. I kind of can’t blame whoever the culprit is for removing the thing.
Margot, half-heartedly digging through a box from her perch on the couch, raises her hands in surrender.
“Don’t look at me.”
“Considering you’ve unpacked a total of two boxes in the last two weeks, don’t worry, you’re not a suspect,” Paige says. She blows a chunk of dark hair out of her eyes. She’s had side bangs as long as I can remember and is always mildly irritated by them, but she never pins them back. Apart from the bangs, she and my mom could be twins, with dark, wavy hair and bright green eyes. Two years between them, like Margot and me.
Jasper is a carbon copy of them both, but Margot and I have our dad’s dark eyes.
“Also, I truly don’t care enough about Jasper’s Legos or Mom’s ugly antique lamps to move them,” Margot says.
“Also that,” Paige concedes. She looks between me, riffling through a box of books and loading them onto a shelf, and Jasper. Jasper has been given the role of box destroyer—technically dismantler, but using the worddestroysold him on the task. He has two already dismantled and is ripping the tape off another.
“I didn’t!” he says.
“It’s okay if you did, bud,” Paige says gently. “But you gotta let us know. That’s how we lose things.”
“But I didn’t!” Jasper protests. He’s seven and inherently curious, but he isn’t malicious. And I doubt he cares enough about our stuff to hide it when his own toys and things are already up in his room on the third floor.
“Don’t lie,” Margot calls, joining the conversation for the sole purpose of setting off Jasper.
Jasper, taking the bait, huffs. “I didn’t take anything!”
“It’s all right,” I say. “We know you didn’t.”
Margot, from the couch, mouths,Liar. I flip her the middle finger when Jasper looks away, and she smiles smugly.
“Margot, cut it out,” Paige says, but her heart isn’t in it. “Butsince we’re on the topic of not touching things, how about you stop messing with my radio?” Paige reaches over and flips the channel to alternative.
“I didn’t touch your radio,” Margot protests, but I don’t believe her, and from Paige’s expression, neither does she.
