1
George Masrell’s house went up in flames at 2:59 a.m. on a frost-tipped October morning. Masrell was eighty, lived alone on the northeast side of town, and spent his days cleaning the bathrooms at Addamsville High. He was liked in the way outdoor art installations are liked: for his quirks and his reliable permanence.
His permanence ended while Addamsville slept. In an hour or two, news crews would arrive, suburbanites would wake for their morning routines, and stories would begin to form. How it happened. Why it happened. Whether or not Masrell would—or was already—haunting the ashes of his house or the hallways of the high school, because Addamsville was so obsessed with its ghosts it couldn’t even hold off for acouple of hours after an old man died.
I was the first one to know something had happened, because at 2:55 that morning, all the ghosts in town looked to the northeast, toward Masrell’s house. In the street and in yards, peering out windows and patrolling the sidewalks. They stopped. They turned. They stared. Mom had always told me to pay attention when the ghosts reacted, because they rarely reacted to things in our world but they always reacted to things in theirs. I paused in the driveway, skin crawling on the back of my neck.
Then I heard footsteps coming toward me, and a faint voice said, “Zora?”
It was 2:56 when I jumped inside a plastic garbage can to hide from my cousin.
I stifled my breath with the fraying hood of my sweatshirt so I could track her footsteps coming toward me. The can had wheels on one side and wasn’t designed to hold a hundred and sixty pounds of living human on a sloped driveway, so I had to shift on the damp bag of trash to keep the whole thing from tipping over. The smell stung my nose. Bootheels tapped lightly on the asphalt. She, like everyone else in town, couldn’t see our spectral neighbors and wouldn’t have noticed anything was wrong.
“Zora?” Her whisper trailed through the cold darkness. I pressed my lips together to keep the swearing and the gagginginside. Trustherto be out at this time of the morning, doing her research. The footsteps moved around the can and stopped. The strap of her backpack rustled against her peacoat. “Zora? Are you—please don’t tell me you got in there.”
Shewould never hide in the trash, the elitist. She only hid in luxury cars and walk-in closets.
She sighed, paused, and then said somewhat reluctantly, “I’m on my period and my mom brought out the bathroom garbage today.”
I shot off the bag. The can tilted on its wheels, spun, and crashed down the driveway, spilling me out on the asphalt with a disgraceful squawk. The black trash bag tangled around my legs. I kicked it away, growling, as I got my bearings and scrambled to my feet.
“Gross!” I hissed at her. “So gross!”
Artemis put her hands on her hips and gave me her best look of disapproval. Her shiny blond hair was pulled back in a stick-straight ponytail, and her eyes looked like black pools in the automatic light above her garage. I glanced up at the towering Victorian—none of the lights had come on inside at the sound of the disturbance, thankfully, which meant my Aunt Greta was still asleep. The ghosts had disappeared from the driveway and the yard.
“Periods are not gross,” Artemis said. “They’re natural. And the waste has to go somewhere.”
“I have them, too, and I say they’re gross.”
“Why are you hiding in our garbage cans? You’re not rooting through our garbage, are you? If you need food or something, justask, my mom isn’t as bad as you think—”
“Oh my god, how poor do you think I am?” I pulled my messenger bag back into place on my shoulder, swiped the trash water off the flap, and began backing down the driveway. I never felt grungier than when I was standing next to Artemis, and soaking in garbage did not help. “I don’t need to dig in your trash. And if you tell your mom I was here, I’ll cut all your hair off. I know where you sleep.”
She rolled her eyes and followed me. I walked faster. Artemis and her mother lived at the top of a hill on the southwest side, where they could oversee all parts of Addamsville: the town to the north, the woods to the west, the bluffs and the mines to the east, and Addams Lake to the south. This meant their twisting driveway, descending through the broad maples and oaks that dotted their front lawn, made my escape from Artemis more difficult than I would have liked. The ghosts had all trailed to the street, their forms shivering and disappearing into the shadows of houses and trees. Hiding from something I hadn’t seen yet.
“Why are you out so early in the morning?” Artemis asked, tailing me as I dipped onto the lawn and skirted around a particularly gnarly maple tree. “Why were you all the way up at my house? And where is your car? Are you huntingagain? I’ve been trying to talk to you about that—I know what happened was awful, but this is so important, and if you’re back on the hunt, I can help you even better than before.”
I didn’t say anything. She could follow me for a while, at least as long as we were on the safe streets lit by warm wrought-iron lampposts, but once we hit the east side of town, her propriety would keep her from going any farther. We reached the sidewalk and I turned east.
“This is kind of creepy, Zora, you know that? What are youdoing? If you’re hunting, you should have told me. You shouldn’t do it by yourself. People might think you’re stealing. You aren’t stealing, are you?”
My shoulders prickled. I’d been very careful about what hours of the morning I conducted my business. From two to four a.m., Addamsville was as silent as it would ever get, inhabited only by the dead, and since the weather had taken a turn, the hours and my freedom to roam unnoticed grew longer. If people caught me skulking around when it was dark, of course they would think I was doing something illegal—I was Zora Novak, after all, arsonist and delinquent.
“Zora, come on, I don’t want to call the police on you.”
I stopped, teeth clenched together, and turned. She stopped, too, and for the first time that night she met my stare with a look of trepidation. Besides our height, the only similarity between us was our eyes, and I’d spent a lot of time learning how to makemine as terrifying as possible. Even when I tried to soften my expression, it didn’t always work.Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.“I wasn’t going to break into your house. I wasn’t stealing from anyone. And I’mnothunting.”
Her chin turtled into her cashmere scarf. “Then what were you doing?”
“You’re not going to believe me if I tell you.”
“I might. I believe a lot of things, after all.” She held up the Moleskine notebook she’d been carrying under one arm. It was the notebook she always wrote in, the one that held all of Addamsville’s stories.
“Why areyouout this early?” I asked. “Areyouhunting alone?”
“Kind of. Not hunting, exactly, just researching. I wanted to check a few locations before theDead Men Walkingcrew gets here tomorrow.” She checked her phone. “Well, today, I guess. I don’t know where they’re filming, and I wanted to make sure the hot spots were safe for them. It’s not going to do anyone any good if they run into a firestarter while they’re here. Now will you please tell me what you’re doing?”
I thought of not telling her. Going home to my sister and a shower and what little sleep I could get before school. Artemis wouldn’t call the cops on me, whether or not she knew why I was out here. She wasn’t a troublemaker, and she wasn’t one to report troublemakers, especially me. She kept her nose deep inher ghost research and minded her own business.
