Mom was already famous. The story of Mom and Aunt Greta, the Aberdeen girls, who disappeared in Black Creek Woods as children and returned months later unharmed and without memories, was one of the jewels in Addamsville’s crown of creepy tales. As an adult, Mom often wandered thetown at night. Hunting, but no one knew that. She didn’t have friends. She only had us. When she went missing in the woods the second time, a lot of people said they felt terrible for us and hoped she came back safe, but I think they expected it out of her.
Dad was a little better. He didn’t see ghosts and no one thought he did, and while his marriage to Mom planted doubt in plenty of minds, his charm let him wiggle past it. Even if you started out on the wrong side of unsure about him, by the end of the conversation he’d have you handing over your wallet and keys for safekeeping. Despite the questionable reputations of the Novaks who had lived in Addamsville before us, most people considered Dad a pretty nice guy.
That was because no one realized he was also the slickest thief east of the Mississippi, and his fingers were stickier than flypaper in June. That got out a year after Mom’s second disappearance, when I was fifteen and he was sent to prison for an elaborate Ponzi scheme, and any tolerance or sympathy our family might have found burned up in the blazing inferno of town judgment.
So then you had me and Sadie. Sadie, five years older, had gone through high school as Sadie, Queen of the Undying and leader of the Birdies, the local gang of juvenile delinquents. She still had her favorite pair of combat boots, though they hadn’t seen the light of day in many a moon. Like Mom, Sadiescared most people who looked at her just by the soulless depths of her eyes, and unlike Dad, she owned a temper that could raze small buildings.
Now her hair was brown instead of black, and she kept it cut to her chin. She liked afghans, cheap drugstore reading glasses, and sweatpants that had words likeTOUGHandFUNstenciled across the butt. She had never seen ghosts or firestarters, and Mom had never told her about them. She worked in Harrisburg, the larger town about thirty minutes to the northeast. People in Harrisburg didn’t care about the families of Addamsville, though Lazarus and Dasree Novak’s names came up occasionally, and Sadie had to deflect interest before someone made too many connections.
“I love our parents, really,” she told me one night as her unquenchable anger battled her need for sleep over her bowl of instant ramen, “but Jesus, all my good customers will leave if they find out who we are. I’ll end up cutting hair for the people who run true-crime podcasts.”
I was bornSadie 2.0: Zora Edition. I stole her dye and colored a fat swatch of my hair platinum blonde. I found a chain to wear around my wrist so I clanked when I walked. I annoyed her until she finally taught me how to do makeup like hers. I learned how to turn my eyes into soul-sucking pits of terror. On top of all that, I could see the dead, and Mom knew it. She taught me what they were. How they worked. She taught methat it was her job to protect the living and the dead against firestarters, the creatures that killed with fire and fed off the human spirit. I wasn’t allowed to tell Dad or Sadie about this, because they wouldn’t understand.
I improved on Sadie in other ways, too. I mean, if you want to use the wordimproved.You could also call it evolving further into the Novak stereotype. I was taller, I was smarter, and I was angrier.
And when your mom disappears, your dad goes to jail, and the whole town hates you on sight, sometimes you get it in your head to start doing stupid things to ease that anger.
Stupid things like hunting firestarters alone.
3
The morning of the Masrell fire, I arrived at school smelling vaguely of water that has been sitting too long on the trash from a teenage girl’s bathroom. There had been no time for a shower after Sadie saw the news; she spent the next hour freaking out, trying to get ready for work at the same time she grilled me about where I had been.
“You were out again, weren’t you?” she’d said, combing frantically at the tangles on the ends of her hair, working her way up the strands. “You didn’t take the Chevelle, but I know you were, because otherwise you’d be yelling about how you were asleep the whole time.”
I could have pointed out that there was no way she could ever really know because she slept like a rock, but she was right, so all Isaid was, “When it happened, I was with Artemis. I have an alibi.”
“With Artemis? Like, our cousin Artemis?”
“Do you know another Artemis?”
“What were you doing?”
“Trying to get away from her. I swear I didn’t do anything. I wasn’t even near Masrell’s house.”
Sadie had given me a skeptical look, then seemed to remember that she still had her reading glasses on and tossed them onto the countertop in our trailer’s kitchen nook before she reached for her shoes. “The police are going to be looking for the person who did this—”
“I know, I heard the television.”
“—which means they’re going to want to talk to you. Tell them the truth—”
“Yes, that’s what I was already planning to do.”
“—because if they find out you’re lying, it’s only going to be worse. Okay? Ugh, that stupid TV crew coming here today; their fans are going to be all over the place, and they’ll make this fire even bigger news than it would have been otherwise.AndDad is coming home soon. What’s he going to say when he finds out?” She had stopped with only one shoe on and rubbed her forehead. “He shouldn’t have to deal with this now, not so soon after getting out—”
I didn’t know why she was protecting him; it was partially his fault the town would blame this on us. But Sadie’ssteamroller tendencies only got worse when let loose, and they were already making me grind my teeth. I couldn’t afford to be angry, so I said, “He won’t have to deal with it, because I didn’t do anything. If I have to talk to the cops I will, and I’ll tell them the truth. It’s not difficult. Go to work and chill out.”
“Chill out” wasn’t in Sadie’s vocabulary, especially if she was outside the trailer, but she did relent and leave for Harrisburg. That left me to cover myself in deodorant and dollar-store body spray and head to school, knowing there was no way on god’s green earth I’d be overlooked by any police officer.
Addamsville sits in a curved basin of green hills in southern Indiana, bordered to the east by the bluffs and to the west by the thick crush of Black Creek Woods, which skirt the base of Piper Mountain. Handack Street and Valleywine Road, the two roads into town, intersect at a jackknife, making an arrowhead that points south toward the blue expanse of Addams Lake. The side streets crisscross in a neat little lattice pattern, littered with cute tourist shops and local landmarks. Toss a rock and you’ll hit a historical house. In the winter, the homeowners compete to see who has the best Christmas light display. In the spring, families in their Sunday best crawl from their homes like the undead to talk about the weather. In the summer, kids develop sunburns while splashing around in the lake. And now, in the fall, the trees turn all shades of gold and red, and thehaunted hayride goes up in the Denfords’ cornfield. To the tourists, Addamsville was a pretty painting on the wall, and all its ugly parts had been cropped out of the frame.
My mom’s 1970 Chevelle, prowling the streets like a rusty shadow, destroyed the ambiance nicely.
This wasn’t any black-and-white 1970 Chevelle. This wasDasree Novak’s1970 Chevelle, and everyone knew it. Pitch-black with two thick white stripes running down the hood. Rust eating at its underbelly. Growling like an angry alligator. Mom had done something to it to make it resistant to fire—like Mom and me—and she’d made it her first weapon against firestarters. I had no idea what she’d done to it, or how, but I imagined it added to the town’s mystique for the tourists. Look, the haunted Chevelle! Run if you see it—the driver hates tourists.
There was once a time when the Chevelle made me fiercely happy, like I was ripping an oily, ragged hole in that pretty painting. But in the past year, the Chevelle had felt more like a beacon drawing all eyes to me wherever I went, from both the living and the dead. I needed a car, though, and Sadie wouldn’t let me drive her old Camry, we didn’t have any other vehicles, and none of us would ever in a million years sell or trade it in. It was the one beloved thing of Mom’s we still had.
A police cruiser with a dent in the fender sat outside the front entrance of the high school, so I curled around the parking lot and hid the Chevelle on the other side, between thegym and the football field. A quarterback with an Addamsville jersey circa 1960 watched me from the other side of the field’s chain-link fence, but the two linebackers normally with him were gone. The bell for first period had already rung; the hallways were empty, and though I managed to keep my face straight, my pulse jumped and my battered coffee thermos rattled in my hand. Teenagers texting on iPhones passed, unsuspecting, by teenagers listening to Walkmans. George Masrell had yelled at me just yesterday for dumping my coffee in the trash can outside the janitor’s office. He’d had a spot on his collar and he smelled like the soap from the restrooms. He was dead now.
