“Or he’s an actual vampire.” Sadie’s voice had started to wobble. “Why did Mom have all of this? Why was it hidden here? I don’t understand. What was she doing?”
I shrugged half-heartedly. I couldn’t tell her. It would only make her life harder. “She was weird,” I said, and it felt like a betrayal.
“I don’t understand,” Sadie said softly.
I dumped the mouse skeleton out of the box, then reached past Artemis and began scooping up the photos. “We’re taking them with us. They belonged to Mom; they’re ours now.”
Artemis would be as eager to look over all of it as I was, but Sadie kept her distance like I held live snakes. We found Grimkneeling by one of the front windows, gazing to the northwest. Sadie grabbed him, and we left the house the way we’d come in. Down to the lakeshore, east to the bluffs. I clutched Mom’s shoebox the whole way home.
Mom had always said it was her job to protect the town and its ghosts by solving the mysteries no one else could see. I understood why—not to atone for anything wrong you’d done, just because it was the right thing to do—but what we’d found in Grimshaw House made infinitely more sense to me.
She’d thought the firestarters were linked to the Aberdeen disappearances. Maybe specifically the Firestarter Murders. She’d gone back into the woods because that was where she’d disappeared, but it was also where Hermit Forester lived. So what had happened? Had she entered the woods and hadn’t come back yet because she hadn’t found what she was looking for?
Or had something else found her first?
16
On the morning of the homecoming parade, town center bloomed with mums and falling leaves, and streamers striped the lampposts lining the parade route. Locals and tourists alike filled the streets. The day was a sunny sixty-five degrees; smells of hot dogs, tacos, kebabs, and funnel cakes wafted down the street. Parents brought folding chairs, and games for their children to play while they waited; others found seats on the curb or the stoops of the shops along Valleywine. Even the ghosts had their spots, as if the people who had come to watch had subconsciously made space for the dead they couldn’t see. There were far fewer ghosts than in previous years, and they hung around the buildings as if they meant to flee at a moment’s notice.
I’d only come to be seen. It was way more suspicious if someonedidn’tcome to the parade, no matter who they were. Better to stay out in the open so everyone could keep an eye on me. I planted myself on a picnic bench outside town hall. Above me four American flags hung along the face of town hall, framing the town seal showing a covered bridge adorned with the words ADDAMSVILLE,IN;EST. 1865.
Mom’s shoebox was tucked underneath Sadie’s bed, where Dad wouldn’t go looking for it. I’d spent the rest of last night, long after Sadie claimed a headache and finally turned in, sorting through her photos and her notes, unable to put them down. The notes were a mess of code, even knowing that she was writing about ghosts and firestarters. She had kept track of routines and habits, likely spots for entrances to appear, the best ways to lay traps for firestarters that had already possessed humans, to get rid of them without anyone thinking she was a murderer.
Her pictures at least had an order to them. A sense of what she was looking for. Bach and Forester were part of it. She’d been looking for Bach’s entrance for a long time, but her map drew so many lines between the spot where she’d disappeared, Grimshaw House, Forester House, and the Firestarter Murder sites, she must have also thought it had something to do with her and Aunt Greta.
The only evidence I took out of the house was the photoof Mom and Aunt Greta. It rested snugly in the inner pocket of my jacket. They had been normal girls once, and something had changed them.
Artemis found me twenty minutes before the parade began, carrying two funnel cakes and a cherry slushy.
“Here.” She handed over one funnel cake and took a seat beside me. I scooted over to give her more room. “What’s that stare for?”
“How did you know I like funnel cakes?”
“You always walk around with one at the parade.”
“I didn’t know you paid attention to me.”
“You’re kind of hard to miss.”
That was fair. And maybe also insulting. But fair.
“I didn’t figure anything else out from the box,” I said. “Still trying to decipher it.”
“It was a huge find,” Artemis said quietly. “We could have spent the night better. The firestarter from the mine will get stronger every day. We have to stop it before it kills someone else.”
“Sadie never would have let me out of the house. Even if she had to sit outside so she didn’t fall asleep.”
Artemis made a noise. “Can I look through the box soon? She took so many photos around Addamsville. I’ll definitely be able to learn more about all the things that happened here.”
“Why are you so concerned with the town’s history?”
Artemis took a long slurp of slushy, thinking. “When you understand the town’s ghost stories, you understand the town. Tragic events and dark times are part of our psyche. Take the lake, for example. It’s been haunted since it was created.”
“Created? The lake hasn’t always been there?”
Artemis shook her head and took another slurp. “It used to be a quarry. They started strip mining the coal so they didn’t have to make more mine shafts. Part of it collapsed in the late eighteen hundreds, and a lot of people died. They filled it up after that. The origins of a lot of the lake stories can be traced back to terrible things that happened in the strip mine. Dynamite blowing arms and legs off, accidental burials, flooding.”
“Huh. So it’s like a middle finger to people like theDMWcrew, who do it for the views.”
