I wasn’t alone. People I didn’t recognize loitered on the sidewalk. Some had their phones out. Some had camera bags. Some carried whole backpacks bursting with equipment. A few woreDead Men Walkingsweatshirts. There were only a handful of ghosts among them, and all hid near the houses, away from the street. They watched Masrell’s. A host of blackbirds weighed down the power lines overhead, like vultures waiting for predators to vacate a recent kill. I hid myself near two women and a man wearing the sweatshirts.
The police knew this was arson and not just Masrell falling asleep with a lit cigarette. If they were interviewing me, they hadn’t found much evidence, if any. They hadn’t asked any specifics about fire, hadn’t tried to find out if I knew what accelerants were used, nothing like that. Because they knew nonehadbeen used, just like in the Firestarter Murders. Those fires had burned hot and fast, and sometimes right in the middle of the day, in front of witnesses. No accelerants, because firestarters didn’t need them. The house looked like it had burned for hours. There was barely a skeleton left.
One of the women from the group I’d hidden behindglanced back at me once, then again. I didn’t like the look, so I moved on to the next gathering of onlookers and positioned myself behind them and a car. Chief Rivera had finished talking to the firefighter and now paced around the heap that used to be the front porch.
She stepped on dry grass. Dry and brown from the uncharacteristic drought we’d had through the fall. I scanned the lawn in front and to the sides of the house. All dry, none burned. The trunks of the trees near the house didn’t look as if they’d been touched by the fire, nor did the sides of the houses on either side of Masrell’s. A fire that hot and that big, and nothing nearby had been burned. Another firestarter staple. The porch roof had squashed a few bushes, and the branches of those that peeked out from underneath waved in the breeze, rustling yellow leaves.
A firefighter stepped from the wreckage of the house. There was movement in the doorframe behind him. A man appeared, wearing a white T-shirt and boxer shorts. George Masrell. Potbellied and stick-limbed, wrinkles of skin pulling his face into a frown. Everything about him was slightly red, like an oven coil still glowing. There were ragged black holes where his eyes should have been. The firefighter stepped back into the house, right through him.
My gut lurched. Even ghosts who’d died in the most tragic accidents and the most gruesome murders appeared as whole as they’d been in life. They had color, and eyes. I saw ghostslike Masrell on a regular basis, but that never made it easier to look at them and know the remains of their spirits were being eaten away. There were twelve from the Firestarter Murders, nine I saw often: five town council members, on the lot where the old town hall once stood; the auto mechanic, in the middle of Elmwood Lane; Yvette Forester in the grocery store parking lot; Lenore Forester, under a beech tree in the neighborhood near the Goldmine; and Valerie Forester, the pale-haired sentinel of Valleywine Road.
Masrell turned toward me. I knew he sensed me there, the way all the ghosts did. He knew I could see him.Which way,I thought.Which way is the one who killed you?Ghosts couldn’t speak, but they could still move their bodies, and the ghosts made by firestarters always knew where their predators lived. He faced me for a moment, and then he turned just slightly, toward the east, and he pointed. I followed his finger to a swatch of trees hiding the old coal mine.
I looked back, heart pounding, but Masrell was gone. I was sure he hadn’t meant the junkyard or the bluffs: the junkyard was too far north, the bluffs too far south. The mine was possible; that place spawned ghost stories for a reason. And it was on the opposite side of town from Forester’s house.
I turned to go, sure that my luck avoiding Chief Rivera would run out soon, and met the gaze of a woman standing thirty yards down the sidewalk. I froze on the spot. She was talland blond and had eyes like the pits of hell.
Aunt Greta.
Greta Wake was what you got if a Greek statue had sex with the Williams-Sonoma catalog. She wore a green blouse under a neat white cardigan, white pants, and spring-mint Crocs that clopped as she started toward me. She was Artemis’s evolved form, divine judgment in a woman’s body, sainted protector of Addamsville, and the unspoken leader of the new town council.
Two men flanked her: Pastor Keller, with the cobwebs of Black Creek Church still hanging from his shoulders, and Buster Gates, the pig-faced owner of the junkyard. Both town council members. Neither big fans of the Novaks.
They were the ones I should have checked for before I visited the crime scene. Hindsight’s 20/20.
“Zora Novak.” Greta’s voice was low, but it carried across the distance between us. “What are you doing here?”
The group of onlookers I’d hidden behind scooted out of her way. Running wasn’t an option, so I planted myself where I was and stood to my full height.
“I figured if the cops were going to accuse me of something, I should find out exactly what I supposedly did.” I gestured toward the house. There was no sign of Masrell or any other ghosts.
“And you thought it would bewiseto show your facehere?” All three of them were on me now. It felt like they all loomed over me, even though I was taller than everyone but Buster. Greta put her hands on her hips. “George Masrell was a respected member of this community, one who your father cheated nearly into poverty—”
“Oh man,poor, that’s like the worst thing to be!”
She powered right through me. “—and you think it’s okay to come here? When the whole town has seen your family show hostility toward him?”
“Are you still talking about my dad, or do you mean when I yelled at Masrell about the coffee? Because he yelled at mefirst—”
“There is a history of bad blood between you, a known habit for starting dangerous fires, and clear motivation!”
I had trained myself well this past year, but Aunt Greta was my kryptonite. Forget ghosts, forget the people nearby; everything inside me went brittle when she was around, ready to shatter on first impact.
“Yes,” I said through my teeth. “There’s a whole Novak family mafia running the Addamsville underground. We get rid of anyone we don’t like, and we do it in the most horrific ways possible.” I put my hands on her hips to mirror her, and by the twitch in her cheek, she hadn’t missed it. “We’reyourfamily, too, don’t forget. The police talked to Artemis, you know.”
That didn’t seem to faze her. Aunt Greta shouldn’t have been acting like this. She had helped Mom with the firestartersonce, the way Artemis wanted to help me. She could sense them, too—she had to sense what was going on here.
Greta seemed to ignore it all, though. She and I stood toe-to-toe, and she smelled overwhelmingly of lavender.
“Yes, we share a family,” she snapped back, head held high. “Which is why it’s so important that Istopmy family from trespassing on private property and getting their fingers cut off—”
“You old hag! I didn’t do anything wrong, and I didn’t hurt anyone!”
“Like hell you didn’t.” Buster stepped up. Color flushed his cheeks and forehead. His hands balled into fists the size of Christmas hams. “And your old man didn’t take all our money, neither.”
“Screw you, Buster,” I snapped. “It’s your own damn fault you bought into that scheme so hard. Thought it would help you get a Goldmine house, right?”
Buster inflated like a hot-air balloon. He’d been one of many to donate to Lazarus Novak’s Fund for the Establishment of Historical Landmarks in Addamsville and was its biggest supporter until it all turned out to be a lie. But he, unlike George Masrell, would be more hurt by his stolen dignity than his stolen money.
