Taylor jumped and snuffled. “Train? What?”
“Just get in the van,” Vivienne said, rolling her eyes.
Hollis found me on our way out, and his hand landed briefly at the small of my back. He guided me toward the door with more familiarity than the situation strictly called for and it felt as unexpected as Hyacinth burying her bracelet in a flower bed.
“Go home,” he said. “Lock the doors. I’ll come by in the morning.”
“Locking the door to my house does nothing, remember?” It seemed like every time I turned around Midnight House coughed up another key from the annals of history and people let themselves in.
“You terrify me,” he said, shaking his head.
“It’s not like I passed the keys out myself!” I protested.
His mouth had gone soft at the corner again, and for one suspended second, it almost felt as if we were alone and something was brewing between us. Almost.
“Giddyup, girl,” Taylor said, gesturing for me to move out of the way.
Now he was wide awake?
I rolled my eyes and stepped out of Hollis’s personal space.
The drive back to Midnight House was quiet. A mixture of deep thoughts and exhaustion, most likely. Taylor was snoring lightly. Allison kept opening her mouth like she wanted to start theorizing and then closing it again, apparently deciding even she had reached her limit for the night. Vivienne reviewed her footage in the dark, the little screen throwing blue light across her face. Reginald stared out the window, arms crossed, saying nothing at all.
Teddy, curled in his travel bag on the passenger seat, slept through the entire drive like none of it concerned him in the slightest. Which, technically, it did not. He wasn’t a member of the Magnolia Society.
I pulled into the driveway a little after twelve-thirty, the second time that night I’d parked in that exact spot with a car full of shell-shocked gala attendees, and I found myself hoping that we could all just retreat to our rooms.
The house had other ideas.
The porch light was off.
I distinctly remembered leaving it on. I always left it on, ever since Aunt Odette’s day, a habit so ingrained I didn’t even think about the switch anymore, my hand just found it automatically on the way out the door. But the bulb over the front steps was dark.
“I hate changing that bulb,” I murmured. It required a ladder and core strength I didn’t possess. But then I realized that wasn’t the only light out. So was the one in the front hall, visible through the sidelight windows, and so, as it turned out, was every other light in the house.
My stomach sank. I walked gingerly, my feet now fully rebellious against the high heels.
“Did you have a power outage?” Reginald asked, climbing out of the van with careful, joint-testing movements.
“The rest of the block has power,” Vivienne said, nodding at Hollis’s porch light glowing warm and steady across the side yard, and at the streetlamp on the corner doing its regular business.
“Oh good,” Allison said. “Just us, then. That’s so much better.”
The slightly hysterical quality to her voice confirmed for me that Allison was done with the night. One more incident and she was going over the edge, that was clear.
I unlocked the front door with unsteady hands, and the foyer that greeted us was dark and cool. Inside, the air had the flat, still chill of a house that had been closed up without any HVAC running.
“Harper,” Taylor said, sounding more sober than he had since noon, “why is it forty degrees in your foyer?”
“It’s not forty degrees.”
“It’s definitely bracing,” Reginald agreed.
I found the light switch by memory and flipped it. Nothing happened.
I sighed. Of course tonight would be the night that the power went out. Not that any night would be a good night.
“Breaker,” I said, with more confidence than I felt, and made my way toward the kitchen, one hand trailing the wall, while behind me I heard the unmistakable sound of four adults deciding, without discussion, to walk very close together.
