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"You look at me one more time like that and we're going to be late," she says.

"We're already late."

"Then you've got nothing to lose." She chuckles.

Cass leans on the horn.

It's when we're pulling out that I see it, and I nearly put the truck through the mailbox.

The woman in the housecoat is still standing past the fire pit. She hasn't moved all day. She's been facing the back of my house since six this morning like a bill collector.

But, she isn't facing my house now.

I slow down at the corner. The boy with no bike is stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, one foot down, turned the same way. There's a man on the Hendricks' lawn I've never seen before, and an old woman at the crosswalk, and a girl in a nightgown standing in the middle of the road who doesn't move when the headlights go through her.

Every one of them is facing the Hollis mansion.

"Gage," Maren says. "Why are they all…?"

"They're waiting for the doors to open."

42

MAREN

HALLOWEEN NIGHT

Half this town is wearing my masks.

I stand at the top of the Hollis mansion staircase and look down into the ballroom, and there they are. The gold cat mask I couldn't sell for two seasons is on the woman who runs the pharmacy. The beaked plague doctor is on someone's teenager. My whole rack of black feathered dominoes went out the door Friday and now they're everywhere, turning, catching light, thirty pairs of eyes I recognize behind glass I priced myself.

I did this. I dressed this room.

"Breathe," Gage says.

"I'm breathing."

"You're not."

The Hollis place has been closed up my entire adult life, and tonight it’s the most beautiful thing I've ever walked into. They've hung the chandeliers with black crepe. Someone has put pumpkins on every stair tread, forty of them, all lit. There's a quartet in the corner murdering a waltz with real commitment.

And candles everywhere.

Candles on the mantels and the window ledges and the piano and along the base of every wall, hundreds of them, white and squat and ordinary, the kind you buy in a box of fifty.

"Someone went to a lot of trouble," Gage says.

He's counting exits. He's been counting exits since the gravel.

Cass drifts past my shoulder with a cider she isn't drinking. "Eight of us in, boss. Two on the terrace doors, two in the kitchen, me and Perry floating."

"And Ansel?"

"Blue mask. By the fireplace. Been here since seven."

Gage's jaw does the thing.

"He's not doing anything," Cass says. "He's just here."