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The noise sounds again.
This time, I open the door and peek inside.
There’s no one else there. Just Lenora, exactly how I left her—in bed, flat on her back, hands at her sides, the left one beside the call button. The low, slow sound of her breathing tells me she’s still asleep.
As for what caused those creaks, I have no idea. It certainly wasn’t Lenora.
I close the adjoining door and crawl back into bed, where the waves and the wind resume vying for my attention. When I finally fall asleep, I have a nightmare.
A real humdinger.
I’m a girl again, on the metal slide at my elementary school playground. The one I never liked because it got too cold in the winter and scalding hot in the summer. Around me, a group of kids—unseen but unnervingly heard—chant in unison.
At seventeen, Lenora Hope
I remain on the slide, not stuck exactly, but not going fast, either. Instead, I inch down it as the chanting continues.
Hung her sister with a rope
At the bottom of the slide stands my mother, looking the way she did not when I was young but in the final days of her life. A teetering pile of skin and bones in a powder-blue nightgown.
Stabbed her father with a knife
My mother pleads with me, only I can’t hear what she’s saying. Whenever she opens her mouth, instead of words, all I hear is the clack of typewriter keys.
Took her mother’s happy life
Still, I know what she’s saying, almost as if the words are being typed across a blank page.
Please, Kit-Kat.
Please.
I’ll only take one.
I promise.
TWELVE
I was wrong about the sunrise.
It doesn’t peek over the horizon.
It stares.
I sit up, squinting at the yellow-orange light blasting through the window. As I do, I notice something strange. Everything on the bed—mattress, blankets, me—is slightly bunched at the bottom of it. Because of the house’s tilt, we’ve all slid a few inches lower during the night. That at least explains the inching-down-a-slide feeling from my nightmare.
I sway when I get out of bed, as if the floor has sloped a few degrees more overnight. Which, for all I know, it could have. In the shower, I notice the water is slightly higher on one side of the tub than the other as it rushes toward the drain. The same happens in the sink as I brush my teeth. Watching the pooled water gurgle down the drain, I wonder if this is why Mary left. She couldn’t spend another minute inside this crooked house.
After dressing in one of Mary’s abandoned uniforms, I go to the adjoining door to check on Lenora. I pause before opening it, remembering the creaks I’d heard during the night. I can’t think of anything that would have caused them except a person walking around inside that room.
But no one else had been there.
Just Lenora.
I crack open the door and peek in, finding her still asleep and in the same position as when I last saw her. Which of course she’d be. Lenora can’t move anything but her left arm without assistance. To think otherwise is ridiculous—and paranoid.
Careful not to wake her, I quietly close the adjoining door before slipping out of my room and going downstairs. Halfway down the service stairs, I notice a crack in the wall that I’m almost certain wasn’t there last night. About four feet long and as jagged as a lightning bolt, it’s impossible to miss. Either I did just that all day yesterday—or it appeared overnight.