"They said . . . it was a piece of his stomach."

Helen inhaled the sip of beer she'd just taken, grabbed her cloth napkin and covered her mouth as she worked to expectorate the amber beverage. When she'd settled herself, she saw Joanna gaping at her. "I'm fine! I'm f-ine," she stammered, assuring her old friend she was not hacking up a part of her insides. "You just—it surprised me. I swallowed the wr-ong way."

Peering from the sides of her eyes, Joanna frowned. "My son is spitting out his organs, and you can sit here and joke about it?"

"No! It wasn't—I wasn't trying to be insensitive." Helen sheepishly lowered her napkin from her face. "I'm sorry, all right? Sorry."

Joanna calmed herself; Helen was relieved. Confrontation was not her forté. Joanna didn't intimidate her, not in the way Danielle always had, but seeing her again after all this time seemed to fold the years into themselves, to shrink her adulthood backward into its preceding adolescence. Had anything really happened since eighth grade? Was she just the same shamefaced person she'd always been? But then Helen caught sight of the fourteen-year-old girl slouched in a squishy leather chair by the window drinking a Sprite, reading a novel, and she recalled her purpose. "I would never joke about this sort of thing," she reaffirmed. "I brought Junie with me, didn't I? Because I'm terrified of what might happen if I let her out of my sight. I can't tell you how often I check on her at night. I've had her sleeping with me for the past week at least."

"Egon's with Ben," Joanna admitted, nostrils flaring, her focus on the stem of the wine glass in her nervous fingers. "They're keeping him a few more days for tests. But I know they won't find anything wrong with him."

"Same with Junie."

Joanna's gaze flicked up. "Is she having physical—"

"No, no. Not the same as yours. Just what I said to you on the phone, the . . . the talking to someone and the drawers and things." Helen paused, but the woman across from her said nothing more. Joanna looked weary, Helen thought. Her sleek dark hair was unbrushed, unstyled, and her beautiful features (the enviable narrow angles of her face, her smooth blemish-free skin) were edged in a sort of blue-gray, hinting at an age beyond her chronology. Helen was sure she was no better, was probably worse off, even. While she'd learned to manage her diet and lifestyle in order to maintain the thicker form genetics had bestowed upon her, Helen had never been able to move beyond tolerance for her shape. Even her husband's continual praise couldn't convince her she was anything more than a hypocrite for perpetuating the myth amongst her daughters that every body was beautiful, that it was the inside of someone that made them so. Only those blessed with fortunate looks could afford to believe in such nonsense.

Darting a glance at Juniper, Helen wondered whether she'd made the right decision in meeting with Joanna. It was obvious that their children were struggling with something, but the two of them had never quite seen the events of the past in the same light, and rather than pull together as they perhaps should have, they'd allowed Danielle to dictate how to feel and think about everything.

But there was little time for regret. She had to tell Joanna the real reason she'd asked to meet with her. "I'm staying in town for a few days at least," Helen abruptly stated, interrupting the other woman's dark brooding.

"Family?"

"No. My brothers are all on the west coast; mom and dad moved to be closer to them." That was a sore spot Helen had little interest in discussing.

With a tip of her head, Joanna rather flippantly remarked, "What, then? Revisiting your youth?"

Helen took another big gulp of her drink, knowing she'd need it to get through the rest of this conversation. She had the fleeting thought that she looked like a crazy woman, clutching her oversized unstylish bag on her lap, chugging beer, wild-eyed and anxious, but what could she do? "I . . . I'm meeting with Anjulie, tomorrow," she said at last. "Staying at that weird place of hers, actually. I didn't want to, but she insisted. Said the room was on the house for as long as I needed."

The chill emanating from across the table was enough to imply Joanna's feelings.

"Listen, Jo. I know Danielle gave us both shit for even thinking of talking to Anjulie, but I don't care."

"So you're just going right into that bizarre house of horrors she runs? You do know her fiancé died in that place, don't you?"

"In their hotel?" Helen slouched back into her chair. "No," she admitted. "I didn't really know it happened there. That's . . . maybe I should take Junie to a Hilton or a Day's Inn or something more public."

"Maybe you shouldn't talk to Anjulie at all."

Helen shook her head. "I have to. I don't know what else to do. And maybe if we can just be open with each other, see what we're dealing with—"

"We've never known what we were dealing with! That's the problem!"

"Well what the hell are we supposed to do? These are our kids we're talking about!" Emotion caught in Helen's throat, forced her to pause. Her head felt warm. Lowering her voice, leaning in a bit, she continued. "I took Junie to see specialists, too, but she's physically and mentally fine, they tell me. No one can find anything wrong, just like your Ben, because we know what's wrong. It's Kitty."

Joanna gasped, quickly assessed their surroundings as if afraid someone might've heard. "Shhhh! Don't say it!"

"Why does it matter? We both know it's back. I know what's happening in my house, the moving furniture, the noises at night. It's here again, and for some reason it's messing with my daughter. My whole family is scared to death! They're not even staying in the house right now." She shook her head absently. "All these years . . . I don't know why it left. I really thought we were over it all. But obviously we aren't, and at least Anjulie wants to do something about it! Maybe she knows something we don't. Or maybe we can—we can . . . oh, I don't know! Find some sort of Ghost Buster or spirit medium, shit we couldn't do when we were thirteen! All I know is I can't just sit here and watch Junie go crazy." She took another gulp from her pint, more to fuel her speech than soothe her mind. "It's capable of terrible, nightmarish shit, Jo. We know it firsthand. And if it wants something like what we went through—if what happened to her happens to . . . to Juniper—"

"Shut up!" Joanna screeched suddenly. The noise around them lulled awkwardly, waited, then cautiously picked up again, but by then the woman did something even more unexpected; she put her face in her hands and broke down sobbing.

Helen was absolutely unsure how to behave. Her daughter, recognizing the commotion at her mother's table, looked to Helen for guidance, but the woman could only return a shrug to Juniper, who reluctantly went back to her reading. Fortunately for the confused Helen, she didn't have to wait long for Joanna to explain herself.

"They c-came to talk to him at the hos-pital," the woman managed between snivels.

Helen sought understanding. "Who, Joanna? What do you mean?"

Joanna inhaled a massive breath, tore her hands from her face and placed them in her lap, then looked everywhere but at Helen before exhaling her answer. "The police. It's not the same, what it's doing to Benny. It's not bothering him like your girl. It's . . . it's something worse."

"Worse?"

"The night that this—this thing happened, the thing with him coughing and, and you know—well, he'd gone off with a friend of his. And when I found Benny, he'd told me the friend had gone home, and, and I assumed he was telling me the truth." Joanna stifled another heaving breath, continued her confession without looking her old friend in the eye. "But that boy, the one I saw him with that night? He's missing. He hasn't been home since he went out with my son."

Helen wasn't entirely sure what the woman meant to say. "Ok . . . so . . . I don't understand—"

"His bike was in the park." Joanna waited again, searched Helen's blank face before snapping, "Why are you so dense? He's lying to me, don't you see? Benny knows that boy didn't go home."

"And you think . . . ?"

"Yes! I think—" Joanna began to tear up again. "I hate that I'm even saying this out loud, but I think Ben did something to him. Something really bad."

Choosing to ignore the "dense" thing, Helen reached a hand across the table, rested it over Joanna's trembling forearm. She didn't know the woman's child, had never met him, but she didn't doubt her friend's fears. She herself was seeing Juniper change right before her eyes, and the worst part of it all was knowing there was very little she could do about it. No medicine, no therapy would help this ailment.

After Emily, when the thing they'd awakened had begun to torment them, Helen had turned to the God she'd always tried to believe in. She'd prayed and prayed and prayed, even as she'd struggled through insomnia and fright. All of those prayers had gone unanswered for months, until suddenly, inexplicably, she was free. Danielle had told them the thing's cessation coincided with Anjulie's departure for public high school—that the torment was meant for her alone, that they'd just gotten mixed up in the disorder. And Helen may have been able to believe that, if they hadn't all done what they'd done.

Removing her hand from Joanna's arm, Helen rubbed her throat. "This is payback, Jo. For what we did."

"We didn't do anything," Joanna whispered through clenched teeth.

Helen's voice trembled. "You know we did."

"Nothing happened. It was all Anjulie."

"You don't believe that."

"I do."

"You don't, and neither does Danielle, whatever she says, so do what you want, but I'm going to try to save my daughter."

Without any sort of warning, Joanna abruptly jumped up and with one arm cleared the small table of everything on it, sending their drinks shattering onto the floor. All eyes were on the two women, but neither really noticed as one stormed out of the restaurant and the other, sighing through her nose, slipped from her chair and crouched down to begin picking up the debris.

The conversation hadn't really gone the way she'd wanted it to, but what could she expect? Joanna was exactly the same person she'd always been, obsequious and myopic. Still, Helen couldn't blame the woman. They were all of them mothers, now. Their lives didn't revolve around themselves, anymore, and surely Joanna was only attempting to do right by her child, even if her methods differed from Helen's. As far as she knew, Juniper hadn't hurt anyone, hadn't even tried to hurt anyone, but that thing was communicating with her girl, even seemed to have possessed her during that seizure. And if it'd killed Anjulie's fiancé . . . that hinted enough at its pernicious intentions.

"I got the waiter, mom."

Helen looked up to see Juniper standing next to a young man with a broom and dustpan. "Let me," he offered. "Please, don't worry about it. Would you like me to bring you another drink?"

"Yes, please," Helen gratefully replied, noting her beer of choice before following her daughter to the window, where they settled across from one another in the two sinking chairs. "I'm sorry you saw that, Junie," she wearily remarked. "We'll head to our hotel in a little while. You can get something to eat if you're hungry."

Juniper stared at her mother, wisdom beyond her years shimmering across her eyes. Helen wished she felt more comfortable around the girl, but the sense of preternatural observation, the impression that something watched her through her daughter, was deeply unsettling.

"It's a bad idea, to be here," Junie observed.

"Oh, don't listen to Joanna. She's an old friend, but she's not worth listening to. Tonight we'll—"

"It's not her," the girl interrupted, her face intensely serious. "It says it knows you. It wants me to tell you. You can't get away with it. You thought you could, but you can't."

Helen's entire body had gone cold. In a small voice, she asked the only question she could, knowing full well the answer. "Get away w-with what?"

Junie's lips ticked up at the corners as she offered the response her mother knew she would: "Murder, obviously."