Men in their early fifties died of heart attacks all the time; that was just a statistical fact. But most men Mr. Portnoy's age didn't also have daughters who had the ability to kill simply by willing someone's death. On the drive home from the cemetery, I shuddered just thinking about the fact that Mischa's trust in me had resulted in the end of her father's life. We were pitiful, foolhardy idiots for having thought for a second that we'd outsmarted evil.

I was the one who had convinced her to resist the commands she'd been receiving to recruit souls. Mischa had told me she feared that the evil spirits who had been communicating numbers to her since the winter — numbers that she thought were intended to tell her exactly how many kids she was supposed to trick into playing games with her so that the spirits could collect them — would hurt one of her parents if she didn't comply. Her theory had made sense; it was the same belief that had convinced Violet to follow the spirits' orders when the curse was on her. I had encouraged Mischa to call their bluff, and to my great regret, they hadn't been bluffing. I'd sent so many fervently written emails and text messages as encouragement for Mischa to resist the temptation to play any kind of games with kids at her private school that might result in a prediction of their death. And Mr. Portnoy had paid the ultimate price.

"McKenna." Mom's voice pulled me out of my back seat reverie. "Pizza for dinner?"

She had obviously been trying to catch my attention and now expected an answer. "Sure," I replied. Pizza was pretty much the last thing on my mind.

"I wonder if Federico's is delivering yet," Mom mused as she dialed the restaurant's number. Usually they began delivering again in the spring, but there was still so much snow on the ground, it was doubtful they'd already resumed service.

Hours later, we sat in uncomfortable silence around the dinner table eating pizza that Glenn had volunteered to pick up across town. Maude, my mother's beloved dog, whimpered at her feet, begging for a bite.  If Glenn hadn't been there, Mom surely would have caved and given her as much pizza as she wanted. My mother was a stickler for keeping the television off during meal times, but I would have welcomed the distraction of celebrities competitively dancing or the nightly news.

"There was an article about the Portnoy girls in the Gazette just a few weeks ago," my mother told us, trying to inspire some conversation. "They both won all kinds of awards at some big gymnastics competition in Milwaukee."

I pulled a piece of pepperoni off my slice, a little grossed out by the pools of grease collecting in the pockets of the meat's surface. Pizza was not something I ever ate in Florida when I was staying with my dad and his girlfriend, Rhonda, who was an extremely health-conscious nurse. "I know. Mischa won first place in the whole state. There's some big-time Olympic coach trying to convince her to move to Los Angeles for the rest of the semester to train for the competition in June."

"Well, that's very exciting," Glenn said. "Imagine, an Olympian coming from little old Weeping Willow!"

His wonder was interrupted by our front doorbell ringing. I was so startled that I jumped in my chair. It was a rarity that anyone came over to our house at night; our town, especially when there was snow on the ground, was not one in which it was common to drop in on neighbors after the dinner hour. "I wonder who that could be?" my mother asked, blotting grease from her mouth with her napkin. She pushed away from the table to go find out. I could practically see the conflict etched across Glenn's face as he tried to decide whether to accompany my mom to the door, or if that would raise eyebrows if a nosey neighbor was checking in on us.

I leaned back in my chair to peer through the doorway of the kitchen and into the living room as my mother opened the front door. Her body blocked my view of whoever had rung the bell, and I heard her greet our visitor in a voice too quiet for me to discern what she was saying. When the encounter lasted longer than it would have if it had simply been a door-to-door salesman or a neighbor letting us know that Glenn had left his headlights on, I wandered into the living room to find out who had stopped by.

"I just wanted to give her this —"

Violet stopped talking the second she saw me. She stood in the doorway wearing her sleek black wool winter coat, no doubt ordered on the internet from some expensive boutique in New York City, holding a manila envelope that my mother was refusing to accept from her. When her clear, aquamarine blue eyes met mine, I knew instantly that whatever was in that envelope was of great importance.

"It's okay, Mom. I want to see her," I said, assuming that my mother was turning  Violet away because she knew that my former classmate had been at the heart of all my problems with the law since November.  Violet had, much to my great surprise, made a genuine — and humble — attempt to befriend me over email in the weeks that had passed since we'd transferred the spell from her and unto Mischa back in January. Her messages had always been brief, just capturing the latest school gossip and reassuring me that she'd keep everything that had happened in January a secret. As much as I wanted to believe that her emails indicated she was, deep-down, a more well-intentioned, honest person than the actions she'd taken in the fall to fulfill the curse had suggested, I was still wary of her. She was cunning, she was slippery, and she was wholly untrustworthy.

"Oh, no, no, no," my mother warned me against taking another step toward the front door, waggling her finger. "Not on this visit, McKenna. There can be no trouble with the police at all. You're to remain in the house and within eyeshot of me until you get back on the plane to Florida. I simply cannot tolerate any of this silliness about curses and death anymore."

Violet frowned, and I did my best to apologize to her with my expression.

"Now whatever is in that envelope, you take it on back to your parents' mansion in the pines and don't you dare bring it back over here," my mother warned  Violet . "If I so much as see you drive down this street again in the next four days, I will call the police. My daughter's entire future is in jeopardy because of you and your antics, young lady. You just keep your distance."

I flinched when Mom slammed the door in Violet 's face. When she turned to face me again, she was flushed with anger. "Have you been in contact with that little witch?"

I shook my head, lying.

"I am serious, McKenna. I don't know what college you think is going to accept you at this point. You only have until September to clean up your record before you have to submit applications. And don't think for a second that you can live in this house after high school graduation and continue to flirt with disaster. I'm going to be paying off your legal fees until I'm one hundred years old. You're not going to be able to freeload around here."

She left me slack-jawed in the living room as she returned to the kitchen to continue eating pizza. The trouble I had gotten into had most certainly put my mom in an awful position, but she'd never before blown up at me. I dared to peer through our parted living room curtains to see  Violet driving off in a car I'd never seen, a sporty little gray thing. Within a fraction of a second of when I began to wonder where it had come from, I remembered that  Violet 's birthday had passed the previous weekend. She hadn't made any mention of it in her last email to me, which I'd received shortly before boarding the plane to Wisconsin back in Tampa. Even an oversight like that, which could have been explained simply by  Violet 's lack of interest in drawing attention to herself, struck me as suspicious.

My mother's words shook me. Even later that night after Glenn returned to his own house and I brushed my teeth in the bathroom, they rattled through my head. It had been simple enough to pretend in Florida that all of the craziness which had occurred since November had been less dire than it had actually been. I could just go to school every morning and keep to myself, pretending like I was a regular new kid in town, unworthy of special attention. There was a guy in my Trigonometry class who had asked me out twice; the first time I said I had plans, and the second time I just said matter-of-factly that I had a boyfriend. I did have a boyfriend, but one I couldn't speak to on the phone or even email. Although what my mom had said about how difficult it was going to be for me to be accepted at any college upset me (because it was probably true), she was also describing a future for me that wouldn't include Trey. She was trying to preserve the potential for me to have the kind of life ahead of me that I'd dreamed of prior to the start of junior year, before I'd stupidly played a game with  Violet that had resulted in the deaths of two of my friends.

If that adult life couldn't include Trey, then I didn't want it anymore.

I left my bedroom door open just a tiny crack, wanting Maude to be able to visit me if she felt so inclined. The tiny sliver of light connecting my room to the hallway also comforted me for a reason that hadn't been a factor in my bedtime routine for several weeks. I hadn't gotten any visits from angry ghosts during my time in Florida. Since I thought we had successfully broken the curse on  Violet , I had taken a great amount of comfort when I'd left Wisconsin for Tampa in believing that I had probably received the last cryptic messages and midnight scares from the dead that I ever would during my lifetime. But that was before I began to suspect that Mischa had somehow come into the very same powers that Violet  had just lost. Mr. Portnoy's death was ample reason to believe that I was in for a severe haunting the moment I turned my lights off, and during this visit home, Trey wouldn't be keeping watch from his bedroom window next door. I was on my own, defenseless.

Trey. I stared at my own reflection in my bedroom mirror for a moment, feeling perfectly conflicted. There was no feasible way I could contact him and alert him to the fact that the curse had not actually been beaten without breaking either some kind of state law, or my mother's heart (or both). In theory, he was probably not in any real danger, since  Violet was no longer channeling evil. Since she was his half-sister, and he'd been plagued with nightmares about evil spirits since he was a little boy, there was a good chance he was enjoying peaceful sleep for the first time in his whole life. If that was the case, it would have been cruel for me to have gotten in touch with him about Mischa's father.

But he'd had the dreams long before  Violet had started receiving orders from the spirits. There was an undeniable and terrifying possibility that his dreams had worsened since the curse had shifted from  Violet to Mischa. It was almost as if his psyche was burdened with all of the guilt of the actions Violet had taken to appease the spirits that had taunted her (while she was easily able to rationalize the violence she was initializing because she believed she was safeguarding her own mother's life). It wouldn't have surprised me to learn that Trey had known about Mr. Portnoy's death even before it occurred, and my heart sank as I wondered how awful that might have been for him if it had been the case, to have been utterly helpless and unable to communicate to Mr. Portnoy what kind of danger he was in.

My pulse raced even though it was just an ordinary spring night in suburban Wisconsin. I knew that I couldn't get in touch with Trey without landing myself, as well as him, in serious trouble. But I also couldn't shake off the urge to do it anyway. It was going to be impossible for me to doze off that night; while I'd fallen asleep rather easily the night before after arriving home from the airport because I'd been exhausted, tonight I was going to stare at the ceiling.

After changing into my pajamas and making certain that the cardboard crate in which I'd stowed all of the figures and music boxes that had been of particular fascination to the ghost who'd haunted me in the fall was still stored in the very back of my closet, I was about to flip my light switch when I heard my cell phone buzz in my handbag.

I hesitated before checking it. I considered myself very lucky that my mother hadn't taken my cell phone away from me while I was visiting home, but if she found out I was texting with anyone related to the trouble I'd gotten into in the fall, she'd confiscate it, for sure. It was very, very rare that I got a text message lately.  Trey didn't have access to a phone at his reform school up near the border. Mischa tended to email instead of text because she was sort of prolific, but now she was furious with me, and I wasn't expecting any kind of communication from her. Henry was across the ocean and had already told me that he was intentionally not investing in an international roaming plan because he needed a break from everything in Weeping Willow. It had hurt me, personally, to hear him say that, but I had understood.

The message was from  Violet. It struck me as odd that she still had my phone number in her phone. The last text message she'd sent me had been back in September, when she was considered the new girl at school. It had been a text message about plans to share rides to the Homecoming game, and I'd deleted it months ago, along with  Violet's phone number, not wanting to have any trace of the girl on my personal device in case it carried with it residual evil that would shadow me around my daily life.

TODAY 11:43 PM

920-555-0012

I found these in my grandmother's office. Can you meet me somewhere tomorrow?

There were two attachments on the message. The first was a two-page PDF that looked like  Violet had created out of photos she'd taken with her camera phone. The first page was a photo of a creased, typed document. When I zoomed in to read it, I saw that it was a formal letter written on the letterhead of an attorney's office in Green Bay. From the offices of Ekdahl & West. I vaguely remembered that there'd been a quote in an article Mischa and I had read back in the fall at the library when we'd been researching  Violet's family history. It had been from an attorney named Ekdahl who was representing  Violet's grandmother in a suit related to her late husband's construction business, and a sum of money his former partner claimed he was owed. I read on.

The letter was addressed to Mary Jane Svensson, which was the maiden name of Trey's mother. It was a carefully worded contract, guaranteeing her payment of one hundred thousand dollars in a certified check once she was able to provide verifiable proof of the termination of her pregnancy. It was dated in October of the year before Trey was born, approximately seven months before his birth, to be precise.

I had to read it twice to be certain of what I was seeing. It was undeniable evidence that Michael Simmons was Trey's biological father, and that the Simmons family had tried to pay Trey's mom not to have him. Interestingly, it was signed by Marcus Ekdahl on behalf of his client, Mrs. Harold J. Simmons,  Violet's grandmother. She hadn't bothered signing it herself, probably having considered herself to be above dealing with such matters personally, and yet the fact that  Violet  had found it in her office suggested that she'd considered it important enough to file away for safekeeping.

Of even greater interest was the second page of the document that  Violet had sent, which was a photo of a signed copy of the contract. Mary Jane Svensson's bubbly, girlish blue handwriting had been signed on the appropriate line, confirming her agreement with the terms. Her signature was dated a week after the date typed in the top right corner of the letter.

Well. That was stymying. She'd accepted the deal, presumably taken the money... and then backed out of the deal? Old Mrs. Simmons couldn't have been too pleased about that turn of events, although I was grateful for Trey's mom's change of heart, since it had resulted in his life. But I immediately wondered if perhaps this explained why Trey had been plagued with nightmares about the spirits that followed  Violet his whole life. His mom had defied the Simmons family, and from what I could assume from their prestige around Willow and mansion on the outskirts of town, that would have been ample reason for the family's powerful matriarch to have exacted some kind of revenge on her. Although, it seemed more fitting to me that Mrs. Simmons' revenge would have been applied to Trey's mother instead of to him.

Maybe  Violet was up to her old tricks again, but I had to admit, I was intrigued. I wasn't sure of what her intention was in sending me those documents; Trey already knew that they shared the same biological father. His mother received checks from some kind of trust fund that had been set up for him, which he'd been aware of for quite a while. It was possible that he didn't know his mother had originally been convinced not to have him, and learning about that fact might really upset him. But there was a chance he was already aware of that; women changed their minds about becoming mothers all the time.

If the first attachment to  Violet's email piqued my interest, the second one definitely made me wonder what she was up to. It was a photo of a hand-written note detailing instructions, it seemed, for planting a tree, with some crude illustrations. Dig a hole exactly three feet deep. Must be exactly three feet. Plant sapling at dawn's first light after a new moon. Fill your heart and mind with thoughts of the devotion as you cover the roots and secure the tree.

What on earth... I had no idea what the point of this nonsense was. Violet had confessed to all of us over the winter that her mother had been so desperate to have a baby that she'd studied up on all kinds of old wives' tales and magic spells. If I was remembering correctly, she'd even said something about her mother asking her father to plant a tree for every baby she'd lost. The directions on what Violet had sent me seemed to be related to that story she'd told back in January; they read like a cross between a poorly written recipe and a barely coherent witch's spell. Then, I noticed that when  Violet had photographed this piece of paper she had been holding it up to the light. Faintly, I saw what was printed on its other side in reverse: the letterhead of St. Monica's church administrative office.

Had someone at St. Monica's provided  Violet's grandmother with sort of spooky directions for planting trees?  Violet had admitted that her mother had become fascinated with witchcraft, but she'd never mentioned anything about someone at the church in our own town having encouraged her interest. The possibility that one of the clergy members there had actually helped her perform occult magic was too freaky to consider.

Especially because Trey and I had gone to Father Fahey for help right after Candace died and we realized that her death and Olivia's couldn't have been a coincidence. And he'd denied us.

My curiosity and inclination to reach out to  Violet was so strong and immediate that I had a terrible feeling about it. It was just too sensational, too convenient for her to have just found those items while I was in town. I turned off my light and made a mad dash for my bed as if there was a chance I could trick Olivia's ghost into believing I'd fall asleep instantly. Pulling my blankets up to my chin, I willed myself to close my eyes and concentrate on nothing but slumber.

Sleep, sleep, I commanded myself. There was nothing at all I could do to strategize a method for lifting the curse off Mischa at that hour of the night. There was no way I could uncover the answer as to whether or not Father Fahey had been involved in setting the curse with Violet's mother, or if he'd been sinisterly humored by me and Trey appealing to him for help. No possible way I could reach out to Trey. No reason I could justify for contacting Henry. No point in thinking about any of those scenarios.

Through the dark shade of my own eyelids, I saw the level of darkness in my bedroom shift ever so slightly. My eyes shot open, and I saw that the screen of my cell phone was illuminated where I'd left it on my dresser. Breath trickled out of my mouth. The temperature in my bedroom had dropped, just as it always did when I wasn't alone with my thoughts. A very faint sound tickled my ears, and when I cocked my head to listen more closely, I realized that numbers on the numeric keypad on my phone were being tapped. One by one. As if something invisible were making a phone call.

My fear of my mother was greater than my fear of the ghost who was trying to run up my cell phone minutes. I threw back my blankets, darted across the room, and reached my phone in time to see the 1-key turn grey, followed by the 2-key. I grabbed my phone just as the call connected. The number that had been manually dialed was Violet's, and I tapped the phone to hang up just as she answered with a delicate, "McKenna?"

I couldn't risk speaking to her on the phone late at night. Mom would hear me talking in my room and immediately barge in, wanting to know what was going on. Annoyingly, my phone's screen illuminated in my hand once again. The screen wiped from left to right as if I were unlocking it, but my fingers weren't touching the screen. "No, no, no," I muttered in horror as someone or something tapped in my secret 4-digit passcode correctly. The phone icon was activated, and suddenly the keypad was back up on the screen. The numbers were being tapped in once more. I turned the phone completely off, hoping that whichever spirit so emphatically wanted me to speak with Violet that night would be unable to muster the strength required to push button hard enough to turn it back on.

The instant the screen on my phone went black, powerless, the temperature returned to normal in my room. I sat alone in the moonlight, wondering whether or not the spirit that seemed to want to put me in touch with Violet had been Olivia. It had only been a few weeks — two and a half months — since I'd swung the pendulum Henry had bought for me at the occult bookstore we'd visited in Chicago when exploring ways to topple the spirits aiding Violet, but it felt like ages ago. Performing any kind of occult procedure in my mother's home after not having exercised my own talents for so many weeks seemed very dangerous, and I'd lost my beloved pendulum somewhere in our travels around Michigan, anyway.

The only way I could verify if that evening's disturbance had been courtesy of Olivia was to simply ask. Olivia, the first of my friends to die back in the fall as a result of the slumber party game we'd played with Violet, had come back to pressure me into seeking justice for her death. She was the one, I'd come to believe, who had left me clues in an attempt to save Candace's life. I didn't think Candace's spirit had come back even once to provide me with direction, but at the time of Candace's own death, she had been so confused about what Violet had done to us all that she might have accepted her death as a welcome reprieve from fearing what was going to happen to her. I liked to believe that Candace's soul was at rest.

Fortunately, I had been wise enough to bring an outfit that had once belonged to Olivia back to Willow with me from Florida. Henry and Olivia's mother loaned it to me when Henry and I had embarked on our trip to Michigan to try to save my former classmates' lives on a ski trip—the very same trip during which we'd essentially captured Violet and made her spill her guts. Mrs. Richmond had busted us in the act of trying to sneak out of the Richmonds' house before sunrise and insisted on giving me warm clothes. Without Mrs. Richmond's help, we never would have made it very far on that trip, although now, in retrospect, we also never would have transferred the curse to Mischa. Poor Mrs. Richmond knew that she was aiding and abetting someone who was technically a runaway, but in the months that had passed since Olivia's death, she'd come to believe (correctly) that the facts didn't add up. She was eager to help me and Henry if it would result in an answer about what had happened to her only daughter.

After turning the light back on in my room, I pulled the pair of jeans that I had intended to launder the next day and return to Mrs. Richmond out of my laundry hamper.

Holding the jeans up in front of me, feeling more than a little self-conscious about how weird it was to carry on a conversation with denim, I whispered, "Olivia, was that you, just now? If it was you, and you want me to listen to what Violet has to say, give me a sign as proof."

If it was Olivia, then she'd already know that I'd only legitimately consider proof from her that she, alone, could have known. The last time I'd asked for a sign from her, she had gave me a pretty eerie prediction that her brother, Henry, would stop by my house with a case of old-fashioned sarsaparilla soda, her favorite, and he did. The trouble was, prior to Olivia's Sweet Sixteen birthday party back in September when we'd played the game with Violet, I hadn't really been close friends with her. We didn't share very many secrets. Although we'd been friendly way back in first and second grade, there had been nothing so precious about our early childhood friendship that would really stand out in my memory if I were hard-pressed to describe it. Back then, being "friends" with someone just meant that our mothers arranged for play dates when they had errands to run.

My bedroom remained quiet. The disturbance seemed to be completely over for the night, and I decided I might as well put the jeans back in my hamper and try to get some sleep before my mother wandered down the hall to use the bathroom and inquired as to why my light was still on at the late hour. Just as I hooked my finger over the light switch to turn it back off, a book fell off the shelf against my wall completely on its own. The books I kept in my bedroom were all from early childhood; I couldn't even remember the last time I'd read a real paperback book. I might not have even noticed that the book had fallen until morning if I hadn't caught the motion out of the corner of my eye and heard the soft thud of it landing on my carpeted floor.

The book that had fallen was "Little House in the Big Woods," by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Jennie and I had been pretty obsessed with the Little House series before Jennie had died when we were eight. In fact, I still had the entire boxed set, which had once been ours, and not truthfully mine. We had posed endless questions to our parents about log cabins, dugout homes, churning butter, and how Jack the dog had managed to keep up with the family's covered wagon as it crossed so many states. Our interest in the books had even inspired a weekend drive to the town of Pepin, clear across the state of Wisconsin, to the setting of the first book in the series. We'd ridden back home to Willow in the back seat of our dad's station wagon wearing bonnets tied under our chins.

As I studied the Garth Williams illustrated cover of the book, I couldn't think of a single reason why that particular title would have been a clue from Olivia. Every possible link about the book's story seemed way too far-fetched and unrelated to what had been happening in Weeping Willow to have relevance. Pioneers? Indians? Corn-cob dolls? If the ghost of Olivia was to have been credited for trying to call Violet that night, I had no idea what connection she was trying to make with that book. I tried to slide it back into the very dusty cardboard boxed set case where it belonged, but it didn't quite fit. On a sudden impulse to flip through the book and take a look at what had been our favorite illustration, the drawing of Mary and Laura cradling their dolls beneath dried hanging vegetables in their cabin, I realized why that book had been knocked off the shelf.

Inside its front soft cover, in shaky red magic marker, the words "To Jennie and McKenna, Happy Birthday from Olivia" had been written in the uncertain, sloppy penmanship of an eight-year-old girl. The memory of our summer birthday party returned to me in a flash. That birthday, turning eight, was the one and only time Olivia had attended our dual party because our birthday was in July and usually the Richmonds took their family vacation around that time. The year we turned eight, Olivia had come down with chicken pox in June, and the Richmonds remained in Weeping Willow. Her gift to us, the entire box set of the series we had slowly been working our way through by checking the books out of the library, had been considered by my mother to be offensively lavish. I remembered her complaining to Dad in the kitchen of our old house after the party that the Richmonds must have thought they were too poor and uncultured to buy me and Jennie our own books. That had actually been kind of true at the time (the part about us being poor), although Mom was adamant that she believed in the cultural importance of libraries in a community.

Only Olivia would have known that. Even when we were all little girls, Olivia was like a princess among the girls in our class. Having her attend your birthday party was validation, and the wealthy Richmonds always gave the most precious gifts. Jennie and I had noticed with jealousy that Olivia attended just about every other girl's birthday party in our class each year except ours, because we'd been unlucky enough to have been born in July. I had completely forgotten that the Laura Ingalls Wilder boxed set had been a gift from her. It was highly likely that those books had gone untouched on my shelf since we'd moved into our new house after the fire, almost nine years ago. I was certain I hadn't read one since Jennie's death.

I sat down on my bed and waited patiently for my cell phone to power back up again. When the home screen — a picture of Trey taken before he'd shaven his head in January while we were in Michigan — greeted me, I furtively texted a reply back to Violet.

TODAY 1:19 AM

I'll meet you tomorrow, but it has to be in public and can't be for long.

I felt like I was slowly sinking to the bottom of a very deep pool, knowing that my lungs were going to burn on the way back up to the surface of the water. Nothing good was going to come of trusting Violet, I was sure of it.