"Wait. Henry, where is Mr. Simmons right now?" I asked. Trey, fuming, was barely listening.

"He's inside! Looking for Mischa or talking to her, I guess," Henry replied, sounding a little scared. "I'm in the parking lot, waiting."

"Where are Laura and Violet?"

"Violet's with him and Laura's back at the Hilton. She stayed behind just in case you guys turned up there without calling first. Listen, she told me last night that she has a bad feeling about Mr. Simmons."

This inspired Trey to chime in, "Yeah, no shit. Who doesn't have a bad feeling about that guy?"

"Trey," I warned.

"Really," Henry insisted. "She said she gets the sense that he's got something really evil planned, and she tried to cast a spell on a mirror to allow her see what it was, but she couldn't get it to work."

I hated myself for wondering at that moment if Henry and Laura were sharing a hotel room. Or more specifically, sharing a bed in a hotel room, but it was certainly none of my business if they were.

"Okay, well..." I said. "What should we do? We're at least an hour away from Long Beach. Is it even worth it for us to try to figure out how to get back there?" We were closer to Mexico where we stood in that Starbucks than we would be if we travelled back north. If Mr. Simmons flaked on everything he'd told us yesterday and abandoned us in California, a trip back to Long Beach would just add expense and complication to our lives.

Henry hesitated before answering, "I don't know. I honestly don't. Maybe you should just stay where you are. I'll call you if there are any updates."

I ended the call and tried to imagine the scene outside Mischa's Courtyard Hilton residence hotel, but my mind was blank. Trey held up his cupped hands-a gesture intended to imply, "So?"

"Mr. Simmons has gone off-script and just went straight to Mischa's hotel this morning. Henry's not sure what he's up to, and Laura thinks he's not trustworthy."

Outside, the temperature was rising in the small beachside town. It was Sunday morning, and local residents crossed the Pacific Coast Highway barefoot on their way to the beach. Spending a whole day in Laguna Beach was a tempting indulgence. The fact that Trey and I were lucky to be alive that morning after our close call aboard the freight train the day before wasn't lost on me. We deserved a day of sitting on the sand and catching up on sleep. But as always, it seemed too obvious that we should take advantage of our current location and enjoy it.

"What do you think we should do?" Trey asked as we strolled along a strip of boutiques and bistros. I didn't have to ask to know what he thought we should do, which was find a way to get to nearby Irvine and hop on the next Amtrak train to the Mexican border.

I exhaled as if trying to blow all the uncertainty out of my head. "No idea." Laguna Beach, for all its pleasantness, was distracting. Everyone surrounding us was in a great mood, delighted to be enjoying the gorgeous weather, gleeful to be near the waves. Being in the midst of so much emotional activity was making it difficult for me to focus. "It sure would be great if someone could give us some kind of sign about what we're supposed to do next."

At the next corner, Trey nodded in the direction of a Mexican cantina, busy with a brunch crowd. "I see tacos," he quipped. "Maybe that's a sign we should go to Mexico?"

I was on the brink of scolding him when a creepy sensation on my back inspired me to look over my shoulder. A police car had rolled up to the curb behind us, and the uniformed officer behind the wheel had his eyes on me as he lifted his radio talk piece to his mouth. "Trey," I said. "Don't look behind you. We've gotta make ourselves scarce."

Even though we were paused at a corner waiting for the light to change, I yanked him into the intersection along with me while the cops were boxed into their position along the curb by other cars waiting for the light to turn green. Without exchanging any words, we followed a group of people into a hotel and up a flight of stairs to a restaurant on its roof. The muscles in my thighs screamed and my lungs burned; I still hadn't physically recovered from sleeping on the uncomfortable floor of a boxcar for several nights in a row, or from smoke inhalation. At the top of the stairs, a pretty hostess smiled at us and assured us she'd be with us in a moment before leading the group of people who'd arrived before us away to seat them. There were heavy footsteps on the stairs behind us and I didn't dare look to see who was creating them. "C'mon," I told Trey, "There has to be another way off this roof."

It was great to see my familiar face in the mirror behind the bar, but alarming that the bartender mixing margaritas did a double-take when he saw me, presumably recognizing me from the evening news. Trey took the lead in weaving through the tables of people dining on eggs and pancakes. The view of the ocean from the rooftop was spectacular, but there was no time to even marvel. Trey had spotted a flight of stairs on the other side of the restaurant that led directly to the beach, and the two of us scampered down it as quickly as we could.

We ran across the sand, hopeful that the police couldn't see us from the rooftop above, and darted onto a side street. Around a corner, Trey zeroed in on a beach goods shop. "In here," he urged.

Reggae music played in the small shop and the college-age kid with a goatee behind the counter nodded at us as he rang up a mother buying a colossal bubble wand for her kid. Trey headed straight for the back of the shop toward a row of hats. "We definitely need these," he said, setting a white baseball cap on my head with Beach Bunny embroidered on its front. "Make ourselves less noticeable on the street. Maybe different shirts, too."

"I could use a different shirt no matter what," I admitted. As well as new-or at least clean-underwear. Even if the police in Laguna Beach did apprehend us, surviving imprisonment and eventual transport back to Wisconsin would be a lot less hellish in fresh clothes. We'd lost our winter layers in yesterday morning's fire on the train, but the socks I'd been wearing for a week straight were probably capable of walking back to Wisconsin on their own.

With one eye on the door as I half-expected cops to barge in with their guns raised, I flipped through a rack of t-shirts. Trey chuckled unexpectedly behind me. "Well, I guess you did ask for a sign."

A few inches away from him, a lifeguard-style whistle on a lanyard was spinning-on its own-in a circular pattern from the display hook on which it was hung. "That's... really weird," I said, a little afraid to touch an animated object that was quite obviously being acted upon by supernatural powers.

"Go ahead," Trey said with wide eyes. "Maybe it's trying to tell us something?"

As soon as I extended my hand toward the whistle it practically leapt into my palm. I curled my fingers around it and separated the lanyard on which it hung from the others on the display. A whistle on a lanyard wasn't much different from a pendant on a silver chain, and when I slid two of my fingers through the loop of the lanyard, the dangling whistle began rotating, counter-clockwise. "Are you doing that-with your fingers?" Trey asked.

I shook my head to indicate that I wasn't. "Show me yes," I commanded the whistle, and it came to a lazy stop and then began rotating clockwise.

"I am officially freaked out," Trey announced.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that although there were other shoppers in the small store, the guy behind the counter was watching us. He either thought we looked like teenagers up to no good, or he recognized us. "Should we trust Mr. Simmons?" I asked the whistle. The whistle came to a wobbly stop and began spinning counter-clockwise. "That means no," I told Trey. "It says we shouldn't."

Trey's eyes narrowed. "Who's it? Like, what's making that thing move?"

I shrugged as it continued to spin counter-clockwise. "I don't know. Could be Olivia, could be Candace..." I trailed off, not wanting to say the other name that came to mind. "It could definitely also be something with dangerous intentions." I returned my focus to the whistle. "Should we go to Long Beach right now?" I asked.

The whistle abruptly stopped and began moving in the opposite direction.

"Ask it if we should trust Laura," Trey urged me.

The guy behind the counter called out over the reggae music at us, "Hey, are you guys going to buy anything, or are you just going to play with whistles all morning?"

After buying the whistle, two t-shirts with Laguna Beach silk-screened on front, and baseball caps, we changed into our new shirts in the public restrooms at the beach, which reeked of urine. Unable to stave off my curiosity until I rejoined Trey outside, I asked the whistle in the privacy of my toilet stall if we could trust Laura. Suspiciously, the whistle just dangled limply on its lanyard and refused to move. Either it simply didn't know, it was trying to communicate that we could trust her-but perhaps she wasn't working with trustworthy information, or it wasn't able to provide any guidance on her because of the layers of magic that probably already surrounded her.

Sensing that there was a line in the bathroom forming for the toilets, I knew it would be only a matter of a minute or two before someone knocked on the door of my stall. "Should we try to reach Mischa before Mr. Simmons does?" I asked the whistle in a whisper on an uneasy whim, knowing that if it responded that we should, we might very well already have been out of time. The whistle just swayed slightly from the lanyard, not really moving in any particular direction. Perhaps whatever spirit had been communicating with me through it had abandoned its efforts, or the answer to my question was inconsequential.

As expected, two knocks landed on the door of my stall. "Are you going to be much longer?" a woman's voice asked.

Just then, the whistle began to move. It wobbled as if it were straining against an unseen force to move in a clockwise direction. "Just a second," I managed to respond to the woman standing outside my stall. Clockwise. The whistle was suggesting that we did need to reach Mischa before Mr. Simmons did, and we were over an hour away from Mischa at that very moment.

"Sorry, sorry," I apologized as I scurried out of the stall.

Outside, Trey sat on a rock wall in his new beach t-shirt near the outdoor drinking fountains and showers. The bruises on his face from the beating he'd suffered at Northern Reserve had almost healed completely, and in a bright blue shirt with his shaved head, he looked almost completely unrecognizable from the boy I knew from Weeping Willow. "Cheesy," he said regarding my appearance as I approached him in my hot pink t-shirt and white baseball cap.

"Didn't know you were a fashion critic," I replied, smirking at his own highly unfashionable outfit.

"Obviously I am. I call this look Escaped Military School Ghost Hunter on the Run."

I took his hands in mine as I sat down next to him. "Listen. I think we need to go back to Long Beach and find Mischa before Mr. Simmons does."

Trey's mouth wrinkled as he considered this. "Is that what your friend, the whistle, is suggesting?"

I nodded in silence.

Trey inhaled deeply, taking in the beautiful seascape around us. "Obey the whistle."

***

The one-and probably only-advantage that we had over Mr. Simmons in tracking down Mischa on a Sunday morning was that we knew her well, and knew what she'd been up to since relocating to California. We totally lucked out in catching buses from Laguna Beach to Santa Ana, pulling into the bus station there just as a bus that would take us the rest of the way to Long Beach was about to depart. If we'd missed it, we would have been stuck in sweltering Santa Ana for another four hours. The entire journey took us two hours during which I figured it was reasonable to assume that Mischa was nowhere near her training gym.

It was Sunday, after all. Mischa's world-famous coach, Gagik Armoudian, was from Romania. It was logical to assume that he was Eastern Orthodox, since over 80% of the population of Romania was. Eastern Orthodox people went to church on Sundays, so if there was any day of the week when Mischa might have had a more relaxed training schedule, it was today.

And if Mischa and Amanda truly spent thirteen hours a day training on a typical weekday, that didn't leave much extra time for recruiting victims outside of their pool of fellow gymnasts. For this reason, as our bus arrived in Long Beach, I was pretty sure that Mischa was making the most of her time off the mat to interact with other people her own age, people it might be easy to entice into playing a game. The best place in Long Beach to do that was at Shoreline Village, a small strip of boutiques and arcades along the waterfront.

"How do we know that Mr. Simmons hasn't already found Mischa?" Trey complained as we trudged past a candy store. "It's been, like, three hours since we heard from Henry. They could all be boarding a flight back to Green Bay for all we know."

Trey had a point, but I trusted that Henry would have called me if circumstances had changed. If there was any chance Mr. Simmons was standing anywhere close enough to Henry to hear his phone ring if I were to call and check in on status, that might have jinxed our whole plan to find Mischa first. "Just... trust," I urge Trey. "She's got to be around here somewhere."

Keeping our eyes peeled for a tiny brunette, we walked past a sunglasses shop, a surfing goods store, a tropical-themed bar, and an ice cream shop before I noticed two girls sitting at a table inside a coffee shop. "Look." I tilted my head in the direction of the coffee shop window for Trey to take a peek. There was no doubt in my mind that the girl sitting with her back to the window was Mischa. I had no idea who her companion was, but the young Asian woman who sat across from her might have been someone Mischa had met while standing in line to buy her iced coffee, for all we knew. Mischa could be very charming. If she was regularly setting out to lure complete strangers into playing card games with her, I assumed she probably wasn't having much difficulty.

"Yeah, that's her," Trey agreed, sounding troubled. "Looks like we got here just in time." Without taking his eyes off Mischa, he reached for the door and hurried into the coffee shop.

Inside the store, a Rod Stewart oldie was playing on the overhead system. I followed Trey as he dashed through the crowded shop toward the table where Mischa and her acquaintance sat. As soon as he reached their table, he rather rudely and unexpectedly warned the Asian girl just as she was about to pull a tarot card out of a fanned deck that Mischa held toward her.

"I wouldn't pull a card out of that deck if I were you," he said to the girl, who looked horrified that a weird teenage guy who'd just come in off the street had dared to interrupt her reading.

"Excuse me?" the girl asked him, her fingers resting on the card that she was about to withdraw.

"Trey!" Mischa snapped. "What are you doing here?" She smiled sweetly at the Asian girl and said, "Ignore him. He's just one of my dumb friends from school. Go ahead, take the last card."

Peering over Trey's shoulder, I saw that Mischa was already almost finished with the tarot card reading. She was providing the girl with a 10-card fortune, and nine of the cards had already been spread out on the table at which they sat. Although the girl's hand lingered on her chosen card, her eyes darted from Trey's face, to mine, and back to Mischa's. She was afraid, as she should have been.

"Don't take the last card," Trey warned again, shaking his head at the girl. "You don't know this girl, do you? Well, I do, and she's not someone you want telling you about your future. Let me guess, she told you she could tell you how you were going to die?"

Trey must have hit the nail right on the head because the Asian girl paled and let go of the card she was about to select. She reached for the handbag that was hanging across the back of her chair. "I feel weird about this," she told Mischa timidly. "I think I'd like my money back."

Obstinate, Mischa leaned back in her chair and extended the fan of tarot cards further toward the girl by outstretching her arm fully. The card that the girl had been on about to pull from the deck jutted out from the fan slightly. "No refunds. Your fortune's already on the table. Aren't you at all curious about what the universe has in store for you?"

The girl stood up from the table with a sheepish expression on her face. "No, no thanks. You can keep my money. I've gotta go."

Mischa exhaled in disgust as the Asian girl bolted out of the coffee shop, leaving behind both her fortune and her caramel latte. Pleased with himself, Trey plopped down in the girl's abandoned chair and plucked the card she'd been just about to select from Mischa's deck. He set it down facing upward on the table. "Death!" Trey exclaimed sarcastically at the gruesome reaper on the card. "Why am I not surprised?"

Glaring at him, Mischa shuffled the cards she held and collected those on the table to fold them back into the deck. "She touched it, you know. That might be enough to count. She'd already chosen it. That might... might have been enough."

"Keep telling yourself that, murderer," Trey said. There had never been much love between Trey and Mischa, but now he wasn't even pretending to like her. "I've gotta hand it to you, Mischa. I thought Violet was evil, but you're charging people money to assign them their death sentences? That really takes the cake."

I interjected, "Trey."

Mischa looked no happier to see me than she did to see Trey. With bitterness directed at both of she replied, "Yeah, you'd be surprised how much easier it is to get people to cooperate when they think they're receiving something worth twenty bucks. And besides, my mom can't really afford to send me much of a living allowance now that she spent all of her savings on my dad's funeral and wake. So I guess I have you two to thank for that."

Mischa began to stand, and underneath the table, Trey hooked his feet behind around the front legs of her chair to prevent her from being able to leave. Her rear hit the seat of her chair with a thump as Trey yanked the chair forward.

"Not so fast," he cautioned her.

"Do you really think it's such a good idea to try to detain me here against my will?" she challenged him. "I'm not the one police in several states are trying to track down, Emory."

I pulled a chair from another table and sat down between the two of them to act as a mediator. "Look, Mischa. You're probably surprised to see us here in Long Beach-"

"No, not really. I figured you'd turn up to cause more problems eventually, McKenna."

"Just, listen," I pleaded with her. "We're not here alone. Violet Simmons and her dad are here-in Long Beach-and they're looking for you."

This actually did seem to surprise her. After Mischa digested this information, she slid her tarot cards back into a canvas carrying case. "So what?" she asked me. "They can't prove anything. What are they going to do, call the police and tell them that I'm using magic to will people to death? I hope they're looking forward to their visit to the insane asylum if that's their big plan."

"That's not why they're here," Trey began, dropping his sarcasm. "Mr. Simmons is going to confront you and offer to pay for all of your training expenses, but in exchange for accompanying him back to Weeping Willow and playing Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board again to reverse the curse once and for all."

"That's ridiculous," Mischa muttered, clearly eager to get out of the coffee shop and away from us. "Why should Mr. Simmons give a shit about me? Why should Violet even care about me-my situation's not her problem. You know, you guys are both in a lot of trouble."

"Mischa," I said softly. "We don't know what Mr. Simmons is up to, but we're pretty sure it's not as straightforward as how he's going to present it to you. He's trying to make us believe that there was more than one curse-or spell, or whatever-on Violet. He thinks that when we played the game with Violet back in Michigan, the spell that transferred to you had actually been keeping Violet safe from some kind of disease that's now destroying her kidneys."

"What?!" Mischa exclaimed in disbelief. "That sounds like a bunch of bullsh-"

"Yeah, agreed," I assured her. "He's also suddenly, and quite mysteriously, insisting that Trey sign a contract that guarantees him an inheritance of half of the Simmons family fortune."

Now we had Mischa's attention. She was the most stubborn person I'd ever befriended, but she was equally intelligent.

"We think he's planning something bad," I continued. "And we think you're in danger."

"Mr. Simmons is Trey's father," Mischa mused aloud with a solemn expression. "Jesus, why didn't I figure that out sooner? It's pretty obvious, isn't it? How long have you known?"

Trey shrugged his shoulders. "Doesn't matter."

Mischa's eyes came alive now with fright. "Of course it matters! Every part of this crazy puzzle matters!" She leaned across the table toward both of us and hissed, "Do you think I'm enjoying this? I have an opportunity to achieve my dream, here, and instead of focusing all of my energy on perfecting my routines I'm having to spend my Sunday afternoons hunting victims to keep my mom and my sister safe!"

"I know, Mischa. It's not fair. But we think if we go back to Weeping Willow and play the game again with Father Fahey, we can reverse the part of the curse that obligates you to keep transferring souls over," I said. "In fact, that's what Mr. Simmons is going to ask you to do in exchange for paying for your training."

Mischa rolled her eyes. "Look. I'm not going back to Weeping Willow right now-not for any reason. The trials are in June, OK? That's a little more than eight weeks from now, and I already missed five days of training when my dad died." She swallowed hard as tears filled her eyes. "I'll do whatever you want after June, but I can't take a break from my training right now."

Laura's cell phone rang inside my bag. "It's Henry," I informed Mischa and Trey. "He's here, in Long Beach, with Mr. Simmons."

"Just tell him I said no," Mischa said, nodding to indicate that I should answer the phone. "Besides, if whatever I have was keeping Violet from dying from some kidney disorder, then what's going to happen to me if we play the game again? Will I die?"

I frowned at Trey. "Mischa, this can't wait until June. How many more times are you going to have to predict people's deaths between now and then?"

She looked up at the ceiling and folded her hands on the table, doing the math.

"It'll be, like, two days. Two days, and this could be over," I insisted.

"Look, you don't even have to agree to come back to Weeping Willow right now," Trey assured her. "All you have to do, right now, today, is meet with Violet's father and listen to what he offers you. We're not going to get to the bottom of what he's trying to do unless we let him present his big plan to you."

Mischa shook her head. "I have to be at the gym in forty-five minutes."

"Mischa," I said, making one last-ditch attempt to try to convince her to meet with Mr. Simmons. "I know you feel like you're totally alone with this burden, but you're not. It's our problem, too. We're here because we care about you."