Later that day after seeing the unsettling television program featuring the Portnoy sisters, Henry called me on the landline at home to share with me some research he'd done on what we might be able to do about the trees on the Simmons' property. He'd read that sometimes when a tree was suffering from some kind of disease, or if roots were disrupting the foundation of a building, it was possible to use a poison called Glyphosate to slowly kill them. It was a slow-going process and not nearly as obvious as simply cutting the trees down, so in a way, it was a perfect solution. He claimed Glyphosate could be bought at any major lawn and garden store. There was no shortage of those in our area of Wisconsin.

However, it was going to require someone to sneak onto the Simmons' property more than once to apply the poison in rows in between the trees. It was also definitely going to burn through the grass, making it abundantly obvious that someone was meddling with the landscaping.

And... it was most effective if applied when trees were in full bloom. Since the ground was still mostly frozen and the temperature barely reached thirty degrees Fahrenheit on a daily basis even though it was April, it was pointless for us to even take action on that plan.

"That's all great research, Henry," I said, wishing I sounded more convincingly enthusiastic about his findings. "I'm sure we can find some way or another to get onto the Simmons' estate and put that stuff around the trees. Maybe if we..." I tried to scheme for a way around making the application less obvious, but there was a dull ache in my head. Scheming had completely exhausted me. I'd done little more than sneak around, construct elaborate plans, and lie to my mother since September. This latest complication of Mischa taking her murderous curse on the road with her across the country was way over my head. When I even tried to think about her stepping off a plane in California, a bright light filled my head. "We could just spill the poison all over the yard, you know? In a bunch of spots. So it's not just around the trunks of the trees."

"Oh yeah. I never would have thought of something so simple, but you're right. Then it'll just look like something bad happened to the whole lawn."

I reached for the orchid pendant hanging between my collarbones with a potent urge to feel it swinging from its silver chain between my fingers. Back in January when we'd met Laura at the book store where she worked, she'd taught me how to manipulate pendulums for answers from the spirit world. The pendulum that Henry had bought for me as a gift in the store that day had become too dangerous to use; I had come to believe that the spirits that provided Violet with her powers were using it to track our efforts to find her in Michigan. Since the last time we'd laced a key onto the drawstring cord from Trey's hoodie sweatshirt to make a homemade pendulum on that trip, I'd resisted the urge to communicate with spirits. But now it seemed like an irresistible option for confirming that Trey was safe.

"Henry, I saw on television today that Amanda and Mischa are going to California to train for the Olympic trials this summer. They may have even already left town," I said. My mom and Glenn were in the living room and even though from where I leaned against the counter in the kitchen twirling the curled phone cord around my fingers, I was being mindful of their proximity. It looked like they were both engrossed in the movie they were watching, but I knew my mother was probably straining her ears to eavesdrop.

The other end of the line fell silent for a long moment. "Jesus," Henry said. "How many people do you think she's killed so far?"

Maude sauntered into the kitchen and looked up at me with a begging look in her eyes for a treat. She sat down at my feet and I twisted off the lid of the canister on the counter where my mom kept her bone-shaped doggie-chews. "No clue," I admitted. I tossed Maude a treat and she trotted back into the living room with it.

Henry sighed. "I'm supposed to go back to France on Tuesday. What can we possibly do to stop Mischa if she's all the way in California?"

Now Mom entered the kitchen holding her coffee mug, intending to make a second cup of tea. "Don't know," I said, wanting to keep the rest of my conversation with Henry as vague as possible.

Maybe, I told myself as I changed into pajamas that night, it was time to just give up. Admit defeat. It was perhaps absurd to have ever thought I could outfox evil. Olivia and Candace were dead, and maybe simply trying to get justice for them was enough. Bringing an end to the curse wasn't going to bring them back to life, after all. I sat down on the edge of my bed and rolled the orchid pendant that hung around my neck between my forefinger and thumb feeling once again a powerful urge to use it as a pendulum. I could ask it if Trey was alright, if I'd ever see him again. It might be able to tell me what Mischa was conspiring, if there was any point in trying to relieve her from Violet's curse. It could provide me with information about so many situations I couldn't see or investigate from the confines of my bedroom, like a spy that had eyes in every corner of the world.

I unclasped the chain and refastened the clasp so that I could dangle it from my extended forefinger. The pendant swung gently, casting small orbs of light on my bedroom walls from its reflection of my ceiling light. It would be so easy, too easy, to simply ask it to show me what "yes" looked like. To ask it all of the questions that had been building up in my head since I'd heard about Mr. Portnoy's death.

Impulsively, I balled up the chain and pendant in my palm. It would be plain old stupid to use a pendulum in my bedroom without cleansing the space as Laura had taught me in the occult book shop. It also didn't feel right to use a gift from Henry as a kind of paranormal tool. I just needed to give myself a break, I decided. There was seemingly nothing more I could do other than wait for something to happen—for Trey to contact me, for some bit of information about Mischa's life to fall into my lap. Passively waiting for things to happen was how I'd lived my life for sixteen years, but in the last eight months, I'd forgotten the meaning of patience.

When I stood up to turn off my overhead light, I realized that the temperature in my bedroom had dropped significantly. That was weird; I could hear steam heat rattling the radiator under my window. For a second I wondered if maybe the ghost of Olivia had decided it was time to pay me another visit. There was a chance that she'd been trying to communicate something when she'd knocked my Little House book off its place on the shelf, and I'd missed the meaning. I cringed next to my closed bedroom door with my finger hooked over the light switch for at least a minute with my heart thundering, waiting for some kind of sign that I wasn't alone, but nothing happened.

In the darkness, I crossed my bedroom and climbed onto my mattress. It was cold in there, colder than it should have been with the heat on even though it was freezing outside. I rubbed my icy bare feet together beneath the blankets. Slowly I became aware of a strange noise. It was a clicking sound, but sort of mechanical in nature.

Click. Click. Click

Unable to determine which direction it was coming from, I sat straight up in bed and looked around my shadowy room. Everything appeared to be in order, or at least in the strange state of neatness that my mom now kept my room in while I was away in Florida.

"If you're trying to tell me something, you're going to have to work a little harder than that," I said to the four walls of my room in a voice that was barely audible. If the ghost of Olivia was indeed in my room, subtlety was not exactly a trait of the tactics she'd previously used to catch my attention. In the past she'd wound up my music boxes, left one of the stovetop burners blazing in our kitchen, drawn pictures in the condensation of my bedroom window. She had become pretty adept at manipulating objects.

The clicking not only continued, it increased in speed. It sounded kind of like the turning of a dial. With an annoyed sigh I got out of bed and turned my ceiling light back on. I couldn't think of a single one of my possessions that would make such a noise. Feeling a sense of dread mixed with curiosity, I took a few steps into the center of my room. Nothing appeared to be moving, but my right ear prickled. The noise seemed to be coming from that side of the room. Perhaps it was originating from something on top of my dresser?

I scanned the objects laid out across my dresser. The messy stacks of textbooks, makeup, and hair products that had once littered my dresser had been cleared away. Now the hair products, which I hadn't even touched since I'd left home in January, stood in a soldier-like row against my mirror. A hairbrush was set alongside my jewelry box. The only other items on my dresser were framed photos of me and Jennie, our whole family on a trip to the Wisconsin Dells when Jennie and I were little, and a black and white picture of my old dog, Moxie, that I'd taken for my photography class during freshman year.

My attention drifted upward. On the corner of the mirror over my dresser, my mom had hung my old gym bag. I hadn't carried my gym clothes to school in that thing since November, and it appeared to be empty, just a deflated red nylon tote bag with striped handles. But when I lifted it off the corner of the mirror, the clicking stopped for just a second and I noticed that the bag was heavier than I thought it would be. Something small slid down to one end of the duffel: my combination lock.

The clicking resumed.

I unzipped the bag and lifted the lock by its silver shackle. Sure enough, the purple dial spun around and around, white numbers and number lines whizzing past the indicator arrow.

"Am I supposed to unlock this?" I wondered aloud. Of all the ridiculous objects in my room to meddle with, I had no idea what Olivia was getting at by spinning the dial on my gym lock. I grabbed the dial by its center and twisted it to the first number in my combination, 19, but when I began twirling the knob to the right to reach the second number, my mind went blank. I hadn't used that combination lock to secure my stuff in the Weeping Willow High School girls' locker room since November, and I'd flat-out forgotten the full combination.

03? 14? A couple of numbers seemed like they might be right, but all of my attempts to unlock the lock were futile. I remembered that there had been a little label on its back when Mom and I had purchased it at Hennessy's pharmacy the week before I began high school, back when I was still nervous about having to change into a gym suit in the locker room every day. "I'm sorry," I said aloud. "If you want me to unlock it, I don't remember the combination."

The purple dial twirled itself until the "0" aligned with the indicator arrow, and then stopped moving. I set the lock down on my dresser, getting the distinct feeling that I had failed to understand whatever it was that the spirit wanted me to comprehend. In the mirror, I saw breath escape from my mouth as steam. The lock was still idle, so I abandoned it in pursuit of a sweatshirt and a pair of socks since it was too supernaturally cold in my room for just regular pajamas.

As soon as I turned my back on the lock to pull an abandoned sweatshirt off the back of my desk chair, however, the dial resumed spinning. I pulled my sweatshirt over my head and noticed that the dial had stopped on a number other than zero.

"Nine," I said, acknowledging that I'd noticed the number.

The dial began twisting again counterclockwise, this time falling upon the number eight. "Eight."

The third time the dial turned itself, it landed on the number three, which I also spoke aloud. But it remained still, so I assumed that the spirit—whether it was Olivia or someone else—was finished. There was something meaning contained in those three numbers. Something that was supposed to inspire me to take action.

"Nine, eight, three," I repeated. "Nine hundred and eighty-three." The number held absolutely no significance Nine hundred and eighty-three what? Had Mischa arranged for the deaths of nine hundred and eighty-three people? That was highly unlikely. Over nine hundred unexplained deaths our area of Wisconsin would surely have caught the attention of law enforcers and the medical community. That would have practically been a pandemic.

983 as in an address? I couldn't think of anyone's address that began with that number.

Maybe the spirit wanted me to add the numbers together, like some kind of exercise in numerology. But they totaled twenty, and since twenty was an option on the combination lock dial, that made no sense. "Ninety-eight and three?" I wondered aloud. The dial spun around instantly like the Wheel of Fortune, slowing down again at zero. I took that to mean I was getting hotter. "Ninety-eight point three?" I asked, and an explosion of warmth filled my head. Ninety-eight point three! That had been the alternative rock radio station every kid in town had listened to when we were in middle school. It had been broadcast out of Madison from the University of Wisconsin, but had been absorbed into a big media conglomerate before I started high school.  "WKFN ninety-eight point three, the home of weekend fun!" I recalled the radio station announcer growling during on-air promotions. Everyone had adored the station's foul-mouthed, wisecracking student disc jockeys.

"Okay, okay," I assured the spirit in the room, not sure how I was ever going to be able to dial into 98.3. Outside of listening to whatever was on in the car, I couldn't remember the last time I'd actually listened to a radio. I wasn't even sure we owned one, at least not a radio like the old-fashioned transistor kind my grandparents in Missouri kept in their living room. There might have been a radio in the garage among the boxes of junk that my dad left behind when he moved to Florida.

As I pulled on socks, trying to concoct some kind of plausible excuse for venturing out into the garage late at night, I heard the zipper on my purse opening. My purse was set on my desk, and from where I leaned against the edge of my bed, I could see the zipper very slowly and unsteadily opening in a series of jolts and pauses. Giving the spirit a hand, I zipped the bag the rest of the way open and found my iPod resting on top of my wallet inside. Of course. I had completely forgotten that my iPod had a radio function simply because I listened to the radio so rarely that I didn't even have favorite stations anymore.

"Ninety-eight point three," I muttered to myself, popping the earbuds into my ears. There was no way I could adequately prepare for whatever—if anything—the spirit wanted me to hear. Just to be on the safe side to prevent myself from having a sudden heart attack if I heard the warbling of a demon or something similarly terrifying once I adjusted the tuner to 98.3, I turned the volume way down before sliding the FM tuner. All I heard was the distant crackle of static, and then without my fingers even pressing the volume controls, the audio icon appeared on my iPod's screen as the volume increased.

"Oh my God. Finally."

Not recognizing the female voice that I heard through the static, I asked, "Who is this?"

The response was garbled, lost to static, but the spirit seemed to sense that her answer was incomprehensible, so she repeated it. "This is Candace. Duh."

I stumbled backward, my fingertips still pressing the earbuds into my ears. Candace. Candace? Since Olivia's death, I was pretty sure I'd only been receiving messages from her and my late sister, Jennie. Never before had wild girl Candace Cotton reached out from the other side to contact me. Mischa and I had always assumed that Olivia had been more vengeful because she had known that her death was eminent during the final moments of her life, and she left this world reluctantly, fighting against Violet's prediction until her very dying breath. In comparison, Candace had been so depressed and heavily medicated by the time she wandered into the ocean in Hawaii it was impossible to know what she was thinking when she succumbed to the fate that Violet had predicted for her.

"Candace?" I whispered, hoping that my voice couldn't be heard outside my room. "How can I be sure it's really you?"

"Are you serious right now? Do you know hard it was to make that lock move around?" the voice asked. I hadn't heard real live, Candace's voice in seven months, but what was coming through on the radio certainly sounded like what I remembered.

"Why did it take you so long to contact me?" I dared to ask.

There was a surge of static before she said, "It's hard to figure out how to make things happen on your side. I tried to contact you at your dad's house, but I was only able to control the light in your bedroom, and the only times when I was able to turn it on and off you didn't even notice because it was daytime."

I wanted very much to believe that I was speaking with Candace, but I'd had enough experience in dealing with spirits since the trouble with Violet began in the fall to know that they could be master manipulators, deceitful and cunning. Until Candace shared something with me that only she would have known, I had to be wary about how much I believed what I was hearing. And unfortunately, Candace and I had never been close enough to share many secrets. She'd always been Olivia's best friend and no one else's, going back as far as kindergarten.

"Also, I spent most of my time trying to reach Isaac, but he's, like, impossible. All he ever does is play Halo and smoke weed. Even times when I was sure he heard my voice, he pretended like he didn't. I mean, it's kind of cute that he has no life now that I'm gone. But it's still, like, seriously?"

That sounded more like the real Candace. She most certainly would have prioritized contacting her on-again, off-again boyfriend over getting in touch with me.

"If you're really Candace," I began, "then tell me why you died the way you did. How did it happen when you knew you were supposed to stay away from water?"

"It was my own fault," the voice replied, and then disintegrated into static again. When it reassembled itself, it was mid-sentence. "...Needed to prove to myself that it wasn't real. My doctors kept insisting that Olivia's car accident was just a coincidence. I wanted to believe them."

The temperature in my room was still freezing, and I shivered inside my sweatshirt. It was logical that Candace might have waded into the Pacific Ocean out of some strange need to convince herself that her doctors were right, that it was insane to believe she was going to drown just because one of her classmates told her so at a birthday party. During the last few weeks of her life, she had moped around with a listless, vacant look in her eyes. Maybe she'd been convinced by her doctors that the only way to move on with her life was to face her fear of the prediction from Violet. In doing so, she'd made it come true.

"...Tell her that I'm sorry."

I adjusted the earbud in my right ear, wishing that the static would calm down just for a few seconds. "Can you repeat that? I didn't catch any of it."

"My mom. I need you to tell her that I'm sorry," Candace said again.

I agreed, even though there was absolutely no way I could call Mrs. Cotton and explain to her that the ghost of her dead daughter had reached out to me over the radio... without ending up in a straight jacket.

The static was growing louder, making me suspect that we were going to lose our connection. "Candace, I'm losing you," I whispered. "You have to tell me what to do about Mischa. Is there anything we can do to stop her? Am I even supposed to stop her?"

All I heard was buzzing and crackling of static, and bits of a popular song by the band Fun creeping into the audible mix. And then, just when I thought I'd lost her for sure, I heard the word "trees" as clear as a bell before the static subsided and the Fun song flooded my earbuds at a deafening volume.

For a second, my heart swelled with hope that Candace was reassuring me that Henry's plan for slowly killing the Simmons' trees would work. It was our ticket to ending the curse once and for all. But the longer I sat on the edge of my bed rethinking the exchange I'd just had with her, I realized that she might have been trying to tell me to not bother killing the trees. She also could have been trying to communicate that messing with the trees was an extraordinarily stupid idea. Which it was, in a way. It would involve trespassing, vandalism, and depending on the assessed value of the Simmons' property and how much they spent on landscaping services, criminal damage.

The temperature in my bedroom was returning to normal, so I gave up on the radio transmission and went to bed. As I drifted off to sleep I marveled at how much easier it seemed to have been for Olivia to manipulate energy and objects in my bedroom to communicate with me than it had been for Candace. But then again, even in life, everything had always been easier for Olivia. She had the beauty, the grades, and the charisma that got her elected to Student Government President and Homecoming Queen.

On Easter, I was distracted all day. My mother had hidden plastic Easter eggs throughout the living room and kitchen for me to find when I woke up in the morning, which was very cute of her but also a little annoying because she should have known that I didn't appreciate the temptation of Easter candy all over the house after losing so much weight over the summer. Glenn met us at our house for church, and Henry and I acknowledged each other from across the pews where we both sat with our respective mothers. Mrs. Richmond wept silently throughout Father Fahey's sermon about Easter being a time for renewal and rebirth. After services, Father Fahey handed Mrs. Richmond one of the enormous potted lilies from the altar and insisted that she take it home.

I picked at my dinner later in the afternoon lost in thoughts about California and Florida, and the impossible distance in between the two states. Mom and Glenn were engaged in a serious discussion about taking a trip together to Chicago before the Summer Olympics to check out all of the city's changes. "Doesn't that sound like fun, McKenna?" Mom asked, and I nodded with a faint grin. Summer seemed impossibly far off since there were still clumps of dirty snow on the ground. By the time the Opening Ceremony aired on television, Mischa and Amanda would have already competed in the trials in Long Beach.

All I could think about was how Mom would drive me to the airport in Green Bay in the morning, and how I'd board a plane that would take me back to Florida. In fewer than twenty-four hours, my life would return to a daily cycle of sunscreen application, avoiding eye contact with Kevin in Trigonometry, grazing on kale salads prepared by Rhonda, and overall feeling a world away from Weeping Willow, Wisconsin and the awful infusion of evil that my friends and I had introduced to our town by playing a childish game with the new girl. Everything about my Wisconsin life felt fake and distant when I was in Florida, as if even my relationship with Trey was part of a bad dream I half-forgot when I woke up. I spent afternoons out on Dad and Rhonda's deck doing my homework in a beach chair and then passing out in the sun.

The next morning I gave Maude about fifty kisses before climbing into the car with Mom. It broke my heart a little to know that the next time I saw her, she'd be a fully-grown dog. On the drive to Green Bay, Mom said, "You've been awfully quiet on this trip."

The flat, empty green fields of Wisconsin spread out on both sides of the highway beyond our windows. I replied, "That's what Judge Roberts ordered, isn't it? Nice and quiet."

She let my semi-snarky remark go for a few minutes before saying, "I hope you keep in touch with that Henry Richmond. He's such a nice guy. Randy and Beth did a good job of raising him."

For once, I didn't feel a surge of resentment for her suggesting that Henry was a better choice for me than Trey.  We were pulling into the short-term parking lot at LAX before it occurred to me to tell her if she liked Henry so much, she should marry him, herself. He and I hadn't even formally said goodbye. Our mutual acknowledgement at church had been it; I was bound for Florida, he was heading back to France. My cell phone had been taken by the cops and Momhad gotten me a cheap pre-paid one before I boarded my return flight to Tampajust so that she could contact me in case of an emergency.  I was going to have to ask Dad to hook me up with a replacement that included a data plan and a new number once I landed. One way or another, we'd have to get in touch to make a plan about the trees, although there was definitely a possibility that once Henry returned to his luxury tennis camp, he'd not want to be bothered thinking about crimes to commit in Wisconsin.

Mom parked and followed me inside the departures area, probably to make absolutely certain that I passed through security to my gate and didn't double back toward Weeping Willow the second she pulled away from the curb. I gave her a superficial hug to avoid getting tearful in the impersonal airport, which was already busy at the early hour. A toddler with a sticky face was howling in the First Class check-in line, filling the entire cavernous space with his sobs while his stressed-out mom did nothing to subdue him. "See you in June, sweetheart," Mom said with a strained smile.

I really wished, as I often did, that things could have been different at that moment. That I wasn't flying back to Florida to spend the rest of my junior year away from home, and that I hadn't destroyed all trust that my mom had ever had in me.

"Glenn's really cool, Mom," I said, wanting to at least let her know that I was happy that she'd started a new relationship in my absence. "I hope you guys do plan that trip to Chicago. A change of scenery could be really exciting."

"Yeah, he's something else," Mom agreed. Her glowing smile made it clear that she thought much more highly of him than her casual compliment suggested.

As I removed my dirty Vans to pass through security with my carry-on bag, a strange feeling came over me that made me feel like I wasn't ever going to arrive in Florida that day. I couldn't explain it; it wasn't as if there was a strong likelihood of my flight being cancelled. The sky was cloudless and periwinkle, and already the morning was so warm that the roads were wet with melting snow. Just as Father Fahey had described Easter as a time for renewal, I was sure that within a matter of days, daffodils and tulips would be shooting up in front yards all over town. The monitor display that hung from the ceiling indicated that my flight to Florida was scheduled to be on-time.

Once through security, I hoisted my carry-on over my shoulder and looked around. I had an hour to kill. There was a restaurant, but it was already crowded with families eating breakfast and overweight middle-aged men perched on bar stools drinking beers at nine in the morning. Entering a restaurant alone was a little too intimidating for me; my face was still recognizable in Wisconsin. Every once in a while a stranger stared a little too long at my face and I could tell that they were thinking, "She's that girl, the one who escaped from her boarding school in the winter." I had already finished the novel that I'd bought a few days earlier in Tampa, so I meandered over to the gift shop in pursuit of reading material for my flight.

Standing in front of the magazine shelves, I zoned out. All of the glossy covers of oiled-up bikini bodies and ridiculously happy smiles ran together before my eyes. The full reality that I was about to leave Wisconsin without having done anything at all to prevent Mischa from ordering the deaths of more innocent people seized me. There was nothing I could do; I tried to assure myself. I was just a kid and already in more trouble than most kids ever find themselves in within the boundaries of my home state. But still... the responsibility of ending everything felt like a giant weight I took with me everywhere; it infiltrated every happy moment of my life. It was always in the back of my thoughts, distracting me during classes, keeping me solemn during afternoons out on the boat with Dad and Rhonda. If Henry and I didn't end it, then who would? No one. Moving on with my life and just letting events unfold seemed to be what every authority figure in my life wanted me to do, so why did it feel so profoundly wrong to follow their advice?

Snapping me back to the present moment, I felt someone grab me firmly by the forearm. Pale fingers gripped my arm through the sleeve of my jacket.

"Don't say anything and just come with me," a low voice from behind me commanded.

Just as I was about to panic, I turned and saw that the voice belonged to a boy a few inches taller than me. At first I didn't recognize him because he wore a thick wool beanie cap over his head, but I'd know those aquamarine eyes anywhere. It was Trey. He'd come back for me, after all. A tidal wave of joy and relief cascaded through my veins but it was quickly followed by a flash of fear. The rest of my day—the rest of my life—was now uncertain.

#0#0#0#0#0#0#0#0#0#0

Don't forget to read Room 9C, the story I contributed to the @OuijaMovie profile, and enter my Room 9C contest for your chance to win a Hot Topic Ouija bracelet and tickets to the movie!