“It was a family that got murdered,” Wilson said. “One twelve Ocean Avenue, Amityville, on Long Island. Six of them. Mother, father, two brothers and two sisters. All murdered by their twenty-three-year-old brother. Ronald DeFeo Jr.”

“Why do you have to creep us out by knowing information like that?” I blurted it out because it bothered me that other people, especially Jack, would think he was a freak, memorizing those kinds of details.

“It’s in the book, which I read. And it’s in the movie, which pretty much everyone here but you has seen.” The others were agreeing. They knew those details, too.

“Abbey, what happened to the woman you were talking about that was ill?” Sage asked. “Keep telling that story.” She must have finished the one about High Point.

“Well, after months of the banging and noise and voices, now she was really sick and weak. She went out back and into the woods in her nightgown. She hadn’t been out of bed in weeks. And she sat down on a stump and spoke to the spirits out there. She said, ‘I am very sick, and I think I am dying, and I am asking you please to help me do this, to do this the best I can, and I can’t with all this racket.’ And she asked them to stop. Her husband found her as she came back out of the woods, and she was shivering and pale and soaking wet, but she was smiling. ‘They’re going to stop,’ she said. ‘They told me they would stop.’ And they did.”

“Who was the woman?” Sage asked.

“The Carlsons near Hamilton, you know that house with the really long driveway into the woods?” Everyone was quiet. I knew them. Mrs. Carlson had been really sick and had died. When I raised money on Daisy Day for cancer, Mrs. Carlson had bought a daisy. She came to the door in her robe, and she was so thin that her face looked like it was caving in. When I told Marie, she said I should never have gone to their house, getting her out of her bed and asking her for money. “That woman is sick with cancer. What’d you go there for? Of all houses?” But Mrs. Carlson had thanked me—really thanked me—and I knew she meant it because she was sick, and she thought what I was doing was in some way for her, and I felt then that it was.

Abbey went on. “But I also heard that when she was out in the woods with the spirits and talking to them, they said something to her.” She paused, and we all stayed, rapt, waiting to hear what the Indian ghosts had told Mrs. Carlson in the woods. Abbey leaned forward and spoke low. “‘Don’t be scared.’ That’s what they said to her. And she said that helped her. It really helped her.”

I shivered again.