In one hilarious cartoon representing Vera at her irreverent best, she depicted the house as a popular retreat for a motley crew of horror icons. Psycho’s Norman Bates, in drag as his dead mother, sat in a rocking chair in an upstairs window. Edward Scissorhands was busy sculpting a topiary shaped like Cerberus, the monstrous three-headed dog that guarded Hades—and their heads looked suspiciously like our own three dogs. Demented author Jack Torrance from The Shining was busting down the front door with an axe. Vera had sprinkled our family into the drawing too, as the Addams Family. Eliot and Sydney as Pugsley and Wednesday were setting dynamite charges under the mansion’s foundation. Oliver, rakish in a pencil mustache and double-breasted striped suit, was Gomez, canoodling the arm of pasty-faced Morticia—representing none other than me—in a sprayed-on mourning dress with octopus tentacle hem. And in the foreground stood Vera clapping her hands to her ears like the spectral figure in Edvard Munch’s The Scream, with a word balloon over her head saying It’s a madhouse! A maaaaadhouse! Luckily the detectives read no deeper meanings into the macabre masterpiece.

Flipping through the pages, I paused on a sketch of some sort of symbol. Celtic, maybe? I traced the image with my eyes, searching for something. But what?

A crash split the silence somewhere in the house, followed by Eliot’s screams, but I couldn’t shift my attention. There was something significant about this drawing. A moment later the dogs erupted in a cacophony of barking; a loud wail echoed.

“Mommy, help!” Yelling reached my ears, but my focus was hooked on the image.

Yes, I knew this image. It was important; I could feel it in my bones.

While the noise intensified, the questions in my head shouted over it. Where had I seen it? On my phone, perhaps? Had Vera sent me a picture of this before? It felt urgently meaningful.

I pulled my cell phone out of my back pocket—it was always on me in case Vera called or, more likely, texted. I scrolled through my ancient texts from her, the most recent one six months ago. April 16. The cursed day. She had texted me shortly before she vanished. I should have seen the warning behind the green bubble of letters and abbreviated words. But I saw the hidden message now, tucked in between the text slang and the emojis:

Mom pls don’t be mad at me when u get home. but i need 2 clean up the mess.