I could tell by the way Mom glanced at Alice that she was lying. Or, at least, doing that mom-lie thing that isn’t a full-on lie, but also isn’t totally true. Butterflies flipped around my stomach. Was this place gross? Dirty? In a bad neighborhood? But wait. Juniper Shores didn’t have bad neighborhoods, right?

We were taking the beach road—our road—so, I mean, come on. How bad could it be?

But when we pulled up in front of the massive beach house, my heart stopped. My blood turned to ice water. “Here it is,” Alice said in this calm tone that I suddenly found creepy instead of soothing.

“Great,” I said, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. As we all got out of the car, Mom smiling like we had won the lottery, I grabbed her elbow, the way she used to do to me when I was little and in trouble. “Mom, can I speak with you a moment?”

Alice smiled that angelic smile at me again and pointed. “I’ll just go ahead up and let you two have a second.”

As soon as she was out of earshot, I whisper-hissed: “Are you insane? You moved us into the mommune?”

Mom laughed. “Wait. You’ve heard of the mommune?”

“Does this seem like I’m making a cute joke, Mom? We cannot live here. These people are creepy.”

“Alice is the nicest person I’ve ever met. She is offering us a place to live for free while I get us back on our feet. It’s beautiful, sweetheart. You’ll see.”

I looked around, then whispered, “Alice murdered three of her husbands, Mom. Not one, not two, three.”

Mom put her hands on her hips. “That woman did not murder her husbands.”

Okay. So maybe it did seem like kind of a stretch that the chic goddess up there in the house was a cold-blooded killer. But everyone at school said that. Everyone. I felt my eyes widen, trying to make my point. “How do you think she got this big house on the ocean?” I asked. “Life insurance, that’s how.”

“This is just like when you and Kelsey were seven and got the idea that the lady we used to see in the elevator from the floor above us was a witch because she had that long black index fingernail.”

Kelsey was my best friend in New York. “Well, that made sense, Mom. Admit it.”

She laughed. “When really she had dropped a pan on her finger, and it grew out just fine.”

I wanted to argue, but maybe it was a little like that. I couldn’t imagine the rumors flying around about my family right now. Well, I could imagine some, thanks to Juniper Shores Socialite. But I would hate it if people believed something false was true. Although the truth seemed pretty bad.…