Elizaveta refused to accept this. For starters, the window was far too high off the ground for a doll to look through. Perhaps if five or six of them stood on each other’s shoulders, the top one could peek in. Nevertheless, a troupe of acrobatic dolls was simply too farfetched to believe. Which meant Rosa had either seen someone or something else, or, more likely, she had imagined it. “What did it look like, honey?” she asked.

“A doll,” she said.

“But…what else?”

“It had long hair.”

“So it was female doll?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Did it say anything?”

“It waved at me.”

“Waved?”

Rosa demonstrated using a princess wave, her little hand tilting left and right at the wrist.

“Then what happened?”

“You came in.”

“And it went away?”

“Yes.”

Elizaveta considered this, then said, “Maybe you were having nightmare?”

“No, I wasn’t! I saw it.”

“Maybe you thought you did. But sometimes when you dream, and you wake up, part of the dream comes with you. It can confuse you.”

Rosa obviously wasn’t happy with this explanation. She squared her jaw and stared at her lap. Elizaveta almost told her to go back to sleep, but what was the point? She likely wouldn’t be able to. Plus, it was almost dawn. “Do you want to come with me to other room?” she asked.

Rosa’s disposition immediately brightened, and she nodded.

Elizaveta offered the girl her hand, and they returned to the main room. Jack was still pointing the gun at Jesus and Pita. They were arguing but stopped when Elizaveta and Rosa appeared.

“She was having a bad dream,” Elizaveta told them.

Pita’s mouth turned down in a bow of disagreement. “She wasn’t screaming like that because of a dream.”

“She thought she saw something at her window.”

“What!”

“A doll.”

“A doll?”

“She was dreaming—”

“We have to go!” Pita snapped, everything about her changing in an instant, animated by fear: her posture, her expression, the sound of her voice. “This is too much. We have to go. We need to go. Right now. The storm’s passed. We’ll take the canoe. We can go right now—”

Jack shook his head. “We can’t all fit in the canoe.”

“Yes, we can, the four of us, we can fit—”

“What about Pepper and Lucinda? And Rosa?”

“Rosa can fit too. We’ll send the police back for Pepper and Lucinda.”

“We’re not leaving them behind—”

“Nitro’s dead, Jack!” Pita exclaimed. “Something got him! It got Miguel too! And now it’s come for us. Whatever it is. Okay? Maybe it’s a ghost, maybe it’s not. I don’t know anymore. But whatever’s out there, whatever Rosa saw, it’s hunting us. Don’t you get that?”

“And you think you’ll be safer out there in the dark than in here?”

“It’s getting lighter.”