Maybe I’d have friends who lived close enough to come to the party I’d already planned out in my head. One that would strategically place my tank-top- and booty-shorts-clad body next to Kyle’s muscled and tanned one.

Of course, it had also crossed my mind that Dad had picked this project to give Charlie and me a chance to actually get used to the taste of the tap water somewhere. Then again, he could just as easily have bought this thing purely on the grounds that it included an ancient, inoperative piano.

Because though Dad happened to be the most functional and pragmatic dad in the history of dad-dom, I happened to be the only one who understood that, deep down, he also sometimes wasn’t.

“Stephanie,” whispered Charlie. “I’m scared in here.”

Did she mean her room? Or the house.

I knew better than to ask.

Instead, I smoothed my brow and approached her with a smile. Charlie was right. There was something in this house. The same something we’d dragged with us to every house since leaving Syracuse. A ghost, I guess you could say.

The kind that lived in the heart, though.

“C’mon, you.” I handed over Checkers and hoisted my little sister into my arms. “Slumber party time. Just for tonight, though, okay?”

“ ’Kay,” she said, soft in my ear, though the tenseness in her tiny frame told me that she hadn’t been paying attention to my words. That, instead, as her focus remained trained on the doorway to her closet, her little girl’s mind fixated on the creature it had cooked up.

The imaginary, lights-for-eyes, dream-spying creeper she’d dubbed “Zedok.”

An entity whose appearance in our lives had, I was sure, little to do with the move and more to do with the fact that Charlie had reached an age where she was starting to notice what was missing.

Who was missing.

TWO

Zedok

Crayons littered the worn parquet floor in front of the parlor’s drop-cloth-covered piano.

My piano.

Charlie sat in their midst, coloring the sheet music she had discovered within the piano’s bench.

My music.

I approached with slow steps, my shadow enveloping her small form.

Charlie did not turn to peer back at me. She merely slowed her progress in obscuring my work with her own.

Somewhere above, on the second floor, a door slammed and a girl’s voice shouted about coffee, the smell of which filled the mansion to its brim.

The girls’ father, the estate’s new on-paper owner, a Mr. Richard Armand, barked a reply from his place in the nearby kitchen. Another upstairs door slammed. The sound of rushing water and the clanking of dishes followed.

For days, similar racket had floated through the walls of this house—the decayed living version—to mine. The preserved dead one.

Gritting my teeth, I told myself I was lucky to have a child as young as Charlie within my reach—a girl whose psyche, unlike her elder sister’s, had not yet been sealed by the rust of logic and reason.