The drinks and popcorn gathered up in my arms, I get back to the car just in time for the next film to start. A beach movie I never heard of called Don’t Make Waves. Bee and I clutch our drinks, downing them in a minute, barely tasting anything.

The movie drags on, Tony Curtis’s character pestering a pretty blonde who isn’t given much to do besides bounce around in a bikini. Sighing, I glance in the rearview mirror. Behind us on the other screen, it’s the latest James Bond film. You Only Live Twice. We’ll probably see that one tomorrow night. We see every movie that plays here. Anything to escape what’s waiting at home.

Or what’s waiting for us here. A change in the wind, and we’re suddenly not alone.

Bertha, a man’s voice calls out, sharp and cold as a fistful of straight pins.

It isn’t Dracula this time, and it isn’t for me. It’s for Bee. She seizes up in the passenger seat. No matter how many times this happens, she’s always caught off guard.

He comes at her again, louder and more determined. Where have you gone, Bertha?

She won’t look at me. She won’t look at anyone. Bee with her own secrets and a name she never uses anymore.

Bertha Antoinetta Mason. The so-called madwoman in the attic. The first wife of one Edward Fairfax Rochester. A man with a sprawling estate and a sprawling ego and a temper that could set the whole world on fire. She married him young, married foolishly, and when she wouldn’t bend to his will, pliable as clay in his calloused hands, he locked her away in an upstairs room before he went searching for someone else, a woman to replace her.

That was over a century ago, thousands of days separating her from him. He shouldn’t even remember her now. But men like him are never eager to lose what they consider theirs.

His cruel laughter lilts on the wind, and I fumble with the speaker, cranking up the volume, desperate to drown him out. This is one of his favorite tricks: calling her from afar, throwing his voice across the miles like a wicked ventriloquist. We have no idea where he is, but he can somehow always find us.

Bertha, he whispers again, and Bee grabs my hand, the two of us holding tight to each other. I look to the other cars, the couples in back seats blissfully unaware. Like always, nobody can hear him but us.

“Do you want to leave?” I ask, but Bee shakes her head.

“It won’t do any good,” she says, and she’s right. Nowhere is safe for us.