“I’ll kill you both,” Willa says. “If I have to.” And I know she means it. But she won’t get the chance.

I pull out the lighter and flick it open. Then I grab Cole by the arm. “Run!” I scream. And I’m pushing him past Willa. She looks so stunned when I toss the lighter on the floor behind us and the carpet goes up with a whoosh.

Cole and I burst out the kitchen door into the dark.

Into the fog as thick as mud.

And somehow I lose my grip on his hand.

I start to panic, because the air smells like drowning tonight.

Not the ocean.

Or the beach.

It smells like drowning. Water over your head. The sting of it in your nose. Dead things and sailors’ curses. The muck on the bottom. The stink of it. Sea monsters and whale bones and fish eating away at your eyes.

“Cole!” I whisper. “Where are you?”

“Avril!” he says. “Over here.”

And I move toward the sound of his voice.

But I get distracted. Because the fence is gone tonight. And my mother is standing at the edge of the cliff. Her back is to the water, and her eyes flash bright and angry. She’s arguing with another woman. Someone with wild curls and even wilder eyes. The curly-haired woman is frantic. She’s waving her arms and my mother is backing away from her. She backs one step too far. Too close to the edge. I see her reach out for help. But the woman with the wild hair shoves her hard.

I hear my mother shout my name. “April!”

And then she’s gone. Vanished into thin air.

Someone grabs me from behind, and I scream. “Avril. It’s me.” Cole spins me around and pulls me against him. I feel the quick press of his lips. His warm breath against my skin. “I didn’t know,” he tells me. “I never made sense of it all. Not until tonight.”

“I believe you,” I tell him.

I glance back toward the edge of the cliff and another memory is playing out now. This one is dark. The shapes are dim. And hard to see. Almost like shadow puppets on a wall.

A woman with blowing black hair stands at the edge of the cliff. She’s staring down into the foaming water below, searching the waves with a flashlight.

A little blonde girl pops up from the tall grass. Her face is tear-streaked. She’s crying for her mother.

The dark-haired woman swivels. Her face is tear-streaked, too, but her eyes go wide when she hits the little girl dead in the face with the flashlight beam. The woman recovers fast, though. She reaches out to the child and I hear the jangle of delicate silver bracelets. It’s a pretty sound. Light and delicate.

It sounds exactly like the music of wind chimes.