When Trey sidled up beside me and saw what I was holding, he muttered, “What the…” Trey understood why I was stunned to find any kind of communication from Father Fahey inside the Simmons house. The priest had allowed us to relay the entire history of what had happened—from the moment Violet had predicted my friends’ deaths all the way up to the hauntings I’d been experiencing in my bedroom—and he hadn’t breathed a word about being acquainted with the Simmons family. He’d even warned us that it sounded to him like Violet had a very powerful bond to the spirit (or spirits) that were enabling her to predict deaths with such accuracy.

Trey exhaled in disgust as, like me, he must have been reflecting on everything that Father Fahey had told us. He was the one who’d told us that an object tied Violet to the spirits. It was at his suggestion that we’d attacked her during a basketball game back in November to tear away the locket that she wore around her neck, and we’d led cops on a high-speed chase up to the Lake District so that we could dispose of it. All of that had been for nothing, obviously.

In fact, it now it seemed as if perhaps the pastor at St. Monica’s had deliberately misled us.

“He knew,” Trey murmured, arriving at the same realization as mine. “He told us to break the connection to throw us off. Don’t you remember? As soon as we mentioned that the new girl in town was involved, he got a lot more interested.”

Violet joined us and took the piece of paper from me. “Are you guys saying that a priest at St. Monica’s told you to steal my locket?”

“Something like that,” I admitted.

She scanned the note with furrowed eyebrows. “What the hell does this even mean? It looks like something on a poster at a yoga studio.”

I took the note back from her to examine it. What was written on it looked like a poem in masculine-looking handwriting, all capitals.

3X

AS YOU DIG, BE MINDFUL OF CREATING SPACE.

AS YOU SPREAD THE ROOTS, BE MINDFUL OF ENCOURAGING LIFE TO FLOURISH.

AS YOU PAT THE SOIL IN PLACE, BE MINDFUL OF THE FRAGILITY OF LIFE.

THE NEW MOON, FEB 1, 2003 4:48 A.M.

“It’s a spell,” I said, recognizing immediately that these were directions for planting something, intended to be repeated three times. Kirsten had told me that a lot of spells were most effectively cast during full or new moons. New moons, in witchcraft, signified the beginning of a new phase or chapter.

“Spreading the roots?” Trey asked. “That sounds like rosebushes. The roots are always in a ball.”

Kirsten had told me that she’d been able to determine that whoever had cast the original spell that had resulted in the curse had planted three rosebushes on the Simmonses’ property, one for each of the daughters Vanessa and Michael Simmons had lost. Two had been planted later, after Violet was born. We’d always assumed that Violet’s grandmother had cast the original spell. In fact, Violet was the one who’d told me that her grandmother had planted the rosebushes.