“You don’t actually have to follow through on the deal once you get them where you want them,” Mrs. Robinson assured me. “You just have to be careful if you’re planning on double-crossing ’em. Because they’ll know, and they’ll be ready to trick you.”

I appreciated Mrs. Robinson’s reminder to be cautious, but I was already well aware that the spirits were capable of outsmarting us at every turn. She didn’t ask me to let her know how everything went. We both knew that if I wasn’t successful, I wouldn’t be calling back.

No one seemed relieved when I shared Mrs. Robinson’s advice with them, although I did my best to sound confident about our chances for outsmarting Mischa.

“Let’s text Mischa right now and invite her over here,” Henry suggested.

I shook my head, wishing it would be that simple. “I don’t want to give them time to think about what we’re up to. We need to put them on the spot and force them into an immediate decision to come here.”

“Okay, so we go to the funeral,” Henry agreed.

“We confront Mischa there, tell her we want to offer her a deal—but we’ll only discuss it here, at my house. And then what?” Violet asked me.

I tried to remember exactly what Jennie had told me. “I need you guys to remember not to specify what kind of deal we want to discuss, okay? And it’s super important that after I tell Mischa what we want to negotiate, none of us respond to anything she says or does, got it? We don’t want to accidentally consent to anything she proposes, and she will definitely try to trick all of us into doing exactly that. So… no head nods, no blinking—be mindful of every single thing you do.”

Violet and Henry had questions about what would happen once we got back to the Simmons house. “It’s better that you don’t know,” I explained. “Because if you know, then they’ll know.”

Then I told them about the voodoo dolls. I expected all three of them to balk at the idea of us stitching together toys in the precious few remaining hours we had, but Violet announced that her grandmother had been an avid sewer and dashed up to the second floor. She returned five minutes later with fabric, scissors, needles, and a pincushion that looked like a tomato, loaded with colorful pins.

“I’ll be honest, I did not expect that I’d be making a doll version of myself when I drove over here yesterday,” Henry mumbled as he sat cross-legged on the floor whipstitching two pieces of fabric together. “Or… ever.”

The one thing Violet didn’t have on hand was stuffing, so we dissected the embroidered throw pillows in the living room and used their innards to fill our dolls. Per Mrs. Robinson’s instructions for personalizing the dolls, each of us cut off a small lock of our own hair to stuff inside with the fluffy white Poly-fil before we sewed up the heads—except Trey, whose hair was too short. Instead, we clipped his fingernails and brushed the clippings into the doll he’d made of himself.