Violet scowled. “What, do you think I arranged for my dad to—”

From behind us, a small voice said, “I don’t feel normal.”

All of our heads turned toward Mischa, who was touching her throat as if she was as surprised that she’d spoken as we were. Suddenly concerned, Trey asked, “How do we know this is really Mischa and the spirits haven’t found their way back into her head?”

With a confused expression on her face, Mischa insisted, “It’s me. I feel like I’ve been asleep for a long time.”

We heard another high-pitched scream from the house’s first floor, which suggested that Violet’s mom had just noticed Henry. Her outburst put all of us back on task.

Violet waved her hand at the phone I held in my hand. “Can you hear your sister at all?” she asked with tears in her eyes.

I shook my head. I heard nothing but the baritone voice of a radio announcer on another AM frequency creeping through the static in bursts. But I did feel the slightest sense of tingling across my head. I hoped Jennie was the cause of it, and not the pure terror that we were all about to be held accountable for breaking into the Simmons house, holding Violet hostage, shooting Henry, and killing Mr. Simmons. And that I’d then go on to die in a horrible plane crash or in some other way, alone, on my return to Florida.

“Just try to reach her,” Trey encouraged me in a hoarse voice. “Ask her to help you.”

My pulse was bounding, and my heart felt like it was thundering in my chest. “I can’t concentrate,” I admitted. I had to be in a certain mind-set to be able to hear Jennie, and at that moment, I was way too frazzled to tune in to her energy. Somewhere, far away, I heard a chorus of voices chanting something that sounded like history, history, which reminded me of how sometimes words would get stuck in my head over the winter, before I’d been able to connect with Jennie over radio waves.

But “history” didn’t make sense. The entire curse was rooted in history. I couldn’t pore over every detail of the last eighteen years to figure out how to unravel everything in the seconds remaining. Where to begin? With the moment Trey’s mom stepped into Violet’s father’s lecture hall eighteen years ago? Or the moment when Grandmother Simmons visited Father Fahey for help?

Never before had I tried to communicate with Jennie under quite this much duress. My ears pricked at the distant sound of sirens, and it took me a second to realize that I wasn’t simply remembering the night of our house fire again. These sirens were real, and they were growing stronger.

“Just relax,” Trey commanded me as he reached for my upper arms and gently squeezed them. “Here, let’s sit.”

The four of us sat down in a circle on Violet’s carpeted floor.

“What are we doing?” Mischa asked innocently. She clearly had limited awareness of what had happened since she’d been evicted from her body the day before, but there was no time to fill her in.