“All right. Now,” Mrs. Robinson said, “if you’re sure your sister keeps trying to send you messages, then what you need to do is listen harder!” She ended with a yell, as if the solution should have been plainly obvious to me.

Defensively, I insisted, “But I do listen! Even on the way here, I thought I heard her on my earbuds—like, these little headphones that you put inside your ears to listen to music,” I clarified. “It just sounds like loud wind. A very specific kind of wind. If she’s saying words, I can’t hear them.”

“Well, then. If you think she’s saying words you can’t hear, you’re not listening to the right station!” she exclaimed, as if my trying to tune in to messages from the afterlife were a joke.

“I don’t understand. She’s not a radio broadcast.”

“But she is! If that’s how she’s trying to reach you, she’s manipulating radio waves. I bet if you tune in to the right frequency, you’ll be able to hear her just fine,” Mrs. Robinson said with a big smile.

I held back a frustrated sigh. Mrs. Robinson probably assumed that most people had radios available to them. “I don’t even think we own a radio. I mean, maybe my dad has one for emergencies?” There was a radio in Dad’s car, of course, but I didn’t know when I’d be allowed to apply for a driver’s license again. And of course, he only listened to his favorite talk shows on satellite radio.

Just as it occurred to me that I might be able to use an app on my phone to listen to local radio stations, two things happened.

First, behind me on the television, I heard a newscaster with a rich baritone voice making an announcement in a teaser for the nightly news. “Deadly tornados touch down in Wisconsin this afternoon. Tune in at eleven for the latest.”

And my phone buzzed with an incoming text.

CHERYL 7:18 P.M.

Have you heard about Mischa? Call me asap.

CHAPTER 4

IT WAS IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER, Mrs. Robinson told me, that Jennie was no longer on the physical plane. Spirits could pick up information from the living world from their side of things, but they didn’t exist or communicate the same way the living did. So although Jennie may have been able to manipulate radio waves and recognize me by my spirit, she may have lacked the finesse to make it clear that she was warning me about a tornado.

Of course, I’d guessed early on that’s what she had been implying. It had just seemed pretty far-fetched that she was suggesting an actual tornado was going to touch down in Willow. Tornados in our part of Wisconsin weren’t unheard-of, but rarely until after May, when the temperature began to rise for summer. The only other tornado to ever touch down in Willow that I knew of had done so when my dad was in high school; it had torn the roof off the old high school gym. And that had been thirty-five years ago.