“Elena and Adam Portnoy were there. Elena brought dinner to the house six times after the fire,” Jennie told me.

Hearing this sparked a vivid memory of the doorbell ringing at our new house, or rather, the house Mom lived in today, the house on Martha Road we’d bought after our one on the corner burned down. We’d stayed with my grandparents in Minnesota for a few weeks immediately following the fire before the new house had suddenly gone on the market, and Mom had insisted on snatching it up, even though Dad thought it was kind of unhealthy.

Jennie was right. For the first few weeks of the school year that fall after we’d returned to Willow, moms in the neighborhood took turns showing up on our front porch every night with casserole dishes, often still hot from the ovens in their homes. Of course Elena Portnoy would have been one of those moms. She may have even been the realtor from whom Mom and Dad had bought our house.

“Good point,” I told Jennie. “She’ll feel guilty if I’m not at the funeral if I remind her about that.” Mom was not one to care much about social standards, but I knew she held dearly every memory she had of Jennie and people in town who’d checked in on us back in those bad days.

I noticed then that my scalp was tingling so severely that I also had goosebumps up and down my arms. The bus was air-conditioned but humid, so I assumed my physical reaction was to Jennie’s presence rather than the temperature around me. “Is Amanda going to die?” I whispered, dreading the answer.

“Yes. Unless…”

I sat up straighter in my seat.

“Someone else takes her place in line. That’s always how it works. A life for a life. An even trade.”

Of course. Amanda was the compromise. The spirits had left her clinging to life by a thread as a means of pulling Mischa’s puppet strings. They knew that there was no one in life for whom she’d be willing to kill other than Amanda. If they’d just let Amanda die quickly, they’d have no leverage over her anymore. This was their way of blackmailing her.

“Is Mischa mad at me?”

“Very mad,” Jennie confirmed. “She blames you. For everything.”

Great.

Jennie went on to tell me that I could trust Violet this time, and it would be foolish of me not to. Since the curse was no longer on her, it was as if she wasn’t even on their radar anymore. And Jennie seemed to think there was something else, something unrelated to Mischa, for which I’d require Violet’s assistance.

“It’s the house,” Jennie said, sounding confused. “It’s unclear. It just has to do with that house.”

The bus was pulling up to my stop, and as if she somehow knew that, Jennie said, “We can talk more later.”

She’d said she was “always here,” but that wasn’t true. I’d been listening for her voice for weeks, and I had never heard her this clearly before. “This radio station? Always?” I asked.