“Don’t touch that,” Henry warned as I instinctively reached to pop the door open. I set the radio upright on the workbench again and slapped the top of it, causing it to spit out one last burst of static. With it, I heard just the last snippet of Candace’s voice uttering the last name—other than Henry’s—that I wanted to consider for the role of bait.

And then… the radio went silent.

“What’s happening?” Henry asked. “Can you still hear her?”

I twisted the radio’s tuner in both directions, but Candace was gone.

CHAPTER 9

IT SHOULD BE ME.”

Henry had ignored my request that he turn down my mom’s invitation to our house for dinner, and had rung our doorbell at six o’clock carrying a bouquet of flowers from the grocery store. When I answered the door, I looked up and down the block in a state of heightened paranoia, terrified that Trey might be lurking behind a bush, watching and making an incorrect assumption about why Henry had come over. But I had to assume that Trey’s instinct was to stay as far away from our street as he could get, which didn’t make me feel much better since most businesses in town were still closed because of tornado damage.

I was grateful for Henry’s company. His presence at the dinner table distracted Mom from the fact that I felt too queasy to eat. I still hadn’t put together any kind of strategy for finding Trey, and had yet to find any comfort in Candace’s recommendation. I was mentally freaking out a little bit.

We sat in the kitchen, speaking in hushed tones over cups of coffee while Mom and Glenn watched a British baking show in the living room.

“No,” I disagreed. “It can’t be you! We have no idea what we’re doing. What if we mess something up and you get stuck with the curse? I may be dead within the next two weeks. Then you’d be on your own.”

Henry refused to look me in the eye. “Don’t say that.”

“Well, it’s true,” I insisted. “Watch this.” I reached for the salt shaker at the center of the table and poured a little mountain into my cupped hand. Then I overturned my hand to dump it on the table, which was covered in a white tablecloth.

“What are you doing?” Henry asked.

I answered, “Look. It’s gone.”

As soon as I’d gotten home from his house earlier that afternoon, I’d tossed salt to the east, suspicious that what had happened at Violet’s house that day might have changed the outcome of Mrs. Robinson’s salt test. No longer was salt that I’d touched turning red when it hit the ground. Now it was simply vanishing the instant it left my hand.

Henry patted the tablecloth where the salt should have landed, and then licked his fingertip, touched the tablecloth, and held his fingertip up to his eye for close examination. “What the hell?!” he exclaimed. “How did you do that?”