I stumbled up my lawn and to my front door, and only then did I dare glance back. I turned to look as Jess and Melissa opened the front door, waving me inside. When I reached my foyer, I scanned the sidewalk.

Liz—Mavis—was gone. But the mist remained.

CHAPTER
28

What a nightmare.” Mark stood on our front lawn, one hand on his hip, and the other resting on a shovel. He shaded his eyes and surveyed the front yard. It was covered in dark brown patches of dead grass. The annuals planted by the Garden Club of Whispering Farms (of which Heather was the president, naturally) on the corner of Maple Leaf and Seneca Drives had wilted into a mushy pile, and the crab apple tree in the parkway in front of our house had turned black and lost all of its leaves overnight; it looked skeletal.

Bones, I thought as I shivered despite the morning humidity.

After I’d made sure Emily wasn’t seriously hurt, Melissa and Jess had helped me clean up the house and left shortly after. Well, they each took a long swig directly out of a bottle of white wine in my fridge for reinforcement before they walked out the door. The red wine was, of course, gone. We all said very little to each other, quietly trying to process what had happened.

“Del thinks it’s some kind of beetle infestation. Or maybe it’s related to the flies,” Mark said. He slumped forward on the shovel, a sheen of sweat on his brow. He was pale and looked like he needed a nap. He had come home last night after I texted that there had been an accident, and the second he walked in the door from Del’s house, I sent him to bed without explaining anything. While we were battling with Liz, the men were all drinking copious amounts of beer around the firepit.

I had woken up to a distant buzzing sound, which at first I’d thought was the Spadlowskis’ leaf blower again, but when I went downstairs, I shrieked for what felt like the thousandth time in twenty-four hours. Overnight, a fly infestation had overtaken my house. What looked like hundreds of slow-moving, fat black houseflies lazily lofted around our first floor, landing on the chandeliers and circling the can lights in the family room. I tried to kill as many as I could before I woke Mark up to run to the hardware store for flypaper and traps. Then we all went outside and hoped to come back in after a couple of hours to a house filled with fly corpses.

The kids had a bucket of chalk and were making hopscotch patterns on the driveway. Multicolored chalk dust ran up their arms and down their legs. Miraculously, Emily seemed unfazed by what had happened, although she had dark circles under her eyes, a physical reminder of what she had seen the night before.