“Did you like growing up here?”

“It’s what I knew,” he said. “I thought it was normal.”

“When I first came here, I thought your mom was just kind of anxious,” I said.

“She is,” he said.

“No, but . . . it’s more than that. It’s like she’s worried all the time. It’s not just about Agatha.”

“You think that has something to do with her sister dying?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Depends on how she died.”

“We never played with other kids,” Barrett said thoughtfully. “And when we did, we weren’t allowed to go into the closed-off wings. Mom’s big on not letting the cold air out, or the hot air in, or whatever, I don’t know.” He frowned, his forehead creasing. “I had one friend for a while—a kid we met at the grocery store in town. I basically forced Mom to invite him over. His mother drove him here, and the moms sat and talked while we played. We were having fun, but Mom called for us and we didn’t come right away—and then she yelled at us both. So his mom got mad at my mom, and we never saw them again.”

“Why did she yell?” I asked.

He shrugged. “At the time I didn’t know. But there are a lot of weird things in a house like this. Exposed wiring, random places you could get stuck. There used to be a dumbwaiter, like a tiny elevator, in the storage room off the kitchen—well, it’s still there but we don’t use it. Apparently when my grandfather was a kid, one of the maids lost a finger trying to send a mop and bucket to the second floor, and Mom forbade us from even opening the doors. She caught me trying to climb in once and freaked out. Like, shaking, she was so scared.”

“Sometimes I wonder how everybody’s not scared all the time,” I said. “When you have a family you love and everybody leaves the house in the morning—don’t you think, What if that’s the last time I ever see them?”

He was frowning deeply. “I never did before. But . . . when Agatha got sick, I think I did feel that way. Only it was too late. The last time I talked to her, we were arguing. And then it was like she changed into a different person. I go over that conversation in my head every day.”

“What were you arguing about?”