“Tell Tricky I said hi,” Charlie said, turning, starting sleepily up the steps. “Night.”

“Can I come in your room after I’m done talking to him? I’ll just stay for a little while, then I’ll go to mine. I promise.”

Alice had yet to spend the night in her own room. She’d always complained bitterly about sharing a room with Charlie back in Cambridge. But now she was so used to sleeping next to her sister, matching breaths until she dropped off, that she practically couldn’t sleep alone. In any case, she didn’t want to.

“You know if you come into my room, you’ll stay the night. Be a big girl now and sleep in your own bed. And don’t bother giving me sad clown face.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Alice muttered. Not true. She was. She’d just been about to, in fact.

“Sweet dreams.”

“You too,” Alice said, with a sigh.

Alice waited until she heard Charlie’s bedroom door close, then looked down at her phone, about to answer it now that she had privacy. But she’d taken too long, and the call had gone to voice mail. Instead of calling back, she dropped her cell in her bag and sat down on the bottom step.

She was tired but keyed up at the same time, her mind racing. It was like finding out that Camilla had died deliberately rather than accidentally excited her, riled her up. She felt it explained something important, only she didn’t yet know what that something was. And then, all of a sudden, she did: the peculiar, heavy atmosphere of the house, the air of not-quite-rightness that hung over it, that’s what the suicide explained. The place wasn’t just sad, it was haunted. Okay, not haunted haunted, like literally haunted. There was no ghostie in a white bedsheet floating around at night, hiding behind doors and jumping out at people, yelling “Boo!” Haunted in a subtle way. But haunted nonetheless. Camilla had died in torment—why else do a Dukes of Hazzard off a bridge?—and her restless spirit could still be felt. Alice didn’t buy Charlie’s reasoning for the suicide. Sure, Camilla’s mother’s death would have been a horrible blow, devastating. Enough, though, to make a girl that beautiful and talented with a boy as wonderful as Tommy in love with her and a dad as rich and adoring as Richard taking care of her to believe that life was no longer worth living? No way. There was more to this story. Alice could feel it in her bones.