I stand there at a loss, searching my brain for a way to get him to talk—a way to pull out the secrets that are so close, I can almost taste them.

“But don’t you hate witches, too?” I try. “Don’t all ghosts hate the witches?”

He shrugs. “Witches are no business of mine. Only my house. MY house.”

I look down at my fingers, thinking and thinking. And then it comes to me.

“What if I promised, once this is all over, that I’d figure out a way to get my mom to move out of this house?” To be honest, I’m not sure I can make this happen, but if I can fight the Memory Thief and break my mom’s curse, it seems like moving would be the least of my worries.

The Murderer is silent a moment, as if considering, but then he shakes his head. “Don’t think so. No. Don’t think so at all. Don’t believe a promise like that.”

I look at him for a long time, and my eyes trail to the mark around his neck. A question pops into my mind.

“What did you do, that was so bad that they hung you? Why do they call you ‘the Murderer’?”

In less than a second, the Murderer is moving. He zips toward me, and stops just within an inch of me, and across the room, the axe falls off the wall. His face is in my face, his red eyes boring into mine.

“GET OUT,” he hisses.

I back away slowly, to the bottom of the stairs, then run up, taking them two at a time. I slam the door behind me, though I know doors don’t help. And I try to catch my breath.

The Murderer is a dead end too.

CHAPTER 16

On Monday, two days till the dark moon, I skip school for the first time in my life. I convince my mom to cover for me. Turns out, it doesn’t take much.

“I’ll dial,” I say, standing by her computer as she punches data from an enormous book of numbers onto her keyboard. “And then you just read this,” I say. “Okay?”

Mom barely glances from the screen as she nods. “Okay,” she says.

I lay a sheet of paper down in front of her that explains I won’t be in today because I have a cold. And then I dial the phone. And though she sounds like a robot as she reads my script to the person who answers, she is polite and unmistakably, at least, my mother.

“Thanks,” I say as she hangs up. I give her a kiss on the cheek, and she flinches.

I curl onto the couch with The Witch Hunter’s Guide, and that is where I spend my morning, looking for anything I’ve missed.

I read “Secrets of the Earth and Moon,” which gets increasingly stranger as I read.