“A miracle? You mean the cancer? Because she got better? But why—”

“The time for wondering is over!” Faye tossed a scrap of white cloth over her shoulder. “We’re going to the DoorWay House. Now!”

Part Five

THE BRANCH

Chapter 30

The woods were a different place at night. By day, the branches seemed to stretch toward the sun. By night, they seemed to reach out toward the path, wooden fingers ready to snatch. By day, the remaining leaves were small brown hands, waving gently, whispering crinkly hellos in the wind. By night, they were black, still whispering, but darkly, warningly. And the Spanish moss that danced by day wriggled like spiders’ legs, beckoned like witches’ fingers by night.

Faye and Wunder didn’t talk as they hurried down the path, but Davy kept up a squeaky ramble of terror.

“I don’t know about this, you two,” he kept saying. “I just don’t know about this.”

Wunder didn’t know about it either, but he knew that there was nothing else to do. He couldn’t put it off any longer. The questions that had been building and building for weeks—the questions he had been too afraid to ask anyone, even himself—it was time to ask them.

The sight of the house rising up beyond the live oak and the nearly bare trees, bone white in the moonlight, made Wunder shiver inside. The house seemed to tower above them, higher and higher the closer they got, all sharp points and odd angles.

There were no lights on. It was a house of shadows.

But the witch was on her porch. It was dark, so dark, but she was there. Rocking in the chair, her white clothing the only break in the blackness.

“I wasn’t expecting you tonight,” she said in her faraway voice. “Have you come for your letters?”

Wunder stood at the base of the porch steps. Faye was on one side of him, Davy on the other. He shook his head. “We read Mrs. Baum’s,” he replied. “What’s going to happen on November second?”

“That,” the witch said, “is up to you.” She stopped rocking. “Perhaps we should go inside. Tea, I think?”

“We don’t want any tea,” Faye told her. “Not even one drop. We just want to know the truth.”

The witch began to rock again. She considered them from her chair, her eyes two dark holes in a shadowed face.

“Did you deliver the letters?” she asked.

“Yes,” Wunder said.

“And?”

“We know that they’re for people who’ve had miracles happen to them,” he said. “And also had someone they love die.”

“That is a good theory,” the witch said. “Although not quite correct.”

“What’s incorrect about it, then?” Faye demanded.

“Who has experienced a miracle?” the witch said. “Everyone. And who has lost someone? Everyone. Everyone, everyone.”

This was what Wunder had been realizing as he delivered more and more letters, and as he stood in the school gym that night.

Everyone was connected to the miraculous. Everyone was connected to the dead.