Chapter One
THE SOUND PIERCES THE NIGHT.
One moment Sienna’s wrapped in sleep, and the next, she’s upright, looking for Edgar, grasping in the darkness for the lamp on the table beside her bed and finding only air, before remembering this isn’t her bed, her room, her house.
Somewhere, a door slams open, footsteps pound down the hall, voices shouting, and somehow Malcolm is still asleep.
She shoves him, saying, “Get up, get up,” until he finally groans and rolls over, lets out a groggy blur of expletives as Sienna lurches through the pitch-black room, hissing in pain as her hip collides with the corner of the desk before she finds the door.
She plunges out into the hall, trading the heady darkness for the thin light of moonlit glass and a handful of lamps left on below.
Jaxon is stumbling out of his room, too, wearing nothing but boxers and an open robe, clutching a closed umbrella as if it were a sword.
Which is ironic, considering there are weapons everywhere.
Malcolm shuffles up behind Sienna. “What the devil is going on?” he growls.
“Someone screamed.” Sienna is sure the sound was coming from their wing, which means—
“Millie.”
They round the corner and find Millie sitting on the runner, her back against her door and her knees to her chest, looking shaken.
“Who did it?” she whimpers.
Sienna sinks to her knees beside the girl as Priscilla arrives, hair in a pink bonnet, followed by Kenzo, who looks like he never went to bed. Cate appears last, wide-eyed and worried, a green tartan throw around her shoulders.
Concern ripples through the gathering.
“What’s going on?”
“What is it?”
“Who’s hurt?”
“This isn’t funny,” says Millie, clutching her legs as her gaze scrapes across the group. “I want to know who did it.”
“Did what, Millie?” asks Malcolm gently.
Millie sniffles. “I couldn’t sleep,” she says. “I thought, screw it, right? Might as well get up and work. But when I got to my desk, it was there.”
Sienna coaxes Millie to her feet, and Malcolm puffs up his chest and brings his hand to the doorknob, glancing back at them all before leading the charge into the room.
The lights are on, and it takes a second for Sienna’s eyes to adjust. She turns toward the desk, half expecting to find a dead animal, or blood, some gruesome scene painted on the desktop or the walls.
But the only things cluttering the surface are a sleeve of multicolored pens, a journal, and the typewriter, a sheet of pale-blue paper—Millie’s designated color—fed into the roller.
At first Sienna thinks it’s blank, but when she leans closer, she sees the neat black type.
Two words in the center of the page.
GET OUT.
Sienna rolls her eyes. All this fuss, over what’s obviously a stupid prank. She pulls the paper out and passes it around, studying their faces as they see what’s printed.
Priscilla frowns. Cate says, “Creepy.” Kenzo cocks his head.
But Sienna notices the corner of Jaxon’s mouth twitch upward in a smirk.
Asshole, she thinks.
“Jesus, Mill,” he says, passing the paper on. “We thought something was actually wrong.”
“It is!” snaps Millie from the doorway.
“Maybe this place is haunted,” says Cate.
Kenzo and Priscilla exchange a look.
“I think the far more likely answer,” ventures Priscilla, “is that this is just a tasteless prank.”
“But how did they get in?” Millie wraps her arms around her ribs. “The door was locked.”
A nervous shiver runs through the room.
“Are you sure?” asks Malcolm. “We were all tired. It would have been easy to forget—”
Millie shakes her head as she drifts step by cautious step into the room. “When you grow up with a little sister, you learn to keep your things secure. I always lock my bedroom door. Even at home. It’s just habit. I didn’t forget.”
That does make it weird, but half the people in this house have written mysteries set in locked rooms, and the answer is never ghosts.
It’s Occam’s razor, like Malcolm said: The simplest answer is usually right.
Sienna looks around, thinking about all the strange things she’s learned to do over the years in the name of research.
Surely more than one of them knows how to pick a lock.
“In that case,” says Sienna, “someone broke in. Obviously someone”—she pauses long enough to glare at Jaxon, who lifts his hands, as if to say Don’t shoot—“is trying to rattle you.”
“Which means,” adds Kenzo cheerfully, “they see you as a threat.”
“Stiff upper lip, dear Millie,” offers Malcolm with a yawn.
“All right,” says Priscilla with a tired sigh. “It’s late. And we have a lot of work to do, so I think we should all go back to bed.”
“I can’t sleep in here!” yelps Millie.
“Look at it this way,” says Jaxon. “If there is a ghost, they’ll find you wherever you go. But you’re welcome to share my bed.” He grins, adding, “I’ll protect you.”
The whole room turns on him then, tempers kicking off, from Malcolm, who looks ready to box his ears, to Cate, who’s shaking her head in disgust, Priscilla, who’s pinching the bridge of her nose, and Kenzo, who simply mutters “Dick.”
“It was a joke!” Jaxon says, shoving his hands in the pockets of his robe.
“Get out,” says Sienna, pointing at the door.
“Just trying to lighten the mood,” Jaxon mutters as Kenzo grabs his shoulders and ushers him back into the hall.
Priscilla pauses in the doorway. “There are plenty of places to sleep,” she says. “You’re welcome to find one.”
Cate lingers. “You can share my room,” she offers. “It’s very . . . green. Aggressively so. But as far as I can tell, no ghosts.”
Millie sniffles and shakes her head, gathering her nerve.
“No,” she says, wiping her nose. “It’s fine. I’ll stay.”
“That’s our girl,” says Malcolm, patting her shoulder.
Millie’s gaze flicks back to the typewriter. “I don’t know how I didn’t hear it,” she murmurs. “I should have heard it, right?”
Sienna frowns. That’s true.
“Could it have been there when you went to bed?” asks Priscilla, but Millie shakes her head, on the verge of tears again.
“A mystery.” Malcolm scratches his chin as he drifts toward the device. He feeds a fresh sheet of blue paper onto the roll and types the message out again. The sound is loud and crisp. He ejects the sheet and studies it, alongside the original note.
“Ha!” he says, donning the air of a classic detective. “Have a look at this.” He hands the original sheet of pale-blue paper to Sienna. “What do you see?”
Millie and Cate both lean in, peering over her shoulder. It takes her tired brain a moment, but then the penny drops. Or rather, the letter.
The G in GET OUT is offset, the bottom edge landing below the other five letters. The crookedness stands out. Typewriters aren’t like fingerprints. They’re not meant to be unique.
“Whoever wrote this,” says Sienna, “they didn’t do it in here. Their typewriter has a fault, and yours doesn’t.”
“What if we got samples from the other rooms?” asks Cate.
“Bright girl,” says Malcolm, beaming like a proud father. “That’s an excellent idea. After all, humans lie, but machines do not.”
“I mean, they do,” says Kenzo. “Just look at AI. But this is analog equipment. Old-fashioned, honest. I say we test it.”
“Count me out,” says Jaxon. “What happened to the right to privacy? I don’t need you all snooping in my shit.”
“You sound pretty defensive,” says Kenzo. “Care to confess?”
“I would, if it were me. But it’s not. Besides, if the culprit broke into Millie’s room, they could break into anyone’s. One of you could be trying to set me up.”
It’s not a terrible point, but the way Jaxon says it isn’t doing him any favors. Besides, he strikes Sienna as exactly the type to pull this shit. But she doesn’t push it. Millie’s got a soft spot for him—God knows why—and there’s no sense upsetting her any more tonight.
“We’ll talk about this in the morning,” says Priscilla. “But the good news, Millie, is that I think we can now rule out an angry ghost.”
Millie looks at least a little mollified, but Cate pulls her throw closer. “If a house were haunted, it’d be this one.”
“Not a specter,” declares Malcolm. “Just a jealous competitor.”
Sienna rubs the girl’s back. “Do you want something,” she asks gently, “to help you sleep? I’ve got some pills.”
Has Millie ever taken sleeping meds? she wonders, belatedly. If not, how much harm could one little pill do? On second thought, she doesn’t know if they’ve expired—do sleeping pills expire? She should check. She reaches on instinct for the cell in her pocket before remembering it isn’t there.
In the end, it doesn’t matter. Millie shakes her head. “No thanks,” she says, looking around her room. “I’ll . . . just keep the lights on.”
“Okay,” says Sienna with another yawn. “We’re just down the hall. Knock if you need us.”
Millie bites her lip. “Yeah. Thanks.”
They leave her in her well-lit room and step back into the darkened hall.
Cate trudges back toward the other wing, wrapped in her tartan shawl, and Sienna yawns yet again as she turns, the brief surge of adrenaline retreating like a tide, sleep dragging in its wake.
A tide . . . it reminds her, she’d been having such a nice dream.
She was sitting on a beach somewhere, a blank expanse of sand and shore and sun, not a soul in sight.
She was stretched on a beach chair beneath a bright-blue canopy, laptop open, and she was writing.
It was good, too, whatever she was writing. She knew that much, even though she couldn’t see the screen. Her fingers flew across the keyboard, the idea tumbling out the way it used to, when she was first starting out, when there was no pressure, no one to impress but herself.
She reaches their room, Malcolm muttering something about ungodly hours and piss-poor pranks, but she isn’t listening.
No, she’s closing her eyes and crawling back into bed, convinced that maybe, just maybe, if she tries hard enough, she can get back there, to that empty beach, to that waiting chair, to that blinking cursor.
Maybe, just maybe, she’ll be able to see what she’d written on the screen.