It wasn’t proof. Not wholly. The Brookhants students sang their yellow jacket song to a number of different tunes. Sometimes they didn’t even use a tune, instead offering it almost as a skip-rope chant. But Alex most certainly had heard them sing it to “Annie Lisle.” That was one of the melodies they favored for it—and their lyrics fit it well.

  Once (with the doctor’s blessing) they’d finally gotten Adelaide out of Libbie and Alex’s bed and back to her cottage—Spite Manor momentarily emptied of all Eckharts—Alex had tried to talk to Libbie about what they’d both heard Addie sing: lyrics belonging to a student song that she simply had no right, and no honest way, to know. But Libbie wouldn’t acknowledge how wrong it was for that song to issue from Addie’s mouth.

  Instead, she said that Adelaide might have overheard students singing it in any number of places, at any number of times. Out in the woods maybe, with Addie close by, going to or from her cottage. Or perhaps she’d been in the orchard when she’d heard it. Or working in the garden when a few of the girls had happened along. Libbie said that Adelaide herself probably didn’t know why she knew the song, or what it meant—she’d just picked it up.

  Alex did not believe this reasoning sound. Adelaide had only been with them since August and, to Alex’s knowledge, had never yet had occasion to meet any of the students, who would have had to roam through the woods for quite a long time in order to get close enough to Spite Manor to be overheard. But Libbie said she would not discuss the matter further, and when Alex had tried to reposition her argument—to make it again, and better—Libbie had simply refused to take it up.

  The mound of trifle on the table before her now seemed to slide and bubble, folding in on itself like the ground in the Tricky Thicket. Watching it made Alex bubble up too with a sour burp she hid behind her hand. She did not want to eat even a single bite of this dessert. But Hanna was right: almond cake, which apparently made up one of the trifle’s layers, was usually a personal favorite, something she even requested from time to time. Hanna and Adelaide both would be hurt or would act hurt—Adelaide especially—if she did not seem to make at least a little progress with it.

  She was sure this dessert was some attempt at a peace offering from the young maid.

  Alex picked up her spoon and nudged at the trifle. The cake was so spongy it trembled. She imagined the rank vapors from the haddock and the dead bouquet draping themselves over it, forcing her to ingest them as well.

  She wondered where she might hide a portion. Just on the other side of the sliding door, in the hall, were two large ferns in brass pots. If she was sure to clear the contents as soon as Hanna and Adelaide left that night for their cottages, Alex thought the plants’ long fronds would disguise her dumping grounds for now.

  But as she listened for Hanna at the door, and already gripping the edge of the trifle dish in anticipation of moving quickly, Alex thought, quite suddenly, of her stern grandparents and their dining table, with its elaborate rules and procedures and endless, to her child’s mind, dinners. After her father’s death, while she was still getting used to the run of her grandparents’ household, she had often done something similar: hiding bits of unwanted food about the room as soon as the meal was finally over.

  Alex told herself that she was no longer that silent child, the nuisance with oyster oil dribbled on her skirt. This was where she lived now, where she had made a life with her Libbie, and she would not hide unwanted food in the plants in her own dining room.

  She did not wish to remain at the table a moment more. She set down her spoon and readied to push back her chair. In the center of her vision, the dish of trifle remained untouched.

  And yet, Hanna had said that Adelaide had made the dessert especially for Alex. She would be disappointed if Alex did not eat any. And Hanna too would notice and remark upon it. Hanna was often so strained with Alex. Always, really—there’d been a strain with Hanna, because she was Harold’s servant first and to Harold her loyalties remained.

  Alex again picked up her spoon. She would not hide the trifle in the ferns. And she would not refuse it. She would eat three large bites, each followed by a hearty swallow of water, and that would be that.

  She managed the first well enough. The cake layer was good, the same flavor as always, but the custard was too thick and the syrup on the apple-and-nut mixture too generously spiced—the flecks of clove and cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg were large and overpowering, as if they had not been properly ground. Even after she’d chewed and swallowed the bite, she could still feel their bulky remains speckling her tongue and lodged in her molars.

  She took several sips of water, swishing them about her mouth before swallowing. As she scooped her next bite, she tried to think of something other than what she was doing. What came to her was the scene that afternoon with Josephine and Camille. There was something about the book—the red book that Camille had concealed—that was amiss.

  Alex wished she’d held on to that copy of The Beetle and not handed it back over to trying Camille Andrews. She replayed the moment when she’d seen the girl slip it into her coat. She wondered if perhaps Camille actually had two books tucked away beneath her clothing—The Beetle and Mary MacLane’s—but she’d shown Libbie and Alex only the one that wouldn’t get her into trouble.

  And why hadn’t Alex pulled the slip of paper from it, or opened to the page that held it? Now it felt like that paper had quite literally been a warning flag flapping from the book. What if it was the missing page from Flo and Clara’s copy of the MacLane? It might have been! And how would Alex ever know now? She couldn’t trust Josephine or Camille to tell her the truth.

  She brought the second bite of trifle to her lips, over her lips, into her mouth. She meant to swallow it without chewing but found she could not do so. Always before she’d thought the Brookhants Black Oxfords the best variety of apple for winter-keeping she’d ever known, but those used in this dessert were mealy and dry. They seemed to wrap around her teeth and suck the moisture from her tongue. And then there were those too-big spices again, even more of them in this bite. Only, when she crunched one between her teeth, a very hard piece, like a jagged pebble, it did not bring the sharp taste of nutmeg or clove. It did not taste like a piece of burnt walnut or peppery cinnamon, either. Instead, it released the botanical taste of wood pulp, or that of a particularly bitter seed.

  She drank more water. She drained her glass, in fact, and got up to refill it herself from the pitcher on the sideboard. As she sat back down, her stomach gurgling unpleasantly, she thought again of the novel Camille had produced that afternoon.

  Alex flashed upon that moment: the book in her hand as she looked down at it, after she’d taken it from them. It had that awful illustration of a large beetle crawling across it, one with thorny mandibles and a shiny exoskeleton tinted with glinting green.

  At once Alex knew, though she could not let herself believe it. She scooped from the trifle a portion of the fruit-and-nut mixture, one with an ample coating of syrup. She stood, holding her spoon up toward one of the electric sconces that jutted from the wall.

  She held her breath and squinted, letting the light shine through the mixture. Just as if she were holding some prehistoric piece of amber, the syrup lit up in the incandescent light and magnified its holdings: a jointed leg, a section of glassy black eye, one portion of striped thorax. Not spices at all, but bits of crushed insect.

  She dropped the spoon. It made only a hushed thud against the thick carpet. Its contents bounced off, some landing on the toe of her house slipper. Almost as a reflex, she stuck her index finger into her mouth, running it along the channel on the inside of her bottom lip, up against her gums. She scooped out a portion of the unchewed spices that had lodged there and held them to the light. On her finger was a wet mash of striped abdomen. And somehow even worse: a single yellow jacket wing in full.

  The vomit bubbled up in her throat. She wanted only to avoid the carpet, but it had been made to cover the whole floor, save a few inches along the walls, so Alex leaned over the table and did it there, rank bile and trifle splashing against the freesia droppings.

  Right after, she felt dizzy and weak. Emptied out. It was as if her whole body was made of that spongy almond cake. It couldn’t possibly keep her upright. And it did not. She slumped into a messy pile on the floor, her view of the room blurry, as if she needed to reposition the stereo card.

  She sensed the dark shape of someone at the door, footsteps coming toward her, a rustling of skirts. Then there was Hanna next to her saying, “Oh, Miss Trills—you really aren’t feeling well!”

  And then her blurry vision gave up for black.

  Even in East Bumblebuzzard, Rhode Island

  The convenience store in Tiverton, BETTY’S, according to the yellow-and-purple sign hanging above its door, smelled like astringent lemon floor cleaner and fresh popcorn. But it was the too-bright fluorescent lights that Merritt noticed first as she entered. They were abuzz. The whole store hummed with them.

  Audrey followed Harper straight to the churning neon slush of the Icee machine—ostensibly what they’d come for—as Merritt drifted down the candy aisle. She wasn’t looking for anything in particular but still found it uncomfortable to be this close to Harper without either of them having resolved whatever it was between them. If there ever was anything between them. And Merritt was sure that there had been. Right?

  There had been, Readers.

  “I don’t know,” Harper was now saying to Audrey. “I wouldn’t go for a blend on your first Icee voyage. Go simple, you know? Get to know the beverage before you get custom with it.”

  Merritt rolled her eyes for an audience of candy bars, all the shining cellophane and rainbow foil. She didn’t know how to do this with these two. She felt like she wasn’t doing it right and she hated that feeling. And the swarm in the woods? What was that, really?

  The door dinged as three people entered the store together. They were late teens or just tipping over into their twenties. The one in front had a John Waters moustache and a sky-blue tank top and skinny joggers covered in pink roses. The other two had on wispy white beach coverups, their bikini straps poking through at select places. They smelled of sunscreen and pot, a lot of pot, Merritt realized as they passed her in the aisle, their flip-flops slapping—sand sprinkling onto the floor.

  “God, it’s cold in here,” the one trailing the other two, the caboose, said as they went around Merritt. That one still wore sunglasses—despite being indoors and despite it being night outside, anyway. The sunglasses now looked Merritt up and down, an obvious appraisal. “You have great fucking hair.”

  “Thank you,” Merritt said.

  “You do!” Harper yelled from over by the Icee machine. “I’ve said it myself.”

  The group of pot-smoking beachgoers laughed at something privately funny as they made their selections in the beverage cooler: two grapefruit and one lime seltzers.

  “Hot Cheetos yes, hot Cheetos no?” Moustache asked the other two.

  “What a question,” Harper answered for them, her mega-cup Icee in hand, red straw at the ready. “Always yes.”

  “Oh my God!” Sunglasses said, doubling back toward her in disbelief. “Oh my fucking God. You’re Harper Harper!” Sunglasses now turned toward Merritt and asked, “It is, right? It’s her?”

  Merritt wasn’t sure if she should—

  “Oh no way,” Moustache said, coming down an adjacent aisle so that he shot out near to where Harper was standing, which was right about in the middle of the store. “No way, no way. We were just watching your ghost post—like in the car before we came in. Terrifying.”

  “You don’t even know how much I love you right now,” Harper said, stepping forward and clapping Moustache across the back, as natural as could be. “Did you hear that, Merritt? My ghost post.”

  “Oh absolutely,” Moustache said. “Hundred percent it was a ghost. It was one of the dead girls.”

  “It was!” the beachgoer next to Merritt said to the two of them. And then to Merritt, more quietly, “I’m, like, shaking right now. You know her?”

  “I do,” Merritt said. She’d lost track of the other one and then saw her walking down the chip aisle with her phone up and recording. Of course that.

  “Hi, I’m Asha,” that one now called, waving with her nonphone hand. “I hope this is OK! I cannot believe you’re here right now.”

  “I am here,” Harper said, waving at Asha’s phone as she held up her Icee. “A toast to Betty’s in Tiverton, Rhode Island,” she said into the camera.

  “Thank you from Betty,” the woman behind the front counter said, deadpan as fuck.

  “Shit, are you really Betty?” Harper said, turning toward her. “As in the Betty from the sign?”

  “None other,” the woman said. “You must have a sign somewhere,” she added. Then she gestured to Asha, who had moved a few steps closer but was still videoing Harper. “They seem to know you like you do.”

  “Her sign is Scorpio and she’s got twenty-two million followers,” Moustache said.

  “Huh,” Betty said.

  “Is this still real life?” Sunglasses asked Merritt.

  “No,” Merritt said.

  “I didn’t think so,” Sunglasses said, drifting to the center of the store to join the other two in orbit around the blazing sun of Harper Harper.

  They took a lot of selfies. Or quadruplies. Harper talked them into Icees and insisted on serving them up, the largest size for each.

  Merritt knew how this worked. She’d been in the Metal Mug parking lot, after all. So while selfie station was happening, Merritt and Audrey joined up to hover like maiden aunts at a bridal shower. It wasn’t that Harper didn’t try to grab them to pose too, it’s that they both shrank from her gestures of inclusion. And Harper being Harper, she didn’t make a whole thing about it, which was good, especially since the three beachgoers didn’t seem to notice.

  As Audrey was paying for the Icees, Betty at the counter—her hair a cascade of black curls, her contouring flawless, and her hoop earrings the width of Starbucks grande cups—asked, “She’s one of them making the movie over at the school? The devil thing?”

  “Yes,” Audrey said.

  “Really it’s more of a curse thing,” Merritt said.

  “And how are you two involved?” Betty asked.

  “Just part of the production,” Audrey said, answering for them both, which Merritt was, in this instance, grateful for. Above them the fluorescent lights hummed.

  “Hey, any chance you’re a local?” Audrey asked Betty.

  “I guess so. People around here seem to want five generations’ worth to count, but I’ve got thirty-plus years here, so.”

  “You definitely count,” Audrey said. “What do you know about Brookhants? I mean, if you don’t mind saying. Like what have you heard about it being haunted or whatever?”

  Merritt was surprised by Audrey’s tenacity in this line of questioning.

  “I mean, like I said, I only know it’s bad vibes over there,” Betty said. “I had friends in high school who went out there to mess around, or they said they were, but I never did it. I don’t play with devil stuff.”

  “So you heard it was like demonic or something?” Audrey asked.

  “I mean, yeah, I guess. People would go light black candles there on Halloween and play Bloody Mary or whatever. Or Ouija boards.” Betty nodded as she remembered. “That was it—they’d bring a Ouija board and try to talk to the dead girls. I’m not trying to mess with dead girls.”

  “OhmyGodIloveyousomuch!” one of the beachgoers said to Harper, like they were making a wish.

  “She’s a big deal, huh?” Betty asked. It seemed to delight her to be puzzled about how and why that could possibly be true.

  “Harper Harper,” Merritt said. “When you have a sec, google Harper Harper.”

  “That’s her name?” Betty asked. “Harper Harper?”

  “Just google it,” Merritt said. Betty pulled her cell phone out from somewhere behind the counter and Merritt took that as her cue, or their cue. She didn’t think she had the wherewithal for another parking lot paparazzi fest with Harper tonight. “Shall we?” she asked as she turned from the counter toward Harper and her fans. “Ready to go, Harper?”

  Harper was just then signing Moustache’s tank top. “I can be,” she said, finishing. “Asha, Mackenzie, Bryce, it’s been a pleasure.”

  It was almost too much, Merritt thought. All of this was really too much.

  “This is the best night of my life,” Asha said. “You are a dream human.”

  “Love you!” Harper said, pushing the door open to the night. After the air-conditioning of the store, the asphalt under their feet seemed to throw its heat up at them.

  “Even at a convenience store in East Bumblebuzzard, Rhode Island,” Merritt said as they reached the SUV.

  “Even what?” Harper asked.

  Farther down along the strip mall, Carl spotted them and pointed the key fob in their direction. There was a beep and a click as the doors unlocked.

  “Even what?” Harper asked again, like she was anticipating liking Merritt’s answer.

  But before Merritt could give it, the beachgoers—Asha, Mackenzie, and Bryce—came running at full force out of the store and toward the SUV. Toward our heroines.

  They’d been momentarily entranced, Merritt thought, by the total surprise of this movie star in their local haunt—and maybe by the pot they’d smoked, too—but once Harper had left, that trance was snapped and they’d realized their missed opportunity. They wanted more. Fans always do. And Harper was still right here, standing in their parking lot.

  “We know you, too!” Asha yelled at them, her flip-flops slapping across the asphalt. Merritt assumed she meant Audrey until Asha added, “You’re the one who kissed her! You wrote the book!”

  “Oh Jesus,” Merritt said, her heart rate ticking up as she opened the door nearest her and pushed herself inside. Audrey was close enough behind her that they pretty much climbed in as one. The smell of the apples Harper had brought in from the road was surprising in its intensity: cider sweet and trapped like a gas in the car. It nearly made Merritt gag.