“We had never had children of our own, and we were going to just keep the child ourselves. We never meant to hurt anyone.” Susan’s voice was trembling. “I promise you that.”

  “But the police said she just disappeared?”

  “It was a hard secret to pull off, but we were quiet, and Lacie was so good about it. She loved it here, being out from under your mother’s thumb, and of course having all the attention on her.”

  Kate sat down, her legs shaking beneath her. “I just don’t remember any of this.”

  “No one knew. We were her secret keepers,” Susan said proudly. “We took that role very seriously.”

  “Did you… did you kill Charlie?” Kate had so many questions she needed answered, but at this moment, that one mattered the most.

  “No, no, of course not. I know this is so much for you to take on, you must believe that Doug and I never meant to hurt anyone.”

  “I don’t believe much of anything, this is all so confusing. What happened to her the months before she gave birth?” Kate had too many questions now flooding her brain. “Where was she all that time? Here?”

  Susan took a deep breath. “You really don’t remember? I wondered, over the years, if you ever would. We just assumed that you were traumatized from the guilt. You knew there was so much more you could have done for her, but you just left.”

  “She was here all along,” Kate said.

  Susan nodded. “Come, I’ll show you.” Kate followed her to the back of the cottage where there was the door hidden by pantry shelves. Like Villa Magda, the cottage was full of secrets. Kate stopped coming to the cottage after Lacie had vanished. It was too painful for her.

  Susan slowly opened the secret door.

  “She stayed here, and we took care of Lacie together for a while, and then you had to leave. She was devastated, losing you, but we told her you would be back.”

  “You took a young girl and played pretend with her life!” Kate felt her blood run cold. “You were manipulating both of us, just so you could have the baby you always wanted. Just because you couldn’t … We trusted you. We were both just kids.”

  Lacie had been here all along, locked away like some doomed princess in a castle. And Kate knew. Kate could have helped her. But instead she was too weak and pretended not to know. Her anger toward herself began to rise in her throat. She wanted to scream and run out of there, take Andrew, and never look back—but she needed to hear more. She needed to know what exactly had happened to Lacie. So she followed Susan just as Lacie had done all those years ago, behind the door.

  “But what happened to her then? Where is she now?” Kate stammered, already knowing the answer in her heart.

  On the wall hung a photo. There they all were—Susan and Doug with Lacie. And then there was another photo of Chloe and Susan. Chloe looked just like Lacie.

  “Chloe…” Kate said right before she heard a shrill crack, a searing pain shooting through her head, and it all went dark.

  Images of Lacie running in the woods in her white dress swirled around in Kate’s head, along with Alice’s voice chanting in a grating rhythm.

  She was as pretty as a swan

  Which made her sister want her gone

  So she locked her in her room

  And slowly brought her to her doom.

  Kate was running after her, but she only got further and further away until all Kate could see was a tiny white dot in the blackness. Kate pried her eyes open, adjusting to the darkness. She could hear voices: Susan, Doug, and someone else.

  “You didn’t have to hit her so hard,” Susan said in a low voice.

  “She’s starting to remember and put everything together. We just can’t take the chance anymore, this has to be over with her now. Why did you let her come back to the house in the first place?” the voice said.

  “We tried. We told her we would take care of everything, but she insisted on seeing the house one last time. You know Katie, once she puts her mind to something, there is no talking her out of it.”

  Kate felt intense pressure in her temple and a warm gooey substance on the side of her head, probably blood. She slowly looked around the dark room, her eyes adjusting until she could make out her surroundings. Her hands were immobile, and it took her a moment to realize she had been tied to a small cot. Was it the same cot where Lacie had slept? The room looked like a replica of Lacie’s room up in the villa: books, an art easel with a painting of the house. Nothing had changed. They had kept the room like this for years. Kate tried to pull on the rope around her wrists but it was firmly tied. She hoped that Darien would come looking for her—or someone, anyone. She couldn’t disappear like Lacie had, alone here in this room.

  “She’s awake,” Doug said.

  “She’s going to need stitches.”

  “Aunt Susan. We don’t have time for this,” the voice said firmly.

  “We can’t keep her here too long,” Doug said.

  Kate saw a bassinet in the corner. The baby. Lacie’s baby. Chloe? Could it actually be true?

  Kate looked at them, hardly able to get words out, searing pain shooting through her head. The voice. Aunt Susan. A man. Kate realized in horror whom that voice belonged to.

  “Darien…” she said as she focused on the third dark figure. The voice. Mix the letters, make out the name.

  D A R I E N / A D R I E N.

  The name on the Reddit thread, Adrien_A_69—the A in the book. He had been with Lacie. He was the boy she was referring to; he was why Susan was her special secret keeper. He was the father of Lacie’s baby, not Charlie. Kate struggled to look up, squinting through the pain, and saw him standing there.

  “Why did you give me the file?” Kate had a feeling she knew, but wanted to hear him explain.

  “You already had it in your head that Charlie was lying. I needed to nudge you in that direction,” Darien said. “I wish you would have just stayed away. You shouldn’t have come back… you had that memory issue, and that was fine with us. But this afternoon, when you came to the police station, you said her name. You said Alice. And you had the book. And I knew we couldn’t just let you go.” His eyes bored through her.

  She took a deep breath, mustering up every ounce of strength she had—and screamed. She was as loud as she could manage, but she knew no one would hear her. Everyone was gone, everyone but Andrew. Her blood ran cold. What if they hurt her son? Darien hit her hard to get her to stop screaming.

  “Quiet down!” His voice was loud and hard. Kate winced.

  “She loved Darien. They were both just lonely kids,” Susan said.

  “I wasn’t ready to have a baby and neither was she, but she got it in her head that we would get married. I mean, she was sixteen, and I was only seventeen. I had dreams of leaving this town. I was scared. We thought that we could change her mind. I tried telling her it would be okay, but she started getting angry, cruel even. She said she would tell everyone we kidnapped her. After the baby was born, it got worse. She was supposed to go back home and pretend nothing had happened, but she was making all these demands.”

  “So you killed her,” Kate said, suddenly seeing where he was going.

  Darien stared at her, his voice flat. “I didn’t want that to happen, none of us did. But I would have gone to jail. Susan and Doug would have lost everything. And it was almost too easy to keep it a secret. Your father fled like a coward and took you with him, and Gail was always too drunk to notice anything. But over the last few months, she started getting suspicious. The only way to keep our secret was to stop her from digging. But then you showed up.”

  She’d thought she wanted answers, but the truth was tearing her apart, nausea rising in her as she thought about them murdering her little sister. “You were supposed to look out for her,” she cried as she looked at Susan and Doug. She swallowed down her fear and looked up at Darien, another truth dawning. “You killed my mother. And you killed Charlie.”

  “Charlie was purely an accident. The night of your birthday, he called me to come back. He knew about the baby and wanted to find out how much I knew. Chloe had confronted him, she figured it out. We were always afraid she might. But she thought Charlie was her father. We had no choice when it came to your mother. She was starting to wonder why Chloe looked so much like Lacie. She wanted to see her, talk to her. At first, we let her, but then she started asking too many questions. We were worried that she was going to say something to you.”

  “Her tea. You poisoned her,” Kate realized, turning to Susan.

  “She already wanted to die; Doug and I just helped her.”

  “She loved you. How could you?”

  “She never loved us,” Susan spat. “We were just ‘the help,’ and she never failed to remind us of that. Gail didn’t love Villa Magda; she just loved the status it gave her in town. Your mother never cared about the town until she had us put on her stupid little garden parties with her rich friends who thought they were better than us. We weren’t family until she had no family.”

  “I never knew you felt this way,” Kate whispered.

  “We didn’t think you would ever come back. You had been gone so long.” Susan ignored Kate’s comment. “I told you we would take care of the memorial, her things. You should have just stayed away.”

  “You gave me those files, the photo, all lies, to get me to remember a different past. To manipulate my memory,” Kate said. She was filled with rage, she wanted to kill him. As always Charlie had been trying to protect her. “Is this what Carl was trying to tell me, that day in the house?”

  “We didn’t intend for him to find out, but he walked in one day and found Lacie in the house. We couldn’t risk him telling anyone, so we paid off his brother to keep Carl quiet as best he could,” Darien said, his eyes wild. He reminded Kate of a feral animal.

  “Where is Chloe?” she demanded. Kate remembered what Ben had told her: “She’s obsessed with you and your sister.”

  “She’s safe with Barbara,” Darien said, leaning close to Kate’s face. “I loved you, Katie. We were supposed to be together, but then Charlie came along and you fell in love.”

  “So you went after my sister to make me jealous?”

  “I tried, but Lacie became obsessed. She gave us no option, we did what we had to do.”

  “And now you’re going to kill me, too,” Kate said.

  “I don’t want to. I really don’t. But you know all our secrets. We can’t trust that you won’t say anything.” His voice was cold.

  Kate felt the horror of what they were saying fill her. “What about Chloe—she knows some of the secrets.”

  “We’ll worry about her later, she doesn’t know enough now to hurt us,” Darien said as he untied Kate’s hands. “And she will now think that her aunt killed her mother and father.”

  Kate was terrified. “You’re all crazy. This can’t go on forever, all these secrets. This entire town, one big secret.”

  “You’re right. They’ll die, finally, with you. You are the only one that we have to worry about, and after tonight we won’t have to ever again,” Darien said as he sighed, his eyes glittering and sharp. Kate could practically see the adrenaline pumping through his veins.

  “When we were kids, you wanted to burn Villa Magda down to the ground. Well, why don’t we make that happen?” Darien said. “It’s just you and Andrew, the rest of them are gone, and you can join Lacie and Charlie.”

  Kate stood up, her head still burning with pain. She longed for Charlie; he would have saved her. Her poor dear Charlie.

  “It would’ve been different, if we had continued after that day in the garden, when we kissed. I know you felt what I did. You lingered, but then that was it. You ignored me after that as if it never happened,” Darien said.

  Kate looked at Darien. “I would have never been with you. You’re just a weak loser,” Kate spat at him.

  Darien slapped her, drawing blood on her lip. He shoved her toward the door, digging his fingernails into her arm.

  The house loomed above, waiting, as they left the cottage. This was its final moment. Kate wondered what Lacie had been thinking in her final moments. She wanted desperately to know what happened, how she had died, but was afraid to know the horror of it. She asked anyway.

  “How did you kill her?”

  “Lacie loved when I made her blueberry pie, it was her favorite,” Susan said as she looked at Kate. “I couldn’t bear to let Darien kill her; I just wanted her to go to sleep like a princess, just like in her fairy tales. The garden grows some deadly night-shade. They look like blueberries, and they’re just as sweet. We only needed a few, placed in a slice of her favorite pie. She went peacefully. By that time, you had stopped writing to her, stopped asking us about Lacie. You left her and then forgot about her.”

  “How could you?” Kate looked at Susan, her caretaker, her second mother. She wanted to throw up. Susan looked away. “We loved you, trusted you.”

  Kate’s eyes overflowed with tears, she couldn’t see straight. “Where is she? Where is Lacie?” She demanded. “Where the hell is my sister?”

  “We took her out on the boat,” Doug said.

  The light suddenly went on upstairs.

  “Help!” Kate started to scream. Darien yanked her back, clamping his hand over her mouth.

  “Be quiet.” Darien growled as he shoved Kate through the kitchen door, his hand smothering her mouth.

  Kate pushed against his hand, the smell of gasoline filling her nostrils as Susan and Doug poured it throughout the house. Footsteps stomped upstairs, and Kate prayed Andrew would find a way to escape.

  “Andrew, run!”

  “Come on, Kate, don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

  She had to get to Andrew. Darien jerked her toward the pantry, his fingernails digging into her skin.

  Smoke started to fill the house, and Susan and Doug called out for Darien. Kate worked on loosening the rope knotted around her wrists. Every inch of her body throbbed with pain, and it took all of her strength not to cry out.

  “Mom,” Andrew called from upstairs. “What’s going on?”

  “Get outside!” She coughed. Her fingers closed in around the last knot on the rope.

  “Get inside!” Darien shouted as he opened the pantry door and a large creature flew out. Kate instinctively ducked and it hit him directly in the face. Another bat, Kate thought, as she finally ripped her hands free. She shoved Darien and ran out into the hall. Darien stumbled backward as he swatted at the bat that flailed violently around him. Kate flew up the stairs, the air growing thicker with black smoke with every step. Kate registered Darien’s voice behind her right as he grabbed her leg. Kate fell forward, but kept hold of the handrail, which gave her enough leverage to kick back as hard as she could. Her foot made contact with Darien’s chest, causing him to fall down the steps with a thud.

  Kate rushed toward the end of the hall where Andrew and Ben’s bedroom was, but it was empty. The dark smoke was filling her lungs, and she could barely see Andrew’s silhouette as he emerged from Alice’s room in the middle of the hallway. He was doubled over, wheezing.

  “Mom,” he cried, as Kate saw Darien’s shadow creep up behind him.

  “Andrew, watch out!” Kate called but it was too late, Darien hit Andrew over the head with the gasoline can, knocking him to the ground.

  “No, you son of a bitch,” Kate screamed, lunging at him. He easily caught her arms and yanked them behind her back.

  “This would have been easier if you had listened to me earlier,” he growled and dragged her towards Lacie’s room.

  “Andrew…” Kate cried. But Andrew was out. Kate whimpered as Darien shoved her inside and threw her to the ground. He closed the door behind her and locked her in with the missing key.

  Kate collapsed on the floor. She was getting tired, and her head was pounding. Kate feared it was over. Lacie, Charlie, and now she and Andrew would all die here at Villa Magda. There was nothing she could do. She was trapped.

  She saw a figure standing there in the corner. It was Alice, but this time Kate knew she was not real.

  “You have to get to a window,” Alice said.

  “I can’t!” Kate cried, her head spinning.

  “Wake up!” Alice screamed at her. “Get up now.”

  Kate just wanted her to disappear.

  “Andrew is lying out there, you have to get up now.”

  Kate tried with all her might to move, but she couldn’t.

  “The secret door. Remember it?” Alice said.

  Kate thought of the secret passageway in Lacie’s room where they would hide when playing. Kate opened the closet and crawled to the back. Through the darkness, her fingers found the wall panel, and she pried it open. She squeezed herself into the space and dragged her body forward. Spiderwebs stuck to Kate’s face as she crawled toward the door that led to her room. Kate found the doorknob and threw the door open. She rushed out and found Andrew lying in the hallway, writhing in pain.

  “Andrew,” Kate coughed. She took his face in her hands. “Please, honey.” She begged him to open his eyes. “I need you to get up.”

  Andrew moaned but remained on the ground. Kate could see that the fire was now ablaze downstairs and quickly spreading.

  “You don’t have much time,” Alice warned.

  Kate grabbed him under his armpits and pulled him like a ragdoll into an empty bedroom. Her lungs felt like they were going to explode. She opened the window and picked him up with all the strength she could muster.

  “Andrew, listen to me. You have to climb out of the window and jump,” Kate cried.

  “What? What about you?”

  “I’ll be right behind you, I promise.”

  “But, jump?”

  “The fall won’t be bad, trust me,” Kate pleaded.

  She could hear the faint roar of a fire engine in the distance. Then it all went black as Kate heard the faint chanting of the final verse of the town’s taunting rhyme swirling around her.