CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I thought about the Dark Game, and how its ritual had somehow messed with our minds. I didn't see our childhood as particularly harrowing.

Perhaps our mother leaving had been the extreme moment that Manley wrote about. Perhaps it even explained my having taken on a voice, a distinct personality, inside the smokehouse, but that wouldn't explain why Mary Manley herself had also been "possessed" (using her own terminology) there. Ghosts. Games. Rituals.

Murder.

I just wanted some ordinariness to creep back into my life.

As I sat in Pola's kitchen, I felt an urgency to get back home.

I was going to take off and write a brief note to Pola, but I waited.

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Nothing's wrong there.

This is all just messing with your head.

You'll get Brooke to the doctor in a day or two.

And then maybe you'll get a check-up, too.

When Pola and Zack got up, I invited them to Hawthorn just to hang out a while.

The three of us drove through the village in the early morning just as the sun was coming up through a haze of cloud and mist. The road, finally plowed out to Hawthorn, had its requisite potholes and ice patches intact, and Zack laughed each time his mother's car hit one or the other.

I felt a little hope in my gut, which seemed to be a new kind of feeling.

Brooke was, of course, still asleep, and I didn't bother going off in search of Bruno. I set Zack to work in the kitchen with me to make eggs and bacon for breakfast, while Pola sat on a nearby stool and watched us try to coordinate the various pans and plates.

It was chilly in the house, and Zack decided that someone needed to make a fire in the fireplace in the living room.

After a relaxing morning, talking old times and letting Zack tell me the history of his life as a young inventor, I went out the front door again to get some wood from the pile by the front porch.

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It was still misty out, as it sometimes was even on the coldest of days on the island. The smells of cleanness that snow and ice brought with them lifted my spirits as I went. As I trudged through the crusty snow by the porch, I lifted some of the wood-the top layer was wet, and so I dug down deeper in the pile. I thought I heard a noise-as if someone were nearby and had perhaps called my name, only indistinctly.

When I glanced up, I saw a woman standing at the open door of the smokehouse.

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