That night as Mom and I ate dinner, I heard the snow plows finally make their way to our street. With the streets cleared, there would be no stopping the Emorys from returning home in the morning. I was dying to tell Trey about Violet's medical records and what Cheryl had told me about Tracy Hartford. I disappeared into my bedroom for an hour to talk on the phone with Mischa after dropping off Mrs. Waldbaum's medication across the street. Mischa had a brain that was an impressive repository for trivia and funny facts, but she hardly had the same powers of deduction as Trey. Trey could have been a top agent for the CIA or Foreign Legion, I was sure of it. He'd be able to draw insightful conclusions about all of this new information, but it just seemed to infuriate Mischa.

"Stupid Tracy Hartford. Serves her right for continuing to hang out with that girl even after Olivia and Candace died," she snapped. "I don't even feel sorry for her. I don't."

It had crossed my mind to tell Mischa about Trey's relationship to Violet, but I had to remind myself while on the phone with her that she was likely to overreact about pretty much anything. Telling her would serve no purpose, and she already wasn't Trey's biggest fan. I at least had to wait until Trey told me how he'd found out, himself. He still hadn't answered my original question having to do with why he'd gone to the Green Bay mall the day that Olivia was killed. Every time I started to relax and then thought about Trey again, I had a sour suspicion that there was a part of what he needed to tell me that I wasn't going to like.

"What about Milwaukee tomorrow, if the streets are cleared?" Mom asked hopefully as she loaded dishes into the dishwasher.

I hesitated before replying, thoughts rushing through my head frantically as I tried to determine the best way to respond. My mom seemed hell-bent on going to Milwaukee for a day of cultural fun while I was home for the break. There was no getting around that commitment without hurting her feelings, so I had to decide if it was more advantageous to get it over with now, or push it off until later in my visit. With so much work ahead of me in dealing with Violet, I felt like my life was too unpredictable to push things off until later dates. It was a possibility that if there was going to be aggravated trouble with Violet or with the law if, there wouldn't be later dates. As much as I really wanted to wait at home the next day for Trey's arrival, I thought it might be best to just give in to my mom's request and be done with the obligation.

"Sounds good," I said, trying to seem chipper. "But let me see how my foot feels in the morning."

All things related to Violet aside, I actually did have a great deal of homework to do while home for the break. I had found studying at Dearborn to be nearly impossible. The other girls in my study hall, held in the school's rather pitiful library, used the class period to snicker, tell jokes, braid hair, and point out other girls' traits worthy of ridicule. Studying in my room was equally frustrating because Alecia talked to herself, hummed, and sang constantly, sometimes even in her sleep. I was terrified of getting on her nerves even though I was sure that I was stronger than her and would be able to hold my own if she ever initiated a physical fight. Dearborn was just like prison in that little girls teamed up with networks of larger girls. The entire system functioned on relationships: who knew who, who owed who favors. My survival depended on my ability to stay out of that network.

So I'd given up on studying, which was kind of unnecessary anyway since all of the classes at Dearborn would have been considered remedial by Weeping Willow High School's standards. I was cruising through them without even trying very hard. The big problem with just coasting through my junior year was that unlike most of the other girls at Dearborn, I still had hopes to get into a decent college, and felt the need to keep up with my classmates back at Weeping Willow High. I still had my junior year text books at home from the classes I'd abandoned, and had told myself for the past six weeks that I'd use my break at home to catch up as best I could on lessons I'd missed.

It was as I was trying to dig into my Calculus I textbook that I received an unexpected text message from Cheryl.

CHERYL 9:15 PM

How much do you know about Violet's mom?

The text took me a bit by surprise because it suggested that Cheryl had gone home and continued thinking about everything I'd told her. Cheryl was not exactly stupid; she probably was in the running for class valedictorian against Nicole Blumenthal and Michael Walton. But I had hardly expected her to go home and brood about my predicament.

Not much. Why do you ask?

I hit send and waited nervously for Cheryl's response, completely unable to return my attention to my Calculus textbook. Why had Cheryl Guthries, of all people, been thinking about Violet Simmons' mom? I'd had limited interactions with the glamorous Mrs. Simmons. Our introduction had been in Violet's kitchen when I was still friends with Violet; I'd gone over to the Simmons' mansion after school to bake cupcakes for our student government campaigns. Mrs. Simmons was a tax attorney at a big law firm in Green Bay, which was kind of a huge departure from the other moms in town. Lots of moms had professions, but mostly as shop owners or teachers at some level or another in academia, like my mom. There weren't so many corporate jobs in our part of Wisconsin, and while a handful of people had fathers who commuted to larger cities for jobs as bankers and lawyers, a mom who had that kind of big-wig job was a rarity. She was impeccably fashionable, beautiful, and it was easy to see how Violet had turned out so graceful and poised with her mother's example to follow.

CHERYL 9:19 PM

Because I was just thinking that premature babies can't really bargain for their own lives.

Cheryl's text reorganized my thinking in a way that made my head feel warm. She was right. If Violet's only close call with death had been as a premature baby, then she hardly would have been the one to strike a deal with evil spirits. That was, of course, if we were right at all in thinking that Violet had made any kind of deal whatsoever with spirits on the other side to lengthen her own life by trading in the lives of others. We could have been way, way off base about that, just like we'd been about the locket.

I sat still on the couch feeling useless. Mom was using the laptop we shared in the kitchen, most likely grading term papers. It was awful, feeling so constrained and unable to take action. Without access to the laptop, I was limited to what I could find on my mobile phone, and watching the loading icon slowly spin on my phone for minutes on end was agonizing. It seemed a little out of line for me to ask Cheryl to do the online searching on my behalf; she was already more involved than I had ever wanted her to be. So I began the research on my own, realizing as soon as the search engine homepage loaded that I didn't even know Violet's mother's first name. I texted Mischa, who had a much better memory than mine, to ask if she happened to know it, but she didn't immediately reply and I assumed she was hanging out with her family.

My attention was caught by headlights coming down our street over an hour later when I was only barely paying attention to a television comedy. The Emorys were back from Osh Kosh.  I immediately turned off the television, clapped my book shut and informed my mother I was going to bed.

In my room, I faced an unpleasant issue in that my most common means of communication with Trey had been obstructed. Mom had covered the window over my radiator—through which I could see straight into Trey's room across the space in between our houses—with a fitted piece of cardboard to block out drafts of wind until we could have my inner pane replaced. Through my other window, I could see that his light was on, but couldn't see his silhouette moving around, if he was even in the room. I sighed, really wishing that the Emorys hadn't taken Trey's mobile phone away from him.

As absurd as it seemed, I decided my best course of action was to peel back the black duct tape my mother had used to secure the cardboard with the intent of putting it back into place after talking to Trey. I slowly peeled the tape back, revealing a sticky film of glue residue on my window frame, and heard my mobile phone ring behind me on my desk.

"You're not going to believe this."

It was Mischa, skipping the formality of an introduction, as always. Music was playing in the background, so I assumed she was alone in her purple bedroom.

"What?"

"I didn't know Violet's mom's name, so I did something kind of bad," Mischa confessed. "Well, not really bad, but it's not nice. I went to one of those family tree websites and created an account as if I were Violet."

"Mischa!" I exclaimed. "That might be illegal!"

"It's not," she insisted, "Come on. How stupid do you think I am? I don't want to get sent to Dearborn. It's just a way to look up public records."

"Okay, so... what will I not believe? Is her mom's name Bertha?" I asked, peering through my unobstructed window to see if I could catch a glimpse of Trey's shadow moving around in his room.

"No, it's Vanessa, but that doesn't even matter, trust me. Check this out. Four years before Violet was born, a baby girl was born to Vanessa and Michael Simmons at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Illinois named Christina Ann Simmons. Born on September ninth, died on September ninth."

"Holy..." I murmured. I replayed the words that Mischa had just said in my head, not believing their full meaning until I thought them over a second time. "Now you're freaking me out."

"Oh, that's not all," Mischa continued, audibly pleased to be scaring me. "A little over a year later? Another daughter, this one named Anna Elizabeth Simmons, was born on January third, and died on January third."

I had goose bumps up and down my arms, and the tiny strands of hair on the back of my neck were standing on end. "How did they have two daughters in a row that died on the same day they were born?" I was imagining all kinds of vague, horrible things, like infanticide and terrible accidents like the one in which Olivia had died. I had assumed since Olivia died that Violet was just evil, even though she seemed scared and upset every time we confronted her about what she'd done. It was only logical that if she was evil that her parents were likely pretty evil, too.

"My friend Megan, whose mom works at the hospital in Suamico? Remember, the one who saw Trey come in the night of the accident? I asked her and she said that birth and death certificates are issued for stillborn babies. And on this website, you can actually see both of the certificates scanned in from hospital records. The time of birth is the same as time of death." Mischa sounded breathless with excitement. "Hold on, I think I can email them to you"

My entire body had gone cold and the lasagna I'd eaten for dinner was making my stomach was rumble unpleasantly.

"Okay, sending," Mischa said.

A moment later, I felt my phone buzz in my hand, and pulled it away from my ear to review what Mischa had sent me. The email had come from the family heritage website with the subject line, "Violet Simmons has shared files with you!" I tapped the email open with my finger tip and bit on my lower lip as the images of two birth and two death certificates loaded in one by one. First Christina's, then Ann's. I felt sinister even looking at those files, and remembered when Trey and I had once been standing in his yard and he had asked me if I felt like we were alone. I felt the same way in that moment in my bedroom: like someone's eyes were on me. "Mischa, I feel really, really weird about this."

"I do, too. Like, super creepy," she admitted. "Also, on this website, it shows that Michael and Vanessa Simmons were married in the Cook County clerk's office the year before Christina died, which means they were married five years before Violet was born. They must have really wanted to have a baby by the time they had her."

I felt a hideous frown spread across my face, the muscles of my face contorted by fear. Michael Simmons had been married, and already for a few years, by the time Trey was born. No wonder Mrs. Emory had kept the truth about Trey's biological father quiet. Piecing the story together in my head, it seemed probable that the Simmons' marriage was under strain after the birth of two stillborn babies, and maybe lovely young Mary Jane Svensson had caught Michael's eye on the campus where he taught. Had Trey's mother even told him that she'd gotten pregnant? Had she even known that Michael Simmons was married at the time she was romantically involved with him? There were so many endless questions... my whole life since the middle of September had become a matter of trying to hunt down answers to a barrage of questions. Of course, I caught myself before I gave Mischa any indication that Violet's father had been cheating on her mother not long after baby Ann died. Trey's shared bloodline with Violet was a layer in this strange story that Mischa was unraveling that I wasn't ready to reveal to her.

Knowing such weird and gross things about a friend's parents made me feel like at any second I was going to be reprimanded for prying. I remembered Cheryl's text, and her hunch seemed completely on target now based on what Mischa had uncovered. Maybe I'd been an idiot not to involve Cheryl sooner. "So, do you think Mrs. Simmons would have been desperate enough by the time she was carrying Violet to have made some kind of a deal with evil spirits for Violet to actually have a normal birth and survive?" I dared to ask.

"Sure. I never really thought about anyone other than Violet having started this whole thing, but I guess it's possible when you consider all of this," Mischa said. "Oh! And that's not all. There was another baby," she continued. "Another girl. Stephanie Rose Simmons, born on June sixth, three years after Violet was born. That one lived a day. The death certificate gives her date of death as June seventh."

Even though I knew I should have been compassionate about all these dead Simmons babies, the knowledge of their brief existences was just overwhelming me with terror. Why had Violet survived, and so many other babies died? Was there something about her that we were overlooking? No matter what, if Trey's mom had told Violet's dad about her pregnancy, he must have been very conflicted about another woman having an illegitimate Simmons baby when his own wife was having so many problems delivering a legitimate one. Three dead babies and Violet... I imagined them all in a row, facing me.

Then I remembered the drawing on my window. Three girls, and then a gap, and then two more. Maybe Jennie hadn't been showing me how many girls would die because of Violet's games. Maybe she was showing me how many already had died at the start of this all, when the curse first began. And if that was what she had been trying to communicate to me, there had to be some greater importance to these dead babies, those that had come before Violet, and the one that had come after her. If they'd all lived, Violet would have three sisters. But, I realized as a darkness washed over me, if Christina or Ann had lived, there might not have ever been a Violet.

"Mischa," I said suddenly, "Do you think there might have been even more?"

"More what? More babies?" Mischa asked. "I don't know. If there were stillborn babies, it's probably fair to guess there may have been miscarriages, too." Her voice dropped in volume and she held the phone closer to her mouth. "My mom had one of those when I was in first grade. She went like, completely went crazy and wouldn't leave the house. Fortunately that was in the spring, and when it was summer break my dad sent me and Amanda to stay with my grandparents at the summer house. When he picked us up in August, he said we should be really nice to Mom and not ask any questions about the baby. We never talk about it. Ever. I sort of forgot it even happened until now."

I explained my theory about the five girls to Mischa I drummed my fingers along my window frame. "Hmmm. How could we ever find out if Mrs. Simmons had any miscarriages? That's definitely not the kind of thing we could google."

"Well," Mischa said in a hesitant, sing-song voice. I could hear her typing on the keyboard of her laptop over the phone. "This website says that Violet's maternal grandmother is still alive. I mean, if anyone would know about Vanessa Simmons' medical history, probably Violet's living grandmother would, right?"

Outside my window, I saw the Emorys' back yard light switch on, illuminating the nearly four feet of snow that had piled up on their small deck while they'd been away. Arms reached through the open doorway and began pushing snow away.

"So, what do you propose we do?" I asked sarcastically. "Call her pretending we're Violet and say, hey grandma, remember when my mom lost those babies?"

Mischa was silent on the other end of the phone, which suggested to me that she was, in fact, considering my ridiculous suggestion.

"No," I said firmly. "Don't even think about it. We're not calling a stranger and impersonating Violet."

The snow on the Emorys' porch began moving a little faster, and I saw that it was actually Trey, shoveling a path from their back door across the deck. "I've gotta go," I said quickly. "I'll call you later."

I pulled my coat on over my pajamas and walked down the hall back toward the kitchen, where my mom was rinsing out cups in the sink. "I thought you went to bed," she said.

"I'll take Maude out," I volunteered. At the mention of her name, the little dog's ears perked up. Her tail began wagging, and she trotted toward the sliding doors. I slid my feet into my heavy snow boots and was thankful to discover that the fake fur inside them was no longer damp from my long walk the day before. My right foot ached a little as I pulled the laces at the top tight, already anticipating a walk through the high snow to the Emorys' yard.

"Not for long. I don't want you out in the cold. The wind chill factor is ten below zero tonight, and the last thing I want is to send you back to that place sick," Mom said.

I was sure she looked through the window as I stepped through the sliding doors carrying Maude's leash, no doubt spotting Trey on the deck next door bundled into his winter coat. I pulled the door shut behind me quickly before she had a chance to think better of my late night chat with him.

Maude raced across the snow toward the back of our yard just as I knew she would, and although I longed to slip through our gate and head over to the Emorys' yard, I waited patiently for her, knowing that the snow was high enough that it would be easy for her to jump over the fence if I wasn't keeping a watchful eye on her. She ran in joyful circles, kicking up snow in every direction, and I shivered inside my coat, feeling that it was way too cold outside the instant the wind blew. To my right, out of the corner of my eye, I could see snow continuing to fly, but I didn't dare say "hi" loudly enough for Trey to hear me over the fence. After Maude finally settled down and left a puddle in the snow, I summoned her over to me and fastened her leash onto her collar. We walked through our gate and I undid the latch to the Emorys' yard, and led Maude over the snow toward their deck. The snow on the elevated surface was so high that I could barely see the top of Trey's ski cap over it.

"Trey," I called, hearing his heavy breathing from the other side of the snow mountain as he lifted and tossed snow with the wide shovel.

"Oh, hey," he said. "I didn't hear you come around."

"I don't have long," I said. "I have Maude with me."

"Crap. I can't even see you. Hold on a second." More dislodged snow flew through the air, some of it landing near Maude. She trotted over to investigate and sniffed at it with curiosity.

A few minutes later, Trey had cleared just enough of a path through the snow for him to come a few feet closer to the edge of the deck and see me.  The sight of him leaning through the strange aisle in the snow wall was comical. His smiling face was rosy from both the cold and intense cardio of shoveling. "That's better," he said. "God, it's good to see you. I was worried."

I smiled and shook my head. "I was worried about you being stuck at your relatives.'"

With sincerity, Trey said, "Naw, that was fine. Everyone treats me like I'm made out of, like, glass or something. No one wants to say anything inflammatory to me to upset my temper now that I'm, like, a problem child. But it was just a normal holiday, you know? Lots of... mashed potatoes. This might sound kind of weird but I really was worried about you. I don't like it when you're in there alone," he said, nodding his head in the direction of my house. "The whole time I was away, I had this awful sense that you were getting closer to something and it made me really nervous."

"I think I did get closer to something. I found out a lot of stuff while you were away, but I don't know how any of it relates." I wanted to climb up the stairs of the deck so that I could at least hold his hands, but that was going to be impossible; I couldn't even see the stairs or guess where they began. "First, I was paid a visit by Henry Richmond."

Trey raised one eyebrow. He knew very well that I would have been Olivia's brother's date to the Homecoming dance if its original date hadn't been cancelled by the high school in the wake of her death.  Henry hadn't been particularly nice to Trey when he was still in high school with us.

"Not like that," I clarified. "He stopped by to bring me a gift from his parents. A gift box of hand-crafted soda that they special order from Pennsylvania. Olivia's favorite. Sarsparilla."

"You're kidding me," Trey said. He sputtered a little because the cold was so bitter it was making it difficult to have a conversation. He poked his fingers underneath his ski cap to scratch his head. "That's weird. But I guess that means everything the ghost told us on Christmas Eve is probably legit."

"Yeah. Very weird." I gave him a quick recap of the strangeness that had occurred in my room with the drawings on the window and its subsequent shattering. Then I told him that Cheryl and I had crept into the high school and found out that Violet had been born prematurely. "Then, Cheryl had this idea that maybe Violet's mother had something to do with the curse, so Mischa did some investigating online. But before I tell you what she found out, maybe you should finish telling me about your real dad."

Trey looked over his shoulder once at his quiet house.

"I don't remember where I left off," he admitted.

"Trey," I said nervously. "Is your dad Michael Simmons?"

He looked at me blank-faced and stumped for a second, and then said, "Yeah. How did you ever figure that out?"

I felt a little guilty suddenly, having grilled my dad and basically online stalked Trey's biological background without his knowledge. "I just guessed. How much did your mom tell you?

"Well, like I said, I've known for a few years that something was probably up. I just had no idea who my real dad might be. I mean, my mom and Walter were already married when I was born. His name is on my birth certificate and everything," Trey said.  "She only confirmed it this summer," Trey said. "She took me out to Ortonville for lunch and told me that the man she'd messed around with in college was moving back to Willow. I guess he'd emailed her when the old lady died to tell her he'd be in town to handle some estate stuff, and suggested that she conduct herself in a discreet manner, whatever that means."

I didn't know how to react, or what kind of expression to wear on my face, since talking about this topic was quite obviously uncomfortable for Trey. "God, Trey, that's awful. Was he, like, rude to her? Like, threatening her to make sure you didn't say anything to Violet?"

Then, words came out of my mouth before I even fully thought them through. "I mean, did she know about you before they moved here?"

"I don't know," Trey said, staring out over his snowy yard. "I'm not sure she knew. The first time I saw her at school, I knew it was her immediately, even before anyone told me her name. I mean, it was the first day of school and there were plenty of new freshmen around who I didn't recognize, but it was different when I saw her. I just... knew."

"And she..?" I urged him to continue.

"She smiled politely at me in the hall one day and it seemed obvious to me that she knew everything. We were never, like, formally introduced or anything. That day we all dragged her out to the track to grill her about what she'd done to Olivia and Candace was the closest I'd ever gotten to her. Honestly, I was kind of terrified while you and Mischa were yelling at her that she was going to say something and let the cat out of the bag about my being her half-brother," Trey admitted.

That day. That had been the day when we'd confronted Violet about what we knew and demanded that she reverse the spell. There had been that moment on the track when she and Trey had exchanged a worried glance that had been troubling me for weeks. Now I knew its meaning. Violet had been begging Trey, her half-brother, with her eyes to bring an end to the interrogation. He had been begging her in response to keep quiet about their shared lineage.

"I mean, I kind of knew before my mom even told me. Not about Violet, of course, because it was way before they moved here. But I met the old woman before she died. Whenever we would cross paths with her in town, she would stop and talk with me. That's why when you and Mischa first thought that maybe it was Violet's grandmother behind all the haunting, I got really freaked out."

"Trey," I said softly, not wanting to upset him, "You met Violet's grandmother and never told me? You had like, a thing with her?"

He shrugged defensively. "I didn't know at the time who she was! The last time I can remember running into her in town, I was probably like, eleven or twelve years old. My mom always just told me to be really nice to her, and I have to say, she seemed like a nice old lady. Here's the really messed up part," he said, taking a deep breath and looking over his shoulder once again at his house to make sure neither of his parents were eavesdropping, "My mom basically said that he was not exactly happy to find out about me."

"Well, he was married, at the time," I reasoned. "He and his wife were desperately trying to have a baby right around the time you were born. Mischa and I did some research. Don't worry, though. She doesn't know about you being Violet's half-brother."

"Huh," Trey said, processing the information about Michael and Vanessa Simmons and their efforts to procreate. "That's funny if he wanted to be a father so badly, because he gave my mom money to get rid of me."

Just then, I heard the Emorys' back door open, and Trey spun around. I ducked, hoping that the remaining snow on the deck would block me from the view of whoever had just stepped outside. I tucked Maude under my knees and scratched her under her collar, which she loved, to prevent her from barking.

"Trey, what's going on? It's cold out here."

It was Mrs. Emory, presumably just checking on Trey's progress. "I'm just taking a break to catch my breath," Trey replied. "This is the most exercise I've gotten in weeks."

"Well, just..." Mrs. Emory hesitated, "See if you can clean off the barbeque grill. I told your father he should have brought that inside before the seasons changed. The rest of this can wait until morning. I don't want you out here much longer. You're going to catch your death."

"Okay, Mom," Trey said, and a moment later the door opened and closed again. Trey shoveled a bit of snow before coming back over to talk to me again.

"The idiot's worried about his deck because he never got around to weatherproofing it in the fall," Trey muttered in reference to Mr. Emory. "I guess my mom never bothered telling Michael Simmons that she didn't use the money to get rid of me, because instead, she just dropped out of college and moved home."

I was confused about the point he was trying to make. "Why are you so sure she never told him? Maybe she just told him she wanted to have the baby and he told her to get lost."

"McKenna," Trey said, "have you seen their house? Trust me, a guy with money like that does not want young girls running around having their illegitimate kids. Guys like that can afford to pay whatever it costs to make people in our part of town go away."

Prior to Trey reminding me of the Simmons' vast wealth, it hadn't really occurred to me that he might actually be entitled to some of their fortune. But he was certainly right; in addition to Michael Simmons probably not wanting to suffer the humiliation of his wife leaving him over an affair with a college student, he also probably didn't want to have to pay for the expenses of raising a child he didn't want.

"So," I began, summoning my courage to ask once again the question that had been troubling me for weeks. "Why did you go to Green Bay the day Olivia died?"

Trey dug his hands into his coat pockets and shrugged, looking down at his feet. Clamming up, once again. "Because I knew something was going to happen. I thought I could stop it. I didn't realize I was doing exactly what they wanted. If I hadn't driven out there that day, Olivia would probably still be alive."