My dad pulled out the earplug, sighed, and pulled out the other. “What?” He was already walking back to his study. The meter on our conversation was running out.

“Macon Ravenwood, what do you know about him?”

“Same as everyone else, I guess. He’s a recluse. He hasn’t left Ravenwood Manor in years, as far as I know.” He pushed open the study door and stepped over the threshold, but I didn’t follow him. I just stood in the doorway.

I never set foot in there. Once, just once, when I was seven years old, my dad had caught me reading his novel before he had finished revising it. His study was a dark, frightening place. There was a painting that he always kept covered with a sheet over the threadbare Victorian sofa. I knew never to ask what was underneath the sheet. Past the sofa, close to the window, my father’s desk was carved mahogany, another antique that had been handed down along with our house, from generation to generation. And books, old leather-bound books that were so heavy they rested on a huge wooden stand when they were open. Those were the things that kept us bound to Gatlin, and bound to Wate’s Landing, just as they had bound my ancestors for more than a hundred years.

On the desk was his manuscript. It had been sitting there, in an open cardboard box, and I just had to know what was in it. My dad wrote gothic horror, so there wasn’t much he wrote that was okay for a seven-year-old to read. But every house in Gatlin was full of secrets, just like the South itself, and my house was no exception, even back then.

My dad had found me, curled up on the couch in his study, pages spread all around me like a bottle rocket had exploded in the box. I didn’t know enough to cover my tracks, something I learned pretty quickly after that. I just remember him yelling at me, and my mom coming out to find me crying in the old magnolia tree in our backyard. “Some things are private, Ethan. Even for grown-ups.”

I had just wanted to know. That had always been my problem. Even now. I wanted to know why my dad never came out of his study. I wanted to know why we couldn’t leave this worthless old house just because a million Wates had lived here before us, especially now that my mom was gone.

But not tonight. Tonight I just wanted to remember chicken salad sandwiches and ten and two and a time when my dad ate his Shredded Wheat in the kitchen, joking around with me. I fell asleep remembering.

Before the bell even rang the next day, Lena Duchannes was all everyone at Jackson could talk about. Somehow between storms and power outages, Loretta Snow and Eugenie Asher, Savannah’s and Emily’s mothers, had managed to get supper on the table and call just about everyone in town to let them know that crazy Macon Ravenwood’s “relation” was driving around Gatlin in his hearse, which they were sure he used to transport dead bodies in when no one was watching. From there it just got wilder.

There are two things you can always count on in Gatlin. One, you can be different, even crazy, as long as you come out of the house every now and then, so folks don’t think you’re an axe murderer. Two, if there’s a story to tell, you can be sure there’ll be someone to tell it. A new girl in town, moving into the Haunted Mansion with the town shut-in, that’s a story, probably the biggest story to hit Gatlin since my mom’s accident. So I don’t know why I was surprised when everyone was talking about her—everyone except the guys. They had business to attend to first.

“So, what’ve we got, Em?” Link slammed his locker door.

“Countin’ cheerleadin’ tryouts, looks like four 8’s, three 7’s, and a handful a 4’s.” Emory didn’t bother to count the freshman girls he rated below a four.

I slammed my locker door. “This is news? Aren’t these the same girls we see at the Dar-ee Keen every Saturday?”

Emory smiled, and clapped his hand on my shoulder. “But they’re in the game now, Wate.” He looked at the girls in the hall. “And I’m ready to play.” Emory was mostly all talk. Last year, when we were freshmen, all we heard about were the hot seniors he thought he was going to hook up with now that he’d made JV. Em was as delusional as Link, but not as harmless. He had a mean streak; all the Watkinses did.

Shawn shook his head. “Like pickin’ peaches off the vine.”

“Peaches grow on trees.” I was already annoyed, maybe because I’d met up with the guys at the Stop & Steal magazine stand before school and been subjected to this same conversation while Earl flipped through issues of the only thing he ever read—magazines featuring girls in bikinis, lying across the hoods of cars.

Shawn looked at me, confused. “What are you talkin’ about?”

I don’t know why I even bothered. It was a stupid conversation, the same way it was stupid that all the guys had to meet up before school on Wednesday mornings. It was something I’d come to think of as roll call. A few things were expected if you were on the team. You sat together in the lunchroom. You went to Savannah Snow’s parties, asked a cheerleader to the winter formal, hung out at Lake Moultrie on the last day of school. You could bail on almost anything else, if you showed up for roll call. Only it was getting harder and harder for me to show up, and I didn’t know why.

I still hadn’t come up with the answer when I saw her.

Even if I hadn’t seen her, I’d have known she was there because the hallway, which was usually crammed with people rushing to their lockers and trying to make it to class before the second bell, cleared out in a matter of seconds. Everyone actually stepped aside when she came down the hall. Like she was a rock star.