Or maybe she wouldn’t.
Wyatt stayed by my side every possible moment — before school, during lunch, and after school, when he was allowed to drop me off at the hotel before heading back to another evening of being grounded.
At the end of my first week back, the police finally gave us the all clear to pack up our things. Jonathan hired a professional moving service to take care of it all. By Sunday afternoon, there would be no trace of us left in the grand old mansion.
When I climbed into Wyatt’s car on Friday afternoon, I turned to him. “Can you be late getting home?”
“Not a chance,” he said, then thought for a second and added, “How late?”
“Like twenty minutes?”
He shrugged. “What are they going to do — ground me until I graduate from college?”
“Great,” I said, fastening my seat belt. “Take me to Sunbird Lane, please.”
I have to admit, I kind of loved making that Spluh! expression appear on his face.
Before he could protest, I repeated myself. “Twenty-one-twenty-one Sunbird Lane? Do you need directions?”
He frowned, pulling out onto Crescent Heights and turning right toward the canyon. “Does your mother know you’re going back there?”
The skin on my palms began to prickle. “If I say no, will you still take me?”
“Of course,” he said.
A happy tremor went through me, which was a nice distraction from the anxiety starting to build in my stomach at the thought of being back on the property. Sentimental journal ramblings aside, this was the house where I was tormented and almost psycho-killed by a psycho killer.
I laughed nervously, twisting a lock of hair around my finger.
“What?” Wyatt asked.
“I was just thinking … like, the least creepy thing about this house is that it’s haunted.”
He slowed the car. “Willa, are you sure —”
“I’m sure,” I said. “Please keep driving.”
When we got to the house, there were a few photographers lingering around. But they kept their distance as Wyatt punched the gate code and drove inside.
One of them shouted, “Are you Willa?”
And Wyatt yelled back, “No, she’s Kate Middleton’s cousin Bernadette!”
Stepping into the foyer wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. All the blood was gone, of course. The dining room had been neatly put back together, as if nothing had ever happened in there. There were no huge sheets of plastic or toolboxes full of makeup. No props from the scene that was supposed to end with my death.
I took a long, shuddering breath and stared up at the second floor.
“You all right?” Wyatt asked softly.
“It feels so sad,” I said. “The house feels so lonely.”
“Don’t be lonely,” he said. “I’m here.”
But that wasn’t quite what I meant. I meant that the house herself — of course it was a she — was lonely. Melancholy, like she’d been abandoned.
Don’t worry, I told her in my head. Some weird person is going to buy you and move in and invite tons of people over so they can show off that they live in a house where a serial killer carried out his psycho schemes. Honestly, the person will probably be a jerk, but you won’t know any better. You’re just a house.
You’ll be fine.
We walked in silence up to my room, and my pulse picked up at the sight of my open bathroom door — now there was a room I never needed to set foot into again.
“What exactly are we doing here?” Wyatt asked. He spoke in hushed library tones.
“I’ll explain in a minute,” I said, going into my closet. I reached down, behind the half-empty laundry basket, and pulled out the pink shoe box. I looked at Wyatt. “Fancy a trip to the backyard?”
He shrugged.
We walked past the pool, which was beginning to look a little green from the weeks of neglect — it almost seemed to me like the pool was the house’s face, and she felt sick about what had happened.
I walked over to where the shovel still stood leaning against the trunk of a lemon tree, a few feet from my initial unsuccessful digging efforts.
It dawned on Wyatt, then, why we were there — to finally follow Leyta Fitzgeorge’s instructions and bury the shoe box.
“I have to do this before we leave,” I said. “This stuff belongs here.”
“What if somebody digs it up?” he asked.
“They won’t,” I said, picking up the shovel and starting to dig. In the shady afternoon, it was much easier. And when I started to get winded, Wyatt took the shovel and dug the rest.
We knelt on the ground next to the hole and gently lowered in the box. It felt like burying more than a book and a couple pieces of jewelry (and a bag of salt). It felt weirdly like we were burying Paige, too. And maybe all the other restless spirits who’d swarmed around me for years. And the rest of the Hollywood Killer’s victims.
I wished I could bury the rose necklace, too. But I had to content myself with the idea that, after the trial, it would be as good as buried in the police evidence storage. It didn’t really matter.
I knew in my heart that Paige was at peace.
Maybe she was hanging out with my dad and they were talking about how aggravating I could be.
Wyatt cleared his throat, and our eyes met.
“Are you going to say something?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “It sort of feels like I shouldn’t, actually.”
He nodded, then stood up and got the shovel. I sat and watched the dirt cover the pink surface of the cardboard until it was gone. Then, when the hole was level with the ground again, Wyatt patted the sandy soil smooth and tossed the extra into the ravine.
“And that’s that,” he said, helping me to my feet.
I carried the shovel back up to the patio but didn’t bother taking it into the garage — I left it leaning against the back wall of the guesthouse, next to the overturned bucket that had helped save my life. I didn’t want the movers packing it and taking it with us.
I glanced at my phone. I’d texted Mom to say Wyatt and I were stopping for a quick coffee, but somehow we’d been at the house for almost an hour. Wyatt was way later than I’d told him he would be.
“Ready to go?” I asked. “I’m afraid I’ll get you in trouble.”
“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “Honestly, if you asked me to rob a bank with you, my dad would probably be cool with it. He’s a little in awe of you.”
“And of you, too, right?”
He looked taken aback. “What did I do?”
“You did … a lot.”
“Name something specific,” he scoffed.
“Things don’t have to be specific to be important,” I said. “You were part of everything.”
We were standing by the back rail, a few yards away from the pool, looking down at the ravine and the city beyond it.
I felt a chill of loss. I’d found a piece of myself in this house, and now, leaving it, I felt as if I was leaving a piece of myself behind. This would be my last chance to be there. To say good-bye.
“Want to sit for a couple of minutes?” Wyatt asked.
I nodded, my eyes suddenly full of tears.
I sat on one of the wicker love seats and waited for Wyatt to sit in the chair across from me.
But he didn’t.
He sat down right next to me and reached for my hand.
“Willa …” he said softly.
“What?” I asked.
“You almost died,” he said, and on the last word, his voice collapsed into itself.
“That’s what people keep telling me.”
He shook his head in frustration. “Before everything happened, I’d been planning to tell you something. And now I don’t know when I should tell you. Or if I should. Ever.”
I looked up and watched a pinprick of an airplane making its way over the city, toward the airport. “You should,” I said.
As I waited for him to speak, I felt like different parts of me had turned into delicate silk kites that were all floating off in different directions. Weightless.