Page 98 of The Unknown

Every moment.

Every interaction.

Every fucking word.

They were never slightly spooked. Or outright scared. Or friendly, haughty, bitchy, confiding, exhausted, suspicious, authentic. Literally all of it was a lie. Now I stare up at them, these four utter strangers I’d mistakenly thought I’d known, feeling foolish and hurt and, yes, grudgingly impressed. They’re all better actors than I ever expected. Even Susie. Much of what happened, the séance and dresses and haunting, was so realistic I had started to believe it. Which, of course, was the point.

“How did you pull it off?”

“We all played a part,” Violet says.

“I staged the video,” Susie proudly adds.

Violet locks eyes with me. “And I led you right to it. We each had more than one set of clothes, of course. When one of us vanished, someone else would immediately use a pole and hook to put the clothes in the tree. Julianne and I hung Heather’s dress while you two were walking to the shore. In Julianne’s case, it was already there before she ran out of the house.”

And I had run right past it, not noticing it until I turned around.

I look to Heather, whose disappearance had rattled me to my core. “How did you vanish like that?”

“The tree,” she says, referring to the downed one that stretched from the woods to the lake. “We hid a camouflage sleeping bag there. I hopped in, zipped it shut, and rolled under the tree until you went back to the cottages.”

“That was it? A fucking sleeping bag?”

“You walked right past me,” Heather says, implying it’s my fault I didn’t notice. Which it is. “Once you were gone, Brad and Loretta came and picked me up in the boat.”

“But I was on the dock when you vanished,” I say. “And I could still see it when I reached the flashlight. There wasn’t any boat around.”

“That’s because they were waiting on the other side of the island.”

The small, secret cove Daisy wrote about in her diary. Of course. If it worked for bootleggers sneaking on and off the island, then it would also work for…whatever this is.

“We cut the motor a mile from here and row the rest of the way,” Heather says. “No lights. No noise. Like we’re invisible.”

“Loretta and Brad are there right now waiting for us to get back,” Susie says. “Which we should do before Ronan finds us.”

“I’m not done with my questions,” I snap. “The séance. How did that work?”

“That was mostly Brad,” Violet says. “Using tricks perfected by fake mediums a century ago.”

“Like moving the chair.”

“God, you were so pleased with yourself for noticing that,” Susie says, her clear distaste for me indicating that perhaps not everything was an act. “What you didn’t realize was that wewantedyou to see it.”

“Why?”

“Because it would make what happened after that seem more real,” Violet says. “Magicians do it all the time. Showing there are no tricks uptheir sleeves to distract you from noticing how they’re actually hidden in their pantlegs. Our hope was that you wouldn’t realize we were fooling you twice.”

Well, shame on me, because I was absolutely duped. Especially after I’d examined the parlor myself and found nothing amiss but those letters arranged on the table just so. Clearly another trick, but one left on purpose in the hope that I’d see it.

“How’d you make the table move?” I say, thinking back to the scratches I’d found on the legs. “A lift of some sort?”

“Three lifts, actually,” Heather says. “One under each leg. Stepping on them at the same time raised and lowered the table.”

“And the whisper I heard?”

Julianne sweeps past me so subtly that, if my eyes were closed, I wouldn’t know she was there at all. “You will be first,” she says in a guttural hiss that’s so like the one I heard in the parlor it makes me shudder.

“But what about the glass?”