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go away. I had to rub my ears, too, because they were buzzing again.
    When I looked up, all I could see were my closed white blinds. I was sitting at the desk in front of my bedroom window, but I always kept the blinds closed and the windows shut at night. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something would jump through the darkness and get me.
    Was that normal? I picked at the bows on my nightgown. Am I on the way to getting sick like Mom?
    No. I smacked my ears until the buzzing stopped. Not happening. Not going crazy. I was fine.
    But I saw things at the Abrams farm. Images that couldn’t have been real.
    Maybe they were real. Maybe they were flashbacks, not hallucinations.
    â€œNo,” I said out loud this time. I had to rub my arms to keep from shivering again. It was stupid, feeling so cold when it was spring in Mississippi and already hot even with air-conditioning.
    I clicked through a few more pictures. More ashes. More soot. I printed the first one and made a note on it.
    These ashes might have dead people in them. That’s gross. And kind of sad.
    The next picture was the same, and the one after that and the one after that. I didn’t know how journalists and detectives did it, looking at pictures of crime scenes over and over again. These shots only had burned-up wood and farm tools, not bodies and blood or horrible stuff, and my brain already didn’t want to keep studying them. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for journalism, either.
    I ticked through pictures of skeleton house boardsand scorched trees, then some shots of the area closer to the woods. Normal trees. Grass so green, it almost hurt my eyes. Then I found the corner of Angel’s pink dress, and one image of her sunburned knee. We were thorough investigators—but effective? Not so much. We had a long way to go before we’d be one of those teams people made television shows about.
    I shivered all over again when I got to the picture of the brush where I thought I had seen someone hiding, right after my hallucination or flashback or whatever that had been. There was nothing in the brush but trees and leaves. So that wasn’t real either. It was just me being chicken about stuff jumping at me through the darkness.
    It wasn’t something I talked about much, being scared of the dark. More like what was in the dark that I couldn’t see. I always thought something had to be there, something awful and dangerous that vanished when I finally made it to a switch and flooded the world with light. Sometimes it was hardest and scariest to see what was right there beside you—what had been there right beside you all along, waiting to snarl and bite you and eat you whole.
    My chest got tight from just thinking about how it felt to get stuck in a dark room and have to run for a switch. “I’m a great big baby,” I muttered, tempted to turn off my lamp and pull up my blinds and make myself stare out the window into the night until I just got over it.I had tried that before, lots of times, and it never worked. But I kept doing it whenever I could find the courage, because maybe the next time I’d make it past the panic and I wouldn’t be a baby anymore.
    When I stood, my legs shook. I glanced at the picture of the brush where nobody was hiding, then switched off the lamp. Then I went and opened the blinds really fast, before I could wimp out. The second they opened, I stepped toward the desk.
    Well?
    If something did jump out of the darkness and bust through my window like a rabid fire-breathing lizard on a rampage, I wanted to give it some space.
    Quiet pressed into my ears as I stared out the inky glass. If Mom had been home, she would have had the television on in their bedroom, watching true-crime documentaries or gathering recipes off cooking channels. Sometimes she listened to music, and sometimes she played movies. Silence was never a problem when Mom was here.
    But Mom’s not here. I hated that so