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though they were toying with her, trying to provoke her into some response, although Diana couldn't imagine what that response might be besides unease or disquiet.
    She made sure she kept her eyes on the road. The sun was climbing the sky, the horizon red. The flat farmland stretched away into the distance, and near the tree lines, low-lying fog gathered, wispy as spirits, something ghostly that remained from the night before. Like her dreams. During the night, she had seen the face of a woman. From what she could remember, it didn't look like Rachel, but with the strangeness and certainty of dream logic, she knew that it was her sister. The dream image showed Rachel not as the skinny, swaggering fifteen-year-old who had disappeared from her life, but rather as an adult, a fully-grown, mature woman, one whom Diana had never seen before.
    And this woman opened her mouth, and she spoke to Diana in the dream.
    But no sound came out. Nothing. A split second of moving, noiseless lips, and then she was gone, lost to the night and the darkness.
    Diana shuddered, turned the heat up higher against the morning chill. Which was worse? she wondered. The dreams that came during sleep or the visions that came when she was awake? She couldn't formulate a clear answer.
    It had been at least a year since she had dreamed of Rachel. In the long days and weeks after Rachel's disappearance, Diana dreamed of her sister nearly every night. She saw her face, pleading for help. She saw a grave—her sister's grave—covered with freshly turned earth. But the dreams had faded along with any hope she had of ever finding her sister alive. Her mother declined, and any spare energy that Diana had to give to someone else went to the care and eventual placement of her mother in Vienna Woods.
    Kay Todd had brought all of that back.
    Diana had dreamed about her, too. And she remembered the dreams about Kay Todd with much more clarity. She saw her weathered, leathery face, her stumpy teeth, and in the dreams—and even awake—the face seemed like a threatening, grinning mask, and in the car, alone, in the new light of the day, Diana felt an icy touch climb up her spine, and she checked the rearview mirror to make sure she was alone and not being watched by that very same face.
    But not only was the car empty so early in the morning, the road was empty, too, and Diana traveled the open distance between Leesburg and New Cambridge like someone walking down a dark street at night, listening for footsteps or pursuit. She accelerated, hoping to get back to town even faster.
    She couldn't know anything, could she? Diana thought. She's just fucking with me, right?
    The entire ride home Diana tried but could never quite convince herself of the fact that Kay Todd was just another crazy, just another lonely and disturbed voice crying out in the wilderness of the world.

CHAPTER SIX

    When Diana turned the key and stepped into her small apartment, it felt like she hadn't been home in months, even though she had last walked out the door about sixteen hours earlier, out the door and into the meeting with Kay Todd. But the apartment felt strange when she entered. The blinds were drawn, the lights off, and her shabby furniture and the scattered belongings around the room looked as though they were someone else's property. She moved quickly through the room, flipping on lamps and overhead lights.
    She went to the bathroom and turned on the shower. She felt greasy from having slept in her clothes. While the water warmed—always a long process—Diana checked herself in the mirror. She thought she looked thinner and likely older than her twenty-four years. Her eyes were a little red around the edges, and her skin looked blotchy and pale.
    Sleeping in a mental hospital chair will do that to you.
    She quickly brushed her hair, untangling the knots, then shed her clothes and climbed into the shower. The water felt therapeutic. She took her time—a luxury she could afford ever