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anything. Let her tell you.”
    “I know! Give her a chance.”
    We came to a row of short fat brick houses penned behind chain-link fences, and Nicki began counting addresses. I wanted to ask her if the psychic was so gifted, why didn’t she predict the winning lottery number and move into a better neighborhood, but I bit my tongue. Anyway, I figured psychics must get that lottery question all the time; they probably had some canned answer for it.
    “This is it,” Nicki said, as a cheese-cracker wrapper brushed against her ankle. We walked up to the door of a brick house. She pressed the bell.
    “You okay?” I asked her.
    “Yes,” she snapped.
    • • • • •

    I’d been wrong about the robes and crystals. We didn’t get incense, a dark room, or eerie music in the background. Instead, a round little woman with glasses let us in. She reminded me of Jake’s grandmother, who used to visit him at Patterson. We stepped into a living room with twenty zillion china figurines lined up on shelves all over the walls. Snowmen, ballerinas, dogs, cats, horses, unicorns, flowers . . . My eyeballs rolled, trying to take them all in.
    Nicki and I stood staring at the figurines (which stared back at us) while the psychic waited in front of two egg-colored couches that were totally overshadowed by the shelves. She didn’t try to speak to us yet. Apparently she’d learned that her guests needed figurine-acclimation time.
    “Wow,” Nicki said at last.
    “Do you like them?”
    “Um—sure. They’re cute.”
    “You’re Nicki,” the psychic said. Then she raised her eyebrows at me.
    I wanted to make her guess who I was, to test her powers, but Nicki said, “This is my friend Ryan.”
    “Welcome. Please, have a seat.”
    We sank into the giant, stale-smelling sofa cushions.
    “Thanks for meeting with me, Mrs. Hale. Or do you—what should I call you?” Nicki’s voice had gone up an octave, as if she’d grown younger since we’d walked in the door. Her hands squeezed each other.
    “Please, call me Andrea,” the psychic said.
    Andrea Hale. So she wasn’t called anything like Madame Zorelda. And she kept smiling that grandmotherly smile, as if she were about to offer us fresh-baked cookies instead of an audience with the dead.
    Nicki dug in the pocket of her shorts and peeled off sweaty bills. Money up front, of course.
    Andrea tucked the money into a drawer and sat on the other couch. “With whom do you wish to speak?”
    I spoke up then. “Shouldn’t you tell us that?”
    Andrea smiled. “There are many souls who might wish to speak with you. It will save time if I can focus on someone specific.”
    Even though I didn’t believe any of this for a minute, my skin prickled when she said that about souls wishing to speak with us. I couldn’t help picturing hordes of dead people massing at the gates. Maybe they would take over the figurines, and we’d have a storm of little china animals flying through the room.
    “My dad,” Nicki said. “His—his name was Philip Thornton.”
    Andrea nodded and closed her eyes.
    An old window air conditioner grumbled and clacked in the background. Nicki shivered beside me but it wasn’t from the A/C, because it must’ve been close to eighty in that stuffy room. I glanced up at the shelves, at all the black-dot staring eyes on the china figurines, and glanced away again.
    Andrea’s forehead wrinkled. Her lips worked. Nicki kept holding her breath, running out of air, and then gasping. I let my knee inch toward hers, not touching her, but close enough to remind her I was there.
    Andrea’s eyes stayed closed. A truck rumbled down the street, shaking the house. The china figurines rattled, watching us. I thought again about them coming to life. Maybe they stampeded through the house at night. Then I realized that if I kept thinking that way, I’d end up back at Patterson.
    “Philip is here,” Andrea said.
    • • • • •

    My eyes darted around the room, looking for