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car. I’d had enough of things popping up out of the ether. Nothing. Just Mr. Stripes. It didn’t look like he had moved. I must have propped him up for the picture and forgotten about it. I must have been imagining how the room had looked when Evelyn had lived in it, and then I must have drawn it, fallen asleep, and had a nightmare. That had to be it. There wasn’t any other explanation, was there? No rational reason.
    My heart was pounding. There was another option, one I didn’t want to consider at all, even though it kept tickling at the back of my brain. Why couldn’t I remember drawing the picture? I took after my dad in terms of art ability, but I was really hoping to avoid taking after him in the mental health area. Schizophrenia was thought to have a genetic component. It was one of those things that my mom and I never discussed, but there were times when I would catch her watching me. Evaluating. Was I being too emotional? Paranoid? Was I going to snap like he did? No wonder I tended to go from having a nightmare like any other normal person to assuming I had actually seen something. Everyone has nightmares. There’s nothing odd about being freaked out when you first wake up.
    I brushed the pieces of the picture back into the trash and then, for some reason, fished them back out. I shuffled them into a stack and stuck them in the back of one of my old Harry Potter books. I licked my finger and wiped the graphite dust off on my yoga pants. And Nathaniel thought I wore alot of black because I was making a statement. Little did he know that it covered up for my tendency to be a slob.
    It was dark out. I couldn’t see anything, but I could still hear the waves. I decided to check the latch again just to be safe. I stepped into a cold puddle of water and jumped back, startled. I bent down and trailed a finger through the water. The wind must have blown some of the rain in. I touched my finger to my lips. The water was salty. Ocean water. My heart sped up. Rainwater isn’t salty, is it? I touched the water again and felt something slick. I held up my hand. A tiny sliver of seaweed hung down from my index finger.
    I slept with the bedside light on.

Chapter 6
    E verything seemed different in the morning. Safer, more grounded. When I got up the house was silent. I looked out at the water and the blue sky. My fear from last night now seemed way out of proportion. I’d had a nightmare, nothing more. I hated to admit Dick might be right, but in this case he was. It had been a big day—the wedding, moving to the house, fighting with Nathaniel over the room. I woke up with the storm going on, saw the curtain blowing in the wind, and my brain filled in the rest. As for the puddle of water, it had dried up. Either I imagined the salty taste, or the fact that we lived next to the ocean made the rainwater salty. What was I, a meteorologist? How was I supposed to know what the rain tasted like out here? I took a deep breath and gave the window lock another shake proving to myself it was latched tight.
    I wandered downstairs. There was a note in the kitchen from my mom. She and Dick had gone into town for groceries. I was willing to bet that when Dick went back to work, this whole “doing everything side by side as if he and my mom were Noah’s-ark creatures” would stop. Dick struck me as the kind of guy who expected a cold martini and warm slippers waiting for him when he got home. Of course, he worked from home, so he wouldn’t have far to go to keep an eye on my mom and make sure she was doing what he wanted. I looked around the counter. There wasn’t any note from Nathaniel, not that I expected him to hang around and show me the place just because he had thawed out enough that we could have an actual conversation.
    The kitchen was large and looked like it had last been updated around 1920. There wasn’t even a dishwasher, and the stove was this huge metal behemoth. I