Maybe I drank a lot last night. Or maybe I had a mini stroke or something. The only thing she knew for sure was that her first name was Celia. She stood up again and walked into the dining room. At one side of the room there was a large cabinet with glass doors on top and drawers on the bottom. The cabinet matched the dining set, and she crinkled her nose at it. I hate that matchy‑matchy thing. I bet all the dishes are in a matching pattern, too. When she opened the glass doors, she confirmed that her prediction was accurate. All the tableware and serving plates were in a matching pattern, a kind of country floral that made her think of wedding registries. On the wall opposite the cabinet there was a large, posed photograph of three people. The background was soft gray, like they’d been in a photo studio. There was Celia, sitting next to the tall dark-haired man. They both wore white-cabled fisherman-style sweaters. The lunch-demanding little girl stood in front of them, positioned so that she was halfway between them. She, too, wore a cabled sweater, this one in pink. All three of them…

The shade of the trees made her feel better almost immediately, although the headache didn’t disappear–just receded a little bit, like a fighter taking two steps back before charging in again with a flurry of punches. Still, she thought she might be able to get to her bike and make it home without fainting, which was the key thing. Lauren had almost reached the ghost tree and her bike when she felt it–a strange sort of shifting, although the shifting wasn’t anything external that she could tell. The trees all stood in their usual places and the wind rustled their branches like always and her feet were firmly planted in the ground and her stomach wasn’t even queasy any longer. But still–there had been something. A feeling that made her skin prickle and her left eye twitch and cold sweat pool at the base of her spine. She shook her head even though it made her headache feel like it was knocking from side to side inside her skull. Those were all things that happened to other people when they walked in the woods that bordered Smiths Hollow. They got spooky feelings and broke out in a sweat and talked…