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"You're standing on it," she says.

Her voice arrives inside my ear like she's leaning against it. It's not a whisper. It's the flat, bored, entirely certain tone of a child telling you your shoe is untied.

"I'm sorry?"

"Everyone stands on it." Her head tips. "You're the first one who heard me. I've been telling people since I was here."

Since I was here. Not since I got here.

My hands have gone cold inside Gage's.

"Maren," Gage says. "Talk to me."

"She's talking to me."

I turn my head, and I take my first real look at this ballroom.

There are eleven of them.

An old man in a suit sixty years out of date, standing at the piano. Two women at the top of the stairs with their arms linked. A boy in a paperboy cap on the window ledge with his knees drawn up. A woman in a housecoat by the fireplace, three feet from Ansel's shoulder, who hasn’t moved from the back of Gage's house since six o'clock this morning until tonight.

They’re all facing the same direction.

Every one of them. All eleven. All turned toward that black star in the floor like sunflowers at four in the afternoon.

"I can't feel it," I tell Gage. My voice comes out very quiet and very fast. "I've been reaching for that seam for an hour and there's nothing there for me. But they can see it. They're all looking at it. They've been looking at it the whole time."

He goes still in a completely different way.

"That's where it is," I say. "Six feet left of where you put my hand. I don't need to find it. I've got eleven dead people pointing at it."

"Maren."

"I know."

"That's important."

"I know."

I look back at the girl in the nightgown. She's still there. She's still bored.

"What's under the floor?" I ask her.

For the first time, something in her face changes.

"A door," she says. "It's been shut for a long time. My mother used to say we weren't allowed to knock."

"And do people knock?"

"Someone's been knocking all week," the little girl says.

Every candle in the room goes out at once.

Four hundred of them, in one breath, and the ballroom drops into the dark so fast that the quartet plays another half bar before it understands. Someone laughs. A woman near the stairs says ooh like this is part of the party, like the town committee planned this, and honestly, why wouldn't she think that.

Then every candle relights.

Not at once. In order.