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It doesn’t matter, though. Not really.
I wanted to check every piece of mail, but one was better than nothing. I got a name, and that’s what matters.
Once we’re inside, I slip away from the group and look him up.
Samuel Hawthorne. Fulfield, Kentucky.
I scroll through several results before I find the right one, but when I do, it’s every bit of confirmation that I needed. Just like the neighbors down the road told us. The second couple, the one on vacation, they’re the ones who live in this house. The ones who own it. And now we have a name: Samuel and Elizabeth Hawthorne.
Whoever is there right now, whoever is claiming to be the owners, are liars, and probably dangerous.
I don’t know what to do with the information, though. Briefly, I consider calling the police, but they’ve made it clear they won’t help unless the actual owner calls to report this. The other problem is that I don’t know where theactualowners are. Samuel and Elizabeth left the house after their brief visit this morning, and they have yet to return.
An email comes across my screen about checking out tomorrow, and, based on the sounds of their phones buzzing, everyone else seems to get the same email around the time I do.
I close out of mine, still focused on trying to reach Samuel. A few of the sites list phone numbers, but none of them match any of the others, and I suspect they’re all wrong. And even if I did call, how in the world would I explain myself? It isn’t like we got off on a great foot this morning, and I still don’t know who the people next door are, but at least maybe I could tell them they’re there and they should come home and—
“Um, guys?” Memphis says from where he’s standing near the window in the living room.
“Yeah?” I ask, looking up with worry at the tone of his voice. Something is wrong.
“Did you all get the checkout email just now?”
By now, everyone is staring at him.
“What? Do they want us to do some weird amount of cleaning or something?” Logan asks.
“Oh my god. I once had a host who asked me to sweep and mop all the floors, take out the trash, start a load of laundry, do all my dishes, and still charged me a three-hundred-dollar cleaning fee on top of it,” Paulette chimes in. “Talk about a scam.”
“No,” he says, looking directly at me. “Er, well, maybe, but it’s not that. They, um, the owners…” He turns his phone around so I can see the screen. “It’s them, Lena.”
I stare at the photos on his phone screen, two faces inside two separate circles, under the wordsYour Hosts.
It’s them. The couple next door.
CHAPTERNINETEEN
“You guys, if they’re the owners, they’ll have keys to this house,” Paulette says, standing up from her seat on the couch. “That means they could come in here in the middle of the night.”
She doesn’t need to elaborate further. We all understand.
“We need to leave,” I say firmly, thinking back to the noise Memphis and I heard in the house in the middle of the night when everyone else was still in their rooms. Could it have been them? Could they have been in the house? “We need to leave right now.”
“But what about Ethan?” Austin asks. “He’s on his way here. Shouldn’t we wait for him? Or try to warn him somehow?”
I check the clock. It’s just after seven. He should be arriving any minute, but we don’t have time to wait. “Send him a message and tell him we’re leaving. Tell him not to come here.”
Austin looks at Mara, who seems to be in agreement as she nods and starts to leave the room.
“She’s right. He shouldn’t come here. It’s not safe for any of us. I’m going to get my things, and we need to go,” she says.
“I’ll get us a ride.” In an instant, I have my rideshare app open and am booking the trip to the airport. We’ll figure out what to do from there.
Everyone jumps into action then, realizing this is serious and happening now. I rush to my room and throw my things into my bag, my body pulsing with adrenaline. Everything about this feels wrong. How could we have not known?
In truth, after Ethan booked this place, I hardly paid attention to the emails aside from getting the code to get inside the house. Nothing else mattered.
Besides, even if I’d seen their photos in the emails, the chances I’d recognize them in person without knowing where I’d seen them before are slim.
