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games for the little girls to play with sticks and apples, which chafed Mister to no end because to him apples equaled money. I told ghost stories and tall tales in the sewing room, and most girls couldn’t listen and sew at the same time. And girls not working equaled nothing for Mister’s bank account.
    I wasn’t afraid of him because I thought I had nothing to lose.
    I finally talked Caroline into moving up to Mister’s, and I wouldn’t have believed it possible, but working up there made me miss the bunkhouse. Maybe I’d gotten too used to the sound of a dozen other girls sleeping around me. Or maybe the house had absorbed something of Mister’s wicked little soul. He inhabited the place as if it had always been his, as though he would live forever within its steady walls. Like he hadn’t crouched in the shadows waiting for his mother to die so he could spring on the carcass of her life and feast on what was left.
    Perhaps that sounds a bit dramatic. I have been accused of worse things than embellishing the truth. I am even guilty of some of them.
    Whatever my sins, I am no liar. Not anymore. And I tell you true: there was something festering in the heart of that house.

Caroline at Night
    They didn’t have to share a room. Mister’s house had empty spaces to spare. But it had been so long since either of them had slept alone that, without even really discussing it, Portia and Caroline packed their things, carried them up the hill, and moved together into the room at the back corner of the house. It was the only room without a view of the orchard, except for Mister’s room, which was at the other end of the upstairs hallway and obviously not an option.
    They did not want to look out over their recent past and feel guilty for having escaped it—to think of the other girls sleeping in the frigid, drafty bunkhouses and crying silently for the homes they remembered a little less every day. And spring was slow in coming this year. When they opened the windows in the morning, the thin air still had a cold lining, like snow inside a blanket.
    It was only at night that they felt so entirely, insurmountably bleak. Moving into the house did not, as it turned out, spare Portia or Caroline from the nightly misery of time to think. And it was quite some time before Portia was able to begin her search for the legendary files. Mister had a stringent schedule—each day of the week brought its own list of chores—and there was little time for exploration. Plus, he had brought a third girl up from the bunkhouses. Delilah was brash and nosy, talking constantly while Portia tried in vain to tune her out.
    “Where’d you come from? Where’s your family? Mine’s from Decatur, but they headed west a while back. Yours go too? Tell you they’d come back soon? Yep, that’s what they told me.”
    Portia had the distinct feeling that Mister had recruited Delilah to drive her mad.
    Whatever comforts Portia and Caroline had expected to find, this house was not their home any more than the orchard or the bunkhouse or the workrooms. So they found ways to distract each other, to calm their minds until sleep managed to overtake them.
    Most nights, it went like this:
     
PORTIA: What are you afraid of?
CAROLINE: Everything.
PORTIA: No, really.
CAROLINE: Really.
PORTIA : How can you be afraid of everything?
CAROLINE : In this house, I am.
PORTIA : Are you afraid of me?
CAROLINE: You’re not a thing.
PORTIA: What about the rest of the world? What are you afraid of out there?
CAROLINE : Sometimes I think there is no rest of the world. I think this might be all there is.
PORTIA : You know that’s not true.
CAROLINE : I can’t remember what my mother’s voice sounds like. I can’t remember how many trees there are in my front yard. Maybe I imagined my whole life before I got here. Maybe it wasn’t real.
PORTIA : You’re not crazy.
CAROLINE : Promise?
PORTIA : Yes. I promise. Now, pick just one thing to be afraid of. Just one. And the