It was incredibly cold and dark, the kind of bone-chilling cold that no number of layers of clothing can possibly stave off. We'd been driving for a half-hour with the heater in Mischa's car on full blast and I was still shivering in the back seat, watching my breath slowly fill my window with steam, blurring the dark plains of Wisconsin beyond. Mischa was making no secret of the fact that she was not happy to have been pulled into our plans for the night, but as the only one of us with access to an automobile, I had little choice other than to ask for her help. She had reluctantly picked us up on Martha Road in the car that she shared with Amanda after emphatically refusing to allow her sister to accompany us. Naturally, I felt bad for Mischa that we'd had to involve her, but of the three of us, she was the one who would most benefit from our potential success.
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I hadn't brought it up, because I knew I didn't need to. If we didn't figure out a way to reverse whatever curse Violet had put on all of us who had attended Olivia's sleepover birthday party, Mischa would be the next to die.
Just as I imagined it the first time I had heard Mischa tell the story about her mother's boss, so many weeks earlier on the night of Olivia's fateful birthday party, a sports bar appeared up ahead on the road to our left. SVEN'S was written in block letters over the bar's door, and the "V" was crooked. Fluorescent signs hung in the dirty windows, indicating that Coors Light and Old Milkwaukee beers could be found inside. But we were hardly in search of beer. I had driven down this stretch of Route 32 with my mom a million times in my lifetime in daylight, but had never gotten the chills before that night when we approached Sven's. Tiny snowflakes began falling from the pitch black sky, illuminated by Mischa's headlights, as we pulled into the gravel parking lot. The crunching of our wheels over the soft surface seemed very loud until the car rolled to a stop and Mischa turned off the car's engine. Then there was ear-splitting silence in the winter night beyond the windows of the car.
We sat quietly for a moment. I picked at my lint-covered purple gloves, suddenly remembering a seventh grade field trip to the House on the Rock. I had shared a bus seat with Cheryl and we'd sat behind Candace and Olivia. It had been early spring, early enough that there was still snow on the ground, and Olivia had worn a pair of cream-colored cable-knit cashmere gloves that seemed far too expensive and sophisticated for a twelve-year-old girl.
Olivia. It was fascinating, even to me, that I was still jealous of the girl even after she had died in an unimaginably horrible car accident. She had been, and forever would be in my mind, the girl who had all of the right possessions, the right expressions, and the correct answer to everything.
"She's going to know we're wearing costumes, you know," Mischa said as she tucked her long brown hair under a baseball cap in the driver's seat. "Ghosts probably aren't dumb."
"Let's just hope they're dumb," Trey said. "And real."
Our plan was flimsy, I knew. As its architect, even I had little faith it would work. But I couldn't think of anywhere else we could possibly expect to find a ghost other than Route 32, where Mischa claimed police commonly heard from drivers reporting to have seen a ghostly girl walking alongside the road not far from the St. Augustine's cemetery. Six months earlier, the idea of intentionally trying to track down a ghost would have scared the hell out of me. But six months is a long time, and everything in my life had changed since the spring. I'd lost thirty pounds, made all new friends, gotten myself involved in a mess because of a dangerously evil girl from school which had claimed the lives of two of my friends, and found a boyfriend. And now, if I didn't succeed in tracking down a ghost, who I could interrogate about current events in the world of ghosts, I wasn't sure what might happen. Certainly, Mischa would die. Quite possibly, I'd die, too.
