The Follower by Kate Doughty (ebook reader with built in dictionary TXT) 📕

the key’s on the hall table, if you’ve locked yourself out by accident.”

Cecily rolls her eyes. “Thanks.”

The key is right where Rudy says it is. Cecily weaves past her father and Joseph with brief hellos, grabs the key, and heads back up. She opens the turret door with a sharp click.

And then she hears a soft thump.

Cecily freezes. She heard something inside the room, didn’t she? Didn’t she? She hesitates, caught by the idea that when she opens the door there’s going to be someone in there, in the room, going through her things . . .

Her mind goes back to the séance—god, they’d invited the ghost in—and all the fear she’d felt earlier returns, but stronger now, so much stronger.

Calm down, she tells herself. She waits and listens. If what she’d heard was a footstep, there would have to be more, right? But there’s no other noise. She eases the door open and tiptoes up the stairs.

The turret room is silent and empty.

Cecily steps in slowly, her senses heightened, listening. But there is nothing. You’re being paranoid, she tells herself. She walks the short length of the room, over to the antique desk, but even after she’s confirmed the room is definitely empty, Cecily still can’t shake that strange, jittery feeling.

The antique doll is still sitting on the floor where Amber had left her during the livestream. Its cracked doll face stares up at her. Cecily glares at it. There is no way she is going to let herself be freaked out by some stupid horror-movie prop. She takes the doll and opens an old chest in the turret room, shoving it in on top of a bunch of other junk her brother must have found. She closes the lid and locks it, even as she convinces herself that she doesn’t need to.

Stupid, stupid nerves.

All right. She clears her head and walks over to the antique desk, sitting down and flicking on her ring light. She reaches for her foundation and . . . it’s not there.

She looks down and frowns. No, it is there. Just several inches to the left of where it should have been, of where she always puts it. She glances at her products, trying to assess their arrangement. Wasn’t her palette over there? Didn’t she leave her go bag on top of the shelf? Wasn’t her mirror positioned higher before?

A cold sense of dread creeps over her. Something for which she has nothing to prove, but something she feels like she knows. Someone has been sitting here, in this chair. Someone has been in this room. Someone has been going through her things. Touching her products. Moving them around. But why?

She whips around, convinced for a second that there are eyes on her back, that she can feel someone watching her.

She runs to the window and looks out, but there is no one. Just the view of the yard and the woods, now a true mirror to the painting Rudy had found underneath the wallpaper. She tries to imagine Alex sitting here, painting the last thing she would see before she died. Cecily shudders. And she still. Feels. Watched.

She turns around to face the room, slowly, half-convinced that someone will be standing behind her, but the room remains empty. The door still hangs open, revealing the stairs below.

Cecily shakes her head. This is dumb. She’s only freaking herself out; she is being scared and stupid for no reason. Things had probably just gotten shuffled around when they’d set up the room for their livestream.

Besides, what was it that she had yelled outside after the bonfire? That she wasn’t afraid of the house. And you’re not, she tells herself. She isn’t, right? So she forces herself to sit at the desk and start putting a look together. She takes out her phone, but she doesn’t turn on Instagram.

Pop music blares across the room, and Cecily begins transforming her face into something pristine, beautiful, perfect. Unafraid. Something that she has to be. Slowly, she forgets about the turret, about the rabbit, about the strange hardware store owner or Amber’s scare at the bonfire. By the time she looks into the mirror and sees a beautiful mint-green-and-gold look staring back at her, Cecily feels like herself again. Good. Confident.

And then she heads downstairs to show her mom the look, but along the way everything changes. Because she meets Amber on the stairs and her sister’s panicked face tells Cecily something is very wrong. She feels the dread return to her bones, and she knows what Amber is going to show her before she even sees it.

Amber holds up her phone to reveal another comment from the follower beneath the post of Cecily from earlier, lying on the floor and advertising for RainbowMani:

I told you not to mess with it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

CHAPTER 13

Amber

Amber bounces on the balls of her feet, trying not to stare at the door as she waits for Jada and Bella to arrive. She had opted for an elegant wrap top over a pair of dark jeans, but even though she knows her outfit is on point, she still feels self-conscious. She’d allowed Cecily to do her makeup for the night—just the basics: some mascara, tinted moisturizer, and a kiss of bronzer on the apples of her cheeks. But is she too made up? Trying too hard or not trying enough? Too well dressed or too sloppy to look the part of social media star?

She wonders if Bella and Jada know that she was on the livestream, if they’d noticed the comments. Not the Alex Grable follower ones—the other ones.

Yes! More Amber! So glad that the Coles listened.

Wow, Amber looks FRESH.

They make her glow. Amber tries to summon that happy feeling, that confidence, as she waits for Bella and Jada to arrive.

Meanwhile, Cecily lounges on a folding chair, looking as if she couldn’t care less that their friends are coming over. So