The Girls Are Never Gone

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The Girls Are Never Gone by Sarah Glenn Marsh

Welcome to Attachments, a podcast that has splintered off from a youtube ghost hunting show, Strange Virginia. In Attachments, Virginia Dare Chase, Dare, is going to document the month she'll be spending at Arrington Estate helping with renovations and diving into the mystery of what happened to Atheleen Bell in 1992. Dare had never heard of Arrington until a subscriber of Strange Virginia, KiwiLovesMango, commented about it being spooky and haunted and Dare suspects that it is being haunted by Atheleen. Things surrounding her death don't quite add up, so Dare is hoping to get to the bottom of the mystery. Let's just hope she doesn't end up at the bottom of the lake instead, like Atheleen.

Dare is riding with her mom and her diabetic alert dog Waffles to Arrington Estate. It's hot and sweaty and Dare's sugar level is elevated because of her nerves. Her mom worries of course, especially when Waffles whines, which could mean a low sugar level, but in this instance, it just means he needs a potty break. They arrive in New Hope at Paradise Lake and pull up to the creepy house. For a place called Paradise, it sure is muddy, but Dare is ready to investigate and increase her subscriber count. 

Dare and Waffles approach the front door of the old house but Waffles starts growling and has to be carried inside with the promise of a hot dog. Silly dog. Inside, Dare meets Quinn, a gorgeously cute girl with red lipstick. Quinn's mom, an interior decorator, owns the house and is renovating it to turn it into a museum and Quinn is hoping to join the interior design industry as well and earn some college credits during this remodel project. 

Quinn shows Dare around a little and talks about dripping pipes and repainting as she shows Dare and Waffles to their room. When inside, Quinn reveals herself to be KiwiLovesMango and tells Dare she is being haunted. She's had nightmares about the house and the lake, has had bad shower experiences - cool water scalding to hot in an instant, and also the feeling of being touched on the shoulder - and she's heard things moving around above her when she knows others in the house aren't up there. 

After Dare unpacks some of her stuff, including most of her diabetic supplies and her ghost hunting and podcast equipment, Quinn shows her around some more. All of the rooms have nautical names and themes and most of them have a lot of water damage. When they go outside, they walk past a garden that Quinn is growing and see an orchard with dying trees. Then they look out toward the lake and spot a girl sitting on the dock. They go to greet her and learn that her name is Holly and that she's local to Arrington and will be doing the internship with them. Her parents own an antique store and she's hoping to gather some unique abandoned treasures for their store. 

As they head back to the house, Holly suddenly grabs Dare, thinking she saw something, but changes her mind. Dare looks out to the lake and sees a greenish glow, maybe algae? maybe the sun breaking through the clouds? but then they all go inside for dinner. Quinn's mom Rose, the homeowner, and Cathy, who works with the historical preservation society and is helping with the restoration, have prepared a nice meal they all enjoy. 

Talk turns to Atheleen during the meal and Holly, being local, knows about her. She mentions a woman called Miss E who used to own the house and who might have been around when Atheleen died. The grownups change the conversation, making sure to remind the girls to stay out of the lake so they don't end up like Atheleen, and then they start cleaning up. Dare helps, hoping to make a good impression after talking about dead people. 

Later, after a shower that puts off no strange EMF readings, Dare meets up with Quinn to interview her about her experiences so far in the house and then they set up a hidden camera in the hallway and split up for bed. Before bed, Dare checks her subscriber count and comments, finding one from a username she doesn't recognize, SewSweet412, mentioning Miss E, the same woman Holly talked about. Dare eventually tries to fall asleep but can't because she hears a dripping sound. She goes off in search of the leak but instead finds a puddle leading her to a hidden door at the end of the hall. Dare decides to record her second episode, ending with the door as an excellent cliffhanger.

The next day, Rose and Cathy go shopping all day for supplies for the house repair. Dare and Quinn make plans to start sorting through things in the attic but Holly wants to have some people over for a party instead. Dare talks to one girl, Willa, whose aunt sold the house to Miss E, but doesn't get much information from her other than that Miss E wanted to turn the house into a bed and breakfast but could never afford it. Soon enough, a handful of friends quickly turns into a lot of drunken teens in the lake, Dare, Quinn and Waffles watching soberly from the dock. Dare and Quinn talk about their favorite ghost hunting show and how they don't have significant others to talk to about it anymore and then they almost kiss, but then Holly screams.

Quinn, former swim team member, dives in and Dare unclips her insulin pump and follows, though Waffles growls and paws at her not to. Quinn is a fast swimmer and rescues Holly before Dare gets to them and all the people who were in the lake with Holly swam off and left her behind. Holly tells Quinn and Dare that something grabbed her. It wasn't a person, it was more like a rip current, but those don't tend to happen in a lake. Holly angrily tells everyone to leave and they clean up all evidence that anyone but them was there.

Later, the girls spend some time trying to peel the wallpaper away from the hidden door that Dare remembered and told them about, but the work is delicate since they're trying to do it in secret. Holly keeps watch as Quinn works and Dare edits her podcast. Just as they discover an old golden keyhole, making them think the room might be from the Arrington family's time instead of Atheleen's or Eileen's, Waffles starts growling at Quinn as if he doesn’t recognize her. Then Cathy starts coming up the stairs. The girls hide evidence of their discovery and dash to Dare's room before they hear Cathy walk down the hallway. Then they hear her coming back. She has found Dare's hidden video camera and tells her she doesn't mind it but that Rose will. Rose won't want her searching for ghosts. Wait. How does Cathy know that's what she's doing?

The girls split up after this, Holly to take a nap and Quinn to take some pictures of the outside of the house so she can paint them. Dare and Waffles tag along. Dare sees portraits of the Arrington family that were painted on the grounds and now Quinn wants to take photos and then create watercolors from them. They take some serious photos and then goof around with selfies, one resulting in a kiss on Dare's cheek. Quinn starts to bring up their almost kiss, but then Waffles goes crazy barking at a pigeon. Oh Waffles, you cockblocker. Unfortunately, the pigeon then does the ultimate horror movie thing and smashes into an attic window. According to all the movies, that means somebody is about to die. 

The next day, Dare, Holly and Cathy sort through things in the attic. Dare wants to find the key to the hidden door or any clues about Atheleen, and she also wants a moment to talk to Cathy who she's been suspicious of ever since she talked about her hidden camera. Holly wants to find something she can restore for the museum using her antiquing skills. Cathy wants to find items they can put in the museum, things they can donate and things that are trash. Dare finds some old letters or notes or maybe diary pages, but nothing in them is really juicy, but she wants to keep them to read more thoroughly. She also finds some daguerreotypes of the Arringtons that would go great in the museum. 

While Holly is still busy looking through things, Dare talks to Cathy about the families that lived in the house and Miss E and tricks her into revealing that she is SewSweet412. She tells Dare she is doing a good job with the podcast and should reach out to Miss E's daughter Megan, though it might be a dead end. The bells for the servant call box tinkle while they are talking, which is weird because the wires for it have supposedly been cut. As creepy as that is, Holly has found something creepier: a nightmare of a doll with missing eyes and scraggly hair and something rattling around inside. She has found what she is going to restore!

Later, Dare goes outside to try to call Megan like Cathy suggested. She runs into Rose first, and then hears someone say her name, but Rose doesn't seem to have heard it, so Dare tries not to think about it. She shares about some non-specific attic finds and the daguerreotypes and thinks to ask Rose if the Arringtons had a skeleton key made for the house, of course thinking about the locked door, but making up some locked trunks in the attic. Rose didn't know if there's a key or not and she seems a little wary of Dare, but is also impressed by the skeleton key question.

When Rose goes back inside, Dare looks at the house and realizes that there are no trees near her room, which doesn’t make sense because she swears she's heard branches scraping in the night. Then she hears Waffles growling and swears she sees a girl, but not just any girl. She thinks she saw Atheleen. She goes to investigate but only finds a deer corpse floating in the lake.

Dare gets in touch with Megan and they have plans to meet at a coffee shop in a few days. Now it's time to clean and sort the things they found in the attic, but Holly's creepy doll does not make an appearance. She seems more interested in the paranormal though, so they talk about that and then end up crowded around Dare's phone later watching Dare and Quinn's favorite show Grave Encounters, introducing it to Holly.

When she goes to bed that night, she starts to read some of the papers from the attic, but then Dare wonders if rats are making the scratching sounds that she hears. As she's good and creeped out, Quinn comes in, also freaked out. Now outside they hear a crying sound that must be coyotes. She asks if she can stay the night and they end up doing quite a bit of smooching.

The next day, the girls are meant to be painting one of the rooms but Cathy makes them stop when they realize the ceiling is leaking. Holly starts a brief paint fight to stop the cuteness overload happening between Dare and Quinn, and then the girls go for showers, Holly first because she's the messiest. While she is showering, Dare plans to look at the letters and papers she took from the attic but then Quinn starts screaming. 

Dare rushes to Quinn's room and Holly joins a little bit later. Quinn's expensive watercolors are all squeezed out of their tubes, there's a huge puddle in the floor, and scrawled on the wall, hopefully in paint and not blood, is THE GIRLS ARE NEVER GONE. Who could have done this? Not Quinn, Dare or Holly. Not Rose either, she wouldn't ruin her own house. It must be Cathy? But why would she do that? Quinn makes one more suggestion, it was a ghost, but Dare, hoping to be reassuring, tells her ghosts aren't real. Oh, but what about your podcast and your YouTube, Dare? Uh oh. Quinn slams the door on Dare and Holly.

A couple days later, Quinn takes Dare to the coffee shop to interview Megan. Holly was supposed to come, too, but she has started feeling sick, worried that when she nearly drowned, she must have swallowed some lake water and it is making her ill. Dare leaves Waffles behind with Holly to keep her company, trusting her CGM will be enough to monitor her sugar level. The car ride is a little awkward but it seems that things are better between the two now. Dare enters the shop first and gets coffee and pastries for herself and Megan and sends a secret coffee to Quinn who is discreetly listening from another table. Before the interview starts, Dare is approached by Strange Virginia fans and is asked for her autograph. It's really cute. 

Megan opens up to Dare easily about her mom Eileen, Miss E, and about the house. Apparently, when Eileen was a teenager and long before she owned the house, one of her friends, Scarlett, lived there but she disappeared, likely drowned, but her family wouldn't investigate. Eventually they moved away and then later on, after Atheleen's family left, Eileen bought the property, maybe hoping to find her friend. 

Megan then describes a time later on when she, her wife and their daughter came to visit. She was giving her daughter a bath when all of a sudden, sludge started pouring from the tap. At bedtime, she went to check on her daughter and her toys were flying around in the air. When she came in, her daughter said she made the skeleton girl go away. Yikes.

Megan then wraps up the story with her mom declining into dementia, getting a lot of cameras on the property to hopefully find someone who used to come on the grounds back before her friend Scarlett died. She then started saying things like “She's not sorry,” Megan thinking she was speaking about herself in third person. She also said “She was there. She saw everything.” Was someone there when Atheleen died? She would also say she was worried that whoever bought the house next “wouldn't let the right ones in,” whatever that means. Dare is a little bummed because after the interview, she has more questions than answers. 

Dare and Quinn tell Holly everything they learned when they get back, but they're worried about her because she seems worse. She's happy to help them solve their mysteries, but needs a nap first. As Dare and Quinn leave Holly's room, Dare swears she hears the creepy eyes rolling around inside the creepy doll that Holly has with her in her room. 

In Dare's room, she looks at her podcast statistics and sees that a really popular show has followed her and given her a shout out and her downloads are now in the thousands and people are clamoring for the next episode. Quinn comes in and celebrates with her and they decide that they want to try to get to know each other more and go slowly this time. No kissing!

Dare needs to change her insulin pump and while she does Quinn goes to the kitchen for a snack. Dare is focused on needles and pump stuff when Quinn comes back in and brushes her fingers through Dare's hair and down her neck. And then Quinn comes back in. Nah dog. Dare looks up to see that Quinn is in the doorway and has a weird double shadow that backs out into the hall. She tries to chase it and capture it but can't. She still doesn't want to believe what happened, but what else could it be? Quinn orders some crystals from the internet to keep them safe and then, uh oh, Waffles has an accident on the bed and she sits in it. Dare changes the bedding while Quinn takes a shower, but then she starts screaming. 

Quinn is screaming because there is a snake in the bathtub. Luckily it isn't a harmful one and it is taken outside and everyone settles back in for bed. Dare decides to edit the interview with Megan, but as she nears the end with the creepier stuff, she hears a whispery voice in her headphones say, “Leave, Dare. She won't save you either.” Dare listens back and only hears the interview. No extra voice. Dare tells herself she's just tired and that she didn't hear anything that means anything, and even if she did, she's not leaving her friends. After a quick snack to raise her low sugar level, Dare finally goes to sleep. 

And falls straight into a nightmare. She sees an argument between two dark haired teen girls, one older and one younger. The younger one appears to be in some kind of trance that the older one is trying to break her out of. The younger walks purposefully toward the lake that looks like it's surging and overflowing and the older rushes toward it and clambers into a row boat, heading for a glowing green light in the center of the churning lake. She dives into the middle, resurfaces screaming, holding what looks like crumpled paper, and then sinks again. Dare looks around for help and then sees several skeletal girls standing in a row, watching. The younger girl then snaps out of her trance, screaming for Atheleen, and a body washes to shore, back to its normal depth. Dare grabs a skeletal hand but wakes before she sees Atheleen's face. 

Dare wakes up to cold water dripping on her face. She looks at the ceiling for the new leak and freaks out when she sees Atheleen's body floating above her, a horrible stench wafting around her, reaching for her with broken muddy hands as she slowly falls, telling Dare to run, go. Dare really wakes up then and realizes she's been crying, Waffles nudging her side. Her sugar level is high and her insulin pump is dead. The stench is still there. Dare goes to the bathroom, but in the mirror she sees what looks like Quinn, reaching out to strangle her. She whips around. No one is there. Dare calls out to Atheleen and Scarlett, telling them to talk to her, to pull her hair, to scream at her, anything to prove they are really there. Is Dare starting to believe in ghosts? No, but she thinks the house wants her to. She can't let the house win. Wait, what? Why is she thinking that?

Dare doesn't sleep after that and instead watches the videos from her hidden camera, hoping to find anything ghostly, but doesn't. The next morning, she goes outside to call for a new insulin pump and notices the lake has risen quite a bit since she was last outside. Phone call completed and new pump on the way, Dare goes back inside. Rose is awake already, still shaky from the snake the night before. She was bitten by a venomous snake when she was a kid, so… no thanks. 

Everyone else is still asleep, so Dare finally gets the interview edited and then finally looks at the letters and diary entries from the attic. There's a note from the father of the Arrington household trying to sell his boat after an accident. Then there are entries about a bratty girl called Hettie that she saw in earlier entries, but now the brattiness seems… sociopathic. There's an entry about Hettie’s sisters probably purposefully forgetting her birthday sail around the lake and all the perceived slights against her, then she vows she'll curse them and their screams and tears will drain them dry as they give her their strength. Um. Yikes? Dare hears someone say her name so she goes downstairs to get to work for the day. It's very clear that her friends were nowhere around and they did not call her name. 

While they work painting another room, Quinn shows Dare and Holly a cute picture of them from the other day when they were painting, but there's an extra shadow with them. Dare debunks it as a coat rack, but is curious about Quinn. Sometimes she seems terrified of the house, like right now, but other times, she seems like she loves it, like when she wanted to create watercolors of it. They are all mostly satisfied with the debunking, though Holly mentions wanting her to figure out why her room is colder than everyone else's and Quinn brings up the shoulder tapping, but then the servant call bells go off again. How are you going to debunk that?

The girls go rushing upstairs to try to find whoever is ringing the call bells, Cathy left dumbfounded with cookies and lemonade in their wake. They know the call came from the level where their rooms are, but they don't know which room is which on the supposedly disabled system. The last room they check is Quinn's and there they find a new painting. Creepy mermaids have been scrawled on the walls along with the words THEY'RE NEVER SORRY. As Dare looks closely, a bottle of black paint hits the wall and explodes right next to her head. She was looking at Quinn when it happened, so did Holly do it? No way, it's not possible. Dare thinks again about Cathy maybe painting it, but that's impossible too. 

Dare then thinks about Megan's interview and Eileen saying she's not sorry. Eileen wasn't talking about herself in third person. There really must have been someone else there when Atheleen died. Are they still in the house? In the locked room? Quinn says she'll get her mom's keys but Holly doesn't want to get involved. She just wants the internship to go well so she can get out of this small town. Dare is worried about her because she still doesn't look very good, but they let her go without a fight. Dare decides to make a post on her podcast asking for local knowledge about what's going on. Surely someone knows something. 

The next day, Dare's insulin pump arrives and as she sets it up, Quinn tells her that her mom wants to talk to everyone and it seems serious. Maybe she realized they've been searching her things for the skeleton key? Before they have this meeting, Dare and Quinn go through the video footage from the night before. But there isn't any? It's been deleted. Ghosts probably don't know how to work video cameras. 

The meeting is to tell them that they are ending the internship early, at the end of the week. There are too many things going wrong that will require paid contractors and repairmen to fix. Dare asks about the call system but Rose confirms that the electricians that were there checked again and all the wires were cut. Rose also says that the lake is becoming too turbulent and it's just not safe for them to be there anymore. Cathy offers them all coffee cake and is sad to see them go and offers to help make arrangements for Dare and Holly when suddenly Holly stands up and vomits disgusting lakewater everywhere. Rose is clearly freaked out and dismisses the girls as Cathy helps Holly up to her room. As Dare, Quinn and Waffles go check on Holly, the servant call box goes off again. Quinn spent some time mapping the system since the last time it went off. The call is coming from Holly's room.

Holly smiles when they ask her about pushing the button for the call system. Cathy touched it with her butt fluffing her pillows before she left. Yes, that's hilarious, but the system should be disabled. Dare gets Holly some toast and they leave her to rest. 

In the hallway, Dare plans to call her mom but Quinn stops her and tells her she's changed her mind about taking things slowly, especially now that Dare will be leaving soon. They plan to have an indoor candlelit picnic and spend quality time together after Dare calls her mom. The girls are super cute and dance and kiss and then Dare touches Quinn's shoulder and she winces. She has bruises from whatever grabbed her in the shower that morning that she didn't say anything about. Quinn gets back to dancing and tells Dare she wants to have a relationship with her when suddenly a gust of wind rushes in through the window. Dare goes to close it when she sees Atheleen's reflection, smiling and laughing, water pouring out of her mouth.

Quinn turns the lights on, clearly not having seen Atheleen like Dare did. They try to clean up the water that got inside and then take Holly some more toast, their cute picnic over. Quinn kisses Dare's cheek before they go in though. They spend the night together in Dare's room, talking, Waffles snuggled between them. Dare startles awake when she gets an alert on her phone. It's not her sugar level like she thought, it's an email replying to her plea for information. The emailer, IvyBeanArt, says Dare should look into Brian McDougal, the police officer who was there the night Atheleen died and gives his phone number. 

Someone comes into the room, but it's not Quinn returning from a walk with Waffles like Dare thinks, it's Holly. She's feeling better and was going to go for a run but the downstairs is completely flooded and she came to tell Dare about it. They go look around and then see Quinn outside, walking into the lake with Waffles’ empty collar and leash in her hand. They rush outside, Waffles, good boy that he is, barking safely from shore, and into the water to stop Quinn who doesn't seem to hear them. They are about waist deep when they catch up to her. Dare shakes her arm, asking what she's doing, but then something grabs her ankle and yanks her under so hard that her head crashes against the bottom of the lake.

Dare is being pushed by unseen hands, held under the water until Holly pulls her up. Quinn is still zoned out, but they manage to make it back to shore. Waffles is there, growling at Quinn, or at her second shadow that Dare sees, then watches as it merges with Quinn's actual shadow. They have some tea once they make it back inside, but then Dare spews lakewater, thinking the house has infected us all. 

Holly goes to her room to pack and suggests Quinn and Dare do, too, but Dare feels like she still needs to solve all the mysteries in the house. Quinn goes for a shower and Dare goes into Holly's room and sees the creepy doll at her bedside, covered with mold. Holly flips, overprotective of the doll and yanks it away from Dare, putting it on the shelf. She says she's still going to repair it for the museum because it's not like anyone can ever leave the house anyway. She slams it on a shelf but it topples and falls, and when it shatters, it seems like something breaks in Holly, too. She corrects herself, it's not like anyone can ever leave the town, and then leaves the room when Quinn comes in. Dare looks at the broken doll and sees that what she thought were its eyes rattling around inside were there, but along with them is a key.

Dare and Quinn immediately open the hidden door, stopping to grab Dare's camera first so she can document everything, Holly catching up. They go inside a very 90s teen girl's room - Atheleen's. There are clothes hanging in the closet, books on the shelves, lots of beautiful watercolor paintings, including mermaids that look like the mermaids painted on Quinn's walls, and photos in frames on the desk. The photos are of Atheleen growing up, but when they look closer, they see that Atheleen's little sister's face has been scratched out of all of them. Who would have done that and why?

Under the bed, they find several boxes. One has CDs, one that Quinn recognizes as one her mom played for her when she was little to soothe her. Oh millennial moms! Still loving those 90s jams! Another box hidden back in the corner is one that really helps them. It's research that Atheleen did about the ghost haunting the house, who seems to travel in the water. The deaths go back all the way back to Henrietta “Hettie” Arrington, who died in a boat accident. The girls remember reading about her in her diary entries and how much she seemed to hate her sisters. Atheleen noted several deaths over the years and discovered that each girl who died was the same age as each of Henrietta's sisters. Atheleen realized that Scarlett's ghost, the last girl who died, seemed to be doing Henrietta's bidding and was after Atheleen's little sister Gussie, Augusta, and she vowed to stop her or die trying. Well… she did one of those things. 

After this discovery, the bells start going off and Quinn swears it's the tune from that 90s jam. Then stuff starts flying around the room. Holly yells at Hettie and Quinn joins in, telling her to let Atheleen go. Then Atheleen flickers and appears. It's definitely the same girl Dare has seen in her dreams, which means she's seen Atheleen's little sister, too. Dare has to admit to herself that ghosts are real. Atheleen disappears and books start flying at them, and Dare asks her to help them stop Henrietta. Everything goes quiet and then they hear footsteps, real human footsteps, coming up the stairs. Quickly they rush outside of the room and hide the door again just as Rose walks up the stairs.

Rose asks them if they heard the bells again, too, and they say they did and that they are helping Holly pack up her stuff so she can go ahead and leave because she's feeling sick, a story Dare makes up on the spot. Rose tries to talk her out of leaving because her parents are still out of town like they have been all the time that Holly has been there and when she reaches Holly, Holly seems to pass out into her arms. At first, they were faking Holly being sick but this seems real. They carry her to her room. 

Quinn tries to talk her mom into getting them all out of there now and to a motel, but Rose has more contractors coming in the morning and has put too much into the house to abandon it, but if Quinn wants to just give up, she can. Quinn quickly changes her mind, confusing Dare, but she explains later that she can't let her mom down. Dare realizes she can't let Quinn down, or her listeners, or herself, so she decides to stay, too. Plus, none of them have really gotten too hurt. Maybe Atheleen is helping as best as she can to stop them from drowning like she did for her own sister. 

Dare then gets a text from Brian McDougal, the police officer from Atheleen's disappearance. He agrees to meet up with Dare at an auto repair shop not too far from Arrington Estate the next day. Hopefully he'll know something about Augusta, Atheleen's little sister, and maybe if Dare can find her, it will make Hettie and Atheleen be able to rest. Her mom will be there to pick her up later the next day, so Dare hopes she can get everything wrapped up in time. She doesn't want to leave the mystery unsolved. After helping Cathy for a bit, Dare takes Waffles out for a potty break and he jumps into the lake after doing his business. When he comes back out, he's got a bone in his mouth. A human jawbone, complete with teeth.

The police arrive shortly to retrieve the bone, Rose being terse with them and Holly making everyone drinks. Dare escorts them out when their short investigation is over and asks about Officer McDougal. She learns that he is indeed a real person, and he's a good guy, retired from the force, which should assuage Holly's fear because she didn't even think he was real. Before they leave, she suggests that the bone might belong to Scarlett so at least they might start their search with her. 

After helping Cathy secure more things so the contractors can get to work as soon as possible, the girls go to Dare's room to sleep, skipping showers just in case the water-traveling theory Atheleen had is correct, which it obviously is. Dare records the room as they sleep, but as soon as she dozes off, she falls into another nightmare. 

This one picks up right where the last left off, reaching into the lake to pull Atheleen's corpse out, but instead of Atheleen's little sister being there next to her, Dare looks over to see Rose, and then the body in the lake is Holly, and then Quinn is there, creepy smile plastered on her face as she pushes Dare in. Dare wakes up in the bathtub as it fills with murky lake water, her digital camera still in her hand, now ruined. Quinn rescues her and they spend the rest of the night talking. Holly didn't even wake up.

Dare wakes the next morning and helps out around the house waiting for the time for her appointment with Brian McDougal. Quinn is already helping Cathy when she wakes and Holly is still sleeping. Rose is out, trying to find someone to help with the house because the contractors never showed. Cathy has decided to hang a cross on the wall and salt the doorways, Supernatural Winchester-style because she clearly knows something is going on in the house. They move furniture out of one of the flooded rooms but then the ceiling starts leaking and the chandelier falls and Quinn is right underneath it. Atheleen's ghost appears before Dare can get there and pulls Quinn out of the way. But why?

After everything calms down, it's time for Dare to meet with officer McDougal, but Quinn doesn’t want to go with her and doesn’t even want her to go at all while Dare wants them all to leave and not come back. Quinn asks if Dare saw Atheleen and says that she's got to stay because of family, and yeah, Rose has put a lot into the house, so Dare understands. 

Dare asked Cathy to borrow her van to go into town to get diabetes supplies before her mom gets there later that night. She takes the keys and she and Waffles head out. When they arrive at the vacant auto shop, it looks completely run down and super sketchy. A car pulls up right after Dare arrives and it is not an older version of the Officer McDougal that Dare looked up online. It's Rose.

Rose tells Dare that Brian McDougal was a family friend and he asked her to meet with Dare and that she has information about Augusta. They need to talk quickly, inside the old garage... Yeah, that's not sketchy at all... Unfortunately Dare doesn't spray Rose with the pepper spray she brought with her and gets locked up inside the old garage. She left Waffles in the van with the air conditioner on, so he'll be okay for a little while at least. Dare pulls out her recorder and starts shouting questions at Rose, about her actually being Augusta because of course she is, and then another car pulls up. It's Quinn. Dare shouts for Quinn, telling her her mom is Gussie and she was planning on letting Hettie have her or Holly, or maybe even Quinn herself, to try to get her sister back, or at least to let her sister rest. 

Finally Rose tells the whole story, about how the ghost girl in the mirror was really nice to her until she turned 12 and the ceiling and floors started leaking in her room, and then she started sleepwalking. Atheleen was very smart and creative, just like Quinn, Rose makes sure to add in, and she figured out Hettie's curse. She knew Gussie would be the next one taken, so she went out into the middle of the lake herself in a rowboat the night Gussie walked out there. She planned to confront Scarlett and Hettie, but she got taken instead. Gussie's parents moved and divorced after that and she stayed with her mom and took her new stepfather's last name. She's been trying to come back and help Atheleen ever since. She was the woman lurking around that creeped Eileen out, telling her to let the right ones in. She bought the house as soon as she could and now, she's going to break the curse.

Dare, Quinn and Waffles drive back to Arrington house followed closely by Rose. Dare's sugar level is over 200 because she's stressed and angry, rightfully so, so she takes a little insulin to help her get back in control. To add more stress, she has a million things going through her head about Rose and about Quinn. Did Quinn know about her mom? Was she in on the whole thing? Quinn's apology for bringing Dare into this whole situation doesn't help, even if she really is just talking about commenting on the podcast, leading Dare to want to come investigate. All Dare wants is to get Cathy and Holly out of the house. 

When they arrive, Dare asks Quinn to stay in the van but of course she doesn't. A huge storm rumbles overhead, rain pouring down. The house is full on haunted now, with lights flickering all over the place and water spilling from all the windows like little waterfalls. Dare starts to go inside but looks outside first, knowing that Hettie will have lured Holly to the lake. She and Quinn find Holly on the dock, completely unresponsive, wind gusting, storm thrashing, and the lake sloshing all around her. Unfortunately at this exact moment, Dare's sugar level starts to drop, because of course it does. She eats the last three glucose tablets she always has with her, hoping it will be enough to help her save her friends.

After trying and failing to get Holly's attention and she swims toward the center of the lake and the eerie green Hettie at its center, Dare and Quinn go for the rowboat that is tied nearby. Unfortunately, Rose gets there too. She won't let them take the boat but after some fighting, they manage it, leaving Rose behind to dwell on the fact that she basically tried to sacrifice her daughter's actual life for her sister's afterlife. 

Dare's sugar level has not recovered and is instead dropping lower. She and Quinn row out toward the center of the lake but they lose both of their oars in the turbulence and then the boat flips over. With Dare's sugar level so low, she can barely do anything, least of all save the day, but Quinn reaches out for her with a new pack of glucose tablets in hand. They get back on the boat and Dare tries to recover, but then a ghostly apparition of Atheleen appears. Quinn shouts for her aunt, hoping to break through to her, but Dare sees Hettie behind her in her green circle of lake, gleefully puppeting Atheleen. Then Dare sees Rose, swimming straight toward the ghosts, and Holly, too. Holly is reaching for Atheleen, but Rose gets to her sister first and hugs her. Suddenly everything goes dark. 

The storm breaks and everything returns to normal. The lake recedes and calms down and Dare and Quinn are able to row to shore where they find Holly. When they get to her, she spits out water and sits up, acting like her old self again, complaining about getting out of this town. Waffles and Cathy are there, too, perfectly fine. Well, Cathy was knocked out outside in the backyard, but Waffles rescued her and NOW she's fine. The only person who doesn't seem to be anywhere is Rose. But then, they all see two figures walk out of the lake, hand in hand, Atheleen and Gussie. They walk together, laughing and happy, into their house, gliding through the closed front door. Holly decides to walk home and takes off, but Dare makes her promise to stay in touch, and she agrees. Quinn is pretty devastated, but Cathy promises to take care of her until they can figure out what to do next. 

Attachments, season one, episode six

A little bit of time has passed since Dare's time at Arrington Estate and it's time to wrap things up. Rose had a memorial service that Dare did not attend, but Quinn sent a video and it was lovely. Dare and Quinn are not together, but they have plans to meet up before Halloween, so there's always hope. Cathy has started her own paranormal investigating group in New Hope, the town where Arrington is, and no, listeners, she will not be doing any investigating there. Waffles is taking swimming lessons and has alerted Dare several times to low sugar levels in the night because he's a good doggo. Dare is in therapy, trying to deal with everything she's seen, and it's also helping with her diabetes. The only thing that isn't wrapped up neatly is Holly. She was never seen again after she walked away from the lake. Dare called her parents and they confirmed that she never came home. Maybe she finally got out of New Hope and wanted to make a clean break, or maybe she never actually made it out of the lake at all, and she's there, waiting with Hettie for the next young girl to move in. The bank took over the house after Rose's death, but you never know what will happen next.