Excerpt

I close my eyes as they leave the room and do my best to ignore everything except the feel of the floorboards under my palm. I do the meditative breathing I learned in an otherwise useless therapy class and wait to see what comes.

The dust has started to settle again. The house had been aired out before we arrived, but I can still smell cloying disuse, a final remnant of years spent undisturbed. I can almost picture the scent, sitting heavy around me, lapping at my ankles. It calls to mind an old memory: fog in the river valley when I was younger and Dorian dragged me out to play, because he wasn't yet too old to not want his little brother following him everywhere. The morning was cold and we couldn't even see our hands in front of our faces, not until we climbed the side of the ravine. Then we could look back to where the fog settled on the world below us, a solid-liquid blanket.

My eyes start to sting and not from the dust. I sit back, blink them quickly, and try to re-focus on the house again. It's too hard, with the memory so close, and they've moved upstairs, so I switch to learning the main floor instead. I start near the front door, where there's short hallway just as you come in off the porch. A little coat closet is immediately on the right of the door, and the kitchen is straight ahead, five steps past the stairs. The living room with the fireplace is ten paces in on the left. I've heard there's a study, but I'll look for it later.

For now, I can hear them moving around upstairs; all the floors are hardwood and the noise carries. They're putting cameras, microphones, and other fun stuff in every room. I'm following their footsteps as best I can, trying to figure out who is where, and I feel my entire body freeze as I realize I can hear five sets. Two of them are as familiar as my own breathing, and I mentally check off Leanne and Paul. Sam's wearing steel-toed work boots, distinctive as she moves around the rooms. That leaves Charlie and the other one, and I don't know Charlie well enough to tell which one he is.

I count the stairs to myself as I go up and stand at the top. Still five sets, two unknown. I pick one at random, and trace the wall with my cane until I reach an open doorway.

"Damn!" Charlie sounds like he jumped a foot. "You sca— startled. You startled me."

"Which room is this?" I don't want to whisper it, but my voice does.

"The nursery," he answers, with a downward turn of disapproval.

"Come with me for a sec, will you?" The other footsteps are down and across the hall.

"Why? What's going on?" He sounds wary and he's lowered his voice to match my hushed tone.

"I need a set of eyes."

He accepts that for now and I lead the way, both of us stepping lightly out of instinct. This time the door I reach is closed, but the steps are behind it, pacing. They pause as my hand touches the doorknob, and then move again, quickly. I throw the door open and Charlie swears as we're hit with a wave of cold air. I can't hear anything anymore.

"The window's open," Charlie says as he brushes past me and across the room.

"Someone was in here. I could hear them."

His steps falter, just a little, and then pick up again. "The porch roof is out here," he says. "Wouldn't be too hard to climb up from the railing or to jump back down again."

"Squatter?"

"Could be." There's a thunk as he closes the window, and then the twin clicking of the side latches. He's silent for a movement. "Doesn't look like..."

"Like what?"

He sighs. "Are you sure you heard something?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"It's just." There's a brief pause, like he's considering his words. "The roof is still wet and there's no footprints. If someone got in and started walking around, there should be."

I shrug. "Just because I only heard them a little while ago doesn't mean they haven't been up here for a while. They could have started moving when you all reached the second floor."

"True." He chuckles. "That was a more realistic answer than I expected."

"Don't judge me by my job here. I'm another skeptic, really."

"Good to know. I was beginning to feel outnumbered."

"Leanne's actually more practical about this than she lets on." I have to laugh at the disbelieving snort that earns. "She's been doing this for five years now and she hasn't marked a single case authentic. She may jump to the supernatural at first, but she tends to experiment her way away from it."

As if she'd heard us talking about her, Leanne enters the room, patting me on the shoulder as she walks by. "Man it's freezing in here, that's great! We need to rig it up if you two don't mind us barging in."

"Go to it," I say, "and make sure the window's sealed while you're at it." She doesn't seem to catch that last part, at least not by the way she responds by calling Sam over to talk about camera angles. It sounds like they'll have everything they need to watch whoever it is who is breaking in and absolutely nothing to keep them out.

"I bet we could cut some firewood down," Charlie says as he joins me just inside the room. "We can brace it in the window, make sure it can't be raised. Even if there's some way to open the latches from outside, they shouldn't be able to get in anymore."

"Good plan," I say and then back out of the room as Leanne and Sam start bringing equipment in and Charlie is called over to help. They're making a lot of noise and it's too distracting for me to make an attempt at seeing what had really happened in that room, if there's even anything in there I could use. I'll solve it later, and I'm willing to bet at least some of what Leanne has in her records will be explained once we figure out who's been breaking in. For now, though, I retreat to the main floor gratefully. Like Leanne said, even with the window closed, that room is freezing.