The door to Paige’s room swung open.
A figure stood in the doorframe, backlit by candlelight—Jude.
Grant felt the change in his eyes, his chest, his ears—a subtle pulling from the doorway, like a vacuum seal had broken and the room itself was gasping for breath.
He squinted, searching for detail, but Jude was only a profile.
The doctor stepped out into the hall and began to walk, his pace as measured as a metronome, foot-strikes steady even as the glass from the shattered light bulb crunched beneath his feet.
In the darkest part of the corridor, Grant lost his silhouette.
His pulse rate kicked up a notch, eyes working every angle of the crack between the door and its frame for a better perspective.
Four feet from the closet door, Jude reemerged into the scraps of light that filtered up the staircase.
Grant could hear him breathing now and smell his cologne which also bore traces of Paige. Grant struggled to pull the door in with all the force he could rally but it wouldn’t close the final inch, leaving a gap that felt as big as the Grand Canyon.
Jude stood in perfect view, the doctor facing the closet door.
Motionless.
Gazing straight at the crack.
For a long time, Jude didn’t move.
When he finally stepped forward, his eyes came into the stairway light.
Grant’s first thought was that they looked dead, but that wasn’t quite right. They exuded a thousand-yard intensity he’d seen countless times during interrogations and interviews. Talking to murderers and victims’ next of kin. People who had fucked up or been fucked up and were trying to come to terms with the rest of their life.
Jude took another step toward the closet, so close now that his shadow filled the crack.
The tension coiled in Grant’s chest had maxed out its tensile strength.
His system spiked with adrenaline.
Somewhere in the distance, a man began to sing.
Jude stopped, turned his head.
The tinny, five-second refrain of “Ring of Fire” repeated itself from somewhere on the second floor.
Jude’s shadow disappeared from the crack, footsteps trailing away while Johnny crooned.
Grant pushed the closet door open.
The hallway was empty, light spilling around the far corner where it had been dark moments before.
Guest bedroom.
Grant bolted down the hall, past the stairwell, forcing himself to slow down as he rounded the corner.
The phone was still ringing, the song much louder.
Grant crept up to the open doorway.
The room stood empty, but there was movement in the bathroom.
Grant took two steps inside, said, “What are you doing?”
The phone went quiet.
Grant saw a shadow stretch across the floor, and then Jude emerged from the bathroom, his white sneakers tracking perfect bloody footprints across the floor. The man stopped and stared at Grant with an expression as lifeless and blank as a mannequin. His hands were darkened with blood, and he held something small and black in his right hand.
Don’s cell began to ring again.
Jude raised his arm above his head, and with alarming speed, pitched the phone at the floor.
It shattered against the hardwood in a debris field of glass and plastic and circuitry.
Then Jude started toward him.
Grant instinctively backed away—something in the man’s stride putting him on notice.
“I just want to talk to you,” Grant said. “I’m Paige’s—Gloria’s—brother.”
Jude didn’t stop.
Grant steadied himself, ready to intercept the man if need be, but Jude just stepped to the side and slid past him, their shoulders brushing.
Grant turned and followed him out the door.
“Hey!”
Jude was already halfway down the hall.
Grant doubled his pace.
“I didn’t say you could leave.”
Jude’s gait didn’t change, and by the time he reached the top of the stairs, Grant was on his heels.
Jude started down the staircase.
Grant put a hand on his shoulder from behind.
“I’m a cop. That means when I tell you to stop, you listen.”
Jude came to an abrupt halt two steps down.
“I want to know what happened in there. In her room.”
Jude brought his hand up to his shoulder and wrapped his fingers around Grant’s wrist.
Grant tried to jerk his arm away, but the man’s grip was a cold vise.
Jude turned and faced him, and the moment he saw Jude’s eyes, Grant’s words died in his throat.
The man’s pupils had been swallowed almost entirely by the roily gray of his irises. Only two infinitesimal pinpricks of black remained, like shrunken keyholes.
Jude folded Grant’s wrist back with ease and a lightning bolt of pain exploded up Grant’s arm, crumbling him to his knees.
Time protracted, seconds becoming eons of escalating misery as his radiocarpal joint approached its limit. A power surge illuminated the staircase for one burning second, and then everything was enveloped in darkness.
Jude released him.
Grant collapsed onto his side, cradling his hand against his chest as Jude’s footsteps continued down the stairs.
“Get back here,” he said, but neither his voice nor his heart was in it.
The front door opened and slammed shut, Dr. Jude vanishing into the rainy night.
Chapter 13
“Paige!”
Grant pounded on her door.
“Can you hear me?”
He grabbed the doorknob and tried to turn it, straining with his good wrist until it popped, but nothing happened.
“Paige!”
His voice raced through the second-floor halls that wrapped around the stairwell.
Grant turned and felt his way through the darkness to the hallway table. There was nothing of use on the surface, but a brief exploration along its side revealed a drawer handle.
He yanked it open, blindly rummaging.
Mostly unidentifiable junk.
Couldn’t believe his luck when he found a small flashlight.
Please.
He twisted the end and a narrow circle of light shone on the floor beneath him.
Grant returned to the door and dropped to his knees.
Put the side of his head on the hardwood and shined the weak light underneath the crack.
Nothing.
He stood, took several steps back, and accelerated at the door, his shoulder lowered, bracing for impact.
There was as much give as if he’d run straight into a brick wall, a bright shudder of agony exploding in his shoulder and screaming down through his arm to the tips of his fingers.
But a fear that tore his guts out overrode the pain.
Something had happened to Paige and he couldn’t get to her.
He sprinted down the hall, around the corner, and shot down the stairs as fast as he could safely travel in the dark.
Need an ax, a sledgehammer, a bowling ball—something with heft.
Failing that, find a toolbox. Physically remove the doorknob.
Grant stopped at the hearth and made a cursory examination of the fireplace toolset. The heaviest thing on the rack was the cast-iron poker, but it wouldn’t stand a chance of breaking through Paige’s door.
He threw it down and ran into the kitchen.
Pulled open the door to the pantry.
The half-bundle of plastic-wrapped firewood still sat on the floor. He frantically searched the shelves, hoping for a toolbox, a hatchet, something, but the heaviest object he spotted was a thirty-two-ounce can of whole cherry tomatoes.
Think. Think. Think.
As he’d first approached the brownstone after opening the wrought-iron gate, he’d walked up a set of stairs to reach the first level.
Which means—
<
br /> —there’s probably a basement.
Grant shut the pantry door and spun around.
The shock of seeing Paige standing two feet away buckled his knees as if someone had cut his ligaments.
Grant stumbled back against the door.
His sister stared at him—reeking of sex, lingerie badly wrinkled, and looking as bleary and confused as if she’d just woken out of REM sleep.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She blinked several times without answering, as if the connections between thought and speech were rebooting.
Said finally, “Did you see Jude?”
Grant nodded.
“He left my room?”
“He did a lot more than that.”
“Tell me everything.”
Chapter 14
The temperature inside the brownstone was diving.
Grant built up the fire with the remaining logs, and with Paige’s help, dragged over the leather sofa and the mattress she’d been sleeping on.
He took the flashlight upstairs, stripped the guest bed.
Hauled the pile of blankets and covers downstairs.
It was long past midnight when Grant finally eased down onto the sofa, and as his head hit the pillow, the sheer exhaustion swept through with such intensity he could’ve mainlined it.
He wrapped two blankets around himself and turned over to face the fire.
The heat felt good, and it came at him in waves.
Paige lay on the mattress several inches below.
“You getting warm?” he asked.
“Not yet. Has it been worse than this?” she asked.
“No, I think we have a winner.”
Without the central heat running, it was quiet enough in the powerless house to hear the rain and the occasional hiss of a car going through a puddle on the street, though they were driving by with greater infrequency at this late hour.
Grant pulled his arm out from under the covers and touched Paige’s shoulder.
“I can’t believe you’ve been living with this for weeks,” he said.
Tears had begun to shine in the corners of her eyes.
“Before,” Paige said, “when it was just me, I kept thinking maybe this wasn’t real. Maybe I was imagining it. Losing my mind. But now you’re here. And don’t get me wrong—I’m so glad you are—but it means this is actually happening.”
“There’s an explanation.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. But we’ll figure it out.”
“You’re a detective. It’s your job to believe there are answers to everything.”
“There are answers to everything. Also, I’m very good at my job if that makes you feel any better.”
“No offense, but I think haunted houses are a step above your pay grade.”
The room undulated in the firelight, Grant so tired his eyes were lingering on the blinks.
“Do you really think this place is haunted?” he asked. “Whatever that even means.”
“I’ve thought about it a lot, and I don’t know. But if this isn’t haunted, I’d hate to see what it takes to qualify.”
“How do you sleep knowing what’s up there? Or rather, not knowing?”
“I only sleep when my body shuts down and my eyes refuse to stay open. The dreams are awful.”
“You have a gun in the house?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Where is it?”
“My coat pocket. The gray one hanging by the door.”
“Loaded?”
“Yes. Why? Planning to shoot a ghost?”
“Never know.”
“You know you can’t ever go into my bedroom. You know that, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Promise me you won’t.”
“Cross my heart.”
For a moment, Grant considered trying to leave again, but just the threat of that all-encompassing pain put a shudder through him.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Paige said.
“What’s that?”
“You’re thinking when you wake up in the morning, it’ll be different. That there will be light outside and people driving around, and we’ll have somehow slept this off.”
“I don’t know what to think.”
She reorganized the covers and tucked them under her feet.
Shut her eyes.
“Don’t get your hopes up. You don’t wake up from this.”
Chapter 15
Two years ago on Thanksgiving night, Grant had questioned a man charged with manslaughter in the death of his wife and children. He’d driven them home drunk from a family dinner and veered head-on into a tow truck. Somehow managed to escape without a scratch.
Grant never forgot how the man had sat in the hard, remorseless light of Interview 3, his head buried in his hands, still fragrant with booze. He wasn’t a bad guy. No priors. Had only been moderately drunk. And up until that evening, he’d always been a model family man.
He’d just happened to make a bad choice, catch a tough piece of luck, and ruin his life.
He wouldn’t answer questions, wouldn’t look at Grant, just kept saying over and over, “I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe this is happening.”
Grant had been disturbed by it for a lot reasons, but mostly because he’d driven when he shouldn’t have plenty of times.
But for the grace …
But lying in the firelight as sleep stalked him, he realized he’d never truly understood the sentiment, the horror running through that poor man’s mind, until now.
I can’t believe this is happening.
Exactly.
It was the feeling, the desperate wish, to go back. To hit undo. To have never walked up the steps to this—haunted?—brownstone. To have never seen Paige’s eyes on Facebook. To be anywhere but here—lying on this couch in this cold house under these conditions and Don dead upstairs.
Don is dead.
He hadn’t put those words together yet. Hadn’t had a chance to.
Now, in the dark with Paige asleep beside him, they came upon him like a freight train out of nowhere, arriving all at once with a truth so big it tripped his breakers.
He felt dizzy, sick.
Don is dead.
It kept repeating in his head—such small words—and yet they were the sound of a lynchpin sliding out. Of Rachel, Don’s wife of fifteen years, washing the dinner dishes alone at night in the kitchen before going up to an empty bed.
A new gust of nausea swept over him.
He’d convinced Don to come here.
Grant couldn’t handle the stillness any more.
Needed a drink now.
He swung his legs over the edge of the sofa and leveraged his weight up, carefully stepping over Paige.
The dying fire provided just enough glow to see the flashlight on the coffee table. He grabbed it and picked his way through the living room, testing each floor plank for noise before committing.
At the wet bar, he reached for the Macallan. Pulled the cork, took a long drink straight from the bottle. It didn’t touch his ravenous thirst, but it quenched something so much deeper.
Grant moved through the living room toward the front door.
At the edge of the foyer, he stopped, turned on the flashlight.
Canvassed the room.
Everything in its right place.
Further on in the dining area, the table and ladder-back chairs made a strange geometry of shadows on the wall as the beam passed over them.
Grant stepped into the entryway.
The chill hit him flush on.
What little heat the fire still produced hadn’t made it this far.
The staircase loomed just ahead.
Pausing at the bottom, he shined the flashlight up toward the second floor. It didn’t quite reach the top, leaving the last few steps in a pool of darkness.
A wash of uneasiness turned his stomach, Grant beginning to second-guess that drink.
He moved closer to the staircase, compelled to scatter the darkness at the top, but just as his foot touched the first step, a thump like a bowling ball dropping on the floor above him shook the house.
He froze, heartbeat thudding in his ears.
Still couldn’t see the top of the stairs.
The dining room chandelier swayed in the wake of the noise, tiny glass prisms clinking.
Grant shot a sidelong glance toward Paige in the living room, unwilling to completely tear his eyes or the flashlight away from the staircase.
The firelight was too weak to see her face, but she lay in the same position.
Grant began to climb, each step groaning, and he kept climbing and kept climbing. Knew it wasn’t possible—perhaps a symptom of sleep deprivation—but it seemed as if there were twice as many steps as before.
As he approached the top, the floral print of the wallpaper slowly emerged out of the black.
He stepped onto the old carpeting of the second floor and stopped.
The beam of light just a tight circle on the wall straight ahead.
Pure darkness on either side.
He twisted the face cap, hoping for a wider coverage of light, but it only dimmed what little it had to offer.
Grant brandished the flashlight over his shoulder as he moved on and rounded the corner, the hallway illuminating unevenly.
He exhaled.
All quiet.
Paige’s bedroom door still closed.
He went on, past the cramped closet where he’d hidden from Jude several hours before, past the table, past Paige’s door, and down to the end of the hall where he turned to find the guest bedroom still open, just as he’d left it.
At the doorway, he stopped, resisting an inexplicable urge to enter.
He shined the anemic light into the room.
The stripped bed.
Bits of Don’s phone still scattered on the floor.
The bloody footprints.
Horror again at the thought of what had happened in here.
At what lay sprawled across the checkerboard floor of the bathroom.
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