The damn kids were at it again. I chased them off. I always do. It riles me, the way some of them laugh. It’s a mean laugh. They’re scared. I know they are. I can see it in their eyes when they glance back at me, but they keep doing it. And they laugh because they know how mad it makes me, to have to chase them off my property like that. They enjoy tormenting an old man.

I used to wonder what I’d do if I ever caught one. Not likely. Not at my age. They’re little whips. I wonder if I was ever young enough to move that fast. I’m sure as hell too slow now. I used to grumble to myself after I’d chased them away, taking grim satisfaction from my fantasy about one of them tripping so I could finally get my hands on them. I never bothered planning it out. I’d just wallow in that dark, murky idea of what I could do. Something mean. Something that would teach them. Something that would teach all the parents and police that did nothing to stop them from throwing rocks at my house and treating my yard like some kind of carnival freak show.

Not my yard. Me. I know it’s me they’re all gathered to stare at. They’re waiting, barely breathing, for yours truly to show up. If it’s a show to them, then I’m the freak.

One day it happened. I wasn’t ready for it. I came roaring out of my house to chase away the trespassers, and one of the little boys, probably no older than nine or ten, tripped on a thick clod of grass sticking up higher than anything else. How his foot managed to find that one clump of crab grass in a field full of nothing but dirt and dust is one of the wonders of the world. But it did find it, and the boy tumbled like I’d never seen.

I stopped when I saw it, suddenly cold to my core—only getting colder when I saw the expression on his face. He was white with terror. His cheeks were blotches of bright red against white, white skin. His eyes were wide like circles. He looked like an animal. And he didn’t stop for it. He got up and kept running, blood streaming off his torn-up arm like red raindrops, his fingers leaning at angles so extreme they had to have been broken, but that didn’t matter none to him. I think he would’ve run on a broken leg, he was so terrified.

When they’d cleared away from the hill that hid my house from the rest of town, I was left alone. I shook myself and headed back to my house, getting madder at every step. What was he so scared of? I never liked children, but after that I hated them clear to the spot in my core that had gone cold, and I ran faster when I had to chase them off. I still never caught them.

I hate them, and I wish they’d stop coming—but a part of me is glad that no more of them have tripped.

[https://i.imgur.com/f011ZNa.jpg]

It’s usually boys that crawl over the last of my fence to come into my yard.

The girls only come to the edge of the road to stare. They usually come in groups, either all girls around the same age or with a mix of boys. Whenever I hear their whiny tones, begging the boys to come back, I stop whatever I’m doing and go outside. The boys’ll break my windows if I let them. I don’t have the money to fix them, and god knows, their parents will never pay for it.

A boy in the yard is trouble.

There’s only been one girl that ever crossed that fence. She was an odd one.

First she came, like they all do, in a group. The others tittered and yelped a bit. I ignored them. I don’t like to be stared at, but it’s more than my energy’s worth to try to chase them off if all they do is stay on the road and act like vultures.

But one of the little girls didn’t laugh or talk to the others. She just stared. My rising temper faded under her gaze. I tried to figure out why. She was scared—like the rest of them—but she looked troubled too, as if there was something sad and puzzling about the whole situation. I think it was that puzzlement that calmed me down. Not because of any sympathy, but because I couldn’t understand it. It left me puzzled too. Puzzled cancels out anger, I guess.

She came back alone. Several times. She’d stand at the edge of the road and gaze at my house with that same puzzled, troubled, scared expression. I chased her off once, even though she wasn’t doing any harm. I must have given up on learning what she was so damn confused about.

That was the night she came back alone and crept over the broken beams that were all that was left of my fence. Most of them were lying along the ground. A few were propped up on their old posts. There was no point in putting them up again. I’d watched the boys kick them down. They wouldn’t stay up for a day.

She crept toward my house. When I came out onto the porch, I expected her to break and run like the others, but she didn’t. She stood there, staring at me. And I stared at her, my arms crossed. She’d leave. She had to. I’d seen her. There’d be no sneaking up to the windows to get a peek at the crazy old man the whole town hates.

Try again another night, Missy, I thought, but you don’t know how light I sleep. If I sleep.

It took her forever to turn around. The minutes stretched out to something like years. I didn’t bother talking, and neither did she. A real odd one, for a girl.

Then, at last, she left. At first she walked away, but each step was faster than the last, and by the time she hit the road, she was running.

She never tried again, although, through the years, I’d see her pause at the edge of the road and glance toward my house. She only did it when she was alone, and I always knew it was her. The other brats were nothing but interchangeable parcels of belligerence, but I knew her face, and I could pick her out, even from a distance. It must have been that night-time staring contest.

I saw her walking with her boy when she got older. Wouldn’t have known him from any other, but from the way she smiled, I guess she thought there was something special about him.

For some reason, I felt a dim sense of rough approval. I don’t know why.

[https://i.imgur.com/f011ZNa.jpg]

After a miserable life, that house was all I had. I owned it outright. Not a penny owed to any man. A long time ago—so long ago the fence was still in decent repair—two men came to try to talk me into selling. There was good land by the road, and they wanted to build some more houses. I told them to build if they liked it. They said my house was a problem. It took them a while to get to the point, but, eventually, I understood; it was too ugly for them. They wanted everything to look right and pretty so they could charge more for their houses. My unpainted boards and sagging roof would cost them money. I told them that if it was worth all that, they should pay for some paint and a new roof. They didn’t like that idea. It would still be too ugly. I told them to go to hell.

“We’ll pay you a fair price for it!”

“And?” I yelled. “You know of any other places as ugly as mine? With a fair price, that’d be all I could afford!”

They didn’t. I still don’t believe such a place exists. Not around here, and I didn’t see a point in moving. Maybe all the townspeople hated me, but I had my peace, and I owned my home, and people left me alone.

Time went on, and I was too old and too poor to repair the fence. When the kids started coming around, I might have sold my house to get away from them, but it’d been years since those two men stopped trying to convince me. After the fifth or sixth visit, they cursed me out as the most stubborn man alive and never came back.

My house is still ugly. It’s still unpainted. None of those other houses got built. I guess that’s the power of being stubborn.

[https://i.imgur.com/f011ZNa.jpg]

As ugly as the house is, it’s still mine. That means something.

Your self-respect ages with you, so slowly that you don’t even notice how everything looks worn and stooped. Things break, and you promise yourself you’ll fix them, but it’s not important because no one comes around and you don’t think to impress yourself because you know who you are anyway. But it still matters. If it didn’t, you’d have nothing at all.

That’s why I get so mad about the rocks and the windows. And when the man came—a man, not a child—when he came, I was so angry the edges of my vision started to blur and I could smell sulfur.

I didn’t notice him for a long time. Afterward I wondered—was I sleeping harder than normal? Had the lethargy finally seeped into me deep enough to dull my hearing? Or was there something about him that made me miss him, but not the kids?

He hadn’t laughed like a kid would. Or raised his voice with bravado. He was silent. The only thing that had roused me was the sound of his shovel. That sharp shhhink, followed by the gravely crack!—the sound of the earth quietly clearing its throat from the rubble. I wouldn’t have known he was there if it wasn’t for the sound of my own yard trying to raise its silent voice.

I went to the back—how had he gotten all the way to the back?—and looked out the corner of the window not covered by cardboard. The crack in the glass severed the man’s image across his torso. I watched his upper body rise through the crack, distorting him, then dip again as he tossed another shovelful of dirt in front of him.

I was too angry to wonder what he was doing. There wasn’t even a thought. There was only the blaze of possessiveness driving out everything else. If anyone had seen me then, I think I would have looked like an animal.

I might have murdered him if I’d caught him—straight up murdered him. This went beyond rocks and the fence and the windows. He was doing something to my home, to my yard, as if I wasn’t even there. As if I didn’t matter.

I’d calloused myself to the idea of hatred, but not to that kind of disrespect.

He’d barely finished whatever he was doing when I came out. He was patting down the last bit of dirt. The gravel he’d turned over made a quiet chink, chink when it hit the back of his shovel. When he saw me, he dropped his shovel and ran like all hell was after him. I chased him up the side of my house and all the way to the fence, but he could run faster than any child.

After his escape, I stood at the edge of my property, huffing with indignation and rage, pacing every now and then, restless and senseless. It was stupid. Why was a standing around? Did I think he’d come back?

I asked myself that, and a hallow chuckle made my chest jerk. I don’t have much of a sense of humor, but I could always laugh at my own stupidity.

The chuckle broke my rage, scattering it. I could think again, and the first thing I thought was what the hell was he doing to my yard?

I went to the back of my property to find out.

[https://i.imgur.com/f011ZNa.jpg]

A week later, I met her. Not her, her. A different her. Someone new. A stranger.

I heard noises out toward the road, but I didn’t act at first. There’d been more noises, and it wasn’t always the children. I waited and listened hard for the sound of laughter.

I was listening so hard, I jumped when I heard the knocking. Crack, crack, crack. Loud and fast. The wood on my door moved enough to unsettle some of the dust.

And for a few seconds, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had knocked on my door.

My mind was empty, but my body knew that when someone knocked, you opened the door, so my body took me over and pulled it back so I could see who was there.

She was a young woman, maybe as old as twenty, but she looked younger. She had a bald head—completely bald, like she shaved it—and she dressed like a boy. The clothes hid a lot, but there was enough shape there to hint she was a girl, and her features were feminine. When she spoke her voice was high and bright.

“Good afternoon,” she said.

I was a hypocrite through and through. I stared at her the way I hated to be stared at, but I couldn’t help it. The whole situation was surreal, but she felt like the opposite of an apparition—she was so solid that she made everything around her seem fake. Her shirt was brighter and bluer than any sky, and it stood out against the gray of the house.

“Are you Mr. Caydan by any chance?” she asked.

I nodded. It was nothing more than me jerking my head down once.

She smiled, and her shirt looked dim by comparison.

“May I come in?” she asked.

“What do you want?” I croaked.

She bounced her meager weight between her feet. There was no purpose to it. Maybe she just liked moving. “Geez—like, right now? To sit down. I’ve been on my feet for hours. Getting out of the sun would be good too. Do you have a chair?”

My stalled brained tripped over the question. I didn’t know her, I didn’t know what was happening, but I did know that I had a chair. It was about all I had. I liked the certainty.

“Yeah.”

“So…may I come in?” Her hands went behind her back, and this time she bounced on her toes. Her eyes looked right at me.

The last time someone had looked at me like that had been when the little girl crossed my fence.

I turned away from the door and motioned to the chair. It was sitting at a cock-eyed angle away from the table. It was covered in dust, like everything else in my house, and, like everything else, it was old.

“There,” I said. “That’s the only one. If you don’t like it, you can leave.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Caydan, I’m not picky.”

She sat down in the chair as if she was diving into a plush armchair, not perching herself on a rickety mess of wood. She grunted with pleasure as the weight left her feet, and she pulled one of her ankles up to her other knee to give it even more of a rest.

“Thank you.”

The way she said it, I thought she meant it. I didn’t know how to feel about that, but an old ash of anger bloomed into an ember. That made no sense, so I ignored it.

I tried to go back to what I was doing before she came, but I hadn’t been doing anything. That made it hard. I’d gotten so used to doing nothing, I’d forgotten how to look busy.

“What’s your name, Missy?” I asked.

“Right!” she chirped. “Sorry about that. Rude of me. I’m Emerra Cole.”

“Do you have business with me, Missy Cole?”

She smiled again. “Missy’s cute. I like that.”

That ember of anger flared along with all my other emotions. How many years before you forget how to be around people? What was the right way to feel?

I was getting more and more uncomfortable with having her in my house—and she should’ve been uncomfortable being there! But you’d never know by looking at her.

She went on, “I don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?” I said.

“I don’t know if I have business with you. Have you heard what’s been going on?”

She must have been from a long way away if she was ignorant enough to ask a question that stupid. The townsmen never told me anything.

I shook my head.

Cole’s smile faded. “A man’s missing. His name was Timothy Masterson. We think he’s been murdered, but we don’t know. We’re out here searching the woods for his body.”

I liked how she said it. Quiet. Respectful.

“Who’s we?” I asked.

“We’ve got the local law enforcement helping, and a bunch of people from town. My friend is kind of in charge, but that’s just because he’ll organize anything if it holds still long enough.”

“Why aren’t you out there?” I jerked my head toward the road.

“Oh, I never hold still. He has a harder time organizing me.”

My cheeks ached for a second. They must have been trying to move in a way unfamiliar to them.

“Why do you think that missing man is out here?” I asked.

“He was last seen coming down the road, toward the woods.”

“But why would he be out this way?”

“We don’t know. I wondered if he was coming out to meet someone. Someone who didn’t want the whole town knowing about the meeting.”

I glanced at her, but she didn’t seem to mean anything by it. She was sitting there, tracing the edge of her shoe with a finger, a thoughtful, earnest look on her face.

I grunted. “They chose a good place for it.”

When she heard that, she seemed to come back to herself. She looked at me again. “It’s pretty isolated out here isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“Do you ever get lonely?” she asked.

“What the hell are you in all this?” I demanded. “You don’t look like you have anything to do with the law. And you’re not from town.”

“How do you know I’m not from town?” she said. “I thought you never went into town.”

“No one in that damn town would ever come knock on my door. Who are you then?”

Her shoulders wiggled through a lopsided, helpless shrug. “I’m me. That’s all.”

That sense of bewildered helplessness—I could understand that. My temper mellowed. “And someone like you gets mixed up in murders?”

“Sometimes.”

“Why?”

“Because I like to help people. That’s what I’m doing now.”

“You can’t help a murdered man.”

One edge of her lips moved back and up by maybe a sixteenth of an inch. “Oh, I don’t know.” Then she got serious again. “But I’m not here to help him. I’m here to help his fiancée. She’s a sweetheart. And she’s devastated.”

Without thinking, I frowned and shook my head. That was more reaction than I should’ve showed a stranger. I turned away so she wouldn’t see my face.

“No point,” I muttered.

“I’m sorry?” Cole said.

I raised my voice. “There’s no point. You’re wasting your time. If that man—Masterson—is murdered, you can’t give his girl a happy ending. You’ll end up handing her a rag to cry in. Is that what you want?”

My emotions had been riding higher to match my voice, but the way Emerra Cole watched me shut it all down; the wind became a breeze, that dwindled to a breath, then stopped. I was left watching her, feeling wide-open, waiting for something I couldn’t imagine.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Her lips tightened for less than a second, then they parted so she could speak: “I think it’s better than letting her cry alone. I can’t give her a happy ending”—her head briefly canted to the side in a gesture I couldn’t understand—“but maybe I can help her find an ending. That’s something. It’s better than not knowing.”

“You think so?” I sneered.

“I know so.”

I couldn’t meet her eyes a second longer. I looked away. At the same time, a strange chime filled my house. I didn’t know what to make of it, but Cole pulled something out of her pocket, glanced at it, and put it back.

She groaned as she forced herself to her feet. “I have to go. My friend is looking for me.” She paused. “Thank you for letting me in, Mr. Caydan. I appreciate your hospitality.”

“I trust you can find your way to the door.”

I’d meant it to be a barb. The whole house was only two rooms. She hadn’t come more than six feet in.

But she smiled and even winked at me. “Don’t worry, Mr. Caydan. My sense of direction isn’t that bad.”

She waved before she disappeared through the door.

When her footsteps faded, the whole house was quiet again. The dust floating through the blocks of sunlight was the only movement.

“My hospitality?” I growled to the silence. “Hell.”

[https://i.imgur.com/f011ZNa.jpg]

She came back the next day. This time her shirt was a green you can only find on the leaves in early summer.

Through the front window, I watched her come up to my porch, so I wasn’t startled when I heard her knock. I didn’t answer immediately. I watched her some more. She twiddled her fingers behind her back and rocked back and forth on her heels, but for all her fidgeting, her expression told me she had patience. Enough patience to wait however long it took—and sure as hell more patience than I had.

I walked over and opened the door a crack.

She smiled when she saw the two-inch line of my face. “Good afternoon, Mr. Caydan.”

“Who told you about me?” I demanded.

Her eyebrows pulled together. “Um…?”

“Yesterday you said that you knew I didn’t go into town. You wouldn’t know that unless someone told you. They’ve been telling you about me, haven’t they?”

Cole’s face twisted up to one side as she thought. It relaxed when she let out a sigh.

“Yes,” she said, once again looking me right in the eyes. “They have.”

I cussed, and I wasn’t sorry for it either.

“Who?” I demanded.

“Do you mind if I come in while we talk?” she asked.

“That friend of yours have you walking all day again?”

“They’re really big woods, Mr. Caydan. It’s a lot of ground to cover.”

I did mind her coming in—I hadn’t forgotten how uncomfortable she made me—but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there was a part of me that was fascinated by her. That’s no compliment. People are fascinated by all kinds of things. Ugly insects. Gruesome wounds. Death.

Gossip.

I wouldn’t open the door, but I stepped away so I wasn’t blocking it. It swung wide enough she could come in. She did, then shut the door behind her.

“May I?” she motioned to the chair.

I grunted. It wasn’t a no or a yes. She chose to take it as a yes and sat down.

“I should bring my own next time,” she said, “then we could sit down and talk together.”

She said it cheerfully and matter-of-fact. I don’t know what bothered me most: her tone, the fact that she wanted to sit down with me, or her thoughtless and confident assumption that there would be a next time.

I crossed my arms. “Who’s been telling you about me?”

“A lot of people.” She shrugged. “Most of the town. When the search turned this way, they all mentioned your house.”

“You mean they warned you about me.”

I thought I saw a sparkle in her dark eyes. “Yes, sir.”

I grunted. Louder this time.

“Does it bother you?” she asked.

“That depends. What did they tell you?”

“Mostly that you don’t like people coming onto your property, and that you’re the angry type.”

I uncrossed my arms, leaned over so our faces would be closer, and locked eyes with her. “That’s true.” I turned and wandered a few steps away. “Knowing all that, you still came?”

“My feet were really tired.”

There was a restrained smile on her face when she said that, and she gazed at me through her lashes. Either that girly had the gall to lie to me, or she was teasing me. I found both options offensive.

Maybe she saw my expression. She certainly hurried to change the subject.

“Is it true that you never went into town?” she asked.

I gave an abrupt shrug, moving only one shoulder. “I’ll go in whenever I have something to buy or something to sell. It’s not often.”

“Did something happen between you and the townspeople?”

“Not for my part. If some of them took offense at my manners, I’m sure they’ll remember the instance.”

“So there wasn’t anything specific they did to make you stay away?”

“Something they did? No. But they hate me, so I hate them. That seems like justice to me.”

“You think they hate you?”

I pointed at her face. “Missy, you want to play stupid, go play with a dog. Games like that don’t interest me. You want to pretend that it’s all an innocent misunderstanding? Come on. Look me in the eyes, and tell me that they didn’t say I was a bad man.”

She couldn’t do it. She frowned when she looked away.

A sharp, quick breath hissed out of my teeth, making a hffff sound. “What was it this time? That I’m some kind of criminal? That I’m evil? Have you met Mrs. Rudslow?”

Cole shook her head.

“She’s a damned old bat.” I circled my finger around my ear. “Crazy. She’ll tell you that I make sacrifices to the devil, and that’s why my home is way out here—so people won’t see me doing my ‘dark rituals.’”

I couldn’t have poured more contempt into those two words if I’d had a pitcher and a funnel.

I went on, “It never occurs to her I might have done it to get away from people like her.”

“I think Mrs. Rudslow’s dead,” Cole said.

“Good. The world’s a better place for her passing.”

And Miss Cole—Miss Emerra Cole, who I was beginning to think was at least as mad as Mrs. Rudslow—giggled like I’d told a joke. My stomach leapt when I saw her nose wrinkle and her shoulders shake, and it landed back in a mess of emotions I couldn’t make heads or tails of.

She put her elbow on her knee, curled her hand into a fist, and rested her chin on it. She looked like a rough draft of Rodin’s The Thinker.

“So how many of the vicious rumors are true?” she asked.

“None of them.”

“None?”

“Let me ask you something, Missy—does it make you a bad person just because you don’t go to church on Sunday? Or maybe that you don’t think that everything written in the Bible is God’s own word?”

“I sure hope not.”

I raised my hand in a there-you-have-it gesture. “Then I’m clear of all charges.” I lowered my arm. “People will lie when the truth isn’t exciting enough. And they can’t forgive me for refusing to waste my time with their inane conversation.”

She was watching me, still stuck in her Rodin pose and moving almost as much as a statue. I didn’t know she could sit so still. The change was almost as unnerving as the gentle smile on her face.

I looked away, but the roiling unease in my stomach didn’t mellow.

I rubbed my nose twice before grumbling, “This murder—are they saying I killed Masterson?”

“Some of them,” Cole said. “Not all of them. There was one woman who took me aside and told me that she was sure it wasn’t you. She said you weren’t like that.”

I stared at her, struck dumb by the idea that there was anyone in town that would say something—anything—even something as meager as that—on my behalf.

Cole stood up and walked toward me while pulling something from her pocket. She fidgeted with it a moment, then held it up for me to see.

“Her name is Rebecca Barr,” Miss Cole said. The dullness in my ears made her voice sound like it came from a thousand miles away. “Do you know her?”

And I stared at the picture. It was her. Sure as anything. The little girl who crossed my fence that night. She was all grown up, standing arm in arm with a man her age.

“No,” I lied. “Who’s the fellow?”

“That was her fiancé, Timothy Masterson.”

[https://i.imgur.com/f011ZNa.jpg]

The next day, when I caught myself checking the front window for the fifth time in an hour, I knew I was waiting for her, and I cussed myself out.

“She can’t be late if she didn’t set an appointment, you stupid old man. Besides—”

I shut my mouth, cutting off my own sentence, as if my audience, me, wouldn’t know what I’d been about to say. That was stupid enough, I let out one-breath laugh.

I’d been about to ask why I even wanted to see her. But I didn’t want to know the answer. There was too much mixed up in it. Three figures haunted my head: Emerra Cole, Timothy Masterson, and Rebecca Barr.

That was three more people than I ever wanted in my life—let alone my head.

I was at the window again ten minutes later. I saw her coming down the road. I knew it was her because no damn flower was that big, and nothing else on the planet had the hubris to wear that shade of yellow on a shirt. There was someone with her. A fancy-looking fellow. He was carrying a broken-down wooden chair with one hand. They made it to the place where my walk met my fence and stopped.

I have no excuse. It was prying. But I didn’t even think to look away. I was too curious to feel ashamed.

The man was frowning as he talked to her. His face looked stern. Cole was frowning too, but not in the same way. She looked too tired to smile. She stood with her arms folded, but she could have been cradling her own limbs as much as taking a firm stance. Their conversation went on for a minute, then the man shook his head and his frown deepened as he glanced towards my house.

When his eyes passed over the window, I realized how fixated I’d been. I almost jerked back. That’s when I felt a blush of shame, but coming up behind it, clawing over its back, came the anger.

Maybe it was my business. After all, I had good reason to think I knew what they were talking about. And he was like all the rest of them—never looked straight at me. If he didn’t like me, then he could go to hell.

Cole held out her arms, and the man passed her the chair he’d been carrying. She wrapped both arms around the back and hugged it to her chest. They only exchanged another sentence each, then the man went back down the road toward town, and Cole crossed the open gap in my fence and came up the walk toward my house.

I opened the door and came out when she reached the porch. When she saw me, she tried to force a smile.

“Good evening, Mr. Caydan.”

I jerked my head toward the spot where the man had been. Where’d he gone so fast? I should’ve still been able to see him. “Was that your friend?”

Cole climbed the last step onto my porch. “Yup. That was him.”

“Does he think I murdered that boy too?”

Cole’s smile became real. The difference was a candle to the sun. “Trust me. If Darius thought you were the murderer, he never would’ve let me come here alone.”

I believed her. It would’ve been hard not to believe her when she said something so obvious in that kind of voice. My anger mellowed.

She hefted her arms a bit, raising her awkward burden all of one inch. “I brought a chair!”

I glared at her for a while, but I couldn’t stand the sight of her arms slowly drooping, then regripping the chair.

I went in first and held open the door so she could get in without hitting it. She put her chair by front window, then, before I could stop her, she swung around and moved my chair so it was by the other corner of the window. The two chairs faced each other, but they were both angled toward the window as well.

“What did you do that for!” I demanded.

Cole stopped and looked up. She was startled and wary, but not…quite…scared.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I like to look at the sky during sunsets.” She squirmed her way through a shrug. “I thought everyone did.”

She’d done it again. Emptied me.

Look at the sky during a sunset? Hell! I couldn’t remember if I’d ever stopped to do that. If I had, it’d been years. Long before the last time I’d moved that stupid chair.

“Do you want me to move it back?” she asked.

I grunted. “I don’t see why I should care.”

That was the truth. I did care, but I didn’t see a reason for it. That bothered me. If I couldn’t come up with a good reason, then I’d be damned if I’d ask her to move it back.

She collapsed onto my chair, leaving the new one—“new,” being a comparative word here—for me. I sat down, and for a minute, all we did was gaze out the window.

The sky was beautiful. It made me angry how something so normal could be so lovely, but my irritation was swallowed up by the sheer size of the thing. Its colors stretched on and on, as wide as the world, floating over the distant tips of the trees that acted as warders to my tiny house.

My eyes slid down their long trunks to rest on the dusty road that led to town.

“How’s that girl doing?” I muttered.

“Rebecca?”

I didn’t answer—not even to nod—but Cole took my silence as assent.

“She’s tired,” Cole whispered. “We all are.” She doodled in the dust of my windowsill. “They called off the search today.”

“Does that mean you’ll be leaving soon?”

“I don’t know. There was one other thing we were supposed to do—something we were supposed to handle.” She suddenly turned to me. “Why did you choose to stay here, Mr. Caydan?”

I stiffened. “This is my house, Missy.”

“You said that the whole town hated you, but you chose to stay?”

My voice rose with every word. “This is my house!” I flicked my hand in the direction of town. “Do you think I’m going to let a bunch of hateful asses drive me from the place I own just because they’re small-minded and bitter?”

“Do you like it here?”

She might as well have slapped every thought from my head.

Like it?

I said, “It’s my home,” then my tongue got heavy, and my jaw clenched shut. It clenched so hard my neck tightened. My gaze dropped to the floor, and I couldn’t look up because I knew that Cole would be looking right at me.

“I understand,” she said.

She didn’t say it with pity. Pity, I could have gotten mad about. She said it like she meant it—that we were the same. I shifted in my chair and cast around for something to say.

“You own a house?”

She laughed. “Oh, geez. No. Big Jacky owns the house. I just live there with seven other people. Those people—” She smiled. “Those people make it my home. It means everything to me.” She looked out my window again. “Sometimes all I can think about is how scared I am I’ll lose it.”

It was eerie how close we were, but still a world apart. She was right. We were the same. I was scared to lose my house. It meant everything to me.

But her everything—it was different from mine. Bigger.

She took a deep breath before looking back at me. “Tell me about your home.”

I glared. “What’s there to tell? You’re looking at it.”

“Tell me how you got it.”

Never was there a girl for asking so many questions. At her prompting, I talked about how I found it, how I earned the money to buy it, how I built it up, added the second room, and worked the yard as my garden.

“I don’t garden anymore,” I grumbled. “I got too old and tired to keep it, and foraging in the woods gets more food than you’d think. The plants that survived are wild now.” I shrugged. “Sometimes I’d forage from them.”

When she smiled that time, her nose wrinkled up like she’d giggled. The joke—if it was a joke—wasn’t worth even the smile.

“What do you do now?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You said you don’t hunt anymore, and you don’t garden. Do you go out in the woods?”

I shook my head. “Mostly I watch. You can lose a lot of time that way. I watch the road. My house. Not much goes on around here that I don’t see.”

All the humor was gone from Cole’s face. Her expression was the most sober thing I’d ever seen.

“Caydan,” she said, “do you know what happened to Masterson?”

I went cold.

She said, “He was supposed to be coming up this road. Did he get as far as your house?”

I pressed my lips together and shook my head.

“But—”

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“Why should I help?”

“You’ve seen something.”

“I’m not saying I have! But if I have, why would I help? Tell me that! Those townspeople—they never helped me!”

“Did you ever ask them to?”

Her quiet question broke my rant to pieces. I had to think.

“No,” I admitted. I scraped together some ego and raised my voice a bit. “It wouldn’t have mattered if I had.”

“But if you never asked—”

I said over her, “You think they ever would have helped me?”

“Did you help them?”

“They never asked me too!”

“Just like you never asked them.”

The cold was gone. Everything was red-hot now. My nostrils flared. I had to pry my jaw loose to speak.

“Get out,” I said.

“But—”

“Get out!” I roared.

Her eyes stayed on my face as she slowly rose to her feet. Those dark eyes were hard and narrow. My stomach sank when I saw it. She walked over to the door.

“Take your chair!” I yelled at her back.

She rounded on me while leaving her hand on the doorknob. She didn’t yell, but her voice was as hard as her eyes. “If you hate the idea of having it there so much, you can move it yourself.”

She left. I watched her walk to the road and turn toward town. When the anger faded, I felt sick.

[https://i.imgur.com/f011ZNa.jpg]

I’d spent hours sitting there. Still in the chair Miss Cole had left me. Facing my own empty chair. Facing the window. It wasn’t the lethargy that kept me there. I was thinking. When the sky turned to stars, I watched them for a while. When it got to be too much, I glared at the dirt in front of my house or at the broken-down fence.

Someone came up the road toward my house. It wasn’t hard to recognize her. She had the same expression on her face as the first time I saw her. Scared. Troubled. This time she didn’t look so much puzzled as lost.

“Rebecca.”

I didn’t notice when I got to my feet, but I found myself there with my hand resting against the window.

What’s she doing out here at this time of night?

But I knew what she was doing. The search might’ve been called off, but she was still looking for him.

My heart clenched around the sadness that filled it, and two-voiced argument rushed through my head.

You can’t give her a happy ending.

But I can give her an ending.

She’s nothing to you. Some little brat.

She looked at me when no one else did.

She’s never helped you.

She stood up for me. It’s more than I ever did for her.

You don’t have to help her. You don’t have to help any of them.

Anger drove me toward my door. Anger at Emerra Cole. Anger at myself.

I knew the truth. It didn’t take me hours to figure it out. It took me hours to swallow it. I had no right to be mad at them for not helping me when I didn’t ask for it, then turn around and say that I didn’t have to help them because they didn’t ask for it.

I grabbed the door handle.

They’ll think you did it.

I froze.

They’ll run you out. You know they will. They hate you, and this’ll be all they need to find a way to take everything from you.

My trembling hand tightened on the knob.

I’d be damned before I’d let a bunch of hateful asses turn me into a two-faced hypocrite just because I was afraid of what they’d do.

I thew open my door and stepped out on the porch.

She looked up when she heard the door open.

The whole scene could have been a repeat of that night all those years ago. The quiet calls from the nocturnal animals and insects. The light from the stars and half a moon. The way she stared right at me. Hell!—she still looked like a little girl to me. Never mind that she was a grown woman. The only difference was that this time, she was on the other side of the fence.

My throat was too tight for me to speak, but I managed to raise my hand. The movement was slow; I had to fight against the weight of the déjà vu. I motioned for her to follow me.

She crept over the fence and into my yard.

I walked down my porch and over to the side of my house. She followed me without saying a word.

I led her back to where my garden used to be. Weeds choked off the last of the straggling plants. There, in the middle of it, was the mound of fresh turned dirt and the shovel, right where the man had dropped it. I pointed.

She fell to her knees. Both hands went to her mouth. Her fingers fluttered there as a staggered series of gasps and quiet cries escaped. My heart broke when I heard them. I looked away.

Now even she’ll think you did it, you old fool.

So what? I was used to being hated, and it wasn’t like I could’ve stayed there anyway.

Her gasping stopped, and she raised her head. When I glanced over, I could see the tear tracks running down her cheeks and neck, even in the moonlight. Her throat heaved as she swallowed.

“Thank you,” she said.

It took me a second to understand. Then some emotion—some kind of rough approval—sparked, and lit an ember. All the regret and the grief that had pooled inside me wasn’t enough to drowned it.

I nodded to her, then turned for one last look at everything I’d given up.

God, it was an ugly house. Covered windows. Splitting boards. The back door, hanging by its hinges. Even when it had been in good repair, it’d barely done its job keeping out the elements. Now it was nothing but a rotting pile of wood held together out of spite. That thing had never made me happy.

And I could have left it at any time.

The thought felt like a touch of light in the darkness.

I could have left at any time, and I had stayed because I was too stubborn to realize it.

I opened my arms wide and started laughing.

[https://i.imgur.com/f011ZNa.jpg]

“Emerra? Emerra, it’s me.”

Emerra groaned into her phone, “Rebecca?”

“I think I’ve found him.”

“Found who?”

“Timothy.”

Emerra sat bolt upright in bed. Her head swam from the sudden movement. “Where are you?”

“I’m at the old Caydan place, in the back yard.”

Emerra threw off her blankets and stumbled toward the door that led to the front room she was sharing with Darius Vasil. She could see the light on under the door. Good. He was there.

“Are you all right?” Emerra fumbled with the knob before she could get it open. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m not hurt. But, oh god, I’m scared! Please!”

Darius was already on his feet. He was watching the door when Emerra emerged.

“Did you touch anything?” Emerra asked.

“No.”

“Good. Don’t touch anything. I’m on my way right now, but I’m going to send someone out to meet you.” Emerra nodded to Darius. He disappeared. “He’ll be there before you know it.”

“Okay.”

“Can you hang on for a minute or two?” Emerra walked back into her bedroom.

“I saw him.”

Emerra barely heard the statement. The phone had migrated an inch away from her ear as she struggled to get dressed while holding the phone with her shoulder. “Saw who?”

“I saw Caydan.”

Emerra paused, pants half on. “You saw him?”

“He showed me where Timothy was. When I thanked him, he turned around, laughed, and disappeared.”

Emerra realized her pants were still only partly on and finished pulling them up. “Why would he laugh?”

“You think I’m crazy.”

“No.” Emerra grunted, then grabbed her phone with her hand so she could hold it to her ear. “Listen to me, Rebecca. I do not think you’re crazy. I just…” Emerra’s eyes wandered to the ceiling. “I wish I knew what he was thinking.”

[https://i.imgur.com/f011ZNa.jpg]

Three days later, the back door of the Caydan place let out a creak, then a groan, as the door leaned back on its hinges. There was a crack of splitting wood, accompanied by a quiet, “Geez.” The door sagged to one side and fell open. It trembled when its knob hit the back wall.

Emerra Cole tried to wipe some of the dust off on her jeans. It would have been more effective if they hadn’t already been coated in the stuff. She walked back into the main room of the house.

Darius Vasil stood in the center of it, looking around at streams of light coming in from the outside. There was enough dust in the air to give them shapes that stood up from the floor.

Emerra looked around with approval. Every window, broken or intact, was uncovered. Both doors were wide open.

“There,” she said. “That’s better.”

“Better than what?” Darius asked.

“You were saying?”

The vampire sighed through his nose and went on. “When we told Beck that we’d found the shovel, still covered in his fingerprints, he confessed to everything.”

“Did he say why he killed Masterson?”

“Jealousy.” The word came out flat and dead. “Beck was in love with Miss Barr. He says that they got into a mutual fight that escalated, but…”

“But who brings a shovel to a fight.” Emerra said.

“Miss Bar must be a special girl.”

Emerra twisted her head so she could give Darius a look from the corner of her eye. “I told you that already.” She walked over to the two chairs. They were still facing each other and tilted toward the front window. Her hand hesitated over the back of the older chair, but then she lowered it, allowing her fingers to rest on the wood.

“Why did he bury him in Mr. Caydan’s yard?” Emerra asked.

Darius put his hands in the pockets of his suit coat and turned to face her. “He thought no one would look there. He knew that the other locals were terrified of this place.”

Emerra looked up. “And he wasn’t?”

“He didn’t believe in ghosts.”

A wry smile appeared on Emerra’s face. “Is that why he threw his shovel and ran?”

The vampire hummed. “I never met Mr. Caydan’s ghost, but I’ve heard he could have an intimidating presence sometimes.”

“Only sometimes. Did Beck realize people would blame Caydan?”

“I don’t know.”

Emerra let her eyes fall to the chair. “At least they know the truth now.”

Darius walked over to the other chair and tapped on the back in short, lively rhythm. “I wonder how Mr. Caydan died.”

“No one knows,” Emerra said, “but it was presumably old age. There was no sign of foul play.”

She glanced up when the silence stretched on. Darius was watching her.

“Did he tell you that?”

“I’m not sure Mr. Caydan always remembered he was dead,” Emerra said. “Rebecca told me about it. She did a report on his life and the legend of his haunted house when she was in eighth grade. She interviewed believers and non-believers. Very thorough.”

“Did she include her experience?”

“She kept that to herself. Lots of kids claimed to see the door opening, but she’d never heard of anyone else that had seen him. And it was only that one time. She’d almost convinced herself she’d been dreaming.”

“She’ll have a harder time with that now. Poor girl.”

Emerra ran her finger over the back of the chair. In a quiet voice, she said, “She’ll be all right.”

Darius tucked his hand back in his pocket. “What I don’t understand is how Caydan became a ghost. There’s none of the usual signs. No magic. No murder. No obsession.”

Emerra shrugged. “I guess some people are just that stubborn.”

The vampire was eyeing her again. “But he’s gone now?”

Emerra gazed around the empty house. “Yes, he’s gone.”

“Good. Then our job is done,” Darius said. “We should go too.”

Emerra nodded.

As they turned toward the door, Darius grabbed the back of the new chair. Its foot scrapped along the wooden floor. Emerra turned around.

“You’re taking it with us?” she asked.

The vampire paused. “Don’t you want to return it?”

Emerra scowled and kicked at a spot on the floor. “They’re not expecting it back.”

“Do you think that Caydan might return?”

“No—well…no, I don’t…think so.”

Vasil raised an eyebrow.

Emerra huffed. “Look, I’m more comfortable if there are two chairs, okay? There should always be two chairs.”

Darius watched her face for a second, then nodded and released the chair. He put his hand on Emerra’s arm when he came up to her side, and together they turned toward the front door.

“Darius, do you think Igor will turn into a ghost when he dies?”

“Emerra, that is a very interesting question.”

They closed the door behind them.