The acrid stench of smoke stung my nose as soon as I stepped out of my apartment. I raced down the stairs as fast as I dared, while Sister Mary Bernadette’s voice screamed in my memory of elementary school fire drills. No running! Get low! Find the closest exit!
It took far too long to reach the ground floor, and all the way down the stairs, my eyes were locked on the black smoke curling around the arched doorway leading into the kitchen. By the time my feet hit the foyer, I was in a full panic. A single thought—escape—propelled me forward, and I made straight for the front door. Striker shot past me, and I glanced toward Graham, grateful beyond words that he had made sure to grab her.
But Graham wasn’t next to me. He wasn’t following me through the front door. As I watched, he ducked into the kitchen.
He had gone straight into the source of the smoke.
“Graham!” I shouted.
I hovered on the porch, unsure whether to continue fleeing onto the lawn or go after him. The shrill beeping of the fire alarm felt like the ticking of a clock that was counting down to disaster.
Counting down to his death.
Just as I was about to throw myself back into the house, he ducked his head through the kitchen doorway.
“It’s okay!” he called. “Come give me a hand.”
In the kitchen, a cookie sheet sat at an angle in the sink. The faucet was on full blast, and two charred black triangles hissed against the cold water.
Graham climbed on top of the table. “Spot me for a second, okay?”
He stretched to his full height and managed to press the fire alarm’s reset button. With the beeping silenced and the smoke being pulled out of the house through the open doors, the fog began to clear from my brain as well. I guarded him with my hands as he climbed down from the table, as if I could catch him if he fell.
He took off his glasses and wiped the sweat from his face with his sweater sleeve. “I won’t pretend that didn’t scare the crap out of me. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Shaken, but fine.” I went to the sink and prodded the triangles. “Ew, this poor pizza.”
“Did you forget to set a timer?”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “Me? I thought it was you.”
“I could have sworn I heard you down here banging pans around an hour ago. I’ve been cleaning my apartment—I haven’t been cooking.”
“Then it must have been somebody else.”
“Nobody else is home.” Concern clouded his features, and he reached out a hand to feel my forehead. “Are you feeling okay?”
I sank down into a kitchen chair and cradled my head in my hands. Had I come home, put pizza in the oven, and then gone upstairs to climb into bed? I couldn’t remember. I just remembered finally falling asleep, and—
The memory of the red eyes in my reflection sent me bolting back upright. Slowly, I turned to Graham, but the words caught and croaked in my throat.
“What?” he asked. “Are you going to throw up?”
Before I could answer, he slid the kitchen garbage in front of my feet. The stench of a rotting banana peel wafted up my nostrils, and I shoved the can away.
“No, I’m fine. Just listen. I think…” I paused. “I think I just astral projected.”
I walked him through my encounter with Camila Aster—which I now refused to think of as a dream—in as much detail as I could remember. When I told him about my eyes glowing red, he frowned.
“Couldn’t it have just been a dream?” he asked. “You’ve been having nightmares about Horace all month.”
“This was different. It didn’t feel like a dream. Or look like one. Or even sound like one. It didn’t exactly feel real either, but…” I trailed off, unable to organize my thoughts about the experience I had just had while asleep.
I wished it had lasted longer.
I wanted it to happen again.
“Mac.” Graham’s voice was gentle. “Your mom chased astral projection for years. You don’t even know if she ever accomplished it. How likely is it that you would do it without even trying?”
For some reason, his words stung. I wanted to slap them out of the air. Sure, on the surface, they made sense. But my gut rejected them. I knew what I had experienced. Nobody I knew tried to be psychic. They just were. And in my case, I suddenly lost the gift, only to discover it all over again. I hadn’t done any of it on purpose.
Logic didn’t apply to the spiritual realm.
Graham was still trying to talk me down. “How long has it been since you got a good night’s rest? You barely slept in New Mexico, and you’ve looked exhausted since we got back.”
“I know.” I fell silent for a moment and considered his argument. It had been over a week since I’d gotten my preferred nine hours of uninterrupted hibernation. But sleep-deprived or not, I knew I had astral projected. I felt it in my gut. I just had to do it again, while fully rested this time, and then he would believe me. “It’s weird, but something changed during that nap. I feel like I can sleep again. I’m excited to.”
A car door slammed out back. A minute later, Reggie stepped into the kitchen, holding a bag from the deli in his hands. “What stinks?”
“Pizza,” I said, pointing to the charred pan in the sink. “Want some?”
He scrunched up his face. “No, thank you.”
“How’s the writing going?”
“Fine.” Reggie moved for the foyer, then paused. After a moment, he turned and looked at me with a curious expression. “Your name is Mac, right?”
I laughed. Of course he wasn’t sure who I was. To him, I was just the idiot on the third floor, the dunce who couldn’t take a hint and kept asking him about his books.
He didn’t seem fazed by my laughter. He simply looked at me expectantly.
“Yes,” I finally answered. “Mackenzie Clair.”
“Oh, good. I’d like you to sit down with me sometime and tell me about the Franklin cabin.”
My eyes popped. “What?”
“Not today, of course.” He hefted the deli bag. “I’ve got to finish my lunch and get back to work. But sometime soon.”
Without waiting for a reply, Reggie nodded to Graham and hustled into the foyer.
As I stared after him, my shock and irritation grew into suspicion. What did he want to know about the Franklin cabin? And why did he want to know it? That place was deeply, inextricably intertwined with Horace in my mind. He had first appeared to me in the Franklin cabin, and the van with New Mexico plates had been hauling furniture and wood paneling stripped from the cabin when it crashed.
“How does he know about that?” I asked aloud.
Graham shrugged. “Everybody knows about it. Your investigations there are famous, especially around here.”
I didn’t buy it. With my eyes locked on the doorway through which Reggie had just passed, the wheels in my mind turned. If Anson Monroe killed Elizabeth—which I believed was true, despite Wallace’s skepticism—then at some point, he left New Mexico and came to Donn’s Hill. When did he get here?
Could he have come to town with a moving truck the very same day Graham and I left?
“All right, Detective Mac,” Graham said. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“What?”
“You had this same look on your face yesterday when Lucy brought up Seattle. I saw your eyes snap right to Fred. You thought he was Horace.” He tilted his head. “Or do you still think so?”
“I did for a second, but I’ve never gotten anything but good vibes from Fred. Reggie, on the other hand…” I ground my teeth together. “Not so much.”
“But we know Horace is Anson Monroe, and we know Anson Monroe was already old when your mom died. Right?”
“Right.”
“Reggie’s only in his fifties. He would have been my age back then.”
“Do you have any idea how ancient we probably look to eight-year-olds? We could go down to the school and take a survey, and I guarantee at least half of them would say I’m old enough to be a grandma. It could still be him.”
“Mac,” Graham said gently. “I did a background check on Reggie when he applied for the lease. He’s never lived in New Mexico or Washington. He’s from New Jersey.”
“Since when did you start doing background checks on people? Did you do one on me?”
“No, but when you signed your lease, the love of my life wasn’t living upstairs yet.” He smiled. “Do you think I’d let just anybody move in here now?”
My cheeks warmed. I stared at him. The L word was nothing new between us; we said “I love you” to each other all the time. But love of my life….
I shook my head, refusing to be distracted from my point by his romantic language. “I could still be right. Horace could be way younger than we think he is. And what, he’s capable of astral projecting but not faking an identity that can pass a background check?”
He sighed and walked over to me to rest his hands on my shoulders. “Okay, I’m not trying to treat you like a toddler here, I promise. But you are tired with a capital T. You need a meal and a nap.”
“What?” I raised an eyebrow at him. “No juice box?”
* * *
After a sandwich that didn’t require the oven to prepare, I headed upstairs to try to get a little more sleep. With luck, I would do more than rest. I couldn’t wait to astral project again and continue my charade-like conversation with Camila.
But halfway up Primrose House’s grand staircase, I paused. I stood on the second-floor landing, listening to the clatter and pings of Reggie’s typewriter from his apartment, and stared up at my door on the floor above.
After having to run down so many stairs while the fire alarm screeched at us, my apartment suddenly felt needlessly, dangerously far away from the front door. What if the fire had spread through the kitchen before the alarm went off? What if Graham hadn’t been home to wake me? The knowledge that I might not have made it out alive sent a shiver down my spine, and I turned on my heel and went through Graham’s door instead. Sleeping had been hard enough lately without having to worry about getting trapped up on the third floor.
I woke ten hours later, well-rested but frustrated. My dreams had been nonsensical and pedestrian and mostly centered around food. The next night was the same, and the night after that. I felt my physical energy returning, and my head cleared enough for me to realize exactly how insensitive it had been for me to tell Deputy Wallace my theory about her grandmother’s death. But each night I spent in Graham’s apartment was one without any supernatural occurrences at all.
It wasn’t something I expected to miss, but I ached for it.
Was I losing my psychic abilities all together? Had I somehow burned through a lifetime’s supply of seeing the dead, all for two trips into the astral plane?
No, I decided. That couldn’t be it. Horace had appeared to me multiple times, for long visits. So unless he had some kind of spiritual generator recharging his psychic batteries, it had to be something else.
Three days after the fire, I decided I needed to recreate similar circumstances to the last time I had seen Camila, starting with my sleep locale. But key to astral projecting would be feeling safe enough to sleep at all, so I requested a few changes to my apartment. That same afternoon, Graham installed a retractable steel ladder, which could be tossed out my turret window in an emergency, and replaced the fire extinguisher in my kitchenette.
“What do you think?” he asked.
I inspected the recharge date on the extinguisher and nodded. “Thank you. I know it’s silly, but—”
“It’s not silly,” he said firmly. “The apartments up here always should have had escape ladders. I feel awful thinking about what could have happened if that fire spread.”
“Do you need help switching out any other extinguishers or anything?” I asked, feeling bad for forcing him to drive to the home improvement store in Moyard.
“That’d be great, thanks.”
As we headed for the second floor, the front door slammed.
“Hello?” a familiar voice called.
My pulse quickened, and I raced down the stairs until I could see who waited in the foyer. Her green hair came into view first, followed by a pair of shining brown eyes.
“Kit!” I shouted, bounding the rest of the way down for a hug.
She dropped a heavy suitcase onto the floor and held out her arms. “Honey, I’m home!”