THE EDGEWATER ARCHIVE WAS EVEN CREEPIER THAN usual after hours. The parking lot it shared with the dentist next door wasn’t even deserted and it still managed to look spooky, as though something large and angry was hiding behind one of the few cars still scattered across the blacktop. By unanimous and silent decision Carrie parked as close as possible to the building, and directly under one of the streetlights.

The front door groaned alarmingly when Chris turned the key in the lock and yanked it open, and the inside of the building was pitch black.

“Don’t turn on the lights,” Chris said when Carrie made to flick the ones in the hallway on. She pulled a flashlight out of her purse in response, and snapped it on almost in his face. “Ow,” Chris protested. “It’s the Board of Directors! They’re trying to save energy and if we turn lights on after hours Professor Griffin might get in trouble for letting us in here.”

“Yeah, that’s not foreboding at all,” Carrie grumbled. She grudgingly fished another flashlight out of her bag for Chris and handed it over. “Let’s just get in, find my necklace—”

“And do one sweep for ghosts?” Maddison asked hopefully. She was wearing a headlamp, and still looked enchanting. Chris was very glad it was too dark for anyone to see him blush, because he was blushing very much.

“Do one sweep for ghosts,” Carrie agreed, “and then get out. Hey, Chris,” she added sweetly—Chris looked at her and immediately quailed, because that was her plotting face—“maybe you and Maddison can go over the building for ghosts and meet me at the office? With any luck I’ll have found my necklace by then.”

“Good idea,” Maddison said, pulling a video camera and a television remote out of her fanny pack. “It’s always best to have more than one person on these sorts of things, for independent verification and stuff.” She handed the video camera to Chris, tucked the remote back into her pack, and set about taking a preliminary temperature reading, failing to notice the silent communication Chris and Carrie were engaged in over her head.

It wasn’t very good silent communication anyway. Chris gave Carrie a series of significant looks and raised eyebrows that she stubbornly refused to comprehend, and even his silent hand-flailing when she nodded angrily at Maddison as if to say, “Well, what are you waiting for?” failed to get a response. Chris was reasonably sure that Carrie was trying to help with his crush, but if this was how she defined helping he wondered how he would survive if she ever disliked a girlfriend.

Actually—she had not liked Lindsey Ipcress very much. Chris didn’t think Carrie was responsible for the Ipcress family moving halfway across the country, mainly because he couldn’t imagine how she could be responsible for the Ipcress family moving halfway across the country, but he had never been quite sure.

“I’m thinking we should start with the basement and work our way up to the third floor,” Maddison said, the remote back in her hand. “Chris, you’re holding the camera upside down. And this is not a television remote, it is my EMF meter,” she added, effectively guessing what Chris had been too embarrassed to ask.

“Oh,” Chris stammered. “Right, sorry. Are you sure we shouldn’t stick together?”

“I ain’t afraid of no ghosts,” Carrie said.

Maddison grinned; Chris winced at the reference.

“And I want to find my necklace.”

“Catch you in a bit,” Maddison agreed, marching purposefully for the stairwell. Feeling like he was walking into a bad idea, Chris followed her.

“And don’t let a ghost scare you into each other’s arms!” Carrie called as they were just reaching the door.

Chris groaned. Maddison snorted.

“Is Carrie trying to tell us something?”

“Uh . . . ” Chris trailed off. Carrie was trying to tell him something, all right. Mainly that she was evil, and tired of his mooning. “Um . . . ” Chris tried again, holding the door open for Maddison while on autopilot. “I still don’t really understand what an EMF meter does?” He could almost feel Carrie’s disappointed scowl.

“Oh,” Maddison said. “That’s understandable!” She stopped on the landing and handed the EMF meter to Chris. It continued to look a lot like a television remote, with red, yellow, and green markings on one end. “Basically, if it lights up like crazy there’s something weird going on with the electromagnetic field in the area,” Maddison explained. “The electrical activity in the area isn’t behaving normally. When ghost hunting, since most people assume ghosts have to put out some kind of energy, unusual patterns of electrical activity might be caused by ghosts.”

“Maddison?” Chris said slowly. “Are a lot of so-called ‘ghosts’ just bad wiring?”

“Yeaaaah, pretty much,” Maddison said. “But I don’t think Carrie was trying to tell you to ask me about ghosts and faulty wiring . . . ?”

“Oh,” Chris said. There didn’t seem to be a way out. “So, I kind of, maybe, sorta . . . ” One of Maddison’s eyebrows was slowly rising into a puzzled expression, and she had crossed her arms. There was no way this could end well. “ . . . haveabitofacrush,” Chris finished in a rush. “It’s not on you!” he added when Maddison dropped her gaze. “I mean, it is on you, but it isn’t anything you did or didn’t do so there’s nothing to worry about, I’ll just go change my name and move to Argentina and live as a hermit and—oh I’m gonna kill her.”

Suddenly he realized that Maddison was laughing.

“Er,” said Chris.

Maddison huffed and looked him square in the face. “Are you trying to tell me you have a crush, and that the crush is on me?” she asked. She had Chris cornered against the stair railing, and he spared a brief thought to jumping over the side to avoid the awkwardness of the ensuing conversation. But the steps to the basement level were dark and the drop was far and that would be very final, unless he came back as a ghost. And if he came back as a ghost, Maddison would still believe in him enough to want to have the conversation. So, it was pretty much a terrible idea.

“I’m trying not to tell you,” Chris admitted. “But it doesn’t seem to be working. You can be offended if you want to, I don’t mind.”

“Actually I am so relieved,” Maddison exclaimed. She was full-on smiling now, which was a good thing, Chris hoped. “You’ve been super nice but kind of weird this whole time. I was starting to think you were secretly a serial killer or a spy for the Russians.”

“You thought I was a serial killer but you still came with me to explore an empty building in the middle of the night?” Chris asked, suddenly feeling guilty for imagining that Maddison’s dad was a serial killer even if he did still halfway suspect the man of being one. He was going to feel particularly awful if he turned out to be right.

“It’s eight thirty,” Maddison said, “and I have two cans of mace in my super-dorky backwards fanny pack. And anyway you don’t have a secret agenda. You just have a crush.”

“Right,” Chris agreed, now feeling even guiltier and very, very trapped. If he came out right now and admitted the truth—Maddison might push him over the railing.

“And, Chris,” Maddison said, serious but kind at the same time, “I barely know you, and what I do know I really like. But I don’t feel the same way about you that you feel about me.” Which was what Chris had been expecting, in the back of his mind, all along. “So,” Maddison continued, “if it’s okay with you I’d like to be friends? And maybe we’ll be more, in a little while?”

“I’d like that,” Chris said, resolving to himself that as soon as possible he was going to come clean about the whole secret. Preferably after he and Carrie figured out exactly what was going on, so he could present it to Maddison as a finished indiscretion. And privately agreeing that he really wanted to get to know Maddison a little more. What kind of girl hunted ghosts with scientific precision because her father was a history professor? “Shall we go in search of ghosts?” Chris asked, offering Maddison his arm.

“I thought you’d never ask,” Maddison said, grinning and taking it. “But you’d better have that video camera running at all times in case we meet one.”

Sadly for the prospective of running screaming into each other’s arms, Chris and Maddison did not come across a full-fledged phantom glowing green and rattling chains.

“But that’s not very likely anyway,” Maddison said, checking the temperature in the third-floor lounge. “I’d be happy for just a definitely unexplained cold spot, or electrical activity far beyond what you get from power lines, or a little glowing mist.”

“I’d be happy if we didn’t find anything,” Chris admitted. Watching people look for ghosts on television was one thing, actually looking for them yourself was entirely another. The shadows kept reaching out and grabbing at him, and the idea of glowing mist was not appealing. He’d spent a lot of his childhood in this building, and it had never before seemed so creepy or so full of dark corners from which a ghost or shadow monster might conveniently lunge.

“Well,” Maddison said, “I’ve been doing this for years and the scariest thing I ever saw was my aunt covered in soap suds and chasing the cat.”

“Were you looking for that?”

“Nooo,” Maddison said. “But she was really angry and it looked darn amazing with my night vision goggles.”

“What about aliens?” Chris asked as another worrying thought occurred to him.

“I’ve never seen aliens,” Maddison said. “I have heard strange whistling in the woods when we were visiting my grandparents in Washington—which means I could have heard a Sasquatch,” she explained. “But no aliens. Why, have you ever experienced periods of lost time or bizarre dreams?”

“Uh,” Chris said, thinking that while his dream of Carrie as a mob boss was definitely bizarre it was probably not what Maddison meant. “No.”

“Then I think you’re fine,” Maddison said. “Now, the Bermuda Triangle or a similar supernatural hotspot, that we might need to worry about.”

They didn’t find spooky glowing mist on the bottom floor, or the first. They didn’t find any on the second floor, where Aunt Elsie’s office had been and where Carrie was, either. But they did hear a door slam shut.

Edgewater Archives was a blocky building built for function rather than appearance, more or less resembling a box. There were utilitarian stairwells on both sides of the building and an elevator in the middle by the reception desk, and Maddison and Chris had been taking the stairs for the dual reasons that stairs were a prime ghost location and that elevators were claustrophobic and sketchy at night in deserted buildings. They were halfway down the main hallway of the second floor when the stairwell at the opposite end of the floor slammed shut.

“What was that?” Chris asked, and then realized that Maddison was jogging lightly and noiselessly down the hall, her long black ponytail bouncing. More alarmed than he would have liked to admit and wanting very much not to be alone in the hallway, he ran as quietly as possible after her, and caught up just as she was noiselessly pushing the door open.

The stairwell was empty, and when they checked there were no suspicious cold spots or electrical activity. Chris sighed in guilty relief and Maddison sighed in disappointment and kicked lightly at a wedge of wood on the top landing.

“And sometimes the ghost is actually a doorstop that didn’t hold the door very well,” she said.

Chris was already a little more alarmed by all this ghost hunting than he was trying to let on. So he decided not to tell Maddison that he thought he’d heard, just as they reached the door at the top of the stairs, the click of the door at the bottom of the stairwell being pushed open. It was most likely his imagination, if it wasn’t his imagination it was probably the wind, and Chris did not want to consider what it might be if it wasn’t the wind.

“Ah, well,” Maddison continued, turning around and leading the way back up the stairs. “Maybe we’ll get something from the video. In the meantime, we should go help your cousin with the real reason we’re here. Especially since I’m technically supposed to be making sure nobody steals my dad’s paperweight collection.”

“He has a paperweight collection?” Chris couldn’t help asking. They were taking the stairs two at a time and the nervous prickle at the base of his neck had almost disappeared.

“Oh, yeah. And it’s all octopuses.”

“That’s funny, because my Aunt Elsie had a giant paperweight collection that was all sailing ships—whoa.”

The office looked like an obsessive-compulsive tornado had hit it.

“Sorry,” Carrie said, from behind the desk she was determinedly dragging away from its long-standing spot by the window, which it had occupied since before Aunt Elsie’s predecessor took the office. “There’s just the tiniest space between the floor and the desk and I can’t find my necklace anywhere. Maddison, I’ll move it back before we leave, I promise,” she added. She glanced around the room. “Er, all of it, that is.” Carrie had pushed everything in the room that could be pushed up against the walls.

“It’s totally fine,” Maddison said, hurrying over and tucking her EMF meter in her fanny pack as she did. “Here, let me help you with that.”

Chris stayed where he was, frozen. He’d recognized the note of real hysteria in Carrie’s voice when she’d said that she couldn’t find the necklace, and a terrible thought was sending ice down his spine.

“You don’t remember where you had it last?” he asked nervously.

“I thought it must have fallen in one of the desk drawers,” Carrie said, and the worried look she gave him was proof enough. “But I can’t find it anywhere.”

Chris swallowed in a vain attempt to squash the metallic taste of panic in his mouth. Between the time Carrie had left the necklace in the office on Thursday and the time they came back to “search” for it, someone else had searched the office and taken the necklace, and this was very, very bad.

“Don’t worry,” Maddison said, innocent of the real situation and trying to reassure Carrie nonetheless. “If it’s here we’ll find it.” She gave the desk a final push and with a horrible groan it moved a reluctant couple of feet. “Whoa,” she added. “That’s a weird mark.”

Chris took a deep breath and fought off the hysterical urge to giggle at what had finally been found under the desk. They may have lost Carrie’s necklace—the only tangible thing Aunt Elsie had given Carrie, and the only thing she had to remember her by—but they had at last found the scorch mark. And Maddison was right. The long-looked-for scorch mark, now discovered under the desk drawers, was indeed weird. It looked as if someone had branded the floor with a four-pointed star.

“The four points of a compass,” Carrie said to herself, dropping to her knees and rapping on the scorch mark. She’d rallied slightly better than Chris, despite being the one the necklace belonged to. “Hey! This sounds hollow,” she added, convincingly surprised.

“Points of a compass?” Chris asked, dropping to the floor next to Carrie.

“Hollow?” Maddison asked. She joined Chris and Carrie. “Well, should we open it?”

“I—the four points make me think of the four points of a compass,” Carrie explained. “I don’t know why. And I don’t think it could hurt anything if we pulled the board up and saw if there was anything inside. Especially if we inform the proper authorities after we do.”

And so saying, Carrie dug her fingernails into the crack between the scorched board and the next and tugged. There was a creak and groan from the wood, and then with a puff of dust and stale air the floorboard came up. Inside was a small hollow, hacked into the insulation and wreathed with wires and bracketed by two pipes. Nestled inside the hollow was a wooden box about half the size of a regular shoe box.

“Careful!” Carrie hissed as Chris gently reached down and tugged it out. She was clutching the floorboard to her chest protectively. “There might be exposed wires or—”

“Nah,” Maddison said, “don’t worry about that, I left my EMF meter on. No electricity or ghosts.”

“Got it,” Chris said, blowing insulation dust off the lid and then scrubbing the rest off on his pants. Without the dusty covering, the box proved to be a warm, reddish wood, trimmed on the corners with brass and embellished on the top with an etched brass plate depicting a Spanish galleon in full sail on a rough sea. The initials E.K. were inserted cleverly into the billows in the storm clouds.

Maddison traced the initials with a finger. “Somehow I think this belongs to your family.”

“E.K.,” Chris said. “Aunt Elsie, what are you trying to tell us?”

“Always be on the lookout for secret compartments?” Maddison suggested. “Carrie, this is awesome but I’m not seeing your necklace anywhere.”

“I know,” Carrie said. “I’m absolutely certain that I had it when I walked in here last week, and I could have sworn that I lost it in here while I was helping Chris carry boxes, but I’ve searched every inch of this office and it’s just not here.”

“Maybe somebody found it later and turned it in to the lost and found?” Chris suggested.

“I checked with the front desk about that before I asked the professor if we could search the office,” Carrie said. “As of last Friday there hadn’t been a necklace matching that description turned in.”

“Checked your pockets?” Maddison asked a bit desperately.

“Yup.”

“Checked this box?”

“Can’t,” Chris said, flicking ineffectually at the lid. “It seems to be locked.” Which was a whole new problem to deal with, because Aunt Elsie hadn’t left them a key.

“I can ask my dad to check the box of archive papers for a necklace,” Maddison offered, “in case it got mixed in with them, or—unless you don’t want me to?”

“No, Maddison, that would be great,” Carrie said. “You really don’t even have to do that much, if it isn’t here then it might just be lost forever.” She sighed. “I think we should probably put the desk back where it was, and you should check your dad’s boxes for the sake of thoroughness.”

“Right,” Maddison said. “It is getting pretty late, and I wanted to be home in time to see my dad before he goes to bed.”