Hello?” came a call from the street.
It was Andi, planted timidly on the pavement. I beckoned from the front door. “Come on in, the coast is clear.”
She kept eyeing the House, every step cautious as she came up the front steps and through the doorway. Meeting Daniel helped dispel her fears, though it left her as puzzled as the rest of us.
“What did you find out?” I asked as we four clustered in the living room.
Andi kept her voice low for the child’s sake. “I got a report from the assisted living facility. Clyde Morris must have been quite a crumb; they didn’t have anything good to say about him. But it’s kind of pitiful: They say he died from suffocation. Apparently he rolled over into his pillow and couldn’t right himself.”
“And Gustav Svensson?”
Andi nodded. “He was a real person, an old fisherman who lived on his boat in the harbor. People say he was a nasty old coot, but he died four days ago.” She took a breath, maybe to be sure she still could. “He drowned. But he had a blow to his head. Folks figure he slipped, hit his head, and fell off his boat.”
We all met each other’s eyes as the pieces came together.
“So,” said Brenda, “Mister objective, scientific, poo-poo-the-supernatural-stuff, what do you say now?”
I knew she wanted to corner me. That wasn’t about to happen. “Whatever this is . . . it is what it is.”
“Oh, that’s good, that’s real good.”
“This is a scientific inquiry. Consequently, even though the means by which we acquire the data is open to question, the data itself could be true. Whatever this is, and however it works, we can’t rule out what the House seems . . . to be telling us.”
Tank nodded toward the kitchen and young Daniel. “And still is. By the way, his last name is Petrovski. It’s written on his shirt collar, and there was a phone number under his name.” He handed me a torn corner of paper napkin with the number scrawled on it. I handed it to Andi.
“I’m on it,” she said.
“Okay,” said Brenda. “So, believing what the House is saying . . . who died from a drug overdose?”
“Or still might?” I said. “And the files in Van Epps’ camera?”
“Three folders, one hour each, nothing but static.”
Brenda reiterated, “Guy can’t run a camera.”
“And there is still . . .” I looked toward the door in the hallway that was locked the night before and, I guessed, still was. “One final message, wouldn’t you say?”
Andi and Brenda exchanged a look. They were sisters on this one.
Andi led the way to the door. “Have you seen this before, seen it elsewhere?”
Clearly, we all had.
“Looks just like the same stupid closet door that wasn’t the closet door back in Van Epps’ place,” said Brenda.
I nodded. We were together on this. “You and I both mistook that door for the closet, and both times, it was locked.”
“But here it is,” said Andi, “a direct copy, and locked just like the other one.”
“Hold on,” said Tank. He spoke quietly again. “Daniel won’t use this hallway. He always goes the long way around, through the dining room, to get to the kitchen.”
“We have our next step,” I suggested. I was just about to wonder how we might accomplish it when, to our surprise, a lawn mower started up in the front yard.
“What the devil—” I started to say, but was interrupted by the clatter of a chair in the kitchen.
Tank looked, then hurried. “Hey, bud! What’s wrong?”
I caught only a glimpse of Daniel before he disappeared, terrified, inside a cupboard and closed the door after him. Tank looked at us, then toward the front door, nonplussed.
Neither I, nor Brenda, nor Andi, had felt comfortable closing the front door behind us, so it remained open, providing a framed view of the front yard. The mower’s operator passed across that view, eyes locked ahead of him, a death grip on the mower’s handlebar, pushing the mower for all he was worth.
It was A.J. Van Epps.