“Yessir, Officer Newall.”
He marched off.
“That was promising!” Artemis bounced on the balls of her feet. “They won’t turn down a police officer.”
“They already turned down achief,” I said, but she ignored me.
Voices came from behind us. “Screw the show; I would never film here, much lesslivehere. Not after that stuff upstairs. Who knows how often they come here?”
“Shut up for, like, five seconds, Lei—oh! Well, speak of the devil.”
You know that feeling when a bug crawls on your shoulder and you can’t see it but you can feel the hairy legs tickling your nerve endings and it makes you want to peel your skin off? That is the feeling I got whenever Tad Thompson began to speak.
He appeared in the doorway, all smug smirks and stupid hipster clothes, holding a photograph. Leila floated behind himwith their coffee, looking interested but not nearly so ready to bite someone. She also dressed like a hipster, but I didn’t mind it as much. Probably because she didn’t wear it like it made her better than me.
“We’re here for our card, thief,” I snapped, then remembered I’d meant to be polite. “Please.”
Tad snorted. “What card? All the equipment is ours. We don’t need to steal footage from a bunch of rednecks. Besides, shouldn’t you be coming here to apologize? A lot of our fans are upset that we were attacked.” He nodded across the street, where attentions and cameras had now been turned on us. “We’re going to put that in our episode, of course. We’reDead Men Walking! We seek out danger as only the bravest can. A town where the ghostsandthe inhabitants are hostile is so on-brand it hurts.”
Leila made a noise. Tad’s expression slipped into annoyance. “Not now, okay?” he said. “None of that feminist shit when we’re not on the camera. I literally cannot take another second of it.”
Leila rolled her eyes and walked away.
Tad turned back to us. “You’re not getting your footage back. Drop it. You’re a bunch of small-town hicks and you wouldn’t know what to do with that footage if you had it.”
“You watched it?” Artemis said.
His lip curled. “Of course I watched it. Watched it, saved it, made copies of it. I wanted to see what kind of damage it’ddo to us if it got back to you. We don’t look great on it, that’s for sure, but you didn’t only shoot us, did you?” He smiled then, showing all his teeth. “I don’t know what that thing was in the mines, but I’m going to make it huge. Angry townspeople, creatures in the mines, old mansions burning down—this place really was the gold mine everyone said it would be.”
Now Grim was the one making noises; he sounded like a wounded deer when Tad said “old mansions.” Tad gave him a strange look and said, “Do I know you?”
Grim clamped his mouth shut and receded into his hair. Recognition dawned across Tad’s face. He snapped his fingers on both hands.
“Oh! You’re the guy! The—” He motioned to the house. “The Grimshaw guy! They told me about you. They said someone still lived in town, and that he looked like a scarecrow with a dead cat for hair.”
Grim recoiled. The whites showed all the way around Sadie’s eyes.
“I’m thinking about investigating here,” Tad said. “The stories are amazing. Thirteen ghosts and treasure inside? I know you all have been using this rathole as your hideout, but we could make a documentary about it. Then, who knows, maybe that old creep in the woods will let us use it as a lake house.”
“You don’t belong here,” Sadie said. “This house belongs to Grim.”
Tad laughed. “I don’t see his name on it. Well,legally,anyway.” He looked Grim up and down. “Maybe you could buy it off Forester. Doesn’t look like you have the money on you, though—or is it in your other jumpsuit?”
I felt the shift in the air by my left shoulder. Sadie blurred past me. Her hands were an inch from Tad’s face when Grim caught her arms and yanked her back. Grim was deceptively strong, but not strong enough to hold back two hundred and thirty pounds of Sadie in a building rage, so I threw my back into her, hissing, “First Dad, now you—I thoughtIwas supposed to be the one who had to be stopped from doing stupid things!”
Tad, gathering himself against the house’s doorframe, stared at us with disbelief on his face and his eyebrows nearly in his hair. “I don’t know why I’m surprised,” he said. “You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.”
“Hey!” Artemis stepped in front of me. “You’re being a real jerk right now, you know that? Why do you have to go around insulting people all the time?”
I shoved Sadie off the porch. Grim towed her back to the street. Then I nudged Artemis behind me and stared Tad down. “What are you talking about, it’s our ‘hideout’?”
Tad held up the picture he was carrying. “Your mom? It’s cute.”
In the picture, two girls, probably around eight or nine, sat on a porch step with a dog. One girl had dark hair, one had light,but they were clearly sisters. Their eyes were a washed-out sepia, almost the same light color as their skin. They looked like me, like Sadie, like Artemis. I snatched the picture out of Tad’s hands. He let me. On the back, in scrawled handwriting, was the year 1983.
“There were more photos all over, but I didn’t have time to look through the rest of your junk upstairs,” Tad went on. “I’m sure it’s just as sentimental.”
I stared at the picture. I had never seen pictures of Mom so young. I had never really seen pictures ofMom.
