The chandelier above the staircase flickered to life on its own before I ever reached the breaker box in the room off of the kitchen. Just for a second, before it went dark again.
“That’s the wiring,” I said, to the room, to myself, to whoever needed convincing most. “That chandelier has always done that. It’s original. It’s temperamental.”
“It did that for Vivienne on the first night too,” Allison said. “She has it on camera.”
“Exactly. Old house. Old wiring. Nothing to see here.”
“I thought you had ghosts,” Allison commented.
She sounded genuinely scared. Even in the dark, lit only by my phone’s flashlight, and Vivienne’s, Allison was clinging to Taylor’s arm.
From somewhere upstairs came the long, slow creak of a floorboard, the specific one outside Room Two that always announced itself, followed by the softer, more distant sound of a door easing shut, gently, deliberately, the way a person closes a door when they don’t want to wake anybody.
Nobody was upstairs.
Every single person currently in this house was standing in a tight, nervous cluster in my dark kitchen.
My joke to Hollis came back to haunt me. Haunt me. Hah. I cracked myself up. Or I would if I wasn’t suddenly very nervous.
Teddy, still in his travel bag, began to chitter. He was spooked.
“Harper,” Reginald said, and for the first time all night, the composed preservation architect sounded genuinely, thoroughly baffled, “does your house do this often?”
“Only when there’s a full moon.”
“There was no full moon tonight.”
“I was joking.”
I found the breaker box, flipped the switch, and the light flooded back through Midnight House. Every lamp, every fixture, every bulb blazing on at once as if the house had simply been waiting for an audience.
The kitchen was empty.
We all disbursed, heaving a collective sigh of relief.
“I’ll be asleep in thirty seconds,” Allison said.
“I might already be asleep,” Taylor joked.
Taylor might be a tippler, but he did appreciate humor, which I appreciated.
The floorboard outside Room Two, when I looked, showed no evidence of anyone standing on it. There was no dust disturbed, no footprint on the runner, nothing at all.
“Just old wiring and maybe ghosts,” I assured everyone, as they all opened their respective guest room doors.
“Ghosts don’t scare me,” Reginald commented. “People do.”
With that, he shut his door and locked it firmly behind him.
Wiser words had never been spoken.
Eight
My alarm clock the next morning went off way too early for my liking. The only consolation was that after I put a continental breakfast out, yawning the whole way, it was clear no one else had slept well either.
The dining room was as quiet as a morgue.
Allison was wrapped in a cardigan despite the fact that it was already seventy-eight degrees outside. A classic sign of fatigue, in my personal opinion. She was at one end of the table by herself.
