“Thai.” I thought about Allison, the way Aunt Odette used to say you had to sit with a thing before you trusted your first read of it. "She's scared of something. I don't think she's scared of ghosts."
"Scared how?"
"I don't know yet." "But I don't think she was talking to Evelyn tonight, Maggie. I think she was looking for something. I just don't know what."
Teddy chittered his agreement, or possibly his disapproval of the smell of extinguished candle wax, and trotted off toward the kitchen, tail high, business concluded.
“Maybe Hollis is right,” Maggie mused. “Maybe we’re just trying to connect the dots on things that aren’t connected at all. Maybe Evelyn committed suicide. Maybe Hyacinth has low blood sugar. Maybe Allison has a dead husband she’s trying to chat up.”
Except that night someone had been searching the house.
The night the power went out. The chandelier had flickered and the floorboard outside Room Two had groaned under a weight that shouldn't have been there, because every single person under my roof had been standing together in a tight, spooked cluster in the dark kitchen when it happened.
At the time, I'd chalked it up to old wiring and a house that liked to perform for an audience, the same story I'd been telling guests for ten months because it was true often enough to be useful. Nobody was upstairs. I'd said it myself, out loud, like a fact, like a comfort.
But nobody being upstairs and nobody being in the house were two very different sentences, and I'd let myself collapse them into one because it was easier than the alternative.
What if somebody had been in the house. Not us. Not a spirit. A person, moving through my home in the dark while five sets of eyes were fixed on a breaker box, cutting the lights on purpose, buying themselves a room-by-room window with nobody watching, because who watches an empty hallway when the power's out and there's a skunk chittering?
It was, I had to admit, a genuinely elegant piece of misdirection. Better than the crushed mint on the napkin. I was certain that one had been aimed at the police, to suggest poisoning. This one had been aimed at us, specifically, and it had worked, because I'd spent that whole night thinking about ghosts instead of thinking about why there would be a stranger creeping through my guest rooms.
I went and got my phone and pulled up the notes app, where I'd typed out, in a fit of self-important amateur-detective energy, everything I remembered about that night.
Chandelier. Floorboard. Door closing softly, deliberately, the way a person closes a door when they don't want to wake anybody.
I'd written that phrase myself at the time and hadn't once stopped to ask what kind of ghost cared about waking the living.
A ghost didn't worry about waking anybody. A ghost had never once, in almost a year of me running this B&B, closed a door quietly out of consideration.
A person would. Not out of consideration but from a need to not be caught.
“Get me chicken Pad Thai,” I told Maggie. “I need to check something.”
I climbed the stairs slower than usual, feeling for every creak underfoot like it might mean something now, and stopped outside Room Two in the dim glow of the hallway sconce. The floorboard was right where it had always been, three feet shy of the doorframe, worn pale from a century and a half of feet finding that exact spot without meaning to. I crouched down and pressed my palm flat against it, testing.
My security system was offline. Nothing was being recorded upstairs in the hallway after I’d had several guests complain about the invasion of privacy. Cameras were for hotels, not B&Bs, I’d been told both to my face and in online reviews.
My thought had been that I didn’t want to dissuade guests. I wanted them to feel comfortable. And really, what were the odds that there would be another murder or kidnapping at my house?
I had assumed slim odds.
But it seemed like we’d had an intruder.
The floorboard groaned, obligingly, same as it always had, same as it had for every guest who'd ever stumbled down the hallway at two in the morning.
But when I ran my fingers along the seam where the board met its neighbor, I found something I hadn't bothered looking for the first time, back when I'd been too busy reassuring four alarmed adults that the house wasn't actually trying to kill anyone. A thin, pale scratch along the edge, fresh enough that it hadn't had time to dull into the wood grain the way the rest of the surface had. Not a scuff from a shoe. Something narrower. A pry mark, maybe, or the edge of a tool worked in and levered up and set back down by someone in a hurry, someone who hadn't quite managed to seat the board flush again in the dark.
I sat back on my heels in the hallway and stared at it.
I hadn't checked that night, not properly, not with a flashlight and a purpose. I'd looked, seen no dust disturbed and no footprint on the runner, and decided that meant nothing had happened, because I'd been thinking about ghosts and not about hands. Dust told you about feet. It didn't tell you a thing about fingers.
Room Two. Which was Vivienne's. I sat with that fact and didn't love where it wanted to take me.
I was still crouched there, deep in a spiral that wasn't doing me any favors, when the front door banged open downstairs and Vivienne's voice came floating up, bright and a little too cheerful for the hour.
"Harper? Are you home? Oh, Maggie, hi."
I stood up fast enough to see spots and smoothed my skirt. I went down to meet her.
