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“I probably did.”

That earned him a nod from three of them at once, and someone hooked a chair out from the neighboring table for him.

They introduced themselves. Frank, Bill, a second Frank distinguished as Frank the Younger despite being at least eighty, a thin man named Gordon. The last one, sitting nearest the window with his coffee and no pie, said, “Walt,” and shook Nate’s hand. He had a warm, careful grip and pale blue eyes.

“So,” Frank the Elder said. “You want to know about your house.”

“I want to know why everyone in this town looks at me like I moved into a crime scene.”

“Because you did,” Bill said.

“Nobody knows that,” Gordon said.

“Everybody knows it.”

“Oh please, you can’t claim to know something when all the evidence is circumstantial at best.”

“Here we go.” Frank the Younger sighed.

Nate drank the coffee the waitress had put in front of him without being asked, and listened.

The story came out very similar to what Diane had told him. The house had been the town’s haunted house since before any of them could ride a bike. The dares, the porch, the upstairs window where a light was supposed to move on certain nights. A hunting dog that refused to cross the property line in ’66 or ’76, depending on which Frank you believed. A workman who died putting the additions in, back before the war. Either he fell, or a wall came down on him, and Bill’s uncle had been on that crew, or knew a man who was.

Nate doubted that Leo could have been that workman.

“And the cellar story,” Gordon said. “Tell him that one.”

Nate set his cup down. “Diane mentioned it. Somebody got walled up down there?”

“That’s the story.” Frank the Elder shrugged. “Every old house has one like it. I wouldn’t lose sleep.”

“I don’t sleep much anyway,” Nate said. “The house creaks.”

“I’ll bet it does,” Bill said, in a voice that meant something else, and for a moment nobody at the table said anything at all.

Nate let it pass. “What about the people? The Bellwethers weren’t the first owners. Somebody had it in the seventies.”

“Quiet people,” Frank the Elder said after a heavy pause. “Kept the gate shut. You’d see cars go up that drive at night, and not the same cars twice.”

“Hippies,” Bill said.

“They weren’t hippies,” Walt said.

It was the first thing he’d said since his name.

“How would you know?” Gordon said. “You got here… when? Was it, twenty-ten?”

“Oh-nine.”

“Oh-nine.” Gordon laughed. “Man’s practically a tourist and he thinks he knows.”

“People talk,” Walt said, and drank his coffee.

“People do nothing but,” Frank the Younger agreed.

“Whoever they were,” Frank the Elder went on, “they didn’t mix. No church, no store accounts, kids never in the school. And then they were gone. No moving truck. No sale sign, not for years after. They left so suddenly. As if they were scared of something. I think that’s when the ghost stories really kicked off. After they moved out. It made people think there was something wrong with the place for real.”

Nate processed this.