“Long story or short?”
“Both?” I placed the tape above the bit of muscle that’d begun swelling and slowly worked my way down.
“There are small, nearly undetectable—” She hissed, and I froze.
“Sorry, too much?” I pulled back.
Rae shook her head, but her jaw was tight as she said, “No, it’s fine.”
I started again, going even slower this time. “Keep talking; it’ll help distract you.”
She hummed as if she disagreed, but continued anyway. “Undetectable fluctuations in the atmosphere that show something from the other side. Basically, they leave behind breadcrumbs.”
I held onto my disbelieving snort. “And how did y’all figure that out?”
“A researcher developed a method decades ago. Arnold Harrison. He started hunting around the same time my folks did. His first breakthrough was when he captured a ghost and?—”
“Hold on.” I shook my head. “Someone captured a ghost?”
“That’s what I said.”
“I thought the point of ghosts was that they’re intangible? You can’t capture something you can’t touch.”
Rae raised a brow. “The point of a ghost varies to whatever each sees fit. And who says you can’t touch one?”
“Most of every ghost story I’ve ever read.”
She laughed. “Well, this isn’t a ghost story.”
SEVEN
There were notes to log,data to examine, a call to set up with Nico and December. Despite the growing to-do list, I dragged my feet during the assessment because Octavia watched me like a hawk. Every turn I made, the woman followed with a budding question.
I gleaned a sense of thrill from the attention. I was as needy as Kat, sticking my head out of my stable as soon as I heard hints of Octavia on the horizon.
“Category two,” Jonah spoke into our recorder as he typed up our initial assessment. The Daniels offered us one room on the second floor. After a sweep of the stable, barn, and house, Jonah and I moved our equipment from the RV into the house. We built a makeshift headquarters in less than an hour. The brown maple wood desk was large enough to fit two laptops and a large monitor. We’d co-opted two dining chairs from the kitchen and tiny pillows from the living room for our backs. Despite Wilson offering us fresh sheets, we didn’t make the beds, too focused on the all-nighter we might have to pull to get the much-needed data tonight.
Rae’s room was right across from ours, the door cracked slightly open as she cleaned up to prepare for our monitoring tonight.
“How long?” she had asked when I told her the next step would be to set up cameras and mics, hoping to get an encore of what happened on her camcorder.
“However long it takes,” I’d said. “Prepare for the entire night.”
“You guys are going to watch me sleep for the entire night?”
I’d opened my mouth to offer some comfort. Most of the people we monitored slept just fine and often forgot they were being watched once they drifted off.
But before I could say any of that, she released a relieved sigh and quickly tried to play it off with a cough. Her question hadn’t been the prelude to protest, but a hope for company.
“I’m advising we bump that up to a cat three classification,” I reminded him and the record. “With a cat four also in consideration.”
“Yeah?” Jonah stopped typing and looked at me. “Why?”
He’d done relatively well in his sweep of the living room. Though I bit my tongue often, trying not to interfere with the order in which he’d tested the space. He’d started by checking the temperature of every room (and had found a few sections that’d been 32 degrees Fahrenheit). But the thermometer wasn’t definitive, especially without the additional information an EMF could provide.
“There was a red flag outside the stable.” I settled into the seat next to Jonah, elevating my throbbing ankle on an extra chair. Octavia’s sinkhole had done a number on it.She’d bandaged me up well, though, almost making the pain worth it.
“My shoe got pulled into the earth.” I gestured for him to get all this down.
