Page 48 of Some Kind of Haunted

I’m following her around, taking notes. Logan is standing in the corner of the kitchen, arms crossed over his chest. He is not looking at Nora. He is glaring at the floor in the kitchen.

I get the sense he knows every inch of space she takes up all the same.

She’s still going down her list. “All doors locked, obviously. Porch lights on. And Amelia had quite a few protections that should have helped.” Nora studies the mantel with a bit of a frown. “The stones are missing.”

I’m frowning, too. “Stones?”

“Just little pebbles she’d collected or inherited. All the founding families have little . . . knickknacks, I guess you’d call them.” From the look on her face, I get the impression that’s not what she would call them. That she’s calling them that for my benefit. “Sort of like an ancestral form of protection. Amelia had a collection of stones that were vaguely in the shape of hearts. Passed down mostly, and some she found herself.”

I don’t remember seeing anything of the sort, and I would because . . .

I look at Logan, because all our life, our father did this. Found heart-shaped rocks and picked them up. Kept them littered about our home when we were growing up. He used to say they were signs from our mother. Love rocks.

Logan sighs heavily and pushes off the wall in the kitchen. He crosses into the living room and jerks open a drawer in the side table next to the couch.

Inside is a little pile of rocks. Just little brown and gray pebbles. I suppose they’re all vaguely heart-shaped, but some require imagination to get there.

Nora looks at Logan. Balefully.

He glares back at her. “It looked like junk and I needed somewhere to put my laptop.”

I frown over this, because I very much doubt he didn’t connect them to our father. Our mother. There’s no way Logan forgot Dad did that, too.

“At least I didn’t throw them outside like I thought about doing,” he tells both of us, defensively.

Nora’s look turns to deep disapproval. She’s not even trying to hide it. She scoops up the pebbles and holds them in her palm. Then she moves around to the doorways and windows, placing rocks along sills and ledges. I hear her do the same thing in the other room.

She’s putting them at every possible point of entry, I realize. Or exit.

I feel something cold creep down my spine.

“That should help,” she says when she’s done.

Logan makes a derisive noise. “Little rocks should help?”

She very purposefully doesn’t look at Logan—which is kind of a Logan move, so I appreciate her giving it right back to him. “Yes. And whatever Harrison gave you. Keep it under your pillow.”

“How did you guys figure all this out?” I ask her. “I just experimented with prescription drugs.” Both medically and recreationally, but I feel like maybe that’s not a small-town thing. It’s more fentanyl than party benzos around here, I’m betting.

When Nora flushes with what looks like actual enthusiasm, I figure that no matter what the party drugs are around here, that’s not her thing.

“Amelia and Harrison taught me.” She sounds proud.

I feel that pang again that she got to spend time with a grandmother I never got to meet. Not jealousy. More like . . . frustrated nostalgia, because I’ll never have the memories she does.

“How did they know?” I ask, because I want to know. And also because my twin, who is pretending we’ve never had heart-shaped rocks in our lives, is a glowering darkness beside me and I want to prolong his non-golden-boy agony.

Nora is holding strong with the not looking at him. “I suppose it was passed down. Founding families are generally the first people to take in the foundlings. Amelia raised your mother, though that story has always been . . .” She shrugs. “I don’t know. Just not spoken about too much? I always assumed that’s because she died and it was sad.”

“And no one’s thought to ask why random kids keep showing up without parents? How about DNA tests? Police involvement? Child services?” Logan’s questions are not delivered with anything I would call genuine curiosity.

Perish the thought. The attorney at law is in, and he’s amping up the accusation.

I raise my brows at him, but Nora doesn’t even spare him a glance.

“Thank you, Counselor,” she murmurs. “Obviously, we’re too backward to think of such things. In these here parts we prefer to toss babies off the nearest porch and whoever catches them gets to keep them. Like a bridal bouquet. That’s actually my personal origin story.”

Logan is like a stone statue beside me, his narrow glare on Nora. “I apologize if you feel attacked. What I’m wondering is if there are records we could examine to see if there’s more to the foundling story than local folklore.”