Page 5 of Some Kind of Haunted

But I know better than to say it out loud.

When Logan pulls into one of the many unclaimed parking spots along the main drag, with that clock tower still looming in front of us, he has a faint frown on his face.

“That’s the knitting shop, I guess,” he says, pointing to a small building that looks like all the other small buildings around here to me. “But where the hell is the house?”

He picks up his phone and the frown goes deeper. I have to study the contours of his frown or I will stare at that clock tower and start screaming. Like this is a nightmare I’m somehow stuck in while awake.

Maybe a building can’t actually hurt me, but I haven’t survived as a woman in this world without listening to a gut instinct or two. And my gut instinct says this place is not safe.

Except a clock tower is not a forked-tongued creep who loomed up out of nowhere, so I set my teeth and look at the world around us. It’s all shadows and dark windows. There are streetlights, but they don’t feel like enough. Where are the signs that people live here and aren’t just rotting corpses in these phantom houses lurking all around?

The bright face of the clock tower reflects in a window across the street from us, distorted in the glass. For a flash of a second, I swear I see an actual face in that window, lit up by the tower’s light. A man’s face. Chiseled and intense and—

Then it disappears. A scream rises in my throat. Someone’s watching us. In the window. Someone is—

Or you’re losing it again, Lexi. Because there is clearly nothing going on in that darkened storefront or anywhere else along this street. And since I have, on more than one occasion, lost it and drawn a little too much attention in the process, I remember my therapist’s guidance to breathe through my panic.

And to keep the crazy inside, where it belongs.

Midas, Iowa, at night isn’t giving much of a hint that there are any people living here, but I imagine blood-curdling screams might draw someone’s attention. And it might have taken me a long time, something like twenty-eight years, but I have learned how to avoid that kind of attention.

Unless blood-curdling screams at night are par for the course in this place.

I shiver at the thought. Count it away. One-two-three, everything is fine. One-two-three, your imagination can’t hurt you.

“I still can’t get any service,” Logan mutters, poking at his phone irritably. He squints up and into the dark. “Sit tight.”

Then he makes a move to get out of the car.

Normally, Logan telling me to do anything would have me doing the exact opposite, but no way am I getting out of this mildewy car to come face-to-face with that clock tower or a face in a window, or any of these horrors that I know exist only in my mind.

So I sit tight while he rummages around in the trunk. He returns with a manila envelope. I recognize it because it’s what our grandmother’s lawyer sent with all the important legal documents Logan looked over, and also keys to the house. And the shop, presumably.

Logan pulls out some papers and reads through them, sitting there so casually with the door open and the interior lights on, like he wants to pinpoint our location for any potential assailants lurking about. Like, say, in that looming clock tower.

“Behind the knitting shop,” he says after a moment or two, as if it’s the answer to all our prayers. He makes a move like he’s going to get out of the car again.

“Where are you going?” I screech at him.

“To walk behind the knitting shop and find our accommodations.”

“And why can’t we stay at a hotel?” I demand, even though I know the reasons. “Like normal people?”

The only place to stay even remotely close to the center of Midas—that wasn’t already booked up, for inexplicable reasons I suspect I will never comprehend, especially now that I’ve seen the place—was a highway rent-by-the-hour motel.

I have never been in a motel. And this is no time to break that streak of good luck and good taste.

Logan knows better than to answer rhetorical questions. “Come on. Let’s go. The lawyer assured me the house was in good shape.”

“Yes, because lawyers never lie.”

He glares at me, which helps a little. But I shake my head. I am not leaving this car.

More accurately, I’m not sure I can. My body feels welded into place. Panic is sticky.

“Lexi,” he says, with enough gentleness I feel almost honor bound to get my shit together and deal with this. “I’m going to walk around the back. I’m going to check out the house. You can either come with me, or you can stay here.”

I cross my arms over my chest and look forward, but in front of me is that clock tower and . . . While I’d rather die most days than do what Logan says, just on principle, the minute he closes his door and leaves me alone I’m immediately scrambling out of the car.