We were coming up on the steps that led to the Hawthorne house then, and the clanking construction noises were growing louder by the second.
“Seems strange that they would be doing so much construction for so long, even on an old house,” Tessa said as she cast an almost wistful look in the direction of the steps.
A chill ran up and down my spine as I followed her gaze, reminiscent of the one that had gripped me earlier when I first saw the house.
The fog was even thicker now, making the house itself even more difficult to make out. Whereas the image had been clear at this angle and distance before, now the creepy old structure was shrouded in a haze of darkness even right up close. It made me even less inclined to step foot on the property than I had been before.
Tessa, unfortunately, had other plans. She stopped in her tracks and began to pull me toward the steps, that glint in her eye now all-encompassing in her pursuit of the story, as always.
“No, no, no, no, no,” I said hurriedly as I tried to pull her back with me, but she was unrelenting, and she’d caught me off guard.
Before I knew it, she was on the second step up, and I was following right behind her, not wanting to let her go it alone under such uncertain circumstances.
“What, are you scared?” she asked, grinning down at me with her hand still loosely resting in mine as I did my best to stay at the foot of the stairwell.
I didn’t like the look of those things, and even less the house they led up to. I didn’t like the look of them at all.
“Uh, yeah, a bit,” I admitted.
“Come on, Agent Marston,” she teased, shooting me a goofy smile. “This is your job, isn’t it? And your case? Don’t tell me that if I wasn’t here, you wouldn’t be running up there already, guns blazing.”
I stopped to consider this for a moment. If Tessa wasn’t here, and I had Holm with me so that I wasn’t going it alone, would I check out the Hawthorne house tonight? I wasn’t sure. The place gave me the creeps, with or without Tessa, there was no doubt about that. But this was an invaluable opportunity.
I shook my head to clear it and pushed away these thoughts.
“No, it doesn’t matter,” I said, pulling on Tessa’s arm gently. “It’s getting dark, and I’ll come back tomorrow with a team of officers. It’s not worth the risk tonight, especially when neither of us has a cell signal.”
I pulled my phone out of my pocket with my free hand just to make sure and had to bite back a curse when I saw that my words were true. I still didn’t have a single bar to work with, and I doubted that Tessa could say any different.
“Come on, there’s something weird going on here right now,” Tessa said, nodding up the stairs in the direction of the house and all those noises.
“That’s my point!” I cried, thinking that this woman was actually insane, though I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that loved her enthusiasm. “There’s something weird going on here and walking into the middle of it without any backup is a fool’s errand.”
“But what if you come back tomorrow and there’s no one here?” Tessa complained. “We know there are people here now, so let’s go and talk to them. Just a chat. They don’t know we’re a threat.”
“They do if they know anything about what we did to their friends in that library today,” I protested, but my voice was drowned out by another, altogether unexpected sound.
A child’s cry. A boy’s, by the sound of it, though it could’ve been an older girl, too, I supposed.
Tessa and I both froze, and our eyes met. The Carltons hadn’t mentioned seeing or hearing any kids in the area. Except for their own, that was.
As if on cue, Tyson and Alice Carlton came running down the beach toward us, a little girl resting in the man’s arms and a glassy look on his face in contrast to his wife’s hysterics.
“Our son!” she cried, bounding up to me and nearly tripping in the sand. “Agent Marston, our son, Miles, we can’t find him anywhere!”
Well, that settled that argument. I at least was going into the Hawthorne house tonight.
“Have you called the police?” I asked the couple sharply, remembering that they had a landline that got service all the way out here.
“No,” Tyson managed, his voice coming out weak and hoarse. “We didn’t even think about that. We just knew you were close and ran. We didn’t want to leave her.”
He propped his daughter up on his hip. The girl looked confused and scared all at the same time, and silent tears were streaming down her face. She was wearing a nightgown, and it looked like sand had gotten everywhere in it just from running across the beach with her dad.
“Hi, I’m Ethan,” I said, walking over to her and giving her a kind, non-threatening smile. “Do you know where your brother went?
“He heard you talking about pirates,” she said, sniffling and wiping the tears off her cheeks. “At the haunted house. So he went looking for them himself. He said that if he found the bad guys for you, maybe you’d give him the buried treasure!”
The little girl said this as if it made all the sense in the world, but her parents looked nothing short of bewildered by it.
“What buried treasure, sweetie?” her father asked her. “What are you talking about?”
“The buried treasure the men told us about, in the forest!” the girl said earnestly, looking over at her mother. “The day you got all mad and said we couldn’t go out there anymore.”
“Do you know about any buried treasure?” Tessa asked.
“No,” she said, shaking her head and sticking her
