"I miss you, little bean, I do, but it's not a good idea to go against your mother. When she comes around, you'll be sure to visit your old Grandma, and I look forward to it, but you have to be patient. Your mother's stubborn, but she wants the best for you. So for now, let's keep our secret letters and hope we can all get together soon. It's sort of fun, anyhow, having a secret. Tell me more about your thrifting! I love hearing about the treasures you find. That nightgown sounds like the sort of thing I'd have worn on my wedding night back ages ago, but I'll spare you the imagery! Love you much."

Cora read the email with a smile and twinge of heartache. She missed Grandma Luce. She knew her mother's upbringing with the old woman had been different than her own; they'd spoken more than once about their disparate experiences with the old woman. But Cora couldn't figure out why her mother was so bent on staying away from Grandma Luce.

The girl sat back against the couch. It was Saturday night, a few days away from Halloween. Her mother was working at that convenience store, and Brian was probably having his people over. She was, once again, alone in the house.

Of course, she knew she wasn't quite alone in there, after all. There was something else in the house with her. Whatever sort of entity it was, she'd come to terms with the fact that yes, it was definitely there, and no, it didn't really seem malevolent. The weird things that happened throughout the building hadn't multiplied, but her own room had certainly become a sort of epicenter for strangeness. Whatever had been going on at night with the lights and the music box was intriguing. It hadn't yet begun to annoy her, even though she'd missed some sleep most nights. On a rare occasion, she'd sleep without disturbance, but four or five days out of seven, the electrical show pulled her from her dreams. What exactly it all was or meant, she had no idea. But it was amusing, and it seemed to respond to her. When she'd open her eyes, the lights would flicker more, and if she touched the wall, she could cause them to go a little wild, even pop if she tried hard enough. She'd wondered if there was something with the wiring, whether pressing certain parts of the wall somehow irritated wires that then reacted weirdly, and though she'd experimented a little with that theory, the wiring had proven off wherever she happened to touch.

No, it was more than wiring. It was more like something was trying to interact with her. Brian would've surely thought it was a ghost, but Cora wasn't so sure. And she hadn't told him, anyway. Something about her nightly visits were . . . private. There was some intense personal aspect to them. The girl was certain her mother wasn't experiencing anything like it. The woman was having nightmares--she'd said as much. In fact, Cora was beginning to worry about her mother. Maeve had always been somewhat irrational (stubborn, as Luce had said), but she was becoming more steadily anxious, jumping at sounds and checking locks multiple times and continuously battling ants she swore were in her room, though Cora had never seen any in there.

But they'd never been very open with one another, and habits were difficult to dispel.

The corduroy couch was comfortable, the lighting was dim and cozy, the television was playing some interesting show, but this room wasn't really where Cora wanted to be. Her own room was best of all; her body acclimated to it immediately. The atmosphere always felt like that of a perfect day at the beach. She was in the living room, though, because of Brian. The girl sat wrapped in a furry blanket, looking out her window rather than at the television, her phone in her hand. She'd just finished reading her Grandma's email and was waiting.

"There you are," Brian's message flashed a moment later.

Cora squinted her eyes to see if she could make him out on the dark street, down toward his house, but she couldn't see much. Rain was falling in a soft mist, obscuring anything not in front of a light. But she waved, just in case.

"Waving back," came the next message.

She smiled.

"Why don't you come over?" he asked.

For the first time, she tapped a response: "I'm super busy."

"You look it."

"Why don't YOU come over HERE?"

There was a bit of a pause before his answer, but it was what she knew it'd be. "I won't go in that place."

Cora bit her lip. She'd known his answer, just as he'd known hers. They never met up on Saturday nights. "See you tomorrow."

"Watch out for ghosts."

She sighed. She knew why he wouldn't come in, but she wished he would. Ben would've come in. He would've been totally down for looking around a potentially haunted house. He probably would've sought out a haunted house on purpose just to get freaked out. She'd used to like that sort of thing about Ben—that fearlessness. Now she realized it'd mostly been ego. Cora did miss talking to Ben a little bit, but she didn't regret cutting him off. His inquisitive and flirty messages had been an ego boost, but his pushing had made her too uncomfortable to continue whatever they'd had going on. She hadn't responded to any of his dwindling messages, even as they'd become annoyed and then angry at her lack of reply. Hopefully, he'd just give up entirely at some point.

Cora's arm, her hand with the phone, hung limply off the couch. The room felt particularly gloomy at the moment. Even her mother's presence would've been nice. It had something to do with the weather, the nights getting cooler and darker earlier, the mist outside. And as she'd begun to know Brian a little more, she'd started to resent his Saturday nights without her. Oh, there was nothing between them, nothing like that. But she'd begun to feel a little possessive of him; he was, after all, the only person she could call a friend at the moment, and as different as they were, they got along for some reason. The girl still hadn't decided whether she believed him about the baby in her basement. She didn't think he was lying to her or making a joke of what'd happened to him; she just wondered if maybe he'd somehow imagined it. Or if he'd been a little drunk, maybe even high--she hadn't asked him about drugs or anything, but it wouldn't have surprised her if he'd been under the influence of something when he'd broken into the empty building. And if the girl he'd been with hadn't remembered what he'd seen, then maybe he'd sort of hallucinated it.

Cora knew from experience how overactive the imagination could be.

In spite of her doubts about Brian's state of mind all that time ago, Cora had still been hesitant to go into her basement alone. She'd helped her mother with laundry, braving the weird scent of powder and the overwhelming urge to search the corners for signs of babies, but she hadn't gone down there by herself.

A light suddenly flashed on outside, to the left of the picture window. It startled Cora at first--there were rarely lights on over there, and when she saw a dark figure huddle out the front door into the rain, she grew even more mesmerized. The girl quickly dimmed the lamp next to her and enabled herself to see Niecey hobbling toward the side of her house, using her walker, something propped on top of its bars.

Cora had seen almost nothing of Niecey since the day they'd moved in. There had been simple interactions, hellos and how-are-yous, but nothing as congenial as their first conversation.

What was the old woman doing? Cora watched in curiosity as her neighbor made her way around the path and disappeared into the darkness untouched by her porchlight. Though it was unclear what exactly was happening, Cora was sure she heard the rattle of a trash can, of something maybe going into it, of a lid slamming down. The girl had by that time slid off the couch onto the gross green shag rug (which, beyond all expectation, she and her mother had grown fond of and decided to keep) and crept to the window, where she peeked over the ledge, her dark eyes glittering eagerly. After a moment of some muffled noise, Niecey's silhouette shuffled back into view, and Cora thought for sure she heard a bit of angry swearing. Whatever the old woman had held across her walker, though, was gone.

Well, this was some type of intrigue, anyway. Cora had been bored to death sitting there, wondering what Brian was saying to those people he insisted on spending time with and thinking about starting an essay just to help the minutes pass. Maybe it was all nothing--an old lady's trash--and yet why had the woman waited until a dark rainy night to dump it?

Cora let Niecey re-enter her home, then waited about ten minutes. Her phone chimed twice during that time, but she ignored the messages and, when she felt enough time had passed, got up and walked to and out the front door, which, perhaps due to the damp weather, was somewhat difficult to pull open.

Rain hovered in the air rather than fell. It was an annoying sort of precipitation, unlike anything Cora had experienced in her old town. No umbrella or jacket could've kept the moisture from seeping into her sweater, which was why she hadn't bothered—well, that and the fact that she anticipated being quick. And she was: within five or so minutes, Cora had darted to Niecey's trash can, grabbed the box sitting conveniently right beneath the lid, and returned to the house with her treasure. Her own bedroom seemed a safer place to explore it; the living room was too open, and her mother had yet to get any sort of curtains for it. So after standing and debating for a brief minute, the girl turned down the short hall.

Every time she entered her room, Cora sensed a relieving sort of welcome, as if she'd been in the wrong place (wherever else she'd been) and was at last returning to the right place.

Closing her door behind her, she set the box on her bed and looked at it; the thing was hardly bigger than a shoe box, and it was only cardboard. There was nothing at all interesting about it save for the fact that it was closed and that an old woman had found it necessary to get rid of on a rainy night. The soft lighting dusted her room in wavering shadows; the airy atmosphere was warm. Cora felt the heavy dampness of her sweater, suddenly, and pulled it off over her head, tossing it to the floor. She realized her one window's blind was up and went to pull the dusty slats back into place. It was unlikely that anyone was out in that weedy backyard looking in, but she felt revealed in her crop tank and black leggings. Even with the blinds drawn, there was some sense that she was on display. But she brushed it aside and sat with her box on the bed, took a deep breath, and lifted the top off.

Mingled interest and disappointment fluttered through her. The box was full of crumbling, color-washed photos. On the one hand, Cora had been expecting something, well, unexpected. But elderly people were always getting rid of their old pictures. It was the way of things, now--nobody kept actual prints. But Cora had also taken interest in old photos during her times thrifting with Grandma Luce. In fact, she'd gone through a particular phase back in fourth grade where she'd bought bunches of them in order to cut and paste. She'd created cards and valentines and weird images and little booklets, all with ancient images of likely-long-dead strangers. And while her interest in such crafting had dwindled, the girl recalled her fascination with wondering who the pictured humans were and what had happened to them.

A group of little girls holding puppies--a couple of middle-aged men in front of a microphone, holding beers--some women with hair curlers, sitting around a table, playing cards--faceless children at a playground, one particular toddler and young woman in the forefront--a tinsel-draped Christmas tree with poorly-wrapped presents beneath it--a school performance, likely, with an unfortunate-looking little boy holding a paper turkey . . . there were many, many photos, all obviously no longer meaningful to Niecey, perhaps many of them not even hers. Cora had no interest in keeping them, either, though she felt an inexplicable obligation to look at each, place it aside, as if doing so would somehow honor each photo's subject once more before it went into the trash for real. Image after image, some worth more than a momentary glance but most not. Cora flipped and shuffled, tried to give attention to each photo, but began to grow weary. There were hundreds of them.

The room around her pressed ever so lightly against her bare arms, almost as if a very soft, very faint blanket were wrapping around her. Cora paused her work and reached under her pillow for her pajamas, slipping out of her clothing and into the gown. She loved the silky feel of it. But as she plopped back down on her mattress, the box of photos wobbled off onto the floor, scattering its remains.

Cora sighed, knelt down to sweep the pictures into a pile, determined to shove them back into the box and just move on, when one suddenly caught her eye. It was an old one, black and white, with a woman standing in front of a house. There was nothing particularly strange about it--Cora would've thought absolutely nothing of it had she found it four months earlier literally anywhere else. What caught her eye was the house in the image: it was her own.