They were led up the short spiral staircase, the wood gleaming with polish, and took a right down a hallway lined with doors.

“Old Ormsby must have either had a lot of family or guests that stayed overnight. There’re a ton of bedrooms up here. The nice thing is they all have their own fireplaces. I stocked them with wood for you.”

“Thank you, Paul,” Eddie said. He walked slowly, his head swiveling from left to right, seeing things, Jessica was sure, that neither she nor Paul ever could.

Paul opened the doors to opposite facing rooms at the end of the hall. “This one is called the Yellow Room. As you can see, why it got the name is self-evident. Everything in here is the way the last Ormsby left it. We cleaned the sheets, of course.” The wallpaper was a rich yellow, as was the upholstery of the chairs, chaise lounge and linens on the bed. “Naturally, Jessica, I thought you’d take this one. Over here is the Blue Room for Eddie.”

The Blue Room was furnished the same as the Yellow Room, just with an opposing color scheme. The blue on blue made the room seem much smaller.

“I’ll take the Blue Room,” Jessica said. “I never was a big fan of yellow.”

Eddie shrugged his shoulders. “Fine by me. They’ll both be dark by the time we flop down at night anyway.”

Paul’s eyes rolled between the two of them, seemingly miffed that they had turned his plan for their accommodations upside down. Jessica threw her bags on the bed and said, “I’m done. Everyone is outside?”

“Um, yes, they’re all on the patio.”

Eddie was a little more careful with his bags. He closed the door to his room and said, “If you don’t mind, Jessica and I would like to walk around the house a little bit before we head outside. We’ll join up with you in a few minutes.”

Paul hesitated, then said, “Sure, sure. I’ll be outside warming up. You probably want to do an initial sweep to get baselines and stuff like that.”

Jessica had to fight from groaning aloud. “Pretty much,” she said with a plastic smile.

His heavy footsteps pounded down the stairs, along the ground floor and outside. The catching of the door’s latch echoed up to them. Because there was no carpeting, objects on the walls and very little furniture, even the slightest sound in Ormsby House carried to all corners.

“It’s going to be hard to tell what’s natural noise and not in here,” Jessica said. “If someone farts downstairs it’ll sound like a ghostly moan by the time it gets up here.”

“That’s a pleasant way to look at it.”

Jessica tried the doors to the other bedrooms as they walked down the hall. All of them were locked. “Who locks their bedroom doors?”

“People who know strangers are staying in their house?” Eddie replied.

The only door that was ajar was to the bathroom. A bronze, clawfoot tub dominated the room. The fixtures were old but everything looked as if it had just been installed.

“Looks like all baths, no showers this week,” Eddie said.

Jessica’s fingertips glided over the tub and sink and mirrored medicine cabinet. “The Harpers said they haven’t done any renovation. This place was left to rot for two decades. How is this possible?”

“The house maintained itself,” Eddie said.

“That’s not possible. A house is a thing. It has no soul, no conscious mind. People talk about haunted houses but it’s not the houses. It’s the energy of the people.”

“Maybe their energy is what keeps the place looking like new.”

“But they let the outside decay,” Jessica said. Warning claxons were going off in her head but she couldn’t find the source of the threat.

“Maybe to keep people away,” Eddie said.

“Is there anyone with us now?”

He stepped backward out of the bathroom, his head turning to the stairs. “Just the same two EB children from yesterday. It looks like they’re waiting for us to go downstairs.”

Not for the first time, Jessica wondered what it would be like to live with Eddie’s ability. How long could a person go on until they lost the fine definitions between the living and the dead? The fact that the few people who had been genuinely proven to share Eddie’s gifts gradually lost their special sight as they got older was probably the mind’s way of protecting itself from going mad.

“Are they saying anything to you?”

Eddie cocked his head, listening. “It’s…it sounds like gibberish. Like baby talk. I can’t make out their faces. But I can feel one thing.”

She walked to the head of the stairs, wondering if she was standing in the middle of their energy or if they stepped aside to let her through. “What’s that?”

“They’re very interested in you.”

Daphne Harper sat in an Adirondack chair wearing a sweater. She could hear water lapping at the shore behind the house but couldn’t see the undulating harbor waters through the dense foliage. Tobe had taken the children on a short nature walk.

All walks are short out here, she thought. There wasn’t much to Ormsby Island itself, but it was grand in its seclusion.

She sipped at her tea from a thin china cup she’d found in one of the cupboards. It felt like spun sugar in her hands. It surprised her the first time she poured coffee into it, waiting for it to crack or explode or even dissolve into tiny granules. It was heartier than it looked.

“Hey Daph, Jessica and Eddie are here. Said they wanted to go around the house a bit before coming out.”

The cup made a tiny plink when she set it down on the wooden arm of the chair.

“That’s good,” she said. “I want them to get comfortable with the house.”

Her brother sat heavily on a petrified tree stump. She wondered when he’d last bothered to bathe. Their mother, had she been alive, would have been very disappointed in her Bohemian son. Daphne did all she could to mother him, to keep him out of trouble with a roof over his head. It was taxing, but family was family.

Paul did have his uses. The children loved him. Of course they did. Children enjoyed playing with children, even if one was an unshaven man-child. Their purchase of Ormsby Island wouldn’t have been possible, or necessary, without him, so she made it a point to overlook his deficiencies.

“I was fixin’ to take the kids on the water this afternoon, keep them out of the way,” he said, pulling a leaf into shreds.

“I wish you’d stop saying that. You sound like a hick,” she scolded.

“Unlike you, I stayed in the south and this is the way we talk. All of us haven’t forgotten where we came from.”

Daphne’s eyelids fluttered with impatience. “You came from an affluent family and attended some of the best schools in the country. It’s not like you grew up on a catfish farm in Louisiana.”

Paul smiled. “Yeah, well, money doesn’t last forever, right? That reminds me, I still wanna try some of that catfish hand fishing. I have to call Pete and see if he’s up to it when I leave.”

Her brother was impervious to her disappointment or anger. She was about to ask him to kindly find something else to do when the back door opened. Jessica, wearing a teal long-sleeved shirt and black jeans, and Eddie in his faded blue jeans and button down denim shirt, walked onto the patio.

Time for the show to begin. Daphne willed her lips into a welcoming smile and rose from the chair to greet them.

“Paul was right,” Jessica said, “this is the place to be to warm up.”

Daphne said, “That’s partly why I’m out here. It was a frigid start to the day. I’m sure it’s nothing new for someone with your experience.”

Jessica slowly shook her head. “I can’t say I’ve ever been to or heard of a house that retains such a low temperature.”

“Really?” Daphne said, a curious look on her face. Eddie wasn’t sure what to make of her reaction, so he did what came natural—tried to poke into her mind.

“Really,” Jessica replied. “Almost makes me think it’s something more on the natural side of things than supernatural. I have a remote assistant who can look up records on the island, see if anything about the island itself or the harbor can explain it.”