Clementine slammed the car into park, trying to ignore the unhealthy shudder it had been making for nearly three weeks now. It sounded like a mouse caught in a trap, the life thump, thump, thumping out of legs suddenly, violently untethered from the spinal cord. The noise is not getting worse, she told herself, knowing it was a lie. You’re just noticing it more.

She ought to get it looked at. Hell, she ought to get a new car. Her current ride had been ugly when it was new, Clementine was sure, even though she hadn’t even laid eyes on it until two previous owners had decided enough was enough. But with her $37,000 salary barely covering rent, student loans and her medicine, she was lucky to have four wheels and a motor.

Her sigh was sudden and unbidden, a reflexive response to an overwhelming wave of crushing defeat. Her hot breath crystallized in the already frigid air, the car’s pitiful heater incapable of providing a lasting warmth. What the fuck am I doing with my life? she wondered, not for the first time that day. And who the fuck cares?

Sighing again, Clementine opened the glove box and rooted around for her grandmother’s cigarette case.

It was silver with gold inlay, a relic from a time when lung cancer was far less terrifying than polio or an infection from being poked by a rusty fork. Sure enough, the grandmother Clementine had barely known had died in a car accident in her mid-50s, long before her tar-soaked lung tissue could mutate and metastasize.

Assuming she found the right buyer, the cigarette case would be worth a few hundred bucks, maybe a few grand. It was in pristine condition and made from rare metals deemed precious by unscrupulous businessmen from generations past.

But Clementine, who still had to subsist on microwave noodles to get through the last few days of each pay period, would never sell. There was a sentimental attachment, sure. The case had been given to her by her mother, who couldn’t bear to sell it, but also couldn’t stand to keep the grim reminder of her own mom’s mortality.

But mostly, Clementine knew she would keep it because it belonged to her and no one else. She was meant to have it, willed by fate or God or a lowercase “g” god or karma or whatever. And if Clementine believed in anything, it was herself and her ability to gauge what is right.

That didn’t mean the case was purely decorative, of course. Clementine had given it a singular, hugely important purpose: her portable pharmacy. She unsnapped the lid and began digging poorly manicured fingers through the mix of blue, yellow, white and striped pills, searching for her mid-afternoon upper. Her source (who was 10 minutes late, of course) was sure to test her patience, so she needed something to take the edge off. Or at least keep her from constantly rolling her eyes.

Clementine glanced at her reflection in the rearview mirror. Her cheap makeup was intact and subtle, the blond highlights in her shoulder-length hair fading. She grinned, checking her mostly white teeth for lipstick stains. Meticulous as she was about oral hygiene, one of her canines recently had adopted an almost golden sheen, making it look jaundiced in an otherwise sterile mouth.

She sighed. It had been over a year since her last professional cleaning. Her health plan sort of covered dental, in the same way that thong-style underwear sort of covered buttcracks. But if she stepped into a dentist’s office, anything more than a quick brush and a floss would set her back at least 150 bucks.

And, of course there was the woman in the waiting room at the only dentist’s office covered by her plan. The unavoidable, pale woman in the food-stained blouse and the tattered jeans. The woman whose mouth always was stretched impossibly wide, her scream silent and eternal…

Clementine jumped as knuckles rapped against her window, nearly causing her to spill the contents of her pill case just as she found the little greenish-blue disk she had been searching for. She quickly snapped the case shut, caught herself, and offered her most demure, insincere smile to the face that grinned back at her through a fingerprint-smudged window.

Though she’d never met Declan (real name Mike) Perrineau in person, she recognized him instantly. Clementine had learned to visualize people with startling accuracy based on nothing more than their phone voices, syntax and word choices. From the instant she picked up Declan’s phone call and winced through his nasally, pretentiously provocative greeting – “So, you’re the reporter looking for a guide into the spirit world.” -- she envisioned a tall, geeky white guy in a black duster and thick plastic glasses with too much gel welding together an impractically complex haircut.

An assessment of Declan as she stepped out of her car, casually popping the pill into her mouth and swinging her laptop bag over her shoulder, proved that her aural assessment had been mostly correct. The 26-year-old electrical engineer wore a black, yet stylish leather jacket rather than a duster, and his glasses had oversized lenses and wire rims that looked like they had been abducted from the 1980s. But on all other counts – beard, haircut, tall geekishness – Clementine was spot on.

She idly wondered whether he’d wait until morning to ask her out or if he’d force the awkward conversation to occur sooner.

“Declan?” she said, successfully keeping the disdain for his assumed moniker out of her voice.

“Yes, Declan Perrineau, president, CEO and chief investigator of Reindeer Run Paranormal Society,” he said, offering a clammy hand. Clementine took it, returning a limp shake. “Nice to finally meet you, Clementine. ‘Oh my darling, Clementine.’”

She had been braced for it. She always braced for it when she met new people. Still, every time someone said it, almost certainly feeling impossibly clever and charming, Clementine had to fight the urge to scream.

Instead, she smiled wider, adjusting her bag on her shoulder.

“So,” she said, as the silence entered uncomfortable territory. “Where’s the rest of the team? I was looking forward to meeting them.”

“Oh, they’re already at the house setting up,” Declan said, his face briefly flashing disappointment. “We’ve got a pretty complex rig. And we’ve got to set up our own network, for security. A lot of people would kill to get access to our hard drives. But you’ll see all that when we get there.”

“How come we didn’t just meet at the house? It’s at least a 10-minute drive from here.”

Keller House – or “Killer House,” as virtually everyone who had grown up in and around Reindeer Run had known it – was located about seven miles outside city limits, slowly rotting along the banks of a tributary of the Passanak River. The three-story farmhouse had been an extravagant, if isolated mansion at the time of its construction in the early 1900s. But it had grown ramshackle and derelict in the decades it sat unused, broken windows, sagging roof and peeling paint feeding rumors that the building was haunted and probably cursed.

County property records showed that the building remained the property of the Keller family, passed down from generation to generation after the death of Reginald Keller in 1942. The current owner, a distant great-nephew named Paul Zentz, lived three states over and had never even set foot inside the property. But like all of the previous owners, Zentz paid his taxes on time, and hired someone to cut the grass every other week and perform just enough maintenance to prevent the county from declaring Keller House a nuisance property.

No one has ever attempted to sell Keller House, though a previous owner did lease a few acres of a farmland to a neighboring property owner. And, from what Clementine could tell through her research, no one had so much as spent the night it the building, let alone lived there, since the death of its first owner.

Clementine, Declan and his associates at RRPS, would be the first, assuming no squatters had found their way into the abandoned structure.

In a brief phone interview three days before she met Declan, Clementine had asked Paul Zentz why he had agreed to open his family’s mysterious, long-dormant homestead to a group of amateur ghost hunters. All of whom, Clementine suspected, probably harbored secret addictions to cartoon pornography.

“Frankly, I’m curious myself,” Zentz had said, his high, reedy voice obviously cured by a few decades of tobacco use. “All my life I was told two things about Keller House. First, I can’t ever sell it, it’s got to remain in the family for as long as it’s standing. Second, I can’t ever step foot inside, not even for a minute.”

“So all these years you’ve owned it, you’ve never even been inside?” Clementine had asked.

“Nope. Not once.”

“Well, if you don’t mind me asking, why not? Personally, I wouldn’t have been able to resist checking it out.”

Paul had gone silent for a few moments. Clementine imagined him stroking a stubbly chin flecked with gray hairs as he composed his response.

“Well,” he had said, finally. “I hear what you’re saying. But I guess those rules have been with me my whole life. They’ve essentially become unquestioned truths of the universe, bound by the laws of physics, time and God, or what have you. I haven’t ever stepped foot in Keller House because I’m not allowed to step foot in Keller House. It’s really as simple as that. Sorry if I’m not explaining it well.

“And as far as selling it, there’s a trust set up to pay for maintenance costs and taxes and other expenses. It’s never cost me one red cent, so I guess I don’t see any reason to tamper with my family’s legacy.”

So curiosity would go down on the record as Zentz’ motive for allowing this little retreat, as well as the accompanying media coverage provided by Clementine and The Reindeer Run Free Press. Clementine also suspected some money had changed hands, though she couldn’t get Zentz or Declan to admit it. Declan made a good living as an engineer, and, from what Clementine had been able to discover, he came from a well-off family more than happy to indulge his little hobby. Declan obviously had money to burn, something that had, not surprisingly, failed to endear him to her.

“Well, we didn’t want to have too many cars at the house. Parking is pretty limited. Plus, we don’t want to draw too much attention to ourselves,” Declan said. “And I thought you might appreciate riding in with me. Give you a few minutes for an interview before the craziness of the investigation.”

Clementine fought to keep her expression neutral, even as she ran through a mental list of everyone who would be looking for her if Declan Perrineau turned out to be a rapist or murderer or a Republican or something. Of course, this was an overnight assignment. So by the time anybody started worrying, she could be in a dozen pieces in a dozen ditches across the tri-county area, the Clementine chunks already starting to rot.

But her instincts told her that was unlikely, and Clementine trusted her instincts implicitly. So she smiled and said, “Lead the way.”

Next Chapter: Arrival