Chapter 7
SEVEN
There were notes to log, data to examine, a call to set up with Nico and December. Despite the growing to-do list, I dragged my feet during the assessment because Octavia watched me like a hawk. Every turn I made, the woman followed with a budding question.
I gleaned a sense of thrill from the attention. I was as needy as Kat, sticking my head out of my stable as soon as I heard hints of Octavia on the horizon.
“Category two,” Jonah spoke into our recorder as he typed up our initial assessment.
The Daniels offered us one room on the second floor.
After a sweep of the stable, barn, and house, Jonah and I moved our equipment from the RV into the house.
We built a makeshift headquarters in less than an hour.
The brown maple wood desk was large enough to fit two laptops and a large monitor.
We’d co-opted two dining chairs from the kitchen and tiny pillows from the living room for our backs.
Despite Wilson offering us fresh sheets, we didn’t make the beds, too focused on the all-nighter we might have to pull to get the much-needed data tonight.
Rae’s room was right across from ours, the door cracked slightly open as she cleaned up to prepare for our monitoring tonight.
“How long?” she had asked when I told her the next step would be to set up cameras and mics, hoping to get an encore of what happened on her camcorder.
“However long it takes,” I’d said. “Prepare for the entire night.”
“You guys are going to watch me sleep for the entire night?”
I’d opened my mouth to offer some comfort. Most of the people we monitored slept just fine and often forgot they were being watched once they drifted off.
But before I could say any of that, she released a relieved sigh and quickly tried to play it off with a cough. Her question hadn’t been the prelude to protest, but a hope for company.
“I’m advising we bump that up to a cat three classification,” I reminded him and the record. “With a cat four also in consideration.”
“Yeah?” Jonah stopped typing and looked at me. “Why?”
He’d done relatively well in his sweep of the living room.
Though I bit my tongue often, trying not to interfere with the order in which he’d tested the space.
He’d started by checking the temperature of every room (and had found a few sections that’d been 32 degrees Fahrenheit).
But the thermometer wasn’t definitive, especially without the additional information an EMF could provide.
“There was a red flag outside the stable.” I settled into the seat next to Jonah, elevating my throbbing ankle on an extra chair. Octavia’s sinkhole had done a number on it. She’d bandaged me up well, though, almost making the pain worth it.
“My shoe got pulled into the earth.” I gestured for him to get all this down.
“A sinking shoe?” He smiled and bumped his leg up and down. “It’s environment manipulation, but what makes that a potential three?”
“I felt a tug.”
Jonah’s leg stopped moving, and his eyes went wide. “No way.”
“Way.” I wiped my hand over my face, failing to swallow my yawn, so I spoke through it.
“We assumed, based on Octavia’s secondhand account, that the ranch hands’ accidents could have been environmental changes.
But we can’t say that definitively until we get them in for interviews—how’s that going, by the way? ”
“Oh…um, I was still concentrating on the preliminary data, so I hadn’t looked into their contact information. That’ll be the first thing on my list tomorrow.”
“Right, right.” I nodded, waving off his nervous energy. “It’s fine. You’re doing great.”
I’d become so accustomed to December and Nico’s swift multitasking abilities that I’d forgotten hunting didn’t typically go so swiftly.
“Potential corporeal grip.” I picked up the voice recorder and leaned back in my seat as I spoke into the mic.
“Loose but consistent. No wavering, even when challenged. The descent took about two minutes. As of now, four hours later, the shoe remains underground, unrecovered. Harrison’s reading on the site of the shoe’s disappearance was an eight. ”
Jonah laughed, half-nervous, half-thrilled. “An eight?”
I shut off the recorder and tossed it on the desk.
The faint grip of a hand could have been in my head, but I’d started looking for hints of paranormal activity at the ripe age of five (my parents never believed one was too young to hunt).
So, no matter how small or unsure I was, for now, we’d include the feeling of something pulling me under.
“How are you feeling?” I kept one ear out for Octavia’s movements across the hall. The squeak of a faucet clued me into her starting the shower.
Jonah pointed to his chest. “Me?”
I stretched my neck with my eyes half-closed. “Yeah, you. This is the first job you’ve done an assessment on your own. It’s also shaping up to be a big one—if my feeling about it being a cat four pans out.”
“I feel…grateful.”
I smiled. “Come on. It’s going to be a long night if you keep trying to be who you were in the interview room. You got the job, Jonah. You’re here, internalize it.”
He dipped his gaze down to his lap.
“What about your parents?” I tried. “How do they feel about you being here?”
Jonah’s laugh didn’t carry its usual ease. “They absolutely hate it.”
I frowned. “Why’s that?”
“They’re traditionalists.” He looked up, meeting my gaze. “Like your parents. They basically worship them. Think they can’t do any wrong—no offense!”
I laughed. “None taken. And yeah, you’ll struggle to find someone who doesn’t bow at their altar.” But after getting the chance to break away from them and develop my philosophy around hunting, I learned how enormous their blind spots had become over the years. Got off my knees.
Aging was a gift, but it also came with the risk of becoming stuck. Two things existed at once with my parents:
They were one of the best things to happen to the hunting community.
They were one of the main things preventing our evolution.
“You don’t think that, though,” I mused. “Even though on page, it’d seem like you would.”
Jonah picked at the edge of his worn notebook. “I have a hard time questioning authority out loud.”
“You don’t say.”
“But, inside”—he gestured to his head—“I just kept thinking, why don’t we do it this way? Why can’t we try it that way? You know?”
I nodded, keeping silent as his shoulders relaxed from his ears.
“And I thought maybe it was just because I was young and not an official hunter that my questions kept being pushed to the side. But after I graduated and tried to be more assertive, well…”
“The older folks wrote you off?”
“In a heartbeat.”
I laughed. “Yeah, that’s their MO.”
“I wanted to stand on their shoulders. Continue to build a foundation.” Jonah shoved his hand into his hair, shaking out the curls.
“Keep questioning,” I said. “Everything. All of us. I don’t care how much you admire me; if you think I’m wrong about something, you say it. I may not like it all the time, but to be better, I need you to share your thoughts. You need it, too, if you’re serious about building.”
His smile grew; the heaviness of his disappointment waned. “I’ll do my best.”
“And I’ll hold you to that.” I pushed out of the chair and limped over to our camera bags. The pipes were no longer creaking with the weight of running water. Octavia had finished showering. “I think we should get back to setting up.”
“Oh, I can do that!” Jonah offered, shooting out of his seat to beat me to the bags.
“No, it’s fine.” To avoid sounding too eager, I added, “You need to practice setting things up on this end. Placing the camera is the simple part.”
Not necessarily true, but I wanted to see her. Octavia was this blind spot I needed to shine a light on.
Jonah nodded, a small smile on his face, as if he’d been promoted in some way. I grabbed the bags and went across the hall, pausing at her cracked door for a deep breath before knocking.
“Come in.” Octavia’s voice sounded as if she were at the bottom of a well.
The door whined loudly on its hinges as I nudged it open. “Hey?”
She wasn’t there. What greeted me was a poster for a K-pop girl group dressed in all black with heavy eyeliner and mood rings weighing down their long fingers.
Octavia’s bedsheets were a deep purple, bombarded with pillows upon pillows.
Perhaps she was stuck under there, caught in the avalanche of fluff.
“Hi.” Octavia slipped out of the small, steamy bathroom. She’d piled her locs on top of her head. A black, waffle-textured robe wrapped tight around her waist, showing off curves I wasn’t aware she had underneath her baggy jeans.
“How’s the ankle?” She raised a concerned brow, her eyes trained on the tape job she’d done earlier.
“Manageable,” I promised. “Wilson set aside some ice packs for me.”
“Good. You should try to keep it off tonight.”
“Will do.” I toggled my gaze between her and the decor, trying not to appear so wanting for whatever she offered.
“Are we ready for setup?” She sat down at a vanity like a proper old Hollywood starlet. With her legs crossed, Octavia got to work on what I assumed was her intensive skincare routine, with bottles upon bottles of lotions and oils.
She crossed one leg over the other, exposing her ankle in the most delicate way possible. She frowned at me in the mirror after I remained frozen in the same position.
“Well?” Octavia’s hands paused in mid-air, covered in thick body butter.
I cleared my throat. “We are. Do you mind if I put these here?”
My gaze landed on the bench nestled at the foot of her bed.
“Go for it,” she permitted.