Chapter 4
It shouldn’t have been this way. What had happened.
Bryan Stenson stood outside the house he’d purchased more than twenty years ago, the cold February wind cutting right through him, while he waited for the cops to finish what they were doing inside.
He’d experienced this before—every time someone had questions.
Asher was the best of them, though. The younger man just seemed to see the people who had lived there less as victims and more as people.
For others, the house just represented a mystery.
No matter the cost to the ones who still had to go on living around here and everything.
He almost thought he hated this house. He should have sold it years ago but…he just hadn’t been able to.
The people who’d died there, their ghosts—they haunted him.
Especially those kids. He’d met them so many times before.
The boy had still been in diapers when the family had moved in.
Bryan remembered that kid. And it hurt to remember.
So damned much. Hell, every time he pulled into this driveway he remembered the day that little guy had first met him at the sidewalk and waved, said “Hi, Misser Senson!”, waving from a little Fisher Price tricycle.
He hadn’t been more than three then. Bryan had considered the Gibsons friends.
Maybe Bryan had even stuck with this damned house because it had become a shrine in a lot of ways.
For him, and so many others, maybe. Obsessed with what had happened back then.
Strangers from all over the place tried to walk all over this place.
It was one damned reason he hadn’t been able to keep it rented long-term since.
Who wanted curiosity ghouls knocking on their door in the middle of the night, wanting to see where it happened?
Who wanted idiot teenagers coming around to “solve the puzzle”?
They weren’t puzzles, they were a family that had been destroyed completely.
So many people didn’t see that.
Him, and Asher—they did, though. Maybe they were guardians in a way.
That man had just been a boy back then, practically.
Asher hadn’t even been the guy in charge.
Just a wet-behind-the-ears na?ve fool trying to save the world.
In southern Indiana, where time had stopped back in 1972 and hadn’t ever started up again.
Hell, Bryan hoped not. Hoped there was a better world out there for Asher, at least. The man was young, he didn’t deserve to be haunted by these ghosts, either. Asher had told him he was leaving law enforcement. Going to do something else now.
Good luck with that. Bryan…had tried to get out of here once.
To move. He’d had big plans—buy cheap houses in a college town in the northern part of the state.
Rent them out every year. Why not? He was good with his hands, could buy and repair himself.
Maybe grab a few foreclosures dirt cheap. Build a life, a fortune.
He’d been an idiot. Young and dumb.
This area had trapped him far too damned fast. But he’d made do.
Built a living, at least, if not a fortune.
He had twelve rentals that brought in about twelve hundred each every month, and a five-unit building downtown that brought in another three thousand profit per month, plus some commercial places.
Not exactly getting rich, but he’d done okay.
His kids had what they needed, and that was what mattered.
He and his wife Cass—they were happy. They had a house on three acres just on the edge of town.
Same road on which he stood now, but…outside of city limits.
Where they could have some privacy. But close enough the kids could ride their bikes to some of their friends’ houses.
He’d wanted to give his kids that kind of childhood.
And his mom had needed him—so even though he’d escaped for a few months, Bryan had come right back home.
But he’d met Cass then. He’d fallen hard for that woman.
And he had never left. Now he was pushing fifty—and didn’t have that many regrets.
He loved that woman of his, and the four children she’d given him since.
But he had more ghosts than he ever had back then.
Bryan just stayed right where he was, and waited. Maybe they’d find something this time. And then…he’d sell the damned house, put the ghosts behind him once and for all.