“Interesting,” Tobe said, crossing his left leg over his right, adjusting his trousers to avoid wrinkling.

What the hell year did we fall into? Jessica thought. The whole scene was straight from a bad Victorian horror story. She wondered when Tobe Harper would break out a pipe and ask Eddie if he’d like to go fox hunting. For once, she wished Eddie would read her mind, and if possible, be able to respond to her. A running, private conversation was what she needed more than anything to lessen the strange vibe she was getting from the Harpers.

“In fact,” Daphne said, “we both believe that the temperature in the house is getting colder each day.”

“And this is all the time?” Jessica asked.

Tobe gave a heavy, slow nod. “All the time. You won’t find global warming in here.”

There was something about his smile and that awfully bizarre accent that made Jessica cringe internally, deep where no one but Eddie could see.

She sipped on the Tom Collins, forcing a mouthful down. “Before we go any further, there is a question I’d like to ask.”

Leather creaked as Eddie sat back in his chair, a subtle gesture of moving away from the line of fire.

Daphne Harper did the opposite, leaning close enough to Jessica to rub her forearm. “You’d like to know how we found you. More so, how we even knew about you. Am I right, dear?”

Jessica resisted the impulse to pull her arm away. Being touched by strangers wasn’t high on her list of “likes”.

She took a slow, even breath and said, “Yes. Your call concerned me in more ways than one.”

“Of course it did, and I don’t blame you. My husband and I are armchair enthusiasts when it comes to the world of the paranormal. My mother claimed to have psychic abilities, holding séances for her bridge group, members of the PTA and even a Catholic nun one time. My husband’s father grew up in a house of ill repute in Cotswold. The stories handed down in his family of apparitions, objects moving about and screeches in the night are a bit of a family legend. We first learned of you, or at least your pseudonym, on your website.”

“I thought you did a fabulous job cataloging the paranormal, just stating facts and keeping opinions to the minds of the reader,” Tobe Harper added.

Eddie’s head jerked to an area beside the sweeping windows. It appeared that neither Daphne nor Tobe noticed.

“I took the website down almost three years ago,” Jessica said. She put the glass to her lips, remembered the sour taste and placed it back down.

“We were devotees of your website long before then. It was a disappointment to say the least when it disappeared. Then we heard about an incident with a doppelganger you experienced personally in New England. That was the first bread crumb left for us to follow.”

Jessica’s heart thumped in her chest. Her blood pressure rose like boiling water in a tea kettle. The incident with the doppelganger, and the sinister EB it was trying to warn them about—almost at the cost of her life—had, to her knowledge, been buried too deep for anyone to find.

Daphne looked to her husband who cocked his head in thought. He said, “It was a teenaged girl that wrote about it on her blog. We were lucky to have found it at all because she must have had second thoughts as it was taken down within a couple of days.”

Eddie sighed. “Could have been one of Selena’s friends. Something like that, experienced by kids, it would be hard for them to resist posting it somewhere. I wouldn’t put it past Selena’s friends Julie or Chrissy, or even one of their friends if they treated the secret like any other sixteen-year-old girl.”

Jessica knew he was right but it did little to settle her nerves. She trusted those girls. They saw what it did to Selena Leigh, to her family, even to Eddie and Jessica. It should have scared them to death, or at the very least, to silence.

“So, she put my contact information in her little blog post?” Jessica asked.

Daphne shook her head. “No, just your first name. We took the rest from there. Believe me, we would never have expended so much time and energy to locate you unless we felt we truly needed your services.”

They still haven’t said how exactly they found me, she thought.

“You want me to get rid of the EBs residing in this house?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes,” Tobe said. “My wife and I don’t mind them at all, but the children, well, they’re young and impressionable and easily frightened. Living out here on an island with nowhere to run should something go bump in the night is a lot to ask of them.”

The kids. Jessica had almost forgotten why she even went through with their request to come here in the first place. The house was so quiet. It was hard to imagine there were two children just over their heads. She hadn’t heard so much as a thump or a shuffle.

“I’d like to meet them,” she said.

A motherly frown crossed Daphne’s face as she checked her watch. “I’m afraid it will have to wait until tomorrow. They were playing outside earlier and are in desperate need of a bath, dinner and bed. I promise, Paul will pick you up early tomorrow and you’ll have plenty of time to get acquainted. But feel free to walk through the downstairs for a spell. I’ll ask Paul to get ready to take you back to Charleston.”

Daphne rose, as did her husband in polite deference. “I’ll be back in just a moment. Feel free to top yourselves off if you like.”

The stairs creaked as the couple went, presumably, to speak to Paul and the children.

“Is this the Twilight Zone or what?” Jessica said, keeping her voice low.

Eddie chewed on his lower lip. “Oddball aristocrats aside, there’s a lot going on here.”

“How much is a lot?”

“More than you can imagine. You want to tell her to take the kids and sell the place?”

She kicked at one of the table’s legs. “She doesn’t seem like the type that would listen.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“So, I guess we come back tomorrow and get busy. Even my EB senses are tingling, and I didn’t need to go to the Rhine to get them.”

Eddie held her gaze. “Did I mention there’s a lot of EB stuff around this place?”

“You did.”

“Well, the two children standing behind you seem to like the idea of your sticking around.”

Jessica turned her chair around, coming face-to-face with rows of empty bookshelves.

She held out her hand, waving it slowly back and forth. “Right here?”

“Yep,” Eddie said.

Her hand felt as if the marrow in her bones had been dipped in liquid nitrogen.

“Looks like we’re going to have to help more kids than we first thought,” she said, shaking the chill from her fingers.

Chapter Twelve

After Paul took them on another death ride to the Charleston docks, Jessica and Eddie went back to their hotel to prepare for the week ahead. Jessica asked him to meet her in the hotel bar in an hour so they could talk. Eddie changed out of his sweaty, wet clothes and into a pair of worn blue jeans and button down shirt.

With nothing much else to do, he rode the elevator and sat at the bar a half hour early. The low lighting and maroon décor was perfect for crying in your beer or finagling a one-night stand. The Braves game was on one television beside the bar, a boxing match by a pair of welterweights on the other. He ordered a beer and stared at the baseball game, following nothing. Two innings in and he couldn’t even tell a passing patron what the score was when the game went to commercial.

“Starting without me?” Jessica said, settling onto the barstool next to him.

Jessica had changed as well into low riding hip huggers with a V-neck shirt that revealed the red straps of her bra. She had filled out a smidge during the two plus years they had been apart. She upgraded her girl body for a woman’s, Eddie thought. The blond hair still made him feel as if he were with a different woman. It was impossible not to notice how attractive she was now. When they first met, it was hard to get past the tough front she’d erected. She was softer now, maybe even a tad vulnerable, but he wasn’t going to be fooled. He knew her interior was still harder than a diamond.