Determined to make Chloe proud of me, and finally excited about something in my life, I decided to go about this job intelligently.

Despite my intense desire to rush off to see if the house would try and eat me without taking me on an expensive date first, I stopped and came up with a concise plan of action.

First things first, I chose to gather more information. Only a few witness statements padded the folder. One each from Peabody’s wife and two kids. Another by the first officers to arrive on the scene, and then Mr. Peabody himself.

Guess whose was the most interesting?

Really, if you thought about it, what better person to begin this investigation with than the culprit himself, Mr. Peabody?

Alfred Dickson Peabody, which, for some reason, made me giggle. What were his parents thinking?

With my credentials in place—legal assistant to the defense attorney in charge of Mr. Peabody’s case, proven by the stack of business cards I filched from Chloe’s desk—the following morning, bright and early, I was allowed through the gates to the loony bin.

Ahem, the Lupium Psychiatric Evaluation Center—for the truly crazy.

Making it through the heavy-duty gate with barbed wire at the top, I parked in front of the massive building. When the gentleman in the white coat and matching pants ran out the front to greet me with a shouted, “You can’t park there,” I handed him my keys.

He gaped, and I patted his cheek and said, “Be a dear and park it in the shade so it doesn’t get too hot.” I didn’t figure I’d be long. An hour at most, less if Mr. Peabody was too busy catching mental butterflies to talk to me.

My heels clicked as I strode through the heavy doors. In my role as awesome assistant, I’d chosen to wear all red. Short red jacket over a red blouse, with a red pencil skirt and matching red shoes.

The lipstick? A shade of red called Blow Me. Which, if you asked me, was kind of backwards. Shouldn’t it be called Blow You?

The male nurse manning the reception eyed me, utterly speechless. I could see he was quite taken by my appearance.

Despite knowing it might stun him into incoherence, I smiled as I introduced myself. “Brenda Jane Whittaker, here to see Mr. Peabody.”

“You can’t see him looking like that.”

“Like what?” I looked down at myself before meeting his gaze. “I can’t help how pretty I am. It’s how I was born.” Well, not exactly, but the laser eye surgery, dermatological treatments, and braces I’d worn for about five years weren’t something the receptionist needed to know about.

“I was talking about the color you’re wearing. Red.” He shook his head. “Didn’t anyone tell you that Mr. Peabody can’t stand it? It sets him off.”

“Oops. I must have missed that part.” I batted my lashes. Naughty me, I had read that tidbit in the report and thought to use it to my advantage. Throw the lunatic off his meds and get him to spill some secrets.

The receptionist, with a name tag saying Oscar, frowned. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but you’ll have to come back when you’re more suitably attired.”

Ma’am? Please don’t tell me I’d finally migrated from the Miss age group.

Am I truly so old? Nah, because Oscar was surely older than me.

Oscar was also in my way.

“You expect me to leave without doing my job?” I slapped a hand to my chest. “My boss will kill me.”

Actually, my boss would probably sigh and wonder why she’d given me this case to work.

“I have rules I have to follow.”

“And here I would have thought you were a man who thought outside the box.” I batted my lashes.

I had no shame. I’d flirt with anything, even this man wearing a ring on his finger.

His lips pursed. “Do you have a spare set of clothes?”

I shook my head. “Couldn’t you loan me a coat or something to wear over my ensemble? I could leave the shoes here at your desk.”

A little more batting of my eyes, a tissue to wipe my lips, and an offer to let him borrow my shoes while I talked to Mr. Peabody—hoping Oscar wouldn’t stretch them too badly—meant a few minutes later, I was wrapped in a huge doctor’s coat and being led barefoot down a sterile, gray hall.

Every single door we passed worked by fingerprint scan. No cards or keys. It made me wonder how anyone would escape.

And why such strict security? These were people with mental issues. Not serial killers.

Or were they? I hadn’t yet seen Mr. Peabody’s garden. I wondered how his flowers grew.

I couldn’t remember if it was a movie or documentary that told me decomposing bodies made the best fertilizer. But if I saw an unusually lush lawn or plants when I did visit his home, I planned to dig.

The room I entered closely resembled my idea of an asylum common area. I almost clapped my hands in delight. The vast room had a wall of windows, each one caged by metal bars, and a tiled floor in a green-and-white-checkered pattern, spanning a good twenty by thirty feet at least. A good-sized space.

The room appeared divided into different areas of interest from a comfy side with a couch and chairs, to a section with tables and plastic chairs—chained to the floor, spoiling any possible fight. Board games and cards littered the tabletops.

A large desk holding a partially completed puzzle and loose pieces sat by a window. In another corner, an area with a few easels and stools for the artistically inclined.

I rather liked the piece of art sketched in dark charcoal of a stick man holding a head dripping blue and green.

The communal area held at least a dozen or more patients, all of them wearing plain garments, track suits for the most part, although a few did wander around in robes. The hues ranged from a light green, pale yellow, or white to the most common gray with hints of past color.

Over by a drawing easel, Mr. Peabody wore a tracksuit, the loose material bulking his slim frame. He leaned forward, sketching furiously, and I snuck up behind him to take a peek.

“Dude, are those eyes?” Jumping from the canvas, the surface streaked and whorled in black, he’d drawn two giant yellow orbs.

“The darkness watches,” he muttered aloud.

“Watches what? Prime time? CNN? Riverdale?” My new addiction, mostly because of a certain hottie with red hair.

“He watches for the sign.”

“Sign of what? Are we talking candle in the window? Phase of the moon?” I hated it when people only uttered half an answer, especially when I was eavesdropping. How was I supposed to know when Ted claimed he was cheating that it wasn’t on his boyfriend Brian in accounting but on his diet?

I perched on a stool alongside Mr. Peabody.

“Hey, Mr. Peabody, I’m Brenda.” I held out my hand, which went ignored, but I excused him the poor manners. After all, he was crazy.

Tucking my hands in my lap, I resisted the urge to grab a crayon and give the eyes in his drawing long and luscious eyelashes.

“You’re probably wondering why I’m here. I’m helping Chloe with your case.” When he didn’t reply, I slapped myself, then hoped no one had seen it lest they think I was nuts, too. “I guess you don’t know her by her first name. I work for Ms. Bailey, your lawyer.”

“Has she napalmed the house yet?” He craned his head to ask me, and I got the full force of Peabody’s gaze.

Washed-out blue eyes that didn’t quite focus on me or anything else in this reality, I’d wager. Under the fluorescent lights, his pallid skin appeared gray, and his teeth yellow.

“About the house, we have some questions first before we demolish the place. Let’s start at the beginning.”

“More questions?” Peabody sighed as he turned the paper he’d drawn on over the top and prepared to work on a new masterpiece. “If you must.”

Easy peasy. I pulled out my notepad to take notes. “When exactly did you move into your house?”

“Fifteen years ago. We bought it just before the birth of our son. Marcus. He plays football, you know.”

I didn’t know. I didn’t care. But I played nice. “According to the bank, you still owe about twenty years on the mortgage.”

“We refinanced.”

I made a noise as I scribbled. “What do you do for work?”

“I’m a manager for a shoe store.”

“Appalling.” Not the job, the fact that a man who worked in a shoe store now had to wear paper slippers. “Do you like your job?”

“What does that have to do with my evil house?”

“Nothing, but now I feel like I should ask, was your house always evil?”

His lips pursed. “Like I told Ms. Bailey, the incidents only started about two months ago.”

“What kinds of incidents? What was the first thing you noticed?”

“The cockroaches in the basement.”

Gross, but not exactly supernatural. “Did you call an exterminator?”

“I did. And we solved that problem, only to run into another. A crack appeared.”

“A crack leading to a Hell dimension?”

“No, a crack in the foundation. It cost me almost ten grand to get it fixed.” Mr. Peabody frowned. “And then they refused to repair it under warranty when the crack reappeared less than two weeks later. Claimed my house wasn’t sitting on a solid foundation.”

“Because you’re actually sitting atop an ancient graveyard?”

“What?” His eyes widened. “No. The house was built atop a marsh that they filled in. Not very well, I might add. It’s slowly sinking. But that’s not why the lights started flickering.”

The more Mr. Peabody talked, the more I wondered if Chloe had it wrong. Sounded like an old house with problems.

“Nothing an electrician couldn’t fix. I have to say, you’re disappointing me so far.” I tucked my hands over my notepad.

“You think I’m crazy. All of you do.” He stared around suspiciously. “But I’m not. I knew there was something evil going on when stuff started disappearing.”

“What disappeared? Family pet? Small child?”

“No, nothing like that. Jewelry. Electronics. ”

Like I hadn’t heard that before. “Does your son do drugs?” I didn’t sugarcoat it. Parents in denial needed a wake-up call.

“If you’re suggesting Marcus pawned our things, then you’re wrong. My son wasn’t behind it. And even he wouldn’t have been able to make our dining room set disappear in the middle of the night.”

I doubted very many drug dealers would take bulky furniture in payment. Then again… “Where do think the stuff went?”

Thin shoulders lifted and fell. “Who knows, I never saw any of it again. When I woke one morning to find all the carpeting gone, I knew it was time to get some help.”

Disappearing carpets? Now we were talking. “That’s when you called the priest.”

“No, I invested in cameras. When they failed to record anything, even the night the stove disappeared—”

“Hold on a second. Surely your equipment saw something.”

He shook his head. “The videos showed the cameras started recording fine, then at one point during the night, the recordings went blank.”

“Like fuzzy snow blank or the kind that turns into a little girl crawling out of a well coming for you?” That spooky movie was why I’d taken a hammer to my VHS player and all my tapes. The vodka and the match were what got me a visit from those cute firemen.

“The video feed was blank. Every single one of them. That’s when I called the priest.”

Finally, the meaty part of his tale. “What kind of priest?”

He blinked. “Excuse me?”

“What kind? Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim… I mean, there’s like a shit-ton of choices these days when it comes to religion.”

“I called the Catholic Church, as they are usually the most equipped to deal with these kinds of evil hauntings.”

“So the priest arrived, and then what? He walked through the front door, and the house gulped him down?”

A shake of his head.

“He threw around some holy water, and the floor opened up to swallow him?”

An irritated crease of his brow and a sharp, “No!”

My imagination had plenty more to offer. “He leaned against a wall, and whoops, got sucked in?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see what happened. All I know is he went into the house and never came out.”

That was Peabody’s proof? Thin even by my low standards. “So you don’t actually know for sure the house ate him?”

“What else could have happened?”

“Maybe he decided a change of career was in order, but he didn’t want to deal with the paperwork, so he sneaked out your back door, switching out his clothes on the way, hopped the fence, and hitched a ride to Texas to become a cowboy.”

Mr. Peabody blinked. Amazed at the possibility he’d overlooked.

“And they think I’m crazy,” he muttered.

“Speaking of crazy, according to the police report and what you told my boss, you have this theory your family is possessed.”

“It’s not a theory. They are possessed.” He practically spat the word, and some of the insanity began to creep back into his gaze.

“What makes you think they’re being ridden by a spectral parasite? Are they glowing in the dark? Measuring sub-human body temperature? Floating off the floor? Crawling out of wells?” I was on a roll, and Mr. Peabody just kept shaking his head. “Crab-walking across ceilings? Spinning their heads? Spewing wasps from their mouth?”

“No. No. And no.” He got quite loud.

How rude. I was simply trying to get to the truth.

“If there were no outward signs, then how did you know they were possessed?”

“Because they claimed to not see a thing.”

I blinked a few times as I digested this. “What do you mean they didn’t see a thing?”

“I mean, they claimed the dining room set was still there. That nothing was missing. They even claimed the priest never came to our house. Obviously, their minds are being manipulated.”

“Obviously.” I snapped my notebook shut and tucked my crayon in the coat pocket—because the receptionist had confiscated my lovely ballpoint pen. Apparently, it could be used as a weapon. I kind of wanted it right now to stab myself with for having wasted a lovely Saturday morning.

I rose from my perch.

“Where are you going?” he cried.

“Away. I can see you’re exactly where you should be. I should have talked to your family first.”

“Stay away from them. They’re dangerous. Evil.”

“They’re not the ones locked up in here.”

“You have to believe me. It’s the house. It’s behind everything. You need to burn it down. All of it.”

“By all of it, are you including your supposedly possessed family?”

At that, his face crumpled. “No. Spare them. Maybe if the house is gone, they’ll return to themselves.”

Or maybe with crazy Daddy gone, they’d get a chance at a normal life.

Despite what Chloe thought, I doubted Mr. Peabody’s house was haunted. The more likely scenario was that the home found itself in need of major renovation, and Peabody snapped when he found out his wife had cheated on him with the general contractor.

My job done here, I stood, and because I couldn’t help my curiosity, I stripped off the coat, revealing my splendid red outfit.

A hush fell over the room. A seriously awesome quiet as everyone admired my sleek style.

Peabody’s eyes grew huge. So big I thought they might fall out of his face. His mouth opened so wide I wondered if his jaw was double hinged.

The screaming started, a fire engine wail pouring from his gaping mouth.

No big deal. I’d made men scream before.

What had me gaping was the fact that Mr. Peabody floated off the floor!