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Touch was for the living. He could spend another fifty years in this house, but even this medium—the strongest in three generations—would not touch him. Could not touch him.

“Leo?”

He’d drifted. He realized it a second late. He was a foot further from the sink than he’d been and his hands were fists and the kitchen light above the table had started to flicker.

“Nothing,” Leo said.

Nate had put the brush down. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened. That’s the problem. I’m dead and nothing is ever going to happen to me again, so why am I still here?”

Nate didn’t answer right away. He stood there with green on his fingers and a crease between his brows.

“You said something about your duty once,” he said. “In the basement.”

“I remember.” He also remembered reading the words in Nate’s notebook.

“So maybe that’s why. Maybe you’re still here because you’re not done with your duty.”

“But I don’t know what it is. I’ve told you that.” Leo heard his own voice climbing and couldn’t stop it. “I stand in doorways. I watch the drive. I don’t know who I’m keeping out or what I’m keeping them out of, I just do it, and I’ve been doing it for fifty years, and how stupid is that when I don’t even know why?”

The light above the table flickered again.

Leo stopped.

Nate glanced at the light, then at Leo, and then he said, “Maybe you need to let me take a proper look at what’s hidden in the basement.”

“No.” The refusal shot out of Leo before he had time to think about it at all.

Nate’s brow creased again, but he didn’t argue. He was being patient. Leo supposed he should feel grateful for that.

He wasn’t feeling grateful.

Leo looked at the floor.

He didn’t know where his refusal had come from. There was a part of him that wanted answers, that had made Nate scroll through fifty years of dead strangers, that would have done almost anything to know.

The part of him that didn’t want people in the basement was different. It was older.

And loud.

“Okay,” Nate said, regrouping. “How about this?” He gestured at the plywood with the color on it. “We finish your painting. I take it to town, claiming I found it in the attic. Someone might be able to recognize you and tell us what happened to you. And maybe that’ll tell us why you stayed.”

Leo didn’t know what to say.

“It’s a plan,” Nate said. “It’s not a good one, but it’s worth a try.”

It really wasn’t a good plan. It depended on a town full of old men recognizing a face that nobody had seen in fifty years on a painting that didn’t exist yet.

“Fine,” Leo said. “Finish it, then.”

He went out through the wall before Nate could say anything kind.

Chapter

Twenty-Six

Under the ugly green paint, the kitchen cabinet doors were oak—which made them perfect for Nate’s plan.