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“There’s one more thing.” Nate kept his gaze focused on Leo, not quite knowing how to say this. He said it anyway. “The town has a favorite story about why the house is haunted. Allegedly the family walled somebody up in the cellar.”

Silence.

Leo stared at him. And then he laughed.

He actually laughed — head back, delighted, the morning sun coming through him just slightly, so that for a second he seemed made of the same light as the garden.

Nate stayed where he was, kneeling in the dirt.

He hadn’t known that Leo could look like this—unarmored and bright — and he was aware, distantly, that the appropriate thing to do was say something, and that he was instead just watching.

“Walled up? In my cellar?”

“That’s the story,” Nate said, a beat late.

“That’s absurd. I’m in that cellar constantly. I have spent… I cannot tell you how much time I have spent in that cellar. There is nobody in the walls. I would know.” He wiped at his eyes, still grinning. “Oh, that’s the best thing I’ve heard in years. The town thinks I’m a — what, some poor bricked-up wretch? Moaning behind the masonry?”

“Very gothic,” Nate agreed, recalling Diane’s words.

“I’m a much better story than that.”

“You are.”

Nate pictured it, briefly. The town’s monster — the thing that had watched from the upstairs window, the something that sent the kids running home scared, sitting on the porch steps in the morning sun, supervising a weeding operation. Getting personally offended by individual plants. Losing a war with a vacuum.

If the diner table could see what he was looking at right now, the story would die on the spot.

Then again… Nate took Leo in, chin up, pleased with himself, the sun lighting him up from the inside…

Maybe they’d just tell a different story.

Yeah, they’d talk about Leo if they could see him.

Trying to shake the thought, Nate went back to the weeds.

“You missed one,” Leo said. “By the drainpipe.”

Nate grunted and pulled the plant that had been pointed out to him.

Maybe the people of the town could not tell him how Leo had died.

But then who could?

Chapter

Eighteen

“The trick with trim this old,” Nate told the camera, “is knowing what you’re allowed to lose.”

He’d spent the past few days filming and editing, trying to get ahead of the bills. The crown molding segment took two takes. He cut it together over lunch and uploaded it with a title that had the word “rescue” in it, because those performed well.

Somewhere in the house, Marvin bumped into something, and Leo complained about it.

Nate checked the earnings from his last few videos, then opened the roofing estimate again.

How many videos would it take?

Too many.