They were quiet again, but it seemed like an okay sort of silence. He let it go on. High above them, the chain connectors creaked lightly with the small movements he and Dani made, side to side, forward and back.

“Can I ask you something?” Sam said.

“Sure.”

“The house I just moved into. Do you know about something weird happening to the last guy that lived there? Like a year ago?”

Her eyes lit up, pushing away the gloom that had settled in them. “Mr. Pierce,” she said.

“I didn’t know his name.”

Dani was nodding. “That was him. All the kids around here know about it.”

“What happened to him? I mean, all I know is that it kept other people from wanting to buy the house, all this time. Like it was something really creepy.”

Dani’s eyebrows went up and she nodded again. “Yeah, you could say that.”

“The suspense is killing me,” Sam said.

Dani laughed. She chewed on her lower lip, thinking it over.

“I don’t know much about Mr. Pierce himself,” she said. “Not even his first name. The way kids tell it, he’s always just Mr. Pierce. I know he didn’t have a wife or kids, but apparently he was a nice guy, normal, whatever. Always said hello to people. And then one day last summer … he just disappeared.”

Sam felt the metal of the swing chains seem to radiate a chill into his hands.

“At first, nobody noticed,” Dani said. “He could’ve just been out of town, for all anyone knew. Then, after enough time, some far-off relative couldn’t get a hold of him, so finally someone here went into the house to check it out. They said everything looked fine, at first. His car was gone, like he’d taken a trip somewhere, and the house was just how you’d expect it to be, if that’s all that happened. Clothes in the hamper. Shades down. Nothing weird or anything. Then they checked the mailbox. That was a little strange. They found like ten days’ worth of backed-up mail inside it. If he was going to be gone that long on purpose, it seemed like he would have told the post office to hold the mail for him.”

Sam pictured it: Pierce’s mailbox jammed full of flyers and envelopes. The mailbox he himself had ridden his bike past, half an hour ago when he left the house.

“So something happened to him,” Sam said. “Probably wherever he went on his trip. There must have been a record of things he did. Like hotels he stayed at, or times he used a credit card. Stuff like that.”