The sky was fabulously blue behind the house, white clouds floating by, framing the roof. The third-floor windows were dusty, but the light was hitting them, enough so that when her eye roamed over the left window, she could see that a man was staring straight back at her from behind the glass. Sara lost her balance and fell sideways onto the sidewalk, her heart racing. No one had been there before, she was sure of it. She caught herself and looked back up at the window. There was nothing there now.

“Gabriel!” she called, though she wasn’t sure why. It was probably just the owner, curious to see who was out on the street. Who was staring at his house.

“Yeah?”

He turned and looked at her in question, his profile framed by the front door of the house behind him, and Sara felt the hair raise on her arms again, skin cool and clammy in the heat. She tried to stand up, but couldn’t seem to figure out how to get vertical without spilling backward onto her butt or forward onto her knees. So she stayed put and nervously called, “There’s someone in the house.”

Gabriel was already crossing the street, his long strides eating up the steps so that he was in front of her in seconds, holding out his hand to give her much needed help. “How do you know someone’s home?”

She clasped her hand in his gratefully and let his strength pull her up off the sidewalk. “Thanks.” Letting go of him, she brushed the back of her skirt. “I saw someone in the thirdfloor window.”

They both looked up. There was no one there.

“Well, I can take pictures of the exterior, whether the owner likes it or not.”

That was true. And Sara wasn’t sure why the man had unnerved her so much. It was just unexpected, that face staring down on her. “Do you have any historic pictures of the house?”

“The oldest one I could find is from 1910.”

“Did you grow up here?” she asked, as Gabriel gestured for them to start walking. Sara had actually been born in New Orleans, the result of her mother’s brief affair with a bouncer on Bourbon Street. Her mother had been a normal, slightly rebellious but not outrageous, suburban middle-class teenager until her own mother had been murdered. Then within six months, Sara’s mother had run away from her father, was drinking heavily and dancing in a nightclub, lying about her age since she was underage. By the time Sara was born, the bouncer was gone and so was her mother’s job, but a new boyfriend had taken Jessie and her baby in. Two years after that, on her eighteenth birthday, her mother had run off to Florida with a retired doctor, who had brains and a lot of money, but not enough sense to know his young girlfriend was playing him for cash.