How could they have gotten into my house to monkey with my computer, anyway? And who would do something like that? I didn’t think anyone I knew would go to the trouble of such an elaborate prank. I didn’t have the kind of friends who would enjoy making me freak out and then laughing about it with me later, and I didn’t have enemies committed enough to go to so much trouble.

There was Justine.

I remembered that look she’d given me at church.

I’d never thought of her as an enemy, per se. She’d been more in the category of “family you can’t stand, but they’re still family.” Maybe I’d been wrong, though. Ben and I co-owned the house, so he kept a key. Justine could’ve used it to get in. She didn’t work during the day, so there’d have been plenty of opportunity.

But could she have set up some elaborate computer prank? It didn’t seem likely.

Someone could’ve helped her.

I studied the print again. The grass the foot was stepping in was of a piece with all the rest of the grass in the picture: dead, wet, and a bit too long to look well kept. The foot was wet and had little bits of sodden grass stuck to it. It looked real.

Maybe I was hallucinating. The naked guy had also apparently walked right in front of me, and I hadn’t seen him. That image looked real, too, but maybe it wasn’t.

Serious mental illness often emerged in your early twenties, right? And I already had one — panic disorder. Maybe that put me at risk for others.

But if I really was hallucinating, wouldn’t I believe I wasn’t?

I slid the photo under the keyboard and sat there, rubbing my hands on my jeans. I couldn’t get rid of the clamminess. I tried to come up with another plausible explanation for the monster foot, but the more I thought about it, the more my chest tightened up.

Finally, I pushed the whole issue away, and my mind settled into a fragile state of blankness. Carefully not thinking about the photo, I went upstairs, got in bed, wrapped my arms around my tattered childhood bear, Sniggles, and willed myself asleep.

I woke up with a plan. It was so simple I should’ve thought of it the night before. I would show the weird pictures to someone else and see if they saw what I saw. If they did, then I wasn’t going crazy, and it was just a matter of finding out who was messing with me, and why. And how.

Chapter 2

“What is that?” Janie said, scrunching up her nose adorably. She was holding half of her BLT in one hand and the cemetery picture in the other.