Angie leaned forward, her voice lowered as if about to convey a deep, meaningful secret. “She disappeared from her mother’s house just about a month ago now, and they never found a trace of her. Her parents were divorced, and her daddy lives out in Montana somewhere now. He was an overhomer, you know. Came out of St. Stephen in New Brunswick as a boy and married an American. Anyway, her mother used to own this place—Jaimie, her name was. I was her head waitress, took over after she left. We were told she just couldn’t handle the idea of her little girl dying alone out in those woods, so she moved down south. But the story around town is she lost it, ended up in a padded room.”

Angie hunched even closer then, and Helen for one second had the strangest urge to laugh like a madwoman herself at this absurd lady in a country deli whispering like she was telling the country’s greatest and most harmful secrets.

“The interesting part is she lost it before the girl wandered off, or so they say.”

“You mean she went crazy and Marie ran off because of it?”

“Maybe, maybe not. Everybody around here’s got cabin fever, like you never know what they’ll do. Mike there’s a good example.” She pointed to where the young man with the tattoo had settled into a booth. “He was headed for college with a football scholarship, some Ivy League school, believe it or not, then he just up and dropped out senior year of secondary school, about four months ago now. Been hanging around here ever since.”

Something clicked, and Helen suddenly felt as if someone had punched her in the stomach. “Where did they live?”

“Who?”

“The little girl’s family. The Kennedys.”

“Off of route 15, near the plant. Nice place. I saw it once last year when Jaimie’s car broke down, and I had to drive her to work. It’s one of those solar type of houses, all open inside with railings along the upper floors. When I picked her up that day, she says…”

Angie continued on in that low whisper, but Helen wasn’t listening. She threw a crumpled five-dollar bill from her pocket onto the counter, grabbed her jacket off the hook and ran for the door, leaving Angie in midsentence and the others in the deli staring after her curiously.

Screw them, she thought. Though part of her knew that something like that happening didn’t have to change the way she felt about the place they were now calling home, she still felt like her stomach was being twisted into knots by some powerful, unseen hand.

Can houses think?

No. But people can. And all I want is to get my little girl and get the hell out of that place.