She focused her attention on the photograph. It was all familiar to her, everything in the picture, and, despite her lack of feeling for the man and woman who had brought her into this world, the relentless curiosity about her past and compulsive thirst for self-knowledge that had been driving her for the past several days, ever since she found out she’d been adopted, had not abated at all. If anything, those impulses were stronger, and her desire to know what had happened to her, why she’d been adopted—

why her parents had been murdered

—was a palpable hunger, almost a physical need. She felt strongly that whatever had happened at that house, whatever cataclysm had destroyed her family, was connected with the dreams she was having now, with the girl.

Dawn.

“Do you know this place?” she asked, pointing at the photo. “Do you know where it is?”

Josh nodded. “I remember that house.” He thought for a moment, turned to her. “Do you?”

She shivered. “How could anyone forget it?”

“It’s on a vortex,” he said.

Cut out the New Age crap, she wanted to tell him, but something kept her from it.

“Of course, we didn’t know what that was back then. Especially not me. I was what? Four? But even I could tell there was something… powerful about that house.”

“You mean it was haunted.”

“Is that what you remember?”

She nodded.

He took the photo from her. “That’s how I remember it, too.”

“Do you know where it is?” she repeated.

He stared at the picture. “I was pretty young, but I know we were traveling around northern California for a month or so. I can’t recall if we were on a vacation or just bumming around—you know how Mom and Dad were—but we’d stopped in this small gold-rush town somewhere in the Sierras. I don’t remember the name, but I’d probably be able to pick it out if I saw a map or something.”

She smiled at him, punched his arm playfully. “And you were only four years old? That’s pretty impressive.”

“I grew up to be an underachiever.”

“So what happened?”