How had her parents died? she wondered. She had the feeling that they’d both died at once, so it couldn’t have been old age or disease. It had to have been catastrophic. Fire? Plane crash? Murder? Had it been something simple or one of those bizarre, convoluted occurrences? Had her father caught her mother with another woman and then joined in the fun only to have the woman’s jealous boyfriend kill all three of them? Had her parents been aspiring actors who were conned into doing a snuff film and killed, their murders recorded on camera and now available on video?

She would probably never know.

She slowed to look at the series of newsracks on the side of the street, sipping her coffee as she peered through the faded plastic windows. She’d always been attracted to supernatural stories in lurid tabloids, the more outrageous the headline the better. She told herself that it was camp, a kitsch, postmodern irony, that she liked to read those stories because they were so bad they were funny, so outrageous they were entertaining, but the truth was that she was genuinely interested in the bizarre tales. She felt some sort of affinity for those subjects, and she could not help wondering now if that could be traced back to her first family.

A headline caught her eye: MINISTER’S FAMILY FLEES HAUNTED HOUSE.

She’d lived in a haunted house as a child.

The knowledge came to her not as a revelation, not as a sudden memory breakthrough, but casually, gently, as though it were something she’d always known and often thought about and had just been reminded of by the tabloid. She reread the headline, stared at the obviously fake photograph of a clergyman, his wife, and his daughter looking up at a dilapidated house over which towered a huge horned demon.

Now that she was actively seeking them, memories of her early childhood seemed to be seeping slowly back into her consciousness. But she was no longer sure she wanted to know about life before her adoption. She was curious, of course, but that was balanced by a growing feeling of dread, the impression that there were things in her past she was better off not knowing.

She could see the house in her mind: a dark Victorian mansion located in a clearing in the woods. The surrounding trees were giant, old-growth redwoods, so it must have been in Washington, Oregon, or northern California. As for why the house was haunted, the specifics of it, she had no idea. She knew only that there was something frightening about the house, something she’d sensed even as a young child.