“Yeah, totally. Trying to psych myself up, say a couple of prayers, you know, the usual,” she joked. “Not every day you get to meet a haunted house. I want to make a good first impression. Have you been here before?”
“Yes.”
“Right, yeah, I knew that. I’m caretaker number four. Of course, you’ve been here.” Her eyes nearly rolled back into her head because she was absolutelysickof herself. She planned to be earnest and endearing, not empty-headed! And of all the people to lose her shit around, why did it have to behim?
“Lucky?”
“Maverick?”
“Don’t be nervous. You’re going to be fine.”
“I’m not nervous,” she said and then added, “About the house.”
“Hennessee House is particular, but nothing ever happens the first night. It likes to take a day or so to assess you before deciding the best way to scare you off.”
“You thinkthe housewants to scare me?”
“I think Hennessee likes to test people, and everyone keeps failing.”
“Good thing I’ve never failed anything in my life.”
“Oh, really?”
“Straight As since kindergarten. If I think of this as a massive practical exam, it’ll be a cakewalk.”
“Nothing will happen tonight but don’t underestimate Hennessee,” he said, sounding worried. “I shouldn’t even be telling you this now. We’ll talk more about it tomorrow. Stephen is convinced you’re exactly what the show’s been missing. Everyone in production is excited to meet you.”
Tomorrow.Tomorrow. Talking to him on the phone had scrambled her brain like eggs in a hot skillet. Meeting him might put her in an embarrassment-induced coma. She asked, “Just curious, how many people does production translate to?”
“Four including myself. Oh—plus an intern.” He laughed lightly. “We have a young but very talented intern on the team now.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “That sounds great.” Except it didn’t!
Reading five people in rapid succession had the potential to put her out of commission for half the morning. The first impressions had to go somewhere, so they formed a queue in her face. Her sinuses to be exact. They seemingly clustered there, clogging up her ducts like a backed-up sink while waiting to be filed away in her memory palace.
When she was younger, every doctor her parents had taken her to swore up and down she suffered from sinus headaches. Some had even upped the ante to chronic sinusitis. The medicine never worked, and no one had any real idea what was making her head hurt so badly she routinely blacked out. The doctors had done their best to give her family answers, but she didn’t have amedicalcondition. She had ESP and needed to learn how to live with it.
Lucky owed her life to Mr. Alm, her third-grade teacher. One day he led the class through an enrichment exercise called themethod of loci—visualization techniques to help store and recall information. By high school Lucky had gotten so good at it, she’d created small, automated workers who retrieved, archived, and stored the first impressions for her. She didn’t have to think about anything except retrieval, which was as fast as any thought took. But reading too many people in a row still remained a tricky feat. She’d have to be careful.
“Great,” Maverick repeated. “Well, I’ll let you get on with your afternoon, then.”
Lucky got out of the car and hauled her suitcases up the stairs, one at a time. A green envelope with her name on it had been taped to the door. She pulled it off and held it in her hands. This was really it—her big break finally come to fruition.
She refused to build a platform by making videos of her reading “real” scary stories lifted from the internet or theorizing about “unexplainable” videos. Paranormal investigation shows had become a dime a dozen. While some were more earnest than clearly staged others, finding ghosts and hunting cryptids didn’t interest her.
Lucky’s heart belonged to the supernatural—the extraordinary side of reality shimmering right under the surfacefor humans. Growing up with ESP, extrasensory perception, all but sealed her passionate interest in it. She believed things like magic and miracles existed as such because science hadn’t caught up yet.
Of course, not everythingneededto be explained. She respected faith and the solace it provided the human brain and soul. But a lot of thingscouldbe explained if someone worked hard enough.
Unfortunately, funding streams for supernatural researchers were bone-dry. The legitimate investors she managed to findrarely returned her emails because she lacked experience. They were usually millionaires-plus, searching for the key to eternal life, interested in harnessing mysticism to increase their power, seeking proof of the great beyond to begin securing their futureover there. As outlandish (and self-serving) as they sounded, they were typically reasonable. They’d want to work with her once she proved herself.
Investigating a haunted house that had no known record of tragedy would be novel enough to get everyone’s attention. Something made this place different, and she planned to find out exactly what that was.
“Okay, Hennessee House,” she said. “Let’s do this.”
3
Lucky—
