Crossing the Line

Nothing could have prepared her for it. None of the articles she had ever read at three in the morning on the internet, none of the “mysterious” pictures she had dug up with a Google image search, none of the yarns spun to her by the grizzled veterans. Nothing.

Paige certainly hadn’t expected to find it here at the mansion, the mid-nineteenth century creature of brick and wood that it was. Its history wasn’t as bloody as some she’d seen. If anything, a jail or some abandoned penitentiary was more likely to house the apparition in front of her.

It was a shadow man, black and translucent, the form illuminated for a tiny second by the wavering beam of her flashlight. It stopped, the head whipped around and for a second, they both stared at each other as if to say “Who the hell are you?”

Coming to her senses, Paige fumbled with the DVR camera, hoisting it to eye level in a desperate attempt to capture the fleeting silhouette on film. The shadow man was having none of it, and dissolved back into the ether or wherever it is that shadow people hang out when they aren’t skulking around in dark corridors.

“Holy shit!”

“Dude, did you see that?”

“Damn it.”

Beams from two more flashlights flooded in behind her, signaling that James and Liam had caught up to her. Their shouts told her that they had also seen the shadow man, and she turned around to face them.

“You get that?” James asked. He’d been chasing spirits for years, but still retained that childlike enthusiasm when it came to sightings. Paige shook her head.

“No,” she said, gesturing with the DVR camera. “I don’t think so, anyway.”

“Check,” he said, moving beside her and aiming his flashlight at the tiny screen. Liam took her other side, and Paige quickly pressed the button and watched the black and white figures fly around in reverse. “That should be far enough,” James said, and Paige lifted her finger. The forms on the screen wavered in place for a moment and then began playing again. Their tinny voices bounced off the walls, echoing into the silence.

“Go, down that way!” It was James. His on-screen counterpart was breaking the fourth wall, pointing down the corridor they were in right now. The picture shook, footsteps reverberated through the hallway, and the floorboards swayed and pitched.

“Someone shine a light down there!” Liam that time, but the picture didn’t change. It was focused on Paige’s boot and the floor beneath it. A sharp intake of breath, and then quick overview of her jeans and sweatshirt as she pulled the camera to her shoulder, and then a shaky few seconds as her hand trembled and the lens self-adjusted.

They couldn’t see anything abnormal, or paranormal, on the tiny LCD screen. Paige let out a sigh of disappointment as she flipped the camera back into recording mode. James shook his head and rolled his eyes, silently echoing her sentiments.

“Maybe it’ll show up better on the big screen,” Liam said, pulling out his notebook. “I’ll mark it for later.”

Paige smiled at that. The soporific hours spent in her room going over the tapes and recordings after every hunt were much easier to bear if she had something to look forward to before starting. It was better than hoping for a few seconds of strangled voices here, or an odd-looking shadow there.

“Sorry,” she said as the three of them moved further down the hall. “I should have been quicker, it was just-”

Liam cut her off with a wave of his hand. “Don’t sweat it,” he said. “We could still get it, and it’s not that big of a loss if we don’t. Just goes down as ‘personal experience’ instead of ‘evidence’.”

James, however, shrugged and muttered something about flushing perfectly good money down the drain, and then said, “Why don’t you give me the camera? Just to make sure we don’t miss anything else.”

Paige tried not to look too disappointed as she handed it over. She was still learning how to work with the all the equipment, having only been hired about three months ago, and she didn’t think it was fair to punish her for missing a shot neither of them could have gotten, either. James was some sort of Ghost Whisperer, and he always caught the best evidence, like that EVP from the sanitarium last week. It’s not like he needed the practice.

“We still have to cover the girl’s bedroom yet,” James said. “The owner said they can usually hear voices up there, so whoever goes will need a recorder. I don’t have one on me.”

“I do,” Liam said, pulling a digital audio recorder out of his back pocket. “You want to go along?”

Paige frowned. She knew that James would most certainly want to go along, and that meant she was done. She’d have to spend the rest of tonight’s investigation back at command central, monitoring the video streams and wasting away the hours until sunrise. Was this more punishment for not catching the shadow man?

“No, I think I’ll head back,” James said, and Paige brightened. He gestured toward her, saying, “You can take her.”

As James went down the stairs, it occurred to Paige that it had been really unnecessary for him to point her out. There wasn’t anyone else here, except for Emily, who was taking her turn monitoring the video feeds and keeping the chairs from flying away. It was the sort of slightly arrogant thing that James was always doing, another one of the things about him that annoyed her.

She shook it off, and turned back to Liam, who was giving her a feral sort of grin.

“Just as well,” he said as they started for the staircase. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

Paige stifled her smile and took a deep breath, following Liam up the creaking stairs. She could only guess what he wanted to tell her, but she was eager to find out.

* * *

At the library of the Albany Historical Society the next day, Paige watched a dust mote float through the sunbeam streaming between the bookcases. In her mind, there was no sunlight because she was back in Camille Snyder’s bedroom, watching Liam instead of keeping track of the electromagnetic field detector in her hand. He had glanced up at her, flicking his hair out of his eyes with a toss of his head, and flashed her another grin. Her eyelids fluttered involuntarily, as though someone had sent an electric charge running through her arm or she’d stuck her finger in a socket.

“Aren’t you supposed to be watching the EMF?” he had said. The yellow-white beam of her flashlight showed he was still smiling, though, and he didn’t sound angry.

“Oh, right, sorry,” Paige said, glancing hastily back at the blinking digits on the tiny screen. She knew she was probably blushing. He’d caught her, after all.

“No, it’s cool,” he said. He had strode over to her, stepping easily over boxes stuffed with dingy lace and ratty books. “I am a little more interesting than numbers on a screen.”

She grinned, and then giggled self-consciously as he looped his arm around her waist. His grip was strong enough that she could feel his fingers through her bulky sweater and t-shirt. This was exactly the sort of thing her women’s studies book had called “objectification” but Paige shocked herself by not immediately flaring up and smacking his hand away. She breathed in instead, the scent of his cigarettes filling her nostrils in a wave of phantom smoke. Normally she hated that stench, but now...

“Paige!” Emily reached across the table and grabbed her arm.

The table had been set up for them in the library between the rows of ceiling scraping bookshelves, and it was littered with the contents of Emily’s tiny white purse and Paige’s notebooks. Of course, it was only after Paige showed the receptionist her official North Atlantic Paranormal Investigators card, indicating that she was in fact a historian with a prominent local organization, that they had been ushered into the library and provided with a number to call if they needed help finding anything. “What did he say?” Emily asked, having gotten her friend’s attention.

“Nothing much,” she said, paging carefully through her own record book. “Just that he was really glad I’m working here now. Apparently I’m a breath of fresh air.”

“Yeah, you are,” Emily said. She’d been brought along to help dig up information about the Snyder family as it had existed in the early twentieth century, and so far had only managed to whine about the lack of air conditioning, pester her friend about when they were getting food, and accidentally rip a page out of a census record from the late 1890s. “Seriously, James is such a hardass. Man doesn’t know how to lighten the hell up. I’m so glad I decided to work there part time.”

“Was this before or after you slept with him?”

“First off, I didn’t sleep with him that way,” Emily said, glaring. “I was drunk and he gave me a ride home and then he just ended up sleeping on my couch. Second, he has always been that way. A hardass, I mean, for as long as I’ve known him.”

Paige smiled and looked down at her book. “Whatever you say,” she said, avoiding eye contact with Emily. She knew her friend wouldn’t lie about something like that, but it was still fun to tease her about it.

“Don’t be a bitch,” Emily said, taking a sip from her water bottle, which she then used as a pointer. “Anyway, this is about you and Liam. Is that really all he said?”

“Pretty much.”

“Are you sure?” Emily was being oddly insistent about this, even for her.

“For the last time, yes, that is all he said,” Paige said, shoving Emily’s open water bottle away from the records. Even though she had been eager to share her big story before, now that Emily was pressing her for details, she didn’t want to talk about it. She felt like she should keep the moments she and Liam shared to herself, as though that would keep them special and somehow prevent them from turning sour. “Why do you want to know anyway?”

“Because I’m your best friend,” Emily said. “And because I wanted to warn you about him.”

“Warn me?” Paige arched her eyebrow, challenging her. Liam seemed harmless enough. A little flirtatious, maybe, but not the kind of guy who came with a warning label. Grumpy James the Hardass who randomly passed out on his coworkers couches was more of a threat.

“Yeah. He can be really charming and sweet and everything, but well, how can I put this?” Emily paused and thought for a moment. “Basically, he can be an asshat sometimes and you should be aware of that.”

“I don’t think that’s a problem specific to Liam, I think it’s more of a general ‘being human’ thing.”

“True, but I still mean it. Like, I thought he was nice when I first started working there but then…” Her voice trailed off, and she stared into space for a few seconds before shaking her head and looking back at Paige. “Just don’t read too much into him. And don’t encourage him, if you can help it. He’s a complete manwhore.”

Paige laughed. “Now that I do believe,” she said, then glanced at her watch. It was close to 4:30. “If we want to get out of here before dinner, we should really get back to work.”

“What are we looking for again?” Paige knew that the mere mention of research bored Emily. She stared at her book with an expression of resentment, her lip curled and eyebrows raised.

“Any mention of a woman named Camille Snyder, or a man named Thomas Buckely,” Paige said, checking her notes from the tour the previous day. She absolutely loved doing research. It helped her connect with the past, to think of the people they investigated as fellow beings instead of just wispy shadows or fragments of souls. “If you can find a picture of either of them, that would be great.” Pictures were even better for Paige. They gave the ghosts a face to pair with a name. It made them tangible, human.

Emily sighed and flicked the yellowed page with her finger, scanning the names and dates with a look of resigned listlessness. Paige took a folder of old newspapers and searched the headlines for any mention of a grisly murder-suicide.

“Here she is,” Emily said, pointing to a name on the list. “Camille Marie Snyder, born June 21st, 1884 in New York.”

“Does it say when she died?” Paige asked, leaning over the table to get a better view of the tightly cramped page.

“Umm, yeah. January of 1903.”

Without saying anything, Paige got up and hurried to the bookshelves, hunted down the proper folder of newspapers. November 1902, December 1902, and then January 1903. She took the overstuffed covers back to the table and pushed the already heaping pile of books and folders aside, spreading the contents of the new one out in their place.

“Look for a murder-suicide,” she said, eyes flickering over the faded print and grainy pictures. “It would probably be front page.” Emily groaned and stood up, titling her head to the side and brushing her hand through the crinkled newsprint. They skimmed the headlines first, then Emily sat down, took out her phone, and began to text message someone furiously, leaving Paige to comb through the smaller articles and obituaries.

The story wasn’t what she expected at all. The way the mansion owner had gone on about it, Paige was under the impression that this had been a huge ordeal, a media circus. She remembered with a grimace the theatrical way he’d described the legend: “The young Miss Camille Snyder was infamous throughout New York for her wanton and insatiable ... appetite, shall we say. It wasn’t long after her 18th birthday that she became intimate with her family’s driver, a one Mr. Thomas Buckley. When she was found out, by her father of all people, she took the only course of action available to her at the time.” Here, the man slipped out of his rehearsed composure long enough to make the crude gesture of dragging a knife across his throat. “Suicide,” he added, as though the motion hadn’t been clear enough. He went on to describe the scene of the crime, as Camille had not only killed herself, but her lover as well: “Head smashed in, blood all over the place, fingers hacked off. A violent end, the boy must have put up a huge struggle. Quite understandable, given the circumstances: his mistress, also known for her violent rages, coming after him for doing the very things she’d ordered him to do.”

Paige also remembered making some sort of tart reply about the boy deserving the end, if that was indeed what happened. Liam had snickered into his hand, and James apologized to the owner and urged him to continue to tour. As they were walking out of the foyer, he pulled her aside and said,

“Please don’t do that again.” He sounded irritated, annoyed, and his eyes were doing that weird twitching thing they did whenever Liam rearranged the chairs in the break room. “We’re here to investigate a possible haunting, not to crusade for dead women’s rights.”

“I wasn’t crusading,” Paige said, a white-hot indignation flaring up in her chest. “I was just asking why he seemed to excuse the driver and not Camille Snyder. Also, I’ll thank you to stop treating me like a kid.”

James was clearly fed up with her attitude. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, rolling his eyes.

“That, that flippant, dismissive thing you keep doing. Stop it,” she said.

“Fine,” James said, moving toward the kitchen. “I’m sorry. Just can the accusations and try to remember why we’re here.”

Shaking off the memory, Paige turned her attention back to the newspaper. A smile crept on to her face, despite the grim story in front of her. Camille Snyder’s death, which was on the second page of the newspaper, had been determined to be a homicide. The suspects were pretty much nonexistent, and the official conclusion was that it was in fact the boy who had killed her. And that meant the pompous ass of an owner was wrong, which suited Paige just fine.

It would be nice to wave that fact in his misogynistic, propaganda-spreading face. She thought that he’d probably made up that nasty story about Camille being a murderess just to sell more tickets for the tours and get publicity. Slandering a poor dead girl’s name just to make a few bucks, what a jackass.

Something about the official conclusion didn’t sit well with her, though. Why would Thomas suddenly kill Camille? Why had the investigation ended so suddenly? If Thomas hadn’t killed her, who had? What about Camille’s father? He’d apparently known about what his daughter was doing on cold December nights when he was tucked away in his bed. Wouldn’t that have infuriated him? The entire family would have been disgraced if the secret ever escaped into the furious whirlwind of gossip and rumors; surely they’d want to keep it quiet, hide it, get rid of it.

Paige wondered what Thomas had looked like, if he’d been tall and broad shouldered or lean and lanky. What sort of guy would make the aristocratic and well-bred Camille Marie Snyder scramble out of the downy softness of her plush bed and into the frigid, rough-hewn room above the stable? Pictures flickered through her mine like the last frame captured before a flashbulb burst: a messy crop of dark hair, a smattering of stubble across his chin, a whiff of pipe tobacco mingled with sweat...

Emily finally spoke, jerking Paige out of her daydream.

“That last text was from James. He wants to know where we are and if we’re on our way back.”

Paige glanced at her watch. It was 5:45. Night two of the Snyder Mansion investigation was going to start in forty-five minutes, and it was about a half an hour drive from here. Grabbing the newspaper and putting it in her bag, Paige gathered up the other papers and started to put them away. Emily stayed where she was, presumably texting James back.

“We would get there faster if you helped,” Paige said pointedly, her arms loaded with thick books and stuffed folders. Emily sighed, but took the hint. They were out of the library and on the road in ten minutes flat.

* * *

In the kitchen of Snyder Mansion, Paige leaned against the dark granite countertop, catching her breath. She and Emily had had to run from the car, which was parked at the other side of the property, to make it here on time. They knew James would be furious if they were even a minute late; he had already glared at them as they burst through the doors at exactly 6:29. He held to the old adage that “on time is late” and his other favorite saying was “time is money.” Liam, however, just nodded at them and then went back to organizing all the equipment they’d be using that night. Emily panted out an apology for both herself and Paige.

“We’re going to do two teams tonight, to cover more of the place,” James said.

Paige stared after Liam, wishing he’d look back at her and give her another smile. Or maybe if he said something to her, that would be nice. She always felt uncharacteristically giddy around him, like she was five again and just figuring out that if you spun around fast enough on the swings, you could make everything on the playground blur together in a swath of greens and greys and blues. The fluttering she felt in the pit of her stomach was so strong, so persistent that it almost hurt. If he would look over at her, then maybe...

Had Camille felt this way about Thomas?

“I think me and Paige could go together,” Liam said. Paige had a difficult time keeping the smile off her face. She felt the little wings of excitement in her stomach beat wildly at the thought of being alone with him again. James, however, shook his head.

“Nah, I’ll take her with me tonight,” he said, picking up a couple audio recorders, some flashlights, and the thermal imaging camera. “You and Emily can check out Camille’s bedroom, and we’ll hit the attic again.”

The wings stopped, as though they’d been caught in a net or shot out of the sky. Far from looking put out, however, Liam grinned.

“Okay,” he said, glancing over at Emily. “Looks like it’ll be just you and me, sweetheart.”

“In your dreams, plebe,” she said, then grabbed a recorder and a flashlight, and headed toward the foyer. She shot Paige a guilty sort of “sorry, kid” look as she walked out the door. Liam winked at her and hurried after Emily.

Paige bit her lip to keep from frowning and followed James up the stairs to the attic. Down below, she could hear the other two laughing about something. Loudly. Jealousy rose up inside her like a big, pissed off cobra, and she stomped up the last few steps. James raised his eyebrows at her, and said, “Something bothering you?”

“No,” Paige said, now feeling ashamed instead of bitter. For all his austerity, James was easily the best investigator here, and he rarely mentored people the way he did with her. All she had done to repay him so far was act fussy because she didn’t get to work with the pretty boy and stomp around a historic mansion. “Just eager to start, that’s all.”

She could tell he didn’t buy it.

“Look, I know you and Liam get along very well, and he’s probably more fun to investigate with, but I hired you and brought you along because I think you’ve got the potential to be one of our better members,” he said. Paige shifted her weight from her left foot to her right uncomfortably. All of a sudden she was back in third grade, being lectured by Mr. Greyson for talking too much and not paying attention to whatever math shit she was supposed to be learning. “You have a strong background in history, and we need more of that around here. So I’d appreciate a little less attitude from you, all right?”

“Yes,” she said, avoiding his eyes and digging at the floor with the toe of her boot. “I’m sorry, really.”

“Don’t be sorry, just don’t,” he said, looking down at the thermal camera. “Here, have you ever used this before?”

“No, not yet,” Paige said, walking to him and looking over his shoulder at the screen. The thermal imaging camera, “the thermal” for short, measured the surface temperature of their surroundings and displayed the data on a color-coded screen. Paige always liked thermal evidence the best, especially when they caught full-bodied apparitions peering around corners or disappearing into thin air.

“We’ll do a quick sweep, and then an EVP session,” James said, handing her the temperature gauge and camera. She took a wary step forward, holding the gauge at her waist and glancing between the screen and the darkness in front of her. “Move slowly, and don’t wave the gauge around so much.”

They circled the room twice, but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary on the screen. It was difficult to navigate the darkened room. The ceiling pitched forward into a point on both sides, and dark wooden beams crisscrossed low overhead. There were creaking, wobbling stacks of boxes everywhere, the flashlight beam throwing them and their shadows into sharp relief. A bit of beaded lace here, a glint of glass there, everything old and peeling and falling apart. Once they finished, James placed the camera on a pile of boxes in the corner of the room, but kept it running. That way, it would be able to catch anything that they called into being during the EVP session.

“Is there anyone here with us?” he asked, after identifying himself and Paige, and dating the recording for future reference. Silence. “How many people are in this room right now?” he asked, putting the recorder on the floor and stepping away from it. “It’ll cut down on ambient noise and interference,” he said after Paige looked at him quizzically. “Feel free to jump in at any time.”

“Are you a man or a woman?” Paige said, looking around as though Camille or Thomas would appear just because she had spoken. They continued asking questions and waiting patiently for answers for about twenty minutes, and then James decided it would be better to switch to provoking. He hoped it would aggravate and rile up the spirits, forcing them to manifest in some earthly form that could be caught on film or audio.

“Why don’t you answer, you stupid whore?” James said, pounding his fist into his palm. Paige’s hand flew to her mouth and she gasped a little. This was harsh, even for him. “Or am I not good enough for you? And where’s your lover boy? Why isn’t he coming out here to defend you, or are you just too much of a slut for him to even bother?”

“James, maybe you shouldn’t-” Paige said, but he cut her off with a wave of his hand.

“It’s provoking, Paige,” he said. “It’s supposed to be mean. That’s the point.”

That hardly excused it, she thought, and they had no proof that Camille had ever slept with more than one person. Calling her a slut was just speculation, and that was probably what bothered Paige the most. James kept hurling insults left and right. He seemed to be having the time of his life.

“Stupid bitch, why don’t you say something? Too damn busy whoring it up with the help is my guess. Not that he’s much use, either, the fucking coward.”

“His name was Thomas,” Paige said, almost a whisper. She was afraid that James might turn around and hit her, that he’d become too heated to think straight. He was frightening, more so than anything that could possibly conjure itself from nothingness. The steady whump-whump-whump of his fist hitting his palm provided a beat for his torrent of insults. She flinched every time. “And Camille, that was the girl’s name.”

“So?” James whipped around and stared at her like she’d just told him he was wearing brown socks with black shoes. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Just, well, I don’t know.” Paige fumbled with a reason for reminding him of the names. She knew the real one, that she had come to think of them as poor victims instead of nameless entities, wouldn’t fly with him. “Maybe they’d react better to their names? It might make them angrier?” It came out like a question, as though she wasn’t sure that this was even a valid point.

James’s eyes lit up and he grinned.

“Excellent,” he said, clapping her on the back. She stumbled forward, almost stepping on the recorder. He steadied her, saying, “Now you’re starting to get the hang of it. Give it a try.”

Paige gulped. The worst thing she felt comfortable yelling into the darkness was “you stinky poo-poo head” and after James’s masterpiece of profanity and degradation, Camille and Thomas would more likely bust a rib laughing than manifest themselves to kick her ass. Also, Paige knew that Camille had only been eighteen when she died, too young to really know how much trouble falling in love could get her into. It didn’t seem fair or right to drag her through the ringer just for doing such a simple thing as daring to have a little fun, to live a little more than she was allowed.

“Go on,” James said, his voice a little higher than before. He was getting impatient, she could tell.

“Umm, stop being such a cow, Camille, and Thomas, you stop being a damn chicken, and show yourselves, you … cows.” She had run out of barnyard animals already.

“Are you just going to sit there and take that, you goddamn piece of shit?” James said. Apparently, he was going to run with Paige’s lame attempt at provoking rather than yell at her for it. “Jesus, you really don’t give a fuck, do you, if you’re just going to sit there and-”

It happened so fast Paige wasn’t even sure she saw correctly. One minute, James was on his feet, calling every insult he’d ever heard into use, and the next, he was flat on his back, silent and still.

* * *

Liam and Paige were in her and Emily’s hotel room, going over the evidence from the Snyder Mansion investigation of two nights prior. They were sitting on the queen sized beds, laptops out and hooked up to the various electronic devices they’d used to capture the ghosts. Liam took video, Paige had audio.

“Jesus Christ!” Liam shouted. “Paige, fucking look at this!”

So he found the thermal footage, she thought. Great. She had wanted to see it first, since she’d been there when it happened and everything. James had been all right in the end, shaken and sore but ecstatic to have successfully provoked something. “Check the thermal, check the thermal!” he’d kept saying, waving over at it insistently.

Paige pulled off her own headphones and leaned over to see Liam’s computer. He rewound the footage and hit “play”, bouncing up and down with excitement like a toddler on Christmas morning.

The white-red blob that was James swayed side to side in the top tight corner, with Paige closer to the center. As he gesticulated violently, a creeping blue and green mass formed at his shoulder and suddenly overtook him. Just as they collided and James slammed to the ground, the mass appeared distinctly human; a head, legs and two outstretched arms were easily identified. The form disappeared before it reached Paige, even though she stood just three or four feet away.

“Whoa,” she said. She’d never seen anything so clear or spectacular before. “That’s awesome.” She was still jealous that he’d get credit for finding it.

“Not haunted, my ass,” Liam said to no one in particular.

The only other things he found the first day were a few spots on the DV footage that could have maybe been orbs. He was sure James would dismiss them as dust the minute he saw them, but marked the timestamps anyway. There was no sign of Paige’s shadow man, either. She hadn’t been quick enough with the camera.

Since she had all of the audio to go over, Paige not only got to hear conversations she had been a part of, but those between her coworkers as well. She was particularly interested in the conversation Liam and James had after she had gone back to base camp the first night. It was all very boring until Liam brought her up. She blushed red as she listened. He had a lot of complimentary things to say about her.

“Well, just remember she’s here to work,” James said. There was a shuffling of feet before Liam answered.

“I know, I know. Jesus, man, you act like I’m chasing her or something.”

Silence, except for the breeze and more foot movement.

“You kind of are,” James said. A scoffing sound; Paige couldn’t tell who.

“Fuck you, I am not.”

“You are,” James said. “You definitely are, don’t lie to me.”

“And if I am?”

In the sigh that followed, Paige thought she could make out a woman’s voice. It was very faint. An EVP! Even though she knew she should rewind and figure it out right away, she was too interested in the living people’s conversation at this point to fuss with some disembodied voice.

“For God’s sake, I didn’t hire her so you could fuck around with her on the side,” James said. He sounded angry; his voice was low and quiet.

“Well then why did you hire her?” Liam said, exasperated.

Paige ripped the headphones out of her ears, as though doing so could take the previous comment with them and then fling it into space where it would die a horrid, asphyxiated death. She didn’t pause the audio, either, just stared blankly at the bouncing green line on the media player screen as the rest of the conversation played out. All she could think was that she had been wrong and Emily had been right. She had been right to warn her about him, and he was nothing more than everything all those horrid stories had made guys out to be: only interested in sex, and willing to do and say anything to get it.

It took Liam a few seconds to notice she wasn’t reviewing the evidence anymore. He paused his own, leaned over and put his face right next to hers. “It helps when you have the headphones in your ears,” he said. Every inch of her being yearned to just haul off and smash his pretty face in for being such an unbelievable douchebag. Instead she stared straight ahead, ignoring him. “Did you find something?” he asked, pulling back a little.

“Sure,” Paige said, waving at the screen. “Around the 32:57 mark.”

Liam picked up her discarded headphones and listened. She studied his face to see how he would react to the conversation. If he felt bad about reliving it, it didn’t show at all. A smile played at his mouth, and briefly forgetting that he was listening for voices beyond the grave, Paige had to physically sit on her hands to keep from hitting him.

“Yeah, yeah, I hear it,” he said, taking off her headphones. She snatched them back and jammed them into her own ears. “Mark that down for James to listen to. He’ll have the final say, but I think it’s legit.”

As she turned back to the evidence, she realized she’d have to listen to that nasty exchange again so she could hear the EVP properly and then write down what it was saying. Clicking back a few seconds on the timeline, she slumped down and drummed her fingers on her computer. Her foot started twitching, and she looked away from both the screen and Liam when she heard his voice say, “And if I am?”

Closing her eyes, she concentrated on pulling words from the static filled silence that followed. She came up with a muffled, high pitched voice saying something indistinct that ended with “me.”

Paige wasn’t quick enough with the mouse, and had to hear the horrible comment again. Her foot bounced even more as she rewound the audio, enough to make Liam glance over at her, clearly annoyed. She smirked and didn’t feel sorry at all.

Five more tries, and Paige was fairly sure the voice was saying “Please, please don’t leave me.” It sounded desperate, breaking on the second “please” and ending with a watery sob. She was also fairly sure that the voice belonged to Camille Snyder, but there was no way to verify that and so it would remain nothing more than speculation. Her anger ebbing a little, she rewrote the timestamp on her notepad, and added “EVP – Please don’t leave me.”

They finished going over all the evidence within the next hour, and called James up for the final analysis. As expected, he flipped over the thermal footage, asking to replay it again and again. The orbs were dismissed as dust, and Paige’s EVP was declared genuine. They were going to present the findings to the owner on Sunday, and as she packed up her things and called Emily, Paige was eternally grateful that she wouldn’t have to deal with that prick Liam until then.

* * *

Paige sighed, sending a sheaf of papers fluttering to the end of the table. She was back at the library, having dropped in for a bit of last-minute research before she met up with James and Liam to present the evidence to the owner. She’d hoped to find a picture of Camille, to go along with her story and her name.

All the portraits of her had been removed from the house after her death, the owner informed them. Her family, the father in particular, was ashamed to be reminded they’d had such a daughter. Maybe, just maybe, those pictures had ended up here.

The table vibrated underneath her fingers, and Paige looked down to see her phone buzzing incessantly. She flipped it open, scanning the text she’d received. It was from James, reminding her that she was supposed to be at the mansion in about half an hour.

With the minutes ticking by, Paige started to get a little frantic. She needed to find a picture of this girl, to give her back her face and her place in the house she’d grown up and died in. Trotting to the back desk, she leaned over eagerly and asked the librarian in a whisper,

“Can you tell me where you’d keep visual records?” The librarian, a dumpy looking woman with a frizzy bun and thick glasses, stared back at her blankly. “Like, you know, pictures?” Paige said, drumming her fingers on the desk. “I’m researching the Snyder Mansion legend, and was wondering if you had or knew of any pictures from that era?”

The librarian blinked once, twice, stared a bit more, and then said, “Shakespeare.”

At first, Paige felt like screaming at the woman’s flippant dismissal, but then realized the woman was pointing over at a wooden bust of the Bard. “Thanks.”

There was a huge file cabinet beside it, and Paige scanned the dates and names, her finger tracing a path in the thick dust that coated the cabinet. There it was, Snyder Mansion, early twentieth century. She ripped the drawer open with a loud clang, but didn’t care at all about the noise.

Dust flew up and infiltrated her nose. She deflected the sneeze that followed onto her bare arm, to spare the pictures. There was a thick stack of them, which Paige scooped up tenderly and hurried back to her seat.

The thing that struck her first was how beautiful she was. Camille Marie Snyder had an oval face topped with an elaborate bouffant, which Paige knew from her fashion history class to have been at the height of fashion in the early Edwardian period. Her nose was tiny and upturned, her eyes wide and gleaming, the mouth fixed in a smile that could just as easily pass for a smirk. It was like she had a wicked little secret and wasn’t ever going to tell.

All at once, it hit her. Here was a girl who had lived and loved and lost everything. Paige sank into her chair, head in her hands. She felt like she knew Camille, as though they’d been best friends their whole lives. There was so much that these pictures, all of which were glamorously posed and lit to show off the stunning figure of their subject, offered. And there was so much they hid. Paige would never really know what secret Camille had taken with her to the grave. She could guess and poke and speculate, but whatever it was that made her smile so mischievously was lost to the ages.

The buzzing of her cell phone stirred her out of her reverie. It would be James again, she knew, or maybe even Liam. Either way, she didn’t want to answer it. She grabbed the pictures and her purse, heading to the photocopier to make one last print.

As she had guessed, the owner was less than pleased with her part of the presentation, namely the truth behind the legends of Snyder Mansion. Camille Snyder was not a murderess, just a much-maligned victim of some unfortunately forgotten or deliberately obscured crime.

“But the stories,” he said.

“Are just that,” she said. “You can keep telling them, if they’re that important to you, but I just wanted you to know the truth.” She presented him with a framed print of the January, 1903 newspaper detailing Camille and Thomas’s death. He took it, glaring at it as though it had insulted him. And that suited Paige just fine.

* * *

Back in the office on Monday morning, Paige booted up her ancient computer and waited for it to load as it whirred like a jet turbine. A framed picture of Camille Snyder now sat next to the monitor, the glass blindingly bright in the early morning sunlight. She smiled as she caught sight of her favorite poster: the one directly beside her desk which read in bright white letters “Ghosts were people, too.” Her second favorite was the one on James’s door. It was an autographed copy of the iconic “I WANT TO BELIEVE” from Mulder’s basement office on The X-Files. It also carried the distinction of being the only framed one in the room, the rest of them being held up with yellowed, peeling scotch tape.

A jingle of bells rang off to her right, and Paige glanced over. Liam strode through the door. He flashed her a grin that she didn’t return.

“So how’s my Paige doing this morning?” he asked, undeterred by her coldness, and rooted through his bag for something as yet nondescript.

Paige shrugged. “Fine,” she said, turning back to her computer to punch in her password. It was the first word she’d said to him in nearly three days.

“Want to see something hilarious?” he said, pulling a piece of paper out of his bag and walking around his desk. Paige stared at him without saying anything. As he grabbed some scissors and cut out a shape from the paper, she was annoyed to find that he was still really attractive. He took the cutout over to James’s door and slapped it onto the glass.

Paige laughed out loud at the picture of “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” margarine which was now taped over the UFO on James’s prized poster.

Liam smirked, quite pleased with himself. No matter how hard she tried, Paige couldn’t find the coldness of a minute prior. She kept seeing the poster out of the corner of her eye and had to fight back another fit of giggles every time she did.

“Just wait till James sees,” Liam said. He stood by her desk, trying to angle himself so he could see around her boxy computer monitor. Rather than risk talking to him, Paige stared at her keyboard and typed absentmindedly. She just needed a distraction, anything to keep her mind away from him. “So,” Liam said, dragging the word out like a piece of gum he could wind around his finger.

“Yes?” she finally managed, refusing to look up.

“It’s Monday,” he said. Paige didn’t need to look up to be able to hear that stupid, annoying smugness in his voice.

“And?”

“That means I get my hug.”

She knew she shouldn’t. She wasn’t even sure if she really wanted to. After all, this was Liam, the man who believed she had been hired for his own personal entertainment and not because she was a competent historian and paranormal investigator. It was bewildering, then, that she found herself leaning forward into his outstretched arms. She held on for a second too long, breathed in the sickly sweet stench of the thin black cigarettes he smoked, grazed her smooth cheek against his stubbly one as she pulled away, and sank into her chair.

By the time she’d self-consciously smoothed out the wrinkles left in her shirt, Liam was back at his desk, rooting through the post-its and memos. She watched him even as her computer dinged at her to type her password again, bit her lip as he screwed up his face in seeming disgust upon finding a week-old memo about something or other, sighed as he walked around his desk and toward James’s office. He disappeared inside without even a glance in her direction and Paige struggled to remember what, exactly, was so distasteful about Liam.