Page 25 of 13 Nights

The porch light is on. She'll be waiting inside with questions and documents and the focused look I've discovered she gets when she's working a lead. I'll answer more than I intend to if I go to her first, because her questions are too precise for comfortable evasion.

Instead, I walk toward Main Street and Tom Hadley's bookshop. A group of tourists crosses ahead of me on the sidewalk, laden with shopping bags from the Headless Horseman gift shop. One of them is wearing a foam version of the gourd I allegedly threw at Ichabod Crane, a man I've never met and a gourd I never touched.

They don't notice me. I've learned to appreciate that, most nights. Tonight, being overlooked grates.

The lights are off. The sign reads CLOSED, but the office in the back glows. Tom keeps long hours when he's anxious, and Ashley has given him plenty of reason this October.

I knock on the glass. The sound carries through the empty shop, and after a moment footsteps cross the hardwood. The deadbolt turns. Tom opens the door without greeting me, steps aside, and walks back toward his desk.

I follow through the narrow aisles of local history and Hudson Valley fiction. Tom settles into his chair with a mug, a stack of invoices, and the resigned posture of a man who expected this visit hours ago.

"Severin." He says it like an acknowledgment of weather, something arriving that he can't prevent and doesn't intend to enjoy.

"Stop managing Ashley's investigation."

"I'm not managing anything. She asks questions. I answer what I can."

"You told her that her mother rented the cottage."

The cup pauses halfway to his mouth. "She did. Before she bought it."

"From whom?"

Tom's silence answers before he does.

"Your grandfather," I say.

"Yes."

"So the Hadleys owned the property. The Hadleys rented it to a researcher who encountered the Horseman. And when that researcher wanted to buy it, your family sold it to her and kept watching." I settle into the chair across from his desk. "That isn't answering what you can, Hadley. That's curating what she finds."

"I told her the truth."

"You selected the portion of the truth most likely to mislead her. A lie in respectable clothing is still a lie."

Tom sets the mug down. His hands are steady, but the tendons in his wrists are taut. He's afraid, and accustomed to being afraid. Neither of those things makes him a coward.

I've known cowards. Tom is something more inconvenient. He's a man who acts on his fear rather than surrendering to it.

"My family has watched people get close to you," he says. "One of them vanished."

"And you assume I killed her."

"I assume the Gate took her." He meets my eyes. "That's worse."

The Gate. The word lands with the flat certainty of a man who has grown up in a house where supernatural language was as ordinary as table settings. Tom doesn't say it with wonder or skepticism. He says it like a diagnosis.

"Who vanished?" I ask, though I already know the answer. I want to hear what the Hadleys have written about her.

"Eliza Marsh. A schoolteacher. She came during the thirteen nights for several years. The last year, she didn't come back on November first. No body. No evidence she left town." Tom pauses. "Decades later, my family found a message inside the boundary. A slip of paper wrapped around her ring. Her handwriting, authenticated against her journal. I am not dead. I cannot return."

Eliza's face comes back to me. She used to watch from the far side of the cemetery wall. I remember the October she stopped keeping her distance and the deliberate decision I made not to let her close.

"I didn't love her." The words come out flat and factual, a defense I've used before.

"The warning doesn't say when you love someone." Tom holds my gaze. "It says when the Horseman is loved."

The distinction lands harder than anything else he's said. Passive voice. The warning doesn't care whether I reciprocate. It cares whether someone else feels it.