Page 7 of 13 Nights

She's a journalist. I can see it in the deliberate silence she leaves for me to fill, in the phone held at an angle that means the camera is still running.

Her mother was a historian: careful, patient, building toward conclusions the way masons build walls. This woman doesn't build. She cuts. She finds the load-bearing wall and puts a question through it, and then she watches to see what falls.

I stayed away from Diane as long as I could. I'm already failing to stay away from her daughter.

"Your mother was smarter than you," I say, and I climb the first two steps. "She left."

I'm close enough now to see the lamp reflected in her eyes and the pulse beating fast at the base of her throat. Close enough that the cold I carry reaches her face and bare hands. Her pulse quickens. She doesn't retreat. My attention catches on the beat of it longer than it should, and she notices.

Neither of us steps back.

"My mother kept this house for decades and never told me it existed. That isn't smart. That's afraid."

Diane was afraid. She was right to be afraid. The Veil touched her, and whatever it registered when it cataloged her name was enough to make a careful woman abandon her research, flee, and never return.

This woman is neither careful nor a researcher. She's sitting outside past midnight, inviting something she can't explain to take the chair beside her, and she's calculated the risk and accepted the terms.

"You set out a chair," I say.

"I had questions. You weren't going to answer them from the tree line."

"I won't answer them from here either."

"You answered one last night. You told me I shouldn't be here. That implies you know something about this place that I don't."

I hate that she's right. She's also still recording. I wonder whether she records everything or only the conversations she expects to be useful later.

"I know this property better than you do," I say. "I know the road, the lane, the trees, and the thing that lives in the dark past the woods. You moved in with a dead woman's drawer full of questions. We're not equally informed."

"Then inform me."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because the last woman who waited for me at this cottage left before dawn and never came back. You should follow her example."

"You keep telling me to leave. You also keep coming back. Those two positions are in conflict."

"I contain contradictions. So did your mother."

"Then why did you come back?"

I came back because the cottage had a light on. I came back because a woman who looks nothing like her mother sat at the same desk, opened the same drawer, and refused my warning.

In a very long time, exactly two people have done that. They are mother and daughter. I should consider that coincidence. I stopped believing in coincidence before Irving learned to hold a pen.

I don't say any of that.

"Irving profited from my death," I say, "and never troubled himself to discover my name."

She stops talking. The journalist calculates. "Washington Irving."

"Yes."

"You knew him?"

"No. He was born seven years after I was killed at White Plains."