Tori thought she could leave four children with me while she flew to Japan, but she forgot one important detail: I had a flight of my own that afternoon, and I wasn't canceling it this time.

Keeping the revolver trained on Alistair’s chest, I shifted sideways toward the small pane beside the kitchen pantry that looked out over the eastern orchard. The dusk had completely settled, turning the woods into a stark tangle of black branches against the pale snow.

There, two hundred yards down the lane near the abandoned apple barn, sat an idling black SUV. Its headlights were dark, but the faint amber glow of its parking lights cut through the rising sleet. A thin plume of exhaust curled into the freezing evening air.

"Charles Miller doesn't leave witnesses," Alistair murmured behind me, his tone stripping away the earlier bravado. "He’s been trailing me since I took the bus out of Bangor. He knows I came here. And he knows whatever Arthur left behind is inside these walls."

"Why didn't you go to the police?" I demanded, my eyes fixed on the distant vehicle.

"Because the police don't have jurisdiction over ghost stories, Myrna. Half the men on the state police roster back in eighty-eight were on Miller’s payroll. You think things changed just because thirty years went by?"

The driver’s side door of the SUV cracked open down the road. A tall man in a heavy charcoal parka stepped out into the snow, followed by another from the passenger side. They weren't moving in a hurry; they moved with the methodical calm of men who believed they had total control over an isolated target.

I pulled back from the window, my mind racing through the blueprint of the house. Four exits: the front porch, the mudroom, the cellar hatch, and the French doors off the study. But the snow in the back garden was waist-deep, and leaving through the front meant walking directly into their firing line.