The Devil You Want

Chapter One: The House on the Bluff

The gate at Thornside had rusted open years ago, so Josie Callender drove straight through it without slowing, gravel snapping under her tires like knuckles cracking.

The house came up out of the rain in pieces. First the widow's walk, a black iron crown against a sky the color of dishwater. Then the turret with its scaled shingles, half of them missing. Then the whole sprawling body of the place, three stories of Victorian ambition perched on a bluff two hundred feet above the Pacific, gray-green paint peeling off it in long strips like sunburned skin.

Her grandmother had lived here alone for thirty-one years.

Josie parked under the porte cochere and sat with the engine off, listening to the ocean chew at the rocks below. Six weeks since Harriet died in her sleep in the blue bedroom on the second floor. Five weeks since the reading of the will, when Josie's mother had stood up so fast her chair fell over.

Everything to Josie. The house, the eleven acres, the outbuildings, the contents. Not one clause for Diane Callender, who had not spoken to her mother in nine years and had not spoken to Josie in six.

The estate attorney, a tired man named Vernon Prine, had handed Josie a manila envelope after the others left. "She was specific," he'd said. "I was to give you this only when you were alone."

Josie had the letter in her jacket pocket now. She'd read it maybe forty times.

*Josie —*

*The house is yours because you are the only one who will not sell it. Search it before anyone else does. Start with the study, and remember that walls lie more often than people. Do not tell the sheriff anything. Do not tell your mother anything. I am sorry to leave you a job instead of a gift, but you were always the one who wanted the job.*

*I loved you the whole time. — H.*

She got out into the rain.

The key stuck. She had to lean her shoulder into the door, and when it gave, the smell rolled over her—cedar and cold ash and old paper, the exact smell of every summer she'd spent here between the ages of eight and sixteen, hiding from her mother's boyfriends in the third-floor sewing room.

"Okay," Josie said out loud, to the dark. "Hi."

She carried in her bags. Then the equipment cases: two condenser mics, the portable interface, the laptop, the backup laptop, the field recorder, the four motion-sensor cameras she'd bought with money she absolutely did not have. She stacked it all on the kitchen table, a slab of scarred oak that could have seated ten, and started opening cases just to hear the click of latches.

Her phone buzzed. Leo.

"You there?" he said. "You made it? Tell me you made it."

"I made it. It's enormous and it smells like a library that drowned."

"Josie." Leo Fairley had a voice built for radio and a personality built for worrying. "I need to say a thing and then I'll shut up. Two sponsors dropped this morning. The mattress people and the sock people."

She closed her eyes. "The socks too."

"They cited 'brand alignment.' Which means their lawyer read the Latham thing and got scared."

"The Latham thing." Josie laughed, and it came out wrong. "That's what we're calling it. Not 'the time Josie proved a man was forging title documents to take houses from eighty-year-olds.'"

"You didn't prove it," Leo said gently. "That's the whole problem, and you know I'm on your side, and you know I'd still be on your side if you'd made it up, which you didn't."

She pressed her thumb into the corner of her eye. Nine months ago she had gone on her own show, *Buried Lede*, and named Spencer Latham—developer, philanthropist, donor to the county fair, her boyfriend for fourteen months—as the architect of a scheme that moved elderly landowners' deeds through a chain of shell companies. She'd had a whistleblower. Three days before air, the whistleblower recanted. Josie ran the episode anyway.

Spencer had gone on the local news in a soft blue sweater and said, with what looked like real grief, that his ex-girlfriend was hurting and he forgave her. Two national outlets picked up his angle. *Vindictive ex weaponizes podcast.* Her download numbers halved in a month. Her lawyer told her not to say his name in public again.

"I'm going to fix it," she said.

"With what?"

"Harriet was a federal court reporter for thirty-four years, Leo. Portland, Eugene, Coos Bay. She sat in on sealed civil suits about land, water rights, county deeds. People around here say she kept copies."

"People around there also say the bluff is haunted."

"She left me a letter telling me to search the house before anyone else does." Josie looked up at the ceiling, at the water stain shaped like Ohio. "That's not haunted. That's a woman who knew something."

Leo was quiet a moment. "Call me tomorrow. Set up the cameras tonight. Please."

"Yes, Dad."

"I'm eight months older than you."

"Yes, slightly older Dad."

She hung up and got to work, because working was the only thing that had ever made her feel like a person.

By nine she had a lamp burning in the kitchen, a camera pointed at the front hall, and a bag of pretzels for dinner. By ten she had walked the ground floor twice with a flashlight, making notes in the voice recorder as she went, narrating rooms the way she narrated everything—the conservatory with its cracked panes and dead ferns, the parlor with its dust-shrouded chairs like a room full of ghosts sitting politely, the library where every third book was about coastal geology.

By eleven she was in the mudroom, and that's where she found the first thing.

The mudroom window had one of those old crescent latches, brass, the kind you turn with your thumb. Josie put the flashlight on it because she was checking every lock in the house, methodically, like a person who had once spent nine episodes explaining how burglars work.

The latch had been filed.

The hook was still there, but its inner edge was shaved down to a bright bevel, no tarnish on the cut, so that when you pushed the sash from outside the hook would ride up over the catch and let the window swing in. Two seconds' work with a shim. Two minutes' work with a file, by someone who knew exactly what he was doing.

Josie stood very still. Then she did what she always did with fear, which was to talk to it.

"Okay," she said, thumbing the recorder on. "Mudroom, north side. The window latch has been altered. The file marks are fresh—no oxidation, no dust in the grooves. This is a prepared entry. Somebody made themselves a door."

She wedged a chair under the sash. Then she went down to the basement, because she was, according to every man she had ever dated, congenitally unable to leave a bad idea alone.

The basement stairs were fir, worn pale in the middle from a century of feet. On the fourth step from the bottom, in the dust along the outer edge where nobody walks, there was the partial print of a boot. Lug sole. Big. The dust around it undisturbed for what looked like weeks.

Her heartbeat had moved up into her throat.

She photographed it. She measured it against her own boot—hers a seven, this thing a twelve, easy. And then she went up the stairs faster than she came down and locked the basement door and stood in the kitchen with both hands flat on the table until her breathing slowed.

The last thing came at one in the morning.

She'd decided to sleep in the second-floor bedroom at the front, the one with a working radiator. On the way there she passed the north bedroom—the one Harriet had kept shut since Josie's grandfather died, the one that always smelled of nothing at all because nothing had happened in it for decades.

Josie stopped with her hand on the door frame.

Cigarette smoke. Faint, stale, but unmistakable, the way it clings to fabric. Harriet had not smoked a day in her life. She'd fined Josie a dollar for saying the word *cigarette*.

Josie stepped in and swung her flashlight around. Bare mattress. Wardrobe. A wing chair pulled up to the window, which was odd, because every other chair in the house sat square against a wall.

From that chair you could see the entire front drive, the gate, and her car.

She backed out and pulled the door closed and went to her room and put a chair against that door too, and lay on top of the covers in her clothes with the flashlight in her fist and the ocean breathing at the bottom of the cliff.

Somebody had been in this house. Somebody had sat in that chair and smoked and watched the road.

And somewhere in these forty rooms, Harriet Callender had hidden whatever it was that made her write *before anyone else does.*

Josie lay in the dark, terrified, and felt something she was ashamed of.

She felt awake. She felt, for the first time in nine months, like she was standing at the front edge of a story.