Chapter 3
Returning to Maple Street late that afternoon, Maya felt the weight of the house pressing down on her shoulders with renewed intensity. The afternoon sun filtered through the dense maples lining the street, casting long, fractured shadows across the driveway. Barnaby hopped out of the truck with an eager bound, but as soon as his paws hit the gravel, he stopped, his ears pinning back against his head. He let out a low warning growl, staring directly at the second-floor bedroom window.
Maya unlocked the front door and stepped inside, the interior cool and eerily silent. She placed her satchel on the entryway bench and immediately headed to her study, where she had spread out the original architectural blueprints she had salvaged from her grandmother’s attic. She needed to look closer at the structural layout, specifically the foundation and the master bedroom directly above it.
With a red grease pencil, Maya traced the lines of the framing. According to the notes written in Arthur Pendelton’s shaky hand, the east wing of the house—which included the bedroom where Maya slept—was added two years after the initial construction. Why the sudden expansion? The records showed no marriage, no birth, no financial windfall that would justify the sudden addition of a master suite.
She cross-referenced the expansion with the town’s permit logs. The permit was pulled in a frantic rush in the autumn of 1967, right after a local worker was reported missing from the township. The worker’s name was Elena Vance. Another Vance. Maya’s breath hitched. Her grandmother had never mentioned any relatives living in the area prior to the seventies, but the surname was too specific to be a coincidence. Elena was likely an estranged aunt or cousin, scrubbed from family lore due to some long-forgotten scandal.
Maya grabbed a flashlight and a heavy-duty tape measure, heading down the narrow wooden stairs that led to the unfinished basement. The air down here smelled of damp earth and old concrete, completely divorced from the sterile modernity of the rest of the house. The concrete floor was poured unevenly in the eastern corner, marked by a strange depression that had been patched over with a lighter grey aggregate.
Kneeling on the cold floor, Maya swept away a layer of fine dust. She shone the flashlight beam across the patched section. There, half-submerged in the curing concrete decades ago, was a small, tarnished silver pendant shaped like a weeping willow leaf.
Barnaby trotted down the basement stairs behind her, his claws clicking rhythmically against the wood. He didn't growl this time; instead, he walked slowly over to Maya, pressing his warm shoulder against her leg. He looked down at the pendant, then raised his head, staring into the impenetrable darkness of the far corner where the foundation met the wooden joists.
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Maya reached out, her fingertips brushing the cold metal of the pendant. As soon as her skin made contact, a sharp, piercing sound filled her ears—the distant echo of a woman crying out in fear, followed by the heavy thud of falling timber. The temperature in the basement plummeted instantly, turning Maya’s breath into visible plumes of white mist. The ghost was not just in the bedroom; she was buried right beneath their feet.
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