Page 2 of 13 Nights

Paul expects me home Thursday. I could return with colleagues in the spring, armed with recording equipment and proper protocols. That is what a responsible researcher would do. But the shadows beneath my skin are darkening, and whatever cataloged me beyond the Veil didn't feel seasonal. I can't test that without becoming the experiment.

Walter doesn't know I copied the warning or the regimental reference I found folded behind another page before returning his box. Those copies are already in the drawer along with my marginal annotations. I open the journal to a clean page and write today's date at the top: October 29. Below it, I add a single line. I want to stay, but I lack the courage. God help whoever tries to break the curse. I close the journal and set it in the drawer on top of everything else. I lock all of it inside the writing desk that came with the place, the one piece of furniture I didn't bring with me.

I'll keep the key and pay whatever it costs to leave the cottage sealed, because the evidence inside is too important to destroy and too dangerous to let someone else discover. And I will never come back in October.

The lamp flickers as I close the drawer. The latch catches with a clean, decisive sound.

I carry everything I'm taking to the car in the gray predawn. The October air stings my throat. The yard is empty, the tree line motionless, but I feel watched with every step.

I lock the front door and pocket the key. The questions can stay where I put them. Whatever waits beyond that damaged warning will have to wait with them.

At the car, I look back. The cottage is small, dark, ordinary. No horse stands in the yard, but one fresh hoofprint mars the porch beside the door.

CHAPTER ONE

Ashley

Present Day

The cursor blinks on a document titled Crossed Bayonets, Chapter One with the patient, damning rhythm of something that knows I have nothing to say.

I've been here a week, and the place still feels borrowed. The calendar on my phone says October 19. Most of the furniture is mine, hauled from a Brooklyn storage unit in a rented SUV that handled the Taconic State Parkway like a shopping cart with a bad wheel.

My desk sits under the front window where the light is best. My laptop is open. My coffee is cold. Even though I have years as an investigative journalist, this is my first attempt at writing a novel. It is not going well. The damn thing refuses to start.

The Revolutionary War book has a contract, a publisher, and a deadline I'm already behind on. I've started the opening a dozen times since my mother died, and every attempt reads like a textbook wearing a costume. The Hessian conscripts I'm supposed to bring to life on the page keep lying there, flat and dutiful, refusing to breathe.

The cursor blinks once more before I close the laptop on it.

The cottage sits at the edge of Sleepy Hollow proper, down a gravel lane that narrows to a single track before it reaches the porch.

It's small, clean, and utterly ordinary except for the fact that my mother owned it for decades and never mentioned it. The deed turned up in my mother's estate paperwork, between a paid-off car title and her cremation instructions. Both names are on the title line: Diane Caldwell and Paul Caldwell. My father died when I was eleven. He never mentioned a cottage in the Hudson Valley either. They bought this place together, maintained it, and kept it hidden for my entire life.

That's the first thing that doesn't make sense. It's not the last.

I could have sold it. The attorney suggested exactly that. I told him I'd think about it. Then my lease came up for renewal, the landlord wanted hundreds more a month, and thinking about it turned into packing.

I tell myself it's practical. The archives are close, the carrying costs are low, and the quiet is exactly what a stalled writer needs. I almost believe it.

My phone buzzes against the desk. Lena's face fills the screen, a photo from last New Year's where she's wearing a sequined headband and pointing at the camera like she's about to issue a subpoena.

"Tell me you've written something," she says when I pick up.

"I've written several strongly worded grocery lists."

"Ashley."

"The produce section at the Sleepy Hollow ShopRite is organized by someone who has never heard of alphabetical order. I had feelings about it."

Lena exhales the way she does when she's deciding whether to push.

Lena Marchetti has been my best friend since grad school, and she carried me through my mother's death with a tenacity that bordered on professional intervention. She called every day. She brought food I didn't ask for. She sat on my apartment floor for an entire afternoon once while I stared at a wall. She never suggested I should do anything other than stare at it until I was ready to stop.

She's earned the right to push. She almost never exercises it.

"How's the ghost town?" she asks instead.

"Full of tourists in witch hats spending a fortune on pumpkin-spiced everything. Peak October charm."