The sun was straight up over the town square in Grandview. The sky was clear and blue as an Easter egg in spring with scant clouds over the distance warning their approach. The air was cold, chill to the touch with the taste of winter and the stinging embrace of an Arctic wind. Pedestrians walked through the crunching and crackling leaves skittering at roadside. Young children dashed through bundled up in heavy coats and adults pulled up their collars to up over their heads. Despite the bright clear sky, there was no sign of the heat that the human population of town wanted. It was another New England winter where the memories of summer were still in the dreams of the city inhabitants and the presence of winter was casting its shadow upon the town. Melinda Gordon bundled up in her favorite cashmere coat trying to keep warm and looking up beaming to Mr. Betters the grocer trying to see off the last of his Halloween pumpkins. He jovially acknowledged her existence with his big beaming grin and placed the sign out to sell the last of his pumpkins quickly before they rotted away. The hardware store was taking down its Halloween decorations and replacing them for Thanksgiving turkeys and cartoon-like pilgrims and non-realistic Native Americans. Melinda smirked a little realizing they'd only be up a week before the Christmas decorations went up before everyone else's. Stepping around the store's merchandise on the sidewalk, she motioned a bit more briskly to her antique store with a slight jaunt, her long auburn locks dancing on her shoulders and her youthful and determined brown eyes peering through her front glass doors to her new best friend.

"A bit cold out there, ain't it?" Delia turned her look up to Melinda.

"Cold is not the word I'd use." She unwound her scarf from her fine features and reached down doing her partial striptease to her clothes. "I'd call it overwhelmingly bitter." She showed her distaste for the cold weather with a face and unfurled her shoulders from her coat, letting it slide down her arms before hanging it on the coat rack in the entrance to her storeroom. Garbed more comfortingly in a dark violet sweater and stylish French blue jeans ordered from a catalog, she rubbed her hands together to summon heat back into her bones and moved toward the counter with her boots rapping against the hard wood floor. Along the way, her glance passed through the doorway to her back room. Delia's son, Ned, was sitting in back with his schoolbooks struggling and scribbling with his math book open.

"No school?"

"Teacher in-service…" Delia lightly cleaned around the antiques. "He's also grounded until his next calculus test, and by his grades, it's going to be a while." She paused a second. "Mel, could you…"

"I didn't even take calculus in school." Melinda thought back to her youth. "My school didn't even have a teacher for it. The highest we got was basic algebra." She looked to Delia's struggle for a son with better grades. "But… I can try."

"Oh, would you…"

"How hard could it be?" Melinda asked out loud. She rolled her eyes with a non-committal bearing and turned round coming upon Ned. The young man had grown quite tall before her eyes and was no longer a mere youth but a handsome young man. She peered over his shoulder at his formulas and patterns and already realized she was in over her head.

"Melinda…" His head turned up to her. "Got any new stories for me?" He referred to her psychic ability to see ghosts. Although she did not see herself as a psychic, she had been quite open with her gift to him and most recently his mother. Neither of them seemed as fascinated nor open of the afterlife as Andrea had been, but at least Ned wasn't as afraid of it as his mother.

"Later," Melinda leaned down next to him. "Your mother wants me to tutor you and… uh…" The book was basically in another language. "They are teaching you this?"

"Exactly…" Ned looked to her as an equal than another adult. "Why do I have to learn this? I'm never going to use it in real life."

"Well," Melinda pulled her hair into a ponytail and secured it. "Figuring it out will help you to figure out other problems. Now let's see here…" She started reading the book to try and understand its codes and formulas. The young man next to her reacted a bit distracted and took a deep breath before looking back at her.

"Melinda…." Ned looked up to her hoping his restrained infatuation with her wasn't obvious. "Could I talk about something to you a moment? I don't want my mother to know about this."

"Ned," Melinda's voice dropped to a notable whisper. "I can't keep secrets from your mother."

"I heard the words…" Delia stepped back into the storeroom. "Mother and secret… What's up, Ned?" She stood and posed with her weight on one leg and her strict mother look taking control of her face. She arched her head at an angle expecting to know the truth. Melinda gasped embarrassingly. Ned stepped back deflated and vulnerable.

"It's about Nick Watterson's Halloween party last week…."

"Let me guess, " Delia looked at him disapprovingly upset. "There really weren't any parents there. You lied…"

"I didn't lie. I was…" Ned looked to Melinda for support and leaned backward as he sat on a table. "Misinformed… After Jesse picked me up, we didn't go to Nick's house. He drove us out to Weatherly Hills in the next county to some old sanitarium out in the woods. They planned it like this so no one would spill the news the party wasn't going to be chaperoned…."

"Was there beer there?" Delia liked this story less and less.

"Yes, but I didn't drink any, I swear." Ned continued. "I drank Pepsi all night so I could be the designated driver on purpose. It just seemed…" He rolled his eyes suffering from teen angst. "The best way to party without getting drunk and in trouble."

"Ned…" Melinda confronted him with her knowledge of the place. Local lore claimed the old tuberculosis hospital was haunted; it was only after such stories had started that local youths had started erroneously referring to it as a an alleged mental sanitarium. The location had been the site of a few low-budget movies because of its atmosphere and most camera crew and actors swore that the derelict structure was filled with ghosts. "Did something happen out there?"

"I'm not sure…" Ned stood up straight and nervously paced side to side. "I mean, Zack, Carter, Jesse and the guys had rigged the place with all these scares… you know, fishing line stuff, spring-loaded gags, hidden tape players and all this junk, but through all of it, there was a few things that happened that didn't seem faked. Our music went off, there were doors slamming, footsteps from the upstairs…." He paused and looked to his mother and then to Melinda. "This one girl, Jackie Stiles, vanished from the party."

"Ned…" Delia approached her son appealing to his conscience. "If your little friend vanished, you should go to the police…"

"She's not my friend, she's this vain, stuck-up diva princess who thinks she's better than everyone else." Ned told the truth. "Or she used to be. I mean, she was missing for over three hours, and we covered practically every possible room of the place looking for her in turns, and just when Nick finally decided to call the police, she pops up out of nowhere, in the old commissary sitting in a chair, sipping a soda as if nothing had happened."

"So, what's the problem?" Melinda didn't see it. "She wandered off, got lost and found her way back."

"I don't think so…" Ned looked to her. "The other day in school, she suddenly aced a history test. She's all of a suddenly mature and friendly and nice. I mean, she actually said hello to be and she's never been said more than one word to me much less acknowledged my existence once in her life. Even her best friend, Laurie Gold, says she like a suddenly new person." He took a deep breath realizing what he was about to say. "Melinda, I think she's possessed."

"What, like, Linda Blair possessed?" Delia didn't particularly like this stuff.

"Ned…" Melinda hadn't dealt with anything similar to this in her years of seeing ghosts. "There's no such thing. Ghosts can't possess the living."

"I was afraid you'd say something like that." Ned started motioning to wander out embarrassingly.

"Ned, wait…" Melinda rolled her eyes and turned back toward the young man. A brief glance to Delia, she made a short non-committal groan. "If you want me to meet her and give my opinion, I will, but chances are… she's just changed after a frightening experience. Getting lost in that old place would freak anyone out."

"Yeah… whatever…" Ned pulled his backpack up to over his shoulder and turned to the entrance. The bell on the door rang and he was soon off commiserating in his personal teen angst once more. Melinda and Delia shared a look between them and both shared a moment of tired frustration dealing with the young man.

"Wait a second…" Delia suddenly remembered something. "You're supposed to be grounded young man."