Annie even gave them a choice of meals. Dean suspected Sam would have preferred the lentil and zucchini torte with salad, but he'd said he didn't care what they ate. He'd insisted he didn't mind having the meatloaf. He liked meatloaf. He'd been absolutely positively sure he liked meatloaf. He'd snatched the menu out of Dean's hand, circled "meatloaf" and taken it down to Annie himself, and Dean had spent the time before dinner checking the DVD collection in their new room, sitting on the delightfully bouncy mattress of his new bed, checking out the toiletry collection in the bathroom and surreptitiously sniffing at the potpourri.

This was way better than a motel, even a good one. It was positively homey. For a little while, Dean found he could even entertain the fantasy that he and Sam really were on vacation and spending their time in Wisconsin doing nothing more sinister than sampling 5000 different kinds of mustard. He was so caught up in the notion as they made their way down to dinner that it didn't even occur to him to question why Talia appeared to be talking to herself when he saw her playing with a Nintendo in the family room. He even smiled a little as he watched her sharing the screen with some unseen playmate, but the smile faltered when he glanced up at Sam and saw the familiar thoughtful grooves settling between his friend's eyebrows. His attention snapped back to the innocent seeming tableau and he saw it through different eyes. Was there another presence there?

"Can you smell that?" Sam asked quietly.

Now that he'd mentioned it, Dean could detect a faint odor in the air – something like the smell of summer rain, or geraniums. He'd supposed it was an air purifier.

"Ozone," Sam murmured.

"You think the house is haunted?"

"You go on ahead," Sam told him. "I'll see if I can get a read on the place."

Dean reached the dining room in time to catch Annie carrying a large tray filled with plates of food.

"Oh, hey! Let me help you with that," he said, taking the tray out of her hands and then helping her set the plates on the table.

"Is everything O.K. with your room?" she asked.

"Oh, yeah. Everything's great," he assured her.

"Only, I . . . um . . . I wasn't sure whether you'd prefer two singles or a double . . . I left it but . . . you can push the beds together if . . . the mattresses zip up and there's spare bedding in – "

"Oh, no! We're not . . . I mean, we don't . . ." Damn. Was it the haircut?! Dean cleared his throat. "Two singles is fine."

Annie started to blush. "Oh, I'm sorry. I thought . . . the way you two were looking at each other . . . I'm sorry. I misunderstood."

Now Dean was embarrassed that he'd embarrassed Annie. "No, you didn't - exactly - it's just . . ." he tried to explain, but it was . . . "it's complicated. But the room's fine, as it is. It's great. Thanks." He smiled warmly and Annie looked reassured, but as she turned back toward the kitchen another thought struck him. "Er . . . what did you mean about the way we looked at each other?"

Annie opened her mouth to reply but Sam came into the room at that moment and Dean cleared his throat again to cut her off. There was an awkward moment and Sam glanced rather suspiciously between them, but then Annie called out to Talia that dinner was ready and she returned to the kitchen to fetch the rest of the meal.

The meaningful look Sam gave Dean as they took their seats confirmed that he'd found some significant readings. It was hard to believe. The place didn't feel haunted. Dean wasn't sure what he'd supposed a haunted house would look or feel like, but his imagination sure didn't fit with this small comfy home, littered with old books and Talia's toys and games, and currently warm with the mouth-watering smells of home cooking.

The meatloaf was delicious, almost as good as his mom's, and Annie served it with all the trimmings and a veritable banquet of roast and steamed vegetables, and when dessert followed Dean quickly got over his temporary falling out with apple pie, once he'd established the apples were local (and not from Indiana). Over dinner Talia chatted casually about her school activities, and an atmosphere of comfortable normality suffused the scene. Annie inevitably made conversation with the boys by interrogating them about the places they'd visited on their "road trip", and they embroidered BS stories about helping out on the movie set in Texas, camping in Lost Creek, visiting art houses in New York and an apiary in Oasis Plains. Sam gave a convincing description of the second biggest ball of twine in the continental U.S. Dean had never seen it, but he'd backed up Sam's story, and Sam did the same for him when he described a visit to a rodeo.

After dinner Talia ran off to play in the next room and over coffee Dean started to turn the conversation around. After customary but effusive compliments on the meal he began by talking about the book store. "It's great. Really interesting stock. Sam, here, came back raving about your comic books. He's a big fan of the Captain Astro series. He's got a major collection back home, don't you, Sam?"

A brief expression of alarm and general w.t.f. flitted across Sam's face and Dean tossed him a wink that was more teasing than reassuring, but he backed Dean up with a cautious nod and smile of acknowledgement. "Big time," he agreed.

"Oh, really?" Annie responded enthusiastically. "Did you have a good look at our collection, Sam?" she asked. "Because we have some, well, not rare issues, but certainly uncommon."

"Oh, he's got them all!" Dean assured her, quickly. "He's not gonna tell you this but he's even got the Astro Boy action figure still in its original packaging. Isn't that right, Sam?" Sam's tight smile had a definite touch of this had better be going somewhere fast, or else, so Dean briskly moved on. "I see you've got a lot of books around the house, too. You're obviously a huge book lover."

"It's true." Annie agreed. "I've grown up with it. My mother used to manage the store when I was a little girl, and I helped out there even when I was young. I've tried to encourage Tal's reading, too."

Dean smiled. "I can tell it's rubbed off," he said.

"Yes, she loves to read, and she has an active imagination . . . maybe too much . . ." Annie's attention strayed for a moment toward the family room. "Anyway," she continued hurriedly, "my husband and I tried to buy the store as soon as we could get finance. We did well at first, almost had it paid off before he got ill but then . . . well, you know how it is, how medical bills will add up. We had to refinance . . . and now it's getting more and more difficult to make ends meet."

Dean nodded. "We noticed you were selling. It's too bad."

Annie agreed. "Things are getting harder all over. The store isn't turning over what it used to. I can barely pay Lori's wages, and I can't run the store by myself when I have a young daughter to take care of. It's a shame. The arcade's nearly fifty years old and there's been a book store there since it opened, but several of the other stores are closed or closing now. They'll probably wind up being bought out by some consortium and the place'll be turned into a big discount store or something." She sighed. "I don't know what I'll do then. I really wanted there to be something stable in Talia's life, she's been through so much, and if we have to move again . . ." Annie trailed off and left the sentence unfinished.

Sam and Dean exchanged a look, and Dean prompted "have you been in this house long?"

She shook her head. "Just a few months. Our old place was too much to keep up after my husband passed, and there were too many memories . . . This house was supposed to be a fresh start but . . ." She hesitated. "Well, let's just say this place has issues."

Dean nodded understanding. "These old houses can be temperamental. What is it? Bad plumbing? Flickering lights? Rats scratching in the walls?"

"No. No, nothing like that. It's just . . ." Annie's gaze drifted to the family room again. "Well, Talia's . . . never really settled here."

"Really?" Dean watched the little girl. She was playing with cards now and looked reasonably content. "I thought she was doing O.K, considering."

Annie looked like she might say something more but then she just started gathering up plates. "I've run on long enough. You boys don't want to hear about our problems. You're on holiday."

"Hey, no, really, it's O.K." they said in unison, but she brushed them off.

"Can I get you anything else?" she asked, "Another coffee? More pie?"

Dean debated whether he could manage a third helping but, honestly, he was full. "No, really, I couldn't. But thank you," he told her, sincerely.

Sam helped Annie pile up the dishes and as he helped her carry them into the kitchen he gave Dean a pointed nod toward the family room. Dean gathered that he thought the daughter might be more forthcoming than the mother. He waited until Annie and Sam were fully occupied with the dishes then casually rose from the table and wandered into the next room. His spirits sank a little when he saw the cards Talia was playing with were from a tarot deck. She had them spread out on a coffee table, and Dean recognized a few of them from the reading that morning.

"I thought you said you didn't read the cards, Tal," he said as he took a seat on the couch next to the young girl.

"I don't, but my friend Donny sees things sometimes. I showed him your cards, the ones I remembered. Do you want me to tell you what he said about them?"

"Sure," Dean agreed, less than enthusiastically. Honestly, the last thing he wanted to hear was more prognostications from prophetic ghosts. "Er . . . is Donny here now?" he asked.

The question may have been too forthright. Talia looked up and studied him carefully, assessing whether he was poking fun. "No," she said. "He went away. Men make him nervous sometimes."

"Oh? Why's that?"

Talia directed a cautious glance toward the kitchen before she answered. Looked like this was a taboo subject. "Somebody hurt him once," she said quietly. "Someone who hurt other children, too."

Dean felt a clammy chill in his flesh as he digested that revelation. Other children. Was Donny one of those whose make-shift graves Talia had helped the police to unearth? In his mind's eye he could still see the tiny skeleton from the steel drawer in the M.E's office, and it was a few moments before he truly heard what Talia was saying as she picked up The Wheel of Fortune.

"Donny says this card is about the way of life. You see this man?" She pointed out the guy who was crawling around the outside of the wheel. "He thinks he's going in a straight line, but really he's just going round and round. Donny says everything in life is like that. The world is round, and all roads always just come back to where they started, so there's no point worrying where you're going. What matters is what you do along the way."

Dean frowned. Odd, how that seemed to resonate with his comments to Sam back in Indiana. Angel, he thought.

"The only part of a wheel that's still is the center," Talia continued. "Donny says you need to know where your center is, and rest there."

Dean cleared his throat. "Talia, how old is Donny?" he asked.

"He says he's nine and a half," she replied.

Nine and a half. "Sounds pretty smart for his age," he observed, a little shakily.

Talia gave him that assessing look again. It struck Dean that she was pretty smart, too, in her own way. "I think he's older than he thinks he is," she said, and she picked up The Chariot. "He says the important part of this card is the two horses. One's light, and the other's dark, and they're trying to pull the driver in different directions, but he needs them both. And he needs them to keep pulling together."

"How long have you known Donny?"

"Just a little while." She thought about it. "A few months."

"Since you moved here?"

She nodded.

"Your mom said you don't like this house? Is that right?"

She shook her head vehemently. "It's Mom that doesn't like it." She checked the kitchen again and added "she doesn't like Donny."

"Why's that?"

"She doesn't know him. She doesn't understand him. People are scared of things they don't understand." She picked up another card, The Magician.

Dean nodded knowingly. "Is she afraid he'll hurt you, maybe?"

"Donny wouldn't hurt me," she scoffed. "He's my friend." She held up the card in her hand. "This is your friend."

Dean frowned, puzzled. "This is Sam?"

"Donny says you wear him next to your heart, but you don't know it."

Dean chuckled awkwardly, taken aback. He could feel his cheeks warming. Out of the mouths of babes and children . . . "Oh, I know it," he admitted quietly. "But that's just between you and me, eh, Tal?"

She grinned shyly, perhaps pleased to be let in on a grown up's secret. "O.K," she said, and then she picked up the next card. "This is yours," she told him, holding up The Hanged Man. "Mom told you it was about sacrifice, didn't she?"

"Sacrifice or betrayal," Dean murmured, more to himself than Talia.

"It's both," she told him bluntly. "Donny says you can't have one without the other. What you do to yourself always affects other people, and you can't truly care for others if you don't care about yourself. You have to see it from both sides."

Dean stared thoughtfully at Talia. He could understand how it might be unnerving for her mother if she made a habit of going all John Wyndham like this, but it struck him that the advice she was passing on from her unearthly friend was of a whole different order from the threats Daniel Whitman had made.

"Tal, how old do you think Donny is?"

She scrunched up her nose. "I'm not sure," she admitted. "He looks and talks like he's nine, but he thinks old."

"How old?"

"Really, really old."

But he realized he was getting distracted from his purpose again so he forced himself back to the point. He needed to be sure the spirit wasn't any kind of threat to the kid. "Tal, are you sure your mom doesn't have a reason to be concerned about Donny? Like, does he have a temper? Does he get angry sometimes?"

Talia pulled a face a little like she thought he was nuts, a little like he'd just really disappointed her. "Donny doesn't get angry about anything," she insisted.

"Not even about the guy who hurt him?"

She thought about that for a moment. "He used to, but he let that go. Now he just wants to help people."

Dean was absorbed in his thoughts as Talia picked up the last card, and she held it in front of him for several moments before he focused and drew back abruptly.

"This is the most important lesson in the cards," she said while Dean stared at the skeleton looming just ahead of him. "Everybody dies."