One Month After the Monte Clair Incident

Blaire

"Alright," Blaire sighed as she clipped her ID badge to her scrubs. "Do you think you'll be working late again tonight?" She turned toward Liam, who was still pouring her cup of coffee in her to-go mug.

"Most likely."

"No rest for Evans County's finest," Blaire situated her bag over her shoulder.

"None," Liam took a sip off the top of her coffee and turned to Blaire. "Tell your dad I said hi."

"He'll more than likely ask about you before me," Blaire snorted. "I'll be sure to let him know his favorite child is doing just fine."

"Save some lives," Liam smirked as Blaire headed out the door.

Blaire's father did ask about Liam first. Though to be fair, he had his nose buried in the newspaper when Blaire entered the diner and there was a small piece featuring a follow-up to the "accidents" at the Monte Clair in which Liam had provided a statement. A month had passed and the demolition was well underway. Once the police had cleared the scenes of both the accidents and the vandalism that took place after the fact, the developers did not hesitate to tear it down.

Alex Cartello sipped his coffee quickly. He had to make sure to finish his two and a half cups before heading out to the hardware store two blocks from the diner. Blaire had ordered a tea and was just adding a sugar packet when the waitress stopped by to refill Alex's mug. Blaire found herself staring at the booth in the corner of the diner, recalling the lengthy conversation that had taken place there with the ghost of a smirk on her lips.

"You okay, Bear?" Her dad had been talking, that she knew. About what, she could not wrack her brain to recall.

"Yeah," she smiled reassuringly. "Just tired."

"Well, that's that crazy work schedule of yours," Alex asserted and Blaire chuckled.

"The hospital just won't accomodate my sleep schedule," she cracked a smile and stabbed at her eggs. "I'm just glad to be off nights. That was when I was really a zombie."

In reality, Blaire was sleeping just fine when she actually was sleeping. It was not the early shifts at the hospital that were getting to her, but the late nights spent scrolling through forums dedicated to hauntings all over the world. What had started out as a desire to make sense of the experience that she and Liam had shared was now a nightly ritual. She would cross reference her findings with happenings in the tri-state area, looking for patterns and unanswered questions. It was these same habits that had both greatly benefited and extremely exhausted her as she finished the top of her class in nursing school. Once Blaire discovered something new, she became absolutely ravenous to consume more.

"How's the store?" Blaire wanted to shift focus from her and prove to her father that she was not entirely distracted. "I saw the help wanted sign in the window. Didn't find anyone after Jake went back to school?"

"Nope," Alex let out the air he was holding in his cheeks, "Jake is gonna be hard to replace. He'd been there for five years."

"Why don't you let me come in on my off days?" Blaire offered, one she had been throwing out casually in conversations over the last few months. "I don't mind helping out until you find a replacement."

"No way," Alex touched his napkin to his lips. He reached out to nurse his coffee again. "I want you to enjoy your days off. Eddie and I can handle the place for now."

"Eddie is 72, dad." Blaire squirted more ketchup onto her hashbrowns. "Eddie can't handle Eddie."

Alex laughed, "he gets by. And I don't want you worrying about me. I've got things."

Blaire wanted to argue, but knew that Alex's stubbornness to handle his own affairs was a tough match for her own. Instead of saying something, she picked her teeth with her tongue before taking another long sip from her mug.

A dull day in the ER left Blaire more tired than she was when she woke up that morning. She caught herself twice wondering if the sutures that she was doing on a middle aged man were from a fight with a spectre of some sort. Unsure of how to casually bring up local hauntings, she bit her tongue as she sewed sixteen stitches in his arm. Later, a four year old boy came in with a broken leg. He was unable to tell them what was happening when he broke it. His mother stated that she had just left to go to the bathroom for a minute and when she returned, he was screaming on the playroom floor. A month ago, Blaire would have thought of all of the possible tripping hazards found in the toy room of a toddler. But that was no longer the case. She found herself shuffling through stories of spirits, demons, and poltergeists that had done a number on the youngest members of a household. But it was not as if she could dive into that line of questioning as the young boy sobbed as she assisted with setting the break.

After her shift, Blaire sat in the car, her hands resting on the steering wheel as the heat whirled through the vents. She watched as her windshield defrosted, her gaze unfocused. She had noticed herself chewing on her lip as she glanced at the time. Liam was getting home later tonight. She had at least another hour before she could expect her.

During her late night searches, Blaire had stumbled upon some local lore that had stuck with her over the past couple of weeks. The house was just two towns over, a short 20 minute drive from the hospital. She was familiar with a more vague version of the story she had found on Haunted Connecticut from bonfires and sleepovers in her childhood. But the stories she had read about sightings in this house, which had been vacant for years now, had stuck with her. So much so that she had considered swinging by just to look into it on most of her drives home from work in the evenings.

Annoyed with herself, but more motivated to squash the gnat-like curiosity buzzing around in her head, Blaire pulled off in the opposite direction of home. During her drive, she found herself wondering what Sam and Dean did to prepare for their ventures into haunted places. How much research took place beforehand? Did they have a system of some sort? How often did they find themselves having to pose as federal agents or some other figure of authority? The more she thought, the more of a logistical nightmare with a steep learning curve it became. Despite it, she found herself spiraling from one thought to the next.

When she pulled up to the house, she couldn't help but laugh at herself. Here she was, idling outside of a site of a probable urban legend in her navy scrubs in the dead of winter. She was hardly the image of a true ghostbuster.

She surveyed the house from the driver's seat. It was an unassuming Dutch Colonial, nothing unlike the houses around it. The only way Blaire had known for sure it was the right house was the overgrown landscaping that crowded the front of the home. There were withered, leafless vines that eerily climbed the side of the home. The more she stared, the more she was able to confirm the length of time that this place had been without any care.

"What are you doing?" She ran her hands through her hair as she looked ahead at the neighboring houses, careful to make sure no one had noticed her there. The street was fairly empty, with very little traffic.

Deciding that this was a laughable attempt at chasing this new thirst for adventure, she put the car into drive. She still had plenty of time to get home before Liam. This would ensure that she would never have to speak of the scenic route she took home.

She stole one more glance up at the house. Her stomach lurched. Standing in an upper window, she saw the face of a young woman. As quickly as she had registered the sight of something in the window, it had disappeared. She froze for a moment, quickly cycling through the possibilities of what she had seen. Just weeks before this, she would have blamed a curtain, a bird flying past, a floater in her eye. But those explanations did not satiate her curiosity. She felt compelled to find out if it was something more.

She threw the car into park and scrambled out of the seat. Once she was sure no one was on the street to watch her travel up the driveway, she turned to the trunk. Armed with a maglite and the same tire iron that had been so useful at the theatre, she started up the drive. She wondered if the police were called, how would she explain this to Liam? Blaire tried to ignore this newfound impulsiveness as she zipped her coat up to her chin. Between the thickness of the collar at her jawline and the hat she had tugged around her ears, she hoped it would make her harder to identify.

She knew better than to take the uneven front walk up to the door. When she arrived at the side door, she was surprised to find that it had been completely unlocked. Part of Blaire had been hoping there was more of a barrier between her and her destination, something to give her pause to think about what she was doing. The door swung open with a deep groan. She felt herself jolt as it made contact with the wall beside it.

She had to decide between the steps to her right that went down into a dark basement or the two steps upward into what appeared to be a kitchen. Blaire was curious, she did not have a death wish. With that, she took the steps up.

The kitchen appliances were dated. Clearly the last owners had not been concerned with updating the place. Cabinets hung off their hinges. Drawers were left ajar. Blaire shone the light into the dining room, straight ahead. There were cobwebs between the chairs, dust had settled like a blanket of snow over the table.

It was in that moment, when Blaire had let herself grow comfortable in the house's deafening silence, that she heard a thump from the other room. The light from the flashlight jerked off-center as she leapt. Suddenly aware of her surroundings, her current circumstances, and her glaring lack of experience, Blaire took off in the opposite direction. She was out the back door and into the cold.

Blaire was thankful for Liam's general lack of engagement that evening. She had gotten home not long after Blaire, wordlessly abandoning her winter accessories and work necessities at the door. She returned from her bedroom with her hair in a loose bun and wearing even looser sweatpants, a telltale sign of the extent of her apathy. It was cocoa puffs and quiet, mindless television for the evening.

It wasn't often that the two of them got into simultaneous funks, but Blaire was grateful for the sense of solidarity as they both settled into the couch, turned on the local news, and wordlessly consumed their comfort foods.

The report of a local suspicious death pulled Blaire from her thoughts. She

watched as they panned over the warehouse where the body was found and couldn't help but wonder if this was another address that she would find in one of her late night searches of what goes bump in the night.

Liam

"Sinclair," A voice enunciated forcefully from somewhere behind her. Liam jumped slightly in her seat and shuffled the files on her desk, pretending to be straightening up her work space. Composing herself quickly, she shot a glare over her shoulder at her partner.

"What?" She snapped.

"I called for you like four times," Hill said as his hands pushed back the corners of his suit jacket and rested on his hips. Liam turned back to her desk and suppressed the urge to roll her eyes when he said "where's your head at?""

"Are you gonna tell me what you want, or are we going to spend another five minutes talking about how I didn't answer your beck and call?"

Hill didn't rise to the challenge, instead slapping another file on the desk in front of her, "another B&E. Over on Madison Street."

Liam bit the inside of her cheek and took a deep breath, willing herself not to lash out again, "just put a few blue uniforms there tonight. Make sure they get a record of everything that's missing."

"That's just it," said Hill, pushing the file toward her once again, "nothing's missing. They keep hearing footsteps in the attic at night, but whoever it is never comes downstairs."

Liam stopped organizing her desk and peered up at him as she contemplated this information.

"And they're sure it isn't a raccoon?"

Hill raised an eyebrow, "I think they can probably tell the difference between a raccoon-sized intruder and a human-sized one."

"Then you're naive," Liam said with the tiniest smirk to indicate that she was not really trying to start an argument with him. She opened the file and glanced over the report a patrolman had made about the incident. The statement from the family indicated that this wasn't the first time they had heard footsteps and thumping from the attic. The space between Liam's eyebrows creased as she read their account of events. Perhaps this was the kind of strange case she had been looking for.

It wasn't that she wanted to have another experience like the Monte Clair. But if there was one thing Liam Sinclair hated, it was being in the dark. Being ignorant. Missing details that should be glaringly obvious. She had been walking through the world like a ghost herself over the last month. It was as if she'd just noticed the veil that separated her from the world as it really was, and now that she knew the veil was there, hanging in her eyes, she couldn't keep herself from swatting at it to try and tear it off. How many evils had slipped under her radar over the years? How many unexplained deaths - how many unsolved cases - would look like child's play to men like Dean and Sam Winchester? She needed to know. Everything had to be started over. Every case looked at with fresh eyes.

"Let's roll, then," she announced after a moment, earning a skeptical look from her partner.

"Now you're interested?"

"Do you want me to be or not?"

"Alright, let's go."

The owners of the colonial house on Madison St. seemed like reasonable enough people. Liam and Hill spent about fifteen minutes in their living room getting another account of the past night's events before Liam asked to take a look at their attic.

The space could only be accessed through a pull-down ladder, and Liam resisted the urge to sigh as she hit a wave of heat while climbing the rickety wooden structure. It felt much too hot for winter, probably because the house's heating system was old and less than economical. Either way, she knew enough to know that ghosts came with chills.

"Watch your step," She told Hill as he climbed through the hole in the floor behind her. Part of the space was covered in plywood flooring, but many spots contained nothing but deteriorating insulation and studs. She gave him a hand up and glanced around at the contents of the cramped room. In the far corner, an area covered in plywood held boxes of Christmas decorations that the family had mentioned storing up here. Liam stepped across the gaps in the flooring, using the studs for support, until she reached the corner.

"Watch your head," Hill murmured, following behind her. She glanced up from where she was crouching to see that large nails were protruding from the

the low-hanging beams.

"No wonder everyone wants to be up here," she muttered, shifting some of the boxes to look behind them, "they've made it so homey."

"Anything?" Hill asked from over her shoulder, where he was shifting more boxes.

"Not unless you're interested in Mistletoe," Liam said, holding up a sprig that had fallen from one of the boxes.

"I might be," Hill retorted with raised brows. Liam rolled her eyes and tossed it aside. She turned and surveyed the other side of the attic, nearest the single, octagonal window on the far wall. One of the wide, thin plywood boards had warped so that its edge rose just enough to trip anyone unsuspecting. She had crossed the attic in moments and knelt in front of it, hissing slightly as she forced her fingers underneath the unfinished wood, pulling up on it.

"There's a crowbar in the car," Hill reminded her.

"Nah, I've got it," Liam insisted as it gave and pulled free with a little bit of wobbling. The plywood, the size of a small area rug, lifted like a trap door and in the spaces between the studs beneath, several objects had been tucked for safe keeping. Liam pulled a pair of gloves from her pocket when Hill stepped forward to grab the plywood from her and hoist it up further. She carefully pulled out the contents - a sleeping bag, some loose clothes, a few half-eaten bags of chips and other snacks, and a backpack with a large hole ripped in the side.

"Looks like we've got ourselves a squatter," Hill said.

"This family's never gonna sleep again," said Liam, carefully picking up the clothes and shaking them with her thumb and forefinger. A used needle fell out, and she sighed.

When Liam and Hill had successfully and safely bagged the found items and emerged from the attic, the couple who owned the house was waiting at the foot of the ladder with bated breath.

"What's that?" The woman asked, her eyes traveling timidly to the black plastic bag clutched in Hill's fist.

"Evidence," Liam said simply, pulling her gloves off, "Ma'am do you know any heroin addicts?"

The woman's eyes went wide, and she stuttered, seemingly taking the question as an accusation, "no, of course not."

The husband cleared his throat and placed a hand on his wife's shoulder, "our nephew."

"Oh," the woman breathed, tense, "yes, Mark. He does have...some issues."

"And does he happen to be unhoused at the moment?" Liam continued. The couple broke eye contact, suddenly very interested in the floor.

Hill opened the evidence bag and stepped forward, gesturing for them to glance in at the contents, "anything look like it might be his?"

The woman nodded, her face turning white.

"So...what? He's been breaking into our house at night?" the man asked, his face disbelieving.

"We'd have to have our people take a closer look at the evidence, but it looks that way," said Liam, "if so, would you like to press charges against him?"

The couple exchanged a wary glance.

"They never press charges," Hill sighed as the two detectives crossed the front yard after bidding the homeowners goodbye.

"Would you?" Liam asked.

"If it meant he would finally get help? Yes."

"Oh, because the penal system is so well known for that," Liam scoffed. Hill stopped, barking a "hey," that signaled he wanted Liam to hold up, too.

"What?" Liam said, turning on him with an intensity that made him take a step back.

"What's up with you? You just solved a case in like 10 minutes, and you act like you're disappointed about it."

"Am I supposed to be excited about drug-addicted squatters?"

"You're avoiding the question. You've been tense ever since the Monte Clair case, and it's affecting your work."

Liam watched him quietly, seethingly, because she knew he was right, and she knew he knew he was right. She shoved her tongue into her cheek and looked away.

"You botched one case," He continued, "it happens. You're the only one still thinking about it."

But that was just it. She hadn't botched it. She had solved it. And she couldn't tell anyone. She had been living with this very public "failure" for a month now, and it was all she could do to keep to herself. Blaire had talked her down from her anger several times, reminding her that anyone she trusted with the truth would find her crazy, which would only make things at work worse. You and I know the truth, Blaire had said, that's enough. But Blaire knew as well as Liam did that it wasn't enough just to know the truth. Still, they had lives to lead and people to help. Liam took a deep breath through her nose and met Hill's eyes.

"Sorry," she said, her voice rasping, as if her body itself was rebelling against the apology. "You're right. I've just been a little off since then. You know it's not easy for me to...fail."

"You need to use your PTO," Hill said, shoving his hands into his jacket pockets and brushing past her toward the car, "Go to the beach. Get laid. Something."

Liam sighed, suddenly exhausted now that the height of her anger had passed, and turned to follow him to the car.

By the time Liam made it home that night, she did not feel like talking. Blaire, ever the perceptive friend and roommate, seemed to pick up on it almost immediately, and silently handed her the box of Cocoa Puffs from on top of the fridge. Liam accepted it with a grunted thanks and poured herself a bowl of cereal while Blaire scraped her grilled cheese off the skillet with a spatula and flipped it onto a clean plate. On nights like this, when the reality of her job didn't live up to the hype, and her colleagues were giving her a hard time, Liam had a tradition of plopping onto the couch under a throw blanket with a bowl of Cocoa Puffs and watching TV until she was almost too tired to make it to her bed. She had single-handedly consumed several boxes of Cocoa Puffs over the last few weeks.

Blaire joined her on the couch, content to sit quietly and watch the evening news. The anchor was reporting on a suspicious death in the next county over, and Liam wished they had included more information that actually mattered. She wondered if it could've been caused by a spirit like Beatrice Patridge and considered asking Blaire what she thought about it. Instead, she shoved another spoonful of Cocoa Puffs into her mouth and turned up the TV to drown out the sound of her own crunching.