Cold Empty Rooms

by Andy Marino

Genres: Ghost; Occult & Supernatural; Horror

Synopsis

From the dark imagination of underground horror sensation Andy Marino comes a haunted house story like you've never read before...

"Marino's work is unlike any others in the genre – horrifying, complex, fascinating, and utterly unique." – Hannah Whitten, New York Times bestselling author

Deep in the woods, on the side of a mountain, there sits an old, sprawling manor. Only those who truly need it will find it.

Mara and Soren are the latest residents. The two are broke, deeply in love, and desperate for a home.

But something is wrong with the house. Soren begins to receive messages from a nameless entity that he has dubbed The Great Other. The first direction is simple: Invite more to this home. The second: Relieve them of their sorrow.

Mara, too, hears this otherworldly voice. She has been running from her past for a long time. The Great Other offers her the solace she seeks, if she has the courage to walk the home’s shadowed halls.

Soon more wanderers begin to arrive: a collection of outcasts, drawn in by Soren’s magnetic ideology.

As his feverish teachings force the residents to reveal shocking truths, old griefs scratch their way onto Mara's heart. Every day, Soren seems more dangerous. More devout. Mara knows she should leave. But within the shifting walls of this ancient home, something darkly miraculous is unfolding.

Wounds have been suffered in this place. Wounds that are. Wounds that will be.

“Andy Marino understands horror in a way that very few writers do." – Keith Rosson, author of Coffin Moon

Release date: November 10, 2026

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 384

Sample

Long before the prayers take shape there is simply the house.

This creaking place, warmed only by last night’s embers. Sitting up in the bed fashioned from Goodwill blankets and two scavenged mattresses, Mara blinks away the vestiges of a typical dream, a spiraling trip through a museum of wrongs. A husband and child not seen in weeks, deservedly so for one but not the other. The other only a boy. All night they bloom and curl, long fingers pointed back at her, always.

Mara’s pinecone-colored hair frames her brooding and dark-complected face. She scratches at dry skin between her eyebrows. Stretching, yawning, she is made aware of her own ripeness. There is running water here, yes, but no working shower, just a hose in the overgrown yard. And there is only so much bathing one can do with a feeble spray outdoors in October. She has taken this past week to sponging in the kitchen, dripping soapy froth on the linoleum while the mangy old cat eyes her warily from a broken chair.

“Marcellina, queen of the dawn, arise!” Soren, nude, comes into the bedroom bearing a cracked and steaming mug. It is a van item, not of the house, emblazoned with the faded logo of a water park.

“I’m up.” Shivering, she pulls the blanket up to her shoulders. “How are you naked? It’s freezing.”

His bandy-muscled arm extends the mug and she accepts, cupping it in both hands.

“Cowboy coffee,” he says. “Hot off the stove.”

Steam wreathes her face. She breathes deep. The mug stolen from a vacant hunting cabin somewhere east of the Finger Lakes, the hills beyond one of those towns with an Indian name. Rude A-frame nestled among evergreens, its door splintering at the first encounter with Soren’s combat boot. Canned corn and beans, a stack of flannel dish towels, a box of shotgun shells. A tub of marshmallow fluff she had eaten with a spoon till Soren pulled over so she could spatter the side of route 80 with off-white bile, bent at the waist, tank top riding up as his calloused hand traced her bony spine.

“No cream?”

“I didn’t get to milk the cows yet.”

He leaps up onto the mattress and lands on all fours like some pale Scandinavian mantis. She lets out a squeal and clutches the mug tight.

“I fucking love this place.” His head darts toward her as if to nip playfully at her flesh. The springs of the old mattresses protest as his hands and feet make shifting divots. “I. Fucking.” She braces herself for the inevitable volume swell. “LOVE THIS PLACE.”

The blanket loosely draped across her shoulders falls away. He reaches for her breast and she scoots, chased by a nervy flash of the man she left behind, sprung from her dream, presiding in admonishment over her reckless freedom. Barefoot, careful not to spill, she rises from the mess of twined sheets and sets her coffee atop a stack of crates in which she has placed worn paperbacks alongside knickknacks from the road. Her boy’s photograph is pressed inside a lurid pulp thriller snagged from a mini-mart. She takes from a hook the scratchy robe appropriated from a Pittsburgh Best Western.

“No robe,” Soren pleads. He reaches out. “No clothes. Ever.” Mara cinches the robe’s belt and sips her coffee.

“My dreams are weird here.”

“Your dreams are always weird.”

“Weirder.”

His hand drops and with a deep sigh of thwarted lust he finger-combs straw-colored bangs away from his eyes. “We were on the move for a while, and now we stopped. It’s gonna take some getting used to.”

At first the ceaseless motion was the point. And now like the alcoholic who swears off the bottle, there are suppressed ghosts to vanquish. She goes to the window, careful not to snag a toe on the floorboards’ irregular joinery. Pulling aside a makeshift curtain, she peers out across the countryside. So these are the Catskills. Leaves in shades of ochre and crimson bunched in riots of color like fireworks exploding with an aching slowness that will take all season. A single dilapidated farmhouse in a clearing not half a mile away, a sagging cutout against the sky. Sad as a dream out of reach.

Someone once built with great hope a barn. Raised its roof with zeal. Now it rots. She lifts her eyes and her heart quickens. The sky is flecked with soft, many-sided shapes. Wisps of things moving in and out of view behind the clouds, as hard to define as phosphenes crackling behind her eyelids.

“Soren, come look at this.”

“Can’t move. Rolling joint on thigh.”

Setting down the mug on the sill, she rubs her eyes and looks again. Now there is only the overcast dawn, low and heavy. But Mara is reluctant to give the vision over wholly to her imagination. She chalks it up to latitudinal phenomena, some drab and fleeting simulacra of northern lights.

“Won’t you join me for a dawn benediction,” Soren says.

Back in the bed they face each other cross-legged. Between them is a small chipped plate on which the burning joint rests. Soren’s unblinking gaze fixes upon her as he uplifts his palms and urges the smoke on its ether-bound journey. In a dirty mirror she spies the cat as it darts across the hall. Odd little thing, nosy as an old widowed neighbor, yet keenly pursuant of a bond with these new humans in the house. Soren is intoning but there is no reverberation, no echo, only an anechoic flatness to this room. Voices do not bounce. Words are born and die without fanfare. Her heartache in this weird new dawn runs in parallel to this flatness. Dampened by all that has transpired here, the agony and triumph of a century long past. A sound burbles in her mind like faraway music, a radio tuned to a string quartet at the bottom of a well.

“We offer up this fragrant and bountiful smoke with a promise that we will improve this place you have led us to in your great wisdom and benevolent grace,” Soren vows with eyes raised, invoking the great presence that drew them together in the first place. A chance barroom encounter, quarters fed into the jukebox to prove to each other they were sticking around. The bar a tenderhearted palace of boots nailed to ceiling beams. Mara and Soren, drinking and dancing and sharing in the wreck of their lives, speaking with coy reverence of the elusive higher power they have both tried to deliver themselves over to in their worst moments or in times of naked surrender. Both of them concluding that church-formed conceptions of God hold no sway. Clink of bottles, scrape of a stool leg. Leaning in close. But they have felt the gooseflesh frisson of some Great Other, they both agreed, yes—Mara during sleepless nights waiting for her husband to come home and Soren in the rote mechanics of the factory floor, standing rubber-gloved at his workstation, eyeballing wiper blades for defects, beseeching some vague universal architect for deliverance or, short of that, revelation of meaning behind the machines’ endless thrum.

She lifts the joint, pulls smoke deep into her lungs, and sends it billowing to wreathe Soren’s head as he speaks. “And we’ll have this nondenominational worship thing going on for anyone, for everyone, totally inclusive, and not, like, dogmatic. I mean, you can be the world’s most hardcore atheist and still roll in and drink a few beers with us, no judgment, no pressure.”

Passing him the smoldering Zig-Zag rollup, watching his mouth work out the shape and thrust of his thoughts. This sheen of grandiosity so nakedly compensating for what he terms the blah years. The wasted days. Autopilot at the wiper factory. Sometimes in his sleep his hands still perform languid quality control checks.

Mara catches the cat advancing along the same floorboard as before, stalking a cockroach on a cartoon loop. The cloudy mirror leans against the wall opposite the bed and in it Mara sees her slender hand pass the joint to Soren.

She blinks—

—and watches the action she performed a minute ago, perfectly mimicked. Reflected with a lag.

Soren’s mouth in the mirror is out of sync with what he is saying now, words carried on smoke-laced breath, “… but a strict no assholes policy, right? So we’ll put together some kind of vetting system, because obviously this’ll be a welcoming destination for weirdos, because honestly you’d have to be kind of operating on the fringes to make your way here in the first place. What I mean is, we don’t want the kind of summer-of-love types who fucked things up when they got into hard drugs, we want the earlier ones, the chill ones.”

He takes a throat-scorching drag, then passes the wet and diminished joint across the plate. Mara performs little birdlike sips of smoke. In the mirror, after a while, she does it again.

“I’m feeling like a newborn here,” he says.

Mara gazes across the bed at his wastrel’s body, the knobs of his spread knees and the dark blond hair where his legs meet. The skin stretched almost translucent across his ribs so that in the right light she is certain she could look past blue veins into the throbbing murk of his organs.

“Look,” she tells him, and points to the mirror. After a moment her reflection repeats the movement. Regarding this other self, Mara is transfixed by the notion that she will spot a telltale blemish, some foreign birthmark to offset this vision from the one she considers real. But after the lag, there is only the purest mimicry. A gaze of disquiet from her eyes that her husband, in the early days, likened to some lidless deep-sea fish. In later days he doubtless forgot even their color, which is an emerald-flecked gray. Center-parted hair, brown and straight, asymmetrically mussed from side sleeping. Features that strike her as bunched too close in the middle of her face—a face saved from blandness by gothic cheekbones. And then the stolen robe, thin and scratchy, pulled tight against her body so that only the patches of bare skin feel the chill. The V of her chest and her legs below the knee, the fine hairs of which she can see from here, almost dew-frosted in the crawling light. The welted ankle, scar tissue like pinkish slugs. The crooked toe.

“Okay,” Soren says, gazing into the mirror, “that is awesome. I am outrageously high. This is the shit I got from that dishwasher outside Buffalo.” He stretches out his arms. “Good morning, world!”

Mara waits until mirror-Soren repeats the gesture then turns to look at him. His face is pinched with an earnestness that puts her on edge. There is a moment of weightless potential. Then he sneezes and studies his reflection, grinning at the lag.

“My aunt was a really cool person.”

“I thought you didn’t know her?”

He sets the joint on the plate and gets out of bed. At the mirror he runs a hand along its deeply grained wooden frame, then rubs his fingertips together to form dust clumps, which he flicks away. Mara watches him lean in abruptly as if to surprise the mirror. In conformity with the lag he appears reflected a moment later. The fine tuft of hair above his tailbone brings to mind for her a baby bunny. In the hall the cat pursues her quarry.

“Just the fact that the woman had something like this makes me think she absolutely ruled.” He jumps in front of the mirror with a vaudevillian expression of surprise. “Where do you even get something like this? I’m imagining a secret market in, like, Marrakesh. A shady deal for an artifact of great power.”

“Or a magic store.”

“A magic store?”

“A store for magician supplies.”

With a fist he knocks on the frame and listens as if for a telltale indication of its trickery. A hollow for some kind of mechanism, of what sort Mara cannot imagine. She stubs out the joint, and when she turns again to the mirror her reflection—operating normally—mimics the movement with real-time precision that startles her.

“Okay,” Soren says, waving a hand in front of his face. “Situation normal.” He wheels around and regards Mara with what she takes as misplaced suspicion. “That really happened just now, right? With the mirror?”

“We both saw it,” she says, watching her lips move in perfect synchronicity.

Soren stands next to her and rests a hand on her shoulder, and they both gaze into the glass, their stillness a tableau. Mara has never been inclined to take photographs, but now she yearns for a camera. There is something about this new phase of life that should be documented.

“We look good,” he says. Placing a hand atop her head, he rakes his nails lightly along her scalp. “I feel like if we didn’t meet that night in the Lucky Sevens we would have met somehow eventually anyway.”

“Yes,” Mara says, running a finger up and down his side, waist to armpit and back again. “It was only a matter of time.” She hesitates until her next words become true in their arrangement. “I think everybody’s got some kind of path that was meant to be. Just not everybody gets to find it.”

“We’re talking about fate, here.”

“Maybe we’re talking about it.” She points up at the ceiling.

“Maybe we are.” He quits scratching her head. “You want some water?”

“I’m going to finish my coffee.”

He pads barefoot out of the room, yawning and stretching. She listens to the cold hiss of the pipes in the walls as he turns on the tap. The Mara in the mirror stands up and approaches the glass while she remains on the bed.

I will not stand up, she tells herself. I will sit right here. But she has to see, so she gets to her feet and follows her reflection’s lead in scrutinizing the edges where the frame meets the glass. Elastic is the word for this mirror’s engagement with time. Stretched first one way, and now another. She watches Soren in the glass as he returns to the room and sets down his cup on the floor. This other Mara goes to him, and with two hands he unties her belt and slides the robe off her shoulders. I will not, she tells herself again. Yet when he comes back and sets his water down and reaches for her belt she lets him, then places one hand on his chest and one on the back of his head, just as she has been shown. In the mirror, he is leading her to the bed while the cat peers in before receding into the sluice of the hallway’s shadows.

Attention Dreamers, Seekers, Charlatans, Theorists, Dropouts, Lovers, Runaways, Fiends, Misfits, and everyone in between (but please, no poets, we have to draw the line somewhere):

You are cordially invited to a new evolution. Live how you want to live with room to grow wild and free in all directions. It’s like The Real World without cameras. It might not work but at least it won’t be boring.

17 Tannery Road

Join us

Mara lowers the half sheet of printer paper to find Soren grinning with expectation, awaiting judgment.

“It’s kind of vague,” she tells him. His grin falters. With a ragged fingernail he scratches at a rash on his forearm. Poison ivy. Leaves of three, let them be. Mara thanks the universe for her own apparent immunity. Half the weeds in these untended environs sport leaves of three. Acres of invasive foliage climbing rotten fence posts and choking half-dead oaks.

She regards his faded overalls with their shredded knees and buttoned-up top hiding the Blind Melon logo on his black T-shirt. It is not a warm day yet he goes about coatless.

Mara is wearing his faux-leather jacket as she toils in the little patch of garden she is loosely carving out of the morass with a scavenged trowel. Over the past week it has emerged from misbegotten tangles of pokeweed and tiny stalks of elderberry and wild bergamot lingering long beyond summer’s end. All of it woven with Virginia creeper that consumes fallen trellises. Clearing a patch of dirt here is like reaching the bottom of some ocean crevice where sightless grubs wend through labyrinths dug with remarkable instinct, and which Mara with her old trowel will collapse in half a second. And the grubs, she wonders: Will they sense her coming down upon them as wrathful?

“It’s intentionally vague,” Soren says. Her attention snaps back and she pockets the flyer. “Like we talked about. We don’t want to define what this is, right? We want it to take shape organically. Like if it ends up being an artists’ colony, that’s cool, but we don’t want to advertise it like that and get a bunch of capital-A Artists. You know?”

A honking V of geese wheels out over the hills. “I know,” Mara says. “But maybe take out the line about it being The Real World without cameras.”

Soren’s hands find his hips and he chews on the inside of his mouth. “Okay, well, I just went to Kinko’s on my grocery run this morning. I already put them up.”

“You put them up where?”

He shrugs. “In town. Bulletin board at the diner. Laundromat, deli, that store that only sells soda and dolls. Various other places.”

“Oh.” Mara lets the trowel fall to plant its tip in the soft earth at her feet.

Soren folds his arms and Mara thinks of his movements in the bedroom mirror, which has reflected normally for eight days now. The more distance she has from that hazy dawn, the more unreal it seems.

In the sky the clouds hide smears that flit too quickly to catch sight of, though Mara knows them like one might recognize a long-dead ancestor in a dream.

He reaches out. “Are you mad at me?”

“No.” She gestures at the wild land, the decayed facade of the house at her back. “But we’ve got months of work to do on this place. It’s barely livable for the two of us.”

She leaves unspoken how fearful she is for others to exert their personalities upon her precious space. How fragile this life she has found herself inhabiting.

“But with more hands on deck,” he says, “we won’t have to fix it all up ourselves.”

“I don’t mind the work.”

A far-off barking dog joins the chittering birds of the untamed property. “You are mad at me.”

Mara pauses, struck by a neediness she can scarcely understand yet must navigate. “I’m not. I promise. I’m here to take things as they come. I was just caught off guard.”

His eyes retain a hopeful glow. “Freedom,” he says. The one-word mantra that powered their escape.

“Freedom,” she agrees, and bends to her trowel. Soren tramps off to the van to ferry grocery bags inside, stepping carefully on the cracked and scattered stones of the front walk.

Mara displaces grubs and pockets a faded Corona cap discovered in a clump of dirt. She rips creeper from the trunk of a red maple whose dazzling brightness leaks onto the house’s dull siding. Burrs cling to her jeans and gloves. She takes off Soren’s jacket and sips water from a mason jar as a breeze coming off the mountains dries her sweat. Then she gets back to work. Her head is buzzing with the simple goodness of the task. To coax actual food from the land has always seemed to her the province of those at peace with themselves. Entertaining the thought sparked visions of the soil rebelling against her touch. But in this place there are possibilities born of freedom. In this place her touch will not be poison. Soren tinkers inside the house and comes out to kiss her forehead and marvel at her progress. The sky darkens and her muscles ache yet still she digs and pulls, collecting sticks and piling them off to one side.

Gingerly she clips abrasive pokeweed and kneels in the dirt to pull it out by the roots. There was once a fence here, and she uses its rough outline as a guide for the garden that will inhabit this patch of yard. She pockets a shotgun shell, a link of chain, a quarter from 1936, a small ceramic kangaroo with no head, an empty cigarette case. While poking her trowel down to dislodge the hard-packed dirt around a broken wheelbarrow, the tool hits something hard and unyielding. She digs up a mask shaped like the upper half of a face, a metal curve with ragged eyeholes punched in it. A tarnished copper harlequin mask.

A scrabbling noise comes from the gravel drive, and Mara rises to her feet to show Soren what she has found. But Soren is not there.

An older man in a cowboy hat comes up the front walk. His shirt is half unbuttoned to reveal a silver medallion on a black string. His jeans are spattered with paint and crusted with dirt. Over his shoulder is a frame backpack for camping or a long wilderness hike. Mara grips the trowel tightly in one hand and the mask in the other.

“Soren!” she calls back toward the house.

The man in the cowboy hat stops walking. He is close enough now for Mara to see the pockmarks in his tanned-hide face. His bedroll pokes out either side of the backpack. His fist clutches a half sheet of paper: Soren’s flyer. He brandishes it toward her like a man flashing his invitation. The paper whips in the wind and curls back over his hand.

The man spits in the grass. “Hey,” he says, waving the flyer. “I got this.”

“Hello,” Mara says, then gives her head a quarter turn backward. “Soren!”

The man lifts a hand to tug at the brim of his hat. “All right,” he says. “Name’s William.” He looks Mara up and down. “Who might you be, little lady?”

“I’m Mara,” she says. “And Soren’s just inside, he’ll be coming right out.”

“Boyfriend, then?”

“Yes.”

William grins and puts his hands up in mock surrender, letting the flyer blow away. “All right, all right, I ain’t here to upset the apple cart.” He winks. “I’m just seein’ what all there is to see.” There is a pause in which Mara shifts from one foot to the other and something small darts through the brush.

“Oh!” the man moves with surprising grace and wriggles out of his backpack and sets it down on the ground. He unzips a pouch and rifles through with vigor, tossing items to the dirt: Rubik’s Cube, tattered notebook, prayer beads, and a long knife in a black sheath. Mara’s heart quickens. At last he fishes out two silver cans of beer. “I won’t offer you a cold one, ’cause they ain’t.” He holds up a can. “But I will offer you a warm one.”

“No, thank you.”

William shrugs, replaces one can in his pack and pops the top of the other. He leaves his possessions strewn in the dirt while he drinks deeply. Mara does not take her eyes off the knife.

William Gregory Payson, if we’re dealin’ henceforth in Christian names.”

This new arrival has settled into the living room’s most magnificent chair, a highbacked rocker carved with the elegance of a rosewood treble clef. Legs out straight, boot heels planted on an upside-down crate stamped LANDEMANN’S DAIRY, camping pack discarded on the hardwood like a canvas body bag scarred with zippers, framed in collapsible metals.

Mara sits on the stone hearth. Fire warms her back, the burning of logs she has witnessed Soren splitting with an axe discovered in the brush, its handle wrapped in vine. His rangy downstrokes require him to stand far back from the stump to complete the arc, Blind Melon bee girl on his shirt rippling as the fabric contorts. Next to her on the hearth, limestone eyes stare up through the copper mask. Hands folded, she watches the men watch each other, missing with a fervent ache the garden. The pockets of her jeans are full of small items from the dirt patch and a quick glance down reveals the outline of the shotgun shell. There is a timeline in which she names herself Huntress and stalks prey through the house’s wooded grounds, vanishing into this willowy and lithe conception of Mara. She indulges this, catches the scent of her future self as she flits past, unrecognizable, hair a rat’s nest of leaves and twigs. A certain holiness surrounds this daydream, and oh, what luxury to let this wild, untamed notion take its course. Meanwhile, how unprepared she is for this new man’s presence, the odd ways his words push the air around in the sparsely furnished living room.

William aims a lopsided grin at Soren, seated on a stool across the crate, and the two men raise silver cans in each other’s direction. Mara’s alter ego shrinks into her mind’s eye and the empty forest shudders in her absence.

“We’re dealing,” Soren says, pausing at a strange interval for a foamy sip, “with whatever kind of name you want to put forth into the atmosphere of our grand and welcoming hall.” He lifts his arms, hunches his shoulders, gestures widely. “Christian, pagan, or otherwise.”

Mara cannot help but look up at the crown molding runneled with grime, exposed Sheetrock bescumbered as if finger-painted with filth by some hunger-striking prisoner. Immobile windows on pulleys adhered with globs of old paint to their tracks. A corduroy armchair the color of a yak shoved into one corner, a now-discarded cushion having left in its wake the odor of a litter box.

Mara’s eyes rove, seeking the orange cat, whom she refers to, at least internally, as Gladys. But Soren’s deceased aunt’s old house is a sprawl of gabled shrugs, its outermost reaches like the crooked spokes on a trampled bike wheel, sheer architectural madness tilting into ramshackle oblivion. Gladys could be anywhere.

The man, at ease, lets the chair rock back and forth. “And what do they call you, brother?”

“Soren Alistair Murphy,” Soren says, draining his beer.

William’s brow furrows and he looks Soren up and down in the exact same manner as he appraised Mara in the yard. His interest now strikes her as something other than sexual. She edges toward giving him the benefit of the doubt.

“You’re paler’n a poltergeist’s titty, son.”

“Irish father,” Soren explains, “Danish mother.”

William removes his hat to reveal dark, sweaty curls. “Got some Viking in you.” He sets the hat on the backpack, finishes his beer, and lets the can fall to the floor. “You know about the blood eagle?”

“Can’t say that I do.”

William lifts a loosely held fist to his mouth and belches softly into it. Then he shoots Mara a fleeting glance. She reads sheepishness in his look.

“You think what the red Indians did to each other was brutal,” William says.

He mimes holding a knife to the place where his damp and matted hair meets his forehead. Mara can so easily visualize the blade from the man’s pack clutched in his hand as he slides the invisible weapon across the dome of his large head like he is scraping a delicate curl of butter from the top of the stick. She wonders if it is really so easy to take a scalp. The fluidity of the motion. She has always imagined hacking and sawing.

William completes the arc at the base of his neck and lowers his arm. “That ain’t nothin’ compared to your ancestors, Mr. Dane.” He shakes his head. “Imagine lying flat, face down in the muddy thoroughfare of your village, some kinda defeated enemy of a Viking raiding party. One minute you’re drawin’ water from the well, the next your whole clan’s put to the sword by some long-haired savages from across the water. And the cold steel goes straight through your back, behind your rib cage, on the right side of your spine”—he mimes stabbing his back through the supports of the rocker—“then on the left”—another thrust—“and though you can’t see shit, you can feel that burning hot pull as your lungs is yanked out through the holes. And them lungs is what makes the wings of the eagle. The blood eagle.”

William unzips a pouch on his pack and comes up with a fresh beer and tosses it across the crate to Soren, who catches it one-handed.

“I’m a quarter Nez Perce myself,” William says with a shrug, “so I’m told. Rest of me’s a mutt.” He nods at the beer. “That’s all I got right there. But I’ll make a run.”

Soren sets his can on the crate. “Probably shouldn’t be drinking the day away.” He gestures vaguely around. “Work on the house never ends.”

William looks around the living room, mouth downturned in a jeweler’s appraisal. “Can’t spy this place from the road, you know. Thought maybe I got hoaxed. Wondered if it wasn’t some kinda lure, your little invitation. But I figured I’d see it through.” He pats his camping pack like it is a sleeping dog. “Ain’t got nothin’ to my name worth stealin’, and if you’d meant to do me harm, well…” He trails off, grinning. Mara notes the blank space . . .