"Do you remember that case I told you I wasn't allowed to talk about?" Kylie's voice turned fuzzy through the cell-phone receiver, crackling through the speakers. Benny knew he had to change his phone carrier, or his phone, or both, but he'd been too busy—lazy—to look into it.

"The one you mentioned might have to do with a string of odd suicides that are linked, but maybe not so linked?" He clicked on the webpage he'd been looking for—an app to analyze sound footage. He'd obtained some impeccable EVP last night and had waited all evening to listen to it. "What about it?"

Kylie huffed on the other line. She usually had such a chipper reverberation in her tone, but today it came off faded, disheartened. That... or his connection was way worse than he anticipated. "Technically, I'm still not supposed to say anything to anyone, but... I'm seeing a pattern and I need your input."

Benny pried his gaze from his laptop to glare at the phone screen instead. It wasn't like Kylie could see him, but he hoped she'd feel the intensity of his glaring somehow. "My input? Me?" He sensed the corners of his lips tugging up. "Are you sure you called the right person?"

It has to be bad if she's about to ask for my opinion.

"Stop it, Ben, come on—"

"—Benny, please, how many times do I have to beg you?"

She groaned. "Benny, fine. Look... I need you to listen before you blurt out anything, okay? This is... serious."

Serious, she said?

She's not kidding around.

Benny shut his computer and grabbed his phone, taking it off speakerphone. He walked away from his stuffy, narrow office-space... which was only a portion of his living-room. "I'm listening." He plopped onto the couch behind his desk chair, its seams ripping apart and stuffing squeezing out of several holes in the off-beige fabric. "I even took you off speakerphone for this, so I'm all ears."

Kylie snorted; the sound so close to his ear, like she was there. Which yanked his lips up a little higher. He hadn't seen Kylie in months and missed teasing her. Missed watching her twirl her golden curls around her fingertips when she was frustrated. Missed how she scowled at him with her sharp green gaze whenever he hit on her. And he hit on her a lot.

"Right, so... it all started with one weird case that we struggled to piece together at first, because it made no sense. But the parents came forward—in confidence, I guess they're super high-profile folks—and admitted they were certain their daughter... killed herself." Benny envisioned her dragging a finger across her throat in a slicing motion. "They barely put it into words, but they claimed her death was unnatural."

Not that he enjoyed murder cases—not those without a pinch of supernatural to them, at least—but Kylie's remarks caught his attention. He leaned farther into the couch and ruffled his hair; a few raven and chestnut strands got stuck between his fingers and he rolled his eyes. "Okay... and?"

"We had nothing else to go on but their word. The girl didn't leave a letter, never had suicidal tendencies, seemed pretty put-together and happy with her life." Kylie sighed. "So we fixed our notes and looked into things... and figured we'd leave it at that." He imagined her wincing; her stories, especially those about her fieldwork with the FBI, went on for hours. Those she chose to share with him, that was. "Fast-forward a few weeks, and we're hit with that trailer park fire in the Columbus suburbs."

Benny squinted.

The fire? What does that have to do with this random girl's suicide?

He didn't need to voice his thoughts; Kylie did so for him. "I know... how would these two things be connected, huh? Did you ever hear about that fire? It's not that far from you, right?"

Stretching, Benny nodded before realizing Kylie wasn't in front of him. "Y-yeah, I did. It's a few hours south from my place." He grimaced. "It was... hard to watch, when they showed it on the news. I mean when they explained a daughter and her mom died in all that—"

"—the daughter is our focus here," said Kylie, her timbre turning up a notch.

Is she... excited? Or freaked out?

He'd known Kylie for years; they went to the same high school and attended prom together as dates. And he'd never forget the booze they drank before and after the party, and where it had led them—

No, don't go there.

He blew out his cheeks. "Okay, the daughter? What does she—"

"—she was best friends with the chick that supposedly committed suicide. The one with the high-profile parents." The line filled with static.

"She... they were friends? They knew each other? The suicide... it was in the Columbus area, too?" He couldn't deny it was a weird occurrence; but how did that connect the two deaths enough to get Special Agent Kylie involved?

"Well... and okay, this is where things start to get weirder, so hang on." She sucked in a deep breath; Benny imagined her chest heaving up with the motion and envisioned the way her cleavage would push out. He almost chuckled, picturing himself trying not to drool—

Ugh, Benny, stop being such a pig!

"The fire... well, it might not have been accidental. It took months to analyze, to investigate, for sure, but... that's why we came in." She paused, and Benny heard her sip something. It was ten AM, which meant she was on her second or third cup of coffee, if he remembered her habits correctly. They had been roommates while she was in college, after all. "Experts say... something or someone inside caused it. No electrical failure or suspected criminal activity from the outside."

"Shit." Benny sat up straight. "So... the mom or the daughter set the house on fire by accident?"

Kylie waited a few moments to respond; though whether that was because she was taking another sip of her java, or because she had no idea how to continue, Benny wasn't sure. "The accident part is what we're unclear on. Other experts that we brought in to dig through the ashes found nothing accidental about any of it. The flames consumed so much. But... they were able to figure out the oven had been turned on, and the daughter... they discovered a charred match-box in her hand, and another in her pocket."

Benny's eyebrows bunched up to the middle of his forehead. "How? Wasn't her body... like... ashes?"

"They located bits and... pieces." She made a gagging sound. "I'm disturbed thinking about it again, but... matches. And her corpse, or what remained of it, was near the stove."

"So she..." It was Benny's turn to gag, the contents of his light breakfast from an hour ago starting to swirl in his stomach. "She set the place on fire? With her and her mom inside? Why?"

"No clue. But I'm almost finished, almost," said Kylie, again pausing to gulp down her drink. At this point, Benny thought she should slip some whiskey into the liquid—or maybe he needed some to help wash down the effects of this eerie situation. "The third and final strange part of all this... is the death in the abandoned colonial house in Georgia. Remember that one?"

That prompted Benny to stand. He nearly ripped his tight-fitting jeans by shooting up so fast. And tall as he was in such a cramped apartment, he almost smacked his head on the ceiling. "What? H-how... how could I forget?"

The news had blasted it for a week straight. How a worried dad in the Columbus adjacent suburbs tracked his daughter's cell-phone to a rest-stop area in the Savannah, Georgia vicinity. And then called Search and Rescue to find her, because he hadn't heard from her in two days. Her last text was one of those I'm okay, Dad type of messages, and of course he'd believed her... until she didn't make it home as planned.

On a girl's trip with her best friend, I think the reporters said.

A day later, the Search and Rescue team stumbled upon a house in the middle of the forest lining the freeway. Colonial style, brick and wood, giant windows above the front door, a chimney, blue slate roof—and impossible to get into. The door was sealed shut, as if stuck after centuries of abandonment. A day later they found a way inside—and what they located in the entryway still shocked Benny.

Twenty-two-year-old Arielle Daniels, a make-up artist from Ohio, lying in a pool of dried blood, her entire chest and stomach pierced by glass shards. A broken mirror rested a few feet from her, and everyone had jumped to the conclusion that she had killed herself with said shards. Benny was desperate to go there—an abandoned Colonial-era house in the forest? It had to be haunted. Kylie's specialty was reality, murder, gruesome attacks; Benny's was the paranormal.

A case like this didn't come along often. A place with such potential, where a death had swept its messy claws so recently, would be bustling with electromagnetic energy. Would be loaded with vibrations from the afterlife, with all the things Benny had studied and was obsessed with.

But Kylie had shut him down almost immediately when he asked her for access.

"The bosses won't allow you on site, not after last time."

The last time she referred to was the occasion when Kylie's superiors invited him to visit one of their murder cases, unsure how to explain certain details. And when he brought all his ghost-hunting equipment—thousands of dollars worth, one of the big reasons he lived in such a crappy apartment in a crappy neighborhood and was stuck at his crappy desk-job—and proclaimed that a ghost had committed the murder, they laughed at him. And banned him from ever attending their cases again.

"What about it?" His heartbeat ran a marathon in his rib-cage, impatient, yearning to figure out what Kylie's point was. And why it involved one of the most mysterious murder-ruled-out-as-suicide cases he'd ever witnessed.

"The girl we found, Arielle? Guess who her best friends were?"

Legs giving out, Benny sank to his knees. "No." He almost dropped the phone, but gripped it tight, not wanting to miss a single second of Kylie's next words. "No way. The suicide girl and the fire girl?"

"You got it!" Heels clicked from inside the speaker; Kylie was walking. "That is the case I'm working on. Because this Arielle girl? We've concluded that the impact the shards had on her skin and organs prove that the wounds weren't self-inflicted. And she had a concussion, which makes us assume she fell down the stairs before this happened. We're thinking foul-play, but... no one else was there. No fingerprints on the shards, the mirror. And the only prints on the banister or door knobs were hers."

"Fuck." Benny let himself melt onto the floor, resting his spine against the bottom of his couch. "So... what are you saying, Kylie?" His heart-rate picked up, so rapid it made him dizzy.

"Well... okay, look, you know how I feel about the shit you work with. Maybe it's real, maybe it's not, I'm not sure. You've shown me proof many times, but... I need to see it for myself." She inhaled and exhaled, her breath heavy on her end of the receiver. "I don't want to say outright hey, a ghost killed this girl, because... I mean, how? Ghosts can't kill, right?"

Benny shuddered; when he first started researching the paranormal, what felt like eons ago, he'd believed the same thing.

Not anymore... I don't think all spirits have good intentions.

"Anyway... we're at an impasse. The FBI is ready to give this up, but the dad... he's insistent. If Arielle didn't commit suicide, he wants answers. Palpable ones. He claims too many people around him and her have dropped dead, and he's not taking we don't know for an answer." A whistle of wind whirled into Benny's ears from Kylie's side—she had wandered outdoors. "We're months into this investigation, and... we've got nothing. They banned you, and you must be super discreet about all this, I'm warning you, but... I need your help. Supernatural help. With all your machines and shit, to debunk the theories coming to life in my mind. I don't like them. The FBI will never acknowledge that a spirit killed her, not if I tell them. But you... Benny? Benny, are you still there?"

Benny wasn't there. He'd released his phone to squeeze in front of his desk and turn his laptop back on. He had plane tickets to buy, bags to pack, and a spooky mystery to solve.

Savannah, Georgia, here I come.