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facebook = cute girls I didn’t know, one in particular named Melissa, feeling sorry for me and writing nice messages so I wouldn’t be lonely. How’s that work?
    I wasn’t complaining. Maybe I should act even more lonely. All in all, it had been a decent day.
    I could have sworn I’d just closed my eyes when I sat bolt upright in bed. The clock informed me I’d been asleep about five hours, but nothing in the dark room could tell me why I was awake. And I knew something had woken me. A sound. A crash from above.
    I held my breath, listening. Nothing. Only the pounding of my pulse.
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    Must have been a dream.
    I got out my iPod, put on “Broken Bells,” and waited to drift off.
    Though I’d pretty much convinced myself that a nightmare had jolted me awake, the first thing I did the next morning was head to the third floor. I wandered slowly through the east wing corridor that was above my bedroom. Methodically checking each room, I found only unused bedrooms and sitting rooms, but no evidence of the crash that had woken me. That left me feeling like an idiot, so I decided to forget about the nightmare and take myself out to breakfast.
    It was pouring, which was a bummer because I’d hoped to make a short, exploratory hike that afternoon. Armed with my laptop and some comics, I located a café in downtown Vail and had a huge stack of buttermilk pancakes while I read.
    Once I’d finished the comics, I pulled out my laptop and discovered I had even more facebook friends. Go, me. Or probably go, Ally. Her mother hen instincts probably had her recruiting people to visit my page like a madwoman. My mini geography quiz had been solved, so I uploaded more pictures, trying to make the locations a bit harder. I was trying to think up my next blog post when the waitress returned to fill my coffee cup for the tenth time.
    “You movin’ in, hon?” she asked.
    I laughed, but when I glanced at my watch said, “Oh.” Morning had drifted into afternoon. And it was still raining.
    “Just teasin’, sweet cheeks.” She smiled. “We’re havin’ a slow day. No rush.”
    “Thanks,” I said. It wasn’t like me to lose track of time, but after a few minutes I knew that wasn’t what had happened.
    I didn’t want to go home.
    That place didn’t feel right to me. from the nightmare I’d had, to the weird art, to the sheer emptiness of it. Sitting in a café until my blood was pure caffeine was a way of delaying my return to Rowan 39
    Estate. But I couldn’t stay here forever, even if the waitress said she didn’t mind.
    I paid the check and dashed through the spitting rain back to my truck, but I didn’t drive home. I’d figured a couple things out: I knew what my next blog post would be and I didn’t want to be alone in that house anymore.
    I was lying on my bed trying to get in touch with my inner tech geek and frustrated that what I’d thought was such a brilliant idea had ended up in fail mode. It was too late to go back to the store, but something had to be wrong with the handheld video camera I’d brought home. Or maybe I’d read the directions too quickly and missed something.
    I’d wanted to get reactions. facebook was fun and the blog . . .
    introspective?
    But video? Video took things to the next level. If I had to have solitary confinement in Vail, at least I could show people what was happening and have a little more interaction with the outside world.
    Rowan Estate should have been the perfect place for my experiment.
    I’d never run out of weird stuff to tape, and it had that whole haunted mansion thing going for it. Sometimes a little too perfectly.
    I played back the video again. The first shots of the house were fine. My brief “hello” from my bedroom was fine, but once I went down the hall, the picture went haywire. It was all the more frustrat-ing because I’d thought shooting the winged statues would be my
    “hook” for the webisode. I guess my career in video journalism failed before it