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reported you and some friends saw something unusual out there.”
    The question clearly made Hammond uncomfortable. With a paper napkin he scrubbed a faint stain on the table. “So that’s the real reason you’re here. I can’t tell you much.”
    Or doesn’t want to, Brandy thought.
    He stopped rubbing, clasped his fingers together on the table and looked up. “I really didn’t see anything myself.” Judging by the forelock dangling over one eye, she found that fact predictable.
    “We were planning a late cook–out on my buddy’s pontoon party boat, okay? I was fixing some hot–dogs on a grill at the bow. We’d been cruising around and it was getting dark. My buddy had just put on the running lights. We were idling along a few yards off shore, a couple of miles from town, across the lake, you know. It’s awful isolated out there.”
    He paused. Obviously, he did not relish the memory. “First thing I knew, some of the girls started pointing and whispering and pretty soon getting pretty hysterical.” Seymour’s gaze shifted outside to the dark parking lot. Then he faced her again. “My buddy, he gunned the engine and took off like a bat out of hell. I was hanging onto the butane stove.”
    “What exactly did the girls see?”
    His bony fingers twisted a class ring, and he glanced at Brandy’s note paid. She put it back into her bag. “Let me call a girl who was there,” he said. “She’s the only one who’ll talk at all. She’s taken a lot of kidding. But maybe she’ll be willing to talk to you.”
    He disappeared into a back room to use the phone. A few minutes later he emerged to say his friend Charlotte would meet Brandy at the Burger King, but the girl had to drive there from south of town. Charlotte didn’t want to see Brandy at her parents’ home. With that cryptic comment, Seymour hurried back to the counter and did not look her way again. Twenty minutes later Brandy saw a car driven by a lone girl turn into the parking lot. When the driver sat another five minutes, hands still on the wheel, peering through the windshield into the fast–food restaurant, Brandy realized her witness might not want to come where she could be overheard.
    She dropped her empty paper cup and plate into a trash can and slipped outside. Her intuition proved correct. When Brandy rapped on the driver’s window, Charlotte motioned for her to come around to the passenger seat. As Brandy ducked in beside her, Charlotte faced her, blue eyes seeking Brandy’s, face pale under a smooth cap of blonde hair.
    “I know what I saw,” she said defensively. “We’d stopped the boat near the shore. Kind of in front of that old house. Then one of my girl friends goes, ‘Look over there. Isn’t that the house that’s supposed to be haunted?’ That’s when I looked. I go, ‘Oh, you must be joking.’” Her eyes grew rounder, remembering. “First I just looked at how big the house was, like it was so high, right near the edge of the water. And then I saw something that looked like a figure at one of top windows. I couldn’t make out much about it, but it moved. Looked like someone’s head and shoulders. That was spooky enough.”
    When she removed her fingers from the steering wheel, Brandy could see they left damp streaks. “I was still trying to figure out what I’d seen at the window when something moved down on the lawn. Lights were on downstairs, so I could see. The shape of a woman was coming around from behind the house. But it didn’t look like a real woman, you know what I’m saying? It’s hard to explain.
    “You couldn’t see through it or anything, like in the movies. But it didn’t seem to walk. It kind of glided, like its feet weren’t touching the ground. It kept moving toward the lake and when it got to the boat house, it went right into the wall. It was there one minute and most of us saw it, and then it was gone.” The girl’s eyes pled with Brandy to believe her.
    “Do you mean it went