I met Clark the next morning at a small diner off Highway 97. He looked older than his voice — thin, stooped, a man who’d spent decades crawling under houses and reading people’s lies.
He spread my papers across the table, squinting through thick glasses. “Yep,” he said after a moment. “These are originals. City archives lost copies years ago.”
“Why would every owner leave so quickly?” I asked.
He pointed at a section of the floor plan. “That basement wall? It’s not supposed to be there.”
“What do you mean?”
“When this house was first built in 1974, the basement extended another six feet under the back lot. The wall you saw was added later — illegally. They poured over something.”
A chill crawled down my neck. “Something?”
He nodded. “After the boy died, Pierce sealed it off. Said it was an accident. But there were rumors — about faulty wiring, maybe a cover-up. The county couldn’t prove anything.”
I drove home with my stomach in knots. The old man — Harold — had come back. Maybe not to warn me about ghosts, but to face whatever he buried there.
I spent the afternoon breaking through that false wall. Behind it was a narrow space, no bigger than a closet. The air was stale, almost metallic. Inside were old electrical panels, wires corroded black. But beneath them, in the dirt, I found what really mattered — a small tin lunchbox.
Inside were photographs: a boy, maybe ten, standing beside a model airplane; a newspaper clipping; a coroner’s report. The headline read: Electrocution Accident at Pierce Residence.
The report said the boy, Ethan Pierce, had died instantly while fixing a light fixture. The father had been the one to find him — and had sealed the circuit box himself afterward.
The old man hadn’t come to haunt me. He’d come to make sure no one else died because of his mistake.
I called Clark again, and together we brought in the county. The wiring was condemned. The house was marked for safety repairs. They told me if I’d turned on certain basement lights, the faulty system could’ve shorted, maybe even burned the place down.
When I returned home that evening, the dollar bill was still on the kitchen table — damp from the night before. I framed it, right above the front door.
Not as payment.
But as a reminder that sometimes, a man’s warning isn’t madness — it’s mercy.
