You wake up in a ditch, half your body submerged in the dirty water. The air is cold on your skin. You become aware that your shirt has been ripped twice down the front and you are missing a shoe.

How did you get here? Where did your Mom go? The last thing you remember is the smell of oil against the floorboard of the Kuga.

You stand up. You are somewhere near mountains, in a field with wild grass grown as high as suburban fencing. You start out in a direction, before suddenly being overcome with the sensation that something is crawling on your back. Not just something, many things. You rip the tattered remains of your shirt from your body and try to rub whatever it is on your back off. You can’t see back there. You can’t tell if whatever it is, is actually there.

The sun casts a sick light on the field ahead of you. Or is it the moon, so bright that you think it’s daytime? Off against the tree-line you see a single woman in a long blue dress pushing a lacy baby carriage.

You call to her. You call to her again. You call to her again. And then, as if it took everything else in the world stopping first, she turns her head in your direction.

(This song is written to sync with the opening credits of The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh.)

On Tuesday morning, you fake being sick. Your Mom takes your temperature and tells you that you can stay home. She sets out an instant oatmeal mix and some leftovers from last night’s dinner in case you get hungry later. As she busies herself getting ready for work, you sneak out to the car and manage to hide yourself under a blanket in the back seat. The night before you stealthily packed all of the items you need for a good recognizance mission:

• One pair of binoculars.
• One pair of heavy duty work gloves. These are too big for your hands, but still should be the thing for handling evidence.
• One notebook and pencil set for interviewing suspicious types.
• One thermos with hot coffee (in this case Hi-C).
• One snack bar of chewy granola.
• One tiny disposable camera. You were given this in your Christmas stocking and have been waiting for this use. Obviously instant film would be better, but you didn’t have the money for new film, so this will do.
• One plastic whistle for alerting police.
• One pair of extra socks and extra underwear, just in case.
• One pair of scissors for self-defense.
• One choose your own adventure book, in case you get bored while waiting.

Sooner than later, you hear your mom’s footsteps on the gravel driveway. She gets in the car without seeing you. Soon you are out on what you think is a highway. You can only see the landmark-less blue of the sky from the floor of backseat of the car. The mission is underway.

“Guess what I did yesterday while you were at the Murphy’s?” Dad asks.

“Did you cut the grass?”

“No but that’s a good guess. A bunch of my friends and I got together and recorded some music out in the garage.” Your Dad takes a hand from the steering wheel and fumbles with a tape and gets it into the stereo. An unholy noise comes from the stereo. He punches the rewind button. “That was a little later in the night. We tried to make scary sounding things.” He hits play and the beginning of a song starts up. “Yeah listen to this. Isn’t this the funk?”

You aren’t really sure if the song is the funk or not, but you know that you shouldn’t have answered by telling your dad that he still had some egg in his mustache.

When you visit Matt Murphy’s house, all Matt ever does is play Nintendo. You get quickly bored watching. You wander upstairs to his older brother’s room and start to look through his old toys.

John catches you. “What are you doing in here?” he asks.

“Just looking at your toys,” you say.

John tells you that the house is haunted. He says that you shouldn’t wander around upstairs alone. John says that at night the Murphy’s hear crying and banging on the walls. Once, he says, when he was using the bathroom, the toilet paper flew up from the roll on its own and he felt someone grab him by the neck. The lights went out and he heard someone laughing, he says.

You tell him that his story is bullshit.

“Yeah but you’re scared,” John says.

“No, I’m not,” you say.

“Oh yeah,” John pushes you. “Then tell me something more scary.”

So you tell him a scarier story.

You are never invited back to the Murphy’s house again.

Mr. Waldon lives outside of town about fifteen minutes, but it always seems to take half a day to drive there. He has an open invitation for your family for weekend cookouts all summer long. He lives in a small cottage on the edge of a large green lake.

Mr. Waldon was a friend of your grandfather. When you Dad was a child, they’d visit every weekend. After a bottle of wine or so, Mr. Waldon will get out the old photographs, pastel photographs of your grandparents and your father as a fat blonde kid with a buzzcut. “I used to run down the entire path – along the cottage, through the backyard and down to length of the pier – as soon as my father parked the car,” says your Dad. He’d be a cannonball in the lake before your grandparents’ even rung the doorbell.

The lake isn’t safe for swimming anymore and the pier has long since rotted through. The view is still there, though, along with lounge chairs, a large above ground pool, and a hot tub. You spend the afternoon switching between the cold swimming water and the searing steam in the hot tub. You stuff yourself with nut mix and hamburgers and mustard-based potato salad. Mr. Waldon plays an oldies station on the radio.

Later you shiver in your wet swimsuit as you walk through his dim air-conditioned cottage to use the toilet. One entire wall of the bathroom is a picture of a sun setting off a tropical island. There’s so much to look at in Mr. Waldon’s house. This time you notice a picture of a pale woman with short brown hair in a poka-dot bikini. She’s smiling from the deck of a boat. You imagine that she was Mrs. Waldon.