Right Hand of Evil by John Saul

cry of someone in fear for her life.
    Now, though, she was staring at him, her head cocked, her eyes wide, her expression puzzled.
    He remembered, then, something that had happened a few years ago, when they were eleven. Their mother had taken them for a picnic by a lake, and they'd gone swimming. He had hauled himself out onto a large wooden float, and was sprawled on his back, gazing up at the clouds floating overhead, when he'd heard exactly the same kind of scream from Kim as the one of a few moments earlier. He'd scrambled to his feet and scanned the water, but she was nowhere to be seen.
    Then he'd looked down.
    Kim, her eyes open and staring up at him, was lying on the bottom of the lake, under ten feet of crystal clear water.
    She wasn't moving.
    Without thinking, he'd dived for her, dragging her to the surface and wrestling her onto the float.
    He'd started screaming himself then, calling frantically for help while trying to force the water from Kim's lungs. Others-grown-ups-arrived and took over, and after what seemed an eternity, but which he'd later been told was no more than a minute or two, Kim started breathing on her own again.
    Afterward, when they asked him how he'd known his sister was drowning, it turned out that only he had heard her scream.
    No one else heard anything.
    Thinking about it, replaying those panicked moments in his mind, he knew his sister couldn't have screamed; even if she had, there was no way the sound would have carried out of the water.
    It was, he'd finally decided, the Twin Thing, that strange, almost mystical connection he and his sister had always felt.
    Today, though, he saw nothing that could have terrified Kim to the point of a scream. Not like that.
    As if she'd read his mind-the Twin Thing again-Kim's eyes fixed on him. "Jared, what's going on? I swear, I didn't call you!" She paused, then spoke again, and he knew she truly had read his mind. "And I didn't even call you in my mind, like I did at the lake that day."
    Jared hesitated, then shrugged. "Hey, if you don't remember, why should I?" he finally said. "And maybe it wasn't you at all-maybe it was a ghost!" He scanned the hallway, gave an exaggerated shudder, then fixed his sister with the most mysterious gaze he could muster. "Want to see if we can find one? If ghosts are real, this sure is where they'd be."
    A moment later, the strange sensation she'd experienced all but forgotten, Kim set out with Jared to explore the second floor. Half a dozen bedrooms opened off the mezzanine-two of which had small parlors attached to them-along with three bathrooms. There were a few more rooms that were locked, but none of the keys their father had seemed to fit.
    On the third floor, tucked beneath the huge oaken rafters that supported the slate roof, were half a dozen more rooms, each with a dormer window, those on the west side looking out over the town, the others over the wilderness to the east.
    Finally, after they'd seen as much of the house as they could gain access to, the family gathered on the front porch.
    "Well, what do you think?" Ted asked as they made their way back to the car. There was an excitement in his voice that immediately put Janet on her guard. A thought had come to her fifteen minutes ago-a thought she had instantly rejected. The electric note in his question told her the same thought had also occurred to Ted. Before he even spoke, she knew what he was going to say. "It would make a great little hotel, wouldn't it?"
    At least a dozen answers to Ted's question popped into Janet's mind, every one of them negative. Instead of voicing even one of them, she slowly turned around and looked back at the immense derelict of a house that had sat abandoned for the last forty years.
    She thought about Ted, and what his future in Shreveport might be. Though neither of them had talked about it yet, she knew there would be no job offer, not for a very long time.
    Which meant there was nothing to hold them in Shreveport; she