The Hysteria: Book 4, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) by Evan Ronan Page A

Megan was trying to draw people she knew?”
    “Maybe.”
    “She always been an artist?”
    Melanie put the drawing back on the bed and sat down. Her legs parted, just a little bit, not too much to be porn-worthy but just enough.
    “Megan’s never drawn anything in her life.”
    “Not even stick figures?”
    “When she was about three.”
    “Where do you think she is?”
    “If I knew that, you wouldn’t be here.”
    Up until this afternoon’s weirdness, I’d put Megan’s odds of being alive at fifty-fifty. Not too many people up and cut off ties with their family and friends with no explanation. But now with MPI as a possible, maybe likely, cause of everything, I’d increased her chances to seventy-five/twenty-five.
    But that was cold comfort. Sure, it was more likely that Megan was alive but now I didn’t just have to worry about her and maybe the one or two people responsible for her disappearance.
    Now I had to worry about the whole town.
    Because MPI doesn’t just affect one person.
    It affects a larger group. In the case of the laughing girls in Africa, the MPI plagued whole communities, both those afflicted with the illness and those having to deal with it. With the dancing manias of Europe, it traveled from one area to another, ultimately touching thousands of people.
    More specifically, I had to worry about this family . They were acting batty but I didn’t have a baseline. Maybe they were always like this, hot and cold from one moment to the next.
    But I doubted it.
    “I never got to tell you, but I’m sorry about your mother,” I said.             
    “Why are you talking about her?” Those legs opened another inch.
    “I didn’t have the details until this afternoon. It must have been very difficult on the family.” I still didn’t have all the details and was hoping for more.
    She said nothing. I kept my eyes well above her equator.
    “They never found the guy that did it?” I said.
    She shook her head no. I waited for her to volunteer more.
    She didn’t.
    “It happened in town, right?”             
    She didn’t answer, just tilted her head to the side and looked me up and down.
    “Do you think Megan’s trying to find the person that did it? Maybe that’s why she dropped off the grid?”
    I didn’t think that but I was trying to get her to open up.
    “She would have told me.”
    “Why?”
    “We’re close. We tell each other everything.”
    “Everything?”
    She nodded. “Until a couple weeks ago. We stopped talking. It was like she didn’t trust me.”
    “You work at your father’s office?” I knew this from Strongbow.
    “Intern. In the mailroom. That’s what a bachelor’s degree gets you these days.”
    “He’s probably going out of his way not to show favoritism, you being his daughter and all.”
    Her legs had an R-rating. Before she inched them to the X-rating level, I got out of there.
    ***
    In my guest room I turned on the local news for some background noise. The blonde from a box reporter was talking about several attacks in town, three people had been rushed to the hospital, one was in critical condition.
    Pater’s words struck me. We had twenty-four, maybe forty-eight hours until a major event if his predictive modeling was accurate and our working hypothesis turned out to be correct.
    I called Manetti.
    “I heard it all. That family is cracked,” she said. “No wonder they hired you.”
    She hadn’t heard it all, just the conversation I had with Turner. I’d switched the transmitter off after that. Pater hadn’t shared everything with me so I wasn’t sharing everything with him.
    I was adopting the federal government model.
    “You want to know how we’re going to find Megan?” I said.
    “I think I’ve asked you that already.”
    “Melanie is exhibiting the same symptoms. We’re just going to follow her.”
    “That’s your plan.”
    “Elegant in its simplicity.”
    “We would have thought of that had we known