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Itzie and Sadie had grown up as siblings in all but name, saving each other from single-childhood. The Espinoza brothers had bought adjacent houses when they came to Cincinnati, houses their kids treated as a single household. Sadie and her “Itzie-bitsy lil brother”

grew up swapping Goosebumps and watching Paranormal Activity movies together under the same big quilt.

Despite graduating as valedictorian and attending the New England Conservatory of Music for violin and viola (at his dads’ insistence), Itzie had ended up in TV production, first as a boom operator and sound assistant, then doing Foley, ADR, mixing, and post. Eventually he clawed his way into showrunning, the first Black showrunner at House she’ll tell ’em how to fix ’em,”

Itzie had told the executives at HYTV, who were still gobsmacked by the fact that “Itzhak Espinoza-Dorfmann”

was a skinny Black kid. “We come back a week after the repairs are done and reinterview the occupants, see if they are still vexed.”

When one of the execs finally regained the power of speech, she pointed out that Haunted House Home Inspectors was a terrible name—overlong, hard to say, redundant, impossible to make into a good logo—and the format itself was guaranteed to enrage the viewers: people who watch ghost hunters on HYTV aren’t looking for intellectual rigor, she explained. They’re looking for ghosts.

“Yes,”

Itzie had said. “That’s the whole point: it’s a dumb name for a dumb show that will attract exactly the wrong viewers. Miss Tammy and Professor Hodge one hundred percent believe in ghosts and the spirit world. They don’t just find ghosts in a creaky old Victorians. They find ’em in never-occupied condos. Jeez, they’d find ancient, unsettled spirits haunting a brand new ?LEI store built on a brand new space station one week before ribbon cutting. They are True Believers. And Sadie is a legit licensed home inspector with a professional reputation to protect. Tammy and Hodge will set them up, and Sadie will knock them down. The viewers will hate it and kvetch up a storm on Facebook and Reddit—and then all their kookie friends, family, and followers will tune in to get just as pissed off, at which time they’ll head to Insta-Face-Reddit to piss and moan and rage. Wash, rinse, repeat. ‘Hate viewers’ are still eyeballs, and eyeballs sell ads.”

Of course HYTV was in—eyes are eyes, ads are ads, and money makes the world go ’round. And of course Sadie was in. A part of that was the money. A bigger part—one she wasn’t particularly proud to admit to—was that it was fun to troll the sorts of credulous Midwesterners who crowded her Facebook feed with “hopes and prayers”

and All Lives Matter.

But it wasn’t really about the money, or about the dark pleasures of tweaking the People of Walmart. Sadie wanted to believe. But she needed to be convinced. And inspecting every haunted house within a day’s drive of Cincinnati seemed like a good start.

As it turned out, while “haunted”

houses often had legitimate safety issues—failing light switches, ancient wiring, poor gas burner ventilation—it was rarely anything truly challenging. As a general rule, your average home owner could clear a domicile of all “unsettled spirits”

in under thirty minutes using standard hand tools. Sadie ended up saying, “It’s nothing you can’t fix!” so often that HYTV printed it on merch and tried making it go viral.

From a revenue standpoint—which was the only one that interested HYTV—Haunted House Home Inspectors was a smash hit. It cost next to nothing to make (the primary “talent,”

the property’s occupants, weren’t even paid a pittance) while advertisers—especially those hawking commemorative gold coins, dubious home health solutions, and “risk-free”

investment schemes—competed viciously to snap up every thirty-second ad spot they could.

It was Itzie’s genius running at full wattage. If anything, he’d underestimated the potential of every aspect of the show: the ad revenue, the free viral promotion, the viewership, and its rage.

Itzie’d gotten bullied a lot in high school. He got it on one side for being one of the few Black kids, on the other for being an “Oreo,”

and all around for having two elderly White gay dads. One day, out of the blue, he’d told Sadie that it wasn’t so bad, because no one ever got on him for being a Jew. “It sorta almost feels like they’re picking on the idea of me, not the real me,”

he said through a mouthful of Cheetos, watching her play Grand Theft Auto. “I’m like a gecko: predators get a thrashing stub of tail, and the rest of me gets away.”

Hearing that had, in a way, saved Sadie’s life. She was on the swim team. Try as she might, her thick hair never got fully dry after morning practice. A bunch of the swim girls had taken to calling her “Wetback”—You know, because she’s so dedicated to swim team that the back of her shirt is always wet from her hair.

She would never tell anyone that she’d started thinking an awful lot about what her dad’s four-pound single-jack hammer could do to those girls’ faces.

Itzie’s observation flipped her perspective: Jewish Espinozas weren’t remotely “wetbacks.”

They weren’t even “immigrants”: they’d been in New Mexico—where her dad and his brother grew up—since before it was “New Mexico.”

The only thing calling her “wetback” did was make it clear how stupid those girls were, like a house cat strutting around thinking it caught a snake when all it had was a shitty old lizard tail.

Unfortunately, the most dedicated HHHI hate-viewers turned out to be a good deal more toxic than the Learned Council of Aryan Swim Girls of Central Ohio. Their emails were vile, calling her every sort of bitch—“White bitch,”

“Black bitch,”

“Mexican bitch,” “light-skinded bitch”—except for the one that actually mattered to her, because it hadn’t dawned on them that a Brown girl could be a “Jew bitch.” But even with all the murder-rape threats, the hate mail was fundamentally sort of a yawn, and really HYTV’s problem anyway, not hers.

The flooding of her business’s Yelp and Google pages with fake one-star reviews was more of a concern, as were the handful of fraudulent complaints lodged with the Better Business Bureau and Ohio Department of Commerce. The afternoon that a stone-faced middle-aged couple followed her around a Home Depot for an hour, recording on their phones, she called it quits with HHHI, despite being three months into shooting the second season.

There’d been no bad blood with Itzie, who was good-natured to a fault. Besides, professionally speaking, he’d gotten everything he needed from Haunted House Home Inspectors after the first season: he’d proven that if you gave him a film crew, he could catch lightning in a bottle. The shows that followed—Ghost Van, Polterfight, Ley Line Hunters, Shinto Investigation, the one where Vanilla Ice spent a night in haunted castles in the Carpathian Mountains—had Itzie running just to stand still.

Which was why Sadie had been shocked when, five years after HHHI wrapped, Itzie called out of the blue on a Saturday morning and asked her to come over.

“You’re in Cincinnati?!”

she cried. “The dads said you got one of those absurd houses perched on the side of a bluff in the LA valley.”

“Pfshh,”

he dismissed. “I rent that disaster when I’m in LA. You know what insurance is like for a thing like that?”

Sadie, in fact, did. “My real place—my address-of-record—is here in the ’Nati. Home is where the absentee ballot goes.” He laughed jaggedly. “Why we even talking about mailing addresses, Sadie? You gotta come over here. I—it—” He laughed again, then blew his lips out in a flapping raspberry, something he’d done since they were kids to loosen up when he got tongue tied.

“You gotta come down here, cuz. You gotta see.”

Sadie was on the verge of asking more questions, but then Itzie added two words—“legit woo-woo”—and that was all it took. She’d be right over.