When we were ten, my best friend Tiffany told me that the son of a family who lived across the street was a murderer.  His name was Lucas.  She never told me who it was he’d murdered, just that Lucas was one, a murderer.  She used to dare me and our other friend Missy to run across the street, up the hill into his yard, to touch the porch’s welcome mat.  The welcome mat was old, weathered, so much so you could barely make out the letters, the corners long gone.  I don’t really think anyone lived there then even.  Of course Tiffany told us his ghost did, forever forced to linger somewhere between the dead oak and his parents’ porch, but that was Tiffany.  “You can feel him here sometimes,” she said, “carried along the wind.”  Whenever it got cold, Tiffany would say, “you can feel him, can’t you?”  Lucas had an icy touch. 

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