Still dripping from the flooded chamber beneath the farmhouse on Old Mill Road, Luna drives home with a rusted key she found in the silt. The key bears a stamped number that matches a filing cabinet in the Pine Hills Municipal Archive’s restricted annex. When she returns at dawn, Marlene is not at her desk. Luna lets herself into the annex and finds the cabinet—but the drawer is already slightly open, and inside is a single folder marked with the word 'WITNESS.' The folder contains a police report from 1964 and a photograph of a woman whose face has been scratched out. Luna recognizes the dress from a painting she saw in the farmer’s house. Something in the dark reaches for her ankle.
Luna returns to the Pine Hills Municipal Archive the morning after the courtyard flooded. The water has receded but left a strange residue on the cobblestones—a black silt that smells of wet iron and old pennies. Marlene is waiting with the next folder: a patient intake form from the county mental hospital, dated 1973. The patient's name is redacted, but the admitting complaint reads 'Compulsive window counting: subject believes the house next door has more windows than walls.' Luna drives to the address on the intake form—a farmhouse on Old Mill Road—and finds every window on the second floor boarded shut. Inside, a faint dripping sound leads her to a locked basement door. When she forces it open, the smell hits her first: wet earth and something sweet, like rotting flowers. The stairs descend into darkness. She takes one step, then another, and then the floor falls away. The episode ends with Luna's flashlight beam cutting through black water as she realizes she is standing knee-deep in a flooded room with no visible walls.
Late autumn, a Thursday. Luna arrives at a municipal archive on the outskirts of the city for a routine records transfer. The building smells of paper dust and floor wax. The archivist, a woman named Marlene, is friendly but watchful. Luna is shown to a long oak table under a green banker's lamp and given a stack of folders with no labels. The first folder contains a child's crayon drawing of a house with too many windows, and a scrap of paper with an address written in pencil. The window in the reading room looks out onto a courtyard where a fountain has been dry for years — except tonight, Luna hears water.
