Rifled

Rifled is the fourth episode of season one. Content warnings: conflict with customers, getting fired, swearing, sudden frightening voices, and ghostly apparitions.

The transcript can be found here.

Episode Description
In which several things are lost and others are found.

Summary
After a shift at Spoodle Customer Support, Lily has one phone left before she's finished. Her last customer is difficult, and the combination of the frustrated customer and being interrupted by Dot causes Lily to yell, and leading to the customer hanging up. Dot wants Lily to join her in the garden so they can bond, but Lily, needing space after the phone call, goes for a walk on her own.

Outside, as Wes gives a ghost tour of the house, Lily finishes off a phone call to her dad, before heading up for a shower, finding Dot waiting to bang on the pipes as part as Wes's tour. After asking about if anything in the ghost tour is actually true, Lily shoos Dot out.

Downstairs, Abbie and Wes talk about the architecture of the house and what architecture should be. Lily comes down looking for her phone; Abbie and Wes haven't seen it. Abbie tries to call it, but between the phone being on vibrate and the various noises of the house, no one can hear it. As Abbie gets ready to do a systematic search with a field recorder, Lily and Wes argue about whether to turn off the radiators - Wes doesn't want the guests to be cold, and would rather err on the side of warmness, while Lily points out that it's summer and already warm - which ends in Wes going to the basement to turn them off.

Abbie begins their room-by-room search, starting in the kitchen. After the windchimes are taken down and the sump pump is turned off, there is still too much noise, particularly from the attic. While Wes keeps an eye on the pump, Lily and Abbie to to see what the noise is, finding the attic storage door already unlocked and open. Inside, they find a mannequin hand with a motor attached, which bangs against the floor - it was for the ghost tour, meant to be a waving figure in the window.

Turning off the hand, Abbie begins looking round, finding a trunk of old tomes. While the books make Abbie excited, Lily just sees the house as old and creepy, and relates how she once peed on the foundations when she was seventeen and drunk. They briefly argue over whether the foundations were marble or limestone, before Lily steps on a piece of glass from the window, and they notice it's broken.

At that moment Wes comes up to tell them to stop poking around, and is shocked to see the broken window. Abbie, finding bird feathers, hypothesizes that a dove flew through the window, got into Lily's room, and stole her phone. Lily thinks Wes stole the phone and left a bird feather in her room, but Wes is adamant that he would never harm any part of the house. He leaves, upset, and Abbie insists they try the field recorder again.

After recording fifteen rooms in the house, Abbie uploads the audio to their laptop. They start with the first recording in the kitchen, slowing it down and trying to isolate the phone ringing. In the recording, a voice can be heard in the windchimes, saying to 'beware the one in the night'. Lily finds it creepy, but Abbie says it's noisy data and it doesn't mean anything. Lily wonders if it's ghosts, but Abbie insists that ghosts aren't real, that they hate noisy data, and that while a bird stealing Lily's phone is improbable, the existence of ghosts is impossible. After a heated moment, Abbie says Lily's phone was likely dropped in the graveyard by the bird.

Hunting in the graveyard, Lily finds her phone, still with some battery left. She's delighted, until she reads her emails; she's suspended from her job due to her poor performance in her last call. As she walks back to the house she meets Wes on the porch, and tells him the news. She then asks who 'the one in the night' is. Wes initially pretends not to know, then tells Lily not to ask Dot, not wanting to upset her. He tells Lily she's protected, but Lily finds that more creepy than comforting.

Dot is drinking coffee in the kitchen, and Lily tells her about losing her job.

Post-Credit Fact
Frank “Giddy” Gideon was an out of work handyman who traded repairs for room and board during the notorious “Chill of ’37”. He kept the heat on all winter long though he did lose two toes to frostbite.

Cast

 * Clarisa Cherie Rios as Lily
 * Marsha Harman as Dot
 * Kathleen Hoil as Abbie
 * Michael Turrentine as Wes

Crew

 * Writer: Jessica Wright Buha


 * Sound design: Ryan Schile
 * Director: Jeffrey Nils Gardner
 * Music composer: Stephen Poon
 * Recording engineer: Mel Ruder
 * Lead sound designer: Ryan Schile
 * Executives Producers: Eleanor Hyde and Jeffrey Gardner
 * Theme performed by:
 * Stephen Poon
 * Lauren Kelly
 * Gunnar Jebsen
 * Travis Elfers
 * Mel Ruder
 * Betsey Palmer