Page 43 of Haunted Ever After

“They’re great at painting,” he said. “Those kids will be able to knock out the living room, and the kitchen if you want it, before you can even blink. And if you’re wanting to change out these cabinets, I’ll get the boys to help me with all that lifting too.” He placed a weathered hand to the small of his back at the thought.

“That’ll be great,” Cassie said, already picturing the chaos of trying to attend meetings from her laptop in the kitchen while all that was going on. But she couldn’t risk unplugging and moving to another room; she didn’t have Hallowed Grounds as a backup anymore. So chaos it was.

One evening, she noticed as she took her dinner out of the microwave that there was a new message on the fridge. One thing about ghosts, they were stealthy when they wanted to be.

television island again

“Television…” Cassie swore as she peeled back the film from the plastic tray, giving herself both a steam facial and mild first-degree burns. “Island? Do you mean like a kitchen island? We don’t have one of those in here. Or a television.” She opened the fridge for some water, and when she closed it again there was a new message.

stupid television people

Now it clicked. “Oh, you mean Romance Resort?” Great, her ghost was getting hooked on reality television. “You’re right, we’re behind, aren’t we? I think there’s a couple episodes saved up.” She carried her meal out to the living room; apparently she was eating in front of the TV tonight. “Only one at a time, though. Binge-watching can rot your brain.”

After the mediocre microwave lasagna and even more mediocre television, Cassie curled up on the sofa by the front window with Boneyard Key: A Haunted History. Reading it felt just like taking the ghost tour. When Sophie had said she’d used the book to create her tour, she hadn’t been kidding. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; a story was made that much richer, that much more immediate, when you were standing right there where said thing happened. It was a smart business model, and Sophie obviously had a good thing going here.

When she got to the story of Hawkins House, Cassie took a sip of wine and started reading aloud. Because who knew who might be listening. And who could help get the facts straight.

“The Hawkins House was built in 1899 by William Donnelly…” Cassie started reading aloud, but it didn’t take long for her voice to trail off. Like the rest of this book, it was Sophie’s ghost tour verbatim. There was nothing in here that Cassie hadn’t heard before. Therefore, there was nothing that Sarah Hawkins hadn’t heard before, either.

“Well, that was pointless.” She sighed and tossed the book down on the table. “Sorry, Sarah,” she called toward the kitchen. “I thought there might be something I didn’t already know in there, but it’s the same old shit. House was built by William Donnelly, then acquired by your husband. You two moved in, and then a few years later he died. And then…” She didn’t want to finish the story that was written in the book. How do you tell someone, You became the town’s scary lady in the old house on the corner? It felt rude, somehow, to point it out to her non-corporeal face.

Something clattered to the floor in the kitchen, and Cassie jumped to sit up straight on the couch. She leaned forward, peering into the kitchen, but she couldn’t see anything from that angle. She wasn’t scared, she told herself as she went to investigate. Sure, it had gotten dark a little while ago, and sure, her house was confirmed to be haunted. But she and Sarah were watching reality TV together. They were friends now.

The kitchen was empty, and in the dim light from above the stove it took a minute for Cassie to find the spoon. The telltale spoon that sat on the kitchen table. Now it was in the middle of the floor, its filigree handle pointed toward the fridge.

Oh. Cassie swallowed as guilt rushed through her. Sarah had probably been spinning that spoon on the table like mad, but Cassie hadn’t seen because she’d been in the other room. She stepped closer to the fridge, to see Sarah’s message.

wrong

my house

Cassie sighed. “You said that before. I remember, because it scared the shit out of me. Can you be more specific? When was it your house?” Her mind whirled with possibilities. Had Sarah built this house? Had she bought it?

She didn’t even realize she was musing out loud until the spoon bumped lightly against the side of her foot. She looked over at the fridge again. The words my house were still there, but now they were followed with before.

Okay. Now we were getting somewhere. Maybe. “Like before you and your husband got married? Did you buy it from that Donnelly guy? Could women buy houses in those days?” Cassie wasn’t a property law girlie, but she remembered a factoid she’d read online. Something about how women couldn’t even get credit cards in their own names until around the 1970s. Was owning a house the same thing? Had Sarah’s name been erased in favor of her husband’s? Was that what she was so pissed off about for all this time? Being misrepresented in property records?

She deliberately didn’t look at the fridge, and waited till the spoon spun again to check for an answer. There were three separate lines this time; Sarah Hawkins was getting more and more verbose.

man closer friend

build house

then me

Cassie stared at those words like they were one of those old-school Magic Eye puzzles, and if she looked at them long enough, they’d make sense.

“Okay, starting with the easiest first. ‘Build house, then me.’ So that Donnelly guy built the house, then you…bought it or whatever. But…‘man closer friend’…” She sounded out the trio of words, as though that would help them make more sense. It wasn’t Sarah’s fault; she was limited by the words on the fridge, and could only say so much as a result. Time to go back online and order more packs of words.

There had to be a better way to go about this. Cassie had never been very good at fact-checking—at work that had always been someone else’s job. She just wrote the copy. But maybe she could handle this. Maybe she could fact-check Sarah’s life.

She had to. Right now Sarah didn’t have anyone else in her corner, and from the sounds of it, she hadn’t for a long time.

But Cassie was in her corner now. And she was going to see this through. Help the ghost in her house however she could. Thankfully, this damn town was full of ghost experts. She pulled out her phone and sent Libby a text. Only in Boneyard Key could she make an appointment at the local ghost hunter’s office for first thing in the morning.

Cassie had high hopes, but the next morning Libby shook her head with a puzzled expression. “ ‘Man closer friend’? What is that supposed to mean?”

“I wish I knew.” Cassie had stayed awake far too late last night, trying to connect those words to something, but she’d come up with nothing.

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