Page 57 of Haunted Ever After

“Three times,” Cassie said.

“Three?” Nick raised an eyebrow. “Soph, you can’t make the poor woman be your constant warm body when your crowds are thin.”

Sophie rolled her eyes. “It’s not that.” She waited for Nick to wander off before turning back to Cassie. “I was wondering if…” She clasped her hands together, released them, then tapped nervously on the counter with a fingernail. “If you’ve…I don’t know…if you’ve talked any more with Sarah recently?”

“Well, yeah,” Cassie replied. “We talk a lot. As often as you can talk to the incorporeal spirit of the woman living in your house, that is.” She was shooting for a joke, but all she could remember was this morning. my man bad.

“Were you able to figure out if there’s more to her story? Have I been getting it wrong all this time?”

“Sophie.” Cassie dropped her voice as though imparting a secret. “It’s for tourists, right? I don’t think the ghost tour police are going to come and take you away if your stories aren’t accurate.”

“They should, though!” Sophie looked miserable. “I worked hard on that tour. On finding the most interesting stories, mapping out a route that shows off our downtown area. Figuring out the right mix of history and ghost stories. I’ve been proud of it, you know? And to find out I’ve been lying all this time…”

Cassie could see where she was coming from, but…“What about the ice cream shop?”

“What about it?” Sophie’s brow furrowed. “Which one?”

Cassie gestured down the road, which really did nothing to narrow things down. She could throw a rock from the front door of Hallowed Grounds and hit at least three ice cream places. “I Scream Ice Cream. I missed the beginning of that story, but Nick said that you made it up.”

“He did?” Sophie looked over her shoulder toward Nick. He poured a cup of coffee and popped a to-go lid on it, oblivious to their scrutiny. “I didn’t make it up,” she said, turning back to Cassie. “It’s in the book! Why would he say I made it up?”

Oh, no. What the hell had Cassie started? “He didn’t use those exact words.” Actually, the exact word he’d used was bullshit but she wasn’t going to tell Sophie that. “He just said that it wasn’t true. I figured you sprinkled in some more colorful stories for the tourists.”

“I don’t do that.” Sophie leaned back in her chair with a sigh that was bigger than she was. “That’s what I was afraid of.” She rummaged in her messenger bag, pulling out her battered copy of Boneyard Key: A Haunted History. “I’ll admit, I haven’t actually reread this book in a while. At least not since I finished putting this tour together, and that was over five years ago. I looked through some parts of it the other night, and now I know he got some stuff wrong. Simple stuff! He said that Eternal Rest—you know, the motel over that way—is one of the only buildings that isn’t haunted, and I know that it is! The Eriksons have been running that place for four generations, and lots of their family members have stuck around.”

Cassie cocked her head. “Then why isn’t it part of the tour?”

“Too far away.” Sophie flipped through the book while she talked. “The tour is an hour long, give or take. Eternal Rest is only a mile down the road, but if we trekked all the way there and back on foot it would take too much time. Plus not all tourists want to walk that much, so you have to take that into account too.”

Cassie nodded slowly. There was more involved with putting together a walking tour than she would have suspected. “So what you’re saying is…”

“I have to rewrite the tour.” Sophie tossed the book to the table with a thump and buried her face in her hands.

“Okay. Hey…” Cassie grasped Sophie’s wrist. “Hey. You can do this.”

“I don’t know.” Sophie’s voice was muffled by her hands. “It’s so much to research.”

“Tell me about it.” Her mind drifted back to Sarah. She had a lot of research to do too.

“Why don’t you talk to Theo?” Nick came by to clear away their empty glasses, but he’d obviously been eavesdropping. “I bet he can help.”

Sophie groaned at his suggestion, letting her forehead thunk to the countertop. But Cassie was stumped. “Who’s that?”

“Theo,” Nick said, as though repeating the guy’s name would clear everything up. It didn’t.

“He’s an asshole.” Sophie was still face down on the counter, her voice muffled.

“He is not.” Nick rolled his eyes and turned back to Cassie. “He runs the bookstore. Boneyard Books? Anyway, there’s a little history museum in the back of the bookshop. Kind of his pet project.”

“Seriously?” Cassie had walked by the bookstore a few times but hadn’t made it inside yet, which was frankly a crime. But the building wasn’t that big; how did they get a whole-ass museum in there?

“It’s not much, believe me. The town’s been here, what, less than a hundred and fifty years? Not that much history to document. His focus is mostly on the Founding Fifteen.”

“His focus is on being an asshole.” Sophie lifted her head up then, adjusting her glasses. “He took my tour once, back when I started. I swear all he did was sigh and shake his head the entire time. I thought his head was going to fall off.” Her tone of voice said that she wouldn’t have minded if it had.

“He can be a little bit of a stickler for accuracy,” Nick said tactfully. “But if accuracy is what you’re looking for…”

“And it is,” Cassie reminded Sophie, her voice firm. “Look, I’ll go with you, okay? Strength in numbers and all that.” She closed her laptop. The hell with it; that press release wasn’t due for a few more days. Sophie needed backup. And maybe Theo knew something about Sarah Hawkins and her bad man.

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