Page 64 of Haunted Ever After

The Beach Bum saw Nick safely to The Haunt, where the steel drum band was still going strong. But he didn’t stop for a nightcap. He wasn’t in the mood for company. He headed toward Hallowed Grounds, then up the back stairs to his apartment. Alone. Again.

But this was Boneyard Key, after all. “Alone” was a relative term.

Twenty-Six

It had happened again.

It hadn’t been a trick of the light. Cassie was sure this time.

When Nick had pulled himself away from her and fled down her front steps, for the space of a couple of racing heartbeats his eyes had bored into hers.

Those eyes had been dark brown. As dark as her own.

He’d been harder to see down by the gate as they said good night, but the streetlight had caught enough of his face for her to see that his eyes were their regular blue again.

A bad feeling had settled in her gut, like a punch to the stomach. She had a pretty good idea of what was going on. She had questions to ask, but with Sarah’s limited vocabulary, she had to ask them just right if she wanted to get the answers she needed.

Cassie woke up the next morning to an unexpected text from Nick. Check your mailbox. Not even bothering to get dressed, she shoved her feet in some flip-flops by the door and flip-flopped her way to the mailbox by the street in her pajamas. The rich smell of cinnamon and bananas greeted her when she opened it, and inside was a foil-wrapped loaf, still warm.

Tampering with mail is a federal offense you know, she texted back after her first slice.

They’ll never take me alive.

Cassie laughed out loud in her empty kitchen, her hand clapped over her mouth to stifle the sound and catch any stray banana bread crumbs. God, she really liked this guy. The warm glow in her chest from cinnamon banana bread and the memory of Nick’s body against hers dimmed quickly, though, when she remembered how everything had ended the night before.

She called off work; it was time to get to the bottom of this.

Another cup of coffee, and then she got to it, unpacking the photos and documents from the folder she’d borrowed from Theo. She lined them up the way they had been the day before, the time progressing in chronological order across her coffee table. Then she opened her latest Etsy package of custom magnetic poetry pieces, placing them on the fridge in random places.

Once she was done, she stepped back and cleared her throat, which had suddenly become very dry. “Sarah? I hope you’re here today. I really want to talk to you.”

It took only a few seconds before the spoon that Cassie had used to stir her coffee rattled from its place on the saucer that still held banana bread crumbs. She exhaled a long sigh. “Okay. Good. So, there are some new words up here. Family words, like ‘husband’ and ‘brother’ and ‘father,’ stuff like that. You were trying to tell me about how the house was yours, do you remember? You said ‘man closer friend,’ which I took to mean he was closer than a friend to you. And I spent money on these custom words so I really hope I’m right.

“Were you talking about William Donnelly? The man who built this house? Was there a connection between you two? Can you tell me?”

Cassie stared hard at the fridge, waiting for a response, but nothing happened. Then she remembered that she never watched Sarah move the words; maybe she was waiting for privacy. Cassie busied herself by wrapping up the leftovers from her breakfast and putting her dishes in the dishwasher. Then she turned around. There was one word in the middle of the fridge; a word that was worth every penny she’d spent on it.

uncle

“Uncle?” Cassie repeated. “William Donnelly was your uncle?” Her mind spun with this new information.

But Sarah wasn’t done. When Cassie looked up again the words had changed.

mother father dies

child goes uncle

big rain wind

“Big rain wind…” She made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat. “Cassie, you dumbass. You live in Florida and don’t have ‘hurricane’ on your fridge?” But self-flagellation could wait. She turned her attention back to the fridge, translating each line of the message one at a time. “So your parents died. You were sent to live with your uncle, before the Great Storm. You were here for the Great Storm?”

And with a mental click, puzzle pieces began to fall into place. There wasn’t a record of any other Blankenships in Boneyard Key because Sarah was the only one. But she wasn’t an outsider; she was actually part of the Donnelly family, whose history here wasn’t documented because he didn’t stick around. Sarah Blankenship had been absorbed from one man’s family to another, with no trace of her own name.

Man, fuck the patriarchy sometimes.

That would be an easy enough thing to verify. Cassie turned to her laptop; she’d splurged on a membership to a genealogy website a while back when she’d first started digging into Sarah’s past. She flipped it open and…dead. Of course. It wouldn’t charge at all now when she was at home. She’d chalk it up to it being old and just give in and buy a new one, but it would work just fine when she plugged it in at Hallowed Grounds. Or when Buster would plug it in. Or that time Nick had done so…Basically anytime a man plugged it in, it worked.

Man, fuck the patriarchy again. Even her electricity was involved.

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