Page 66 of Haunted Ever After

“Hmm.” Nick looked skeptical, his gaze sweeping her up and down. Cassie’s cheeks heated up, and this time when she reached across the counter it was to swat him.

“Not like that! Pervert.”

“I’m just saying…you and him, alone in that museum of his…try and behave yourself.”

Cassie snorted. “I’ll see what I can do.”

But when she arrived at Boneyard Books, picking her way back to the museum side of the shop, she pushed aside the curtain and found that she wasn’t alone at all.

“Hey.” Sophie waved from one of the seats at the card table.

“Please tell me you haven’t been here all night.”

Sophie’s mouth twitched in a smile as Cassie dropped into the seat opposite. “Of course not. But there’s so much here…so much I never knew about. I took the morning off to do some more reading.”

“Took the morning off? You have a day job?”

Sophie raised an eyebrow. “Ghost tours don’t exactly pay the bills, you know. I work from home. Medical transcriptions, stuff like that.”

“Oh. Nice.” Cassie could relate to working from home, and how easy it was sometimes to sneak off when something more tempting was itching in your brain.

“What about you?” Sophie folded her arms on the table, over the papers scattered from their file folder. “What are you doing around here?”

“I found something.” She pulled out her laptop and powered it up.

“What did you find?” Theo’s voice came from the doorway, and Cassie jumped and spun in her seat.

“Where the hell did you come from?” The front counter had been deserted when she’d walked in, so she’d expected him to be back here in the museum.

“The classics section.” Theo tugged on his brown tweed vest and straightened his tie, looking exactly like someone who would hang out in the classics section. It was probably the sexiest part of the store to him. “Some new books came in I had to shelve. This place is occasionally a bookstore, you know.” His voice was chiding, but his eyes sparked with humor.

“I’ll try and remember that,” Cassie said with a smile of her own. “Anyway…” She turned back to her laptop, pulling up the documents she’d hastily downloaded at Hallowed Grounds. “Take a look.”

Theo adjusted his glasses as he leaned over Cassie’s shoulder. “Sarah Hawkins was Donnelly’s niece?”

“Before she was Sarah Hawkins. When she was Sarah Blankenship.” Cassie nodded. “That explains why you didn’t know the name; she was the only one. Plus, she told me this morning that she was his niece, so it all tracks.”

“Wait.” He straightened up. “She told you?”

“Oh, yeah,” Sophie chimed in. “Cassie has these words on her fridge, and Sarah moves them around when she has something to say.”

“Really?” Theo looked at Cassie with new interest. “That’s…that’s genius, actually.”

“Thanks. It’s been touch and go, but it seems to be working.” Cassie felt like a little bit of an asshole, taking credit for this innovative plan to communicate with the dead, when it was really a happy accident.

“I’ll say.” Theo looked at Cassie’s screen with unfocused eyes, and Cassie could all but see the wheels turning behind his light green eyes. “So Donnelly built the house and lived in it with Sarah. Then Sarah married Hawkins and he got the house…”

“That means Sarah lived there the whole time,” Sophie chimed in. “The house was always hers.”

“But not hers at the same time,” Theo said. “Her name was never on it. It was more like her dowry or something.”

“And then Donnelly left, Hawkins died, and it was just Sarah and the house again. For all those years.” Cassie sat back in her seat. “And all those years, it’s been called the Hawkins House, like she didn’t matter.”

Theo shrugged. “History’s written by the living, after all. Mr. Lindsay wasn’t exactly a protofeminist. A Haunted History is going to show his bias.”

“Yeah.” Cassie sighed. Fuck the patriarchy one more time. “But it’s not like this has been buried all that deep. Why didn’t anyone put this together before?”

“Nobody cared enough to.” Theo’s eyes flicked over to Sophie in apology, and her gaze went to the table and the papers she was studying.

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