Page 83 of Haunted Ever After

“Cold?” Nick wrapped an arm around Cassie, tugging her close, sharing his heat.

“Mmmm, a little.” But she wasn’t going to complain. She loved being cold enough to snuggle into Nick. Hoodie weather only lasted so long in Florida, and she was going to cherish every moment of it.

“Come on, let’s get inside. I’ll finish making dinner.” He swung around and hopped off the seawall, holding a hand to help her down.

“Oh, no.” She jumped down without his help. “I’ve got it.”

“Oh, come on,” he said as they headed back toward the house. “It’s just grilled cheese sandwiches. It’s not like I can screw up grilled cheese sandwiches.”

He screwed up the grilled cheese sandwiches.

“It’s only on one side this time.” Nick set the plate in the middle of the kitchen table with an apologetic grimace. All the sandwiches looked perfect: golden brown and cut on the diagonal, oozing with melty cheese. Then Cassie picked one up and turned it over; the other side looked like a charcoal briquette.

“I don’t understand.” She dropped her half sandwich to her plate. “You run a café. How are you so bad at this?”

“See, I don’t think of it as being bad at cooking.” Nick put a couple sandwich triangles onto his plate before starting the surgical process of peeling off the burned half of the sandwich. “I think of it as job security for Ramon.”

“And I’m sure he’s grateful.” Cassie dipped her spoon into her bowl of tomato soup—thank God she’d been in charge of that—and gave it a taste. At least that had turned out well. Then she followed his lead, picking off the burned pieces of bread from her sandwich. “Who knows, maybe you can make open-faced grilled cheese sandwiches a thing.”

Nick snorted. “Not if I’m trying to do it on purpose. I’d probably set the kitchen on fire.” His eyes, bright with amusement, met hers across the table, and Cassie had to laugh.

“Yeah. Maybe you should stick to coffee.”

“True. Elmer always said that was what I did best.”

Cassie studied him from across the table. His voice had softened, the way it always did when he talked about Elmer. “You miss him, huh?”

He nodded around a bite of mutilated cheese on bread. “I’d never admit it to his face, but I do. My phone’s so much quieter these days.”

Cassie’s soup spoon vibrated next to her bowl, striking it with a faint clink. Automatically her gaze went to her fridge.

window

“Oh!” Cassie stood up, dropping her napkin next to her plate before hurrying to open the kitchen window. “It’s time already.” They’d meant to finish dinner beforehand, but time had gotten away from them. It took a while to ruin a perfectly good plate of grilled cheese sandwiches.

Nick looked at the fridge, then at the clock on the microwave. “Damn. I’m late.” He stood up too, following Cassie to the living room, where they opened the windows wide. Then he bent to give Cassie a kiss. “See you after.”

It was meant to be a quick peck—an I’ll be right back kiss. But Cassie couldn’t help it; she reached up and slid her hand around the back of his neck, holding him there so she could linger. She still wasn’t used to this: his mouth on hers, the way his touch warmed her to the core. She lived for these little moments, for his slow, lazy smile against her lips as he took his time kissing her. He was thorough, his arms sliding around her waist and pulling her hips into his, making a promise he would keep later that night.

“Damn,” he said again as he finally, reluctantly pulled away. “Now I’m really late.”

“Oh no. I’m sorry.” Cassie wasn’t sorry. Not in the least. She leaned against the doorjamb, watching with a hazy smile as he trotted down the front steps and through the garden gate, hurrying down the street toward Hallowed Grounds. Then she poured a second glass of wine and made her way to the upstairs balcony off of their bedroom. It was her favorite spot to watch the ghost tour come by. She left the door to the balcony open in case it was Sarah’s too. With all the downstairs windows open to the night air, Sarah was guaranteed a good vantage point no matter where she was in the house.

It was mid-January, so the Christmas lights that were strung around the downtown area would be coming down soon. She’d loved the way they’d lit the town in a bright glow, with her house just on the edge of it all. She and Nick had taken their lights down from the house last weekend, so tonight she sat in relative darkness. The night was cool by Florida standards—just cool enough for a tomato soup and grilled cheese dinner and leaving the windows open in the evenings. The salt air teased locks of Cassie’s hair free to dance in the breeze, and she pushed them behind one ear.

Cassie settled into her bistro chair just in time. Low murmurs of conversation came from the sidewalk below, broken up by a cheerful, authoritative voice as they approached her house.

“And here we have the Sarah Hawkins House.” Sophie’s voice rang out loud and clear. She always spoke a little louder when she gave this part of the tour, since she knew who was listening. “It was built in 1899 by William Donnelly, shortly after Boneyard Key was established here after the Great Storm of 1897. Not long after that, Donnelly left for points north, deciding he’d had enough of Florida. And after that storm, who could blame him?” She paused as a couple of the tourists chuckled, the way they always did at that little joke.

“He planned to leave the house in the care of his niece, Sarah Blankenship. We think her intention was to rent out rooms to the visitors who had started to congregate here in Boneyard Key. There hadn’t been a hotel established here yet, and the income would help when women didn’t have a lot of opportunity to earn a living.

“Sarah had helped Mr. Donnelly design the house, especially the gardens, and she loved this house tremendously. She was looking forward to living here—just her and her cabbage roses—but then William Donnelly met C.S. Hawkins. Mean Mr. Hawkins, we like to call him.” Sophie pitched her voice low, in the spooky storytelling voice she was so good at.

Cassie nodded along as Sophie continued to tell the story. It had taken months, and several sets of custom magnetic poetry, for Cassie and Sophie to get the entire story out of Sarah. She didn’t seem to harbor any ill will toward her uncle who had married her off. She understood, in a way that Cassie and Sophie didn’t, that William Donnelly thought he was doing right by his niece—seeing her married to a wealthy pillar of the community. And while the wealthy part certainly came in handy for Sarah once she was a widow, there was no way any of them could have known that Mr. Hawkins would linger for so many years after his death, trying to control Sarah from the great beyond.

“Sarah lived in this house alone, taking the brunt of her jerk of a husband’s behavior, not letting anyone else come inside the house for fear that he might harm them too.”

“Now, wait a second,” one of the tourists piped up from the back of the crowd. “I bought a copy of Boneyard Key: A Haunted History yesterday, and it doesn’t have any of that in there. It says that Mrs. Hawkins was the mean one. So what’s the truth?”

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