The Kiss Lottery

Chapter 17 Everly

Chapter 17

Everly

The room is bigger than I expected and filled with old wooden shelves draped in cobwebs. The shelves are cluttered with tin boxes, crates, old tools, and leftover bricks from when the courthouse was built. Dust motes drift in the air.

“All right, let’s split up,” Beckett suggests. “Me and Everly will take this side, and you three take the other.”

Fritz nods in agreement as he, Troy, and Tabby head left, their flashlights bouncing in the darkness.

As they disappear, I pull on Beckett’s arm. “Did you call Margo and have her call someone to open the back door?”

He smirks. “I actually called Carson. He said he’d take care of it for us.”

Without thinking too much about it, I give him a big hug and look up at him. “Thank you.”

He gazes down at me. “I’d do anything for you.”

Something scurries in the darkness, probably a mouse, and we pull apart and focus.

We start by reading the labels on the boxes on the shelves. They’re arranged by date, so at least someone had the foresight to organize them at some point.

“We should start with a date range for Quincy’s life,” I suggest. “Let’s go from 1850 to 1920.”

He nods, and we begin pulling down boxes. The first box I open is filled with a few old newspapers. I riffle through them, looking for any mention of Quincy Seaton. Geez. This might take hours.

“Look for birth records, death certificates, anything that might give us a clue,” I say.

“I don’t see anything like that. Most of the old records were destroyed during a fire in 1922. What’s left is probably what was salvaged from that.”

An hour goes by as we work together.

“Hey. Look at this,” he says, holding up a yearbook from 1910. I see that he found several and has been flipping through them.

The cover is faded and the pages are stiff, but it’s intact. We look through it carefully, the black-and-white photos staring back at us.

“Here,” he says as he points to a name and photo. “Quincy Seaton.”

My eyes widen. Damn. He’s a real guy.

The picture shows a tall man in a suit with glasses. Below his photo, it reads: “Superintendent of Rose Schools, Quincy Seaton.”

Whoa. This is cool.

“He was an educator,” Beckett murmurs as he reads the text. “And look at this.”

He flips to the dedication page at the beginning. “This yearbook is dedicated to Lily Wane, a nurse from Memphis.”

Tingles dance over my skin. “Oh my god, that’s her.”

“Hey, guys!” Fritz calls from across the room. “You need to see this.”

We hurry over to where they’re gathered around an old trunk. Nearby is a row of metal hospital beds.

“Is this the haunted hospital area?” Tabby whispers.

I pat her arm. “Ghosts aren’t real.”

I pull out the yearbook. “Look, Quincy was a real person.”

Fritz takes it gently from me. “It doesn’t say if he was married or not.”

I elbow him. “Would that really matter to Lily? Doesn’t she just want to know if he was happy? He had a great vocation. He helped children. Isn’t this enough?”

Tabby pulls out her flask and takes a long sip. “If I was a spirit, I’d want my man to cry forever about losing me. I’d want all the details. I’d stalk him in his dreams.”

“Yeah, stalk me,” Troy murmurs, but she doesn’t hear him.

Fritz nods. “He dedicated the yearbook to her, so he must have loved her.”

Beckett nods, his voice thoughtful. “Love doesn’t always make sense, but it can endure time, distance, even mistakes.”

We all turn to look at him, and I suddenly realize he’s looking right at me. My chest tightens, the air between us thickening. There’s something in his tone, something that feels personal.

He scoffs, trying to play it cool. “But hey, what do I know? I’m just spitballing.”

Fritz turns to me. “Hmm, your lottery match has some interesting ideas about this, Everly. What do you think?”

I feel put on the spot, scrambling for something to say. I shake my head to clear my thoughts. “Love can be fickle. People change on a dime.”

Their eyes shift back to Beckett. He doesn’t flinch. “But that doesn’t mean it’s gone,” he says quietly. “Maybe it’s been there all along, waiting.”

His words hit me right in the heart.

Is he talking about us?

Is this his way of telling me that everything we felt is still inside him?

I mean, yeah, there’s the kitten and the bear and the hats, but ...

My throat tightens. “Did you send me an invitation to come to Rose for the lottery?”

I’m staring right at him, and the others seem to fade into the background.

A wry smile lifts his lips. His voice is soft when he speaks. “Of course I did.”