Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
I drove past Bayberry House twice before I actually parked.
The first time, I told myself I was looking for the address.
I wasn’t. I’d driven past it every day since I moved to Starfall Bay—big Victorian, wraparound porch, exactly where Lori said it would be.
The second time, I slowed to maybe fifteen miles an hour and watched the warm light spilling from the windows like someone checking the temperature of a pool before getting in.
A woman I’d met twelve hours ago in the produce section had told me to show up at a restaurant after hours to meet other women with supernatural abilities.
That was the situation. That was what I was doing with my Tuesday night.
My old Tuesday nights had involved folding Sal’s shirts while watching home renovation shows.
This was, objectively, more interesting. It was also possibly insane.
I pulled into the small lot behind the building and turned off the engine. The dashboard clock said 7:58. Lori had said eight. Tammy locked the back door at eight-fifteen and meant it. I had seventeen minutes to either go inside or drive home and pretend none of this was happening.
My phone buzzed. Carmen: How are you doing? Eat something real tonight, not cereal.
I typed back: Going to a thing. Making friends. Very normal.
I did not specify that the friends were a healer, a telekinetic, and a woman who could read your emotional state like a weather report. Carmen worried enough.
The back door of Bayberry House had a small light above it and a welcome mat that said “Come in, We’re Open” in letters so faded they were more suggestion than instruction. I sat in the car with my hands on the steering wheel and tried to organize my reasons for going inside.
One: Lori seemed sane. Grounded. The kind of woman who’d tell you the truth even if you didn’t want to hear it, and she’d told me there were others like me.
Two: Rosaria wasn’t going away. The hot flashes weren’t going away. Whatever was happening to me, ignoring it hadn’t worked for the past three days and probably wasn’t going to start working tonight.
Three: I was so lonely I’d had a full conversation with my toaster that morning. Not with Rosaria in the toaster. With the actual toaster. About whether it was worth buying a new one or if the uneven heating was part of its charm.
The toaster hadn’t answered, which was actually a relief, because at this point I half-expected it to.
“You are stalling,” Rosaria said from the rearview mirror.
I adjusted the mirror so I couldn’t see her. She reappeared in the side mirror instead.
“Go inside, Gina. These women may be useful. And sitting in a parking lot feeling sorry for yourself is not a productive use of my time.”
“Your time? You’re dead. You have nothing but time.”
“I have a murder to solve and a daughter-in-law who is sitting in a Subaru having a crisis of confidence over a dinner invitation. Go. Inside.”
I went inside.
The back door opened into a hallway that smelled like rosemary and something sweet, maybe pie, and I followed it toward a warm glow and the murmur of voices.
Bayberry House was gorgeous even with the lights dimmed—all warm wood and mismatched chairs and local art on the walls.
The kind of place that made you want to sit down and stay a while.
Then a wine glass exploded.
Not dropped—exploded. One second it was sitting on a back table, the next it was in about forty pieces on the hardwood floor, and the woman behind it was already on her feet with her hands fluttering and her face the color of a fire engine.
“Sorry! Sorry, I’m so sorry—“ The woman was already on her feet, hands fluttering, face crimson.
She was tall, angular, dressed in a silk blouse and tailored slacks that belonged in a corporate boardroom, not a closed restaurant at eight-fifteen on a Tuesday night.
Her blonde hair was pulled back in a bun so tight it looked painful.
“It just—I didn’t mean to—she startled me when she opened the door and I—“
“Jill.” A woman was already coming around the counter with a dustpan, moving with the easy calm of someone who swept up telekinetic accidents on a regular basis. “Breathe, baby. That’s the third glass this week and I’m running low on the good ones.”
“Gina,” Lori come over to me and pulled me into the room, “this is Jillian Porter. She breaks things.”
“I don’t—it’s not on purpose.” Jill pressed her palms flat on the table like she was trying to physically hold herself down.
“It’s a stress response. My therapist says—well, my old therapist, I can’t exactly tell my new one that I’m—anyway.
” She took a breath. “I’m Jill. I used to be a corporate lawyer and now I accidentally destroy glassware. It’s a whole thing.”
“Gina Ferraro.” I sat down across from her because Lori gave me a look that said sitting was not optional. “I see dead people, apparently. So.”
Jill’s eyes went wide. “Dead people? Like, plural?”
“Just the one so far. But she’s enough.”
“And this is Tammy,” Lori said, as the woman with the dustpan deposited the glass shards into a bin and set a margarita in front of me without being asked.
Tammy was warm brown skin and gray locks and statement earrings the size of small chandeliers, and her smile had the wattage of someone who genuinely liked people, which I’d forgotten was possible.
“Welcome to the weird club.” Tammy squeezed my shoulder. “Amelia talked about you.”
“She did?”
“Mmhmm. Said you’d turn up eventually. Said you had the look.”
I didn’t know what “the look” was, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
Jill was watching me with the anxious focus of a woman who’d been waiting for someone else to be new so she wasn’t the newest anymore. “When did yours start?”
“Two days ago. Yours?”
“Six weeks.” Jill picked up her margarita, set it down, picked it up again.
“I was in a partners’ meeting in Boston.
Someone told me I’d been passed over for the third time and I got so angry the conference room window cracked.
Top to bottom, right down the middle. Fourteen people watched it happen.
” She took a long drink. “I resigned the next day. Told them it was stress-related. Which, technically.”
“What did you do?”
“Googled ‘spontaneous telekinesis menopause’ at two in the morning. Which, for the record, gives you some very strange results.” She almost smiled.
“Then I found an article about Starfall Bay, and something about it just felt—right. So I drove up. Lori found me my second day here, crying in the parking lot of the hardware store because I’d accidentally set off every car alarm in the row. ”
Lori settled into a chair and accepted a margarita from Tammy. “I have a radar.”
“She has a radar,” Tammy confirmed. “She found me when I was twenty-two and didn’t know why I could see colors around people’s heads. Thought I was having migraines.”
“Aura reading,” Lori said, for my benefit. “Tammy sees auras.”
“Among other things.” Tammy winked. “But auras are my bread and butter. I can tell when someone’s lying, when they’re sick, when they’re falling in love. Makes me hell at poker.”
I looked around the table at these three women—a retired nurse, a former lawyer, and a restaurant owner who could see your emotional state like it was a paint swatch. A week ago, I’d been eating cereal alone and feeling sorry for myself. Now I was drinking margaritas with a coven.
“So here’s how it works,” Lori said, once the margaritas had been topped off and Jill had only rattled her glass once. “We look out for each other. We train together. We help new arrivals get control of their abilities before they accidentally level a building.”
Jill winced. “That’s not—has that actually happened?”
“Nineteen-eighty-seven.” Tammy sipped her margarita. “Before my time, but the old-timers talk about it. A pyrokinetic went through menopause and the library caught fire. They rebuilt it with sprinklers.”
“The point,” Lori said, giving Tammy a look, “is that you’re not alone, and you don’t have to figure this out by yourself. Control takes practice. Early manifestations are messy. That’s normal.”
“We meet here every Tuesday,” Tammy added. “After I close up. Sometimes more often if someone’s having a rough patch. And Lori does one-on-one training sessions for the new folks.”
“Training sessions.” I turned the word over. “Like supernatural tutoring.”
“Like learning to drive,” Lori said. “You’ve got the keys, you just need someone to teach you how to steer before you run into a telephone pole.”
Jill muttered, “I’ve already hit the telephone pole,” and Tammy patted her hand.
“So.” Tammy rested her chin on her palm and fixed me with a look that was warm but very direct. “Tell us about your ghost, Gina.”
I wrapped both hands around my margarita glass. The salt rim was rough under my thumbs. “It’s my former mother-in-law. Rosaria Ferraro.”
“Former?” Lori raised an eyebrow.
“I was married to her son for thirty years. We divorced. She died.” I paused.
Tammy and Lori exchanged a glance I couldn’t decode.
“And she just appeared?” Lori asked.
“In my bathroom mirror. During a hot flash.” I realized how ridiculous it sounded and took a drink. “She says she was murdered.”
The table went quiet. Jill’s margarita glass trembled slightly on the table, but she pressed her fingers against it and it stilled.
“Murdered,” Tammy repeated.
“Poisoned. After a family dinner. Everyone thinks she died of shock because my ex-husband had just announced our divorce, but she says—“ I stopped. “Look, I know how this sounds.”
“It sounds like a ghost with unfinished business,” Lori said. Calm. Matter-of-fact. Like ghosts with murder complaints were a standard Tuesday. “That’s the most common kind. They’re anchored here by something unresolved. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the anchor.”
“Is it hot in here or is it just me?” Jill asked, tugging at her collar.
“It’s not just you.” Tammy was fanning herself with a menu. “Honey, that’s not regular menopause. That’s something else.”
I looked between them. The heat faded as quickly as it came. Everyone was staring at me.
“What?” I said. “What did I do?”
“Your hot flashes.” Lori was watching me with that clinical focus, the nurse assessing a patient. “They’re not just internal. You’re radiating. The temperature in this room just went up about ten degrees.”
“That’s—“ I wanted to say impossible, but I was sitting in a room with a telekinetic and an aura reader, so my bar for impossible had shifted considerably. “I can’t control that.”
“Not yet.” Lori leaned forward. “That’s what the training is for. We’ll start this week.”
Tammy had just started explaining the schedule for training sessions when I saw the shimmer in the mirror behind the bar.
Oh no. Not here. Not now.
Rosaria materialized between two bottles of bourbon, her spectral form reflected in the long mirror that ran the length of the bar. Silver hair. Pearls. That expression of concentrated disapproval she’d perfected over seven decades.
“The decor in this place is abysmal,” Rosaria continued, drifting along the mirror to get a better view of the room. “Why are the chairs all different? That is not charming. That is a woman who cannot commit to a style.”
I pressed my lips together hard.
“And these women. These are your new friends?” She paused behind Jill’s reflection, studying her with naked judgment. “That one looks like she has not slept in a month. And the large one—“
“Don’t,” I said.
Everyone at the table stopped talking.
“Don’t what, honey?” Tammy asked.
“Sorry. Nothing. I just—“ I took a gulp of margarita and waved a hand. “Go on.”
Tammy’s eyes narrowed slightly, but she continued.
“You do not have time for this, Gina.” Rosaria had moved to the mirror directly behind me.
I could feel the cold radiating off her reflection.
“While you sit here drinking substandard tequila, my killer is out there. Free. Probably redecorating my house as we speak.” Her voice dropped to something close to a hiss.
“I did not come back from the dead to watch you join a book club.”
“It’s not a book club,” I muttered.
Another silence. Three sets of eyes on me.
“You seeing her right now?” Lori asked. No alarm, no surprise. Just a straightforward question.
I sighed. “She’s in the mirror behind the bar. Criticizing your decor.”
Tammy turned to look at the bar mirror. “Huh. I knew I felt something. Tell her I chose every one of these chairs personally and they’re conversation pieces.”
“She cannot hear me?” Rosaria sounded offended.
“She can’t hear you,” I said.
“Ridiculous. I am speaking perfectly clearly.”
“You are being haunted,” Lori told me, studying my face with that careful intensity. “By a ghost with an agenda. That takes a toll. You need training before anything else.”
“I need to find out who killed her before she drives me completely insane.”
“Both,” Lori said. “In the right order.”
Rosaria made a sound of disgust and flickered. “The order should be my murder first and your little self-discovery journey second. Priorities, Gina.”
I opened my mouth to argue, then realized I’d be yelling at a mirror in a room full of women I’d met an hour ago, so I closed it again and finished my margarita instead.
Tammy had been quiet for a moment, her head tilted, eyes slightly unfocused the way they’d gone when she talked about seeing auras. Now she straightened, and the warmth in her face had shifted to something more serious.
“Gina, I’m looking at your aura right now. You’ve got a lot of grief on you, which makes sense, given everything. But there’s something else. Something dark. Attached.”
“Attached,” I repeated.
“That ghost isn’t just visiting. She’s anchored to you. Specifically to you. That’s not how it usually works—most spirits are anchored to a place, or an object. But she’s hooked into your energy like a burr in a sweater.”
The cold behind me intensified. In the mirror, Rosaria’s expression had gone very still.
“Can you get her off?” I asked, and was embarrassed by how small my voice sounded.
“Not without resolving whatever’s keeping her here.” Tammy looked at me with a gentleness that made my throat ache. “She’s not going anywhere Not until this is finished.”
Rosaria’s reflection met my eyes in the mirror. For once, she didn’t say anything.
She didn’t have to.