Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
The candle was mocking me. I was sure of it.
“Focus on the wick,” Lori said, sitting across from me at the back table in Bayberry House with the patience of a woman who’d done this before and expected it to go badly. “Don’t think about lighting it. Think about heat. Think about something that makes you feel warm.”
“How about the hot flash I had in the parking lot ten minutes ago?”
“That works.”
Jill and Tammy were watching from the bar, Jill clutching her water glass with both hands and Tammy leaning against the counter with her arms crossed. I’d spent the first twenty minutes filling them in—the toxicology results, Tony’s visit, Paula and the diary.
“Methanol,” Jill had said, tapping her pen against the legal pad she’d started using to track suspects. “That’s—okay, so from a liability standpoint—sorry, investigative standpoint—that’s going to be a problem. The defense would argue degradation, contamination, procedural—“
“Jill,” Tammy had said gently.
“Right. Not helpful.”
Now we’d moved to training, which Lori had insisted on before any more detective work.
“Before we get to fire,” Lori said, “let’s talk about what you already do. Seeing ghosts. Right now it’s involuntary—they show up when they want, you see them whether you like it or not. But you can learn to control the door.”
“There’s a door?”
“Think of it like a dimmer switch. Right now yours is stuck on high. We need to teach you to turn it down when you need to, and up when you’re ready.
” She set a small hand mirror on the table between us.
“Try closing your eyes. Imagine your ability as a light in your chest—bright, open. Now picture yourself turning it down. Dimming it. Pulling the energy inward.”
I closed my eyes. Pictured a light. Pictured a dimmer switch. Pictured the Costco lighting aisle, which was probably not what she meant.
“I feel ridiculous.”
“Normal. Keep going.”
I breathed in, breathed out. Something shifted—a tug behind my sternum, not painful but strange, like a muscle I’d never used—
And then a voice that was absolutely not Rosaria’s said, directly in my left ear: “Excuse me, do you know if the library’s still open?”
My eyes flew open. Next to the bar—hovering, really, about two inches off the ground—was a thin, elderly woman in a housecoat and reading glasses, translucent and faintly blue around the edges.
She was clutching a spectral stack of books against her chest and looking around with the polite confusion of someone who’s wandered into the wrong building and is too embarrassed to leave.
“Oh no,” I said.
“There’s someone,” Tammy said, squinting at the spot near the bar. “I can see the edges. Blue aura, confused energy.”
“I had them due back on Thursday,” the ghost continued, shuffling in a small circle. “But I can’t seem to find—everything looks different. Did they move the drop box again?” She stopped shuffling and peered at me through her spectral bifocals. “Can you see me?”
“I can see you.”
“Oh, wonderful. Do you know what happened to the drop box? It used to be right on the corner. I’ve been looking for it all week and I can’t—well, I can’t seem to find much of anything lately.”
I’d accidentally tuned into a dead woman’s overdue library books instead of tuning Rosaria out. Perfect.
“I opened the door the wrong way,” I told Lori.
“You opened it wider, yes.” Lori didn’t look concerned, which was both reassuring and annoying. “Close it now. Same exercise. Pull the energy in.”
“They charge ten cents a day, you know,” the ghost added, adjusting her glasses. “It adds up. I’m very responsible about returns. I’ve never had a late fee in forty years and I don’t intend to start now.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, pictured the dimmer switch, and shoved it down as hard as I could. The ghost’s voice faded like a radio losing signal—“—forty years, not a single late fee, and I won’t have people thinking—“ and then she was gone.
I opened my eyes. The spot by the bar was empty.
“Well,” Tammy said, “at least we know someone’s worried about their library fines.”
Jill had pressed herself flat against the back of her chair. “Was that—did you just—was there a ghost right there?”
“Lady in a housecoat worried about overdue books.” I rubbed my temples. “I don’t think she knows she’s dead.”
“They often don’t,” Lori said. “But you shut it down. That’s progress.” She pushed the candle closer to me. “Now. Let’s talk about your other gift.”
She folded her hands on the table the way she did when she was about to explain something she’d explained a hundred times. “Different people, different abilities. Jill moves things. Tammy reads auras. I heal. And some people manipulate energy—heat, cold, light.”
“Like a thermostat,” Tammy offered.
“Your hot flashes,” Lori said, ignoring Tammy. “They’re not just hormonal. You’ve been running hot your whole life, haven’t you? Quick temper you learned to swallow? Passion you tamped down?”
I thought about thirty years of biting my tongue. Smiling through Rosaria’s insults. Agreeing with Sal when I wanted to throw things. Swallowing every argument, every frustration, every spark of anger until I was so compressed I couldn’t remember what it felt like to burn.
“Maybe,” I said.
“That’s energy. It has to go somewhere.” Lori nodded at the candle. “Light it.”
I stared at the wick. Thought about heat. Thought about the thermostat metaphor. Thought about warmth and fire and—
Nothing.
“Try harder,” Lori said.
I concentrated until my jaw ached. The candle sat there, cool and waxy and deeply unimpressed.
“Maybe picture something that makes you angry,” Tammy suggested.
I thought about Sal telling me I was “past my potential.” Josie’s nod—twenty-eight years, and I got a nod. Rosaria saying divorce like it was a disease. Thirty years of someone else deciding who I got to be.
Something flared in my chest.
The candle didn’t light. But three feet to the left, a paper napkin burst into flame.
“Oh—“ Jill jumped back so hard her chair scraped.
“Now control it,” Lori said, calm as Sunday. “Put it out.”
I turned toward the napkin, panicking, and reached for whatever I’d just done, trying to reverse it, pull the heat back, smother it—
The notebook next to the napkin caught fire.
“That’s the opposite of putting it out!” Jill shrieked, and her hands shot up involuntarily, and a glass of water launched off the bar like a guided missile. It missed the napkin by a solid two feet and hit Lori square in the chest.
Tammy was already moving. She grabbed a dish towel, threw it over the napkin and notebook, and pressed down hard while Jill apologized in a stream of corporate-adjacent panic—“Oh God, I’m so sorry, that was a completely involuntary response, I had no intention of—Lori, I am so, so—“
Lori sat there, dripping, her cardigan soaked, water running off her reading glasses. She removed them, wiped them on the one dry patch of her sleeve, and put them back on.
“Well,” she said. “We know what your gift is.”
“I almost burned down your restaurant!”
Tammy lifted the dish towel. Two charred patches on the table, a blackened napkin, and a notebook that would never be the same. “You did burn my table. But that’s what coasters are for.”
“But you made fire.” Lori smiled. It was the smile of a woman who’d been soaked by telekinetic water and still considered the evening a success. “That’s a start.”
“I wasted thirty years,” I said. It came out before I could stop it.
I’d been staring into my tea, thinking about the fire, about the dimmer switch, about all the energy I’d been swallowing since I was twenty-two years old.
“I spent my entire adult life being quiet and small and pleasant, and now I’m fifty-two and I’m setting napkins on fire and seeing dead people and I don’t even know how to unlock my own front door half the time. ”
Lori sipped her tea. “We can practice unlocking doors, if you want. Literally. There’s a trick with energy manipulation—directing heat into a lock mechanism, expanding the metal just enough to pop it. Useful skill.”
“That’s not what I—“
“I know what you meant.” She set the mug down. “But I answered the part I can actually help with first. The other part, the thirty years—that’s harder.”
I wrapped my hands around the warm ceramic. “My kids. Josie and Nick won’t talk to me. Carmen’s the only one who stuck around, and I’m terrified of losing her too. And I keep thinking—if I’d left Sal earlier, if I’d been braver, if I’d come to Starfall Bay when Amelia was still alive—“
“Then you’d be a different woman having different regrets.
” Lori’s voice was matter-of-fact, but her eyes were kind.
“I was a nurse for thirty years. Hit menopause at forty-seven and my world cracked open. I could feel people’s pain—not metaphorically, physically.
Thought I was losing my mind. My first husband was alive then.
He didn’t understand—thought I was having a breakdown.
We fought for months before Amelia found me and explained. ”
“What changed?”
“I healed a woman’s migraine by touching her shoulder.
In the grocery store, of all places. She’d been crying in the cereal aisle and I just—reached out.
And something in me knew.” She looked at me over her glasses.
“I was forty-seven. I’d spent my whole life thinking I knew what I was, and then I became something else entirely.
It wasn’t wasted time, Gina. It was roots. You can’t bloom without them.”
“What if I bloom into something that just sets things on fire?”
“Then we buy better fire extinguishers.” She reached across the scorched table and squeezed my wrist. That warmth again—the faint easing of tension, the headache I hadn’t noticed receding. “We bloom when we’re ready. Not before. And you’re ready now.”
I sat with that. The restaurant creaked around us. Through the dark window, I could see the street, the closed shops, the glow of a streetlight on wet pavement. My reflection looked back at me from the glass—just me, no ghosts, no spectral critics.
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to mention,” Lori said, her voice shifting to her clinical tone. “About Rosaria’s ghost. You said she’s anchored to you specifically, not to a place. And Tammy confirmed it.”
“Right.”
“Strong emotions anchor spirits. The stronger the feeling, the stronger the hold. Murder would do it—the rage, the injustice. But Tammy said the attachment was unusually intense, even for a murder victim.” Lori paused.
“That suggests there’s something else. Another piece of unfinished business beyond the murder.
Something personal, something she hasn’t resolved. ”
I thought about Rosaria at the family house, staring at the photo of herself. The way her voice had gone quiet when she talked about Paula. The things she’d almost said and then pulled back from.
“She’s holding onto something,” I said.
“She’s holding onto a lot of things. That’s what kept her here.” Lori adjusted her glasses. “But here’s the practical question. Do you have any idea who killed her? Because the fastest way to get Rosaria Ferraro out of your bathroom mirror is to solve the murder.”
“I don’t know who did it. Not yet.”
“But?” Tammy leaned forward, chin on her palm. She’d heard the but before I’d said it.
“But I might know where there’s a clue.” I picked at the edge of a napkin, tearing it into strips without thinking about it. “Paula came to see me. Sal’s sister. She showed up at the cottage with wine and this whole concerned-sister-in-law routine, and then she brought up Rosaria’s diary.”
“Diary,” Jill repeated.
“Locked. Leather-bound. Rosaria kept it for decades—wrote in it every night. She wanted to know if I knew anything about it.” I lined up the napkin strips on the table. “She knew exactly where Rosaria kept it. Top drawer of the dresser. She’d seen it when she was sixteen and got caught snooping.”
“So Paula tracked you down to talk about a diary she hasn’t seen in thirty years.” Tammy’s voice had lost its warmth. Not cold—careful. “That’s not casual, sugar. That’s fishing.”
“Was she fishing for the diary?” Jill asked. “Or fishing to see if you had it?”
“Either way, she wanted to know where it was,” Lori said.
Jill uncapped her pen—she’d started carrying the legal pad everywhere—and tapped it against the table.
“Okay, but why? If Paula’s just trying to help, she’d mention it and move on.
If she’s bringing it up specifically, unprompted, driving two hours to do it—“ The pen tapped faster. “That’s strategic. That’s someone with a stake in what’s inside. ”
“Rosaria said the diary had secrets about everyone,” I said. “What if there’s something in there about Paula? Something she doesn’t want anyone else to find?”
“Then she’d want it before you got it,” Tammy said.
“Or before the police got it,” Jill added. “From a legal standpoint—sorry, from a common sense standpoint—a diary full of family secrets in the hands of a murder investigation would be a nightmare for anyone with something to hide.”
I stopped shredding the napkin. “There’s only one way to find out what’s in it. I need to get into Rosaria’s house and look for it. If it’s still there.”
The table went quiet for a beat. Then Tammy and Jill both started talking at the same time.
“We can help with that—“
“I have some thoughts on entry points and—“
“Hold on.” Lori held up a hand, and they both stopped. She had that effect. “Is Rosaria’s stuff even still there? She kept it in her drawer but have they cleaned stuff out? Sold things?”
Good question. I wasn’t in the know anymore, but Carmen could tell me if Rosaria’s things were still there..
“I can find out,” I said. “Give me a few days.”
We closed up after that. Tammy packed the leftover enchiladas into a container and pressed them into my hands like a prescription.
Lori locked the back door with Tammy’s spare key and walked me to the corner before heading to her car.
Jill waved goodnight from across the street, her legal pad tucked under one arm like classified documents.
I walked home through the cold, ate half the enchiladas standing at the kitchen counter, and went to bed with my head full of diaries and suspects and a dead woman’s secrets.
I needed a break. I needed twenty-four hours where the biggest decision I made was paint color versus pattern, where nobody mentioned murder or unfinished business or the word anchored.
Tomorrow I was driving to HomeGoods, buying something for the cottage that I picked out myself, and pretending to be a woman whose biggest problem was throw pillow selection.