Chapter Three
Three
When Nick brought Cassie’s iced latte to her table, he’d left a little plate of banana bread beside it.
She looked up from her email, confused. “I didn’t order banana bread.”
“On the house,” he said on the way back to the counter.
Well. She wasn’t going to turn down a free treat. She wasn’t a dummy.
Cassie hit Send and returned to her inbox. What was the point in answering all these emails if people were going to just reply to them, sending the ball immediately back into her court again? This was unfair. As she opened the next email, the next fire to put out, she popped a bite of banana bread in her mouth. Ooh. Cinnamon. Yum.
By the time she got to a stopping point, her laptop was charged again, the banana bread was long gone, and the first trickle of customers had started to come in for lunch. Not wanting to overstay her welcome, Cassie dragged the watery remains of her latte through the straw, trying to get every last molecule of caffeine before she brought her dishes up to the counter. Nick was on his phone again, but he put it down at her approach.
“Banana bread okay?”
“More than okay. I like the cinnamon.”
“Yeah? You’re about the only one today.”
“Well, everyone else is wrong. You can make that every day as far as I’m concerned.”
“You’re on.” There was something about his face when he smiled. Frown lines were replaced with crinkles in the corners of his eyes, and he didn’t look younger so much as hopeful. He looked much better when he wasn’t frowning down at his phone. Had anyone ever told him that?
“I called Buster,” he said as she paid for her coffee. His voice had a tone of you’re welcome in it, even though she hadn’t asked him to do it. “He said he’d be by this afternoon.”
“I said I was going to call him.” Her skin prickled, and not in a fun way. She handled her own shit; she didn’t need help.
“But you hadn’t,” he said. “So I did.”
“And you just scheduled him for this afternoon? What if I wasn’t going to be home?”
“Then I would have called him back and told him to come later. It’s no big deal. Are you going to be home this afternoon?”
Of course she was going to be home. That wasn’t the point. She opened her mouth to argue more, but something in his face stopped her. Maybe he really was just trying to help. She sighed. “This afternoon, huh? That quick?”
Nick nodded as he handed over her change, which she promptly dropped into the tip jar on the counter. “I told you. You need anything around here—a plumber, roofer, anything—tell ’em you’re in the Hawkins House. They’ll clear their schedule.”
Nick wasn’t wrong. After Cassie got home, she barely had time to have lunch and unpack the first box of the day when Buster Bradshaw knocked at her door at two on the dot. He was roughly Cassie’s grandfather’s age, and his weathered face lit up like a kid at Christmas as he took a tentative step over the threshold, looking around in wonder. But the glee on his face faded almost immediately.
“What did they do to you, old girl?” The words were softly spoken, not directed toward Cassie, but she heard them anyway.
“What’s wrong?” Cassie looked around the way he did, at the probably-not-original crown molding, her senses on high alert. The electric was already screwed up—what else had the inspector missed?
He shook his head in barely disguised contempt. “Nothing. I’m sure it’s fine.” The word fine dripped with loathing. “It’s just…modern, you know? This house never used to be modern.” He sighed and shook off his bad mood. “But that’s a flip for you. Anyway. You said there was something wrong with the electric?”
He started out upstairs, testing the outlets, before moving downstairs to the living room, while Cassie opened another box marked KITCHEN . Dinnerware. Finally. It had been a long week of eating off paper plates and drinking from the exactly two mugs she’d been able to find.
Tucked in a corner of the box near the bubble-wrapped plates was a coffee tin, and Cassie let out a small “a-ha” sound when she took it out. Inside was her magnetic poetry collection. The little tin contained dozens of single words with a magnetic backing. It was a silly thing she’d started in college as a party game, but over the years she’d found that arranging random words on her refrigerator soothed her. Cleared her mind in a way that any other form of brainstorming couldn’t. At her rental, her landlord had replaced the fridge about a year ago, a brand-new one with a door that magnets didn’t stick to. She never thought she’d say it, but thank God for older appliances.
Cassie hummed under her breath as she peeled the words apart, sticking them one at a time onto the door of her refrigerator. Eventually she pulled a few toward the center.
yellow
sunshine
feels
like
morning
Not very original, but it was a start. She switched the first and last words. morning sunshine feels like yellow . A little better.
She was jolted out of her almost-meditative state by Buster behind her. “Nothing wrong with any of these outlets.”
“Are you sure?” That couldn’t be right. Frustration rose in a grumble in Cassie’s chest. “My laptop won’t charge. I keep having to go down to the coffee shop to get it to power up.”
“Oh, you mean Elmer’s place, just down the way?” Buster’s eyes lit up.
“No. Nick. The one who called you?” Who the hell was Elmer?
Buster snapped his fingers. “That’s right, it’s Nick’s now. I keep forgetting. Nick’s a good kid. Here. Lemme see.” He gestured, and Cassie handed him her laptop and cord from the kitchen table. She tried not to heave a sigh as he hooked up her laptop and moved to plug the cord in the outlet in the breakfast nook. He was a nice old guy, and sure, Nick said he was the best, but this felt like every time the guy in IT asked her if she’d tried turning her computer off and on again. Being mansplained to in her own home was a little much.
“That’s the first one I tried.” She attempted to sound patient. Of course it was the first one she’d tried; that breakfast nook was the perfect place to sit with her laptop. In fact, it was where Cassie had planned to spend the better part of her day. If, you know, the outlet worked. “It’s not gonna…” Her voice cut off abruptly as she heard the telltale chime of her laptop connecting to power. She flipped it open, and sure enough, the battery symbol in the corner glowed green, indicating that it was plugged in and charging.
“See? There you go.” Buster didn’t sound condescending or mansplain-y. His voice held the simple satisfaction of a job well done.
“But…” This wasn’t helping her frustration. Why had it worked now? What had he done differently? She peered at the wall, then back at her happily charging laptop. “I tried that outlet. I tried it so many times.”
Buster waved a hand. “These old outlets. They’re temperamental.”
But Cassie’s attention was still on her laptop. The damn thing practically looked smug. “I guess,” she said absently. “I’m sorry I called you all the way out here for nothing, though.”
His laugh was a creaky wheeze. “There’s no ‘all the way out here’ around here, ma’am. It takes maybe ten minutes to get from one end of town to the other, and that’s if you’re not in a hurry.” He waved Cassie off when she got her wallet out of her bag by the door. “No charge. It was worth it just to see inside this place.”
“Really?” Sure, the beachside cottage was cute and all, but it wasn’t all that grand. What was so exciting about seeing inside it?
“This place was empty for years. Decades, to be honest. Just kind of sitting here, starting to fall apart. Part of the background, no one really thought about it.”
“Oh.” Cassie looked around the living room with new eyes. With its fresh paint and polished floors, it was hard to imagine the place dark and empty, abandoned and alone. Was it possible to feel sorry for a house? Because she kind of knew how that felt.
“Then that flipper from Jacksonville or wherever bought it a couple years back.” Buster’s tone of voice told her exactly what he thought of that flipper from Jacksonville . “Everyone hoped to get a look inside, but he didn’t use a single local on the renovation. A whole lot of out-of-towners, big temporary fence, ‘No Trespassing’ signs up all over the place. Next thing we know, we heard some city girl bought it.”
“Guilty.” Cassie tried to sound cheerful, but from what Buster was saying, they didn’t take too kindly to outsiders around here. Just another reason why this move might have been a mistake.
But Buster didn’t seem to have a torch or a pitchfork anywhere on his person. “For a city girl, you seem okay. Have to say, I’m glad to see you’re actually planning to live here. I figured it was gonna become one of those vacation rentals or something, like everyone’s doing these days.”
“Nope, just me.” Her words bounced off the bare walls and boxes, echoing back in her ears. Just me. Lonely girl in the lonely house.
“Well, welcome to town.” He extended his hand and she shook it. “Keep an eye on things around here, you hear? Call me if anything comes up. I’d be glad to stop by anytime.”
What was going to come up? The house had been renovated, it had passed inspection, wonky electric and all. But out loud she said “you got it” as Buster left.
Cassie fell into an easy routine for the rest of the week. Work at the breakfast nook during the day, then unpacking boxes in the evening. With each box she emptied, the more the cottage started to feel like hers. Her mugs, her plates in the cabinets. The prints she’d bought at local art shows unwrapped and ready to hang in the living room. In the evenings she switched on the lamps and tried not to think about the picture Buster had painted of the house being empty and abandoned. They had each other now. Maybe that would be enough.
By Friday evening she’d had enough of work and unpacking. As dusk darkened the sky, Cassie took a glass of red wine upstairs to the balcony off her bedroom. It faced the street, but there wasn’t any traffic. No smell of hot blacktop and exhaust from busy Orlando roads, no bumper-to-bumper commutes out to the suburbs. Here in Boneyard Key, the sound of the ocean meeting the shore was a calming, rolling sound, punctuated by the early-evening breeze ruffling the Spanish moss that hung from the live oaks that lined the quiet downtown street.
That breeze did nothing to cool things off. Cassie plucked at her shirt, unsticking it from her back, where a film of sweat had already coated her skin. Florida was damp, no way around that. She took a good deep breath—this close to the ocean, it was mostly a lungful of salt air and humidity.
Had she made a mistake, buying this badly flipped house on the other side of the state? She’d made the decision in a weak moment. Several weak moments, in fact. One too many “big announcements” in the group text, followed by a photo of an engagement ring or one of those sonograms that was supposedly of a baby but just looked like a grainy potato.
Cassie never had any big announcements to share. Perpetually single and not pregnant, those texts, with the strings of squees and “welcome to the club” responses, just made Cassie feel more and more like she wasn’t in the same club as her friends. Like all of her friends had moved on to a different one, and she was all alone.
Then her landlord had decided to sell her house. The market was crazy, he wanted to sell, and he’d dropped that bomb on her right when it was time to renew her lease. The news sparked a homebuying frenzy of her own; she put down offer after offer on houses, biting her nails while interest rates soared and fell like a roller coaster. One by one, her offers were rejected in favor of real estate investors with seemingly bottomless pockets.
The culmination of those weak moments, where she felt like she was being pushed not only out of her friend group but out of her cute College Park bungalow, was when she’d widened her house search from the Orlando area. Sure, her mom had complained; she was used to her only child living practically in her backyard. But Cassie was ready for a change, and there was nothing really keeping her there. Her copywriting job at a big advertising firm had been remote for a while now, since the first lockdown. She’d proven that she could work anywhere, so it stood to reason that she could also live anywhere. Maybe it was all a sign. She needed a new start.
When a quaint, recently renovated beachside cottage came on the market, she’d jumped on it almost automatically. She hadn’t expected to get it. It was a pattern by now: see a house, fall in love. Offer, get rejected. Mourn, then move on to the next. When her real estate agent had called to tell her she’d gotten the house, Cassie had barely believed it. Suddenly she was in uncharted waters, under contract on a house she’d only seen on a video walk-through.
Now three months, a couple inspections, and about four thousand signatures later, she was a homeowner. Wanting something new, she’d ended up with something old instead, in this weird-ass tourist town.
Cassie picked up her phone and fired off a text to the group chat. Hope y’all are having a great Friday night! Can you believe I moved somewhere without DoorDash? She glanced at the time before putting her phone down. Would anyone answer? What would she be doing right now if she were back home in Orlando? Probably wrapping up happy hour, easily two margaritas in by now, debating whether to hit the Thai place around the corner or find a Tijuana Flats and load up on flautas and at least three selections from the hot sauce bar. Either one was a solid solution.
The sudden sense memory of biting into a crispy cheese roll at her favorite Thai place, the melty cheese and brittle egg roll wrapper shattering under her teeth, brought tears to her eyes. She missed those nights out. She missed her friends.
Of course, that was all B.K.—Before Kids. Their solid group of six had dwindled one by one until Cassie was the only one unattached and ready to go on a Friday night. The other five would have to ask their husbands before going out—the hell?—or would be too busy with kids at home. Cassie missed those nights out, but truth be told, those nights had been over for a while now.
It was one thing to feel left out of the friend group, but to have left a big city like Orlando, with its many nightlife options, in favor of a tiny tourist town in the offseason…what had she been thinking coming to Boneyard Key? Making new friends as an adult in a new town, without the easy in of things like church or children, was all but impossible.
Her phone rattled on the side table, and she scooped it up, eager—and maybe a little desperate—for human contact. New messages in the group chat! She pulled it up: a photo of Monika and Christine, taken at the exact Thai restaurant whose crispy cheese rolls she’d been craving. Mamas Night Out! Hope you ladies can make it next time!
Cassie read the message a second time to let the words really sink in, each one a little dart to the chest. “Mamas.” “Make it next time.” There was nothing about that text that was meant for Cassie. Meanwhile, her earlier message was just sitting there, read and unacknowledged. She may as well be invisible. She’d been missing them, and they didn’t even notice she was gone.
She tossed the phone back to the table. Screw it. Maybe a change of scenery was good for her after all. Sure, Boneyard Key didn’t have a Thai place. Or a taco place. But maybe soon she’d have the nerve to try out that seedy-looking oyster bar on the other side of the historic district, and she’d seen a pizza joint around here somewhere. And of course there was Hallowed Grounds—and its very hot, only slightly grouchy barista—though it was just a breakfast and lunch place that closed at two. But it wasn’t tourist season yet; it made sense to roll up the sidewalks in the late afternoon.
Cassie leaned back in her bistro chair, moodily sipping her wine as night fell. From behind the house, the Gulf lapped against the seawall like her own personal meditation app. The sound of the waves lulled her into a dreamy half sleep that had only a little to do with the large glass of wine in her hand.
Then the silence of the night was broken by a lilting feminine voice from across the street.
“And our next stop…This is the Hawkins House.”
The voice was directly below her. Cassie straightened up in her chair and peered down. The sun had fully set while she’d been out here brooding, and the darkened balcony gave her a tactical advantage. She could see them, but they couldn’t see her. A group of people stood on the sidewalk in front of her house—though “group” was being generous. Handful. A handful of people formed a rough semicircle, looking up at her house. Looking up at her. One person stood in front of them, with her back to the front door, a tour guide lecturing her audience.
“The Hawkins House was built in 1899 by William Donnelly, shortly after Boneyard Key was established here after the Great Storm of 1897.” The lilting voice belonged to the tour guide. Who did a sightseeing tour at night? The sights were significantly harder to see. “The house was later acquired by C.S. Hawkins, who lived here with his wife, Sarah, from the time they were married in 1904 until his death in 1911.”
Then it clicked. Walking tour at night, history of a house…this was a ghost tour. Cassie should have guessed; it went with the rest of the ghost schtick in this town. She knew about ghost tours. Just about every tourist town had one, and it was a fun way to spend a couple hours. She had yet to see one that was actually spooky or told any stories that weren’t just a spin on the classics. The sad girl hitchhiking on the side of the road, brought home to sadder parents mourning her death from years ago. Sometimes there was a twist where the driver of the car loaned her a jacket that turned up draped over a headstone placed conveniently in the backyard. Historic ghost stories usually involved a forbidden love between a rich wife and a pirate, because who didn’t love a pirate?
Cassie found herself leaning forward a little more, as though those extra six inches would help her hear the tour guide better. What story was she telling about this house? Would it be the hitchhiking ghost? Or maybe the pirate, since they were by the ocean? It would be pretty neat to have a pirate ghost around.
But the tour guide didn’t veer off into generic ghost story territory. “And that’s when Mrs. Hawkins became…” The woman dropped her voice a couple of octaves, sounding less like a tour guide and more like someone telling stories around a campfire. Preferably about someone with a hook for a hand. “ Mean Mrs. Hawkins .”
“What did she do?” one of the tourists asked. “She off her husband?” Everyone else in the group laughed. But Cassie didn’t. Because she had to sleep in this house tonight. And she would prefer that this house not contain a murderer, thank you.
Thankfully, the tour guide shook her head. “There was speculation. He was much, much older than she was. C.S. Hawkins was known as a pillar of the community, while Sarah was a relative newcomer, here from up north. His death left a hole for sure. But Mrs. Hawkins, she didn’t care about being part of the town anymore. As the years went by, her place became that house , you know?”
A couple people in the crowd didn’t even glance up from their phones, their faces bathed in light emanating from their palms, while the rest looked up toward the house in trepidation. “That house?” one of them asked.
A chill swept up Cassie’s arms, cooling the sweat on her skin and making her shiver. She wasn’t sure how much more of this she wanted to hear, but the tour guide was deep into the spooky storytelling now. “Some said she’d chase kids out of her garden with sticks because she didn’t like anyone too close to her house. Before long this was the house the kids skipped when trick-or-treating on Halloween. No Girl Scouts dropped by to sell cookies.
“Some would say that from down on the beach you could see her on her back balcony, staring out into the water. But other than that, no one saw her. She never had friends going in and out. No relatives. She was a recluse here in Boneyard Key, and she didn’t want company. So she lived here alone until she died, sometime in the 1940s. Since she didn’t have children, the ownership of the house went to the city. They’ve tried to sell it over the years, but something—or someone—always caused the sale to fall through. So the house has been sitting here, vacant, for decades. If you ask me, that’s thanks to Mean Mrs. Hawkins. Still here, not wanting anyone else in her home.”
“Sophie,” one of the tourists called out. “There’s a shadow moving! Up there!” He pointed up to the balcony, and Cassie jerked back into the shadows so fast she nearly toppled her chair over. She scrabbled at the wall for support while clapping her other hand over her mouth to hold back a maniacal giggle. She’d been leaning forward, listening intently, and had made herself part of the show. Whoops.
The tour guide, Sophie, followed the tourist’s pointing finger. “I’m not surprised.” Her sigh was theatrical. “Don’t get too close, and whatever you do, don’t go through the front gate. Unless you want a stick to the back of the legs.”
“The house doesn’t look vacant. There are lights on inside.” Another tourist sounded skeptical. “I thought you said no one lives here.”
Cassie looked over her shoulder into the house. She hadn’t turned on any lights upstairs, but the living room and kitchen downstairs were probably lit up like a Christmas tree. Whoops again. Should she keep those lights off on Friday nights? Help Sophie sell the idea of this place being haunted?
Sophie seemed to be able to roll with it. “You’re right. I guess it’s time to revise that part of the story. The Hawkins House was bought a couple years ago and restored. It’s a private residence now.”
But the tourist’s skepticism thickened. “Who’s going to willingly live in a haunted house?”
Cassie couldn’t agree more. The inspection report on this place had plenty to say about the minuscule crack in the foundation and that one loose shingle on the roof. Shouldn’t they have mentioned somewhere in there that the place was haunted?
But Sophie shrugged, then turned back to her group with a sunny smile. “Maybe the new owner’s made a friend!” She sounded entirely too chipper about the prospect. “Now, we’re going to go through downtown, and I’ll tell you about the ghost who haunts this strip of beach. It’s just over near the break in the seawall, near the ice cream shop. Which is different than the ice cream shop by the café that we passed before.”
“How many ice cream shops does this town have?” one of the tourists asked as the group began to move along down the sidewalk.
“Only one open now, but three in total. Well, four if you count the T-shirt shop that has a big cooler in the back. Oh, and the place on the dock where you rent kayaks, they sell ice cream there too…” Sophie’s voice faded as the group made their way down the main drag. Now that it was safe to move, Cassie leaned over the railing, watching the group disappear into the night before heading into her bedroom. She flipped on the light, looking around with new eyes. Had this been C.S. and Sarah Hawkins’s bedroom? Was Sarah’s spirit really still here? And would this house be big enough for the both of them?
Of course, the room looked exactly as it had this morning. The ceiling fan whirred above her, stirring stray pieces of hair around her cheek. Her matching bedroom set—purchased from Rooms To Go not long after college—in all its dated glory, the walls still aggressively beige. The scariest thing in this room was the number of boxes she still had to unpack.
“This would all be very mysterious,” she told her reflection later that night as she applied her bedtime moisturizer, “if ghosts were an actual thing. Which they’re not.”
At two thirty in the morning, Cassie was sound asleep. At two thirty-seven in the morning, three of the magnetic words on her fridge moved an inch and a half to the left.