Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
“Good morning, Sarah!” Cassie clattered down the stairs and into the kitchen, sending her thanks, as she always did, to Past Cassie, who had set the timer on the coffee maker the night before. Past Cassie was so good to her sometimes.
She stuck two slices of bread in the toaster and poured herself some coffee, talking all the while. “Now, Buster is coming by in the afternoon to talk about the kitchen floor, so I hope you have some opinions on that for me. I want to—” Her voice trailed off as she opened the fridge for the milk.
man for pink girl is bad
“Oh, for…” Cassie poured milk into her coffee and reminded herself to be patient. This was all very new to Sarah. The twenty-first century, communicating with the living. Reality television. “You mean Wanda, right? The one in the pink bikini on Romance Resort ? You know as well as I do that girl has terrible taste in men. It really shouldn’t have been a surprise when she ended up picking Noah.”
Cassie slathered butter on her toast. “I’m sure she’ll get tired of him soon. Don’t worry about her, okay?”
She put the butter and milk back in the fridge, in time for a new message to appear. bad man . Sarah seemed really hung up on this. Didn’t she know how reality TV worked? No, of course she didn’t.
“Listen,” she said. “These relationships aren’t permanent. They last maybe three days, tops. And those are the committed ones. She doesn’t have to stay with him forever.” She crunched through a piece of toast. “In fact, I bet by the end of the week Noah will be history. He’s kind of a dick, you know? And Wanda may be horny right now, and blinded by a perfect set of abs, but she’s not stupid. Now about those flooring choices…”
Cassie took a long sip of coffee before looking back at the fridge, letting Sarah take her time. But the words, when they changed, made Cassie’s heart drop to the shoes she didn’t have on yet.
my man bad
She very carefully swallowed her last bite of toast as a chill that had nothing to do with the AC made the hair on her arms stand on end. No, Sarah Hawkins wasn’t a grieving widow. From the looks of things, she was still a frightened one, a century after her husband had died.
“Okay.” Her voice was small in her own kitchen. “It’s okay, Sarah. He’s gone. He can’t hurt you anymore.” But it wasn’t that easy, was it? Trauma can linger, apparently even after death. She made a mental note to reschedule with Buster. The kitchen floor could wait a day or two.
Meanwhile, she had to get to work. She packed up her bag with her notes. Another day, another dead laptop. It was nice having Hallowed Grounds back as her own personal office space. It was even nicer to have Nick back in her life.
From the looks of things, he was just as happy to have her back in his life too. Was there a better sight in the morning than his smile when she walked through the door of his café? “Morning.”
He leaned across the counter and she stretched up on her toes to kiss that smile with her own.
But he frowned when she dropped back to her heels. “You taste like coffee.” He narrowed his eyes. “Did you drink outside coffee?”
“I had some in my kitchen this morning,” she said. “Is that a crime?”
“And now you want more coffee, I bet.”
“You know it.” Her usual back table was occupied, along with almost every other table in the place, so she made herself at home at the counter, taking the seat at the end near an outlet.
He clucked his tongue at her, turning to the espresso machine. “Too much caffeine. It’s bad for you.”
“It keeps me going,” she replied cheerfully, opening up her laptop. She half expected Nick to argue with her further, but by the time she logged in there was an iced hazelnut latte in front of her. She glanced up at Nick, who dropped her a wink and a half smile before turning to the next customer who’d come through the door.
The downside of sitting at the counter at Hallowed Grounds instead of her usual table in the back was that Nick was too close by. Too distracting. Cassie was getting zero work done. Sure, her document was open. She’d even made a correction or two on the draft of the press release for the granola company. But her mind wasn’t on it. Her mind was on Nick. The way he moved behind the counter with masculine grace, pivoting from the espresso machine to the pastry case. The way he greeted the regular customers by name and the tourists with a veneer of politeness.
In fact, that was the upside of watching Nick work. She had a front-row seat to a one-act improv play: Nick Versus the Tourists.
“Excuse me.” A dark-haired man called in Nick’s direction as though he were hailing a cab in Manhattan in the 1980s. When Nick didn’t respond right away (because he was handing a to-go cup across the counter to a woman with dark hair and darker eyeliner), the man said it again. He had the air of someone who didn’t like repeating himself, and looked like he’d probably invested too much in crypto.
If Nick was annoyed, he didn’t let it show. Too much. “Yeah, what’s up?” He wiped his hands on a towel before throwing it over his shoulder. “What can I get you? Something from the pastry case?”
“There’s a lot of carbs in here.” Mr. Crypto frowned at the pastry case as though it had offended him personally.
Nick nodded. “It’s a pastry case.”
The man sighed and shook his head, and Cassie noticed that his hair didn’t move a millimeter. Incredible. “Do you not have any protein options?”
“It’s a pastry case,” Nick repeated with exaggerated patience. “Not a lot of protein in pastry.”
“You don’t have egg bites? Avocado toast with an over-easy egg?”
Cassie pressed her lips together hard, picturing Nick making avocado toast. He probably didn’t even know—or care—what an egg bite was.
“Nope,” Nick said, a little too cheerfully. “You want protein? Here’s what you do.” He pointed out the door. “You go out of here, make a right. Walk all the way down and around the bend to the pier. There’s a little place there. Jimmy’s.”
Mr. Crypto’s face lit up. “And they have better options there? I mean, they have to, right? Look at this place.” He scoffed, as though laughing in the owner’s face was the key to getting good customer service.
“I don’t know about better,” Nick said. A smile started to break across his face, a slow progression. “But ask for Jimmy—he’ll be the one with no shoes on—and he’ll rent you a fishing pole. You can take it over to the pier, catch all the damn protein you want.”
Cassie couldn’t help it. A snort escaped her, and she clapped a hand over her mouth. She wasn’t the only one. The conversation had attracted a little attention, and one older guy—had to be a local—all but guffawed in Mr. Crypto’s face, which had burned bright red as he turned on his heel and stalked out of the place.
“Not a great business model,” Cassie said to Nick after he left. “Don’t you want tourists coming back?”
Nick shrugged. “Not that guy.”
She snorted again and turned back to her work. She really should get this press release finished before lunch.
But life had other plans. No sooner had she woken her laptop back up than Sophie dropped onto the seat next to her at the front counter. “I was hoping I’d find you here.”
“She’s already taken the tour,” Nick admonished from the other side of the counter.
“Three times,” Cassie said.
“Three?” Nick raised an eyebrow. “Soph, you can’t make the poor woman be your constant warm body when your crowds are thin.”
Sophie rolled her eyes. “It’s not that.” She waited for Nick to wander off before turning back to Cassie. “I was wondering if…” She clasped her hands together, released them, then tapped nervously on the counter with a fingernail. “If you’ve…I don’t know…if you’ve talked any more with Sarah recently?”
“Well, yeah,” Cassie replied. “We talk a lot. As often as you can talk to the incorporeal spirit of the woman living in your house, that is.” She was shooting for a joke, but all she could remember was this morning. my man bad .
“Were you able to figure out if there’s more to her story? Have I been getting it wrong all this time?”
“Sophie.” Cassie dropped her voice as though imparting a secret. “It’s for tourists, right? I don’t think the ghost tour police are going to come and take you away if your stories aren’t accurate.”
“They should, though!” Sophie looked miserable. “I worked hard on that tour. On finding the most interesting stories, mapping out a route that shows off our downtown area. Figuring out the right mix of history and ghost stories. I’ve been proud of it, you know? And to find out I’ve been lying all this time…”
Cassie could see where she was coming from, but…“What about the ice cream shop?”
“What about it?” Sophie’s brow furrowed. “Which one?”
Cassie gestured down the road, which really did nothing to narrow things down. She could throw a rock from the front door of Hallowed Grounds and hit at least three ice cream places. “I Scream Ice Cream. I missed the beginning of that story, but Nick said that you made it up.”
“He did?” Sophie looked over her shoulder toward Nick. He poured a cup of coffee and popped a to-go lid on it, oblivious to their scrutiny. “I didn’t make it up,” she said, turning back to Cassie. “It’s in the book! Why would he say I made it up?”
Oh, no. What the hell had Cassie started? “He didn’t use those exact words.” Actually, the exact word he’d used was bullshit but she wasn’t going to tell Sophie that. “He just said that it wasn’t true. I figured you sprinkled in some more colorful stories for the tourists.”
“I don’t do that.” Sophie leaned back in her chair with a sigh that was bigger than she was. “That’s what I was afraid of.” She rummaged in her messenger bag, pulling out her battered copy of Boneyard Key: A Haunted History . “I’ll admit, I haven’t actually reread this book in a while. At least not since I finished putting this tour together, and that was over five years ago. I looked through some parts of it the other night, and now I know he got some stuff wrong. Simple stuff! He said that Eternal Rest—you know, the motel over that way—is one of the only buildings that isn’t haunted, and I know that it is! The Eriksons have been running that place for four generations, and lots of their family members have stuck around.”
Cassie cocked her head. “Then why isn’t it part of the tour?”
“Too far away.” Sophie flipped through the book while she talked. “The tour is an hour long, give or take. Eternal Rest is only a mile down the road, but if we trekked all the way there and back on foot it would take too much time. Plus not all tourists want to walk that much, so you have to take that into account too.”
Cassie nodded slowly. There was more involved with putting together a walking tour than she would have suspected. “So what you’re saying is…”
“I have to rewrite the tour.” Sophie tossed the book to the table with a thump and buried her face in her hands.
“Okay. Hey…” Cassie grasped Sophie’s wrist. “Hey. You can do this.”
“I don’t know.” Sophie’s voice was muffled by her hands. “It’s so much to research.”
“Tell me about it.” Her mind drifted back to Sarah. She had a lot of research to do too.
“Why don’t you talk to Theo?” Nick came by to clear away their empty glasses, but he’d obviously been eavesdropping. “I bet he can help.”
Sophie groaned at his suggestion, letting her forehead thunk to the countertop. But Cassie was stumped. “Who’s that?”
“Theo,” Nick said, as though repeating the guy’s name would clear everything up. It didn’t.
“He’s an asshole.” Sophie was still face down on the counter, her voice muffled.
“He is not.” Nick rolled his eyes and turned back to Cassie. “He runs the bookstore. Boneyard Books? Anyway, there’s a little history museum in the back of the bookshop. Kind of his pet project.”
“Seriously?” Cassie had walked by the bookstore a few times but hadn’t made it inside yet, which was frankly a crime. But the building wasn’t that big; how did they get a whole-ass museum in there?
“It’s not much, believe me. The town’s been here, what, less than a hundred and fifty years? Not that much history to document. His focus is mostly on the Founding Fifteen.”
“His focus is on being an asshole.” Sophie lifted her head up then, adjusting her glasses. “He took my tour once, back when I started. I swear all he did was sigh and shake his head the entire time. I thought his head was going to fall off.” Her tone of voice said that she wouldn’t have minded if it had.
“He can be a little bit of a stickler for accuracy,” Nick said tactfully. “But if accuracy is what you’re looking for…”
“And it is,” Cassie reminded Sophie, her voice firm. “Look, I’ll go with you, okay? Strength in numbers and all that.” She closed her laptop. The hell with it; that press release wasn’t due for a few more days. Sophie needed backup. And maybe Theo knew something about Sarah Hawkins and her bad man.