Chapter 6
Morgan
One gooey, chocolaty, metaphorically resonant ghost cake later, I’m watching Sawyer thank the repair guy for replacing his Kennedy-damaged tire. The proprietor’s words hum in my mind. Unfinished business.
For once, I feel not just hopeful. I feel optimistic.
It’s fucking great.
While we paid our bill, Sawyer promised me he had a proposition. One that could help us and our ghosts. Obviously, I told him I was game for anything. I just bought fifty dollars’ worth of crystals, after all. Why wouldn’t I go to his haunted house and hear him out?
And I can’t deny that my fellow hauntee is handsome.
While I wasn’t flirting with Sawyer—Come to this ghost-themed bar often?
—under other circumstances, I could easily imagine doing so, with his short dark curls, the lean muscle he seems carved of, the way laughter leapt unexpectedly from his stern, strong-jawed profile.
With Sawyer’s car situation resolved, I drive from my unfortunate parking space to his SUV, then follow behind his car to where he lives.
It’s not far. For fifteen minutes, Atwater Village’s low strip malls and suburban flatlands fade into Silver Lake’s verdant, palm-treed hipster hillside, until Sawyer pulls into his driveway.
I veer toward the curb, mentally psyching myself up for more parallel parking. Just as I’m about to abandon my effort, Zach pops into visibility next to the front of the vintage Bronco I’m wedging myself up to.
“You’re good,” he calls out for only me to hear. “Plenty of space. Keep backing up.”
I start to smile. Only in Los Angeles is parallel parking guidance one of the upsides of haunting.
“Keep straightening out,” he counsels. “Perfect. Remember to curb your wheels!”
“Thanks for being helpful for once,” I say when Zach rematerializes in my rearview mirror.
“More helpful than collecting mail, wouldn’t you say? Admit it. I’m way better than that guy’s ghost,” Zach replies haughtily.
Laughing, I step out of the car.
Honestly, even without Sawyer’s SUV in his driveway, I could’ve picked out my destination on the street of cool, elegantly remodeled old California homes. One house on the block definitely looks haunted.
The front yard is…scary. Overgrown and dead, with just terrible curb appeal. It looks abandoned, with dry vines winding over each other in high clumped masses obscuring the house I can only glimpse past them.
Sawyer waits for me next to his car on the cracked sidewalk.
“Seriously, Morgan, be careful,” Zach warns. “Judging from his yard, this guy is a serial killer.”
I close my car door. Admittedly, I’m not feeling awesome about following the man I just met to a second location right now. “If he gets out a chain saw, maybe you could short-circuit it or something,” I say.
Zach vanishes. So much for helpful. I remind myself why I’m here—unfinished business, no way to pay rent, “Call Me Maybe”—and walk over to Sawyer, mustering my courage.
I guess he notices the ghostly pallor of my face. “I know it looks bad,” he preempts, sounding sincerely remorseful.
“Oh, your yard? It’s lovely,” I joke. “Who’s your landscaper? Beetlejuice?”
Sawyer winces. “It was in bad shape when I bought it. Most of the interior is fixed up, and the yard was next. But…”
I hear the end of Sawyer’s unfinished sentence. Kennedy.
He’s grieving. This home was his project until loss overwhelmed his life, overgrowing like choking vines.
I feel shitty for making fun. Contrite, I step into the garden mess, wanting a better look.
Except there is no better look. The yard only gets worse. Above the dead grass, dried bushes of shriveled, dusty leaves intertwine chaotically. I’m pretty sure this is downtown for the neighborhood spiders. Light hardly pervades the shaggy mess, which is dense enough to get lost in.
Or…to lose yourself in. If I wanted to hide in plain sunlight, walled off from the world, I would welcome this plant portcullis Sawyer lives behind.
It’s not as if he likes his horrific murder garden, I remind myself. He said so himself. He knows it needs—
I whirl, suddenly realizing. “You want me to landscape this?”
Sawyer puts his hands in his jeans pockets, sheepish.
“It’s just…it’s a huge job,” I say gently, despite knowing I could slap on several more words for huge and still come out understating the calamity of this man’s yard. “It would take…a lot of time. I’m not always great at long-term commitments,” I admit.
Pathologically commitment-phobic is more like it.
I pretty much wrecked my twenties, nearly drove my parents into debt, charging carelessly into commitments I couldn’t keep.
College. My premature engagement. I know renovating Sawyer’s garden isn’t equivalent to promising myself for marriage, but…
still. I’m done getting people’s hopes up.
It’s just easier, I’ve found. Easier to get up every day. Easier to not judge myself. Every time I move cities with no money, no boyfriend, and no idea what I want, I’m not failing. I’m just starting over.
“But really,” I emphasize. “I’m just the office manager for a landscaping firm. I barely handle my own projects. My bosses could totally do this, though,” I encourage Sawyer. “They’d love it.”
Now Sawyer hunches his shoulders. If he hunched them any more, his head would disappear into the cozy wool sweater he’s wearing in the middle of July.
“I can’t afford them,” he explains.
Despite my remorse for mocking his landscaping, my eyes go wide. “You want me to fix your yard for free?”
Sawyer doesn’t get defensive. He looks patient with my incredulity, actually. It suits him, like waiting comes naturally to my new prospective pro bono employer.
“Just hear me out,” he implores me. The sun manages to filter past the thicket surrounding us, dappling him in light. “What if the ghosts have unfinished business that they need our help with?”
“You think Kennedy’s unfinished business is your lawn?” I clarify.
Sawyer looks down. He speaks to the dead ground. “She was my fiancée,” he says.
The guilty pit I was ignoring opens wide in my stomach. I replay my own words, every mocking dismissal I made of holding on to his ghost, every flippant joke about the dead. I practically owe him a fucking topiary out of his haunted thickets for the way I carried on.
“We bought this house together,” he continues. “She was a contractor, and we did most of the renovations together to turn this into our dream home. But she died before we could finish. I haven’t had the heart to work on it without her.”
He pauses ever so slightly on the important words. Like he has to force his voice to form them. Of course he does. How would they ever get easier? While I complain about Zach opening my cupboards or putting songs in my head, Sawyer has carried unimaginable grief with him for years.
No wonder he likes being haunted.
“But if we do this, aren’t you afraid Kennedy will…
move on?” I ask gently. It’s why I latched on to Sawyer’s idea in Serving Spirits, after all.
I’m hoping if I find whatever unfulfilled wish Zach needs fulfilling, he’ll vanish from my life, not to mention my cupboards and my roommate’s Netflix queue.
The same possibility has obviously occurred to Sawyer.
His breathing goes shallow. He looks nervous, his lips seeming to quaver when he speaks. Suddenly, the solidity of him, the stone-worked quality of his features I noticed immediately, disappears. He looks on the verge of crumbling to pieces.
“I…I would do anything for her,” he says.
“She wants me to do this. For some reason, she sent me to that meeting. She wanted me to find those seeds and ask what you do. She’s been…
fading,” he explains. “Like you said—what if because she hasn’t accomplished her unfinished business, she just…
fades to nothing? I can’t let that happen. ”
He’s close to crying now, wrestling his tears like he’s desperate to keep them from showing. His determination wins out, and his expression sets.
“If this is what she wants, I’ll do it for her,” he whispers. “No matter what.”
I know what I need to say, even if it makes me feel horrible. I summon my own determination. Letting all my compassion into my expression, I speak softly to him under the fractured garden light.
“I’m really sorry, Sawyer,” I say. “This has to be…impossible to face. I want to help. I do. It’s just…” I struggle to explain myself. “This is a really big job.”
I don’t give voice to the clamor of whispers in my head, the ghosts I contended with long before Zach. I’ll screw it up. I’ll disappoint you. I won’t come through. Don’t depend on Morgan Lane. A decision so bad, it’ll haunt you forever.
“I have my own problems right now,” I say instead. The selfishness of my words makes my skin itch, but it’s better than offering promises I can’t keep. “Including my own ghost whose unfinished business I have no clue about. And I’m about to go severely into debt…”
Sawyer looks up. His eyes focus, like he’s grasping onto this tether I’ve given him out of his emotions. “Let me show you one more thing,” he says.
I half expect Zach to comment, That’s exactly what a serial killer would say.
Instead, only quiet greets Sawyer’s offer. I nod.
Sawyer leads me off to a side garden path that winds past the home. The foliage is somewhat less egregious here, fortunately. Chipping paint on the white wooden fence hems us in while I follow Sawyer to the back of the lot.
Our destination is a detached room on the other side of a small patio swallowed by a gorgeous bougainvillea. The renovation Sawyer mentioned is halfway complete—the walls look freshly clean of dirt and moss, but the trim on the windows is shabby, and the heavy handle on the door rusted.
Sawyer inserts his key, then proceeds to jostle the uncooperative lock vigorously. My cowardly hopes rise for a second—maybe Kennedy is interfering, and I can easily chalk my landscaping reluctance up to the clear evidence his ghost fiancée does not want me snooping in her spare room. What a shame!
For once in my life, however, paranormal activity doesn’t seem to be the culprit. Sawyer manages to jog the lock while pushing his shoulder into the door, springing open the entry.
What waits inside is…very dusty. Serving Spirits has nothing on my new acquaintance’s spooky-ass house.
When I examine the outline of the room in the dim sunlight filtering through the dirty window, I realize what I’m seeing is half mother-in-law unit, complete with tiny kitchenette and fancy sleeper sofa, and half…
pottery studio. Dust covers the pottery wheel in one corner, while sculpted projects in various stages of completion line the shelves.
“It was my studio. I haven’t worked in a while,” Sawyer explains.
His studio. I remember Sawyer’s deflection when I pressed him on Kennedy’s interference in his professional life. I work from home.
I assumed Zoom and Slack. This is…intriguing. Not what I expected from the withdrawn, contemplative man whose home I’m touring.
“You could…stay here,” Sawyer proposes. “Once I, um, clean. We set this room up for friends and family to visit. You’d have your privacy.
The lock even has a separate key that you can have, and I won’t be able to access it without your permission.
” He steps in, gesturing past the kitchenette.
“There’s a small bathroom behind the kitchen.
Your roommate could stay in your apartment, and you could live here, with Zach, rent-free. ”
Rent-free. The sweetest words in the English language.
Two words, two syllables, eight letters.
Say it and I’m yours. Rent-free. If I joined Zach in the spectral realm and could only communicate via Ouija board, Serving Spirits patrons could still find the ghost of Morgan Lane pushing the pointer to R-E-N-T-F-R-E-E.
Nonetheless. “Not completely rent-free,” I say. “I’m guessing in exchange for the yard?”
Once more, I receive Sawyer’s hunched shoulders. He nods, and in the crumbling interior, I’m forced to recognize haunted houses suit him.
“Yes,” he concedes gently. “But you can take as much time as you need. I know you have a job and a life. Any time you can spare on the garden is great, and you can stay here as long as it takes.”
I soften. When was the last time anyone said I could take as much time as I need?
Stepping into the space, I evaluate my potential new living conditions, available for the low, low price of landscaping the world’s most horrific front yard.
Under the overwhelming dust, I start to see how the space could be charming.
Rustically simple with plenty of sunlight for my houseplants once we clean the windows.
Savannah could come back to our apartment, and I could keep paying my share of the lease while staying here until I’ve exorcised Zach.
It would solve my financial problems, for sure.
“A little cozy for us, don’t you think?” I find Zach seated on the kitchenette countertop, swinging his feet. His see-through heels, clad in the dadcore New Balances I guess he died in, pass in and out of the cabinet.
“You don’t get a say,” I remind him. “This is your fault.”
Sawyer startles.
“Sorry, talking to Zach,” I say sheepishly, realizing how my outburst would have sounded. Sawyer very much does get a say in inviting the random woman he brought home from Ghost Therapy to live in his guesthouse. “It’s weird you can’t see him, although I guess no one else can,” I say. “Just me.”
“It’s something we can figure out together,” Sawyer replies. “Why our ghosts can only be perceived by us. Where is Zach?”
I point to the counter.
Sawyer very sincerely faces the general direction of Zach.
My spectral companion’s eyebrows rise.
“Zach, I promise to try to help with your unfinished business, too,” Sawyer declares.
Something unexpected crosses Zach’s face. Something pained, and I realize it hasn’t just been nine weeks of Zach haunting me. It’s been nine weeks since anyone else has spoken to him.
It must be lonely.
Slowly, my ghost’s easygoing cheer returns. He shrugs, looking to me. “Dude seems all right,” he says, grudging. “No serial killer vibes detected. Anything to get free of you, honestly.”
When I smile, Sawyer notices. “What did he say?” he asks.
I hold out my hand for the key. “When can we move in?”