HALLOWEEN TOWN #2
Look, she’d spent all her childhood summers, and a lot of her other school vacations, in a town that lived and breathed the paranormal and ghosts, and while she’d had a couple of encounters—seeing people out of the corner of her eye, waking up to someone standing at the end of her bed, cold patches in her grandparents’ inn—she’d never been face-to-face, eye to eye with … well … with an apparition before.
“Poppy, sweetheart … I hate to barge in without warning, but you’re running out of time.”
The apparition was talking to her? Poppy pinched the inside of her wrist and twisted her skin. Ow! She definitely wasn’t dreaming. Maybe she was having a stroke. Or a hallucinatory panic attack brought on by the stress of marrying Benji.
Just keep holding on to the basin; do not let your knees buckle. And do not, whatever you do, faint. Your mother will kill you if you crease your dress or muss your hair.
Poppy couldn’t take her eyes off the woman in the mirror. This was so fucking weird.
Then another female figure materialized in the mirror, and Poppy blinked. Leather jacket and pants, streaked eyeliner, teased bottle-blonde hair, a smoker’s mouth… This ghost looked like she’d walked straight out of a 1970s documentary on female bikers and hellraisers.
The biker ghost hip-bumped the other apparition. “Move over, cupcake. This requires some tough love—”
“Ruby, for heaven’s sake, you can’t barge in and take over. We agreed that I’d persuade her—gently.”
“Gently won’t cut it. This one needs a swift boot to her ass.”
“Ohmigod, ohmigod, there’s two of you? What? Why—?” Poppy slapped her hand on her chest, her mouth wide open. “I’m having a breakdown, that’s the only explanation. It’s been a rough few months, too much stress, too little sleep. I haven’t eaten that much. Cried too much.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m Ruby, by the way.” Ruby jabbed a thumb at the more polite ghost. “She’s Naomi.”
Ruby pulled out a pack of cigarettes and tapped one out. “The point is, hon, you’re about to make a mistake you can’t undo. To put it plain, your fiancé is a douchebag asshole.”
Poppy felt like her head was about to explode.
“Why don’t you tell me how you really feel?” she muttered, unable to believe she was talking to two mirror-bound ghosts.
Okay, no matter whether this was real or whether she was hallucinating, it was time to yank back some control.
And that meant thinking, breathing, returning to normal.
“I’ve just got a case of wedding jitters.
Yes, I admit, it’s extreme, but everyone panics before a wedding. I’m feeling a little overwhelmed.”
Ruby released an unladylike snort. “Honey, you are so fucked up that you summoned two ghosts to help you out of this jam.”
While Poppy was partial to the odd F-bomb herself, she never expected to hear it out of the mouth of someone, well, dead.
“Let’s get real, shall we? You don’t want to get married. And you especially don’t want to marry Benji. I don’t blame you, he’s a dick.”
“If you marry him, you’re going to regret it forever,” Naomi, the other one, interjected. “You want to bail, Poppy, we know you do. You just have to find the courage to walk.”
“In your case, run,” Ruby stated, her voice hard.
Poppy shook her head. She couldn’t. Too many people, including Benji and her parents, her siblings—The Fabulous Four—were waiting for her. Too much money had been spent, so much effort had gone into making this the wedding of the year. Her mother might never recover from the embarrassment.
“Choose yourself, and fucking run,” Ruby told her.
“You have a future to save,” Naomi urged.
“And it isn’t with him,” Ruby added. Her face softened, just for a moment. “You can do this, Poppy.”
Poppy watched, entranced as a thin, hairline crack appeared in the mirror, right between the ghosts’ faces.
Cracks then covered the mirror in a thousand, scattered lines, and the faces distorted, then faded away.
Poppy, coming back to herself, took a deep breath.
The mirror was completely back to normal, and everything was as it was when she’d walked in here, just—she looked at her phone and checked the time—five minutes before.
Her face, now the only image in the mirror, was bloodless-white. She’d imagined it all, right? It had been a dreadful hallucination, a trick from too much stress and too little sleep.
At that moment, her grandmother’s gorgeous, perfectly matched pearl necklace slowly slid from her neck and dropped into the basin, still intact, still on its string.
She picked it up, checked the diamond clasp, and saw that it had come undone.
How? The clasp was tricky and she’d needed help to fasten it around her neck.
They’d even joked that she might need to cut it off her neck because the clasp was so tight.
It was, Poppy realized, her grandmother’s way of telling her she agreed that Poppy should bolt.
She lifted her hand and saw that it was trembling. “Right. So, are you going to choose yourself?”
Poppy scooped up the necklace, shoved it into the cup of her custom-made, strapless bra, picked up her phone and shuffled over to the window.
She kicked off her wedding shoes, designer and expensive, ripped off her sheer stockings and lifted the heavy hem of her dress to her knees.
Higher, higher, there … she could now lift her leg and sling it over the windowsill.
She hesitated and looked back at the mirror.
Was she going to do this? Seriously? Yep, it looked like she was.
Sitting on the edge of the windowsill, she swung her legs over and dropped down into the bed of roses below, her bare feet sinking into the mulch, soil, and manure.
It squelched up between her toes and covered her French pedicure.
The back of her dress fell into a pile of dislodged soil, and Poppy looked at the streak of brown mud on the cream silk. Oh, well.
There was no going back now.
* * *
“Oh, I love your costume!”
Three hours later, Poppy, still barefoot, took a step back when a tiny woman bolted toward her, her grin wide. “A jilted bride! You’re just perfect!”
Tired after the bus ride, scared and utterly overwhelmed, Poppy tried to make sense of her words. Her new friend, thoroughly overexcited, hopped up and down on the spot, squealing again when she saw her bare feet.
“Oh my God, you look so authentic!” The tourist looked around and waved her partner, wearing two cameras as necklaces, over.
“Honey, the tourism page said that we might see people dressed in Halloween costumes wandering around Solstice Springs. Since it’s early in the season, I didn’t expect to see anyone. But look!”
“I see her, babe.”
“Can I take a photo with you?” Without waiting for her answer, the woman tossed her arm around Poppy’s bare shoulder. It was warm and a little sweaty on her shoulder, and her husband lifted the bigger of the two cameras.
“Oh my God, I just love Halloween, and I’ve been begging my husband to bring me to Solstice Springs, and he surprised me with this trip.”
“Smile, ladies.”
“She can’t smile, she’s a runaway bride, silly.”
So Poppy stood there, unsmiling, not willing to spoil her new best friend’s H-Town experience.
The tourist, after telling her for the fourth time, or was it the fifth, that she was nuts, just nuts about Halloween, completely obsessed, thanked her, told her she adored her costume, and finally, finally walked away.
Poppy rolled her eyes and rubbed the back of her neck, not that surprised by the encounter; this was H-Town after all.
She swatted her veil out of her face, picked up her dress, and contemplated whether she should walk east up Main Street or duck through the park.
The walk to Solstice Deep would take longer through Blackweather Green, but it would be a lot quieter, and there was less chance of running into someone she knew at this time of the day.
If she walked up Main Street, by the time she got to the inn, everyone in town would know she’d bolted from her afternoon wedding.
Yeah, the park it was.
Poppy hadn’t pictured herself coming back like this. Not in a crumpled wedding dress, barefoot, clutching her phone and the ragged edges of her sanity, stepping off the bus like some tragic heroine from a midnight zombie movie.
It absolutely hadn’t featured anywhere on her life’s bingo card.
Still, none of it mattered now. Because soon she’d be in her grandparents’ creaky inn, her heart’s true home.
Grandpa M.’s estate was finally settled, and her father was now the fourth McMaster to own the property.
Sure, it was officially her dad’s, but she knew where the spare key to the kitchen door was hidden.
She’d sneak in and head straight upstairs to her childhood bedroom, a quirky little sanctuary, nestled under the slant of the third-floor roof.
With its drafty windows and floors that groaned with every step, it was her secret hideaway.
Solstice Deep had always been her soft place to land, the only spot she’d ever felt absolutely herself, no masks required.
And right now? She needed that. She needed home like she needed oxygen. She needed safe.
Because, frankly, there was a good chance she was losing her bloody mind.
Who ran away from their wedding because two ghosts told them to?
Crossing Main Street, she ignored the curious looks from tourists and entered the park. Looking around, she sighed.
It was, as she’d imagined, beautiful. Even before Luna—Wren’s godmother—got her Halloween-obsessed paws on the place, Solstice Springs had been quietly charming.
Truth was, the town was easy-to-sell-to-tourists lovely.
Add the element of it being settled by an offshoot of the Salem Puritans, who’d been kicked out of Salem for being a little too wild, a little too theatrical, and its wholehearted, year-round embrace of Halloween, and visitors poured into the town.
Its soundtrack was the ching of cash registers pinging from tourist income.