Chapter 5 #3
“I don’t care what you believe,” she said, ignoring my heavy complaint. “You need to be honest with me.”
A cloud of cold seriousness shaded her expression. She didn’t seem to care about the wet sock or saving face anymore. Her gaze cut through me, ice burning my warm skin.
“What are you talking about?” I frowned, angling my body away from her and toward the stable.
“Have you done something to someone? Stolen an heirloom? Tricked them into giving you money?”
I let out a humorless laugh. “What? Why the hell would I do something like that?”
She pressed her hand to her chest. “I’m not here to judge you.”
“Yeah?” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Because it sure sounds like that’s exactly what you’re doing.”
Rae pointed to the mud. “That action is personal. And from everything Esther told me, the accidents involving your other ranch hands probably weren’t solely based on environmental accidents—”
“One of my hands accidentally fell on a fence post,” I said flatly. “The other forgot to turn the stove off. It can and is that simple.”
“Something pulled my ankle. Touched me. That means this entity has the ability to combine environment and physical touch to inflict harassment. This hostility—especially this early on—is an indicator that someone is pissed. And you’re the landowner, so nine times out of ten, that someone would be pissed at you. ”
“I barely talk to anyone on a good day, so how in the world would I have the chance to offend and…kill?” Because if this were a vengeful ghost, this was a person who died a vengeful human.
“You don’t have to kill someone for them to harbor a grudge from beyond the grave,” she said.
“No one has a grudge against me.” But I sounded unconvincing even to my own ears. That’s because she was doing this to me, though. Inserting these wild what-ifs into my psyche.
“I have to be honest, I’m finding it a little difficult to believe you.”
“I’m sorry?”
She closed her eyes for a second and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I mean…you have a wall that’s the height of a skyscraper.”
“Excuse me for not baring my soul to a lecture hall of strangers for a profit. But I don’t think I’d sell a bobblehead as well as you do. I’m not interesting enough.”
Rae huffed and gave herself a second to recover. “I don’t care about interesting. What I need is honesty.”
“Ask me a question,” I dared. “And I’ll answer.”
She eyed me.
“Why wouldn’t I help you get to the end of the job quicker? I want you out of here as soon as possible. And you prefer working with more agreeable clients, I’m sure. So, ask me anything, and I’ll make sure you have everything you need to move on.”
Rae slowly nodded. “Good.”
“Great,” I agreed. “So, start.”
“What was the trespassing about?”
I froze, replaying the question a few times. “Sorry? What?”
“The trespassing on your record?”
“What does that have to do with this?” I gestured to the mud.
“It has to do with lying.”
“It wasn’t a lie; I’d forgotten about it.” I threw up my hands. “Sorry, I don’t actively think about a thing that happened over a decade ago during the worst patch of my life.”
Rae’s mouth parted, but nothing came out. I laughed under my breath and forced myself to continue.
“It…” I poked my tongue into the inside of my cheek, thinking about how ridiculous this was, confessing my old sins to a woman holding a ghost-detection tool.
“It was my boyfriend at the time’s idea.
He wanted to film what it was like to sneak into an antique shop after hours.
The guy was interested in becoming a director and needed content for his backers on a fundraising website.
And I was silly and in love enough to be convinced to help him.
I wanted to be supportive. There. There’s the big secret that’s got some ghosts upset with me. ”
Rae stared at me for a beat before letting out a small laugh.
I frowned. “This is what I get for following your rules? Being laughed at?”
“No, no.” She looked away for a second, waving her hand back and forth. “It’s not…I’m sorry…I wasn’t expecting that. You just…you don’t seem like someone who could be convinced to do much of anything, let alone break into an antique shop to get B-roll.”
“It was A-roll, I think.”
She laughed some more.
“He didn’t have much money after he spent it on a scam artist’s course that said they’d turn him into a blockbuster director in one summer, so…”
“Thank you for sharing.” Rae’s laughter faded. “It’s nice to hear you’re such a devout partner.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t have many other skills to offer outside of devotion.” I eyed the mud pit again. “Do you really think I have something to do with this?”
Rae was completely somber now. “I don’t know. Sometimes we don’t know our impact until the results flash themselves in our faces.”
I winced. I’d lost my parents after ignoring their calls for weeks. Wilson got into a car accident on the weekend I’d been supposed to visit but had put it off for yet another time. And every single person I’d hired sustained an injury under my watch.
The common denominator was clear.