Chapter 30
The next morning, I’m up bright and early to visit the bakery for the promised Lost Bird flyers and maybe a chocolate croissant to soothe my fragile nerves.
The poltergeist didn’t bother me again last night, but I was constantly expecting to hear knocks in the stairwell or see a folding chair flying at my face.
Waiting for something scary to happen is almost worse than it actually happening.
The video store is fine, at least, and—
You know what?
I’m going to stop calling it the video store.
There are no more videos on display. No more Arnold, no more Short Circuit 2 poster.
It’s a bookstore.
Maybe it’s just starting to be a bookstore, but that’s worth something.
The bookstore is fine—gosh, that feels good to think—with no poltergeisty games like Cherry Plank Pick-Up Sticks or Boxed Video LEGO-splosion.
Everything is exactly like Hunter left it.
I head out the front door, leaving it unlocked in case he gets here before me.
I can’t believe I’ve become the kind of person who would leave the door to their business and apartment unlocked, but, well, it’s Arcadia Falls.
The most expensive thing I own is a parrot cage, and I’m fresh out of parrots.
The Unsafe Safe is stuffed with cash, but it just looks like an old table under a tablecloth.
And if anyone tries to steal anything else, maybe the poltergeist will scare them away.
As soon as I’m on the street, I see it:
My flyer, plastered everywhere. There’s one taped to every Chamber business, the backs of stop signs, and the blue metal mailbox, which I think might actually be a federal crime. There must be dozens of them. Shelby really is magical.
The bakery is still closed when I get there, but there’s a light on in back and the scent of warm bread fills the air.
I knock on the door, and an employee tells me Shelby isn’t in yet.
I don’t know her well enough to burst into her apartment before I know she’s awake, so I shoot her a thankful text with lots of prayer hands and head back to the store.
As a family friend, I am allowed to buy two hot ham-and-cheese croissants before they open.
I owe this girl more than I can express.
My next task is the sort of thing I’ve been dreading. It’s not difficult, and it will yield excellent dividends, but it’s going to take some work.
I grab a trash bag in the apartment and make a beeline for the Unsafe Safe.
I feel like a cartoon character as I sweep armfuls of crumpled bills into the trash bag.
There are so many I have to shove them down to make enough room.
I briefly wonder why there are no coins, and then I remember the huge jug upstairs in a corner of the apartment, filled with silver and topped with feathery plant fronds, and wonder how hard it will be to roll up all those coins.
Let’s just start with paper.
Back upstairs, I put on my audiobook and sit at the kitchen table, pulling out the dollars one by one and straightening them as best as I can.
It’s tedious work, flattening bills that have likely been crumpled for months or years and counting them out into stacks, which I wrap with rubber bands from Maggie’s junk drawer.
I’m somewhere above twelve hundred dollars when I hear a bang from downstairs.
“Hunter?” I call.
There’s no answer.
“Ghost?”
Still no answer, but that makes a lot more sense.
I creep downstairs with 911 pressed into my phone, hoping I’m not about to find an actual problem. Instead, I find…the opposite of a problem.
The office door is open, and sitting on the floor is the fishbowl full of cash that until recently sat by the boiled peanuts. I’d actually looked for it earlier and couldn’t find it.
“Thank you?” I say to the empty room.
This ghost must’ve inherited Hunter’s former tendency to run hot and cold.
I kneel and pick up the fishbowl. It’s icy cold—the whole room is, actually.
It becomes even colder when the door slams shut.
“Not again!” I put down the fishbowl and hurry to the door, twisting and tugging the knob. It doesn’t budge. “Ghost, did you just catfish me into my own office? What do you want?”
The chair in front of the desk slowly, creakily rolls to the side of the room.
“You want me to sit?”
The chair falls over.
“Okay, no, then. Do you know charades?”
There’s a loud thump on the floor, like someone has stomped their foot.
“Are you angry?”
Another stomp.
“Is…is one stomp yes?”
Another stomp.
“Do you want me to go away?”
Two stomps.
Interesting.
“So you don’t mind me here?”
Two stomps.
I guess two stomps is no.
I realize I am playing a party game with a ghost.
“So what are you angry about?”
Multiple stomps on the floor like a child having a tantrum.
“I don’t understand. Maybe I can leave and get a Ouija board?”
Two hard stomps on the floor.
“Well, then write on the wall in blood or something! It’s cold in here and I left a lot of cash upstairs and—”
“Rhea?”
My whole body sags in relief when I hear Hunter outside.
“In here!” I call, slamming the flat of my hand against the door.
It opens, and I tumble out and directly into Hunter’s chest. He catches me, and I wrap my arms around him and shove my face into his shirt, clinging to him like he’s a life preserver.
He pulls away to look down at me, puts a hand against my cheek. “You’re freezing. What’s going on?”
“The ghost. Poltergeist. It tricked me into going in there and locked me in. It was trying to communicate with me, but we didn’t get very far.” The door is still open, the money sitting enticingly on the floor. “Hold the door for me, will you? I want this done.”
Hunter reluctantly releases me and braces himself as he stands against the door.
I dart into the office, grab the fishbowl, and dart out again, my heart hammering like crazy.
It’s not cold anymore—the room or the glass.
I guess the ghost has gone back to wherever ghosts go when they’re not scaring the bejesus out of people.
“Let’s go upstairs,” I say. I don’t want to be anywhere near the office right now. “And if you found the door to the stairwell, I’d love to get that put back on so I’ll have some privacy. From the ghost.” Which sounds deranged, but I’m way past worrying about that sort of thing.
Hunter follows me upstairs, and I give him a ham-and-cheese croissant and offer him coffee from my brand-new coffee maker. We sit at the table, surrounded by stained cash, and I gulp down my coffee like it’s ghost repellent.
“Has the ghost been bothering you?” Hunter asks me. “Have you seen it?”
I stare at the opening to the stairs, startled. “No. Can witches see ghosts?”
“Some can, apparently. But what happened just now?”
I swallow a lump of croissant. It’s so good—it doesn’t deserve to be choked down this desperately.
“Just noises. A bang last night, thumps today. The room went cold when we were talking—or when I was talking and it was stomping. One stomp for yes, two for no. I accidentally asked it an open-ended question and it had a temper tantrum.” I shake my head.
“I thought being a witch would involve more cauldrons and brooms and fewer hauntings.”
“Magic shit is magic shit,” Hunter says. He finishes his croissant and dusts the crumbs off his fingers and onto the waxed paper. “Can’t have the good without the bad. Are you hurt? Or just scared?”
“More annoyed, really. I finally get a place of my own and I’ve got an incorporeal roommate with communication issues.
” I take a sip of coffee, searing my esophagus.
“Oh God. I hope I can get rid of it before opening day. I do not need books flying off the shelves. At least, not Ghostbusters-style. More like what Fifty Shades did in 2012.”
He raises an eyebrow. I melt.
“I’ll have to trust you on that,” he says. “But I’ll ask my grandmother. Maybe she knows something.”
“And I’ll ask Tina McGowan about anti-ghost spells when I take all this cash to the bank.
I’ll feel a lot better when there’s nothing in here worth stealing.
Every time the ghost thumps, I think I’m getting robbed, and then I don’t know which is scarier: a person with bad intentions or a clumsy-ass ghost.”
He sits up straighter, and suddenly he’s all business. “Speaking of opening day, I have a few questions, if you have a moment?”
“What’s up?”
Thus begins a process in which he asks me construction questions I don’t know how to answer and then makes suggestions that I immediately accept.
“I trust you,” I finally say. “You know what I want, you know I’m on a budget, and I know you’ll make the best decision for me. I’d like to open on Halloween, if you think that’s possible.”
Hunter leans back in his chair and laughs. “Oh, I’ll be done way before then, don’t worry. You just order your books and do your decorating and advertising—you know, the hard part. These shelves will be done within the week.”
He stands and stretches, showing me an enticing strip of belly.
I want to nestle into him, but I’m not quite sure about the parameters of…
whatever we’re doing. The first time I kissed Billy Wayne, I was fifteen, and we were all over each other like bonobos.
But now I’m an adult, and there are all these weird rules I never learned about dating.
I stand up, too, hoping he’ll make the first move. But he doesn’t.
“I’ll be downstairs building your dreams. Holler if you need me.”
I put on my big-girl panties and take a chance. “Uh, holler.”
He laughs and pulls me in for a hug and a quick peck on the lips.
Nothing like the passion of our last encounter, just light and friendly and fun.
“Cisco’s on his way to help me, or I’d take you up on that holler.
” His eyes crinkle and he slips his fingers down my sides and into my belt loops, pulling me toward him.
“But maybe you’d like to join me for dinner at my place? I make a mean steak au poivre.”
I put my hands on his chest, liking where this is going. “You can cook?”
His grin is knowing and pleased and…devastating. “I just follow the recipe. It’s not that hard. I don’t know why men pretend they’re so helpless.”
My knees literally go weak. “Are you sure you’re real?”
He leans in to kiss me. “Pretty sure. We’ll see how much you like your bookshelves before you decide. Is that a yes?”
“A thousand times.”
He winks and heads downstairs, and I try to convince my knees to stop wobbling and my heart to stop bouncing around like a freakin’ Gummi Bear.
I finish flattening and bundling the rest of the cash, including the Poltergeist Fishbowl dollars, and try to figure out the best way to carry $1,223 to the bank without looking immensely robbable.
I end up just shoving everything in Doris’s bird backpack and zipping down the privacy panel.
Oddly, it weighs about the same as my missing bird.
I wave to Hunter and Cisco as I push out the front door.
But the strangest thing has happened outside.
Much to my surprise, all the Lost Bird flyers are gone.