Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Lara didn’t like talking about Adam with Ty. Well, with anyone, really, but Ty had been the final nail in the coffin of her and Adam. Lara just didn’t see that as a problem. Adam had been a decent boyfriend, a decent guy.
But when he’d started hinting around about marriage, she had felt nothing but dread. She hadn’t been able to picture the future he seemed to want. And when he’d started to blame Ty’s existence in her life for that, she’d known that whatever she thought she was doing wasn’t working.
Everything she’d told Ty earlier this afternoon had been one hundred percent true. She didn’t see the point in all that hurt. She had the people in her life that she’d developed a relationship with before her family had died, and she didn’t need or want to add anyone else to the mix.
It didn’t even make her sad. It was kind of a relief to be free from expecting something different out of her life. Things were settled. She was settled. Maybe that whole thing at the door with Ty this morning hadn’t felt settled, but she just needed a few days to recalibrate to having Ty around.
Because she was glad he was home. Glad he was ready to move on from baseball, though she still thought being some kind of coach was the next natural step—one that would suit him.
He was patient and fun and good with kids.
He knew what terrible coaches and influences looked like, so he wouldn’t be one.
She needed to talk to Grandma. Maybe if they worked together, they could get him to come around to the idea…and believe it had been his own.
Buoyed by the thought, she started to close down the museum for the day.
Ty was in the basement taking out some trash, so she locked the front door and began putting the interactive things back to rights.
The two kids this afternoon had done a number on everything—something Lara was always gratified to see.
The kids might have been bored by most of the history, but they got a kick out of dressing up like explorers and soldiers and wild west cowboys. They’d even asked to come back tomorrow as their parents had shuffled them out the door.
She knelt in the play area to put the costumes back on their hangars neatly. She heard a faint burst of static, and then the little radio in the decades exhibit turn on.
Lara paused for a moment. There was no song playing. It was a commercial for a kid’s store.
“Weren’t they cute, Clementine?” she said quietly. Her and Grandma had made a game of talking to their resident ghosts—assigning certain behaviors to the people showcased in the museum.
Clementine had been a well-known figure in the early ranching days of the area.
She’d had eight children—five of whom survived into adulthood—and lost her husband when they’d all been under the age of eighteen.
She’d continued to run the ranch, into her early nineties.
In the eighties, her family had donated some of her journals and other artifacts to the museum.
She tended to show up in sounds—radios turning on, cell phones going off, sometimes people heard humming, particularly once the children’s area had been established.
Neither Lara nor Mary Lou considered it fanciful to have conversations with the guests they couldn’t see. It just seemed sensible that a building as old as this one, in a town with as much history as Wild Rose Point, there had to be something lurking.
They got inexplicable flickering lights—they’d assigned that one to Lissy, the pregnant widow from WWII who’d died in childbirth…
just a few days before her husband had died on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day.
Door slams and cold snaps from Floyd, the disgraced roaring twenties politician, often followed by the sticky floral perfume of his flamboyant mistress, Josie.
The smell of campfire or cigars was Jack, a man who’d come to the area in the early 1800s to fur trade—who Lara believed was also the figure guests sometimes claimed to see standing on an ocean rock.
Lara was so used to it all, it never fazed her. But she knew someone it fazed. She heard Ty’s steps coming up from the basement and tried to bite back a grin.
When he appeared, his hair was mussed up, and he had a streak of dirt across his cheekbone.
Something internally sighed at the sight of him a little disheveled.
Stop that, she ordered herself.
The radio abruptly shut off, and Ty eyed it warily as it passed. He said nothing, so Lara bit her tongue. It was his first day back, she wouldn’t start poking at him about the supernatural.
Yet.
“Playing dress up?” he asked dubiously at the sight of her kneeling amongst the costumes.
She got to her feet but kept one of the hats in her hands. “You’d look real cute in a cowboy outfit.” She held the cowboy hat out to him teasingly.
He took it, placed it on his head obligingly.
Another internal sigh, and another internal reprimand.
Ty tapped his chin, surveying the costumes. “Then you need a prairie apron.” He grabbed the flowered fabric, stepped forward and put the neck hole over her head.
Too close again. Nearly toe-to-toe. And yeah, he looked just fine in a cowboy hat, but the apron at least felt like a bit of a barrier. A reminder this was fictional—just a joke.
But then the lights flickered, a couple of them going out, sending the room into dim light that almost reminded Lara of candlelight.
Ty eyed the light fixtures as warily as he’d eyed the radio.
Which was now playing some old, slow brass band song.
She knew what Ty was thinking, and it made her grin. But before she could tease him, he fixed her with a stern look.
“Don’t say it.”
“Don’t say what?” Lara replied innocently. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly rational reason a few lights went out and a few didn’t. Electricity can be…finnicky. Especially in these old buildings.”
He narrowed his eyes at her, but she just smiled blandly right back.
Ty didn’t like to come out and say things like: ghosts aren’t real. Not to Lara anyway. She liked to think her dead loved ones were wandering around spraying perfume or sending dimes, and more power to her. He didn’t want to shit all over that. It was kind of sweet.
But insisting the museum was haunted was something else, and the idea of signs and ghosts gave him the damn creeps.
Especially because there had been a handful of unexplainable things over the years.
But those were just weird coincidences he wouldn’t have even considered being ghosts if not for the Townsend women.
They’d put the thought in his head. So it was just…suggestion, not real.
And it was a topic best left ignored.
Harder to ignore with old timey slow dance music playing all around them, and lighting that leaned toward romantic. He pulled the cowboy hat off his head and placed it on the hat hook. Then he made sure to put some distance between him and Lara.
“Do you remember that dream you had?” Lara said, her voice overly bland and innocent. Which meant he knew exactly what topic she would not be dropping.
He scowled at her. “Lara, I’m warning you.”
She pulled the apron up off her head and carefully hung it up. “Just come here for a second.”
He knew he should refuse, except that was childish. She was going to try to creep him out with one of her ghost stories, but he was a grown man. Not scared of things that didn’t exist. He wouldn’t let her get to him, and then she wouldn’t keep trying to.
She led him to an exhibit that was new since the last time he’d paid attention. It was a kind of decades wall, highlighting different significant figures in the town. She pointed to the early 1800s and a paragraph about the history of the nearby fort.
But he didn’t read it, because his gaze was stuck on the picture of a man in old-timey clothes standing on a rock.
“His name was Jack Lawrence,” Lara said. “He was a fur trapper and trader. This picture was taken toward the end of his life, so probably 1870s or so.”
He knew why she was showing him this, and he knew why she was telling him this, and he didn’t like it.
Maybe…maybe that picture looked like the guy from his dream—because no matter what Mary Lou or Lara had said at the time, he had to have been asleep—but again thinking this picture looked like his dream was just the power of suggestion. Not real memory.
Just like the faint whiff of cigar smoke he definitely wouldn’t be smelling if Lara hadn’t put the idea in his head a couple years ago when he’d asked if someone had been smoking in the basement.
He shuddered in spite of himself.
“Must have been some life,” Ty managed to say, sounding vaguely bored—because that would irritate her.
She rolled her eyes and moved back for the counter.
“Let’s grab a pizza on the way home so Grandma doesn’t feel the need to cook for us.”
“Sure,” he replied, forcing himself to look away from Jack Lawrence the fur trapper, and to walk toward the stairs. They went back down into the basement where Lara gathered her coat and purse.
They both paused a little at the door. Would it stick this time?
But after the initial pause, Lara opened it without a problem, and they both stepped out into a chilly, windy evening. Lara locked the door, then they both walked down the stairs and onto the pathway that would lead up and around to the main drag.
Ty refused to look out at the ocean—the rock he’d once dreamed he’d seen some figure of an old man standing on. He kept his gaze fully on his feet.
Until Lara nudged his arm with her shoulder.
“You’re so freaked out.”
“I am not.”
Since she was laughing and seemed happy instead of that determined kind of depressed from earlier when they’d talked about Adam, he slung his arm over his shoulders as they walked.
“If a ghost jumps out, you’ll protect me, right?” he said.
Her laughter vibrated through him. “I’ve got you, Ty.”