Chapter 3
CHAPTER 3
Nina Miller had always been an early riser. She actually seemed to enjoy waking early, drinking her weak coffee, and starting the day with the sun. Anna didn’t understand that at all. If it wasn’t a work day she had to force herself to get out of bed by nine. If she could, she’d sleep until noon every day. Her ex had always hated that about her. Among other things that had displeased him, she’d discovered too late.
Her mom had retreated to bed hours ago, but since Anna couldn’t sleep she kept herself busy going through stuff. Piles and piles of stuff. She vowed that once her mom was settled in Florida, she’d go back to her little apartment in Nashville and toss half of everything she owned. Doodads she’d picked up on vacation. Clothes she liked but hadn’t worn in five years or more. Those pretty plates she never used.
If she never saw another plate…
Why had her mom collected these monstrosities? Some of them were pretty, she admitted, but most commemorated some event or place or person, like the Elvis plate that had broken when it hit the floor. Anna picked a New Orleans plate off the top of the stack on the table and stared at it a moment. It was pretty, but no one was going to eat off the thing. These decorative plates were just for show, and not exactly what anyone would consider modern decor. It would take a lot of wall space to display all these plates, even half of them. Who would want to?
She wanted to declare then and there that she wouldn’t do this to her children, but since at the age of thirty-six she didn’t have any kids it wasn’t likely to be an issue. Trent hadn’t wanted children, perhaps because he was an overgrown child himself. Needy. Selfish. Constantly making messes for her to clean up. She should’ve dumped him years before the marriage had ended, but she’d been so certain he could change. For her. For himself. For his parents, who she was pretty sure liked her more than their own son.
Thinking about babies really shouldn’t make her mind turn to Colt, but it did. Had to be a flashback to girlish fantasies. Being in this house, in this town, seeing a grown up Colt, made her remember how she’d scribbled Anna Hart and Mrs. Coltrane Hart among numerous hearts and curlicues in notebooks or her diary.
Surely her mother hadn’t saved any of those…
She wasn’t a besotted kid anymore, and Colt wasn’t a teenage heartthrob. They were both grown, they’d both been hurt, they were not who they’d once been. She didn’t really know him anymore, and he didn’t know her. Still, she thought about him. Who he’d been; who he was today. The connection was strong, somehow. Why hadn’t he come to the door earlier this evening? He’d just stood there on the sidewalk, cursing and looking unhappy. Unhappy because she was here? Because Jack was not?
She placed the New Orleans plate in the bottom of a new box, then picked up another. The Grand Canyon. Her mom had never been, so why? So many whys .
The plate was snatched almost violently from her hand. By… no one. The painted porcelain remained suspended in the air for a moment, then it dropped to the floor, shattering much as the Elvis plate had. Anna blinked hard. Was she so tired she’d started hallucinating? Shards scattered around the small dining room, skittering across the floor to be stopped by a baseboard or a table leg. Great . More cleanup. Just what she needed.
Anna swept up the mess with a broom and dustpan, hoping the noise hadn’t woken her mother. She dumped the shards on top of the New Orleans plate, then grabbed the stack of plates she’d rescued from the back of a closet and dumped them all in the box. No more going through one at a time trying to decide if there was anything of value in the lot. There was not. It was all junk her mom had wasted money on for years.
Colt had a business. She was almost positive there was a dumpster out back, between the old depot and the railroad tracks. If she could sneak this box and a few others out her mom wouldn’t miss them. She hoped.
It was early for her, but like it or not it was time to get to bed. Maybe a good night’s sleep would chase away the hallucinations and the thoughts of babies and Colt, which should not come at the same time. Her life in Nashville was settled; it was orderly. She had good friends and eventually she’d find a man, if she decided she wanted one again. She’d be more careful next time. If there was a next time.
She taped the box shut and wrote Colt across the top. Maybe her mom wouldn’t think to look inside, since it was well taped and not marked Trash .
Anna stood tall, stretched, and surveyed the cluttered dining room. There was a lot to do, but she’d made progress. Even a little progress was worth celebrating. She’d already dismissed her earlier hallucination that the plate had hung in the air longer than was physically possible. She needed sleep, badly.
Boy, did she. She could swear the box flap that had her brother’s name written on it in black marker moved a little. She held her breath as she glanced into the box, searching for a mouse among the random papers, trophies, and pictures. Nope. After declaring the box clear of rodents, she could breathe again.
How sad that there was so little in this box with Jack’s name on it. Did her brother have a decent life somewhere? Did he ever think of the family he’d left behind? She didn’t have kids but did he? Was she an aunt? Was Nina Miller a grandmother?
She thought about him more than he deserved. What he’d done to their parents…
The flap moved again, this time at least a couple of inches. There was no breeze, no fan, no mouse. No reason for that flap to move. She was hallucinating again, that had to be it.
But she wasn’t. There were no tremors like the ones her mother had been describing. Not here, in Seawolf Beach. This was… something else.
A photo drifted up and out of the box to hang in the air. The snapshot of Jack and Colt, taken at a local park when they’d been… Sixteen? Seventeen?… moved closer to her face. It shimmied, as if being shaken by an invisible hand.
She wasn’t dreaming. She wasn’t hallucinating. No, this was real. Impossible as it was, as it should’ve been, this was happening. The picture of Jack and Colt floated in the air all on its own. After a few heart-stopping seconds it began to move unsteadily. Around her, in front of her, behind her. And then it fell, as if it had been dropped.
The photo landed on top of the box with Colt’s name on it.
After a restless night, Colt awakened with a new resolve. No one in Jack’s family needed to know his ghost was hanging around. It wasn’t his job to tell them he hadn’t abandoned them, that he’d died. He might be tempted to tell Anna when and if he saw her again, but he’d resisted temptation before. This would be no different. It wouldn’t be long before they finished preparing the Miller house for sale. When that was done Anna would go back to Nashville, Nina would move to Florida, and maybe when they were gone Jack would go, too.
If he didn’t, he could live in that house with strangers until the time came.
Or worse, maybe once Jack’s family moved away he’d relocate to the depot. Could he? Would he want to?
If only this ability came with a handbook. Tips and Tricks of Dealing with Your Glimpse into the Afterlife; Rules and Suggestions for Your Friendly Neighborhood Ghost.
If he cared to he could write that book himself, interviewing the spirits in the depot when there were no customers in the store. Assuming they knew more than he did, which they probably didn’t. They all seemed to just be hanging out, as clueless as he was. He didn’t want to strike up conversation. He didn’t want to ask questions. For years he’d done his best to ignore his invisible-to-everyone-else companions. Some would not be ignored, but most left him alone.
Most.
He showered — without Maude today, thank goodness — dressed, and headed downstairs. Today, in addition to running the store, he’d order a cleaning service and some new furniture, which could be moved into the newly vacated rental house on Pine Street. If it was summertime he’d have to wait at least a week for both, but fall was different. Until the late-October music festival, the town would be relatively quiet. He might be able to move in this weekend, though that would be pushing it.
Since the house was ghost free, at least for now, it would be a nice place to go at the end of the day. He could sleep without waking up to Maude peering over the end of the bed. Dress without suggestions about what to wear from spirits no one but he could see. No, he did not have a Sinatra t-shirt. No Johnny Mathis, either.
Some of the ghosts ignored him, and he was happy to return the favor. Others wanted to be friends. Either way, they’d been disrupting his life for the past twelve years. Maybe he didn’t have to wait for new furniture. He’d wait for the cleaning to be done, though.
From here on out he’d take a different route when he walked to the Pine Street cottage. Most of Seawolf Beach was laid out in a grid, so he had options. He had no desire to see Jack sitting on the Millers’ front porch. Colt could do without the guilt of knowing his old friend was dead and he wasn’t going to do a damn thing about it. Well, the guilt would remain, but he could do without the reminder. He’d love to take Anna out to dinner while she was here, catch up, see what she’d been up to since leaving Seawolf Beach. She was a reminder of a good time in his life, when he’d been happy and na?ve, when he’d had parents and friends and been ignorant of the spirits that had remained invisible, quiet.
But he wouldn’t. He’d never been great at keeping secrets; he’d always been a terrible liar. More than once he’d been told that he couldn’t even play poker properly. There was no stoic poker face for Coltrane Hart.
The ghosts were quiet this morning. They were here, but happy to chat amongst themselves and leave him alone. He tried to keep them happy by putting on an old Johnny Mathis record. That smooth voice seemed to captivate them.
Avoiding the Miller house would be easy enough, but he couldn’t do a damn thing about Anna coming here, to his place of business, his home for short while longer. If she stopped by he was going to have to look her in the eye and lie. It would be a lie of omission, but still, not the truth as he knew it. Not that she was likely to believe him if he did try to tell her what he knew.
As if thinking about Anna conjured her, there she was. She parked her little blue Honda in the no parking zone directly in front of the door, opened the trunk, and lifted an obviously heavy cardboard box. Records, most likely. He had told her he’d look them over…
After muttering a curse he ran to the door to open it for her. She carried the box to the checkout counter and placed it on the floor, not even trying to be gentle. His name was written on the top of the box that clinked and rattled when it hit the floor. Not records.
“You have a dumpster, right?” Anna asked. She looked tired, as if she hadn’t slept for days. The shorts she wore had seen better days, but they showed off really great legs. Just what he didn’t need to notice. She looked up at him with… oh, those blue eyes he shouldn’t notice, but did.
Anna and Jack were so different in many ways. Anna was blond and blue-eyed, like her father. Jack had Nina Miller’s dark hair and brown eyes. They didn’t really look like siblings, until you studied the shape of their chins and their smiles, which were identical. Their personalities were opposite, as well. Anna was sweet and kind. He could see now that Jack had never been either.
“Out back,” he said.
“I hope there’s plenty of room, because I have more,” she said, turning and walking toward the front entrance.
“Pull around,” he said before she reached the door. “I’ll meet you with this box and we’ll unload it all.”
Anna nodded and headed for her car, pushed the trunk closed, and drove off.
Maude, again. “She’s pretty.”
“She’s trouble,” Colt answered as he lifted the box with his name on it.
“If customers come in, I’ll alert you,” the ghost said. “You just take your time helping out that nice young girl.”
“Thanks.” There was an occasional benefit to having ghostly help in the store.
“And if you want to have sexual relations with her, I’ll keep everyone away from…”
“Maude!” Colt snapped.
She smiled innocently as he turned toward the back of the depot, then walked through a green door. Between the public space of his store and the back door there were four separate storage rooms, a small office, and a bathroom for him and his handful of part time employees. The bathroom was off-limits to customers, but sadly not to ghosts. One of the rooms had been converted to a break room with chairs, a small table, a fridge, and a microwave. Another he used exclusively for cleaning records. It had a table at just the right height so he didn’t have to bend over as he stood there and cleaned, the microfiber towels he preferred, and his own vinyl cleaning solution. An old turntable sat on a shelf near a box where records in need of cleaning were stored.
By the time he exited the back door, Anna had already parked near the dumpster, which was off to the side between the west corner of the building and the rarely used tracks. She opened her trunk; Colt headed toward her.
“Records in any of those?” he asked as he tossed the box with his name on it into the big bin.
“Nope. Decorative plates. Chipped glassware that’s still, according to my mother, mostly good . Magazines, some of them with excellent recipes, I hear. We haven’t even gotten to the records yet.” She sighed, and again he saw the tiredness in her.
She lifted a box from the trunk; he was there to take it from her. “You catch your breath. I’ll get these.”
There was no argument to that offer. Anna seemed content to lean against the car and close her eyes as he tossed boxes into the dumpster. She did thank him. Twice.
When her trunk was empty he closed it and asked, “Coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
She locked her car with the remote in her hand and they walked into the depot through the rear door. The back section of the depot was a maze, of sorts. Over the years, as the building had been used for other purposes, walls had been added. They made their way down a short hall, then took a sharp turn into a narrower hallway that went past his office and into the main area where Mathis was still playing.
Anna managed a tired smile. “Do you ever play music written after 1970?”
“On occasion.”
“I had no idea you were into the old stuff. Dad was. He and your dad both loved that old music, especially jazz. Everything else was substandard in their eyes.”
Her expression when she mentioned her dad broke his heart. Donnie Miller had been imperfect, as most people were, but he’d loved Anna and she’d loved him. She missed him, she grieved.
“I’m sorry about your dad,” Colt said. “He came by now and then, just to say hello. He was a nice guy.” Well, nice enough. To him, at least. He had the good graces to stay gone after death, which was a plus.
“I loved my dad but he was a hard ass who thought his way was the only way, and not just when it came to music.”
He thought again about asking Anna to dinner to catch up, but dismissed the foolish idea. She was busy with family stuff and had no time for distractions. Yeah, that was his excuse, for the moment.
He poured her a cup of coffee, and then one for himself. She cradled her disposable cup as if it were the finest china, and sipped at the hot brew as if it were magic from the gods.
Some days it was.
Colt took a long look at Anna’s face. It wasn’t a bad view, not at all. Not that he should notice. Her mood was different today, off, somehow. What he saw in her wasn’t grief for the loss of her father. It wasn’t annoyance at her brother. This was something else. “Are you okay?” he asked.
She gave him a wan smile. “Do I look that bad?”
Never . “You look tired, that’s all.”
“I didn’t sleep much last night, and Mom is driving me a little crazy. She can’t take everything with her, but she refuses to part with anything she thinks might be worth a quarter at a garage sale.”
“You’re not having a garage sale, are you?” he asked, slightly horrified. Old stuff and ghosts seemed to go together.
“Not if I can talk Mom out of it.”
“We could stop by the antiques store and ask Nicole if she’ll take a look, maybe tell you if anything you’re looking to get rid of has value.” We. Why had he said we ?
“That’s a great idea.”
“How long will you be in town?” How long would he have to look her in the eye and lie?
“As long as it takes. I was hoping for a couple of weeks, but it’s looking like I’ll be here a while longer. When we get rid of the all the crap, I mean Mom’s treasures, there are a few repairs to be done before we can put the house up for sale.” She drained her coffee cup and handed it to him. “More, please.”
He obliged. Anna might be here a month or more. That struck him as being both wonderful and terrible. He liked having someone from the past to talk to. An old friend. A reminder of a more innocent time. She hadn’t been a friend in the old days, not really, but her brother had been and she’d been a part of the mix.
He shouldn’t see Anna as anything other than a reminder of the past back in town for a brief time before leaving for good, but he was beginning to feel close to her. Bad idea. The sooner she was gone the better, for so many reasons.
“What about your job in Nashville? Won’t they miss you?”
“I have a good bit of vacation saved up, and the record company I work for has more than one bean counter. If this goes on too long I might ask if I can do some remote work. They like everyone to be in the office, but I can do most of my work from anywhere.”
“You know where the antiques store is, right? It’s next to…”
“Would you mind going with me?” She interrupted. “I can wait until you’re free. You obviously know this Nicole, and… I’ll be honest. I can use all the help I can get. If I take Mom with me she’ll probably end up just buying more crap.” She laughed, but it was a tired laugh.
Maybe what he’d seen in her was simple exhaustion. He knew the feeling…
“Why couldn’t you sleep last night?” he asked, knowing as the words came out of his mouth it was a mistake to ask. He didn’t want to know. Didn’t need to know. He definitely shouldn’t care .
Anna looked him in the eye. “You’ll think I’m crazy.”
“Probably not.”
Maude was near the checkout counter, dancing again. She moved her hips with vigor. Occasionally she glanced his way and waggled her eyebrows. Crazy? Hold my beer…
The record that had been playing ended. Maude stopped dancing. She sighed, twirled around twice, then shouted out, asking Colt to look for her pearl earrings while he was in the antique store. He ignored her.
The expression on Anna’s face was one of uncertainty. Dread, even. She took another sip of coffee before looking him in the eye again.
“Do you believe in ghosts?”