Chapter Twenty-Six
Twenty-Six
It had happened again.
It hadn’t been a trick of the light. Cassie was sure this time.
When Nick had pulled himself away from her and fled down her front steps, for the space of a couple of racing heartbeats his eyes had bored into hers.
Those eyes had been dark brown. As dark as her own.
He’d been harder to see down by the gate as they said good night, but the streetlight had caught enough of his face for her to see that his eyes were their regular blue again.
A bad feeling had settled in her gut, like a punch to the stomach. She had a pretty good idea of what was going on. She had questions to ask, but with Sarah’s limited vocabulary, she had to ask them just right if she wanted to get the answers she needed.
Cassie woke up the next morning to an unexpected text from Nick. Check your mailbox . Not even bothering to get dressed, she shoved her feet in some flip-flops by the door and flip-flopped her way to the mailbox by the street in her pajamas. The rich smell of cinnamon and bananas greeted her when she opened it, and inside was a foil-wrapped loaf, still warm.
Tampering with mail is a federal offense you know , she texted back after her first slice.
They’ll never take me alive.
Cassie laughed out loud in her empty kitchen, her hand clapped over her mouth to stifle the sound and catch any stray banana bread crumbs. God, she really liked this guy. The warm glow in her chest from cinnamon banana bread and the memory of Nick’s body against hers dimmed quickly, though, when she remembered how everything had ended the night before.
She called off work; it was time to get to the bottom of this.
Another cup of coffee, and then she got to it, unpacking the photos and documents from the folder she’d borrowed from Theo. She lined them up the way they had been the day before, the time progressing in chronological order across her coffee table. Then she opened her latest Etsy package of custom magnetic poetry pieces, placing them on the fridge in random places.
Once she was done, she stepped back and cleared her throat, which had suddenly become very dry. “Sarah? I hope you’re here today. I really want to talk to you.”
It took only a few seconds before the spoon that Cassie had used to stir her coffee rattled from its place on the saucer that still held banana bread crumbs. She exhaled a long sigh. “Okay. Good. So, there are some new words up here. Family words, like ‘husband’ and ‘brother’ and ‘father,’ stuff like that. You were trying to tell me about how the house was yours, do you remember? You said ‘man closer friend,’ which I took to mean he was closer than a friend to you. And I spent money on these custom words so I really hope I’m right.
“Were you talking about William Donnelly? The man who built this house? Was there a connection between you two? Can you tell me?”
Cassie stared hard at the fridge, waiting for a response, but nothing happened. Then she remembered that she never watched Sarah move the words; maybe she was waiting for privacy. Cassie busied herself by wrapping up the leftovers from her breakfast and putting her dishes in the dishwasher. Then she turned around. There was one word in the middle of the fridge; a word that was worth every penny she’d spent on it.
uncle
“Uncle?” Cassie repeated. “William Donnelly was your uncle?” Her mind spun with this new information.
But Sarah wasn’t done. When Cassie looked up again the words had changed.
mother father dies
child goes uncle
big rain wind
“Big rain wind…” She made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat. “Cassie, you dumbass. You live in Florida and don’t have ‘hurricane’ on your fridge?” But self-flagellation could wait. She turned her attention back to the fridge, translating each line of the message one at a time. “So your parents died. You were sent to live with your uncle, before the Great Storm. You were here for the Great Storm?”
And with a mental click, puzzle pieces began to fall into place. There wasn’t a record of any other Blankenships in Boneyard Key because Sarah was the only one. But she wasn’t an outsider; she was actually part of the Donnelly family, whose history here wasn’t documented because he didn’t stick around. Sarah Blankenship had been absorbed from one man’s family to another, with no trace of her own name.
Man, fuck the patriarchy sometimes.
That would be an easy enough thing to verify. Cassie turned to her laptop; she’d splurged on a membership to a genealogy website a while back when she’d first started digging into Sarah’s past. She flipped it open and…dead. Of course. It wouldn’t charge at all now when she was at home. She’d chalk it up to it being old and just give in and buy a new one, but it would work just fine when she plugged it in at Hallowed Grounds. Or when Buster would plug it in. Or that time Nick had done so…Basically anytime a man plugged it in, it worked.
Man, fuck the patriarchy again. Even her electricity was involved.
There was something to that. Another puzzle piece. But Cassie could only handle one of those at a time, and right now she was working on Sarah’s past. With a sigh she reached for her laptop bag. Buster would be here any minute to fix the showerhead in the upstairs bathroom, but he had a key. She left a note on the table asking him to check the electricity one more time. Couldn’t hurt, right?
“I’ll be back in a bit!” she called out to the empty house. “If there’s anything else you want to let me know about, feel free! I’ll check the fridge when I get home.”
Her heart pounded a little faster the closer she got to the café. Nick’s gift this morning had been unexpected and all the more perfect because of that, but was it also a message? They were all about no pressure, no strings. Was this saying he wanted more? Was this saying he wanted less? Like I like you, but please quit coming by the café every damn day ? She glanced idly in the window of I Scream Ice Cream as she walked past, remembering what Nick had said about it on the ghost tour. Sometimes an ice cream shop is just an ice cream shop . Maybe banana bread was just banana bread.
Nick glanced up from behind the counter, and his smile looked like the sunshine after a summer rainstorm. So she’d probably been overthinking it. As usual.
“You done already?” He tossed a towel over his shoulder in the style of every clichéd diner owner in every movie or television show. “You’re not supposed to eat an entire loaf of banana bread in one sitting, you know.”
“You didn’t leave me a latte to go with it,” she shot back. “How was I supposed to enjoy it like that?”
“I had to keep you coming back here somehow.”
“You know I love you for more than your banana bread.” Her breath caught in her throat as the words left her mouth. She meant it in a teasing way; she’d said that kind of thing more than once to him. But Nick’s eyes widened, just long enough for Cassie to see that this time, those words had had an impact.
She really shouldn’t have said that. No pressure, no strings , she repeated to herself. Get a grip.
But Nick put his elbows on the counter, leaning toward her, an easy smile on his face. “I’ll take what I can get.”
Okay. They were okay. She relaxed into a smile as she stretched onto her toes, leaning over the counter for a kiss. “You can’t leave one of those in the mailbox, either.”
“Good point.” God, his smile felt good against her mouth. She opened her eyes to watch Nick press his lips together for an instant as though to savor the kiss. “Iced hazelnut?” His gaze lingered on her mouth in an extremely distracting way, and Cassie forced her brain back on task.
“Yes, please,” she said. “And power.” She headed to her table in the back corner; Nick was just too damn distracting. “I think I’m going to just have to bite the bullet and rewire the whole damn house at this rate.”
“That sounds nice and low stress.”
“Oh, yeah. Won’t dip into my nonexistent savings at all.” Her laptop gave a pleasant chirp as it started charging, and Cassie tsked at it. Her logical brain reminded her that it wasn’t her laptop’s fault and her electricity worked fine; she had working lamps and appliances and hair dryers and all kinds of things. There was just something about her laptop and her house that didn’t get along. Sarah Hawkins seemed to have something against Cassie working from home. It was the twenty-first century; Sarah Hawkins needed to get with the program.
That thought flashed in her mind like the neon ghosts in the coffee cup outside of Hallowed Grounds, and she knew she needed to pursue it further. But then Nick dropped off her iced hazelnut latte, along with a kiss on top of her head, and safe to say that put her mind on other, more pleasant things.
“Whatcha working on today?” He glanced down at her laptop, his hand flat on her back between her shoulder blades. Something about his touch was so grounding; it was like being connected to him was the most comforting thing in her life. It felt right. So right that it was almost unremarkable.
“Research,” she said. “On Sarah Hawkins. Enough is enough.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Nick said. “Getting a little sick of that bitch.”
“Hey.” Cassie looked up with a frown. “Don’t call her that.”
He held up defensive hands. “Look, she’s not my biggest fan. I don’t want to take it personally, but she’s making it hard.”
“I get that. But she’s my roommate. There’s got to be a reason for all this. And I’m going to figure out what.”
“If you say so.” There was still an edge to his voice, but he kissed her hair again before leaving her to it. Cassie took a long sip of her latte—heaven—then brought up the genealogy website. Last time, she’d only gone as far as to confirm that C.S. and Sarah Hawkins lived in Boneyard Key in 1910, but now she brought up the 1900 census and searched for William Donnelly.
The result came back almost immediately. Donnelly, William. Age fifty-seven, occupation: Architect. The next line however, was where she struck gold. Other members of the household: Blankenship, Sarah. Age nineteen. Relationship: Niece. No occupation listed.
“Gotcha,” Cassie whispered at the screen. If she ever needed any confirmation that Sarah’s spirit was really in her house, here it was. The fridge had said earlier this morning that Donnelly was her uncle, and now here was the proof in a PDF. But this new knowledge sent a chill down her spine and her brain down a rabbit hole. Why did William Donnelly leave town? How did C.S. Hawkins enter the picture? She wasn’t sure what search terms she needed to enter to get the answers she sought.
But maybe her answers weren’t online. Cassie all but chugged her latte as she repacked her computer bag.
“You charged up already?” Nick waved off Cassie’s debit card when she tried to hand it to him.
“Not quite. But I need to talk to Theo.”
Nick’s brow furrowed. “I thought you already talked to him.”
“What, are you jealous?” She stretched up for another over-the-counter kiss. “I found something that I want him to see.”
“Hmm.” Nick looked skeptical, his gaze sweeping her up and down. Cassie’s cheeks heated up, and this time when she reached across the counter it was to swat him.
“Not like that! Pervert.”
“I’m just saying…you and him, alone in that museum of his…try and behave yourself.”
Cassie snorted. “I’ll see what I can do.”
But when she arrived at Boneyard Books, picking her way back to the museum side of the shop, she pushed aside the curtain and found that she wasn’t alone at all.
“Hey.” Sophie waved from one of the seats at the card table.
“Please tell me you haven’t been here all night.”
Sophie’s mouth twitched in a smile as Cassie dropped into the seat opposite. “Of course not. But there’s so much here…so much I never knew about. I took the morning off to do some more reading.”
“Took the morning off? You have a day job?”
Sophie raised an eyebrow. “Ghost tours don’t exactly pay the bills, you know. I work from home. Medical transcriptions, stuff like that.”
“Oh. Nice.” Cassie could relate to working from home, and how easy it was sometimes to sneak off when something more tempting was itching in your brain.
“What about you?” Sophie folded her arms on the table, over the papers scattered from their file folder. “What are you doing around here?”
“I found something.” She pulled out her laptop and powered it up.
“What did you find?” Theo’s voice came from the doorway, and Cassie jumped and spun in her seat.
“Where the hell did you come from?” The front counter had been deserted when she’d walked in, so she’d expected him to be back here in the museum.
“The classics section.” Theo tugged on his brown tweed vest and straightened his tie, looking exactly like someone who would hang out in the classics section. It was probably the sexiest part of the store to him. “Some new books came in I had to shelve. This place is occasionally a bookstore, you know.” His voice was chiding, but his eyes sparked with humor.
“I’ll try and remember that,” Cassie said with a smile of her own. “Anyway…” She turned back to her laptop, pulling up the documents she’d hastily downloaded at Hallowed Grounds. “Take a look.”
Theo adjusted his glasses as he leaned over Cassie’s shoulder. “Sarah Hawkins was Donnelly’s niece?”
“Before she was Sarah Hawkins. When she was Sarah Blankenship.” Cassie nodded. “That explains why you didn’t know the name; she was the only one. Plus, she told me this morning that she was his niece, so it all tracks.”
“Wait.” He straightened up. “She told you?”
“Oh, yeah,” Sophie chimed in. “Cassie has these words on her fridge, and Sarah moves them around when she has something to say.”
“Really?” Theo looked at Cassie with new interest. “That’s…that’s genius, actually.”
“Thanks. It’s been touch and go, but it seems to be working.” Cassie felt like a little bit of an asshole, taking credit for this innovative plan to communicate with the dead, when it was really a happy accident.
“I’ll say.” Theo looked at Cassie’s screen with unfocused eyes, and Cassie could all but see the wheels turning behind his light green eyes. “So Donnelly built the house and lived in it with Sarah. Then Sarah married Hawkins and he got the house…”
“That means Sarah lived there the whole time,” Sophie chimed in. “The house was always hers.”
“But not hers at the same time,” Theo said. “Her name was never on it. It was more like her dowry or something.”
“And then Donnelly left, Hawkins died, and it was just Sarah and the house again. For all those years.” Cassie sat back in her seat. “And all those years, it’s been called the Hawkins House, like she didn’t matter.”
Theo shrugged. “History’s written by the living, after all. Mr. Lindsay wasn’t exactly a protofeminist. A Haunted History is going to show his bias.”
“Yeah.” Cassie sighed. Fuck the patriarchy one more time. “But it’s not like this has been buried all that deep. Why didn’t anyone put this together before?”
“Nobody cared enough to.” Theo’s eyes flicked over to Sophie in apology, and her gaze went to the table and the papers she was studying.
That made the breath whoosh out of Cassie’s body. That, more than anything else she’d seen and heard these past few months, drove home the point that Sarah Hawkins had died alone. No friends, no family. No one to miss her. All she’d left behind were her beloved cabbage roses, and those were long gone.
“I’m going to get this right.” Sophie’s usually small voice was strong, backed with steel. “I know this ghost tour’s just a stupid thing for tourists, but I owe it to these people I’m talking about. If I’m going to tell those stories, I need to tell them right.”
“I know you will.” Theo’s voice was kind. “Anything I can do to help, let me know.”
“Same here,” Cassie said. “I still have the Hawkins House stuff at home. Come over anytime if you want to take a look.”
Sophie’s smile was thin, but genuine, and Cassie could relate. Her mind was in a jumble, turning over these moments of Sarah’s life that she’d just figured out. But the puzzle pieces were clicking into place now.