Chapter 3
Chapter Three
The ghosts of Solstice Springs weren’t interested in rattling chains or theatrical moaning—they had standards, and clichés bored them to tears. They considered themselves perfectly normal, thank you very much, just functioning on a higher vibrational plane than humans.
Granted, they didn’t have access to the fun stuff of human life—food, alcohol, sex (leading to passionate and loud complaints)—but they still belonged to a community. Every spirit was bound to Solstice Springs by birth, life, death, previous living arrangements, or a pivotal moment.
The real difference between them and humans? Well, someone who was living-challenged could spend the afternoon conversing with someone from four-thousand years ago and then drift over to chat with a newcomer who’d arrived four days ago. That made this side of the veil an interesting place to exist.
As for why some souls moved on while others lingered—no one had a definitive answer.
Theories floated around: unfinished lessons, unresolved trauma, waiting for an earth-bound soulmate to arrive.
Some simply liked this in-between space.
They’d settled in, grown comfortable, and saw absolutely no reason to be anywhere else.
Captain Silas Blackwood, Miss Lila Finch, 1920’s vaudeville showgirl, and The Reverend, a travelling preacher, came from different times and places.
They couldn’t remember The Reverend’s surname, or how they came to be friends.
Miss Ruby, an ex-biker chick (her words), and Naomi, an aspiring novelist, were new ghosts—forty human years and fourteen—and new to their friendship circle but, somehow, they’d found each other.
These days they spent most of their free time watching, as Naomi called it, Human TV.
Solstice Springs born and raised, Captain Silas Blackwood, 10th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, heard the faint clatter of beads and kept his gaze fixed ahead.
Experience had taught him that to look right was to invite calamity—or at the very least, an hour of moral sermonizing on the sins of the flesh from the good Reverend seated to his left.
Miss Lila Finch’s perfume drifted over to him, spicy and exotic. In ghost years, she was much younger than him, an ex-vaudeville dancer, a blatant attention seeker, a woman who would haunt a convent if only to rattle the windows.
Miss Lila’s polar opposite, The Reverend, claimed a direct line to the Almighty and was forever tugging Silas toward righteousness.
After the horrors he had seen on the battlefield—men split open, limbs strewn like kindling, the stink of blood and fear thick as fog—Silas believed the Almighty gave up on humanity centuries ago.
“Are you not going to greet me, Captain?” Lila drawled, her voice breathy.
Ingrained civility, the curse of all gentlemen, made him turn his head before his common sense could stop him—and his eyes nearly leapt from their sockets.
It was one thing seeing the new fashions as time passed, but he could easily avoid the inappropriately dressed.
Silas prided himself on being a gentleman.
It wasn’t easy to ignore Miss Lila.
Every few decades, Lila required an ego boost and some additional attention and decided to remind the good ghosts of who she’d been.
That meant hauling her old costumes out of the virtual storage vault and dressing up.
Today’s “dress” was a net of beads that left her knees bare.
Her knees! God preserve him. Worse still, her bosom was restrained by nought but a narrow band of cloth.
Her hair, shorn indecently short, brushed her ears beneath a ridiculous hat bristling with purple feathers.
“Good God,” he muttered.
“Please,” The Reverend huffed, crossing himself, “do not take the Lord’s name in vain… Jesus Christ.”
Silas snorted at the man’s bulging eyes. Lila simply twitched her beaded skirts higher, the jade-eyed devil. “Louise Brooks wore this in her picture show—one year before I fell from that balcony there.”
Across the square sat the old playhouse where she’d danced her last dance and fallen to her death.
Lila claimed she’d tripped mid-pirouette; Silas had long suspected excessive absinthe—or perhaps a lover’s quarrel and a careless shove.
However she fell, she’d been scandalizing the town ever since.
The Reverend looked perilously close to fainting.
“Cover yourself, woman,” Silas growled.
She ignored him, reclining so that her bodice shifted and revealed a pale curve that made The Reverend emit a strangled sound.
Seeking distraction, Silas nodded to Miss Ruby who was across the green, dressed in black leather pants and a black vest heavy with badges—biker uniform, she’d told him—and engaged in earnest conversation with Poppy McMaster’s grandmother.
Miss Ruby’d met her end via one of those infernal two-wheeled machines just a mile out of town.
Ma McMaster, as all the breathing in Solstice Springs knew her, had passed just a few human years ago.
He’d known her, in ghost terms, since she was a child, and understood that her passing was final …
so why was she back? And why was she talking to Miss Ruby?
Lila followed his gaze and sat up, frowning. “Why is Ruby talking to Ma?” she demanded. “And where’s Naomi? Did she stay at Solstice Deep this morning?”
Ruby and Naomi liked to haunt Solstice Deep, and that made sense as the big Victorian inn wasn’t far from where Miss Ruby’s accident happened. Naomi, it was said, had visited the inn a few weeks before she died.
Lila shrugged and then her gaze wandered to the man walking toward Crescent Lake, little Wren Dunlop by his side. “Mmm,” she said, licking her scarlet lips. “A fine specimen. Is he new to town?”
The Reverend answered her question. “Arrived recently. He is renting the cottage on the lake, down from Solstice Deep. A surgeon.”
Silas narrowed his eyes. The man moved with the careful precision of one who’d seen too much chaos—steady hands, hollow stare.
Word traveled among the dead—swifter, oftentimes, than among the living.
Silas had already learned that the doctor had briefly worn a uniform once, though never at the front.
He’d traded battlefields for those places where the earth turned wrathful, tending to the wounded ruined by nature.
That was work Silas could honor; any soul who saved lives earned his regard.
But his dereliction of duty—be it in a soldier or a surgeon—was unacceptable.
Why was the surgeon here in Solstice Springs and not in the field, saving lives?
Silas had been a field medic at both the First and Second Battles of Bull Run and at Antietam.
He’d been overwhelmed by blood, had seen too many limbs obliterated by bullets, shrapnel that pierced chests and stomachs, deep puncture wounds, and wide slashes from bayonets.
He’d never once considered abdicating his post.
Fury, deep and primal, rose within what was left of his ripped soul.
He’d lived, and died, on the battlefield, and he’d spent the past one-hundred and sixty years and more relieving every moment—thinking about what he could’ve done differently, how he could’ve saved more lives.
But this man, young but old enough to know better, had stopped. He’d run.
Yet Silas recognized the weariness clinging to him like powder smoke—the guilt that never slept. It was the same burden Silas had carried from the field to the grave.
A sudden squawk drew their attention. Lila pointed toward Lantern Beach. Reggie, the turkey, perched on the massive log overlooking the lake’s stone beach. “Someone should have roasted that bird years ago,” she said. Then, with a tilt of her head, she spoke again. “Isn’t that the dancer?”
Silas followed her gaze. Miss Wren was now all bright eyes and restless grace. The little wild thing he’d watched playing with her friends had grown into a woman.
“Do you remember that wish she made as a child?” Lila mused. “The one she threw into the bonfire?”
He didn’t. There had been many wishes over many years. “What wish? And when?”
“Her mom had died a few weeks before Halloween and she was living between Luna and her father?”
That man. Useless creature. Silas nodded.
“That year, she was twelve I think, I watched her write her wish… Wait, let me think… ‘I wish for someone who will always love me, who’ll stay … and never leave.’”
Silas shifted, uncomfortable. Miss Wren didn’t have the easiest time growing up.
“She hasn’t found that person yet, and she’s running from something,” Lila murmured, sounding perceptive—an act so rare that Silas almost applauded.
“She’s fascinated by the tragic doctor,” Lila murmured. He watched as her gaze landed on the doctor-soldier. Even after nearly two centuries, he recognized that look—the quickened breath, the sudden flush on her pretty cheeks.
Silas leaned back, folding his arms over his chest, and frowned. The air hung heavy, thick, as it always did before a storm. He shifted uneasily on the bench, unease creeping under his skin. Something was coming.
Life, because there was life after death, was about to get very interesting this Summerween season.
* * *
Later that same day, in the kitchen of her godmother’s hundred-year-old house, standing on the foundations of the original home built by Luna’s ancestors—proud founders of Solstice Springs, one of the bunch who fled Salem for being too dramatic—Wren eyed Luna, not trusting the calculating look in her eye.
“Darling,” Luna said, pouring wine into two coffee cups, the old-school landline clamped under her chin.
Morrigan—who technically lived two doors down but regularly conducted patrols of the neighboring houses in search of snacks and idolization—wove between her legs like he owned both properties and everyone in them. “Check on supper, please.”