The Farmer's Free Fall

Chapter 1 Clarke

Clarke

There was a dead man across the table from me. If he wasn’t a ghost, I am sure his pleading eyes would be glistening with crocodile tears. But I was refusing eye contact, so I wouldn’t know. “C’mon, Clarke, please,” he said, bringing his clasped hands under his chin for maximum effect.

“I’m running out of secrets, Earnest.” I sighed, keeping my eyes on my laptop screen.

I’d received three estimates for the new roof for Toades, my family’s antiques shop—or Premier Antiques Emporium as the sign says—and the fourth should’ve been coming in any minute.

Baker told me it would be in today, but Sweetwater Peak locals prefer a slower life pace—especially in the winter—so in all actuality, Monday, or even Tuesday, was more likely.

That, or he’d just decide to show up on my front porch tomorrow to tell me in person.

This place was both endearing and annoying. Two sides of the same rural coin.

“And I’m working,” I said. Toades suffered a lot of damage in a thunderstorm a few months ago, and repairs had been slow, to say the least. The roof was the biggest and most expensive undertaking.

Even though my parents and I patched it the best we could and the tarps covering the gaping holes were miraculously still holding, I couldn’t put this roof off any longer.

Without the roof, the attic couldn’t be used for storage, and since my parents had spent the last thirty years collecting sh—stuff, I mean—much of the shop was now covered in boxes.

Boxes that needed sorting, items that needed repairing or getting rid of.

The past couple months had made me think about what I wanted Toades to look like when it was mine—if it would ever become mine.

Fewer boxes were at the top of the list. Maybe then I’d stop feeling like my world was caving in on me.

Perhaps I should’ve let my parents handle this, but honestly, I didn’t know if they ever would handle it.

They preferred to “let things work out,” while I preferred to work them out myself.

If I was ever going to get the chance to run Toades, it at least had to remain standing—preferably with a halfway decent roof.

The sun was setting in Sweetwater Peak, Wyoming, flooding the inside of Toades in a burnt-orange and soft-pink glow.

Normally, the warmth of the sunset through the glass would calm me down, but I’d been keyed up for months, with no end in sight.

I rolled my shoulders back and down and tried to unclench my jaw, but it didn’t help.

“Please,” Earnest said. “It’s the last time I’ll ask this week—I promise.”

“It’s Friday.” I sighed again. “I won’t even see you again this week.

” I would normally come in on a Saturday, but my mom thought I was working too much.

So she essentially banned me from the store on Saturdays, and we were closed to foot traffic on Sundays and Mondays.

Joanie Cartwright might appear sweet and gentle, but underneath her fringed floral dusters and lavender hair dye, she was not to be trifled with… on some matters.

My mom and I had been trifling about many things for months, so putting up a fight about Saturdays didn’t seem worth it in the grand scheme of everything else.

Plus, I didn’t really want to spend the day with her at Toades anyway.

And just because I wasn’t at the shop didn’t mean I couldn’t get work done.

Whether I was at Toades or not, there was always something to be done—always something I could be doing.

And if I wasn’t doing something, then the guilt would creep in.

If we were being truthful, I probably was working too much. I just…didn’t have anything better to do. My best friend, Sadie, moved to Arizona—she’d been a snowbird for the past few years, but this year she decided to make the move permanent. And my twin sister, Collins, wasn’t around either.

“Consider it a goodbye present, then,” Earnest said hopefully.

“You know,” I said, refreshing my email inbox, “if you weren’t already dead, I would kill you.”

Collins and I had these weirdo supernatural abilities: We could talk to and see ghosts.

Maybe we never would’ve noticed or maybe it wouldn’t be such an integral part of ourselves if we grew up anywhere but Sweetwater Peak—it’s haunted as hell—or if our parents did anything else besides owning an antiques shop that was an absolute hotbed of paranormal activity. But we did and they do.

Collins loved our abilities. She found friendship and solace in interacting with the spirit realm. Me? Not so much. I didn’t hate it. I just preferred to keep most of my interactions with others on the living side of the earthly plane.

Our abilities also differed slightly. Collins usually only heard one voice at a time—like she was having a normal conversation.

Unless I was focused on one ghost—like I was on Earnest right now—I didn’t always hear intelligible words.

Mostly I got frequencies: high-pitched ringing or dull hums, something that sounded and felt like static when there were multiple ghosts around me at once.

And since I seemed to be surrounded by ghosts no matter where I went, that static could get loud.

I think that was part of the reason I wasn’t as fond of our abilities as my twin sister.

For Collins, it was as easy as breathing—as integral to her as oxygen.

I had to work at it—at focusing in on one thing or at bringing the noise down.

It didn’t always feel natural to me. It felt like there was always something trying to invade my space.

Most of the time, I was able to tune everything out.

And with nearly thirty years of practice, I was good at that—reducing the presence of the ghosts to a dull hum.

Sometimes I could quiet them so much that it just felt like white noise.

I didn’t know what it said about me that I was better at shutting the ghosts up than talking to them.

At least, I had been, until recently. I didn’t know what was going on in the intersection between the supernatural realm and my head, but the buzzing had become more persistent and harder to tune out than usual—especially over the last couple of weeks.

I chalked it up to stress and spending too much time at Toades.

As if my plate wasn’t full enough already.

My dad always said that the best way through something is to just…get through it, and I was determined to put my head down and do just that. I hoped the new roof would get Toades and me right as rain.

Earnest was the exception to my lifelong feelings about the ghosts. He was family. He’d been at Toades since I was a kid—tethered to a record console upstairs. “Tethered” was the term that Collins and I came up for the deep connection ghosts had to an object that allowed them to remain after death.

Our parents bought the old record player console—at auction with a plan to sell it, which they obviously never did. So we grew up with Earnest around. Weirdly, he felt like the closest thing we had to a brother.

And much like I imagine a brother would, he was currently driving me fucking nuts.

“Please, Clarke,” Earnest said again. I let out another sigh.

He died in a car accident in 1957. He had been on his way to Sweetwater River to meet his lover, Adeline Bennett.

Adeline froze to death waiting for him (morbid, I know, but those are the facts) and became the center of a Sweetwater Peak ghost story whispered around bonfires or with flashlights in the woods.

Every kid in Sweetwater Peak was told that if you put a white sheet over your head and whispered a secret, the Lady in White would appear.

Growing up, Collins and I had tried it a million times with no luck.

Until Collins had a run-in with Adeline last fall, both of us assumed she was just that—a ghost story.

But Adeline was very much real. And now she and Earnest had a second chance at their love story.

But they had not yet been able to reunite permanently.

In general, the spirit realm didn’t have a lot of rules, but Adeline seemed to be bound by the secrets in the way that Earnest was bound to the console—maybe they were her tether in some weird way.

Earnest and Adeline had tried different ways to get to each other once Collins made the connection, but they didn’t have any luck.

Anytime Earnest tried to get to the Sweetwater River, he would fade before he got there and would end up back at Toades—it was the same for Adeline, but she would end up back in the forest.

Still, nearly every day, Earnest would ask me to put a sheet over my head and tell a secret, so he and Adeline could rendezvous for a brief, stolen moment. I didn’t know why it worked. But somehow, it did.

And it drove me crazy.

I liked processes and efficiency. I didn’t like variables. The spirit realm seemed to be one giant variable.

I’d told nearly every secret I had—including the fact that I was the one who let Collins’s hamster out of its cage when we were nine. Unfortunately, Fudge the hamster was never found.

I refreshed my email again—still no estimate. It was past five. I read the email I sent again. It was artfully crafted and sweet as sugar. Maybe I should’ve been meaner. More urgent? Irritated, I reached out and shut my laptop with a little too much force.

Earnest’s eyes were still on me. I’d seen a few pictures of him from when he was alive, but they were all in black and white—like how he appeared to me now: gossamer and wispy around the edges. It made me sad that I didn’t know what color his eyes were.

Goddamnit, he was getting to me, just like he always did. I could never actually tell him no. Earnest was excellent at ghost guilt.

I swiped my coat off the chair next to me and put it over my head. Even though I couldn’t see him, I knew Earnest was grinning in a way that made him glow even brighter than the sunset.

“I cheated on a math test my senior year by writing all the formulas on the inside of a water bottle,” I said with a deep breath.

Technically, that was only half the secret, but I was confident it would work.

The other half of the secret had to do with why I cheated on my math test, but I’d save that one for another day.

Within a few seconds, the temperature in the room fell. I knew that when I pulled my jacket off my head, Adeline would be next to Earnest, and they’d be making googly ghost eyes at each other.

Gross.

I didn’t look at them when I did so. I just shrugged into my coat, slid my laptop in my bag, and got up to leave.

“Thank you, Clarke,” Earnest called as I walked out the front door.

I glanced back at Earnest and Adeline, where they would be for the next hour or so until Adeline was whooshed back to the river—heads close together, whispering about something.

I felt a pang in my chest. I shut the door softly, so I didn’t disturb them, and I locked up the shop for the night.

God, even the ghosts had some company.

Winters were kind of…tough for me. The town was quiet, half the shops were closed, a lot of people were gone, and, of course, it was cold as hell.

The air bit at my cheeks. It was the beginning of March—still winter in Wyoming, but it had been a bit milder than usual. There wasn’t as much snow left on the ground, so I could still walk to work—even though I risked freezing to death every morning and night.

Although I loved a Sweetwater Peak sunset more than almost anything in the world, I was jonesing for Daylight Savings Time to be over.

The fact that it was this dark at 5:30 p.m. was downright depressing.

Soon, though, the sun would still be up for my walk home, and I might start to feel better. I hoped I would, anyway.

My walk wasn’t long—seven minutes, usually.

I couldn’t even listen to the entirety of “American Pie” in that time.

I had my gaze on the sunset as I approached my house—trying to romanticize the moment and what would inevitably come after: stovetop mac ’n’ cheese, probably a hot dog, a glass of the finest boxed wine money could buy, and crying over elderly-dog videos on the internet.

But—for once—it didn’t look like that was going to happen because there was something—someone—on my porch.

A living someone. I didn’t have to see his face to know it was Leith Wilkes.

His broad shoulders and annoyingly perfect hair gave it away immediately.

It looked like he was running his fingers through his hair before he positioned a baseball cap over it.

Shit. What was he doing here? When I said I wanted company, Leith Wilkes was not who I was talking about. In fact, he was probably the last person on the planet I’d like to talk to.

I’d been avoiding Leith nearly all winter—which is not easy to do in a town the size of a quarter—but he’d been persistent. His texts finally stopped a few weeks ago, so I thought I was off the hook.

Apparently not.

He smiled when he saw me—a big, bright smile that wouldn’t be out of place in a toothpaste commercial—and gave me a wave. I didn’t wave back. My heart stuttered a little, but I ignored it.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” he said as I got closer. It was then that I realized that Leith wasn’t the only person on my porch. His dad was there too.

His dead dad.