Chapter 5 Clarke
Clarke
Leith parked in the back of Coop’s, and my stomach flipped when he cut the engine. We hadn’t even gotten out of the truck yet, and this was already one of the stupidest things I’d ever done—definitely the stupidest thing I’d ever done without my sister.
“Ready?” he asked.
No. I actually was not ready to break into a lawyer’s office.
I thought about Wilder’s face as Leith opened his passenger door for me back at my house.
His look was one of relief, and it made me uneasy.
I wasn’t fond of feeling like I’d been pushed into doing something—at least partially—by a ghost. I felt like I’d taken a stick of dynamite to my rules—the things that kept me safe and grounded among the spirit realm but also as separated from it as I could be.
I could almost feel the line I’d drawn getting blurry—like there was darkness creeping into the edges of my vision. And I’d let it happen for Leith.
The ride over here was quiet. Well, I was quiet. But Leith chitchatted enough for the both of us. Normally, I enjoy a little chitchat. I’m good at it too. I just didn’t want to talk to Leith.
I also didn’t want to think about how his truck smelled like cloves and leather.
I didn’t want to think about how those adolescent butterflies fluttered their way out of dormancy every time he shifted gears or turned the steering wheel with one hand.
And most of all, I definitely didn’t want to think about how my stupid childhood crush still seemed powerful enough to get me to break my very logical rules.
“Let’s get this over with,” I groused.
I went to open my door, and Leith said, “I’ll get it for you,” as he hopped out of the truck.
But I opened my own goddamn door.
When my feet hit the gravelly dirt of the parking lot, Leith smiled and shook his head. “Same old Clarke,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. Leith seemed hell-bent on reminding me tonight how long we had known each other, mostly because it was the quickest way to guilt me into this ridiculous mission, I think.
But still, it irked me. Because he only knew the teenage Clarke.
And she would have been absolutely thrilled with this evening’s turn of events: sneaking in the shadows with Leith Wilkes, partners in crime.
Even if she would have pretended otherwise.
But that wasn’t me anymore. And being around Leith reminded me how teenage Clarke would probably be so disappointed in me.
And for more reasons than this.
I spent most of my youth being told that I was going to do big things and go big places. And yet, here I was—doing normal things in an abnormal place.
I got the keys for Coop’s out of my coat pocket. There were eleven keys on the ring, but I only knew what two of them were used for: the front door and the back door.
Even though we were barely approaching seven p.m., it felt like the middle of the night.
The only sounds were our feet on the gravel and the jingling of Brady’s keys as I found the right one.
It was too cold for crickets or birds or wolves, and that made me very aware that it was just Leith and me out here.
So for the first time in my life, I was itching to get inside a building where I knew some ghostly inhabitants roamed. Then, at least, I wouldn’t be all alone with Leith Wilkes and his perfect hair and his stupid earring.
I could feel him behind me as I unlocked the door, knew he was too close as I went through it. He was probably desperate to get inside from the cold.
“Okay,” I said once I shut the door behind me.
I could only really see Leith’s outline in the darkness of Coop’s back hallway.
Immediately, I felt the supernatural energy buzz around me.
Just like at Toades. Even though I was more aware of exactly what—or who—I was feeling than the average person, the hair on the back of my neck still stood up, and I immediately had the feeling I was being watched. “What’s your master plan?”
“We find the door that leads next door, and then we find one more door that apparently leads to a hallway that basically acts like a frontage road for the buildings on the north side.”
“How do you know that hallway exists?”
“I found the building plans in the library.”
“Really?” Sweetwater Peak didn’t have an archival system, so I guess the library would be the only place Leith could find this information, but I was frankly shocked he had been that organized.
“Did Betty Jean help?” Betty Jean was the town’s only living librarian.
There were a few dead ones that still lingered.
They gave great fiction recommendations.
“Yeah, why?”
“Because when Ron realizes these documents are missing, and he goes to the Sheriff’s Department—”
“—the one-man Sheriff’s Department,” Leith interrupted.
“There’s someone out there who will know that you were looking at plans of the building right before they disappeared.” Even though I didn’t expect anyone in Sweetwater Peak to readily comply with law enforcement—like ever—I still didn’t like that someone out there could tie Leith to the building.
“You’re catastrophizing, Clarke. And I was going to take pictures of the documents anyway.” Leith shrugged. “Easy. Then this definitely won’t even qualify as a crime. Especially because we have keys.”
I huffed. Normally, I’d be into his level of preparedness and how quick he came up with a solution.
Okay, maybe I was. A little.
It was time to move this operation along. The sooner this was over, the sooner I could redraw my boundaries with permanent marker—with Leith and the entire spirit realm.
“How do we get next door?” Leith asked, looking around Coop’s.
Everything in the building was connected, but in true Sweetwater Peak fashion, it was connected in the most complicated and inefficient way possible.
Coop’s was connected through the second floor—not the first. “The door that leads to the building next door is on the residential level of the building, which is why you didn’t see it on the plans.
” There were two doors at the end of the hallway that housed the entrances to Collins’s and Brady’s respective sides of their apartment.
I knew where every other door in the building led except for those two, so I figured they led next door.
“That makes sense.” Leith nodded. “All right, let’s go.”
My head was already buzzing, so I knew that the gaggle of ghosts that inhabited Coop’s was nearby before I noticed a gossamer figure to my left as we walked toward the stairs on the far side of the shop.
I didn’t look too closely, but it felt like the cowboy with the neckerchief.
Even though I didn’t pay attention to the ghosts at Coop’s, I’d been here enough to know the regulars.
The cowboy was a reminder that, once upon a time, Coop’s housed a saddle shop.
As we climbed the stairs, another one appeared at the top—a young woman whose jaw would probably hurt if she was still alive, given how enthusiastically she was chewing her gum.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, or at least, that’s what I thought she asked since I was reading her lips and trying to fight through the static.
My eyes narrowed on her as I did my best to focus and hear what she was saying.
“Where’s the other one?” she added. Of course, Collins would be familiar with all the ghosts in Coop’s.
I obviously couldn’t respond to the ghost’s question with Leith on my heels, so I ignored her as best I could—eyes forward, jaw clenched.
She refused to move out of the way when I got to the top of the stairs, and even though I tried to sidestep her, the left side of my body ended up going through hers.
It felt ice-cold, and I fought an obvious shiver.
Collins and I called that a signature. It was our broad way of understanding how ghosts interacted with the natural world.
Of course, we could see and hear that they were there, but for everyone else, ghosts appeared as their signature: temperature drops, weird noises, unnatural breezes, and sometimes moving objects.
“Damn,” Leith said—right as he walked through a ghost, unbeknownst to him. “Is the heater not working up here? It’s cold as shit.”
“It’s warmer down the hall,” I said. And it was—once you got past the ghost. “Drafty old building.” Leith and I passed the doors that led to each side of Brady’s monster-of-Frankenstein apartment. It used to be two separate spaces, but now it was joined together by a very large kitchen.
“Is it always this creepy up here?” Leith asked. I realized I probably should’ve flipped the hallway light switch before we came up the stairs, but I didn’t know if the weird flickering and burnt-out bulbs would make it better or worse for Leith.
Or for me, honestly. Collins was the one out of the two of us who embraced the supernatural and everything that came with it—even the scary shit.
She probably wouldn’t even be scared if she came face-to-face with the devil himself—especially because she subscribes to the version of hell that’s in that Fall Out Boy visual album where Elton John is God and that one guy from Motley Crüe is the devil.
She was just better suited to the ghost stuff.
My theory is that it was just Collins in the womb, and I was a mutation—a fluke, so her abilities accidentally got split in two.
Which would explain why our abilities had little differences—that we could each do something the other couldn’t.
And sure, I know that’s not scientifically possible, but neither is talking to ghosts.
I guess the one thing about my abilities is that they’ve made me believe that anything is possible. It felt very…hopeful, most of the time. But as of late, that belief had become harder to cling to.
“I don’t know which door it is,” I said. There were two side-by-side doors at the end of the hall. They were skinnier than the apartment doors. They weren’t numbered like those doors either.