Chapter 2
The divorced ferry women were seated at the Purple Stallion when I arrived. Based on their rosy cheeks and empty glasses, they were several drinks ahead of me. I sat at the bar and watched purple-clad servers carrying trays of margaritas to sunburned tourists in polo shirts.
I ordered a beer from the bartender, a kid in his twenties who mixed throwback styles by sporting both a mullet and a fanny pack.
While he poured, I convinced myself the door and ghost mug were simply my imagination at work.
A breeze opened the door. I hadn’t looked closely enough to actually see steam coming from the mug.
Someone forgot to put a cup away while they were dealing with Agatha’s possessions.
No one had been in the house making tea. I was tired.
And, yeah, the house was spooky, so my mind was playing tricks. Stress, not Casper .
I frowned. My shaky mental health wasn’t the only explanation.
Someone might have broken into the house.
Mackinac marketed itself as a haven away from crime-ridden big cities, but it was also a tourist trap.
The cottage had been empty while Agatha was in hospice.
Someone might have noticed and made a move, not knowing the new owner was about to arrive.
Glancing around, I scanned the restaurant for locals who might know about recent home invasions.
A man who looked like a pile of rags come to life sat on the other side of the bar.
His facial hair couldn’t be called a beard but was more than stubble.
He looked like he lived in that bar seat and knew the island.
But he also looked like he might start ranting about mermaids if given the chance, so I looked away.
I ordered a veggie burger. When I set aside my menu, a woman with bright orange hair sat next to me.
“You look just like Agatha, you know.” She stared at me with a smile that was kind, if a little too friendly for my liking. “How’s the house treating you?”
“Do I know you?”
She smiled again, crinkling the heavy makeup around her eyes. “News travels fast.”
I nodded, unsure what to do or say. The bartender delivered my food, so I nibbled on a french fry.
“I’m Miranda.” She extended a hand, and I took it.
She was wearing large rings on three of her fingers.
They matched her chunky necklace, which sat atop a bright green dress.
Her entire outfit was loud and her smile was genuine, but it also held something back.
Miranda seemed like a woman who was delighted by the secrets she kept.
“Gibson.”
Her penciled eyebrows raised. She didn’t remark on my unusual name. Someone younger might’ve asked for my pronouns, to which I would’ve answered, “whatever, she is fine, I don’t give a fuck,” but the woman just smiled.
“Have you heard of any houses broken into recently around here?”
“Goodness, no.” She handed me a card. “You’ll find me off Verbena Way. Your dear auntie and I got up to all sorts of trouble.” She batted extremely thick fake eyelashes.
Since I didn’t know my great-aunt Agatha existed until recently, I had no idea what to make of that. My mother had been estranged from her family due to religious differences, and when I became old enough to, I estranged myself from her. Religion was only one of the many differences between us.
I glanced at the card. Miranda’s title was listed as “Spiritual Medium. Tarot Readings by Request.” Inwardly, I groaned. There was no way I’d visit a medium—haunted house or no.
She concentrated, then said, “Let me guess... Capricorn?”
I opened my mouth to deflect, but she was right.
A man appeared at her elbow. “Miranda! Ms. Cartwright doesn’t care about that crap.” He was an imposing presence, built like a fridge and smiling like he owned the place. “Seymour Anderson, Mackinac High-End Homes. You and me should chat about that land.”
Miranda clicked her tongue. “How do you know Gibson is interested in selling?”
“Of course she is!” Seymour guffawed, throwing his head back and putting his hands on his hips.
He was wearing a pristine athleisure tracksuit in a shade of light blue.
Odd choice for such a macho guy. “This young lady knows what a goldmine that dump could be. If it gets in the right hands, that is.”
My jaw automatically clenched at being called a “young lady.” I had always hated being called a lady, because it was usually meant as an insult.
Well into my thirties, the “young” part was definitely insincere.
But I wanted insight into the island’s real estate, and here it was, in the form of a douchebag in sky-blue sweats.
He handed me a card. “Call me. You will not regret it.”
“Like Mrs. Montclair didn’t regret letting her home go?” Miranda’s voice was as sweet as honey, but the look in her eyes was sharp.
“That was different—”
A voice yelled, “Leave ’er alone!” Pile-of-rags man heaved off his stool and left a stack of bills on the bar. “Disgraces, both of you. The cottage is hers.”
He met my gaze and nodded, then shuffled out of the restaurant, almost knocking into a family buying souvenir T-shirts in the attached gift shop.
Miranda and Seymour trailed after him, leaving me sitting at the bar with a cold burger and the feeling that dealing with this house would be more of a hassle than I anticipated.
I wanted the money enough to deal with colorful local characters but that didn’t mean I was eager to be friendly about it.
***
It was windy on my walk back to Abaddon Cottage.
I had a jacket in my suitcase, but I had rushed out of the house convinced it was haunted, so I hadn’t exactly gotten a chance to unpack.
I crossed my arms and rubbed them to keep warm.
The hot dog and ice cream stands at Windermere Point were closed, but the rest of downtown came alive as night fell.
Music and happy people drifted out of the restaurants and hotels.
I wandered among the crowds, feeling totally alone.
A group of kids rushed by on bicycles, almost knocking me over. Their leader, a curly-haired kid of about ten or so, called a quick “sorry!” over his shoulder. I scowled at the kids, but they were gone before I could yell at them.
Using the GPS on my phone to figure out which direction to go, I headed back to the cottage.
Within a few minutes, I left the old-fashioned lamps and cheery flowers of Main Street behind and entered the dark world of the rest of the island.
A paved path circled the entire island, so unless I ventured into the forested park in the middle, there was little chance of getting lost. All the streetlights weren’t lit, though, leaving patches of the path completely dark.
The enormity of the lake on my left and the heavy damp feeling of the woods pressing in on my right made me uneasy.
It’s not that my life in the city was perfect, but walking home at night, I never felt alone.
It was rarely hard to find somebody worse off than you or a substance to distract you from the shitty nature of everyday life.
Out here, there was nothing to fill the silence, just dark woods and the lapping of cold water at the rocks.
I used my phone flashlight to light my way down the little private lane to the house. After I pushed open the door, the sight of the ghostly furniture made me jump, even though I knew it was there.
The house was quiet in an altogether different way.
Abaddon Cottage was like a deserted train station at 2 a.m. It was the kind of quiet where a light flickers somewhere in your periphery and you know the train isn’t going to come but something else might.
Quiet that makes the hairs on your arms stand at attention.
Where anything at all could happen. The cottage was a living being that slumbered, waiting to wake up.
The chandelier reflected my phone flashlight back at me in weird shards of artificial light. I walked past my bag on the floor at the foot of the stairs and into the kitchen. My heart sped up as I checked the kitchen table.
No mug. No book. Just me, imagining things.
I breathed in and out slowly, staring at the empty table. Of course it was empty. There hadn’t been anything there in the first place. I was losing my mind—in Michigan.
Returning to the hall, I grabbed my phone charger out of my luggage, which had fallen when I rushed out of the house.
The main zipper was starting to come apart, and a few socks escaped onto the floor.
I hadn’t considered unpacking before hightailing it to a bar.
I was thirty-seven years old and still spreading my shit all over the place. My mother would’ve had a fit.
I shook my head, dispelling those thoughts. My mother was long dead. She couldn’t nag me about being messy from beyond the grave, though god only knows she would certainly try.
Sighing, I found an outlet in the hallway but when I plugged in my phone, sparks flew and the wall emitted a terrible smell. I snatched the charger from the wall and waved my hand in front of my nose.
Giving up on power, I sat on the stairs and scrolled through social media with my remaining battery.
I had texted Brooke a few times as I made my way out to the island, but she left me on read without responding.
My thumbs hovered over the messaging app, but I forced myself not to send another text until she responded to any of the previous ones.
She knew I made it here without dying. That’s all I could expect from her because she wasn’t my girlfriend.
Was she? I never seemed to know where we stood.
I switched over to Instagram, where Brooke had posted a picture of her and the rest of her band, Call Me Kate Kane.
My face cracked in a smile at the sight of them on stage, sweat pouring off their bodies.
Brooke’s mouth was open in a shout. She was wearing a neon over-the-shoulder sweater with skintight pants that gave her the illusion of having an ass when her behind was as flat as any vinyl record in her collection.
And Doc Martens. No matter how many times I told her Docs didn’t mean what she thought they meant anymore, she kept wearing them.
I had a bad habit of going after girls in their twenties instead of women my own age.
Women my own age thought I was too old to pursue my dream of being a full-time musician. My ex certainly had.
Stephani, a young guitar player from a band that had recently broken up, posted a comment saying, “can’t wait to jam with y’all next week.
” She followed it with a kissy face emoji, and without thinking, I threw my phone across the hall.
It clattered against the door and ricocheted into the library where it came to a stop on the ugly green carpet.
“Fuck it,” I said out loud. “You’re not going to replace me, Stephani With One E. I’m a better player than you’ll ever be. Brooke likes me, not you. Plus, you’re too young, and your bangs are stupid.”
I flipped on the light switch, bringing scattered light to the foyer. Then I picked up my wayward socks and threw them in my suitcase haphazardly, fixing the zipper and extending the handle.
Real adult behavior, Gibson, well done.
“What else?”
There was a weird shadow on the floor from the missing light in the bottom row of the chandelier. I focused on it, directing all my rage onto the little square patch of darkness.
“I can fix that,” I said. “Then I’ll sell this dump and get the fuck out of here... And I’m still talking to myself.”
The hallway closet was home to several spiders that scurried away when I opened the door.
Tugging on the lightbulb chain, I half-expected to be electrocuted.
But, miraculously, the light turned on without killing me.
I moved aside dusty boxes and eventually found one with chandelier-specific bulbs.
There wasn’t a date on the box, but the typography was dated and it was covered in dust. I took it into the foyer anyway, along with an old metal stepladder.
The stepladder wasn’t tall enough to reach even the bottom row of the chandelier, so I dragged the wingback chair from the reading alcove over and stacked the ladder on top of it.
“Fix your shit, Gibson,” I said, then climbed the improvised ladder.
I reached for the darkened lightbulb, trying to bring some sense of order into the chaos of my life, and immediately lost my balance.
My heart shot from my rib cage to my throat. I realized, with a clarity I’d felt once before, that I was going to die. The stone tile would crush my skull, and that would be that. Completely alone, in a house on an island where no one knew me, I would die.
A cold blast of air whooshed in from the sitting room.
The nearest couch, the uncovered pink suede one, flew across the room.
Its wooden legs scraped loudly across the floor.
The pink sofa slammed into the wingback chair I’d dragged under the chandelier, and I slammed into the pink sofa.
The impact knocked the air from my lungs, and my head hit the armrest, hard.
A searing pain—then darkness.