Chapter 17
The next morning, I woke up in the third-floor bedroom to the sound of construction from next door, feeling like a different human being.
I was a little hungover. But I hadn’t realized there was a hollowness in my chest until it wasn’t there.
I woke up in the room that had belonged to my great-aunt and I didn’t feel like a stranger anymore.
I padded downstairs before Yasmin and Nate woke up and quietly made myself a coffee and watched for any signs of Annabelle.
Apparently, my ghost was sleeping in. I poured the fragrant, dark liquid into a travel cup that had a pair of baby goats on it along with the words “Here’s looking at you, kid!
” Then I put my guitar on my back and slipped out the front door.
There was no reason I would have needed to explain my plans to my cousin, her boyfriend, or the ghost who haunted my house, but I was glad they weren’t around regardless.
The first ferry off Mackinac Island was in the early morning. I was first in line.
Sea spray pelted me from the side of the large boat and the wind stung my eyes, but I turned my face up to greet the rising sun.
I didn’t hate any of this. By the time we arrived back on the lower hand of Michigan, I was sweating through my bra, but I hopped off the boat and stretched my legs, grateful for the fresh air and change in scenery.
I checked my phone directions and pointed my feet toward the public library. It was a twenty-minute walk on roads that were built for cars, not horses. The sounds of real life were jarring after a week spent on the horse poop-filled bicycle graveyard that was Mackinac Island.
If I could prove that Annabelle was a real person—if she actually lived and died on the island like she said she did, then I would go through with Yasmin’s stupid spell and see if I could bring her back.
What did I have to lose? Dignity? Time? Seymour Anderson could wait another day for his high-value land with my creaky old house on it.
I’d been so wrapped up in the stress of it all that I seemed to have forgotten that I was the one with the valuable asset to sell to him—not the other way around.
At the entrance to the public library, I started to lose my nerve.
Was I really about to try to research a ghost?
But then I remembered the vision I’d had the night before.
Somehow, Yasmin had seen into a painful memory of mine and drawn it in her prophetic book.
And somehow, I’d gotten a glimpse of what the house could be—full of life and happiness and music.
Preparing myself to look stupid in front of a librarian, I went inside.
The library looked and smelled exactly like I expected a public library in Michigan to look and smell.
Old, damp books and the smell of the general public.
It didn’t smell all that different from Annabelle’s alcove, actually.
I approached the reference desk, which was staffed by an older Black lady with white hair wearing a purple floral shirt, and asked about the local history archives.
“Do you have an appointment?” she asked.
“Oh, um, no.” I hadn’t even considered the possibility that I would need one, thinking the hardest part about this journey would be summoning the courage to go and not the bureaucracy that might be involved. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to see if I could find someone.”
“Well, I’m not supposed to do this if you don’t have an appointment because it takes me away from the desk.
But, seeing as this is a bustling metropolis full of citizens requesting library materials .
..” She gestured at the stacks, which were completely empty except for a white-haired lady browsing the gardening section and a man napping on a chair with a paperback on his chest. “I think I can pencil you in.”
With a wink, she gestured for me to follow her to the Michigan room of the library, which was filled with local memorabilia and framed photos of the Great Lakes from various times in history.
She told me her name was Linda and directed me to sit at the table in the center of the room. Then she asked, “Who are you looking for?”
“A woman who was on Mackinac Island in the early 1800s.” I set my guitar case down, resting it against the table. “She was British but stayed there after the Americans got it back.”
“Hmmm. Well, that might be going back a bit far, but we can try. Do you know the year she was born? Or died?”
“She died in 1816,” I replied, somehow pulling that piece of Annabelle trivia out of my brain. Then I unlocked my phone and brought up the notes I’d cobbled together on Annabelle. I scrolled past the ones that said things like “great cleavage” and “how can she change her clothes?”
Linda scratched her chin, then pulled a handful of boxes from the wall. She opened one carefully, pulling out a binder. Each page was encased in a sleeve.
“That time period might prove difficult,” she said.
“There’s a project at the university to translate documents from the French colonies around Mackinac, but the French were driven out by the British in the 1780s, so I doubt you’ll have much luck there.
And the earliest photos weren’t quite that early. ”
Together we looked through the files from the transition of Mackinac from white British colonizers to American ones.
I could barely read the faded ink script in the documents, but Linda described the documents to me, pointing out their importance.
She had little reading glasses that she put on the tip of her nose as she worked.
Linda was patient and kind as I asked basic questions about the fort, the geography of the region in general, and the documents we looked at.
After looking at over a hundred pages of property deeds and municipal tax records, I took a break to wipe my eyes. Then I blew out a breath and said, “It’s wild to think about how the island is now when it started like this. I mean this in a nice way, but ... it’s such a weird place.”
She hummed in agreement. “Nice to visit. Full of rich white people and horses, but a nice place to visit.”
“But it’s like ...” I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say.
My first impression of Mackinac was exactly that—gentrification to the max, and horse shit.
But then I saw how much people loved living there and how devoted the community was to staying.
And yet, there were just so many rich tourists and almost everyone who vacationed there was white.
“Visitors pretend their problems don’t exist out there cuz there aren’t any cars and it reminds ’em of what they think the past was like.
” Linda shook her head. “But that’s not what the past was actually like.
In the past, it was hard just to live. Eating fudge, not seeing any poor people, and not driving a car for a week doesn’t make going to Mackinac experiencing the past—just Mackinac.
” She looked down, her glasses slipping almost off her nose.
“And by poor people, I mean brown people.”
“Yeah, it’s . . . strange? Like . . .”
“It costs a million dollars to buy a garden shed on the island. That ain’t strange—that’s America.”
“Two.”
“What?”
“Two million.” Sheepish, I admitted, “I’m out here because I inherited my great-aunt’s house.
The ‘as is’ offer I got for it was two million.
” I grimaced, but Linda threw her head back in laughter.
Her glasses slipped off her nose and fell onto her ample chest, caught by the beaded chain around her neck.
“Good for you, girl,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Good for you.”
Somehow, several hours passed while I looked at municipal drawings, handwritten letters I could barely read, and flowery poems written by people other than Annabelle.
Linda went back to the reference desk when she was satisfied that I could handle the sensitive documents carefully enough not to damage them.
She showed me how to put them back in their special boxes in the right order, then returned to her post at the library’s entrance.
My stomach growled, so I raided the library’s vending machine for lunch. I ate in the hallway while Linda kept a careful eye on me to make sure I didn’t bring crumbs back into the reference room.
After my improvised lunch, I went back to my old records. I had just pulled out a stack of photos that were too late to be related to Annabelle but that I thought were neat when a teenager flounced down on the seat next to me.
“Hi,” she said.
Linda approached the table. “This is my granddaughter, Tanesha.” To the girl, she said, “Behave yourself and get your homework done.” Then she went back to the reference desk, leaving us alone in the stale air of the Michigan room.
“Hi,” I said to the girl.
“What are you looking for?” She pulled out an expandable file and a pencil case with unicorns on it from her backpack.
“A ... friend of mine.” I realized how insane that sounded as I said it, but the girl just started on her homework and didn’t comment. “She lived on Mackinac Island when the British were there a long time ago.”
“Slay.”
I snuck a peek at her notebook, which was full of math equations and doodles. Seeing the innocent rose patterns and fancy S’s made my Grinch heart grow a size.
The girl pointed at my guitar case, which I’d set down next to my chair. “What’s that?”
“My guitar,” I said, realizing I’d started thinking of it as mine instead of Agatha’s. “I’m writing a song and was going to go to a special place to work on it after this.” I sighed. “But this is taking longer than I expected. Do you come here all the time after school?”
“Only when I don’t have plays.” She made a dramatic gesture with her arms to showcase her thespian sensibilities. “Or choir. I’m a singer.”
“Nice.”