Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
The second we push open the door to the other building, relief floods my veins.
It’s an atrium, the remains of an office space visible through the windowed dividing wall—a sprawling wooden desk, a toppled over chair, floor-to-ceiling cabinets framing a window that looks over the woods.
The energy here is neutral. Empty. It’s only Charlie and I in here.
Shelves line the walls, mostly empty save for a few stray filing boxes and some papers strewn across the floor.
Long forgotten, but they strike the flame of tiny hope in me.
They didn’t take everything. Maybe they left behind some long-forgotten confession from James Dewhurst. The final piece to this puzzle.
“I’ll check the cabinets if you want to start with these filing boxes,” Charlie says, crossing to the desk.
There’s only half a dozen to search—shouldn’t be hard.
I strip off my backpack and jerk the first one off the shelf.
Even if the paranormal investigation has gone off the rails, a renewed sense of purpose sets my jaw in determination and I feather through brittle, yellowing papers.
Something beyond the veil has been pulling our strings, directing our every move like we’re marionette puppets. There’s a reason it brought us here.
Squinting in the dim room, I rifle through document after abandoned document, until a hazy glow filters through the glass window separating the rooms and I look up.
“You have light in there?” I call, confused.
“Huh?” Charlie pops up, and with him, the source of the light.
I grimace. “Oh my god, what are you wearing?”
He taps the plastic lens of the headlamp strapped to his forehead, tufts of hair scrunched beneath it. “Oh, this? Sorry, did you need it?”
I resist the urge to ball up one of these old documents and throw it at him as a grin spreads. “Absolutely not. Do you know how dorky you look?”
As if he’s really sending the point home, he adjusts his glasses higher on his nose, a slow smirk flashing back at me. “You jealous, Win? Sure looks dark in there.”
All the self control leaves my body. I bunch up the first sheet of paper I touch and hurl it at him. With a tap, it bounces off the glass and falls to the floor as I laugh. “You’re a utilitarian icon.”
He grabs the light and it clicks as he angles it up then back down, like demonstrating its power will sell me on the thing. One eyebrow arches. “What? This isn’t doing it for you?”
Wrinkling my nose, I frown. “Unfortunately, it kind of is.”
He clicks his tongue, then disappears again, voice echoing through the half-empty space as he calls, “Stay on task, Nancy Drew.”
I shake off his obnoxious charm. And I do.
I dig through box after box after box of junk while kneeling on the dusty floor and find not a single trace of James Dewhurst. It’s a lot of administrative bullshit I’d have no idea how to begin to decipher, but don’t even see so much as a name or initials that jump out from the journal entries.
In the other room, it sounds like Charlie’s experiencing much of the same, wrestling open cabinet door after cabinet door and coming up short.
My knuckles whiten around the lip of the last filing box as I curse under my breath.
I knew it was a long shot. I knew that.
And yet it still feels like paramount failure.
“Anything?” I call.
Charlie sighs. “No. Nothing. Just paperwork.”
I swing my legs out from under me and pivot, slumping back against the cool metal shelf.
Charlie rounds the dividing wall, boots crunching on god knows what beneath his feet, and leans in the archway, arms crossed over his chest as he looks at me.
I shirk away from his pity, focusing instead on my peeling cuticles as I pull my knees to my chest.
“I’m sorry, Win—”
“Don’t. It’s not a big deal.”
He says nothing. Simply closes the distance between us and sits down next to me, legs stretched out in front of him. His head rests against one of the vertical boards on the shelf and he lolls it sideways to look at me, still saying nothing as he folds his hands in his lap. Waiting.
I can’t help it. I huff a laugh. “Dammit. You still do this?”
He snorts. “It still works?”
I scrunch my nose, quietly admitting yeah, maybe.
He learned very early on in our relationship—possibly before we even kissed for the first time—that the more he prodded me to talk about something, the more I clammed up.
Instead, he’d get quiet. He wouldn’t nag or pester or even assuage me of my worries.
He’d just . . . wait. Give me the space I needed to figure out what was even going on in my head, while still letting me know he was there when I was ready.
His patience was like my own personal truth serum; I couldn’t help but talk to him when he did it, much to my initial chagrin—and his amusement.
Worked damn near every time. Almost.
He rakes a hand through his tousled hair and murmurs, “You’re like a jar.”
“Oh, great. Very sexy,” I deadpan.
He barks a laugh, bumping his shoulder against mine. “No, I mean . . . sometimes you need to be loosened up before you’ll open.” Quieter, he adds, “But that doesn’t mean you don’t want someone to try.”
An inhale lofts from low in my belly as our eyes connect.
Who on earth handed Charlie the instruction manual for me, and how the hell can I get my hands on it too?
It took months of therapy this past year to finally open my own eyes to the impulse, the desire I have for someone to want to muddle through the hard stuff to dig up all my good.
Someone patient enough, someone who wants me enough, to stay while I work through it. And somehow he’s known this all along.
I’m not good at peeling back the layers. In fact, I hate it. But Charlie never minded the work.
I rest my forehead on my knees, both hiding my face from him and hiding his from me.
“I know it doesn’t make sense but I feel like .
. . like I’m supposed to figure this out.
Finding the journal was amazing, but it feels like such a tease.
” My groan muffles between my legs. “And now I’ve totally derailed this episode for no reason. We found nothing.”
“Can’t you come back another day? Try again?”
“The historical society who owns this place only gave us permission for today. And it’s being torn down next month.”
“Wait—you asked permission?”
His confusion coaxes a laugh from me and I picture Garrett with his crowbar when the guys rolled up to this place. “Crazy, I know.”
Charlie straightens. “You still have today.”
I turn my dejected scowl on him. “C’mon. This job’s a bust.”
The fight’s fizzled out of me in the face of everything that’s gone wrong.
So what, we captured some disjointed footage?
We didn’t make contact with James Dewhurst, not in the way River hoped.
We found the journal, but no confession.
I’m tired, my hip aches, and I’m pissed at how these ghosts keep toying with me.
The last thing I expect Charlie to say is, “It’s not.”
I glare up at a dangling light, its wires clenched between the teeth of the crumbling ceiling. “Charlie—”
“Don’t quit on me now, Win. You still haven’t made a believer out of me. You got one more shot.”
“But your storm—”
He lifts his hand and curls his fingers in a hand-it-over motion. “Give me that ghost walkie talkie.”
I snort. “The Ovilus?”
“Yeah. That. The one that algorithmically spits out words the human brain convinces itself make sense in context.” He winks and my stomach spins—at the wink, not the dig at my tool. Because he’s completely wrong about how it works.
I tip forward on my knees and reach for my backpack, tugging it closer until I can reach in the small pocket and fish it out. Returning to my spot, I hand it to him. “Charm away.”
He cups it in his palm and turns it on.
Charlie looks around the dim room, his headlamp bouncing off the walls like a rave. He blows out a breath and squeezes the back of his neck with his free hand, juicing out the last of his skepticism before he calls out, “Is anyone here?”
I roll my grin between my teeth. Of course I believe in this stuff.
But coming from Charlie? It does seem a little ludicrous.
His nonbeliever-ism seeps even into his tone of voice, whether he notices it or not, and suddenly this feels like a middle school sleepover, where you pull out a Ouija board and fight about who moved the planchette. But he’s trying. I’ll give him that.
He frowns down at the Ovilus, like he’s angrily willing it to “algorithmically spit out words.”
It stays silent.
“I’m Charlie. This is Winona. We just have a few things to say.” He glances at me, like a student looking to the professor to see if they got the answer right. I give a small nod. “We’re . . . uhm, we might have some questions to ask too, I think.”
It isn’t fair how endearing he is, all these years later. How willing he is to entertain something he doesn’t believe in simply to help someone. To help me.
“We’re looking to talk to someone specific here. His name is—”
“JAMES,” the Ovilus reads out.
Blood turns to ice in my veins.
Charlie’s wide eyes meet mine and for the first time today he looks unnerved.
I’m right there with him. My hackles are raised and my senses are dialed up to one-hundred.
It doesn’t matter how many jobs I work like this, how many responses I get, there’s always something about the eerily intelligent replies that make me uneasy.
My former inner skeptic squirming in her boots, maybe.
But my heart’s thumping a victorious rhythm. Maybe this isn’t a bust after all.
Charlie sucks in a breath, his torso lurching back. “It’s—did it just get cold? Did you feel that?”
I ignore him, bracing to listen for the tiniest disturbances, not even daring to breathe. “James? Are you here with us?”
A line carves into Charlie’s cheek as his mouth scrunches to one side, his determined gaze focused on the Ovilus, and I wonder if this is what he looks like when he’s coming up on the chaotic swirl of a tornado.
I stand. “Could you—” A clatter echos from the other side of the diving wall and my stomach lurches as I press my palm to my racing heart. “Come on.” I hold a hand out to Charlie and help him up, dragging him toward the sound.
“The fuck was that,” Charlie murmurs, voice tightened by the chokehold of nerves consuming his twitchy body.
“Ghost,” I hiss, never missing an opportunity to be petty. Then, louder, I ask, “James? Is that you? If that’s you, can you come through this device in Charlie’s hand and say something? I have a few questions for you.”
Thin light streams through the window and slashes over the wide surface of the desk.
Past the glass, the simmering charcoal sky is an annoying reminder we’re on a timeline here.
His storm’s closing in. My ghost’s playing hard to get.
I close my eyes, roll my neck, think of the next prompt to get whoever this is to talk.
I open my mouth, but the Ovilus speaks first.
And all it says is, “ASK.”