Page 23 of Haunted Ever After

“Oh. Oh.” It took a second for Nick to catch up. “Did you get a visit from Mrs. Hawkins?” This was big news; no wonder she was freaked. “What did you see? Did she say anything?”

But Cassie took his eager questions as mockery. “Don’t you dare make fun of this.” Her eyes were pleading.

“I’m not, I swear!” He held up defensive hands. “She’s never made contact with anyone before. And usually it’s, you know, members of the Founding Fifteen that have the strongest ties to the ghosts around here.”

“Then maybe I should do a 23andMe, because she came through loud and clear!” Emotion blazed in Cassie’s eyes, which seemed to burn away her fear and steady her hands. She snatched her keys back, unlocking the door and pushing it open. “There.” She pointed inside, but her feet stayed firmly on this side of the threshold.

Cassie may have been rattled, but this wasn’t Nick’s first rodeo. He knew to take stock of the temperature of the room as he stepped inside. Nothing out of the ordinary; no ice-cold breeze brushed his skin as he took tentative steps into the living room.

“The kitchen,” Cassie called from behind him. He glanced over his shoulder to see that she hadn’t followed him inside; she stayed on the front porch, hopping from one foot to the other while she watched his progress.

“It’s okay,” he said. “There’s nothing here.” Of course, he wasn’t a hundred percent sure of that. Despite having a ghost roommate of his very own, he wasn’t a true expert in this stuff. But he did a slow circle of the kitchen, taking in the unopened Diet Coke bottle in the sink, the neat and wiped-down counters…and the magnetic poetry on the fridge. my house.

Ah. Okay. To be fair, he probably would have spent the night on the porch too.

Cassie picked her way into the house, her big cardigan wrapped around herself like knitted armor. “I got home last night, and everything was cold. And that was just…there. Like a message.”

“The words?” Nick studied the fridge again. That would be an awful lot for a ghost to manifest. “There’s like hundreds of them.”

“Not the magnetic poetry; that’s mine. They help me think, you know? Something to mess with. But…” She swallowed hard and clutched more tightly to her sweater.

Now he was starting to follow. “But you didn’t arrange the words like this?”

She shook her head. “First it was just the word ‘wrong.’ Then I looked away for a second and…” She let out a shaking breath. “And then I decided that I’d go sit out on the porch for a little while. And then it was morning. I didn’t sleep a whole lot.”

“Hmmm. I bet.” He looked back at the fridge. It was an older model, and it seemed awfully loud, humming away here in the kitchen. “Do you hear that?”

“No.” Cassie looked alarmed. “Hear what?”

“You said Buster looked over the electricity, right?” He took a step closer to the fridge, his head tilted, listening intently. Could a kitchen appliance be haunted on its own?

“Yeah, he said it was fine. Which…” She gestured angrily at her laptop, on the table next to where she’d tossed her sweater. It was hooked up to the charging cord, but the other end lay next to the outlet. He bent for it, plugging it in on instinct. He didn’t expect anything to happen; it was like that idle light switch flicking you did when the power was out right after a hurricane.

But the laptop gave a chirp, and Cassie gasped.

“What did you do?” They both looked, dumbfounded, at the green light on her laptop, indicating that it was charging just fine.

“I plugged it in. Just…” He gestured, miming what he’d just done.

“And it’s working?” Cassie stared at her laptop and the outlet as though they’d both betrayed her. There was a low-level buzzing coming from the laptop as it charged. It sounded a lot like the fridge, come to think of it. Maybe there really was something wrong with the electricity in this house. Nick made a mental note to give Buster a call, ask him to come back and make sure he hadn’t missed something.

“Maybe it just needed a man’s touch.” He tipped an imaginary hat. “You’re welcome, ma’am.” It was a stupid joke, but Cassie gave a thin laugh. This was good; if she was laughing at bad jokes that meant she was coming off the ledge.

She looked a lot better, in fact. Nick had been worried when he first saw her this morning, but now the color had come back into her cheeks, and as she sat in one of her kitchen chairs, her cardigan clutched in her lap, she already looked steadier.

“Okay.” Nick took the chair opposite her. “Let’s look on the bright side here.”

“Really? There’s a bright side?” Despite her sarcastic tone, her eyes were pleading.

“You’re inside your house again,” he said. “That was something you couldn’t do last night.”

“Huh.” She looked around the kitchen, as though just realizing she wasn’t still on her front porch. “Good point.”

“Are you still afraid of the place?”

“No…” She sounded surprised. “Everything looks so normal in the daylight.” She leaned an elbow on the table, resting her forehead on her hand. “God, you must think I’m a lunatic. Freaking out like that.”

“Not at all.” He dared to reach out, run a hand up and down her forearm. Her skin was reassuringly warm now. “You’ve had a lot of ghosts thrown at you in the last twelve hours or so. It can be intense.”

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