Page 9 of Haunted Ever After

The tour guide, Sophie, followed the tourist’s pointing finger. “I’m not surprised.” Her sigh was theatrical. “Don’t get too close, and whatever you do, don’t go through the front gate. Unless you want a stick to the back of the legs.”

“The house doesn’t look vacant. There are lights on inside.” Another tourist sounded skeptical. “I thought you said no one lives here.”

Cassie looked over her shoulder into the house. She hadn’t turned on any lights upstairs, but the living room and kitchen downstairs were probably lit up like a Christmas tree. Whoops again. Should she keep those lights off on Friday nights? Help Sophie sell the idea of this place being haunted?

Sophie seemed to be able to roll with it. “You’re right. I guess it’s time to revise that part of the story. The Hawkins House was bought a couple years ago and restored. It’s a private residence now.”

But the tourist’s skepticism thickened. “Who’s going to willingly live in a haunted house?”

Cassie couldn’t agree more. The inspection report on this place had plenty to say about the minuscule crack in the foundation and that one loose shingle on the roof. Shouldn’t they have mentioned somewhere in there that the place was haunted?

But Sophie shrugged, then turned back to her group with a sunny smile. “Maybe the new owner’s made a friend!” She sounded entirely too chipper about the prospect. “Now, we’re going to go through downtown, and I’ll tell you about the ghost who haunts this strip of beach. It’s just over near the break in the seawall, near the ice cream shop. Which is different than the ice cream shop by the café that we passed before.”

“How many ice cream shops does this town have?” one of the tourists asked as the group began to move along down the sidewalk.

“Only one open now, but three in total. Well, four if you count the T-shirt shop that has a big cooler in the back. Oh, and the place on the dock where you rent kayaks, they sell ice cream there too…” Sophie’s voice faded as the group made their way down the main drag. Now that it was safe to move, Cassie leaned over the railing, watching the group disappear into the night before heading into her bedroom. She flipped on the light, looking around with new eyes. Had this been C.S. and Sarah Hawkins’s bedroom? Was Sarah’s spirit really still here? And would this house be big enough for the both of them?

Of course, the room looked exactly as it had this morning. The ceiling fan whirred above her, stirring stray pieces of hair around her cheek. Her matching bedroom set—purchased from Rooms To Go not long after college—in all its dated glory, the walls still aggressively beige. The scariest thing in this room was the number of boxes she still had to unpack.

“This would all be very mysterious,” she told her reflection later that night as she applied her bedtime moisturizer, “if ghosts were an actual thing. Which they’re not.”

At two thirty in the morning, Cassie was sound asleep. At two thirty-seven in the morning, three of the magnetic words on her fridge moved an inch and a half to the left.

Four

Nick should never have opened his mouth. He’d just wanted a beer on a Friday afternoon.

But it was too late. Vince turned to look over his shoulder, his hands pausing against the tap. “Wait. You said what?”

“You heard me.” Nick willed Vince to keep going, but his mental mojo was way off. Vince set the glass down on the bar and turned fully away from the tap, and it was all Nick could do to not groan out loud.

“I need to hear it again.” Suppressed laughter made Vince’s voice tremble. “Tell me again how you met the cute new girl who’s moved to town and called her a tourist. To her face.”

“Aren’t you a bartender?” Nick waved a hand toward the sadly neglected beer taps behind the counter. “Bartend, will you?”

“I don’t know…” Despite the doubt in his voice, Vince turned back to the taps, picking up the glass and filling it with lager. “This may become my new bedtime story. You’re gonna need to tell it to me again and again.”

Nick grumbled under his breath. Why had he bothered coming to The Cold Spot after work? He had beer at home. “Fine,” he said. “But in my defense, she’s from Orlando. She’s not used to places like this.”

But Vince was merciless, even as he passed Nick his beer. “Doesn’t matter. You fucked up, kid.” His wide grin took the sting out of his words, making him look like that cool uncle at the family reunion.

The cool uncle that was into hair metal, that is. The man’s look hadn’t changed since the early nineties: long curly mullet that had gone more and more gray over the years, a faded Metallica T-shirt with jeans and battered motorcycle boots. His face was lined by years of bad decisions, and his eyes even bore phantom traces of eyeliner.

“She is cute, though, right?” Vince raised one arched eyebrow.

Nick sipped his beer and pretended to consider. Pretended that Cassie’s face wasn’t already burned into his memory. Pretended that, while he was usually annoyed as hell when someone planted their ass in his café and mooched his outlets and Wi-Fi, he hadn’t minded so much when it was Cassie. She could plant her ass in his café anytime she liked.

“Yeah,” he finally said. “She’s cute.” He tried to sound as blasé as possible, even throwing in a one-shouldered shrug to emphasize just how much he wasn’t still thinking about that girl he’d just met.

But Vince wasn’t falling for it. That was the problem with this town. Everyone knew you too well. Especially Vince, who’d been running The Cold Spot—a nondescript gray brick building on the road leading out of town—since before Nick was old enough to (legally) drink. Vince knew what kind of beer Nick liked: cold and crisp lager, not those floral-scented IPAs, not thick dark beers that were practically chewable. The upside was that Nick could walk in and say “Gimme a beer” like he was a guy in a movie, and Vince would know exactly what he meant.

But the downside was that Vince could tell, just from the tone of Nick’s voice, that Cassie had made an impression. And Vince was just warming up.

“She could be good for you, you know.” Vince leaned his elbows on the bar, settling in for conversation. Nick took another sip of his lager, wishing that someone—anyone—would come in. Anything to make Vince go away. “You need to get out more.”

“What?” Nick blinked. “In what free time? I’m running a business. You know as well as I do how much time that takes.” But Vince had a point. Sure, both of them ran similar businesses, but Vince had time for a side gig at The Haunt, performing stripped-down versions of his old hits alongside Jimmy Buffett covers that resulted in some deeply weird acoustic sets. And besides that, he still had time to hang out at Jo’s consignment shop, helping her appraise any musical instruments that came through.

Speaking of which…“Oh, did Jo talk to you? She got some new guitars in that she wants you to take a look at.” There. Subject change away from his love life. Perfect.

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