Page 40 of A Novel Love Story

Anders.

What was he doing sneaking around?

He hadn’t noticed me up in the window as he dipped beneath the pergola, and disappeared through the narrow vine-covered alleyway beyond. Where was he going? I tried to think whether there was anywhere connected to the Daffodil Inn’s garden, but nothing came to mind.

Curious.

If I had time tomorrow, I’d see what was so important that he’d go visit it in the rain.Then again, I’d almost hit him standing out in that same rain, so maybe wandering around in storms wasn’t such an odd thing for him.

I retreated to bed. The mattress was comfy, if a little old, and the linens smelled like fresh laundry and lemons. The sound of the rain whispered in between the gauzy sunlight-colored curtains, and I sighed back into the feather pillows. This was it. Heaven. I didn’t understand what was holding Junie and Will back from opening the inn—everything seemed perfectly copacetic. Surely the plumbing couldn’t be that—

Then I heard it.

At first, I thought it was just a noise of the house settling. So I rolled over in bed, and admitted to myself that I might actuallymissthe starlings in the eaves …

But then I heard it again.

I sat up.

Was that … no. It couldn’t be.

Rachel Flowers wouldn’t write aghost storyinto her books. It must have been Junie or Will getting up to go rustle around the kitchen.

The sound didn’t …seemlike rustling, though.

Slipping on my still-damp sneakers, I grabbed my phone and turned on the flashlight, and crept out of the room and down the stairs. I wasn’t very sneaky, as it turned out. If my shoes weren’t squeaking, then the floorboards were.

But the sound persisted as I reached the bottom of the stairs and turned my light down the hallway.

The ungodly demonic gurgle was coming from the door beneath the stairs. The door to the basement.

The haunted toilet.

To my utter dismay, the door to the basement was unlocked, so of course down I went into the bowels of the Daffodil.I ran my hand along the side of the wall until I found the light switch at the bottom of the stairs. If it was a ghost, who would it be? Would Rachel Flowers bring back a character she killed off? No, the only people she killed were the ones no onewantedback. Gemma’s ex and Bea’s stepmother, and a host of unnamed parents because Rachel Flowers was nothing if not a sucker for the orphan trope.

Another low, awful gurgle rumbled. It really wasn’t a terrible basement, all things considered. If the toilet wasn’thaunted, I think Junie and Will would’ve turned it into a recreation room. There were a pool table, extra couches covered in plastic, and a door at the back that led out to the private garden with the mermaid fountain.

If this—thisghost—was the reason Junie and Will didn’t have their happily ever after yet, then maybe I’d just … give it a small talk.

I followed the sound to the perpetrator in the far corner, and opened the door. The toilet in question looked like any other basement toilet, though it did have a worrisome ring of rust around the base that looked, a bit too cryptically, like blood. I tried to flush the toilet, and but it just bubbled and burped—like there was something clogging it.

Huh.

I tried it again—but nothing this time.

Then, even worse, there was another strange noise—like a high-pitched screech in the walls, and I jumped back out of the bathroom and swung the door closed.

Okay … maybe it wasn’t going to be so easy. I knew enough about toilets to unclog them, but this? This was above my pay grade.

The pipes above me gave a tremble, and whatever ghost Rachel Flowers had written into this story could stay dead.

I was up and out of the basement by the time the rattling stopped, taking the stairs up to the second floor two at a time. I’d barely gotten my tennis shoes off before I dove into bed again, and pulled the covers high.

Junie was wrong. I was not brave at all.

13

All By My Shelf

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