Page 49 of Ghostlighted
Chapter Seventeen
After closing the butler’s pantry door to keep a very disgruntled Gil from following us into the mudroom, I tossed my keys up and grabbed them out of the air. Jingling them in my hand, I grinned at Avi as we crossed to the garage.
I grabbed the doorknob. “Ready?”
“Will you stop that?” he said irritably.
“Stop what?”
“Rattling your keys.”
“Sorry. Nervous energy.” I tucked the key ring in my hoodie pocket, opened the door, and gestured for Avi to precede me. “After you.”
He didn’t move. “Are you sure about this? Remember the laptop bluescreen incident?”
“My car predates modern computer controls, so as long as you don’t get too close to the battery or the ignition, I think we’ll be okay. There’s not much more you could fritz out in there. The radio’s already busted, and so are the dome lights, so… so…”
Avi peered at me. “What? You’ve got that look.”
“What look? I have a look?”
“Don’t hedge. That look you get when you retrieve some obscure fact from your vast store of ghostwriting minutia and make a mental connection. A lightbulb moment.”
I chuckled weakly. “A lightbulb moment. That’s appropriate.”
“Maz. Stop stalling. What just occurred to you?”
“Well.” I flipped the switch to turn on the brushed steel wall sconces that flanked the door. “Lights.”
“Lights?”
“Yes. Lights. I mean, think about it. There are light fixtures all over the house and you’ve never blown them out. The typewriter, too. You used it when it wasn’t turned on.” Heck, it might not have even been plugged in for all I remembered. I’d been a little distracted at the time because my new house had been vandalized and I’d slept through the whole thing.
“So?”
“So I was assuming that because of the laptop bluescreen incident?—”
He winced. “I said I was sorry about that.”
“I know. No worries. It recovered.”
I descended onto the garage’s single concrete step and motioned for him to join me. He hesitated, wringing his hands in his signature anxiety tell, but finally followed. I realized that while we were both nervous about the potential of his visit to the Manor, we saw it from completely different perspectives.
For me, it was like a door opening on new information that could change everything, for Avi and for Ghost. But for Avi, it was the opposite possibility—a door closing in his face, its dead bolts thrown and key lost forever. Proof that he had nothing more to hope for.
“Hey,” I said softly. “You okay?”
Once again, he hesitated. Then he squared his shoulders and nodded, a muscle ticking in his jaw. “I’ll be fine. Go on.”
I waited a moment, but he had the air of determination that I’d come to recognize.
“I think we—or at leastI—made an assumption that might not be correct.”
He canted an eyebrow. “Really, Maz? An assumption? You?”
If Avi could dial up his snark again, I figured we were good to go.
“Shocking, I know. I assumed that your presence interfered with electronics and, by extension, electrical things. But I don’t think that could be correct. The wi-fi router works, and one of the nodes is in the attic. You walk past it, and all the other nodes, all the time. Maybe it has more to do with… I don’t know… circuit interruption? Like there’s a critical instant”—I jerked my chin at the car—“like a point of ignition or the moment the current connects to a lamp or a toaster that youcouldinterrupt if you touched it at the right time.”
