Page 2 of The Mare Rider of Cornwall Cove
I paused while sliding my foot into my fuzzy slipper. My sight moved to Phil staring out into the darkness.
“I thought he was a senator,” I remarked and got a dull look from my boyfriend. “Your father. Didn’t you say he was a senator?”
Phil blinked in confusion. I know he’s a big footballer, and with that comes a certain stereotype, but Phil was not dumb. He was quite smart when it came to certain things. He knew cameras and had a real eye for what people liked to see. His test scores were not much lower than mine in certain subjects. To be fair, the only reasonIknew about the differences between the House and the Senate was because Grandpa made sureI knew as much about the country he had immigrated to as he had to learn to become a citizen. It was a solid bet that if you surveyed the American-born students—aside from me, who had Grandpa—on the Liverswell campus about the three branches of American government, you’d get blank stares or lots of BS replies. No shade on the students who were lax in that knowledge. American history classes in the lower grades were pretty minimal and damn boring if not taught with passion. Add in the cuts to budgets and teachers leaving the profession, and it was no wonder kids weren’t learning the basics. “You said they had congressional things to do.”
“Oh, that’s…yeah, same thing, right?” he said, then ducked his head in that sheepish way of his that made me want to do just as Reggie had suggested.
“Sure, well, yeah, close,” I replied and let it drop. It was easy to mix up things when you were half asleep. “I’m sorry they haven’t reached out, but you have us.” I waved a hand to indicate my little family pod and motioned right through Reggie. A flash of a game room packed full with women in late 1700s gowns with stays and men in powdered wigs appeared before my eyes. There was a horse sitting at a card table trying to move a small blue peg from one spot to another on a cribbage board with his big horse teeth.
“Oh gads, donotdo that!” Reggie squawked and flew to the other side of the room as I scrubbed at my eyes with the tips of my fingers. “Do watch where you are flailing about, Archimedes. You know how distressful that is! I need tea.”
With that, he moved through the wall. I lowered my hands from my face. Phil stood looking at me, his expression that of a man who had just seen his dog get run over.
“If you want, I’d love to have you join me,” he said softly. I glanced around the small room, certain that he had suddenly gained the powers of the seeing eye I had inherited. When I sawnothing of a supernatural nature, I looked back at my boyfriend. “If you want. We can go slow. I kind of don’t want to run alone today.”
Oh man. My heart snapped in half. The poor guy. I’d suspected his family had turned from him when it became public that Phil and I were an item. I’d not gone looking for any kind of reaction from his father, obviously, and none had ever crossed any of my social media feeds, but I could assume that a powerful man such as a senator would not be thrilled to have his son dating an Asian-male-nobody who talked to spirits as a side gig.
“Me?” I tapped my sternum. “You wantmeto run with you?” He nodded. I tried my best to come up with any reason not to run ten thousand miles on Christmas morn with my bae and came up with nothing. Not one good reason. There were about a dozen bad ones from being lazy to hating to run to being lazy. Yeah, all terrible. “Hey, that sounds great!” I lied.
His downcast expression disappeared. With a hoot, he raced over to me, kissed me hard on the mouth, and then scurried around to find a pair of sneakers for me. Once I was laced up, we crept through the apartment, catching the soft yellow glow of Reggie placing the teakettle on the stove. The ghost gave me a sideways glance. I pointed to my running shoes, a total misnomer for the sneakers on my feet, as I never ran unless I was late to class, a bully was chasing me, or an UIA, unfriendly interactive apparition, was trying to suck my soul out through one of my orifices. Reggie gaped. Phil tugged me down the stairs, taking care to avoid the squeaky ones so as not to wake Grandpa and Monique too early. Probably they were already up. Old people required hardly any sleep, it seemed. What they were doing awake and silent, I didn’t want to think about. Kind of like the horse at the soiree, some things were best not being dwelled on.
“Okay, so first we stretch,” Phil announced once we were in the bookstore. I yearned for some tea. “Put your heel up on the counter to stretch your hamstrings. Here, no, that’s not…let me help.”
After a few attempts and a goodly amount of whimpering on my part, we got one and a half hamstrings stretched. Phil, who was now bouncing about like a Labrador about to head to the nearest pond, did his best to bend me into pretzels. Once I was loose, he and I set off, the sidewalks bare and salted, a light mist in the frigid air that froze my nose hairs instantly. He jogged in place, mist puffing in front of him with every exhalation.
“So, we’ll head up the street, through the cemetery, and then take the back roads out into the suburbs before we turn and come back. The campus coffee shop opens at seven, so we can stop and get some tea.”
“It’s Christmas,” I reminded him.
“Oh shit, yeah. Never mind. We’ll just skip coffee and crullers and come home for tea and breakfast. And presents!” He stole a kiss and then jogged off, nearly dashing right through Eloise, the young teen specter who was good friends with Reggie, and Caleb, the milkman—two resident ghosts locked on this street for eternity. Many souls that were accidentally killed, like Caleb, killed by a horse’s hoof to the skull, or Eloise, hit by a drunk driver, or murdered, like our own Reggie, were trapped on this plane. Eloise was a sad spirit. Dressed in a Pink Floyd tee and bell-bottom jeans with a Farrah Fawcett flip, her broken neck let her head fall to one side. It was kind of distressing to see, but I’d grown used to it. When you speak to the dead, you see all kinds of gruesome wraiths. People died in some really horrible ways.
Eloise moved back in a hurry, giving Phil the finger as she melted halfway into the brick front of our neighbor’s home. Main Street in Liverswell was an odd combination of row homes and stores, many like ours, which was both a shop and our livingarea. Drove the zoning board crazy, I imagined, but many of the buildings dated back to Revolutionary War times, so they were left as they had been back in Reggie’s day.
The home beside ours was currently owned by a family with dogs, kids, and two poltergeists. The Tewberry twins respectfully. Both died at twelve in a house fire at the turn of the last century. Both were more than a little mischievous. They tended to dabble in dark things that made me edgy. I’d yet to visit the Connors and their sons to spread mugwort and wormwood in the attic. Maybe I could do that today. Take over a platter of cookies and sprinkle herbs about that would keep the twins in the attic for a month or two.
“Morning, Eloise,” I said and got an odd look. “Yeah, I know. It’s stupid early. Phil was alone, and it’s Christmas…” She pouted even more deeply. “Oh hey, no, I’m sorry. Why don’t you come visit the shop later today? Reggie has something fun planned for you and Caleb.”
That seemed to perk her up. A small smile tugged at her crooked mouth. She gave me the okay sign before she disapparated entirely into the wall. Hopefully she didn’t extend the invitation to the Tewberry twins…
“Hey, are you coming or what?!” Phil yelled from the corner. I waved, heard a mewl, and looked down at my feet to see that Sir Thomas, the spectral familiar of a long-dead healer, gave me a leg rub and then trotted off to join Phil. As a familiar, the tuxedo cat could roam as he wished. Resigning myself, I took a deep breath of cold air, wiped the steam that my exhale produced from my glasses, and then set off at a moderate pace. I jogged past windows lined with blinking lights, my mood lifting a bit as I neared Phil on the corner. “Nice form, baby. Now let’s see how fast we can crank out our five miles.”
I tripped over my own feet.
Five miles?!
***
The ghostly cat trotted ahead of me, black tail in the air. The things a man did for love.
I made it as far as the gates of the Liverswell Cemetery before my legs gave out. I lurched forward to grab at the heavy wrought iron gates that stood open for visitors and threaded my arms through to remain upright. Sir Thomas rounded a corner and disappeared behind a snow-laden rhododendron. The green leaves were curled and droopy, but they clung to the bush despite the cold and wet snow. My thighs were on fire. My lungs were unable to suck in enough air.
“I’m coming to join you, my friends,” I wheezed as my knees threatened to buckle. Sweat ran into my eyes. Sweat. My glasses were dotted with perspiration. Phil appeared at my side, jogging in place, his sweet blue eyes filled with concern. How lovely. I’d get to look at his handsome face as I took my last earthly breaths.
“Hey, you okay?” he asked, thick clouds of steam carrying his words skyward before disappearing.
“Did we do the five miles yet?” I pleadingly asked even though I knew we had not.
“Well, uhm,” he continued running in place, the showoff, and lifted his left arm to check his battered fitness tracker. That he could even read it was a Christmas miracle, given the plastic cover was cracked. “Good news! We did a mile. Almost.”
