Page 30 of Halloween Haunting
“I’m not! I swear it!”
“I’ll check it out,” Bryant mumbled, satisfied but obviously not pleased. He reached for Grace in the same breath, grasping onto her upper arm and pulling her out of the room. Clint’s eyes followed them on the way out, the deep sadness Grace had seen before only growing stronger. Bryant’s hold on her lingered there until they were near the front of the haunted house, and Grace was beginning to smell the cold evening air.
“Are you okay?”
“I am. Just a little shook up is all,” she said, trying to sound more cheery than she felt.
“I’m sure you’re ready to get home,” he said.
Grace looked over at him and smiled. “Like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Still willing to help me find the killer, or was that enough to scare you out of a consultants job?”
She paused as they stepped out into the night, where the long line for the haunted house had only stretched on further. For a moment she thought he was really giving her an out. He was not expecting to hear a yes or a no, but seemed to really only speak out of genuine curiosity. Like he really wanted to check in on her.
Heat swarmed to her cheeks as she held his stare beneath the moonlight. “Not quite,” she murmured, ignoring how a far too pleased smirk was spreading across her face. “Not quite yet.”
And as Grace started to walk back to the police car, she was entirely unaware of how Bryant was smiling in a broadly similar fashion behind her.
15
“Happy Halloween!” shrieked a mechanical witch within Holiday Hollow’s annual downtown festival for the spooky celebration. The entire street had been transformed, just as Grace had expected it to have been. The street itself was closed off to traffic after the trick-or-treating had all finished. As the children were tucked away in their beds, dreaming about all the candy they managed to collect on the frightful day, their parents, and the rest of the adults took to the streets, having their own scary bash on the streets.
Booths with carnival games and traditional festival food were lined up in front of the shop windows. Every costume imaginable could be seen on the street as the people of Holiday Hollow played silly games and ate their fried food. An older woman stirred a huge cast iron pot in the middle of the street, above a makeshift campfire. Light radiated out from the center of her cauldron as she dragged her wooden spoon through it, whispering foreign words and spells into the rolling liquid. The concoction spit out at her before she jerked away, and fireworks sprayed from the cauldron, and ignited across the sky.
Grace plucked another sprig of cotton candy from Caroline’s wide cone, and dropped the stringy sugar in between her lips.The startling sweet treat dissolved on her tongue and the taste of ripe strawberries filled her mouth. It had to have been the best cotton candy she had ever tasted before.
“Good, right?” Caroline nodded when she caught Grace’s pleased expression. “You won’t find cotton candy like this anywhere else.”
“Why? Isn’t it just regular cotton candy?”
Olivia’s head jerked over, her cheeks almost growing as inflamed as the color of her hair. She tsked and shook as though Grace’s words were a personal offense, like she was the inventor of cotton candy itself. “Nothing about this is regular human-made cotton candy. Whatever the humans make tastesnothinglike this one. They’re practically entirely different entities.”
Embarrassed heat swarmed to Grace’s face as she swallowed the rest of her mouthful of cotton candy, because the truth was that she truly didn’t know. One thing she had managed not to do since moving to Holiday Hollow was talk a lot about her childhood. There weren’t too many things she wished to say, and it often led to her landing face first in a pity party that she wanted nothing to do with. Grace never had the chance to go to small-town carnivals, to pop up festivals happening in the middle of nowhere, not as a kid, or as an adult. She didn’t indulge in things like cotton candy with Chuck’s clipped tone and judgemental eye holding onto her the entire time.
Are yousureyou want something like that? He’d ask.Didn’t you have a big breakfast? A big lunch? I know you’re not a pig, Grace, but you’re starting to look like one. You don’t want to look like a pig, do you?
And she’d simply agree with him, refusing whatever food that had been placed in front of her. No matter how starving she was, no matter how much she wanted it just for the sake of wanting something. And that was how life was for decades. Grace wished for it to have all gone away the moment she signed the divorcepapers, but the rules and limitations of her marriage remained in her life like pillars. To remove them would mean destroying the entire foundation – who would she be without it holding her up?
Anna’s hand waved in front of Grace’s face. “Earth to Gracie! Where’d you run off too?”
“S-Sorry,” she sheepishly murmured. “What were we talking about?”
“Olivia had asked if you had cotton candy before.”
Grace bit back her flinch. “Right,” she mouthed. “I…I uhm, don’t really think I have.”
“Really?” Olivia gawked. “Well luckily for you, all you have to base it on is that it’s thebestcotton candy!”
Laughter spread over the group as Grace watched them. Relief washed over her at the realization that she wouldn’t have to explain anything about her bleak childhood, but as the relief lingered, Grace couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to simply share that with someone else, free of judgement. None of them were judging her for never eating something as silly as cotton candy, like many others would’ve quickly done. So why couldn’t she feel comfortable enough to share inner truths about herself, things that people who are closeshouldknow about each other?
Was that what it was like to have friends?
“Oh!” Caroline squealed and pushed the rest of the cotton candy into Olivia’s eager hands. “Look! It’s a dunk tank!”
Before Grace was fully able to gather her courage, Caroline was running free from their group of four. There was a line of carnival games that stretched down the entire street. A ring toss booth had a long line of people waiting to get their shot at the impossible – landing their thing, red ring around the nose of a particularly fluted bottle. The prizes hung up just out of reach, all behind the vendors head, teasing anyone who dared to tryand win them. Grace watched as an older gentleman stepped up for his turn, aiming the ring before letting it fly. It skidded across the lips of the bottles before flying entirely off the back.
Beside that booth was the classic skee-ball, where there were multiple groups of people competing all at once. Whoops and hollers echoed out from that line as the competition unfurled, and the winner threw their hands up in the air as the bell chimed. Adults were finally having the chance to be children again, and Grace was adoring every second of it. The whiplash Holiday Hollow gave her was something she had never experienced before. One day she’s witnessing a murder, and the next she’s having the time of her life at a Halloween festival. Not only that, but she’s a consultant to a murder case. A consultant capable of seeing glimpses into the future and the past.
