Lucas held up a hand. “We don’t know anything, Mr. Calhoun. In the process of learning about the home’s history, we uncovered Rosie’s story and are simply trying to gather as many facts as we can.”
Mitch looked to me, as though waiting for me to confirm. Before I could agree with Lucas, Mitch narrowed his eyes. He snapped his fingers. “Wait a second! I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.” He crossed the room and swiped a newspaper from the end table beside one of the oversize couches. “This is you, right?”
He handed me the paper and I immediately recoiled as though it were a rattlesnake.
Sure enough, right on the front page, a copy of the black and white head-shot I’d put on my business cards stared back at me, and beside it, in larger-than-life bold print, was the morning’s headline:
Do You Believe in Ghosts? Local Florist Claims a Special Link to the Spirit World.
Chapter 17
“What on earth is this garbage?” I demanded, shooting to my feet.
Lucas took the thin paper from my hands. “The Harbor Hubbub? This looks like it was run off someone’s home printer,” he snorted. “Man, this place really is Mayberry, huh?”
I scowled at him and swiped the paper back. “Where did you get this?” I asked Mitch.
“A friend of mine lives over in Beechwood. He says they have the best crossword puzzles and passes one along whenever we have breakfast meetings.” Mitch glanced at the paper. “I didn’t read much of the article, but that’s quite a headline. I probably should have.”
I tracked back to the couch and snapped up my purse. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Calhoun. You don’t mind if I keep this, do you?”
“Not at all. I’ve never told Carl, but I actually despise crossword puzzles.”
Lucas followed my lead and stood. “Thanks for answering our questions.”
“Sure.” Mitch led the way back through the house, though on the second trip, I was too distracted to pay much attention to the ornate knick-knacks or the sweeping views from the row of picture windows that made up most of one living room wall. He paused at the front door and looked back at me. “I’ve got to ask. Is it true? The article? You’re some kind of ghost whisperer?”
I curled up the thin paper into a tight roll. “Not that I expect you—or anyone else who sees this—to believe me, but yes, actually.”
To my surprise, Mitch’s expression didn’t change. He considered me carefully and then gave a slight nod. “Rosie was an amazing woman. I sometimes wonder what might have happened if she’d listened to me and broken things off with Calvin. Especially now, considering what you’ve said.” He dropped his gaze to the ground for a beat. “Wherever she is now, I hope she finds peace.”
He pulled open the front door and ushered us outside. “Good luck, Ms. Sanderson. Mr. Greene.”
“Can you believe this?” I hissed, unrolling the paper again as soon as the door was closed.
Lucas reached for my elbow and steered me down the front walk. “Come on. Don’t get so worked up about it.”
“That’s easy for you to say! You’re not the one slapped across the front page of a newspaper!”
“Judging by the homespun quality of that thing, I doubt the readership extends into the double digits. I think you’re safe, Scarlet.”
I scowled at the paper and then bundled it back up again. Even if he was right, it still felt violating. The byline was attributed to a woman named Candy Shepherd. As far as I knew, I’d never met her before. Where did she even get the story? My mind reeled through the possibilities as we headed back down the long driveway toward Lucas’s truck.
We were halfway to the street when Lucas’s phone rang. He pulled the phone from his front pocket and grimaced at the screen. “It’s the studio. I’ve got to take this. Here.” He tossed me the keys to the truck. “I’ll be right there.”
I went ahead, peeking back once to see that he was still on the phone. I let myself into the truck and unfolded the pitiful excuse of a newspaper. The article took up less than a full page and was riddled with factual errors. By the time Lucas joined me, my mouth was hanging open.
“You should see this! They actually claim that I’m cozying up to you to gain access to the studio so I can pitch them on some kind of ghost hunter TV show! Can you even believe that?”
Lucas grinned. “Well, if that was your plan, congratulations, because it worked!”
“What?”
He held up his phone. “That was Brooklyn Skye. She’s the head producer on the show. Sheila Carter got a hold of this article and pitched the idea of having you do a special segment for the show. According to her, if the ratings are good enough, they could see you having your own show.”
I sputtered for words. For air.
“I gotta say, I’m a little hurt if you were only hanging out with me to get a studio contact.”
“I—I wasn’t—this isn’t—”
Lucas chuckled and placed a hand on my shoulder. “I’m teasing, Scarlet. Listen, Brooklyn wanted your number so I passed it along. I hope that’s all right. You don’t have to take the deal, but hey, maybe hear them out.”
My mouth slammed shut and stayed that way until we got back to Lily Pond.
Lucas left the truck idling outside the darkened shop. “You want to go get something for dinner?”
“No, thanks.” I shook my head and opened my door. “I’m getting a headache. I think I’m going to call it an early night.”
“Scarlet, are you mad about the TV show deal?”
I tried to smile but it felt strangled. “No, no. I’m fine. Just need some sleep.”
I shut the passenger door before he could argue the point.
He looked confused as he pulled away, but offered a quick wave as he drove off into the night.
Guilt tugged at me. I knew he was only trying to help, but I was on serious sensory overload and needed time to process the events of the last couple of hours. With a heavy sigh, I let myself into the shop and hurried to the back wall to flip the light switch that illuminated the studio space.
“Gwen!” I turned in a circle, searching for any sign of her. Silence. I raised my voice and tried again. “Gwen? Are you here?”
“You truly do know how to wake the dead, don’t you, Scar?” Flapjack asked, lifting his head from his paws. He’d been asleep by the cash register.
“Trust me, it’s for good reason. Have you seen her?”
Hayward and Gwen floated down through the ceiling a moment later, wearing matching grins. Their whispered conversation fell aside when they spotted me.
“You’re back early,” Gwen said, disappointment tinging her voice.
I slammed the paper down on the counter with a thwap that echoed through the space.
Hayward and Gwen jumped. Flapjack yowled and then glowered in my general direction.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “Did any of you see this? If Flapjack had a litter box, I’d use it to paper the bottom!”
Gwen swooped closer and peered at the paper over my shoulder. She was close enough that the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. With an awkward shuffle, I moved out of her range. There were few things less pleasant than direct contact with a ghost.
“Oh, hardly anyone pays attention to this rag,” Gwen said. “You notice no one pays for it.”
I glanced down at the front of the paper and noted that there wasn’t a price even listed. “Who is this Candy woman?”
“She’s a librarian. That’s where they print this thing, you know. It’s always the same stuff. Announcing the winners of the elementary school spelling bee or advertising the church bake sale. Every once in a while, there’s something good, like a passive-aggressive opinion piece on trash-can courtesy.”
“Trash-can courtesy?” Flapjack repeated. “Man, days like this, I’m glad to be dead.”
I didn’t bother pointing out that even in life, trash cans wouldn’t have been a particularly taxing issue for him.
“I swear, Scarlet, no on
e reads this thing,” Gwen said.
“I’m sure that some people read it,” I said. “And all it’s going to take are a few people who then spread the word to a few more people, and then the whole town is looking at me like I’m either a freak or a charlatan. Oh, and every ghost in a hundred-mile radius will show up at the door, too.”
Flapjack yawned and sprawled out across the floor. “How much longer are you planning to rant and rave? I was planning on taking a nap.”
“Really? That’s the big concern here?” I frowned at him. “I’m being painted as some kind of fame-hungry freak show and that’s what you’re worried about?”
He blinked slowly and then rolled away. Compassion wasn’t his strong suit.
“I promise, Scarlet—it will blow over,” Gwen said.
“Lucas just got a call from some studio person right before he brought me home. They want to talk about putting me on TV. Does that seem like the kind of thing that’s just going to go away?”
“A television show?” Hayward perked up. “Lady Scarlet, that’s wonderful!”
I arched a brow in his direction. “Is it?”
Gwen shrugged. “I think it sounds fun.”
I rubbed my temples. My pretend headache was becoming all too real. “The entire reason I decided to settle down in one place was to really try to build a semi-normal life. How am I supposed to do that now? Beechwood isn’t big enough that I can just pretend this will go away. Everywhere I go, people will be whispering about me.” I moved toward the door to the stairwell, shutting the lights off on the way. “I’m ready to phone this whole thing in. Chalk it up as a brutal—not to mention expensive—learning experience, and hit the road again.”
The rest of the night was melancholy, and the constant downpour outside the windows of my apartment just added to the mood. Hayward, Flapjack, and Gwen had all taken turns trying to cheer me up, but after a few hours of coddling and nonsense suggestions like, “put on some music and have a dance party” (Gwen) and “eat a triple-decker tuna fish sandwich” (Flapjack), I’d managed to scare them all away with an angry outburst.
Not one of my prouder moments, but it had done the trick. All three of them had gone out for a walk—ghosts have it easy, being waterproof and all that—leaving the apartment quiet.
Too quiet.
My thoughts drifted all over the place as I aimlessly wandered the apartment. At some point, I decided that if all I was going to do was pace, I might as well run the vacuum cleaner through the place, so I did that, the noise and rattling of the old machine taking up all the room in my head for a few minutes. Once I stashed it away in the hall closet, I got out the cleaning caddy and went to work scrubbing the kitchen counters. After so many years spent living in hotels and hostels, it was nice to use some elbow grease to clean my own place.
Unfortunately, my thoughts continued to churn even as I scrubbed and polished every surface of my home. Instead of providing an outlet or release, it seemed that the harder I tried to banish the angst-riddled thoughts, the more they consumed my attention.
From where I was standing, it looked as though I’d wandered in a giant circle. Everyone was telling me half-truths, maybe even some complete lies, and none of the pieces made sense anymore. The one story that bothered me the most was Rosie’s. I still had no idea where things had gone wrong between her and Calvin. She was convinced he’d been the one to kill her, but hadn’t been able to provide a motive. She said herself that she thought everything was fine between them until she’d walked in on him and Wendy. But if she really thought everything was fine, why would she have made the leap from seeing her best friend and fiancé together to assuming they were having an affair?
Then again, she said she hadn’t been feeling well, and Calvin supported that claim. She must have been confused. Did that mean that she could have been confused about what actually happened and had been going off her own wrong assumptions all this time?
When I finally stopped and put away all the cleaning supplies and went off to bed, my mind was made up.
I may as well have stayed up, because sleep was elusive. At first the bedroom was too warm, so I threw off the covers, marched down the hall, and turned off the furnace. I burrowed back under the covers, but within minutes, my teeth were chattering. With a huff, I went back and cranked the furnace up again. I tossed and turned, my body and mind restless and churning.
Finally, I slipped into darkness only to have it ripped away all too soon by the loud chirping sound of my cell phone’s ring tone. I’d forgotten to set it on night mode before crashing into bed.
With one flailing hand, I retrieved the phone, answered the call, and smashed it against the side of my face. “Hello?”
“Scarlet? Hey, wake up. I need your help.”
“Lucas?” I wiped a hand over my face. What time was it? Peeling my eyes open, I glanced over at the clock beside the bed. The digital numbers glowed a soft lavender color: 2:30 a.m.
I groaned. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s been another attack.”
Chapter 18
When I arrived, the Lilac House was illuminated with red and blue flashes from the line of emergency vehicles at the curb. I parked on the opposite side of the street and reached the beginning of the driveway just as two paramedics emerged from the house carrying a stretcher. What on earth had happened? Lucas’s call had been brief and skimpy on details.
Across the yard near the front porch, Lucas stood in the thick of it. He was a beacon in the middle of the chaos, at least a head taller than the two offers that flanked him. One of his associates, Roy, was at his left, looking like he was waiting for Lucas to send him into action. He glanced up and met my eyes, then gestured for me and I started forward.
The ambulance doors swung open and caught my attention. The paramedics were loading the stretcher into the back and my heart lurched. Calvin’s face was ashen, nearly matching the color of the crisp white linens. My heart stopped for a full beat, until I realized he was moving. I tore my eyes off of him and raced over to Lucas. The officers dispersed at my arrival, leaving Lucas and me alone in the swirling madness. “What happened?” I sputtered, still trying to take it all in.
“I was in the van, taking the night shift,” Lucas started, placing his hand on my arm and gently guiding me toward the front of the house. “Everything was quiet, and then out of nowhere, I heard a scream. I swear, Scarlet, I’ve scrubbed the footage. No one went into that house.”
I glanced across the yard to where Calvin was being loaded into the ambulance.
“I don’t know how this happened, because the doors were locked,” Lucas continued, his voice tense.
“Did the show change the locks when they took over the house?” I asked.
Lucas paused at the front door, one hand on the knob. He swore under his breath, then rolled his eyes. “Damn. He must have still had a key to the place.”
I shrugged. “He probably kept a spare. The ones the show got at the sale were likely the copies the real estate agent had in order to show the place.”
“The locksmith is coming tomorrow,” Lucas growled. “It’s always the last thing we do.”
The officers I’d seen with Lucas were busy processing the scene, their voices short and clipped as they worked. As we walked by the staircase, I noticed a smear of blood. “Calvin fell down the stairs?” I asked, raising a hand to cover my mouth.
Lucas nodded and quickly steered me out of the main room. When we were alone in the hallway, he lowered his voice. “This was Rosie, right? It has to be!”
“I—I don’t know. Maybe?”
“Scarlet, I need you to find her. It’s time to take the gloves off. She broke her promise to stay away, and she’s gone too far. She needs to go. Now. Before she manages to kill somebody.”
The simmering rage in Lucas’s eyes stole away what little breath I had left. His face was smooth, inscrutable, but just under the surface there was something dark. Dangerous.
I nodded. �
�Okay. Right. Um, once everyone is out of here, I’ll do it. I’ll banish her.”
“Good.” Lucas released his grip on my forearm. “Calvin is being taken to the hospital. He hit his head pretty good. He was unconscious when I found him, so I called 911, then after I made sure he had a strong pulse and wasn’t bleeding badly, I searched the house. No one else was here.”
My stomach flipped inside out.
“I need some air,” I told him. Without waiting, I hurried through the house, ignoring the barked orders of the officers, and let myself out the back door just off the kitchen. I stepped out onto the back porch and gulped in breaths of the chilled night air as fast as I could.
“Rosie, why?” I breathed, scanning the backyard. The security lights were on, illuminating three-quarters of the large lot, but there was no sign of her.
Questions fired off in rapid succession in my mind. What had Calvin been doing at the Lilac House at two in the morning? What had he been looking for? Or was it who? He hadn’t seemed all that open to the possibility that there even was a spirit world, but maybe he’d changed his mind? Or, was he merely there to say a final goodbye to the home that had represented so many of his broken dreams?
I glanced over my shoulder and realized Lucas hadn’t following me out, and a crazy idea popped into my head. I pulled my keys out of my pocket and hurried around the front of the house. No one noticed me as I climbed into the van, started the engine, and peeled out into the night.
Finding Calvin’s hospital room was relatively easy. One little white lie to the nurse and I was in. The nurse told me they were waiting on the results of some kind of scan. At best, he had a nasty concussion and a few broken bones.
I followed the numbers until I found his room. He was awake, staring up at the ceiling, when I entered after a soft warning knock.
He rearranged himself so he could see the doorway, then pushed himself up into a sitting position. “What are you doing here?” he asked, wincing.
The Ghost Hunter Next Door: A Beechwood Harbor Ghost Mystery (Beechwood Harbor Ghost Mysteries Book 1) Page 15
