He stood. “Message received. If you need anything, call me, okay?” He kissed the top of my head, and I all but melted.
“Thank you, I will.”
After he left, Austin came in and detached his video game system from the TV and carted it out of the room.
“Where do you think you’re going to play that?”
“I put your TV in my room for now. I don’t want to bug you.”
I laughed. He’d been trying to get a TV in his room since we moved back into my parents’ house and I’d refused. “This is only temporary kiddo, remember that.”
“I know, Mom.”
I mindlessly watched TV until I drifted off to sleep, which, according to the doctor, would happen often, and was okay. My head needed to heal, and I was okay enough to not worry too much about sleeping, though I did make Austin promise to check on me multiple times, just in case.
He took that to heart, too, but between his gentle wake ups, I did have an interesting dream. I relived my accident, with a slight change.
As the car sped off the road and toward the cliff, I gripped the steering wheel with both hands. We hit something in the brush, something hard that sent the car flying through the air. When it crashed down onto the ground, Del flew through the window and landed partially inside and outside of the car.
I woke up screaming.
Austin rushed to me as I sat on the couch dazed and breathing heavily.
“Momma, are you okay?”
I pressed my hands onto the couch cushion and leaned my head back, my spine stiff as a board. I nodded. “I’m fine, honey. Just had a bad dream, that’s all.”
“Should I…should I call Coach?”
“No sweetie, it’s okay. Don’t bother Jack. It was just a bad dream about the accident.”
He topped off my glass of iced water and handed it to me. “Here. When I have bad dreams, water always helps me.”
I sipped the water. “Thank you, honey. Go back to your game. I’m fine. I promise.”
He eyed me, his left eyebrow furrowed, and his right resting high up on his forehead. “You sure?”
I nodded. “One hundred percent.”
He left, and shortly after, I was back asleep and back in the car again. Only in that dream, Del and Thelma weren’t in the car. It was only me, and I was able to get out and walk toward the cliff. I stared down at the vehicle below.
“It was my fault. I wasn’t paying attention.”
I swiveled to my left and sighed at the young woman standing next to me. “It was an accident, Emily.”
She gave me a semi-smile. “I know. I wasn’t not paying attention on purpose. We were just laughing and having fun, and I was distracted, but still, I could have killed Olivia.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“I tried to find you, but I didn’t.”
“No, you’re wrong. You did.”
“It was too late though.”
She shook her head. “Everything happens for a reason, even if we don’t always understand.”
“Oliva wanted me to find out if you’re okay.”
She smiled. “You can tell her the party in Heaven is much more fun than I expected, and when it’s her time, we’ll see each other again.”
My eyes opened slowly, and I smiled. “Thank you, Emily.”
I noticed the bag of Snickers sat on the coffee table next to the couch. I hadn’t seen it there before. I reached over and took two of the small bites from the bag as a Hallmark movie played on the TV.
I sighed. “I tried, Nellie. I’m sorry I didn’t understand you had someone in the car, too.”
Static clouded the movie from continuing, and the TV suddenly went black. Both Andrew Castleberry and Nellie Clementine appeared in front of it.
Andrew’s energy went in and out, much like the picture on the TV just had, but Nellie’s was strong and bright.
“You helped them both,” she said. “It wasn’t Olivia’s time, but it was time for Emily to be with her ancestors.”
“I wanted to help.”
“And you did, and we thank you,” she said.
I shrugged. “I did my best. If I can do anything else, please let me know.”
“There is one thing,” Nellie said.
Two weeks later as I completed the final stop on the Haunted Historical Society Tour, I smiled up at the library. “Originally, this wasn’t the last top on the tour, but I decided to switch things around. I thought Nellie deserved her story be told in a way that honored her memory.” I moved toward the entrance, and with my back to the building, pointed up toward the window on the second floor, just off to the right of the entrance into our small library.
“As you may know, this used to be the Castleberry Post Office. It’s been the library for several years now, but the Castleberry spirits don’t seem to care when things change. Or maybe they do.” I smiled up toward the window. “Back in the day, there was a young woman named Nellie Clementine. Nellie was a beautiful woman, and the men in town noticed her. How could they not? She was young, pretty, and dressed in beautiful gowns just because she could. But Nellie wasn’t like the other women in town. Nellie was independent. She was strong, and though people may have considered her a spinster at her ripe old age of twenty-four, Nellie had no intention of letting that stop her. She was ahead of her time. She wanted to work, wanted to share the successes of men in town, and she did what she had to do to make that happen.
“Like working at the post office. Nellie didn’t need to work, and her father often gave her a hard time about that. He told her men didn’t want women that wanted to be out of the house. They wanted women who wanted to grow their seeds, he’d told her.” I smiled. “An expression that would be banned in today’s world, don’t you think?”
The members of my audience nodded.
“But Nellie, she didn’t want that for herself. And though the rumor is that she had an affair here with William Thurman, the postmaster, I’m here to tell you she did not.”
A few members of the audience gasped.
“Yes, that’s right. Rumors and legend say Nellie was in love with William Thurman, and that the two had a torrid affair. But after much research, I’ve learned that wasn’t the case.”
I’d worked on my summary for the two weeks since Nellie shared her story with me, and I wanted to get it exactly right, so I paused, and a lot of it was for effect, but some was to gather my thoughts.
“I’ve learned Nellie Clementine didn’t have an affair with the postmaster. Even though that happened often back then, William Thurman wasn’t Nellie Castleberry’s type. She preferred her men closer to her age. And Miss Clementine had a lover, a young man around her age who just happened to be a wealthy member of town from the Castleberry family. Only Robert Castleberry had gone off to Atlanta and no one had heard from him in over a month. The town thought he’d been killed, but Nellie, she didn’t believe that. She waited and hoped, and one morning, while talking to a friend just outside the post office, Mrs. Thurman heard the young woman talking about her true love.
“I’ll wait for him forever,” she’d said. “I don’t need a man to take care of me. I can do that myself, and if we can never be together, I’ll settle for what we do have,” Nellie Clementine told her friend. Mrs. Thurman heard that and assumed Nellie was talking about her husband, though I haven’t quite figured out why. And so she rushed back home, retrieved her shot gun, and came back here to the post office, where she stepped inside and shot poor Nellie Clementine right in the heart. Killed her right there, on the floor of the post office, because she made an incorrect assumption.”
The crowd stared at the door.
“Some say Nellie still haunts the small building, though I don’t know why she would. But they say if you watch the window,” I pointed to the window again. “And watch closely, you can sometimes see her shadow as she roams around upstairs.” I turned around and watched the window with the rest of the group.
“Oh, d
id you see that?” A woman asked. “The curtain, it moved. I saw it move.”
“I saw it, too,” a gentleman said.
“Me, too.”
“I did, too.”
I smiled up at the window where the curtain then shifted completely to the left, and Nellie Clementine appeared in a flash, smiled at me, and then quickly disappeared.
No one in the group said a thing, and I assumed that little visual was just for me. “So, let’s honor Miss Clementine. Let’s let her know she is not forgotten and that we know the truth, because wouldn’t we all want a two hundred plus year old rumor squelched about us, too?”
I smiled. It was nice to know I still had my ability, and that I could do something for someone who could no longer do it on their own.
THE END
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my wonderful editor, Jen, my favorite proofreader, JC Wing, ARC supervisor and assistant, Wilfrieda Schultz for keeping me in line, my wonderful ARC team, and my friends and family who’ve supported me as I’ve traveled along this writing journey. Most of all, thank you to my Hottie Hubby for being my best friend and my biggest fan.
About the Author
Even though I’ve always wanted to be a writer, I also wanted to support myself, so instead of following that dream, I opted to get a job with a regular paycheck.
When my mother died in 2009, and then I lost my father less than a year later, I decided to take the leap. I wanted to find a way to honor my parents, to keep their memories alive, and I did that with my first book, Unfinished Business.
That book went to number one all over and sat happily in the top one hundred books sold in each for over a week with one particular outlet.
I received hundreds of emails from people who felt that little semi-mystery gave them hope, that it made them find comfort when they needed it most, and that they wished they had a friend like Mel.
I was hooked.
I don’t write for the money (though the money is nice sometimes). I write for those emails, and knowing I’m doing what I love, finally. If my writing takes people away from their worries for even a short period of time, I’m a lucky gal.
I hope my parents can read in Heaven.
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Other Books By
Carolyn Ridder Aspenson
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The Pooch Party Cozy Mystery Series
Pooches, Pumpkins, and Poison (coming soon)
Author Shared Series
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