by Amy Sparling
Raine's stereo plays some indie music I've never heard of, but it sets the mood for sleep. Feeling the darkness encapsulating me, I lean back in my seat and close my eyes for a bit.
Raine's hand is holding mine, rubbing his thumb around my palm. "Taylor, wake up."
My eyes fly open. The car is stopped and all I can see around us is the moon casting a glow on water to my right. "Sorry," I say. Raine gets out of his car and I stumble to get out of my side too.
When my eyes adjust, I see that we're in the driveway to a house. A house so big and foreboding that it could only be a mansion. The ocean is to my right, along with a rickety old dock anchored to the land. To the left is absolutely nothing but darkness. I look around us, searching for any signs of artificial light, like maybe from a neighboring house or street but see nothing.
And then I realize Raine is gone.
My shoes crunch across fallen leaves on the gravel driveway, the sound is so loud in the darkness that it's all I can hear. I follow the driveway until I see a dark figure up ahead. "Raine?"
"Yes ma'am." The sound of his voice erases my brief moment of panic. I rush up to him. He's standing near a concrete archway, looking up at the inscription across it. "I can't read this, can you?" he asks.
"It's Italian," I say. He looks at me expectantly. I shrug. "That's all I know."
"Oh," he says, taking my hand. "Let's go."
It is so unbelievably dark out here; I fear I may be going blind. "Why are we leaving your car so far back? It would be easier to drive."
"I could get a flat tire. I don't know what's on this land."
He's made a good point, so I tell myself not to whine anymore. Sure, it's scary out here, but Raine is the master at things like this. And right now, the master is holding my hand so I'm safer here than anywhere else.
"Don't you have a flashlight?" I ask as we near the three story mansion. It's only a half moon tonight, and its glow isn't doing nearly as much as I'd like when approaching a scary house in the middle of nowhere.
A beam of light clicks on at our feet. Raine holds his flashlight almost directly down, barely illuminating more than where we're walking. "Well that helps, a little I guess."
"This place is just crawling with ghosts. I don't want to piss them off or scare them away with light when they're not used to it."
"Right. Okay."
"Do you really not believe? Or is this just some charade?"
"It's not a charade." We stop at the bottom stair of the porch. Raine shines the flashlight around. The porch wraps around the entire house. It's made of concrete with stucco archways around each opening. "You ready?" he asks. At the moment, I'm more scared of being attacked by a rabid wolf than seeing a ghost. "Sure," I say. He switches the flashlight to his left hand. "Want to hold my hand?"
"Does holding your hand guarantee that I won't be sucked into a ghostly netherworld never to be seen again on Earth?"
He holds his flashlight up to his face, casting a frighteningly sexy glow on his chiseled jaw. "No, but it guarantees that I'll be sucked up there with you."
I take his hand and let the butterflies fill my stomach. Together, we step up on the porch and he shines the light ahead of us.
The front door is wide open.
Chapter 20
"Holy crap this is amazing." Raine's no longer flashlight shy as he shines the beam of light from the hardwood floors to the vintage wallpapered walls then to the ceiling and back. The place looks like it's straight out of a Victorian movie, and if it wasn't covered in dust and cobwebs, I'd think we stepped into a time machine that took us straight to the year 1900.
"You've never been here before?" I ask, dropping his hand as I walk to the grand staircase. The right banister is coated in dust; the left one is shiny and smooth. "Not inside," he says, bending down to rub his finger across the floor.
"Wait. You're telling me that the famous Raine Tsunami, who knows everything about Sterling, has never been in this creepy old house?"
He rubs his eyebrow. "The door was always locked. And I got word that the door was open, so…"
"So you figured it wasn't breaking and entering if someone else opened it for you?"
He scoffs. "It's research. Not crime." He joins me by the stairs and puts his hand on the left banister. I wonder if he notices the lack of dust. He closes his eyes for a moment. "Upstairs. Let's go."
Holding the light directly in front of him, he hops up a few stairs. For the first time tonight, I get an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. "You think I could have your hand again?" I ask, my voice shaky. He comes back down and locks his fingers between mine, without even making a sarcastic joke about my weakened bravery. What a gentleman.
As we walk up each creaky stair, Raine's refusal to shine the light anywhere but directly where we're walking grates on my nerves. I'm dying to know what lies at the top of the grand staircase before we actually get up there. After what feels like a hundred steps later, Raine stops. "Do you feel that?"
"Feel what?"
"Close your eyes." He lets go of my hand. I go ahead and close them, but as soon as I do, I am overcome with the sensation of falling. I gasp, flail my arms out and grab onto Raine's jacket. "Yeah, I felt that too," he says. "Weird."
My eyes fling open, adjusting to the bright glow from the flashlight. I let go of Raine. My balance feels fine. "Why is it only when my eyes are closed?"
"I don't know." He shines the flashlight down the hall to our left. "Maybe because we're at the top of the stairs. Let's go."
We go down a narrow hallway that opens to the first floor to our left and has several closed doors to the right. A chill passes through me, whether from a draft or a ghost, I don't know. I mean, it's obviously a draft, but now I'm not so sure. If I were here with anyone else besides Raine, I would have bolted by now. He pulls me along behind him as we reach the end of the hall. An oil painting of a woman hangs on the wall next to me. She's about my age and she has a very disapproving look on her face.
"That's her," Raine says, pushing open the door in front of us.
"Who is she?" I follow him into the room—a bedroom—that has a big bay window overlooking the water. Moonlight lights up the room just enough for me to see a bed, a writing desk and a chair.
"She's the woman who was murdered in here."
I flash him a devilish smile. "Creepy." He swoops the flashlight between our faces and looks me dead in the eyes. "You amaze me."
Oversized butterflies do acrobatics in my stomach. I know how this scene would play out if we were on a reality show. We're already on a beach, in a mansion. All we need is…
I take a step back. "So are we gonna look for ghosts or what?"
Chapter 21
The ghost of the woman in the picture never stops by to say hello. Raine tells me how she was murdered in her bed by her husband, the wealthy Mr. Graves, after he caught her stealing money from his railroad stocks. The bloodstains are still on the bed, though it doesn't look nearly as gruesome since it's over a hundred years old. Gallons of her blood left to soak through the mattress have made the linens rot through in the center of the mattress that's just a rusted metal frame now. The four bedposts seem to be in pretty good shape. Raine almost throws up when I wrap my arm around one.
Legend, and several well-researched books Raine points out, has it that Mr. Graves went insane after he realized what he had done and killed himself. The bank took the house and no one ever did anything with it. Even after all this time, not a single family member, however distant, has ever come forward to claim the property. Mrs. Graves is believed to haunt the train station and also here, at her wicked huge mansion that's so far away from the world that no one could hear you scream. Let alone haunt.
That is until now, with Raine and me. Only we're not hearing or seeing or feeling a damn thing. The salty ocean air wisps across my face, sending goose bumps down my arms. We're sitting on the balcony in Mrs. Grave's room, having found the French doors unlocked after we snooped throu
gh the rest of her room. Research, Raine calls it. We researched through her room.
Raine leans back on his hands and rests his head on my shoulder. Twenty-two agonizingly awkward seconds go by before I let my head fall on top of his. "Thanks for coming," he says.
"Sure thing. You know I love sitting in creepy houses for hours, staring out at the ocean. It's so romantic."
"Yeah, I guess it is."
I sit up straight. "I was just joking." He's staring out at the ocean, but I think I see him nod. "Dude, if you're ever trying to romance a girl, do not bring her here."
He looks at me. "I'm not that stupid."
Ten more awkward seconds go by. I swear it feels like a million.
"How long are we going to wait for Mrs. Graves to show herself, or uh, do whatever ghosts do?" I glance behind us and do a quick scan of the room, but see it exactly how we left it. I imagine the woman in the painting, as a ghost now, hiding in the corner with her arms crossed like a child, refusing to come out and say hi.
"How long do you have?"
"Forever. I don't want to go home and face Mom's wrath."
"What'd you do?"
"Tonight was supposed to be my first night of work at her job, and I ditched out."
Raine bites his lip. "This is my fault."
"No, I didn't want to go." I say, standing up to stretch my legs. "I was planning on being a horrible employee so they'd fire me. But now she'll want me to find another second job, so I guess it is your fault."
"You're too young for two jobs." He stands up too. I walk back inside and let out the breath I'd been holding. "Tell me about it."
"So why are you doing it?"
"Mom wants a bigger apartment." The combination of dark and dust makes it impossible for me to see myself in the round vanity mirror, but I stand in front of it anyway. Raine takes a cloth out of his back pocket and wipes a spot on the glass for me. The items on the vanity were left untouched all of these years. My fingers graze over an old comb, hand mirror and perfume bottle. They are dirtier versions of the things we have in display cases at the museum. "This is fascinating," I say. "I can't believe no one comes here."
Raine slides open the middle drawer and lifts his flashlight to it. Rings, diamond earrings, necklaces and more sparkle like the day they were bought. My hand flies over my mouth as Raine lets out a low whistle. "Take something and put it on," he tells me. "Act like you're going to keep it."
I reach for a ruby bracelet. "No, get something fancier." He takes a gold ring with a rock way to huge to be a real diamond, but probably is, and holds it out to me. "If seeing another girl wear her precious belongings won't make her come out, then she's no longer trapped in this world."
I slide the ring over my index finger and look around the room, half-expecting something spectacular to happen, like fireworks blazing through the room. Of course, that doesn't happen. Raine has a blank look on his face for several seconds. His shoulders fall. I take off the ring and put it on my ring finger. "I think I'll keep this ring forever," I say aloud, letting my voice echo off the walls. "I don't care who used to own it. It's mine now."
Raine smiles, encouraging me to continue. I take haughty steps across the room, careful to avoid the creepy decomposing mattress on the bed, and stop in front of the writing desk. "I bet whoever owned this ring didn't even like it."
Raine puts a finger to his lips, silencing me. He cranes his neck and listens for several moments. I attempt to listen too, but the total silence has me bored way before Raine. The ring sparkles on my finger as I twist my hand back and forth under the moonlight. The rock is about twice the size of the one I pawned and a million times more sparkly. And even better than the ring I pawned, this one is a perfect fit.
"If I was given a ring this beautiful, I don't think I'd mind being murdered in my sleep," I say, breaking the silence. Raine scribbles in a tiny notebook he keeps in his back pocket. "What are you writing?"
"Our findings tonight." He flips the pen upside down and taps it on the notebook. "Which was totally nothing." He slides it back in his pocket. "I'm sorry," I say. "I think I'm bad luck."
He considers this for three awkward seconds. "Maybe."
Chapter 22
"Was your mom pissed?" Raine asks the next morning at the museum. He rips open a bag of skittles.
"Yeah but she told her boss I was sick and rescheduled me for tonight." I hold out my hand and he fills it with the delicious chewy candies.
"That blows. I wanted you to come to my tour tonight." His voice is all sticky from chewing.
"I've already seen it."
"Yeah but every tour is different."
I down the rest of my Skittles and hold out my hand for more. "Doubt it."
"Where exactly are you working tonight? Not many places are open past nine." He pulls the bag away from me. I make a puppy face and he ends up giving me more.
"Twin Peaks."
"The gentleman's club?"
I nod. "Is that what they're calling it these days? A club?"
He switches out the notebook in his back pocket for the bag of Skittles and flips to a page in the back. "I refuse to let you work there."
"Yeah, well I refuse too. But since I'm kind of forced to show up, I'm going to go and then do a horrible job so they fire me." He snorts and writes something in his notebook. I peer over to see what he's writing but he doesn't let me see. He scribbles for a while and then looks up at me. "What if I paid you twenty five percent to be my assistant on the tours?"
"Twenty five percent of what?"
"Whatever I make on each tour." He writes something else before looking up at me. "It would be about two hundred a night."
My mouth falls open. "There's no way you make that much money on each tour." He shrugs. "Fifteen bucks a person."
"What do you do with all of it? Spend it on leather jackets?"
"You know it." He brushes imaginary dirt off his shoulders. "I blow the rest on my car."
Margret comes in from the back room carrying a box. Raine rushes to relieve her of the heavy load. "What's all this?" he asks, placing the box on the counter where we all peer inside it. "It's the new promotions." Margret pushes us away so she can cut open the sides with a pair of scissors.
Raine and I help her open and sort the new brochures, stickers and door hangers that advertise the museum's new summer schedule and activities. Something about brand new office supplies makes me happy, if only for the fact that I'll have new brochures to shuffle to avoid awkward conversations. Raine keeps looking at me as if he wants to talk, but he waits until Margret leaves the room again. "So are you going to break the news to your mom, or just let her find out when you don't show up to work?"
"What news?"
"The news that you have a new job."
"I never agreed to work with you." Every moment I've spent with Raine has been better than the last, but working for him? It sounds like the way to ruin a friendship faster than getting drunk and hooking up on the Jersey shore.
"Well if you'd rather be treated as an object, then go ahead." Something in the look he gives me hurts. It really hurts. I'm used to being called poor and I'm used to being treated like a typical nobody--those things don't hurt me. But Raine makes it sound like I have a choice as to how people treat me.
"I don't," I say in a near whisper. He looks up from the brochure he's reading. "Hmm?"
"I said I don’t want to be treated like an object."
He reaches out to shake my hand and a small piece of that pain in my chest breaks off and disappears.
And I become an assistant.
Anna busts through the door, out of breath and sweaty. Some tourists stare at her like she's lost her mind. "Taylor!" she says, jogging up to the front counter.
"What's wrong with you?" I know she'd kind of a hippie, but right now she's barefoot.
"Oh nothing. I just ran over here as soon as I found out."
"And what discovery are we talking about here?"
"Is it true t
hat you're Raine's assistant?" She bites her lower lip waiting for my answer. Just to screw with her, I grab a dust cloth and randomly dust the mannequins. "Oh come on!" she goes, following me around each marbleized person. "Yes or no?"
"Yes." I polish a man's hand. "It's not that big of a deal."
"Um, it's a huge deal actually." She yanks the cloth away from me in mid-dust and points it at me. "Do you know the last time Raine had an assistant?"
"No." My stomach knots. Raine had another assistant? An old girlfriend, perhaps?
"Try never."
"There's a first time for everything." I head back to the front counter. Margret plays a game of solitaire—not the computer kind, but the real deck of cards kind—next to us. "Margret, back me up, please."
"What is it, dear?" she asks, looking up from her game. She can move the black six on top of the red seven, but she hasn't noticed it yet.
"Anna is making a huge deal out of Raine offering me the assistant job. Tell her it's nothing."
"It is a big deal," she says, finally spotting the black six and moving it over. Anna sticks out her tongue at me.
I cross my arms. "Why is it a big deal?" Margret takes off her reading glasses and folds them in her hands; it's always the signal that she's about to launch into a story about the good ol' days. "Raine's father is the one who made ghost tours famous, you know. He was quite popular for many years. Raine, of course, grew up idolizing Ray for how charismatic and passionate he is about ghosts." Her gaze falls to the floor as she thinks of the past. It gives me chills. "And then Ray suffered the accident and got confined to that wheelchair…we all thought the tours were over for good. But then Raine, I guess he was only thirteen at the time, started passing out flyers for a tour he was going to put on himself. We all went just to humor him, but it turned out that he was quite good, just like his father."