by Eliza Lainn
Noah sighed. An entirely different kind of weariness set on his shoulders. “Unfortunately, I do. His mother, Margaret, loved kids. She’d come volunteer at the middle school if we ever needed parents for something and were coming up short. I got to know her a bit. And I’ve been to check in on her a few times since Scott died.”
“I didn’t know that.”
Everyone—Noah included—turned to look at Rose.
Her face flamed red. She snatched her pen from off the table and held it poised above her notepad, eyes focused on the paper. “Go on. What else?”
He didn’t start back up right away. For a moment, he just stared at Rose. Then his eyes slid back to the floor and he continued, his voice somehow bleaker than before. “Scott had been hanging out with some friends that night. The rumor was that there was some drinking—probably due to the crowd he was hanging out with.”
“Which was?” I asked.
“Your typical athletic types. Jocks, cheerleaders, that sort. They’d been known to throw parties with alcohol involved before—I’d heard through the teacher grapevine that Miss Harbon had been trying to wrangle in underage drinking for a while.”
“So, he was drunk driving?”
“It’s a rumor, but not one I’ve gone out of my way to confirm or deny. Margaret doesn’t think she was, but whether that’s a grieving mother trying to process…” he shrugged.
“If he were drinking at this get-together he was having with his friends,” Bronte said, “it might explain his coming back to haunt them, right? Blaming them for getting drunk and then having the accident?”
Noah bobbed his head back and forth as he thought about it. “Maybe. But the rumor might have started due to Scott’s reputation before joining the football team. He was a nerd—did the Dungeons and Dragons bit and everything.”
“Dungeons and Dragons?” Oliver asked.
“It’s a role-playing game,” I explained quickly. “Players make characters and then act out scenarios while pretending to be those characters.”
“Oh, like a video game?”
“Very similar,” I nodded, “but it’s done in a group, no electronics. You have one person narrating the adventure while the others respond to the situation the narrator presents. It’s usually just done with a book and some different-sided dice. And it’s generally considered a very nerdy thing to do, but it’s been gaining popularity lately.”
“And nerdy is bad?” Cyril asked.
“Not necessarily. Maybe in high school—you’ve seen us watching Mean Girls, right?”
Oliver groaned. “God, not that pink movie.”
“I don’t think Oliver much likes Mean Girls, Bronte.”
She let out a little squeak of pseudo-indignant surprise.
I laughed. “Yeah, that pink movie. That selfish, clique behavior is found in high schools across America. Probably not to that degree, but something like that.”
Rose tapped her pen against her notepad. “So, we’ve got a nerd-turned-football-jock tragically killed in a car accident. Where drinking might have been involved. And the junior class of the school getting sick shortly thereafter. It’s definitely a connection worth looking in to.”
“Is that what we’re going to focus on?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. Even though Miss Harbon seemed to have done a thorough job looking for other causes, I want to double-check her work. We’ll pull what we did at the Horton and split into two teams: one supernatural, one natural. Sound good?”
When no one disagreed, she bit down on her lip and looked over at me. “Stella, I want you and Noah to take the supernatural angle on this.”
I felt a whiny retort rising up in the back of my throat. Instead of voicing it, I locked my lips down and nodded. She was the boss. And I knew she had to have a good reason.
Didn’t mean this case was going to suck any less.
“You two will be the best at looking at it from the ghost standpoint,” she said, her tone full of apology. “Noah knows the family. You have the ghosts. And both of you are comfortable using your psychic powers. It makes sense. Agreed?”
I nodded. Rose straightened as she looked over at Noah.
His gaze slid up from the ground and locked with hers. For a moment, they just stared at each other.
“God, will they ever stop pining after one another?” Oliver grumbled.
Hearing him, Noah’s eyes slid to the floor as he nodded to Rose’s question.
I rolled my eyes. “Smooth, Oliver. Really nice.”
“What did I say?”
I looked at Noah. “Meet tomorrow morning?”
“Yeah.” He pushed off from the wall he’d been leaning against and slid out the door.
I watched the door shut. Then, grumbling, I shoved the pillow in my lap aside and rose. “You two ghosts better stay in here. I’ll be right back.”
I caught up with Noah on the second landing. He waited for me to fall into step beside him before we continued down the final flight and to the parking lot.
“You’re worried,” he said, stopping at the edge of the parking lot and glancing over at me.
“Can you blame me? We might be going up against a monster here, and quite frankly, your head isn’t in the game.”
“Neither is Rose’s.”
“Yeah, but she’s not the one with the ghost barrier. Plus, she’s looking at the natural angle, where the most dangerous thing they could run into would be, I don’t know, pissed-off teens. I’m more worried about you being on top of this than she is.”
He let out a long sigh. “Fair enough,” he finally mumbled, rubbing at the back of his neck.
“Any way I can help with whatever’s going on between you two?”
He gave me a smirk. “I thought you didn’t want me dating her? I kind of thought you’d be happy about this.”
“You’re both taking a page out of every CW TV show I’ve ever seen and are playing the part of the pining, thwarted lovers to a T. I might not agree with all your viewpoints, but I don’t want to see you suffering either. And I especially don’t want that suffering to hurt my best friend. So how do I fix this?”
He rubbed at his neck again. “I’m not sure you can.”
“Is the problem just the way you interact with ghosts?”
“Just,” he repeated hotly. His eyes flashed down at me. “Stella, I still don’t think forcibly pushing them to the other side is wrong. And she does. And that friction is just making me question if I’m a good fit for Apparition Investigations. And that is just making me wonder if I should leave, because what if we run into a dangerous situation and this argument heats up again and she gets hurt? Because I just don’t think I can leave her to do this alone, without me being there, because the thought of her fighting against ghosts and monsters just makes me physically ill to think about.”
I held up my hands in surrender. “Ok, ok, I get it.”
His eyes flashed again, but almost immediately, they began to cool. His shoulders sagged. “I just don’t want her to get hurt.”
“She’s hurting now.”
“Yeah. Makes me a pretty lousy boyfriend, huh?”
“A little bit, yeah.”
He chuckled at that. Then sighed. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Me neither. But this not doing anything at all business is eating her up. So just think on it. And come up with a plan soon. Please? Or I’ll shout you into next year and then it won’t be a problem anymore.”
He gave me a half-hearted smile. “Deal.”
Chapter Five
Noah picked me up the next morning, bright and early, at eight.
Only horrible people woke up others this early.
“I brought coffee,” he said, holding up the Starbucks cup.
I took it from him and sipped, prepared for a bitter taste. But, surprisingly, it was sweet, with the hint of something I couldn’t quite place.
“And we’re off to a rocky start,” Oliver grumbled, his voice floating from
the back seat. “You do realize she hates coffee, right?”
I took another sip. “This isn’t bad. What’s in here?”
“Caramel.”
“Seriously?”
Noah reached out and readjusted the rearview mirror, directing it, I imagined, to look at Oliver. But when he spoke, it was to me. Though the smugness was probably for Oliver’s benefit. “Yeah, I remembered you don’t like coffee—and Rose mentioning once that you hate it because it’s bitter. But it doesn’t have to be.”
Cyril chuckled. “One point for the living.”
After another, longer sip, I set the cup in the cupholder. “You’re being nicer than usual.”
“Right?” Oliver chimed in grumpily.
Noah shrugged. “I still haven’t thought about what I’m going to do with AI, but if I do decide to leave, I want you there watching Rose’s back. You and that set of pipes you’ve got.”
“I wasn’t planning on leaving.”
“I know. I just…I don’t know. Just let me bribe you with coffee to make myself feel better, ok?”
“Fair enough,” I said, reaching for the cup again. “So does Margaret know that we’re coming?”
“Yeah. I called her last night to let her know I was going to be stopping by. I haven’t told her that we secretly suspected her son is haunting his old junior class, so maybe don’t mention that bit.”
“Hear that?” I called out to the backseat. “No funny business.”
“Against a widow grieving the loss of her only child?” Cyril sounded horrified. “Of course not.”
Oliver, on the other hand, went with the joke. “Shame. And here I was hoping to do her dishes or something while we’re there.”
We pulled up to a house that had seen better days. The front lawn had grown wild, with newspapers lined up in a pile beside the front door. Dead plants with faded, browning leaves lined the front porch. The curtains had been drawn tight. Nothing stirred, nothing moved.
Noah shut off the car. “She’s been finding it difficult to get out of the house lately,” he explained by way of an apology.
“I don’t blame her,” I whispered, tugging off my seatbelt and sliding from the car.
Toeing away some of the old newspapers, Noah pulled open the screen door and rapped his knuckles against the door. We waited a few moments, no calls or scurrying noises coming from inside. He twisted the handle, and when it opened, he pushed in.
“Margaret?” he called out, cautiously putting a foot inside. “Margaret, it’s Noah.”
I looked over his shoulder as best as I could, into the front hallway. The lights were all off, and coupled with the drawn curtains, it cast a darkness over everything inside. There were bags of garbage lined up beside the front door, ready to be taken out. And judging from the flies buzzing around and the putrid scent wafting from them, they’d been there for a while.
A woman trudged into the hallway. She wore a bathrobe over her pajamas, her hair hanging down in messy, uncombed strands. A lit cigarette dangled between her fingers. And she just stared.
“Margaret,” Noah repeated, opening the door wider so that he could step in. “You left your front door unlocked again.”
She shrugged, obviously unconcerned, and retreated out of the long hallway through the same opening she’d come in.
Noah followed, holding the door open for me first.
As I moved after him, I noticed faded squares patches on the hallway’s wallpaper. From where photos had hung. Most of them had been removed, some with massive tears in the wallpaper from when they’d been hurriedly ripped out.
Tears burned at the back of my throat when I realized what those photos had been.
“Poor soul,” Oliver whispered behind me. “Reminds me of Mrs. Rodger.”
“At least Mrs. Rodger had some life in her eyes,” Cyril said.
Margaret retreated to her living room. Old takeout boxes and wrappers had been piled in one corner. There was a blanket and pillow on the sofa, as if she’d been sleeping out here instead of in her room. Empty cigarette boxes littered the coffee table, the room’s smell easily telling me what had happened to their contents. And the TV, while on, had been muted.
She plopped down on the couch, her eyes straying to the TV.
Noah lingered in the space between the hallway and the living room. “How are you doing, Margaret?”
For the first time since I’d seen her, emotion flashed in her features. She snapped her attention to Noah. “How am I doing?” she repeated with a snarl.
He sighed. “Poor choice of words.”
“How would you be doing?” she snapped. “Huh? Your only family? Gone. Your only child? Gone. How do you think I’m doing?”
“Margaret, I—”
“What do you want?” she demanded, dragging on her cigarette.
Noah looked back at me, not sure how to proceed. I stared back at him in wide-eyed terror because I didn’t know how to proceed. How did you ask a grieving mother to give you details about her dead son? How did you do it without being callous and heartless?
“Tell her you want to know about the sound he made when he laughed,” Cyril said.
I jerked, momentarily caught off guard by the voice. They’d been so quiet, I’d forgotten they were there.
“Tell her you want to hear about what Scott’s laugh sounded like,” Cyril pressed.
I glanced at Noah and he shrugged, guiding me forward with a nod. So, I stepped into the room. “Mrs. Epson? I was wondering if you could help me…if you could tell me what it sounded like when Scott laughed?”
Her eyes snapped to mine. “What?” she asked, her voice scratchy like toothpicks.
“Scott’s laugh, Mrs. Epson. What did it sound like?”
She stared at me, her eyes narrowing by the second. As the moments ticked by, I felt I was about to cave. Any moment now, I wouldn’t be able to keep her eye contact. I’d slink back behind Noah.
But then she took a drag of her cigarette. And her voice sounded slightly softer when she spoke. “Like a boom. Thunder. Just as quick and just as sudden. You know when you’re standing outside, and it’s gray and cloudy and you just start to think it might rain…that the sky is perfectly set for it…and then there’s a clap like thunder. He laughed like that.”
“Sounds beautiful,” I whispered.
Distance and memory crept into her eyes. Her entire body relaxed as she sagged back into the sofa. “Yeah,” she whispered, “it was. So perfect. Damn near scared me half the time because it was always when I least expected it and so damn loud. He didn’t do it often. But he could be easily infected by other people laughing. Chasing theirs like thunder chases lightning.”
“Cyril?” Oliver asked gently, no doubt seeing something on his friend’s face that I couldn’t.
It was a moment before he answered. “I’ll be out in the car.”
Noah glanced behind him, then turned and took a few steps toward Mrs. Epson. “Wish I could have heard it.”
She pulled herself from her thoughts. But the sharpness in her glance was gone. After another drag, she breathed, “What do you want, Noah?”
Noah cleared his throat. “I wanted to check on you, Margaret. I visited the high school yesterday. And I’m worried about Scott’s friends.”
I was impressed. None of that was technically a lie.
“His friends? You mean Mel and the boys?”
“Yeah. I’m going to talk to them later, with the guidance counselor.”
Margaret took another drag. “I haven’t given them much thought since…do you think they’re ok?”
“I’m going to find out. Do you remember much about them?”
I glanced over my shoulder, toward the front door. “Excuse me,” I mumbled, retreating softly out of the room.
Chapter Six
Cyril and Oliver’s voices went quiet when I opened the passenger side door and climbed inside. I turned to the backseat. “You two still back there?”
“Yeah,” Oliver
answered.
“Is everything ok?”
“I’m going to go see if Noah needs help,” Oliver said.
“He’s probably fine,” I said, but Oliver didn’t return an answer. “Is he gone?”
“Yes,” Cyril answered heavily. “You should be inside.”