13. Ghoul Intentions
13
Ghoul Intentions
THE CROWS WERE on the roof when I left the bed-and-breakfast that afternoon, and that meant Ben was lurking around somewhere. Though at the moment, either he didn’t want to be perceived, or he was hiding in a bush somewhere crying. I would be, if I found out I was dead and the only person who could see me was a failure of a ghostwriter who gave him a plant instead of, you know, the manuscript that was due.
I should tell him what Rose told me—about his accident. He had disappeared so suddenly this morning, I didn’t get the chance to ask if he remembered how he died or not. Though, the fact that he thought he was still alive, somehow, definitely tilted that answer toward
not.
Google Maps on my phone said that the Main Street Flower Emporium was still open after all these years, so I left for the center of town. My senior year prom date bought a corsage from them that ended up being haunted.
I didn’t want to think about how that happened.
Just like I didn’t want to think about the deep, twisting vein of sadness in my stomach, and how as time passed in Mairmont and Dad wasn’t here, it kept growing. Would it go away someday? Would the dagger in my side slowly shrink to a paper cut? Would the grief ever disappear, or was it stagnant? Would it always be there, just under the surface, lurking in the way only grief could?
I’d always written how grief was hollow. How it was a vast cavern of nothing.
But I was wrong.
Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn’t the absence of everything you lost—it was the culmination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn.
The bell above the door chimed as I came into the flower shop. It smelled like roses and lilies and my grandmother’s potpourri that she always kept in the bathroom. There was an older gentleman behind the counter, fixing up a flower arrangement. An old-timey radio played Elvis in the background.
“Mr. Taylor,” I greeted, wondering if he remembered me from seventh-grade English class.
He looked at me over his thick glasses, and his eyebrows jerked up. “Miss Florence Day! If it isn’t you, I swear.”
I fixed a smile over my mouth. “It’s me. How are you?”
“As good as I can be, as good as I can be,” he replied, nodding. “Been doing up flower arrangements as quick as I can, but it don’t seem quick enough these days. So much going on. Are you here to place an order?”
“I—oh. No. Well . . .” Movement caught the corner of my eye, and I turned to watch Ben not so subtly try to hide behind a bouquet of roses on a table. Because that wasn’t conspicuous at all. I
studiously turned back to the florist, intent on ignoring him. “I was wondering if you knew where I could find a thousand wildflowers?”
“A
thousand
?” Mr. Taylor scratched the side of his head.
“I know. It’s a lot.”
“I don’t really stock
that
many wildflowers, and if I did that’d be . . .” Before I could stop him, he took out a beat-up old calculator and punched in some numbers. “About fifteen hundred dollars.”
I blanched. That was more than my part of the apartment rent for the month, and I most
certainly
didn’t have that kind of money. “Well—um. That’s good to know, I guess.”
“Is this for your father’s funeral? I could pull something together—”
“Oh, no. No, no, no, I couldn’t possibly.”
“Of course you can! Xavier was a good man. I’m sorry. I know it’s tough. How’s Bella hanging in there?”
“Mom’s okay,” I replied, but it struck me that I didn’t really
know
if she was fine or not. I tried calling her after my chat with Rose, but she didn’t pick up. She and Carver might’ve still been in the meeting with the lawyer. I didn’t know how long those things took. “And anyway, I’m just running some errands for her. Trying to make things easier. Dad left a laundry list of things to do for his funeral.”
Mr. Taylor barked a laugh. “Course he did! Mind if I ask what else you need doing?”
So I told him—the flowers, and the murder of crows, and the party decorations, and Elvis—
“You know, there’s an impersonator who always sings up at Bar None. Your dad loved him. He’d stop by every Thursday night before heading to his poker game and make the poor guy sing ‘Return to Sender.’ ”
“Bar None,” I echoed, remembering that Dad
did
love to go have a drink or two before poker nights.
“Yep. Always got them hips goin’ and everything.” He mimicked the impersonator as best he could without throwing out a hip. “Maybe that’s who your dad meant?”
“Maybe,” I said. It was worth a try, at least. I’d go first thing tomorrow. “Thanks—that’s a big help.”
“Always. Lemme know if you change your mind about those wildflowers,” he added as I waved goodbye, and then he gave a start, as if he remembered something. “Oh, Florence—I’d hate to ask . . .”
“Yeah?”
“As I said,” Mr. Taylor fretted, “we’re up to our gills in orders and running a bit behind—those flowers your dad ordered may arrive a bit late.”
My heart jumped into my throat. “He ordered flowers?”
“Earlier this week,” Mr. Taylor replied. “A bouquet of daylilies, to Foxglove Lane.”
So, not wildflowers. Of course Dad wouldn’t make it that easy. But Foxglove Lane . . . I knew where it was. But why would he send flowers there? I didn’t know why I said what I did next. Maybe it was to glimpse into the everyday life I’d missed. Maybe it was to walk, for a moment more, in Dad’s shoes. I said, “I’ll deliver the flowers.”
“Oh, I couldn’t ask you to—”
“It’d be a pleasure. Besides, I’ve nothing else to do today, and it’d be good to explore the town a bit since I’ve been gone.” I smiled to really sell the point, and he must’ve been really strapped for help, because he handed me the address written in Dad’s loopy script and a single arrangement of daylilies, and thanked me profusely.
It really wasn’t that big a deal, and I really
didn’t
have anything else to do today. I didn’t want to go to Bar None, because it was
Saturday in the late afternoon, and I was sure it was already getting a bit crowded. And while I loved Mairmont, I didn’t want to see many of the people in there. I didn’t know who from my graduating class left the town or stayed—and most of them, unlike Dana and John, hadn’t been very nice.
I’d been lucky to have not run into them thus far, but considering that I’d only been here about twenty-four hours . . . I knew my luck was shit, and it’d run out sooner rather than later.
As I left the florist, I tried to ignore my untimely shadow, and Ben was
really
hard to ignore. Especially because he was pretending to
not
follow me, and that just made it creepier.
“I see you, you know,” I said when I reached the end of the block. I looked over my shoulder, and he quickly whirled on his heels and pretended to go the other way. “Seriously?”
He winced and turned back to face me. “Sorry. I was . . . I just saw you and I . . .”
“You’ve been following me since the bed-and-breakfast.”
He wilted. “I have no excuse.”
“Admitting there is a problem is the first step to recovery, good job.”
“I’m not sure what else to do.” He put his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched. He looked a bit more unraveled than he had this morning, his hair floppy and his eyes tired. “Or where else to go.”
There was nowhere else. It was me and then . . . whatever came after.
If
anything came after. My family was the spiritual but not religious sort. We all had our different ideas of what happened—whether we returned to the world, or became part of the wind, or just . . . if we just stopped.
And anyway, whatever I could’ve said wouldn’t have helped him.
He was, on all accounts, dead. Rose had verified it. And at least
I knew I wasn’t going crazy—he really was here. For the moment, however long it took.
And I was his last stop.
I hugged the arrangement tighter. “Well, you can come with me,” I offered.
“Can I?” He perked, like a golden retriever who’d finally been asked to go for walkies.
“Yeah. We can get to the bottom of this thrilling mystery together,” I said, referring to the arrangement. “Why would my dad send flowers to a stranger’s house?”
“Maybe he knew them from somewhere?” Ben guessed.
“He
did
have poker games. Maybe it’s one of his buddies from that?” But I doubted he’d send them daylilies. He’d send them orchids or corpse flowers or—
something
a bit more his brand. Daylilies weren’t his style at all.
My frown deepened as I thought, prompting Ben to propose, “We’ll see when we get there, I suppose.”
“I hate surprises,” I agreed with a sigh.
Foxglove Lane was one of those quiet streets adjacent to the main drag where you could just see yourself buying a house behind a white picket fence and growing old in it. The houses were all different colors of Charleston-type designs, with porches that faced the west and narrow builds. When I was eight or nine, I went to a birthday party for someone who lived on Foxglove Lane. Adair Bowman, maybe? It was a slumber party and they broke out the Ouija board and I sat back and had absolutely nothing to do with it.
One, because Ouija boards were mass-market trash made by a toy company to sell the occult to the middle class.
Two, because even though Ouija boards were mass-market trash made by a toy company to sell the occult to the middle class, I still refused to poke the bear.
Adair called me a scaredy-cat. I definitely was. But I also slept perfectly well that night while the rest of the kids had nightmares about old General Bartholomew from the cemetery coming to haunt their dreams.
The house in question was halfway down the lane, far past Adair’s old family home—though I think they moved the year after I’d solved the infamous murder. It was smaller than the others, but very well loved. The front lawn was quaint, with trimmed azaleas around the house and a colorful flower bed, newly planted for spring.
I climbed the brick steps to the front door and rang the doorbell.
It took a moment, but an old lady finally answered. She was hunched over, wrapped in a fluffy pink housecoat and darned slippers, and had the most beautiful wide brown eyes. “Oh,” she said, opening the glass door. “Hello.”
“Mrs.—” I checked the name and address on the card, written in Dad’s sloppy handwriting. “Elizabeth?”
“Yes,” she replied, nodding, “that’s me, dear.”
I offered up the daylilies. “These are for you.”
Her eyes lit up at the arrangement, and she took it gently with gnarled and bruised hands. There was dirt under her long fingernails. She gardened. Alone?
“
Florence
,” I heard Ben whisper, because he saw the gentleman first.
There was a shimmer in the hall behind her, an older man in an orange sweater and brown trousers, the hair that was left on the sides of his head combed back. He mouthed, “Thank you,” his eyes glistening with tears.
Oh. I understood now.
Mrs. Elizabeth smelled one of the lilies and smiled. “Charlie always gave me lilies on our anniversary. I think that’s today? Oh,
my. Time’s always a bit wonky when you get older,” she added with a laugh. “Thank you, dear. You know, I get these every year but I still don’t know who from!”
“A friend,” I replied.
“Well, this friend of mine has very good taste,” she decided, and gave me one of her lemon biscuit cookies before I left.
Sometimes, a spirit’s final business wasn’t talking to someone, or exposing their murderer, or seeing their own dead body—sometimes it was simply a waiting game.
Ben was playing a different sort of waiting game on the sidewalk. He looked paler than he had a few minutes before. “That man—he looked like I do. Shimmery and . . .” With a hard inhale, he sank into a crouch, his hands on the back of his neck. “I really am dead, aren’t I?”
I finished my bite of cookie, and sank down next to him. “Do you really not remember how you died?”
He shook his head. “No. I mean—I—I remember leaving work, and then . . .” He inhaled sharply. Halted. Clenched his jaw. “It was . . . just outside of the building, wasn’t it? My accident?”
Silently, I nodded, but I wasn’t sure he saw me. If he saw anything, really. His eyes had this distant look to them, a thousand-mile stare to a place and time he’d never be again.
“I—I was typing an email on my phone when . . . the van popped the curb and . . .” He blinked, his eyes wet with tears, as he looked up at me. His voice cracked as he said, “How did I forget that?”
“I don’t know,” I replied gently, wishing that I did know something—
anything
—to help him. I knelt down beside him, curling my arms around my knees. “I’m sorry.”
He bent his head, as if he could hide the fact that he was crying, but his too-big shoulders shaking gave him away. I wanted to
reach out for his shoulder, to comfort him in one of those
there, there
pats, but I couldn’t even touch him. I wasn’t good at other people’s emotions because I didn’t know how to help, usually. When someone was in pain, I wanted to fix it. And I couldn’t.
Which made me frustrated.
And when I was frustrated, I cried. If I was not already mortified enough. This had to stop—now. I tried the only way I knew how. “A-At least you’re still kinda hot,” I sobbed.
He jerked his attention to me. His eyes were red rimmed. “W-
What
?”
The tears just kept coming. I pushed them away as quickly as I could. “D-Drop-dead g-gorgeous, really.”
“I . . . I don’t—are you—?”
“I b-bet you s-strike a k-k-killer silhouette.”
“You’re crying and trying to hit on me?”
“I’m trying to make you laugh so you stop crying, because then I’ll stop crying,” I lamented, but it sounded more like
I’mtryingtomakeyoulaughsoyoustopcryingbecausethenillstopcrying
, and it was a miracle he even understood me at all.
But he did—and he laughed. It was soft, and weak, more of a
pah
than a laugh, but it was there. He rubbed his palms over his eyes. “You’re the weirdest woman I’ve ever met.”
“I know,” I sniffed. “But d-did it work?”
“No,” he said, but he was lying. In the afternoon light, his cheeks were turning a very delicate shade of red despite the tears in his eyes, and it only made the mark above the left side of his lip look that much darker.
“Oh, don’t you die of mortification on me,” I teased.
“I’m apparently already dead,” he replied softly. “So that’s impossible.”
“I don’t know, your cheeks are a dead giveaway.”
He pursed his lips together, and then said, surprising me, “I’m afraid you’re gravely mistaken.”
I barked a laugh, a real laugh that I didn’t know I had in me anymore, and it surprised me. It surprised him, too, because he looked away to hide a smile, rubbing the tears out of the corners of his eyes. While the mission wasn’t accomplished, I think I did get him to feel a little better, and at least he wasn’t crying, and that meant I wasn’t crying, either.
I said, shaking my head, “That was a terrible pun.”
“Yours weren’t much better. And you’re supposed to be a writer for a living.”
“
Ex
-writer,” I reminded. “My editor didn’t give me another extension.”
“Ex-editor,” he reminded. And then he said very softly, gently, “Thank you, Florence.”
I couldn’t touch him—this wasn’t my first ghost, and probably wasn’t my last—but it was instinct. To comfort him. Even though I wanted someone to comfort
me
, too. I just wanted someone to stop me, and sit me down, and tell me that things would hurt for a while, but they wouldn’t hurt forever.
I wanted to tell him that this wasn’t forever.
My fingers slipped through his shoulder, numb and cold—
And then he was gone.
Again.