15. The Sorrows of Florence Day
15
The Sorrows of Florence Day
ST. JOHN’S OF Mairmont Cemetery was a tiny little patch of green grass surrounded by an old stone wall. There were tombstones that stuck out of the gentle hills like white teeth. Some had flowers bursting from them; others hadn’t been touched in decades. The cemetery was shadowed by oak trees that were large enough and thick enough that I was sure they’d been here long before any of the bodies below the lawn. And sitting in each one of them, perched so comfortably, were crows. A whole murder of them. Sitting in the budding branches and looking down at us with their beady little eyes, nestled in to watch us.
The wrought iron gates were closed and locked, but that had never stopped me before from creeping in. There was a crumbling wall about twenty feet down from the gate that I could get a foothold in and haul myself over.
“Oh, it’s closed,” Ben noted, reading the sign. “I didn’t realize cemeteries closed—where are you going?” He followed me over to the place in the wall where it was a bit crumbled.
I pointed at the wall. “I’m scaling that sucker.”
“Can’t we . . . I don’t know . . . ask permission or walk through a park instead or—”
“Park’s closed at night, too, and besides”—I took off my flats and tossed them over the wall—“I know the guy who owns it. We’ll be fine.” I decided not to add the part where I’d been permanently banned from the cemetery after dark after the previous owner called me in for trespassing one too many times. Seaburn wouldn’t care. Though it wasn’t Seaburn I was worried about.
“I’m suddenly second-guessing this,” he muttered.
“You’re dead—what could you possibly be afraid of?” I asked.
He gave me a level look. “That’s not the point.”
I rolled my eyes and put my feet into the old climbing holds that I’d chiseled out when I was teenager, and began to work my way up six feet to the top, where I looped my leg over and straddled it. “You coming or am I going for a walk alone?”
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other as he debated. Ran the numbers. Debated his options. His shoulders were stiff, his eyebrows furrowed, as if it were more than
just
breaking into a cemetery that stopped him.
I swung my leg back over. “We don’t have to, you know,” I said, softer. “We can go to a park if you aren’t comfortable. Or—the Ridge?”
I couldn’t
believe
I just suggested that.
He shook his head. “No, it’s fine. It’s just . . . there aren’t others? In the graveyard? Others like me, I mean.”
“Ah, other people working through a post-living experience.”
He pointed at me. “That.”
I glanced back at the graveyard. The moon was so full and so bright, I could see from the gates to the far wall, and all of the off-white mausoleums and gravestones in between. “No, I don’t see anyone—wait. Are you
scared
of ghosts?”
He stiffened. “No.”
He said that
way
too quickly.
“You are! Oh my god,
you’re
a ghost.”
“Supernatural things upset me.”
“I promise no
wittle ghostie
is going to hurt you, Benji Andor,” I teased, “and if any of them do, they’ll have me to contend with.”
“You can punch ghosts?”
“No, but I’m a really bad singer. Unleash me with a microphone on any of your enemies and they’re
toast
.”
He snorted a laugh. “Good to know.” Then he took a deep breath and said, “No, I don’t go back on my word. This isn’t turning out how I expected but—things rarely do, don’t they?”
It sounded like he was referring to his own predicament. He couldn’t have been much older than I was, and he was dead. He had plans—everyone has plans, even if they don’t realize it. Even the ones who go because they think they don’t have plans. There’s always something that comes up.
I wondered what he regretted, what parts of his life he wished he’d done differently.
I wondered if my dad had any regrets when he went, too.
“Then c’mon.” I nodded my head toward the graveyard, and looped my leg back over the wall. “Live a little.”
“Yes, well, would that I could.”
“Probably wrong choice of words. See you on the other side!” I pulled the rest of myself over and dropped down onto the grass. I was only 55 percent sure that he’d follow me—was he really such a stickler for the rules? He was
dead
. “Just walk through the wall, my dude,” I called over to him. “You’re a
ghost
—”
A moment later, he stepped through the wall and shivered. “That feels so weird,” he complained, dusting invisible lint from his crisp button-down shirt. “I don’t like it. It tingles. In weird places.”
I headed up toward the path that looped the whole cemetery, and called back to him, “You’re a terrible ghost.”
“It wasn’t as though I applied for this role. What if we get caught?”
“If
I
get caught,” I corrected, “then I’ll run. You’re a ghost. No one else can see you.”
He caught up in a few quick strides, and fell into pace beside me. Lee never did that. He always expected me to match his. “Right,” he said, “about that. I have questions.”
I took a deep breath. “Okay. I’ll try to answer them.”
“Can you summon ghosts?”
“No.”
“Do you exorcise them?”
“No. Like I said earlier, most of them just want to talk. They have good stories. And they want someone to listen.” I shrugged. “I like listening—don’t give me that look,” I added, sensing his gaze on me, as if he was trying to puzzle me out. As if I had surprised him.
He quickly looked away. “Is this . . . post-living part of your life a family business?”
I laughed at that. “No. My family owns the funeral home in town, but only me and my dad can see spirits. Ghosts. Whatever you want to call them—
you
. I don’t know why. Maybe it has something to do with the funeral parlor? Who knows.”
“Is that why you left? Not to be too forward,” he added quickly, realizing that, in fact, it
was
a little too forward. “I just . . . picked up on it. People are surprised you’re home.”
“I guess they would be.” For a few steps, I mulled over the question. What to tell him, and what to leave out. Though, what was the point of lying to a dead guy? “When I was thirteen, I helped a ghost solve his own murder. Before that, the whole mediator thing was kind of a family secret, but when your town paper writes ‘Girl
Solves Hometown Murder with Ghosts,’ it kind of blows that out of the water.”
“So you became a local celebrity?”
I barked a laugh. “If only! No one believed me, Ben. Bestcase, they thought I was doing it for attention, worst case they thought I had something to
do
with the murder. Imagine being thirteen and on the witness stand and having to say, ‘A ghost told me
.
’ It was . . .” I tried not to remember much about that year if I could help it. The articles about me, the weird news stunt, the people calling me a liar. “Anyway, most people thought it was just a wild story. I guess it makes sense—I’d wanted to be a writer ever since I was little. I like words. I like shaping them. I like how the stories you create can be kind and good, and I like how they can never fail you, if that’s how you make them.” I kicked a rock, and it skittered off into the grass. “Or, you know,
in theory.
”
I bit my thumbnail as we walked on in silence. The only sound was my footsteps soft on the grass.
After a while he said, “I liked that about your first book.”
Surprised, I turned to him. “
Rake
?”
“No, your first book. What was it—
Ardently Yours
, I think was the title?”
My eyes widened. “You didn’t.”
“Why is that so surprising?”
“
No
one read that book, Ben. It never left its first printing.”
“I assure you I did.”
I wasn’t sure how much of that I believed. First Seaburn said he read it, then Ben—two people who didn’t know each other. Once my dad had said, “Don’t worry, buttercup, your book will find the people it needs to,” but I didn’t believe him.
I was beginning to second-guess myself.
We mingled among the tombstones. I knew where Dad’s plot
would be. It was already sectioned off at the top of the hill, under the large oak tree where the crows perched. I sat down on one of the stone benches throughout the cemetery, and Ben took a seat beside me.
I outstretched my hands toward the graveyard. “So? Worth it, right? One of the best views in Mairmont.”
He pressed his mouth into a thin line, and his lips twisted a little. “I mean, it still isn’t worth the trespassing charge but . . . it’s nice.”
I bit in a grin, and pulled my feet up under me to sit cross-legged. The sky unfurled in front of us, infinite and dark. The stars were much brighter here—so bright I almost forgot that you didn’t need light out here in nowhere. The stars gave you all the light you needed. “Dad used to sneak in here with me when I was a kid. We’d stroll the graveyard. He called it his
exercise
. Sometimes when the ISS would pass overhead, we’d come out here and watch it. We’ve seen loads of comets and space junk falling in the sky. You really can’t beat a view like this.”
“No,” he agreed. “You kind of forget in the city how many stars there are. I grew up in Maine where there were a lot of stars, too.”
“Ann’s in Maine,” I pointed out. “Maybe you were neighbors and didn’t even know it.”
“There’s a lot of writers in Maine. How do you know I wasn’t neighbors with Stephen King?”
“Good point.”
“Has anyone famous visited you as a ghost?” he asked.
“
Famous
?” I tilted my head in thought. “No . . . not that I know of. Most of the people I dealt with were from Mairmont, and I really didn’t talk to ghosts in New York, so I wouldn’t know. You’re a weird outlier, come to think of it. You died in New York but you’re haunting me five hundred miles away.”
“I’m wondering the same thing,” he mused, rubbing his chin. “I
never imagined my afterlife would be walking cemeteries at midnight in the middle of nowhere.”
“My ex hated this type of thing.”
“What—sneaking into cemeteries and performing séances to summon the dead?”
“Wouldn’t that have been fun? And no. He wasn’t ever really into this scene. I mean, you aren’t, either,
clearly
,” I added, motioning to his rolled-up shirtsleeves and neatly pressed trousers, “but he wouldn’t have even entertained the idea. Even if he knew I liked it, he wouldn’t have asked.”
He cocked his head. “True, he isn’t really the graveyard type. I always thought it was strange how he wrote a contemporary gothic horror.”
I stiffened. “Right—you know him. Lee Marlow.”
“We are—were—work associates,” he clarified, frowning as he had to correct himself to past tense. “We both got into publishing around the same time, so I saw him at functions—I recognized you when you walked into the office the other day,” he added. “We never really crossed paths, though.”
No, but I was never going to tell him that I recognized him, too, when I first saw him the other day. “Was that also why you were at that writing bar the other night?”
“Colloquialism? Yeah. I was there at the bar getting drinks with him because
apparently
he wanted to vent about the font they’re using in his book.”
I made a face. “God forbid it’s
legible.”
He chuckled. It was a warm, throaty sound that reminded me of red velvet cake. In a book, I would’ve called it a
delicious
sound. “Did you read it?” he asked. “Marlow’s book.”
“Oh,” I replied distantly, “I’m very familiar with it. You?”
“No—I have an advance copy but it never piqued my interest.”
“Might’ve saved yourself there. The heroine in the book is so dry and salty and apathetic—about
everything.
”
Ben winced. “He probably thought that meant a strong female character.”
I threw up my hands. “I know, right? A woman can be emotional and vibrant and love things. That doesn’t make her weak or inferior—
argh!
I’m not going to rant about it, it’ll just make me upset,” I added, forcing my hands down by my sides again. A blush crept over my cheeks. “Not that I care what he wrote. At all.”
It’s not like he wrote me into his book. I
wasn’t
that dry and salty. At least I didn’t think I was.
And I
definitely
wasn’t apathetic.
“And,” I added, unable to stop myself, “he made her a bad kisser. Like,
pathetically
bad. And I don’t know about you, but I think salty bitches kiss
great
.”
He nodded, agreeing. “In my experience, women with sharp tongues usually have soft lips.”
“You kiss sharp-tongued girls often?”
His gaze lingered on my lips. “Not often enough.”
My ears began to burn with a blush, and I glanced away from him. He was a
ghost
, Florence. Very much dead. And off-limits. “You know, if I was any other kind of person, I’d ask you to haunt Lee Marlow’s hipster ass.”
“A ghost for hire.”
“You’d be chillingly good at it.”
“I have a bone to pick with him, anyhow.”
“Oh?” I laughed. “Were you in love with him, too?”
“No, but you were. And I can tell that it hurts.”
That surprised me. “Am I that obvious?”
“No—yes,” he admitted. “A little. You don’t seem like the person who wrote
Ardently Yours
anymore. Not in a bad way, but in the
way you feel when you’re reading something and realize what you’ve been looking for—are you listening?” he added as I stood and began to pace in front of the bench. “I don’t think you’re listening—”
“Shush, wait.” I held a finger up to him to get him to quiet. My brain was thinking, and it was connecting dots like a constellation. “The manuscript.”
“What about it?”
“What connects us! It’s not
Ann
, it’s the manuscript. You’re here because
I’m
not done with it. That’s your unfinished business!”
He tilted his head. “Well, you’re almost finished with it, right?”
“Um . . .”
“Florence,” he said sternly, and a shiver went up my spine. “You’ve had over a
year
.”
“Yeah, and a lot of things have happened in a year!”
“But—”
Suddenly, a flashlight blinded me. I shielded my eyes with the back of my hand and winced away from the blaringly bright light. There was the crunch of gravel, and the jingle of keys.
Shit.
I hadn’t even noticed him unlocking the cemetery gate or coming inside. I’d been too wrapped up in flirting with this ship called
Disaster
.
I dove behind the bench. Ben hid with me.
“Hello?” the police officer called. “Hey, you kids, you’re not supposed to be in here.”
“
Shit
,” I whispered. “I think that’s Officer Saget.”
“Bob?”
“What? No—was that a joke, Benji Andor?”
“Too dated?” he asked, ashamed.
“A bit—
shit
.” I ducked down lower as the flashlight beam searched overhead again. How could I possibly explain to Ben the years of hate accumulated between Officer Saget and me? “So, fun story: I might be banned from this graveyard.”
“Florence!”
“I was a kid!”
The police officer called out to us, but I pressed my finger to my lips and told Ben to be
quiet.
He wasn’t going to trick me this time. I was an
adult
. With a functioning and fully formed brain this time!
Well, mostly functioning. On good days.
The officer walked closer, over the dark grassy hill, toward us. While I didn’t have any outstanding warrants, I did absolutely have a parking ticket I hadn’t paid in ten years. I didn’t want to think about what that cost now. Never mind the other misdemeanors I had on my record. Starting a fire at school. Stealing Coach Rhinehart’s golf cart. Trespassing in the Mairmont County Museum . . .
Enough to make me a public nuisance.
Suddenly, with a startled caw, the murder of crows sitting in the oak tree took flight at the same time. They scared Officer Saget, who cursed and ducked as they swooped in and broke out into the night sky. Then I saw Ben try to grab for my wrist, but his hand passed through it. He looked momentarily annoyed.
“Hurry!” he hissed.
He didn’t have to tell
me
twice. I turned on my heels and leapt into a sprint toward the back of the cemetery, cutting around tombstones and fake flowers propped up against plaques, and headed for the back corner. It got darker the farther we ran, and a little sliver of wall had fallen down behind the old oak there—
I slipped through the crumbled wall and broke out onto Crescent Avenue, and hopped through a few backyards until I returned to the cross street with the inn. I didn’t stop to catch my breath until I was inside the wrought iron gates and halfway down the path to the front door.
“I’ve never been so close to getting caught!” I clutched my sides as I dissolved into peals of laughter. “Did you startle the crows?”
“I would never,” he replied indignantly, folding his arms over his chest.
I could’ve kissed him. “Thank you.”
The tips of his ears burned red and he looked away. “You’re welcome.”
Trying to hide a grin, I wandered up the cobblestone path to the front door when I paused on the porch steps where we began, and glanced back at Ben. “I’m sorry,” I said, “that I lied to you about getting caught in the cemetery.”
“Well—at least now I know,” he replied, and shook his head. “I’m going to—I don’t know. Go see if I can haunt the diner or something. Smell some coffee. Question,” he added as an afterthought.
“Answer,” I replied.
“Is it normal to hear things? Chattering—voices—barely? Like they’re just out of earshot?”
I frowned. “Not that I know of, but I never asked.”
“Huh. Okay, well, good night. Try not to get into too much trouble,” he added, and left down the sidewalk toward the Waffle House. I stood on the porch of the bed-and-breakfast for a while, watching as his transparent form slowly melted into the darkness and was gone.
I already had one dead person to mourn. Common sense told me that I shouldn’t get involved with Ben, that my heart couldn’t take another goodbye so soon, but I think I’d already decided to help him. I wasn’t sure when I decided—yesterday? When he first showed up at the front door?
I was foolish, and I was only going to hurt myself, because if I knew anything about death, the goodbyes were harder with ghosts than corpses.