Page 17 of Ghostlighted (Ghost Townies #2)

Chapter Thirteen

“ T he answer?” I tucked my hand against my chest to warm it up. “Okay, I’ll bite. What was the question?”

Avi rolled his eyes. “Why I can go outside.”

I waggled my fingers at the floor. “You’re not outside now.”

“Yes.” A verbal eyeroll this time. “Because the ring is inside.”

“The ring?” I lowered my hand, uncurled my fingers, and stared at Oren’s wedding band. “You think the ring has some kind of unlocking mechanism? I’d think a key would?—”

“Not the ring by itself.” Avi huffed and ran both hands through his hair. “Look. Could you humor me for a minute?”

“Sure. Anything you want.”

He pointed to the Mission-style console table that sat inside the front door. “Put the ring there, please.”

I did, much to Gil’s interest. I pointed at him. “You are not to touch this.” He gave me a slow blink.

“Don’t worry about him,” Avi said, shooing me toward the front door. “If he steals it, I’ll watch where it goes.”

“If you say so.” I opened the door and walked out onto the front porch. “Is this far enough?”

He nodded, his chin set determinedly. He paced toward the door, but when he tried to step over the threshold, he blinked back to the foot of the stairs where he’d been before, startling Gil into bouncing away sideways.

Okay. That was… interesting.

He beckoned to me. “Now come back and get the ring.” I did. “Back outside, please?”

I stepped onto the porch.

He joined me. We met each other’s eyes. I don’t know which one of us started to laugh first, but suddenly we were both doubled over. Which was a good thing, because that meant I was in the perfect position to grab Gil when he made a dash for the lawn.

“Oh, no you don’t.” I set him inside and closed the door. When I turned, Avi was standing under the maple tree, gazing up through the leaves. I leaned against the porch rail, watching him. “So. Got any ideas on why the ring is the thing?”

He nodded. “I do. Not sure you’ll like them.”

“Hit me.”

“Well…” He lowered his gaze from the leaves and met my eyes. “You’re a little bit Oren.”

I held up my thumb and forefinger, a hairsbreadth between them. “A very little bit. A third cousin bit.”

“Maybe that’s all it takes. Maybe that’s why I can talk to you and no one else.

I could always talk to Oren. About anything.

Even that last time, when I… When we…” Avi’s chest heaved and his voice dropped to a whisper.

“When we fought. I still told him all the reasons why I was so upset and he didn’t dismiss my feelings. We never hid anything from each other.”

I glanced down at the ring gleaming in my palm. “Except this.”

“Yes.” He moved to the foot of the steps. “Except that.”

Oren hadn’t told Avi about the plans for a trip to Canada to get married, but I think we could both give him a pass on that one. You could hardly spill the beans on a big wonderful surprise if you wanted it to stay, you know, a big wonderful surprise.

“If it’s the ring plus me, though, why did you blink inside earlier?”

He shrugged. “Maybe there’s a proximity limit? We can test later.”

“Good idea. I think we should test to see if it works with somebody else holding the ring, too. Somebody you and Oren both knew and trusted.”

“That would probably be Ricky or Saul.”

I winced. “Yeah. Ricky’s probably got a little too much on his mind right now. Saul and Jerry are out of town until Monday.”

“We can wait on that.” He spread his arms. “For now, this is enough.” He ducked his head and peered up at me, almost shyly. “Maybe tomorrow we could take a walk down Main Street?”

“Of course.” I turned my head toward the corner, my gaze sweeping across the wrought iron palings that marched along the edge of the Manor grounds, and my jaw sagged.

Wait just a freaking minute.

An ember ignited in my middle and I took the steps two at a time to join him. I really wished I could touch him because I wanted to grab his hands and dance down the slate walk.

“You said you were frustrated because you don’t know anything about your afterlife, right?”

“We’ve been over this,” he said, his verbal eyeroll accompanied by its physical equivalent. “Multiple times.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I couldn’t fight my grin. “You know who might know something about that?”

He crossed his arms. “I’m not in the mood for guessing games, Maz.”

“Humor me, okay?” I crept past him on the balls of my feet, and, just as I hoped, he pivoted to follow until I was facing the porch and he was facing Iris Lane. “Tell me, Avi. Who once lived right across the street from our house?”

“I told you. No guessing ga—” He blinked. “Oh.”

“Exactly! Thaddeus Richdale spent the last half of his life poking at the veil, and I just happen to be employed in organizing the boatload of detritus from his explorations. So what do you think?”

“What do I think about what?”

I grinned, rocking from my toes to my heels. “Come with me. Help me go through Thaddeus’s stuff.”

He pointed to my hand, which still held Oren’s ring. “In case you’ve forgotten, I can’t even pick up my husband’s ring.”

“Yes, but you’re aces with paper.”

His eyebrows shot up. “I… I’m not sure I would say I’ve reached aces status yet.”

“But your paper handling muscles are getting stronger every day, and Thaddeus’s stuff is about eighty percent paper. With the two of us working on it, we’ll be able to sort through the… the dross and find the gold much faster.”

He didn’t completely lose his scowl, but there was a definite twinkle in his eye—unless that was just the porch light shining through from behind him. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll lose your job if you finish too quickly?”

“Nah. I always knew this was a temporary gig, and I’m not drawing it out to soak Saul and the Manor for more money just to line my own pockets.”

“Is this your clever ploy to avoid sorting through it on your own?”

“That’s not it either. I don’t mind going through everything.

I told you. It’s fascinating. But I’m used to modern search engines and data retrieval protocols, which boxes of dusty papers and mysterious arcane items definitely do not have.

If we can get answers sooner, not only will it help the Manor, it’ll help you. And it’ll help the town, too.”

“How do you figure that?”

“In my first few days here, Jerry told me about the annual parade and festival, and how it had gotten cut back and finally canceled because of lack of attendance.” I gestured for Avi to follow me as I trotted up the porch steps.

“I think that reduction was a mistake. Instead of going smaller, you should have gone bigger.”

Avi trailed behind me as I opened the door and deftly snagged Gil before he could dodge outside. “I wasn’t exactly in a position to do anything about it at all, considering I was already dead.”

“I meant you as in the town, not you personally.” I closed the door, and with Gil in my arms, headed into the library and plopped onto the window seat.

He sat opposite me. “Paranormal tourism is a huge thing, Avi. There are legend tripping conferences. Self-guided haunted site crawls. Guided tours.”

When I’d been looking at EVP equipment today, I’d found multiple companies promoting them, but they were focused on finding ghosts.

If we could reverse engineer the process—from the presence of an actual ghost backward to how the ghost arrived and chose to manifest—we could put Ghost on the paranormal map.

We could save the town.