Page 22 of Ghostlighted (Ghost Townies #2)

Chapter Seventeen

A fter closing the butler’s pantry door to keep a very disgruntled Gil from following us into the mudroom, I tossed my keys up and grabbed them out of the air. Jingling them in my hand, I grinned at Avi as we crossed to the garage.

I grabbed the doorknob. “Ready?”

“Will you stop that?” he said irritably.

“Stop what?”

“Rattling your keys.”

“Sorry. Nervous energy.” I tucked the key ring in my hoodie pocket, opened the door, and gestured for Avi to precede me. “After you.”

He didn’t move. “Are you sure about this? Remember the laptop bluescreen incident?”

“My car predates modern computer controls, so as long as you don’t get too close to the battery or the ignition, I think we’ll be okay. There’s not much more you could fritz out in there. The radio’s already busted, and so are the dome lights, so… so…”

Avi peered at me. “What? You’ve got that look.”

“What look? I have a look?”

“Don’t hedge. That look you get when you retrieve some obscure fact from your vast store of ghostwriting minutia and make a mental connection. A lightbulb moment.”

I chuckled weakly. “A lightbulb moment. That’s appropriate.”

“Maz. Stop stalling. What just occurred to you?”

“Well.” I flipped the switch to turn on the brushed steel wall sconces that flanked the door. “Lights.”

“Lights?”

“Yes. Lights. I mean, think about it. There are light fixtures all over the house and you’ve never blown them out.

The typewriter, too. You used it when it wasn’t turned on.

” Heck, it might not have even been plugged in for all I remembered.

I’d been a little distracted at the time because my new house had been vandalized and I’d slept through the whole thing.

“So?”

“So I was assuming that because of the laptop bluescreen incident?—”

He winced. “I said I was sorry about that.”

“I know. No worries. It recovered.”

I descended onto the garage’s single concrete step and motioned for him to join me.

He hesitated, wringing his hands in his signature anxiety tell, but finally followed.

I realized that while we were both nervous about the potential of his visit to the Manor, we saw it from completely different perspectives.

For me, it was like a door opening on new information that could change everything, for Avi and for Ghost. But for Avi, it was the opposite possibility—a door closing in his face, its dead bolts thrown and key lost forever. Proof that he had nothing more to hope for.

“Hey,” I said softly. “You okay?”

Once again, he hesitated. Then he squared his shoulders and nodded, a muscle ticking in his jaw. “I’ll be fine. Go on.”

I waited a moment, but he had the air of determination that I’d come to recognize.

“I think we—or at least I —made an assumption that might not be correct.”

He canted an eyebrow. “Really, Maz? An assumption? You?”

If Avi could dial up his snark again, I figured we were good to go.

“Shocking, I know. I assumed that your presence interfered with electronics and, by extension, electrical things. But I don’t think that could be correct.

The wi-fi router works, and one of the nodes is in the attic.

You walk past it, and all the other nodes, all the time.

Maybe it has more to do with… I don’t know…

circuit interruption? Like there’s a critical instant”—I jerked my chin at the car—“like a point of ignition or the moment the current connects to a lamp or a toaster that you could interrupt if you touched it at the right time.”

This time, Avi got a look—I’d seen it before, whenever he was tracing a memory or evaluating a problem. His eyebrows lowered behind the rim of his glasses, his head tilted slightly, and his eyes seemed to focus on the distance.

“I suppose,” he said slowly.

If I was right, it would mean two major breakthroughs about Avi’s abilities in as many days. I gripped the keys in my pocket and nearly pulled them out to toss in my palm again, but resisted in consideration of Avi’s nerves.

“Think about it. That time the laptop bluescreened, you’d pointed to something in the document I was working on.

Your finger was close to the screen, but nothing happened.

Everything was fine. But when you leaned your hand on the table, you misjudged the distance and your fingers passed through the keyboard. ”

“Sorry.” He glanced away, clearly embarrassed. “My spatial awareness sucks.”

“It’ll get better. You’re just not used to being a ghost yet.”

“It has nothing to do with being a ghost.” He turned a glare on me. “My spatial awareness has always sucked.”

“My point —and I do have one—is that computer circuits pass signals around constantly. There’s more traffic happening, so there’s more opportunity to interrupt one of those signals than, say, preventing a single connection when a light switch gets flipped or a key turns in the ignition.”

He lifted an eyebrow and gestured toward the Civic. “Are you volunteering your car as a test case?”

“And risk being wrong?” I shook my head. “Not a chance. That would feed right in to the campaign to get me to buy a new car.”

“Oooh. We should definitely try it out then.” Avi grinned and waggled his fingers. “Just a little touch to interrupt the signal, you said? I may need a few tries to get the timing right.”

As much as I didn’t want to fry my car’s ignition, I was so happy to see Avi’s playful mood that I nearly agreed to let him give it a go.

But we had something more important on the agenda today.

“Let’s make our first forays into circuit interruption on something less expensive and immediately necessary than my car, okay?

We’ve got the whole Manor waiting for us. ”

He wrinkled his nose. “A roomful of dusty papers. Oh, joy.”

“A roomful of dusty papers that could give us clues about how the whole ghost thing works.”

“A point. All right.” He studied the Civic. “How do you suggest I enter?”

“Uh…through the door.”

“Which I can’t open.”

“That didn’t seem to stop you on the porch earlier.”

“Because you were on the other side with the ring.”

I spread my arms as though encompassing the house beyond the garage. “But we’re still within your domain. You’ve always moved through the house.”

“Yes, but not inside something that isn’t part of the house.” He cast a revolted glance at the car. “And that is definitely not a part of the house, nor would I ever want it to be.”

“This is a good trial, then.” I leaned against the wall. “See if you can get in on your own. If you can’t, I’ll climb behind the wheel and you should be able to join me.”

He shot me a skeptical glance. “On your head be it.”

His shoulders rose and fell once, twice, three times, and then he marched over to the passenger door, his feet mostly touching the concrete floor. He frowned, staring down at the handle before shaking his head and reaching toward the window—and then through the window.

“Come on, come on,” I murmured, practically bouncing on my toes. “You can do it.”

Avi pulled his hand back, frown deepening, and took a step forward until he was standing partway through the door.

He stepped back, shaking both hands. “That feels… weird.”

“Weird bad or just weird?”

“I don’t know. Although I’m not anxious to try it again.

It’s like…” He gazed up at the ceiling, gnawing on his lower lip, and sketched an unidentifiable shape in the air with both hands.

“I’m not acquainted with it, or at least I wasn’t when I was alive.

It’s present here”—he glanced at me sidelong—“but from the perspective of my domain , it doesn’t belong here, so I can’t interact with it in an ordinary way. ”

“Like sitting in the passenger seat?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

I held up my keys while patting my pocket that held Oren’s ring. “Then I guess we’ll try it the other way.”

I wrestled the driver’s door open and got in. Before I could wrench the door closed with its usual metallic protest, Avi was sitting in the seat next to me.

“That was quick.” I punched the garage door opener on my visor and started the engine, which only sputtered once or twice before it caught.

He just shrugged. “I guess I needed the ring’s presence to induct the car into the domain .”

“That term really bothers you, doesn’t it?”

“It reeks of toxic privilege.”

After the door trundled up, I backed the car out, making sure the door rolled down behind us before I headed down the short drive and onto Iris Lane. “Really? To me, it reeks of medieval cosplay or internet branding and annual payments to a web host, but whatever.”

“Mmm.”

Even without his noncommittal reply, I could tell he wasn’t paying attention to me. Instead, he was leaning forward, gazing avidly through the windows as Main Street unrolled in front of us.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Ghost’s Main Street is totally charming, but Avi was looking at it as if… as if…

As if he hadn’t seen it in more than ten years.

I kept any snarky judgmental comments locked behind my teeth and let up on the gas, slowing down to fifteen miles an hour.

Yes, it was ten MPH slower than the limit, and if my dad had been driving behind me, he’d be turning the air blue, but there was no traffic this morning, so I wasn’t inconveniencing anybody.

And even if I was? I didn’t really care. Avi’s experience was more important.

“You okay?” I asked.

Avi took a shaky breath, his hands clutching his knees.

“It’s lighting up so many memories.” He gestured toward the window.

“Now that I see it, I can tell that a couple of stores are missing. One restaurant. And the knitting shop and occult supply are merged. But it looks… cared for. Not derelict at all.”

“I’m pretty sure that the Ghost townies wouldn’t allow that to happen. They love this town and they’re all really proud of it.”

He glanced at me with a crooked smile. “Don’t you mean we love this town and we’re really proud of it?”

I laughed softly. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I do.”

An awkward silence descended as I turned onto Violet Road and drove along the Manor’s fence. To break it, I asked, “Did you visit the Manor much when you were a kid?”

He nodded. “It was a regular school field trip for third and sixth graders before they closed the elementary school and shipped everyone to Richdale. Ricky and Taryn and their age group got the third grade trip, but not the sixth.”

“Did you visit outside those trips?”

“I worked there as a junior docent for a little while when I was a high school sophomore, but even then, tourism had started to drop off, so my summer job ended up being only two days a week and ended in the middle of August.” He shrugged.

“After that? I don’t think I ever went back.

” He snorted. “I probably thought I knew everything there was to know about the place, so why bother? It’s not as though there were any actual ghosts there. ”

“Teenage disdain. It’s a hard bar to clear.

” I slowed as we neared the main entrance, where the Closed sign was still posted inside the open gates.

“But that’ll change today. Because as of today, there will be an actual ghost there.

” I pulled into the drive, easing over the speed bump between gateposts.

“I guess you’re right. I wonder if—” Avi gasped and leaned back until he was halfway inside the seat. “Maz. Stop. Stop the car. Stop!”

I slammed on the brakes, glad that there was nobody behind me. “What is it?”

“I… I can’t. I have to leave. Now.”

I threw the car into reverse and backed up. Once we were clear of the grounds, Avi let out a shaky breath and bent nearly double, his arms wrapped across his stomach.

“Avi? What’s wrong? Are you okay? Does something about the Manor frighten you?”

“It doesn’t frighten me.” He turned his head to peer up at me and I recoiled, bonking my head against the window. I’d never seen that look on Avi’s face before, not even when he’d found out what Carson had done to him.

Pure, unadulterated rage.

“If I go through those gates, Maz, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“What? Why?”

He shook his head, his cardigan bunched in his clenched fists. “Something in there is pissing me off for no reason at all. It’s… It’s fraying my control, nipping at the edge of my consciousness. I have to go home before I do something I’ll regret. Before I hurt somebody. Before I hurt you .”

“Okay. Okay. It’s fine.” When I’d spoken to Marguerite Windflower—aka Peg—she’d told me that Thaddeus Richdale had done something that actively repelled spirits. I didn’t think it would enrage them, or that it could still be in effect. “I’ll drive you back.”

He choked on a laugh. “You don’t have to drive me, Maz. Getting home is never a problem. I’ll see you tonight.”

“I, um, have a date to pick Ricky up tonight.”

“Then I guess I’ll see you both.” He took another deep breath. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

Then he was gone.

“Well, crap.” I put the car in Drive and passed through the gates again. “And like hell will I not worry about you, Avi.”

I now had a new goal. Somewhere in the piles of Richdale family detritus, there had to be a clue about what Thaddeus had done to drive ghosts away. I’d find it, and once I did, I’d rip it out by its roots.

Avi didn’t deserve to live right across the freaking road from something that threatened him like this. Also, if this mysterious whatever-it-was was keeping other ghosts away, then it definitely had to go, not only for the sake of the town, but again for Avi.

Because if there wasn’t some supernatural blockage in place preventing it, there was one spirit who’d do everything in his phantasmagorical power to get back to Ghost, and it wasn’t Thaddeus or Jonah Richdale.

It was Oren Buckley.