Page 25 of My Favorite Lost Cause (The Favorites #2)

MAREN

E lijah enters the kitchen on Monday looking grimmer than normal. He takes a seat at the table and waves me off when I hold up the coffee pot.

“I’ve got some potentially bad news,” he announces. “They moved the inspection up—it’s now happening Wednesday.”

Charlie’s jaw drops. “That’s two days from now. How is that possibly legal?”

Elijah shrugs. “I doubt that it is, but in the time it would take to get our complaint heard by anyone, the inspection will already have been done. I’m still assuming the whole thing’s a formality—I mean, they know we’re in the middle of a renovation—but I’ve contracted with a roofing crew out of Beaufort to start repairing the joists and then the roof.

As long as we can prove that we’ve got it all in process, we’ll be fine. ”

Charlie pinches the bridge of his nose, stressed out even though Elijah’s telling him not to be. It’s a surprising side to a guy who gives the impression, at home, of always being slightly too relaxed. “So you want me back in the basement?” he asks.

Elijah tips back in his chair. “I think we’ve got to spread out so by the time this inspector arrives, he can see that every hazard is in the process of being repaired.

I’ve got an electrician coming in to look at the wiring, so you can help me redo the porch and I’ll leave a small team finishing up in the basement. And Maren…wallpaper?”

I nod, laughing at my uselessness. Can’t pass inspection without wallpaper removal. Everyone knows that.

I clean up breakfast, then grab the wallpaper steamer, with the puppies at my feet. I’ve barely got one foot on the steps to the second floor before Echo and Narcy both start crying. They follow me to the third step before Echo turns and races back to the first floor with Narcy in her wake.

“What’s going on?” Charlie asks.

“They’re scared to go up,” I tell him. I’m trying not to be freaked out by this. They’re scared of lots of things they shouldn’t be—the robotic vacuum was so distressing to them that I finally gave it away. “But, you know, we don’t have stairs at the condo, so they’re not used to them.”

Charlie gives me a side-eye. “They ran up the porch stairs just fine.”

“I hate when you apply logic.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed,” he says. “So are we in agreement that the house is haunted, and we should be getting the hell out?”

I grin. “You don’t want that any more than I do. You like it here. Admit it.”

His smile matches my own. “It’s okay. Not crazy about the Amityville Horror situation currently unfolding, however.”

I shake my head. “If there’s a ghost, it’s a good ghost.”

“You know who says that? The first person to die in a horror film.” He lifts Echo and Narcy, one under each arm. “Your mother is about to be possessed by spirits of the undead, so I guess it’s gonna be the three of us from now on.”

I’m smiling as I watch him walk outside, still talking to them. He’s already come around to them, and he doesn’t even realize it .

I start upstairs again, a little more unsettled than I was before.

And though I’m determined to avoid Margaret’s room for the time being, when I reach the landing, it’s as if…

my feet are accustomed to turning in that direction, like one of those paths you’ve taken so many times that you can arrive at its end with no memory of how you got there.

I walk in, and nothing happens. No giddiness, no grief.

But just as I’m leaving the room, I catch a glance of myself in the mirror, and it’s as if…

I see her, and I see me too. Both of us young and hopeful.

It’s gone before I’m even sure it was there, and what am I supposed to make of it if it was?

I keep waiting for Margaret to write me some big message, telling me clearly what I’m meant to do with myself, and it doesn’t happen.

I head to the primary suite. I love this room too, but in a different way. I love Margaret’s room the way you might love your childhood home. I love the primary suite simply because it’s glorious, with two full sets of French doors and a wide balcony overlooking the backyard and the cove.

I picture this room with its carpet pulled up, the gleaming hardwood beneath it refinished. I picture it with a canopy bed piled high with blankets and a dog bed at its foot for the puppies. Not that the puppies will sleep here . Obviously, it will be Charlie’s room one day.

It’s strange that I keep forgetting it won’t be mine too.

That night, I dream about a desk I had as a kid, one that belonged to my mother as a girl. I pull out the chair and feel beneath the desk’s top drawer for my journal, hidden in the open space between the drawer’s frame and the cross post.

I am bursting with news that I can share with no one but this book in front of me. It feels as if my life is changing by the minute, growing more exciting and more troubling all at the same time.

What’s strange is that when I look at the hands holding the pen, they are mine and yet they are not mine.

I try to focus on the words spilling onto the page, but I can’t quite make them out.

I only know that I can barely contain my excitement and that they are absolutely one hundred percent about him .

My eyes fly open. It’s barely dawn, and the puppies are sound asleep at the foot of the bed.

The desk in that dream…did I see it in the attic last week?

I’m positive it’s just my imagination running away from me again, but…

the hands. I noticed my hands, and even at the time, I thought that they looked different.

And the handwriting, too. I tend to print more than anything else, but those words in the dream were in perfect, rounded cursive…almost like calligraphy.

It’s definitely my imagination, the whole thing.

But what if it isn’t? I saw Elijah’s guys carrying the furniture out of the house yesterday…Did they take it to the dump already? And if the furniture is gone will I actually drive to the dump like a lunatic, crying that I dreamed about a journal?

I climb from the bed, waking the dogs as I slip on shorts and flip-flops.

I exit the studio with them at my heels, and I’ve just passed Charlie’s door when he emerges in nothing but boxers, running a hand over his face—a motion that sends a dozen muscles rippling across his stomach.

“Maren, why the fuck are you up and making a racket at five-thirty in the morning?”

“Sorry,” I whisper, wincing.

“You know, you whispering now doesn’t help me much. Why are you up and…inappropriately dressed?”

I frown at him. “Inappropriately dressed?” I demand, looking at my outfit. “Sorry, Winston Churchill. I didn’t know we had a dress code. ”

“I’m pretty sure you know you ought to be wearing a bra when we’ve got thirty strangers working on the property.”

I glance down again, and like clockwork, my nipples decide to stand at attention. “Oh. Well, no one’s here right now. I just wanted to see if the furniture from the attic was still in front.”

He scrubs his hand over his face again. “It is. Mystery solved. And we’re not keeping it, so go back to fucking bed.”

Thank God I don’t have to drive out to the dump, because I absolutely would have. “The dogs are up, so I’m just going to check on some stuff. Go back to sleep. Sorry I woke you.”

“Put on some clothes first,” he barks as he returns inside, letting the door slam shut behind him.

I ignore him—the crew won’t be here for hours—and continue on to the front of the house, where the oaks block the early morning sun and the furniture remains stacked in a big pile—tables atop shelves, bed frames disassembled and leaning haphazardly against the surrounding trees.

Fortunately the little desk is only on top of a credenza.

I’m in the process of dragging a bookcase over so I can climb up when Charlie walks around the house, now in a T-shirt and shorts.

I flush. I’d rather he not be out here to witness my insanity. “I thought you were going back to bed.”

“Yeah, that was the plan, but I had a sudden image of you climbing on sixteen poorly balanced pieces of furniture to get something and here you are. Why ?”

My exhale is half embarrassed and half exasperated. I wish he’d stayed in bed—then I wouldn’t have had to explain this thing that might sound a little quirky. Possibly worse than quirky. “You’ve got to promise you won’t make fun of me.”

“That’s…a really tall order.”

“Fine,” I reply, beginning to scale the bookcase, which sways slightly beneath my weight. “Then you don’t need to know.”

He was ten feet away, but I’ve barely climbed up one shelf before his hands are around my waist and he’s setting me back on the ground. For a single moment, I’m wildly conscious of those hands of his, in a way I shouldn’t be. “I won’t make fun of you,” he says, letting me go. “Tell me.”

I don’t actually believe him, but it’ll all come out eventually. “You remember our first night here?”

“Of course. It’s the closest we’ve ever come to having sex. I’m not about to forget that anytime soon.”

I roll my eyes. “We were not about to have sex. But anyway, it wasn’t the mouse that woke me up. I was tapped.”

“Tapped.”

I reach out and tap his shoulder three times in a row. “Like that. I thought it was you.”

He regards me with wary eyes. “What the fuck, Maren? And you didn’t mention it?”

“I thought it would sound crazy if I said some ghost was warning us about the mouse, so I?—”

“What if it wasn’t a ghost? What if there was someone actually in the house?”

Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. Still... “There wasn’t. I’d have heard footsteps. Anyway, you remember that day you found me in the room upstairs, and I didn’t realize all that time had passed?”

“Yeah…” he says with a hint of dread.