Page 36 of Never Been Witched (Starfall Point #3)

She ran a translucent hand along her throat, where Alice noticed a raw red wound under the grayish bruising. It looked like someone had snatched a chain from around her neck, cutting the skin. Not enough to give her a fatal wound, but enough to leave a little blood soaking into her dress.

“V and S,” Alice murmured, remembering the inscription. “Stanford” and “Samuel” began with the same letter. She sighed. “Fooled by vague engraving, yet again.”

“Would your father’s liberal attitudes about hard work have allowed you to marry the son of a casket-maker?” Riley asked.

“Oh, I didn’t say that,” Victoria admitted.

“My family would not have been pleased at all. But I like to think that, eventually, I would have been able to convince them. They would have bought Samuel his own enterprise—a furniture factory in Grand Rapids, most likely. And they would have told their friends that Samuel was the son of a timber baron, heir to a furniture empire, to save face. I hoped he could have lived with that, but I doubt he would have enjoyed it. He loved his family, and wouldn’t have appreciated any implication that they were inferior. ”

“And Stanford?” Alice asked.

“I spent as little time with him as possible,” Victoria said, her voice sad. “Honestly, he barely noticed.”

“Did you talk to anyone about your doubts?” Riley asked, and Alice was grateful not to be stuck in this awkward interview alone.

Victoria sat on the lip of Eloise’s fountain.

Eloise patted Victoria’s back as she swam past. Or, at least, she made a patting gesture.

Alice wasn’t sure how that worked, ghosts touching each other.

“My sister knew something was happening, but she was getting so close to her own coming-out and I didn’t want to frighten her.

My mother? She kept telling me that this was normal, to have second thoughts about Stanford, and that she’d had her doubts about Papa.

Which wasn’t exactly helpful. I think she was worried about the embarrassment that a broken engagement would mean for her at the Ladies’ Charitable Aid Society, the church, her various clubs.

And I think she was concerned that if I broke things off with Stanford, I might not make another suitable match.

Society mamas would not risk connections between their sons and a lady who had already bolted from the altar once.

She kept asking me to wait, not to do anything rash.

Meanwhile, she was planning the wedding as if it was inevitable.

I told myself fairy stories. I kept pretending that one day, I could introduce them to Samuel as my beau. ”

“So, it wasn’t Samuel?” Alice said, absently gesturing toward her own neck. She already knew the answer, but she wanted final confirmation.

Victoria seemed genuinely offended. “Of course not. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but he would never.”

“You don’t remember?” Alice asked.

“The other ghosts tell me that happens sometimes, that when a death is particularly traumatic, the mind, well, blocks it out, like the blank space in a dream. It’s kinder that way, I think,” Victoria mused. “And the afterlife has so few kindnesses.”

Over their heads, an unctuous black shape slithered along the ceiling. Riley, Alice, and Victoria shuddered in unison.

“Oh, come on,” Riley sighed.

The ceiling ghost always brought a feeling of cold, anxious dread into any room it entered. It hovered overhead, dripping down as if reaching toward them. Alice couldn’t help but notice it seemed to be shying away from touching her—which she was not going to complain about.

“Speak of the devil,” Victoria said, frowning at the ceiling. “Excuse me. I generally make myself scarce when that spirit scuttles about. I find its presence very…unpleasant.”

“I do too,” Riley told her.

“I’ll do my best to find the ring,” Alice promised. “I know it’s not your attachment object, since you’re trapped in here. But—”

Victoria didn’t wait for Alice to say goodbye. She simply disappeared in a way that Alice envied.

“You suck,” Alice told the ceiling ghost. She grabbed the nearest bowl of herbed salt and threw it up like wedding confetti. The surface of the ceiling ghost hissed like water hitting hot frying oil. It retreated into the heart of the house, behind the basement door, where the scariest things hid.

The salt not absorbed into the ghost scattered across the floor, into the parlor. Alice heard a distinct pinging as it slipped into the heating grates. Alice listened to the tinny noises and nearly dropped her book.

The vents.

Victoria had said her family watched the furnace and the pipes being installed at the hotel.

When her grandparents burst into the shop and called Collin a “hoodlum,” Alice had vaguely heard a metallic plink in the midst of her panic.

In all her searches of the shop, she hadn’t looked in the vents.

When she’d first started working at the shop, one of her regular tasks had been lifting the heavy iron grates and vacuuming the shallow pans just beneath the floor.

Her grandparents were convinced this was a necessary weekly task because the clover-shaped gaps between the iron bars were wide enough for the odd dust ball or bit of paper to fall through.

Apparently, it would be “unseemly” for a customer to look down and see debris, if they happened to crawl along the floor to look down into the vents…

? When her grandparents started spending their winters in Florida, Alice had slowly cut back to cleaning the vents every other month or so.

And with the disruption of her grandparents’ arrival, she hadn’t done it in…

“Oh…” Alice whispered when all the cogs in her head clicked into place. “That is not ideal…”

***

Alice was scurrying again, making record time across the island, considering the wind blowing off the water. Riley hadn’t wanted her to go on her own, but while Alice might be able to explain her own presence in the shop to her grandparents, they would not appreciate plus-ones.

The shop was dark as she approached and she had to keep telling herself that she wasn’t doing anything wrong, entering her workplace-slash-home.

She wondered if she would have enough time to claim some of her stuff from her apartment before her grandparents called State Trooper Celia Tyree on her.

Alice stood in the same general area of the shop she’d been standing when she’d dropped the ring.

She turned, searching the floor for the nearest grate.

“Alice!” Arthur called across the shop. “Oh, how I’ve missed you.

Your grandparents, they’re bloody unbearable—pardon my language.

They make me want to leave the building for hours at a time just to get away from them, even though it makes me itch, being away from Bessie.

” He watched as she crawled along the wall of the shop, closest to where she’d been standing when her grandparents had confronted her.

“What are you doing creeping around there, love?”

“Hi, Arthur,” she whispered. “I’m trying to keep this a sort of stealth maneuver, all right?”

“Oh, sure, sure,” he told her. “But still, what are you doing?”

Alice braced herself up on her knees. “I’ll explain in just a minute, OK?”

Overhead, security lights clicked on. Apparently, her grandparents had installed motion-sensor lights while she was out.

Perfect.

She sighed, crawling along the wall. The vents leading to the shop’s furnace were ancient —decorative ironwork with sharp, occasionally rusted edges—nothing that would have been considered child-safe by any standard.

Alice used a small key chain flashlight to peer down into one and then another grate. She thought maybe she saw the glint of gold at the bottom of it, but it was obscured by dust and bits of paper.

She pulled a small tool kit from her purse and loosened the Phillips-head screws that held the cover in place.

She grimaced. It had been a while since she’d cleaned out the grates.

She ignored the guilt that zipped through her belly, the urge to take a Shop-Vac to every grate in the showroom.

That was about to be someone else’s problem.

She picked up three quarters, a large black coat button, and a paper clip.

It felt like clearing out from under a couch cushion.

She searched around with her fingers, reaching into the heating duct, praying she wouldn’t feel anything rodent-related.

Her fingertips brushed over a rounded shape.

She closed her hand around the object and pulled it out into the open.

The ring!

She could feel it, the vibration of ghostly attachment, the heartbreak and the hope that had been poured into this object, once upon a time.

The weird compulsive tickle to regain the ring since she’d lost it was finally appeased.

She practically sank to the floor as the relief spread through her body.

“So. Now you’re sneaking into the shop like a thief in the night?” Marilyn asked.

Alice groaned at the sound of her grandmother’s voice. The showroom lights clicked on. Apparently, her grandparents had made it across the island in record time. Stupid app notifications.

“What joy is ours,” Arthur sighed. “I’m sorry, love. Don’t pay attention to anything they say. You’re above all their nonsense.”

Alice shoved the ring into her jacket pocket and stood up.

Her grandparents were standing there in their typical post-dinner attire: fall-friendly cardigans pulled over their day clothes.

It was a weird, stuffy affectation that even as a child, Alice realized didn’t make her grandparents anything like Mr. Rogers.

“Well, I came by to give you my resignation and I realized I hadn’t cleared out the vents in a week or two,” Alice lied cheerfully. Because she knew how much cheer annoyed them after five—and they would be so incensed by her quitting, they wouldn’t notice the unlikelihood of the vent thing.