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I’m sitting at my desk in the offices of Herveaux & Sons Construction Monday morning when Alcide plops down in the seat across from me. He puts an iced coffee on the coaster for me. He wants something. Alcide only brings me iced coffee when he wants something. 

“What can I do for you, Alcide?” I unwrap the straw and plunge it into the coffee. I can see he also sprung for cold foam, so this must be something big. A sip of the coffee tells me it’s cold brew. Oh fuck. “Are you firing me?! If this is my severance package I’m going to go Carrie Underwood on the new truck.” 

He laughs and says, “Of course I’m not firing you! You’re the only one around here who can keep these donkeys in line with a look.” 

“Oh, so you’re giving me a raise,” I reply with a grin. 

“Actually, I’m here to ask what sort of bewitching spell you put on my boy. He couldn’t shut up about you last night,” Alcide informs me, which makes my heart stutter and my cheeks warm up. 

“No love whammies, I promise, at least not from me. That boy wooed me with a boat, soft music, and one of his sweatshirts. It’s still in my car.” 

Alcide looks at me in a way I can’t quite describe. “Which sweatshirt?”

“It’s black with a trinity type symbol.” 

His eyes bug out. Uh oh. 

“It’s a triquetra. That’s Eric’s favorite sweater.”

“Awww, I love that you know that about him,” I half tease. 

He shakes him head and I’m not sure what to make of his visit. 

“Alcide, you made it seem like Eric’s a safe guy to be around, so if you weren’t serious about that it would be a great time to tell me that.” 

He sighs heavily and tilts his head back to look up at the drop tile ceiling. This can’t be good. 

“Alright, so Eric’s not an unsafe guy like he’ll drop a roofie in your drink or punch you in the face if you eat the last french fry.” 

“Good?” I feel like there’s more. 

“The thing is, he’s… I mean he’s not the most relationship stable guy. By that I mean monogamy isn’t something he generally does. He likes to keep his options open, you know?” 

“So don’t get too attached to him?” 

“Usually, yeah, that’s the advice I’d give if someone asked.” 

“But not this time?”

“You have his favorite sweater. He wouldn’t even let me borrow that. It’s like if you caught someone else drinking out of Stanza.” Stanza is my knockoff Stanley tumbler, and she’s my favorite cup to drink from. She’s sunset colors that go from purple to pink to yellow, fading seamlessly from one color to the next. If I catch anyone with my Stanza, I will not hesitate to karate chop them in the throat. I sent a memo. 

“Pretty serious.” 

I remember the woman with the crunchy hair who Eric was talking to when I walked into County Line Bar Saturday night. She looked pretty engrossed in the conversation and he just ditched her. A week ago, two weeks ago, was that woman feeling the same things I am, only for Eric to have moved on already? Was it all one-sided on her part? Maybe I misread the whole thing and the other woman is just a friend? No. I know that look. There was lust, desire involved. I don’t know how he was looking back at her, though. If it was the same look, maybe that’s why he’s not free until Thursday. Ugh. No, I’m not going down this rabbit hole of assumptions and suppositions like I’m in some silly Katherine Heigl rom-com from fifteen years ago. 

“All I’m saying, I guess, is he doesn’t get in his head about women, usually. So if you aren’t prepared for something serious, find a way to tell him because I’m pretty sure he’s ready to go all-in,” Alcide tells me.

“Thanks, Al, but we haven’t even been on a date yet. I don’t think I need to worry about it.” 

“You don’t know Eric.” He stands up. “But you will.” 

“Is that a threat?” 

“I think it might be a promise.” Alcide walks out of my office. 

I swirl my cold brew and take another drink. I don’t know why I love the mocha coconut so much, but it’s addictive. Unable to stop myself, I pick up my phone and text Eric. I’d just as soon put this to rest than worry about it. I’m not into leaving things lingering when they can easily be addressed, and then either dealt with or discarded. 

S: We’re both adults, right? Capable of open communication and being honest even when it might hurt each other? 

I’m not expecting an answer right now. It’s not even nine o’clock. I don’t know what time County Line Bar closes on Sunday night, but it’s reasonable to assume Eric might still be asleep. Except I get a pretty quick response. 

E: I like to think I’m capable of those things. What’s on your mind?

S: Herveaux asked me why I put the whammy on you and then warned me that you have player tendencies. Should I be concerned? 

E: Only that your boss might need someone to fill in after I rip him a new asshole. 

S: Don’t. He’s your friend, yes, but he’s my friend, too. You’re not denying what he said.

I’m still typing when Eric sends a follow-up message. 

E: This is probably going to sound like a throwaway line, but you’re special, Sookie. It’s true that I don’t get into a lot of committed relationships, but it’s not because I’m not capable. I’m selective.

S: Oops. Okay, strike my last sentence from the record 🙊

E: So ordered. 🧑🏼‍⚖️

My phone rings and it’s Eric calling. I spring up and shut my office door. My private business doesn’t need to become office gossip. 

“Hi.” 

“Good morning. Lola woke me up for her breakfast.” 

“Give her some scratches for me.”

“You got it. So what else is bothering you?” He doesn’t sound annoyed, which I’m grateful for because a lot of guys would decide this is too much and block me. 

“Are there any women out there who have a solid reason to believe they’re your girlfriend?” I ask. 

“I’m pretty upfront with people. I’ve outgrown that immature notion of leading someone on as a way of manipulating them or avoiding accountability. If anyone thinks we’re in a serious relationship, it’s because they’ve chosen to ignore everything I’ve said,” he tells me. “So my answer is no, I don’t have a girlfriend and no one should think she is. But I’m interested in the possibility that you might change that.” 

Good enough for me. 

🌬️

Later on I’ve got Ray LaMontagne playing on my big Bluetooth speaker while I sit at my computer downstairs with a burrito bowl from Thalia’s that puts Chipotle to shame. The birria is to die for at Thalia’s. I make sure to get extra lime. It’s just… chef’s kiss. Yum. 

While I eat, I sift through the pictures I took at Hadley’s yesterday. I didn’t bring my laptop along because I wouldn’t have been able to leave last night. Hadley isn’t horribly demanding, but I would have felt pressured to do the editing right then and there, rather than heading home. So here I am, looking the pictures over. Again, I’m not a professional photographer. This is a hobby. I’ve got no formal training, but I like to think I know if the contrast is off or if I need to remove glare or something. I’m capable of making fairly simple edits and applying filters. 

The test shots are of no consequence, so I discard those. It’s all going well until I come across some pictures I don’t remember taking. They’re out of focus and as I move to the next slide, I feel my heartbeat pick up. A pale face appears in the next slide. It’s an extreme close-up of a woman I don’t know. There’s no way it’s Amelia, Pam, or Hadley. This woman has red hair with a butterfly haircut. Her eye makeup is fairly natural, although her dark brown eyebrows betray the red hair framing her face. Her lips are super glossy. Deep blue eyes are lined with dark lashes that don’t look fake. Who is she? How did she get on my memory card? 

For a moment, I wonder if maybe I have come to the end of the shoot, but no. We took pictures outside, and I haven’t seen those yet. I move to the next slide and when my eyes register what it is I’m seeing, I scream. The same face, only now the eyes are vacant and the woman is hanging by the neck from the rafters in Hadley’s barn. 

What. The. Fuck. 

To make it even weirder, Hadley and Pam are right next to dangling feet, completely oblivious to the woman’s hanging body, while they arrange pastries on the dining table. My stomach turns and before I can change my mind, I send the image to the printer. I go back to the previous slide and print that, too. With a shaking hand, I reach out to pick up my phone. I need to talk to Holly. 

“No, wait,” I tell myself. “Look up the address first. See if there’s something else.” 

I take a deep breath and shrink the window to open Chrome instead. It takes a few tries to successfully type in Hadley’s address, but when I do, I scan the results. The first few links are to Zillow, realtor.com, and Redfin. Listings from when the house was still on the market. I take a deep breath and click on the realtor.com listing. The listing reflects that the house is off market, but I can scroll down and see the sales history. I can’t see what the price drops were before Hadley bought the house, but I have to assume it was initially listed for more than $850,000. The land is likely worth that much on its own, even without the house and barn on it. Now add the structures and the fact that they’ve been newly renovated? I’m guessing the original sales price was nearly double. 

I scroll down to the sales history and see that the property was purchased in 1941 for just $2,750. It’s crazy to think that’s all it sold for, but considering wages back then, it makes sense. I expect to see the house having changed hands a bunch but no. The property sold in 1941 and 2024. That’s it. And Hadley purchased it for a scant $230,000. How is this possible? I could understand that sales price, maybe, if the buildings on the property were falling apart and beyond saving. That’s not the case. The workshop didn’t get the makeover the other buildings did, but it had a green metal roof out on it, and it seems structurally sound. So why did this Lisa woman accept such a low offer? 

Maybe the realtor can offer some insight? I’m afraid to show these pictures to Hadley, though, and I feel like I have to if I’m going to dig deeper into her house. I roll my chair across the floor to retrieve the pictures from the printer. A chill goes through me when I look at them. My phone rings on the desk and it makes me jump. I roll back to see it’s Eric calling. 

“Hey,” I say when I pick up, and I know I sound a little shaky. 

“Hi. You okay?”

“Uh, I’m not sure. I might have come across something really weird.” 

“What kind of weird?” 

He’s going to think I’m insane if I tell him about this. 

“Do you believe in the paranormal?”

“Ghosts and things? Yeah, actually. It’s not something that’s really openly discussed or accepted in the military, but I think anyone who gets deployed and says they have never had a weird or inexplicable encounter is full of shit,” Eric tells me. “Why? Do you live in a haunted house?” 

“No, at least I don’t think so. If I’ve got spirits here, they don’t bother me. It’s my cousin. I told you about the photos I went to take yesterday. Well, I’m just going through them now and I found pictures I didn’t take of someone who wasn’t in a physical body with us.” 

“You’re shitting me.” 

“Nope. It’s really creepy, Eric. I’m about to go down a rabbit hole because I think something really bad happened on that property that ended with a woman hanging herself in the barn.” 

“What makes you think that?” 

“I have a picture of it.” 

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.” 

“What’s your address? I want to see.” 

I give him my address. “Bring Lola.” 

“Deal. See you in twenty,” he says, and hangs up. 

I can wait twenty minutes to keep researching. It’ll give me a chance to finish my dinner. 

🌬️

Lola’s tail wags when I open the front door. Eric smiles when he sees me, which I guess is the human equivalent of a wagging tail. I smile back and say, “Welcome. Come in.” 

I step back and let them in. Eric releases Lola from her leash, and she gets busy exploring the house. I don’t mind. 

“I’m sorry, I don’t have any toys for her. She might catch whiffs of my parents’ dog, but they always take Sambuca’s toys home,” I explain. 

“She’ll be fine. I’ve got some emergency toys in the truck, just in case,” Eric says. He closes the front door. “This is a cute little house.” 

“Oh, thank you. It was stuck in 1956 when I bought it, but I got it for a song because of that. Working for a contractor has its benefits.” 

“Al does good work,” Eric agrees as he looks around. “Definitely doesn’t look like 1956 in here anymore.” 

“I almost kept all the pink tiles in the bathroom,” I chuckle. “Pink tiles, pink tub, pink sink, pink toilet…”

“That’s a ridiculous amount of pink.” 

“Agreed. Besides, yellow is my favorite color.” 

“I noticed.” He gestures to my outfit. I’m wearing goldenrod colored denim shorts and a goldenrod and white striped tee. 

“Oh. Yeah. Dead giveaway, I guess.” 

“Your couch is also yellow. Your car.” 

“It’s so cheerful. Thirsty?” 

“If we’re going to look at ghost pictures, I think we could both use a drink.” 

“I think you’re right.” 

Eric follows me the short distance to the kitchen. My front door opens into the living room/dining room space, but the kitchen is open to them. A peninsula is what separates the kitchen from the dining room. I’ve got a round table that comfortably seats four. My furniture is more mid century in design, but I like a lot of cozy textures, so there are pillows and plush blankets all over the place. My own photography is framed and hanging on the walls in place of generic art prints. I’ve always felt like a house should be a reflection of the people who live there, rather than constantly being staged for sale to the next owners. 

“Beer, vodka, iced tea, lemonade, water?” I ask Eric. 

“Beer is good.” 

I open the fridge and grab a bottle of Guinness. “I hope this is okay. It’s what I use for battering my fish.” 

“It’s perfect.” Eric waits for me to hand him a bottle opener before he pops the top. I grab the pitcher of lemonade and then pull a bottle of Tito’s from the freezer to make myself a vodka lemonade. 

“So you don’t think I’m insane for thinking I’m seeing a ghost?” I ask while I mix my drink. 

“No. Even before I enlisted in the military I believed in the paranormal,” Eric assures me. “I think sometimes it’s easier here to convince yourself that you didn’t really hear what you heard because of the wind and the trees. You didn’t really see what you saw for the same reason. Maybe that’s true most of the time, but every now and then, I don’t think it’s just the wind.” 

I put the vodka and lemonade back in the fridge and freezer. “Come and look at this.” I motion for Eric to follow me. 

Just beyond the kitchen is a doorway. To the left is the door to my single car garage. To the right is the staircase leading to the basement where my home office, laundry room, and three piece washroom are located. Eric follows me down the stairs. When I renovated the house, Alcide finished the basement for me. A new sump pump was installed, LVP flooring was laid, drywall was hung over spray foam insulation, and now the basement is cozy as heck even in the coldest weather. 

“Nice basement. It’s like having a whole second house down here,” Eric says. 

“Yeah, it could be. If I ever wanted to add more bedrooms or turn part of this into a home gym or separate the office so the rest is play space for kids, I could.” I walk over to the printer to pick up the pictures, but they’re gone. Weird. Did I leave them on the desk? 

A quick check of the desk tells me the pictures aren’t there either, and I am positive I had prints but I didn’t take them upstairs. 

“What’s wrong?” Eric asks.

“The pictures are gone. I left them on the printer and now…” I bend over to look in the trash bin under my desk, but they’re not there either. “What the fuck? They didn’t just get up and walk away.” 

I move my mouse to pull up the pictures on the computer, but when I start to go through the photos again, the two pictures I didn’t take are gone. Am I going insane? 

“They’re gone,” I whisper. “I swear to God, Eric, there were two pictures I didn’t take. Now they’re gone. It’s just the pictures I took, but I swear there was this woman with red hair, blue eyes, and she was hanging by her neck from the rafters in the barn.” 

I pull up a picture that shows the exposed rafters and point to the approximate location of where the woman was hanging. 

“She was right about here and in the picture, you can see her hanging and then my cousin and Pam are standing beside the dining room table, talking like they’re oblivious to the corpse beside them,” I explain to him. 

“That’s fucking creepy,” he says. 

Lola comes down the stairs, happy to have found people and more space to explore. 

“Super creepy,” I agree. “Is it possible for ghosts to manipulate things like that?” 

“Honestly? I have no idea. There have been reports of audio recordings being manipulated. Being able to manipulate a memory card seems a bit odd, but not completely impossible. But I believe you if you say the images existed.” 

I get down on my knees and look in the gap between the floor and the cabinet on wheels where the printer is located to see if somehow the papers blew off and landed down there. It happened before with reports from work. There’s nothing under the cabinet but a couple of dust bunnies and a paperclip. This is going to bug me. 

“Why show me this just to make it disappear?” I ask as I stand up. 

“Maybe she’s messing with you. Or maybe she just wants someone to know she’s there? Most people who deal in the paranormal say ghosts linger because they either don’t know they’re dead, or they’re having trouble moving on. If she’s got unfinished business, maybe we need to find out what it is,” Eric suggests. 

“We?” I arch an eyebrow. 

“Yep. You just got yourself a Dr. Peter Vankman to your Dana Barrett,” he says with a smirk. 

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