“Brenda!”
Barclay Langford, the stunned bridegroom, stared down at the crumpled form of his bride…an unmoving pile of sparkling fabric and awkward limbs on the balcony next to him.
The broken champagne glass glittered on the balcony next to her, and the dark red cocktail had splattered all over her face and the front of her frock.
She was dead.
One
Present Day
The last timeCallie Quigley had been inside the Tremaine Tower was when she was sixteen.
On New Year’s Eve.
Just before midnight.
That was sixteen years ago, and it had been amemorablenight…in more ways than one.
And there were parts she definitely didn’t want to repeat.
And yet, here I am.
She chuckled nervously and pushed against the heavy door.Too late to back out now.
The door creaked and protested, swinging open with great reluctance to reveal the stairs that wound up to the clock tower’s only chamber.
The metal steps rang dully as she climbed, her boots making solid sounds with each step. She hoped the noise would scare away anything that might lurk inside the tower…whether it be of the furry, scuttling sort or the darting, wing-thwacking kind.
She wasnotgoing to think about the wispy, ghostly type.
The Curse of the Tremaine Clock Tower was well-known among the residents of Wicks Hollow—about how Brenda Tremaine had been cursed by her fiancé’s former lover, and how she’d dropped dead on the twelfth stroke of midnight—just before making her wedding vows.
But that event alone hadn’t been enough to cement the story of the curse. There’d been several other strange and sudden deaths over the years since December 31, 1929.
All on New Year’s Eve.
All during weddings.
All unexplained.
All cursed.
Callie shivered a little, and not just because it was mid-December in Michigan near one of the Great Lakes.
Why did I decide to do this again…?
Because CQEvents is going to be one of the premier wedding planners in West Michigan and this is a great marketing move.
At the top of the stairs, she found herself on a spare landing with a door that she knew opened into a small room, along with dust motes, cobwebs, and piles of other stuff she didn’t care to examine too closely.
The lock to the room was a little cranky, but the key she’d been given eventually turned, and she pushed open the door.
Sixteen years hadn’t changed much about the place—including the fact that it was still as shadowy, dank, and eerie as she remembered from that fateful night.
Callie walked over the threshold, her breath making short, compact white puffs in the chill air. The small room—which was hardly more than a waiting area for the Clock Tower’s extravagant balcony—had two large windows on either side and was cast in the long shadows of a late afternoon in December.
A few straight-backed chairs were angled around a low table, and Callie wondered if they’d even been moved since she and Ben and the others had high-tailed it out of there that night. Some dusty bottles—including one still lying in the center of the table from their Spin the Bottle Truth or Dare game—littered the floor.
