“Maybe I should just stay like this,” Alice cried.
“Ladies,” Roan said in that smooth-as-whisky-falling-over-ice voice, “no one is going to be stuck in lights. I will get you out, Alice. Now stand still and I’ll start untangling.”
Roan began unwinding Alice again as Ruth looked on skeptically. “We should keep her in there for a while,” she said to me. “Teach her that she needs to go to the doctor.”
“I’m not sure that’s the lesson that should be learned.”
“I am.”
Deciding that I could use a little cheer, I headed toward the kitchen to get a glassful of apple cider that Roan had heated up.
Christmas music played on his Bluetooth speaker, and the voice of Michael Bublé filled the inn. It was the middle of the week, and Roan didn’t have any guests. They would be arriving within the next day to stay for the weekend and shop at all of Haunted Hollow’s stores. For a town that touted Halloween, it sure did do Christmas pretty well.
It would be my second Christmas in this town, the first one where I’d be engaged and my second Christmas without my dad, Vince Breneaux.
As I ladled up apple cider, all I could think of were the traditions that my dad and I had kept. Christmas Eve we would spend ghost hunting, searching for spirits that just had to be difficult during the holidays. Surprisingly, a lot of ghosts liked to play Christmas Past or even Christmas Future. Dead husbands murdered by their wives tended to appear and tell their wives that they would die within the hour, that if they didn’t confess their guilt to the police, they would befall a horrible fate.
Just thinking about it made me laugh. Did that make me a bit of a sadist?
I remember one lady ran out of her house, her hair wild, house robe open, the belt trailing behind her. She ran up to every person she saw and confessed to killing her husband. Sure enough, when Dad and I approached her house, there sat the spirit laughing his fool head off.
I helped the spirit of the dead husband to the other side. After all, once the wife confessed, his business on earth was done.
Others performed a basic Christmas Past haunting. Those were the sort of ghosts that simply wanted to be remembered. Usually there wasn’t a lot of menace to those encounters, but one time a ghost decided to play Christmas Past at a holiday dance. Unfortunately the ghost turned up looking exactly as he had died—beheaded.
Needless to say, the party had quickly come to end when everyone started screaming. Then somehow a fire erupted, the water sprinklers got turned on and the whole banquet hall wound up a dripping mess.
Yep, those were the good old days.
“Don’t you think Christmas is, like, the raddest holiday ever?”
I glanced up from my cup of cider to see my friendly neighborhood ghost, Susan Whitby, leaning against a chair, chewing bubblegum while she twisted her eighties beaded rope necklace.
“Yeah, it’s pretty rad.”
“What’re you drinking?”
“Hot apple cider. Want some?”
“Barf-o-rama. Like, no thanks.”
“Suit yourself.” I took a long sip. “Everything okay? Is there some reason why you’re here at the inn and not at my house?”
So yes, Susan lived with me. It was kind of a weird thing with Roan. He didn’t like to spend the night at my place because, well, Susan may have walked in on him once or twice while he was in the bathroom.
Susan swore that she wasn’t trying to get a glimpse of his jewels, but I knew the truth. Susan was a closet pervert. There was no two ways about it.
So because of that, whenever one of us wanted to spend the night, I did so at the inn.
Susan tugged the ghostly bubblegum she was chewing, creating a rope from her mouth to her fingers. “Well, I came here because someone stopped by.”
I frowned. It was unlike Susan to have stopped filing her nails to tromp all the way over to the inn to give me information like that. I wasn’t kidding. To Susan, filing her nails was a religion, so ignoring that task meant something big had happened.
“Who was this someone?”
She shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Some guy.”
She was avoiding the topic. “Susan, what’s wrong? What guy?”
