I could call Donny with questions, but calling him minutes after I said no to his offer feels annoying, like I should’ve thought of these questions when we were already talking.
I can figure this out myself.
I climb back in the car, and Bob launches himself into my lap, covering my face with kisses like I’ve been gone for hours, and the cone presses against my cheeks.
There are enough ghosts out there for Donny and Nico to stay busy, but those guys actively go searching for them. I’ve only seen one ghost in twenty-one years. That’s not exactly an epidemic.
Even so, I need to be ready just in case. Donny made a salt circle to trap the ghost inside it. So, logically, a circle should also keep ghosts out, right? If the salt is a barrier they can’t cross?
The question is how to make a salt circle in a car.
I could pour salt in a giant circle around the outside of my car, but I don’t want to risk it blowing away if we get bad weather. I do some brainstorming and, thirty minutes later, am at Home Depot, pushing a flat orange cart around the store. Bob sits on top of it, facing forward like a mermaid on the front of a ship.
I grab a cast-iron skillet in case I need to go all Rapunzel on some ghost asses, a fifty-pound bag of road salt, and a coil of vinyl tubing. Back in my car, I use a funnel to fill the tubes with salt and tape the ends together to create a ring around my living space. The skillet goes under my driver’s seat, where I can get it fast if I need to.
What if this isn’t enough? If another ghost comes to pay me a visit and my arts-and-crafts project does nothing but make me feel like an idiot before I die?
Bob looks up at me like a very old and disgruntled version of the Pixar lamp, and I scoop him into my lap. He smells like corn chips and the vet, but I hold him until my heart rate drops below panic levels. Maybe learning more about what I’m up against will calm me down.
I’m super careful walking up the marble steps into the library because Bob is smuggled in my backpack, his nose poking out of the zipper just enough to breathe but not enough to be seen, and I don’t want any sudden movements to hurt his leg. Mrs. Chang is at the circulation desk. She’s got to be in her seventies, with silver hair she keeps in a neat bun and reading glasses on a beaded chain around her neck.
I pull a bag of caramel candies from my pocket and set it on the counter.
“Oh, Eden, you’re spoiling me,” she says, reaching for the bag. “You need to stop giving me these.”
“I will not be stopping, actually,” I say.
I started bringing her candy to thank her for pretending not to notice me sneaking Bob in every time I came here, and we ended up bonding over our shared sweet tooth. It became our thing.
She gives me a caramel, and I roll the hard candy around my mouth as I walk into the empty computer lab. I settle into the corner station where the security camera has a blind spot, and unzip my bag enough for Bob to stick his entire cone out.
“Stay quiet.”
He glowers at me, as if he’s humiliated to be carried in my backpack.
I stare at the search bar for a full minute before typing:William Caine serial killer.
These computers are from the nineties, so results take a couple of seconds to populate. I click on a Wikipedia entry, and there it is: a black-and-white photo of a man in his forties with hollow cheeks, sunken eyes, and thin lips pressed in a line.
It’s the same face I saw in the smoke.
Caine strangled four women in parking lots between 1987 and 1989, then was sentenced to life in prison. Like Donny said, he had a stroke three weeks ago at the ripe old age of 79. All of his victims were women in their twenties or thirties. I click through to the victim photos, and get a cold and tight feeling in the pit of my stomach. Every single woman has dark hair. I reach up to touch my own hair, staring down at the black strands as they run through my fingers. I could have been one of them. I almostwasone of them, because this… this is real. Serial killers are coming back from the dead to continue their murder sprees.
I try to focus on breathing, but my breath comes out in puffs like I’m sitting outside and not in a heated library. Wait.
That’s not right. Why is it so cold in here?
I snap my head up from the screen, scanning the rows of empty computer stations. Nothing. Just dust motes and the hum of ancient computers. But I can feel it. The same alarm bell that went off in my brain right before the rope came over my head.
My fingers dig into my biceps as I try to shake the feeling. It’s like something’s hovering just behind my shoulder, breathing but not breathing.
“… hhhhh-eeee…”
I twist around, but there’s nothing there.
“… puh-puh-llll…”
The sound is garbled and wet, like someone trying to speak through a mouthful of water. Bob’s ears snap to attention.
