I’d seen a girl lurking around Bolt Cross Road, but I’d never been able to figure out who she was. Ghosts didn’t show the signs of how they died, so I’d assumed it had been some disease, or a car accident.
“Oh,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“What other stories are real?” I knew a lot of them, but apparently not all.
“You’d be surpris—”
I slammed on the breaks. Artemis jerked forward, caught by the seat belt and her bag. A boy jogged across the street in front of us, arms out. A girl on the sidewalk screamed. A group of people materialized behind her, laughing. Noise. Not ghosts. The boy, who looked old enough to be a college student, came around and mimed rolling down my window.
I growled, already counting down from ten. “Let’s see what these interlopers want.”
The boy leaned into my window before I had it all the way down.
“Hey, we’re trying to get to theDead Men Walkinglocation, where they’re filming tonight. The, uh—”
“Hillcroft,” one girl called.
“The Hillcroft coal mine,” said the boy.
“Ah, okay,” I said in my best congenial suburban Hoosier voice. “You’re gonna wanna head west here. Straight through the field; don’t take the streets or you’ll miss it. If you reach the Royal Six, you’ve gone too far.”
“Hey, thanks.”
“No problem! Have a great night and stay safe!”
He jogged back to his friends. I rolled up the window and kept driving; in the rearview mirror, the college kids crossed the street and started into the ditch on the other side. Artemis watched them go, then said, “The Royal Six is on the other side of town.”
“TheDMWcrew should pay me for crowd control.”
“You aren’t worried they’ll get hurt or lost walking around the fields in the dark?”
“Better than them getting killed by a firestarter. Besides, I owe them nothing. If anything, they owemefor not running them over while they’re stumbling around in the street.”
“If you say so.”
I felt judged, but I always felt judged around Artemis.
We passed the trailer park on our way back to the bluffs. Lights shone through some of the trailer windows. A dog on a chain barked at the Chevelle as it passed. Artemis watched as we went by.
“You know what’s weird?” she said. “The Coalmine doesn’t have any ghost stories.”
“The Coalmine” was what most people called the trailer park. Even people who lived in the trailer park used the name, but when they said it, it was with a much different tone than the people who didn’t live there.
“My place has stories,” I said.
“Your place has stories because your trailer sits where Aberdeen House used to be. There aren’t anyhere. For all thestories we have in the rest of the Addamsville, the Coalmine doesn’t have any.”
I frowned. “Are you sure about that?”
“I’ve looked at almost everything in town. I’m pretty positive—”
“You don’t know about Daisy?”
She looked at me. “Who’s Daisy?”
“Hold on.” I put a hand up. “You don’t know trailer park stories? Daisy is, like,theghost on the east side.” I’d never seen her, but that didn’t mean the stories didn’t exist. “She’s a white pit bull with a brown spot over one eye and a notch out of her ear. She wanders the edges of the trailer park, or on the fringes of the trees. She keeps little kids from going places they shouldn’t and leads them back home when they get lost.”
