It didn’t even make her sad. It was kind of a relief to be free from expecting something different out of her life. Things were settled.Shewas settled. Maybe that wholethingat the door with Ty this morning hadn’t feltsettled, but she just needed a few days to recalibrate to having Ty around.
Because she was glad he was home. Glad he was ready to move on from baseball, though she still thought being some kindof coach was the next natural step—one that would suit him. He was patient and fun and good with kids. He knew what terrible coaches and influences looked like, so he wouldn’t be one.
She needed to talk to Grandma. Maybe if they worked together, they could get him to come around to the idea…and believe it had been his own.
Buoyed by the thought, she started to close down the museum for the day. Ty was in the basement taking out some trash, so she locked the front door and began putting the interactive things back to rights. The two kids this afternoon had done a number on everything—something Lara was always gratified to see.
The kids might have been bored by most of the history, but they got a kick out of dressing up like explorers and soldiers and wild west cowboys. They’d even asked to come back tomorrow as their parents had shuffled them out the door.
She knelt in the play area to put the costumes back on their hangars neatly. She heard a faint burst of static, and then the little radio in the decades exhibit turn on.
Lara paused for a moment. There was no song playing. It was a commercial for a kid’s store.
“Weren’t they cute, Clementine?” she said quietly. Her and Grandma had made a game of talking to their resident ghosts—assigning certain behaviors to the people showcased in the museum.
Clementine had been a well-known figure in the early ranching days of the area. She’d had eight children—five of whom survived into adulthood—and lost her husband when they’d all been under the age of eighteen. She’d continued to run the ranch, into her early nineties. In the eighties, her family had donated some of her journals and other artifacts to the museum. She tended to show up in sounds—radios turning on, cell phonesgoing off, sometimes people heard humming, particularly once the children’s area had been established.
Neither Lara nor Mary Lou considered itfancifulto have conversations with the guests they couldn’t see. It just seemed sensible that a building as old as this one, in a town with as much history as Wild Rose Point, there had to besomethinglurking.
They got inexplicable flickering lights—they’d assigned that one to Lissy, the pregnant widow from WWII who’d died in childbirth…just a few days before her husband had died on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. Door slams and cold snaps from Floyd, the disgraced roaring twenties politician, often followed by the sticky floral perfume of his flamboyant mistress, Josie. The smell of campfire or cigars was Jack, a man who’d come to the area in the early 1800s to fur trade—who Lara believed was also the figure guests sometimes claimed to see standing on an ocean rock.
Lara was so used to it all, it never fazed her. But she knew someone it fazed. She heard Ty’s steps coming up from the basement and tried to bite back a grin.
When he appeared, his hair was mussed up, and he had a streak of dirt across his cheekbone.
Something internally sighed at the sight of him a little disheveled.
Stop that, she ordered herself.
The radio abruptly shut off, and Ty eyed it warily as it passed. He said nothing, so Lara bit her tongue. It was his first day back, she wouldn’t start poking at him about the supernatural.
Yet.
“Playing dress up?” he asked dubiously at the sight of her kneeling amongst the costumes.
She got to her feet but kept one of the hats in her hands. “You’d look real cute in a cowboy outfit.” She held the cowboy hat out to him teasingly.
He took it, placed it on his head obligingly.
Another internal sigh, and another internal reprimand.
Ty tapped his chin, surveying the costumes. “Then you need a prairie apron.” He grabbed the flowered fabric, stepped forward and put the neck hole over her head.
Too close again. Nearly toe-to-toe. And yeah, he looked just fine in a cowboy hat, but the apron at least felt like a bit of a barrier. A reminder this was fictional—just a joke.
But then thelights flickered, a couple of them going out, sending the room into dim light that almost reminded Lara of candlelight.
Ty eyed the light fixtures as warily as he’d eyed the radio.
Which was now playing some old, slow brass band song.
She knew what Ty was thinking, and it made her grin. But before she could tease him, he fixed her with a stern look.
“Don’t say it.”
“Don’t say what?” Lara replied innocently. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly rational reason a few lights went out and a few didn’t. Electricity can be…finnicky. Especially in these old buildings.”
He narrowed his eyes at her, but she just smiled blandly right back.
