“You’ll have to give me a second to think,” Rae whispered. “All my good ones are spooky.”
“Tell me how you started your merry gang of ghost hunters.”
She laughed. “Merry? I don’t think anyone but Jonah fits that bill.”
“Just Jonah? What disqualifies you?”
“Merry’s a bit too sweet.”
“Rae, I hate to break it to you, but you’re a glorified toothache. Besides the moment you kicked me out of your book signing, you’ve been nothing but sweet.”
“Kicked you out is a strong phrase.”
“It’s as strong as you are sweet,” I agreed.
“I gently nudged you aside.”
“You had not one but two security guards escorting me to the side.”
“Oh, come on. Jonah and Nico are hardly security guards.”
“They’re as good as any I’ve ever seen.”
She laughed and relented. “Fine. Um…I wanted to start a team after a job that would be my last with my sisters. We were in a small town on the coast. The mayor hired us to get rid of vengeful spirits in their diner. Dawn, Eve, Opal, and I didn’t always agree on methods and approaches. When we were younger, that didn’t get in the way much. I yielded most times. But as we got older, arguments became more intense. I yielded less.”
“Naturally.” I thought of the first time I dug my heels in after my parents insisted on moving again. They’d been as shocked by my protests as I’d been. Until I turned seventeen, I’d been agreeable. But the years had worn through my patience, leaving me threadbare with no supplies to patch up. When we had our first fight, my parents were stunned by my anger. I had been, too. I hadn’t realized I’d spent my childhood bottling everything up. I was tired of being dragged around like some pet. Tired of my lack of agency. That resentment burst out in one go, shoving an eternal wedge in our relationship. Some of the last words I’d ever said to them were sharp and splintered. Cuts of regret I kept hidden until this very day.
“The last day we spent in town, a storm was about to roll in. They put me on runner duty, like always?—”
“What’s runner duty?” My eyes closed as I tried to imagine a younger, less experienced Rae. But I couldn’t picture a different version of the woman before me.
“It’s a nicer way to say bait.” The amusement in her tone transformed the story from a crappy memory of non-agency to entertainment. I wished I could do that with my memories of being with my parents. I wished I could look at the colors of the past and not just the darkness.
“That had to suck,” I said.
“I didn’t mind it. I kind of enjoyed pretending to be a damsel in distress.”
“So, you played damsel and your sisters were the ones to unmask the ghosts? The Daphne to their Velma?”
“Ghosts can’t be unmasked.”
“InScooby-Doo, they can.”
“Scooby-Doo lives in a less complex world,” she countered with a laugh. “Where the paranormal is rarely real.”
“Opposed to where we live, a more complex world, in which it is real.”
“You catch on fast,” Rae teased.
“What happened on runner duty?”
She took a breath. “What didn’t happen? They completely ignored the alternative approach I wanted to take, sending me to incite an old-fashioned game of cat and mouse. I tripped in the sand—because who the hell runs well on the beach?”
“I do.”
She scoffed in disbelief. “Why?”
“I used to train in it,” I said. “I wanted to join the cross-country team in high school.”
