Page 13 of Some Kind of Haunted

But I’m being ridiculous. This guy can’t be a day under ninety. He can’t even walk on his own without a cane—

Then again, maybe that’s his schtick. How he lures women into his antique shop to murder them with rusted metal and old window frames.

You’ve really lost it, I tell myself.

Hesitantly, I follow the old man. But I reach into my purse and close my hand around my pepper spray, just in case.

We take a turn in a narrow hallway covered in old movie posters. The kind of artistic movies Logan pretends to love and I’ve never been able to stay awake through. We move through a room that’s nothing but bookshelves. Then, with a shaky hand, he sticks a key into the lock of a door and pushes it open.

Here it is. The torture chamber. I’m about to meet my grizzly end—

“You go on and poke around. I’ve got books to alphabetize.” The old man points to a stack of books on the far side of the room. Then he purposefully sets the key chain on a bookshelf inside the room he wants me to go in.

I see it for what it is: Reassurance he isn’t going to lock me in the room and feast on my bones. Or maybe he can’t be bothered to shuffle all the way back here.

Either way, I peek my head into the room.

And my breath comes out on a sigh.

The room is full of beautiful things. Truly beautiful things. Real antiques, I would say. Logan probably knows all about brands and eras, but I’m transfixed by a display of framed needlepoint on the wall.

Delicate. Beautiful. I can’t stop myself from walking inside and taking them all in.

I want to inhale each work, study every centimeter, admire every inch. They would look so good hanging on a wall in my apartment back in New York. There’s a bluebird. A delicate and intricate garden. There’s even one that I think is supposed to be the Empire State Building. Then there’s a celestial scene of the Gemini astrology sign.

My sign.

I don’t know how long I’m transfixed by the tiny little stitches, the amazing craftsmanship. I itch to take out my phone and take pictures, but that would require tearing my gaze from them.

I think I’ve looked at every one in great detail, thought about how I could replicate them, but then I catch the sight of another one, set apart from the others.

My heart lurches.

It is a depiction of that goddamned clock tower. The white is pristine, the black face dark and a perfect circle—a rare feat in needlepoint. The gold of the arms fairly gleams, even though it’s made of thread.

Without thinking it through, feeling a bit like Sleeping Beauty drawn to the spinning wheel’s spindle, I reach out as if to trace the perfect stitches with my finger—

“Oh, you don’t want to touch that.”

I jerk my hand back and then look over at the doorway where the elderly man is standing again, when I didn’t hear him shuffle close. “Th-the clock tower?”

“Beauty, isn’t she?”

“Oh. Sure. They’re all so amazing.”

“I meant the actual clock tower. Have you heard her history?”

Something about him calling the tower a her gives me the major creeps, but I don’t know what else to do but shake my head. What can I say? No, I don’t know its history, and I sure as hell don’t want to.

“The first one was built in 1870, but unfortunately didn’t have the best foundation. One day it came tumbling down. Killed a baby.”

He says this matter-of-factly. So much so it takes me an extra beat to react.

“A baby?”

“So unfortunate,” he murmurs, and his eyes look green in the light. “But times were tough back then.”

I’m not sure times were ever clock tower falling on a baby tough, but I’m not going to argue the point.