Page 18 of Some Kind of Haunted

“She’s cute,” I say, ignoring him. “She seems sweet. I liked her, which is rare. But why did she turn you into a clumsy asshole?”

I realize as I say this that I want Logan to have gone all stupid over a girl. That is a much less ominous explanation for his sudden behavior shift. I want the Midas effect to be in my head only.

Because that means it’s not real and I’m just being dramatic and a little psycho, and that’s fine. That’s business as usual.

“Their lawyer didn’t give me the full story, and I don’t like the way Cleo was pressuring us,” he says, shaking his head in that I’m having important thoughts way he has. “Why bother? What is she hiding?”

He puts the cart away and we climb into the car. It’s overwarm, almost humid inside, and the moldy smell is less offensive now than the other, sharper, grosser thing, so I try to breathe out of my mouth instead of my nose.

I study his profile. I think about that raccoon and shudder. Then I think about how he didn’t answer the question. “Maybe Cleo was protecting her clearly very shy friend?”

Logan shakes his head again. “No. There’s something more. She was far too adamant.”

“About selling the store to the one person who has a vested interest in it? Weird.” I don’t have to roll my eyes when my tone does the heavy lifting for me.

But Logan seems oblivious. “Once we get the full financial picture, I’ll know what they’re hiding and we can move forward accordingly.”

“She said it would take days. We’re headed back to New York on Sunday.”

Logan slides me a look as he’s driving down this godforsaken deserted highway back to Midas, past expansive fields to nowhere. “I canceled our flights.”

I can only stare at him open-mouthed. Has he lost his mind? Did he drink the Midas water that is clearly poisoned by something?

“We need to figure this out,” he says, mounting an argument in his counsel for the defense mode, and I want to punch him. “It’s one of those things we have to be here for. We’re not going to clear out Amelia’s house by Sunday at the rate we’re going, and we still have to talk to a Realtor about putting it up on the market. With the Wi-Fi at Jack’s diner, I can work remotely until we’ve got it all sorted, and you said it yourself—you’re taking a sabbatical this month before launching another show. So, why not stay the month and handle this ourselves?”

It’s like he’s having a stroke in front of me in real time. “I don’t know, Logan, maybe because this is the literal pit of hell?”

“It’s not that bad.”

“It is that bad. I sleepwalked last night. A diner owner took against me for no earthly reason, but it feels like I should start listening for banjos on the breeze. There was a raccoon murder that I swear Nora and Cleo blamed us for.”

Jack and that clock tower freak me out, for different reasons, but I don’t say that part out loud because I know it’s my own paranoia, not reality.

I know this because your girl has been down this dramatic road before.

Logan is resolutely silent to all my very salient points, so I make the most important one. “I can leave on my own, you know. I don’t need your permission.”

“You’re right,” he agrees in that easy way of his that enrages me on a good day. “You don’t.”

I refuse to say anything else. He’ll only agree with me, and it’s infuriating, because he’ll still do exactly as he pleases while I work myself up into a state. I am not going to fall for it.

I’m not.

“You can’t just stay here,” I say after maybe a full minute of silence, tops.

He smiles, golden and bright. “I can. I will. You, as you pointed out, can do whatever you like.”

I would poke him in the neck, which he hates, if he wasn’t driving.

But then he’s turning off the highway, and I hate to think I know my way around Midas so quickly when I would prefer to erase it from my head entirely, but I know this isn’t the turn we’ve taken the past few times in and out of town.

“Are you taking the scenic route?” I mean that as an obvious joke, but I have to admit that there’s something not . . . un-scenic about all of this. The fields. The bluffs. It’s kind of pretty, like a strange but not unpleasant glimpse into what people would have seen hundreds of years ago.

It’s the emptiness that gets to me.

“I just saw this sign,” Logan says, his eyes on the road. “I want to check it out.”

“What sign?”