Page 31 of Some Kind of Haunted

She says this almost welcomingly. Like yesterday’s knitting store standoff never happened. Like we are friends. Second cousins who are more than names on the same family tree. Like she does not blame me for the bloody guts of a raccoon—when she most assuredly seemed to yesterday.

I have no idea what to do with that. So I just follow her as she goes to the back door and unlocks it with what must be her own key to the shop. My dead grandmother’s shop, I remind myself. My dead grandmother, who everybody knows, but Logan and I don’t.

“So, you knew my grandmother.”

“Amelia was my grandmother’s sister,” Cleo says, and she doesn’t sound grudging or curt. “They were tight. Never went a day without talking to each other.” She slides me a kind of considering look. “They were twins.”

Twins. I think about that black-and-white photo on the mantel of two women who looked almost exactly alike. It’s not unusual, of course. Twins run in families—I’ve been told that my whole life. But something about this feels weighty. It seems meaningful that Logan and I are twins who also talk every day, like my grandmother and hers. No matter what.

“I don’t have a crafty bone in my body,” Cleo continues. “But if I did, no doubt Amelia would have taken me under her wing. As it was, she was around a lot.” Cleo’s expression gets kind of sad. “They were each other’s best friend. In fact, before I can remember, my grandma lived in that house.” She nods at the little house I just came from. “And Amelia lived up above the shop.”

There’s a strange kind of grief in that as we step into the warmth of the back room of the shop. I would say it’s similar to the grief I feel when I think about my mother—I never knew these people. I’m grieving the never knowing them or their stories and pasts rather than them.

But there’s something different about this—because my mother has been dead all my life. No one knew her or experienced her in all these years. Amelia was apparently alive, being best friends with her twin sister, and taking people under her crafty wing.

People who are not me, who happen to have a whole lot more than one crafty bone in her body.

Cleo pauses in this back room and looks up the stairs. “Nora, we’re here,” she shouts, using the word we as if Nora was expecting us, not just her.

I push that away because there’s probably a group chat. In my experience, there’s always a group chat. I look around the back room. I am itching to get my hands on some yarn. Cleo is looking at her phone.

No crafty bones. No interest in yarn. And she’s being a little forthcoming today, so why not ask? “If you don’t want the store or anything to do with it, what do you do?”

She doesn’t look up from her phone. “Airplanes.”

I am not sure how that’s an answer—what does she do with airplanes? Fly them? Fix them? Ride in them? Become one, like a transformer?

Before I can decide if I want to press, Nora hurries down the stairs, fastening an earring to her ear as she does so. “Sorry, I’m late and a little frazzled this morning. Weird dreams.”

She doesn’t meet my gaze, but something inside my stomach clenches with anxiety. I don’t like the idea we’re both having weird dreams.

But hey, aren’t we both under some stress? Dealing with some anxiety over the fate of this store? It’s just . . . how brains work. Not some deep, dark sign of something horrible.

She’s got more makeup on than she did yesterday and she curled her hair—or did something different with it. Cleo, on the other hand, looks exactly the same. Black on black on black, only she’s not scowling at me today as Nora leads us through the shop and out the front door.

Outside, it’s still freezing.

“Oh. Here.” Nora shrugs out of her finely knit cardigan and hands it to me. “That T-shirt isn’t going to ward off the chill.”

She has a pretty blue long-sleeved shirt on under the cardigan, and even though I want to refuse to take it, I’m freezing, and Nora is the kind of person I have a hard time saying no to. I feel like if I say no she’ll crumble into dust, though I’m aware she’s given me no reason to think that.

I shrug her cardigan on—and admire the stitchwork—as Cleo and Nora walk across the street toward the diner. Where I’ll no doubt have to face Jack and the fact he appeared in my dreams last night as a kind of grumpy savior. It’s like having a sex dream about a coworker that renders it impossible to ever look that coworker in the face, and I really don’t need to be thinking about sex dreams around Jack.

Why couldn’t Logan just make us coffee himself?

But I’ve got these two women being nice to me when that was not how it seemed to be going yesterday. Two women who know this town and everyone in it, so why not ask? “What’s Jack’s deal?”

“He’s a direct-descendant Bellamy,” Nora says, like that answers anything.

“What does that mean?”

Cleo shrugs. “The weight of things is different for him.”

I don’t know what weight she’s referring to. I don’t know why a grumpy guy in a diner should find anything weighty, but then, I don’t know anything about this place. Something that I feel like people should take into account given the whole never set foot in this place before thing, but words from my dream last night come back to me.

The Darlings aren’t like other families. Maybe the Bellamys aren’t, either.

Maybe this town really isn’t like other towns.