Page 45 of Paper Ghosts

She jerked back. Was that a man standing in the backyard, near the precipice to the creek? She rushed to the French doors in the dining room, where she slapped on the switch to the floodlights.

But no one was there.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Tasha’s feelings had smelled like new crayons all week. It was driving her crazy. She knew what it probably meant, but she wasn’t ready to acknowledge it yet.

She’d spent a fair amount of time over the years trying to figure out why this only seemed to happen to her. Her conclusion was that she’d had so much turmoil in her life that she was numb to normal ways of processing big emotions, so her brain had simply found an alternate route. If she wasn’t going to feel the big stuff, then she had to smell it.

She was standing at the window in the easternmost guest room of her house, which had the best view of the Wester House next door. She wasn’t watching for Bailey, specifically, though she knew she was here. Tug had told her she was coming home when he and Tasha were both in their yards yesterday, raking yellow ginkgo leaves that made the neighborhood look covered in a pirate’s hoard of spilled gold coins. Willamena, he’d said, was in decline.

Suddenly, the Westers’ floodlights came on.

And there she was, after all this time. Bailey stepped outside onto the back patio, staring into the backyard as if searching for something. As much as Tasha had been dreading her showing up, bringing all those memories from eight years ago, there was a sour thrill at seeing her.

Her hair was cake-frosting blue.

After several moments, Bailey finally turned and walked back into the Wester House, and then the floodlights went out.

“There you are,” Gary said from the doorway. “Can’t sleep?”

Tasha held out her hand to him. He walked over, and they stood arm in arm in silence for a while.

“I know it’s too quiet without your mother in the house anymore. But she’s getting great care.”

“I know. It’s not that.”

Her mother had spiraled after she’d left for college, which hadn’t been a surprise. That alone would never have been enough to bring Tasha home. But during her junior year came the fateful call about the car crash. The doctors, the social workers, everyone Tasha talked to told her there was no way Pam could live independently for the foreseeable future. But caring for her mother had been an overwhelming task for a twenty-one-year-old with no close friends or family. She took a job at the local country club and most of her income went to sitters for her mother while she was there, but it was worth it just to be able to spend her shift breaks crying alone in her car, mourning the loss of her one chance to escape this place.

She’d met Gary there. He would tip well, and flirt, too, which she liked but thought nothing of, and not because he was decades her senior. It was because he was a Tillbury. She’d been raised to believe that envy was her superpower. Without people like them, people like the Westers and the Tillburys wouldn’t exist. Thanks to her mother, Tasha had bought wholeheartedly into this. She used to believe her job in this town was a thankless, but secretly important, one. To make others look good. Once, when her eyes were still swollen from her last cry, Gary came in for lunch and asked what was wrong.

Let me help you, he said.

She knew all about how daughters without solid male role models growing up sometimes sought out father figures as adults. During her childhood, all she’d wanted was to feel protected, loved. She’d despised the precarious feeling of never having enough of anything—stability, attention, money. Gary gave her all of those things, yes. And most people thought that was the basis of their relationship. Tasha was young and pretty with daddy issues. Gary was rich, older, and childless.

But the truth was, she adored him. And his love, his acceptance, changed her. It made coming back here almost mythical, with Smeller burning away completely and Tasha Tillbury rising from the ashes. Sometimes she still couldn’t believe she lived in this neighborhood now, the one her mother used to drive through, let alone right beside the Wester House, where her mother had chased Clutch into the creek after the bonfire.

Don’t think about that.

“You’re not worried about renovation on the courthouse being behind schedule, are you?” Gary asked. They’d gotten the news that afternoon. “It’s nothing unusual. The clock tower just needed more work to make it stable. There’s no reason to think the interior renovation won’t go as planned this winter. Then we’ll get started on developing your mother’s land. I promise.”

She put her head on Gary’s shoulder. “I’m not worried about that.”

Her mother’s house had been easy to let go of after she married Gary. Due to a string of refinancing, there had been more owed on it than it was worth. But that land outside of town had been harder to part with. It represented all the hope her mother had left. On her better days, in the care facility where she now lived, Pam still talked about the vacation home she wanted to build. That land had been mortgaged, too, but Gary had paid it off. After the work on the courthouse was done, their next project was to finally start building out there. But not just one home. Several. To sell. At last, her mother was going to have something everyone else envied. It was important to Tasha for a reason she couldn’t name, that her mother would be remembered for something good.

“So just out of curiosity, why are you standing in a dark room, staring at the Wester House?”

She smiled. Gary had grown up next door to the Wester House, so there was very little about it that surprised him. Tasha had once planted flowers along the property line and Gary had casually told her to be careful. Willamena guarded her borders. Sure enough, the next morning all Tasha’s beautiful tiger lilies had disappeared.

“I just saw Bailey Wester,” she said as she turned and walked with him out of the room.

“You were friends with her once, weren’t you?”

“No,” Tasha said. “We were never friends.”

Bailey had closed her bedroom curtains last night, the ones with tiny gold stars and moons, but they were open the next morning when she woke up. She rolled over, feeling rested, which annoyed her. She’d never been a great sleeper, but she’d always slept best in this house, where curtains opened and doors randomly locked and unlocked on their own.

She got out of bed and immediately tripped over one of the dozen donation bags now littering the room. She quickly dressed, not forgetting to put on her hat, then went downstairs to tell her dad she was going out for a while. But once in the kitchen, she saw his office door was closed, which meant he was working. She wrote a note on the fridge whiteboard, then left to buy a bleach kit for her hair. Hopefully she could get this blue color out before he or Mim saw it.