Page 15

Those were clearly the wrong words to say to the woman who had obviously earned her moniker of Red Tape Rox. “We do not make exceptions for our friends,” she said, her tone as clipped as the boxwood hedge in front of the town hall. “This is the town of Silver Cove, not some tin-pot dictatorship with greased palms and kickbacks.”

Birdie fixed Rox with a steely look. It was one Cam remembered well from growing up—it was the gaze you’d get when your more daring cousin convinced you to blow your curfew and go boating with older boys. “So, Rox, how is the planning for the fete going?” Birdie asked, her eyes locked on the mayor. “You’re the chair this year, right? Too bad about Martina not being able to cater. I suppose you could just get platters from the deli. Or we could do a potluck. I mean, we would all understand, but I can just imagine what a disappointment it would be for you.”

Birdie’s salvo had landed, and Roxy looked unsettled. Cam wasn’t sure where her grandmother was going with this tactic—maybe she was just rubbing Roxy’s nose in her potential failure?

“I’ll figure something out,” Roxy said defensively.

“You know, Cam here would do a fabulous job on the food,” Birdie said.

Shitshitshit. Cam suddenly realized what Birdie was up to. She was going to offer up her granddaughter’s nonexistent catering services in exchange for getting the permits. But Cam couldn’t possibly stay in Silver Cove that long—the fete was two weeks away. Her car was mostly packed, and she and Parsley were heading home to Brooklyn tomorrow morning. She had to get back to work on Izzy’s cookbook in order to make her deadline. She had meticulously planned out her schedule.

“I-I couldn’t possibly…” Cam stammered.

Birdie turned to her granddaughter. “Of course you could. It’s just a few more days, and you could pull this off with one hand tied behind your back.” She leaned across Roxy’s desk. “But we would have to get the permits expedited.”

Cam would have admired her grandmother’s wheeling-and-dealing skills if she hadn’t been silently panicking. She had to get back to Brooklyn—now—or there would be no cookbook, and then she wouldn’t be able to afford the renovations in the first place. Staying in Silver Cove, where distractions were as thick as the marsh reeds around the bay, was not part of the plan.

Roxy harrumphed and grudgingly picked up the permits and reached for a stamp and ink pad. She inked up the stamp that read APPROVED and held it over the papers. “So you’ll cater?” she asked. “It’s hors d’oeuvres and a dinner buffet for one hundred. The town will cover all the food costs. And I want it to be so delicious that everyone will always remember the year that Roxy Shipman chaired the fete committee. Do we have a deal?”

Cam looked at the stamp, which hung mere inches from the permit. There was nothing else to be done. “I’ll need a sous chef,” she said. If this was a bargaining table, she was at least going to get something out of it.

“You can hire whoever you like,” Roxy answered.

“And one more thing,” Cam said, mentally setting fire to the carefully arranged schedule she had made for herself. “I’m not making any fucking gougères.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

ADA

Remember when I told you how thrilled I was about my current situation? That situation being, of course, the fact that I’m a ghost? Well, this ghost business is not as easy as they made it seem in those Gothic novels I used to devour. Let me bring you up-to-date on what has been happening since my… I don’t know what to call it exactly, and that’s frustrating, seeing as finding the right word has always been one of my chief talents. Resurrection? That sounds quite biblical, and believe me, even though I sat on that hard wooden pew every Sunday of my natural life beside my parents and later, my husband, I am hardly a believer. Reanimation? That’s not quite right, either. I’ll have to give it some thought.

I wish I had a journal to keep track of these things. But in my current form, I can’t exactly stroll down to the general store on Main Street and buy one the way I used to. And speaking of Main Street, I’ve determined that I am, in fact, still in Silver Cove. I knew it right away from the thick, marshy scent of the air, a smell I breathed in every day of my life—and now, every day of my… well, whatever this state is. My hunch that I was still stuck here in my provincial old hometown (is my spite showing? Marshall always said it was such an unattractive trait in a woman) was confirmed through some of the detective work I’ve managed to do despite my bodily limitations. So here I go again with another impossible tale, but that seems to be the only kind I can tell these days.

I seem to be confined to the room where I had awakened, and although people come and go here, I haven’t been able to make myself known to them. Still, I’ve picked up on a few things. Seeing as how I was invisible to everyone who entered, I have learned quite a bit about what life is like in 2025.

First of all, being a woman is an entirely different business than it was in my day. That’s what I’ve managed to learn from that stack of magazines. I figured out how to turn pages. It seems that, if I blow on them hard enough, it creates a little gust of air. And what an education I’ve gotten! It’s just magnificent, really. Women aren’t just allowed to vote, but they hold all sorts of important positions. They’re in Congress, and they’re governors, and it seems that one woman got particularly close to being honest-to-goodness president of the United States!

They’re something called CEOs, which I take to mean very important in the business world, and while that was never my cup of tea, I’m awfully glad for them, and it’s the kind of thing I’d like to show Marshall just to watch the blood drain from his already pale, pinched face. “Ha!” I would say to him. “And you used to say that women had no heads for numbers!” If only I’d lived in this new, strange world, I could have been anything I liked, and I could have worn my necklines just as low as I liked, with no judgment.

Best of all, it seems that these days, husbands are all but irrelevant to a woman’s career. In fact, I even read an article in Cosmopolitan (it turns out that it’s actually not about life in the city, although it’s immensely enjoyable nonetheless!) that was all about getting ahead at work, and it mentioned nothing about men, and advised being gutsy, which I am firmly in favor of! Also I’m still not sure what an “Instagram influencer” does but it all seems so exciting. I know there’s a lot that’s terrible in this modern world—shootings and prejudice and something called a Brazilian wax—but it does seem that women have it a heck of a lot better than they did in my time.

And when it comes to what I learned about the doings in Silver Cove, it seems things have changed quite a bit here, too. There’s a woman who seems to be running things here named Roxanne. She wears the most wonderful, dramatic scarves, and everyone is just terrified of her and does what she tells them to, even though they grumble about her behind her back. I think she’s marvelous.

Truly, this ghosting business is made for snoops. So I know that a woman here named Ginny, who is organizing all the items people keep leaving, is devastatingly in love with this darling older man named Bill who has come several times with boxes. Every time he shows up, she makes an immediate beeline for the water closet. (Yes, I followed her there. I told you I was a snoop!) And she hides out there. Why she doesn’t just march over to him and flip her hair and ask him to go courting (women are allowed to do these things, I have discovered!), I just do not, for the life of me, understand. Ha! “The life of me.” As if I have a pulse!

I won’t bore you with any more of what sounds like small-town gossip. If there’s anything I dislike more than gossip, it’s the prospect of being boring. The horror! The truth is, I haven’t figured out how to do what it seems I’m here to do.

In the meantime, I can wait.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Izzy, it’s so great to hear from you!” Cam forced herself to sound enthusiastic instead of merely desperate. She had been texting Izzy for days to no avail. If the fabulous Izzy Jones didn’t like her last batch of recipes, she was going to need more guidance.

“Hey, Cammmiiee,” Izzy oozed, as if they were best friends, not a miserable ghostwriter and impossible-to-please boss. “I thought I’d give you direction for my recipes.”

Cam rolled her eyes. Her recipes? Izzy wouldn’t have known the difference between a tablespoon and a teaspoon if they walked up and introduced themselves. But she put aside her annoyance and grabbed her notebook off Birdie’s cluttered counter. “Great, great,” Cam said encouragingly, tucking her phone under her chin and using her free hand to plug her ear so she could hear Izzy better. Ian had begun his work and it apparently involved power tools as loud as locomotives. “Tell me, what are you thinking?”

“I just spent the last week at this amazeballs retreat at this farm in the Catskills, and I’m really getting into the vegan thing. I mean, I’m not totally there, you know what I mean? I’m, like, more vegan-curious than one hundred percent vegan. But I definitely want some vegan recipes in my book.”