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He looks up at me seriously, and I feel the tension dripping off him.
“Could a ghost do something like this?”
I shake my head, knowing where he’s going with this.
“Ghosts can mess with electricity, Wi-Fi, stupid shit like that. Their spirits can interact with energy, but they can’t physically touch anything. Cassandra can blow out the lights in the clubhouse, but she can’t unscrew a lightbulb and throw it at someone.”
He nods, but his demeanor doesn’t relax. He’s thinking Anderson is somehow behind all of this, and maybe his loyal followers are messing with us, but there’s no way he’s a ghost. He would have haunted us by now. But I have an idea.
“I’ll find Cassandra. She must have seen something. She’s always creeping around my room. If she didn’t, one of the other ghosts did. They’re as good as any security cameras.”
He nods and stands, looking like a stiff wind could blow him over. I’m worried about my friend because I never have had to worry about him before. He’s always been the strongest among us, and always kept a cool demeanor. He built this club from the ground up, and he’s always been our constant source of reassurance.
If he’s starting to crack, we’re all in trouble.
Without another word, he walks out the door, leaving me to finish cleaning. Once my room is sufficiently put back together, I go downstairs to look for Cassandra. Her favorite places to hang out beside my room are the room where we have church—because she knows she’s not supposed to be in there—and the bar.
I check in the meeting room first, aware Pocus will call church any minute now. Ghosts are forbidden from attending church, but Cassandra throws a fit and ends up sneaking in anyway. Oddly, she’s not there.
She isn’t in the bar either, but I sense that she’s near. The neon sign above the bar flickers, alerting me that she’s in the room. Cassandra loves hide-and-seek, but I don’t have the patience.
“Get out here,” I demand. “Cassandra, this isn’t funny, I need to talk to you.”
She doesn’t come out, so I search for her. The tricky thing about a ghost is they can hide in absolutely anything. That’s why she loves hide-and-seek so much—she always wins. When I see her cowering behind the bar, on top of a pallet of soda water, I know something is wrong. She isn’t hiding from me, but she’s hiding from something else.
She’s terrified. I see it in her face and the way she can’t look at me. She stares blankly ahead.
“Cassandra?” I ask more gently, stooping down on the ground so I’m at her eye level. “Did you see who broke into my room?”
She shakes her head furiously, and I see a ghostly tear spring to her eye.
“I’m not mad at you. I know you had nothing to do with it, but you have to talk to me.”
She remains stubbornly silent, staring forward and wringing her little hands. This isn’t a side of Cassandra I’ve ever experienced, and it freaks me out. Ghosts aren’t scared of anything. They’re the ones who do the scaring. They delight in scaring others.
After a few minutes, I give up. I hear the sound of the men coming down the stairs. We’re having another late-night church, something no one is looking forward to.
CHAPTERSIX
“You know why we’re here,” I tell the men assembled in front of me. “Tonight, two of our own were put in harm’s way. When we returned to the clubhouse, we found it vandalized. I don’t believe in coincidence. The two events are related somehow.”
Gator puts up his hand, and I nod to him, yielding the floor.
“Prez, do you really think someone shot up a bar to play a childish prank? It doesn’t make any sense. Why put other lives in danger to mess with us?”
I sigh heavily because I haven’t been able to work that out myself. It could have been much worse. Whoever vandalized the house club could have set it on fire or gone on a killing rampage inside. Only Tory, Abigail, and Daisy were here when we left. The thought haunts me and reminds me that I can’t let my guard down for a second.
“I can’t answer that, Gator,” I tell him. “Which is why we need to up our security for the next few days. This may have been a harmless prank, but I can’t believe that when my family could have been put in harm’s way. I need a situation report. Snake, what did the cameras pick up?”
For the last hour, Snake has been combing through our security footage to find who might have vandalized the front yard and broken into Hex’s room. Snake looks at me with a hesitant expression, and I immediately know he has nothing to give me. There’s nothing to bring this nightmare to an end.
“I’m sorry, Prez, the footage was scrubbed.”
I look at Gator and hold up my hand. “Does that sound like someone messing with us, Gator?”
He hangs his head in surrender.
“If some idiot teenagers vandalized our property, they wouldn’t have scrubbed the footage. They wouldn’t know how.”
