AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He’d turned me down flat, though. Wouldn’t even discuss the matter.
Mrs. Pollard let out a soft whistle, then took a sip of her coffee. “That sleepwalking was something else. Got myself quite an eyeful that night.” She fanned her face with one of the recipe cards she’d had printed outjust in casesomeone didn’t have the time to write out or take a picture of her recipe.
For some reason, I sought out Estrelle. She sat quietly bythe window, watching and listening to everything going on. She lifted a thin eyebrow in my direction and I swore there was amusement dancing in her pale eyes, though it was hard to tell from across the room. I questioned again why she hadn’t chimed in. Her silence was highly unusual. And slightly disturbing.
Redmond snapped his fingers. “The sleepwalking happened right around the time Dez began talking about ghosts, right?”
Trying to ignore the conversation, I went about making the almond milk latte. Usually work helped calm my inner turmoil. Here at Magpie’s, I was in complete control and had been since I was nineteen years old. That was when my father, who’d been desperate for a change of pace, handed me the reins of the business, deciding I had enough experience to run the place on my own.
Today, however, being here was stressing me out. And stress, according to my doctor, was the last thing I needed in my life.
“Ghosts?” Sienna asked. “Really? I hadn’t heard that.”
Lord. How had she not heard? But then I remembered. She’d been out of town, visiting her folks, when he first started talking about it. By the time she came back two weeks later, the talk had turned to how sixteen-year-old Ambrose Symons had run his electric scooter off the road and into Mrs. Harlin’s heirloom tomato bed after ogling a young bikini-clad woman heading to the beach. The crash hadn’t hurt him at all but Mrs. Harlin had gone after him with a broom, and he’d ended up needing four stitches on his arm. No charges were brought against either.
“Just one ghost,” I corrected, before the story got out of hand.
I tried to drown out the chatter between the two of them by steaming the almond milk, but I, unfortunately, could still hear the conversation.
Redmond said, “Dez has been talking about how his house is haunted, telling anyone who’ll listen that a ghost has been showing up in the middle of the night, making noise, making a mess of the place. He doesn’t seem bothered by it—in fact, he seems amused more than anything.”
Carmella said, “He’s always loved a good ghost story.”
I didn’t know what to make of Dad’s supposed ghost. I’d tried to brush it off as him just having a bit of fun, but one afternoon I’d let myself into his house and had seen the mess with my own eyes. Dad wasn’t persnickety with his cleanliness, but he wasn’t a total slob either, so the quick deterioration of his home was completely out of character.
It had been unsettling, to say the least.
And impossible to ignore. Because he, mercifully, hadn’t wantedmeto move in, I’d floated the idea of hiring an in-home caretaker. I even offered to pay for the help, not that I really had the money to do so. He’d shut down the conversation with a hearty laugh that rolled on and on until he gently steered me toward the door.
“My ghost is messy, and I have better things to do than clean. All is well here, my little magpie. Stop worrying.”
Sienna said, “Does he think the ghost is his w—” She suddenly cut herself off and looked helplessly around.
Carmella jumped in, filling the painful silence. “To me, Dez is acting only like a man who’s ready for a change. And change isn’t always a bad thing.”
“Oh!” Sienna brightened. “Maybe he’s selling Magpie’s because he’s planning on retiring. He once told me that he wanted to cruise around the world. That would be agreatthing.”
I wiped the steam wand clean and stared blankly at her. Why would Dad say such a thing? He’d already seen the world. He wouldn’t leave Driftwood now. Not without my mama. And certainly not on a ship—he knew the kind of anxiety that would cause me. Plus, I talked to him only recently about retiring and he said he wasn’t near ready. He liked working, staying busy. Ever since handing Magpie’s over to me, he’d been renovating fixer-uppers in the area and turning them into rentals—all except for the home he’d sold to me on the cheap. The super cheap.
I wasn’t sure what was going on with my father, but it went beyond the idea of retirement. A little over a month ago, we’d had dinner plans but he had stood me up. When I went to hishouse to check on him, I found it still a disaster area. Worse than that, though, was his neglect of Molly. His cantankerous cat’s water dish had been bone dry. It had also been my thirty-eighth birthday. And he’d forgotten.
When he finally arrived home, full of apologies, he’d tried to play off his absentmindedness as no big deal and the conversation quickly devolved into an argument. When I once again suggested hiring someone to keep an eye on him, his house,Molly,his usually jovial face had clouded over with anger, something so rare it had stunned me silent.
“Enough, Magdalena,” he had snapped. “Enough. Let it go.Let it be.”
Then his face softened, the anger vanishing as quickly as it had come. He grabbed a garishly painted porcelain monkey candlestick off the counter and used it as a faux microphone to wail about Mother Mary speaking words of wisdom—he was never one to pass up a chance to sing a song by the Beatles, especially when the lyrics were used to lighten a heavy situation.
Frustrated after that visit, I had marched myself straight to my office here at Magpie’s and used my mama’s old typewriter to create the worst possible help-wanted ad for an in-home care provider. I hung it in the front window where everyone arriving the next morning would see it first thing, and even had visions of scanning it and posting it in local online groups. My determination to hire someone had lasted approximately two minutes before I chickened out and took the notice down. I crumpled it up, threw it away in the trash can outside the shop, and went home to bed with a heavy heart.
Now Dad was talking about selling Magpie’s, and I wished I’d kept the ad up, because I needed a spy. Someone who’d report any unusual behavior straight to me. Plus, I wanted to make sure Molly had a full water dish at all times. We had a contentious relationship, Molly and I, but I still cared about her well-being.
I passed Redmond’s latte over to him and rang up his order.
He took a sip and let out a happy sigh. “Wonderful as usual, Maggie.”
As he paid with a credit card, the bells on the door announcedanother visitor. The jingling was getting on my nerves, but I breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of Rose.
“Sorry I’m late!” she said as she sailed through the dining room and around the counter, a long, dark braid sprinkled with silver strands trailing behind her. She tucked her handbag away and grabbed an apron. “Good morning, everyone.”
