“I bet you say that to all the history nerds,” she blushes, waving him off.
“Decidedly not,” he laughs, grabbing her hand warmly in his and shaking it, eliciting another radiant beam from her.
After we’ve said our final goodbye and leave, Ian looks at me. “Wow, that was a wealth of information. It appears that she is tied directly to your family, your home and you specifically.”
“What do you think she wants of me? To kill me for revenge?” I ask, afraid to hear the response.
“If the real Kat were here she’d probably say Mary wants to make sweet ghost love to you,” he laughs.
“Or Cara for that matter,” I snort with amusement, but then think back to the hotel room and the look that had been in “Kat’s” eyes. “You know, I have no idea if it was genuine, but her eyes were quite taken with me. She spoke of how long she’d been waiting to be with me. She was definitely...frisky.”
“So what I’m hearing here is that a ghost really does want to hump you,” Ian says, scrubbing his chin with his hand, eyes mischievous. “These ladies just throw themselves at you. Dead or alive, and even a mixture of the two.”
“Up until this moment I’d thought the same of you,” I laugh, feeling the tension that I’d unfairly built towards him dissipate. “But I suppose it’s just the living ones.”
“Yet here I am—still single,” Ian shrugs with good humor. “The women who’ve shown any interest in this town have been in love with someone else, a ‘spork ghost’, and a lesbian who isn’t actually interested.”
The moment feels both telling and awkward and we both pause, suddenly demystifying and understanding one another, eradicating any trace of rivalry, even though neither of us will dare voice it. “So, what now? Does this get us any closer to being able to solve this?”
Before he can answer Kayla approaches us on the street, her stylish boots clicking down the sidewalk as she hurriedly marches to us. “I always forget how tiny this town is,” she remarks when she reaches us. “I got your text and almost jumped in the car and then realized I could basically do one somersault and be at your feet.”
We fill her in briefly and she nods, receiving the information. “How did the spell work from what you saw?” she asks, gesturing to a coffee shop that we all duck into as the wind continues to howl through the narrow streets. The gusts push like insistent hands, shoving us in unceremoniously.
“It was barely legible, but it was some sort of chanting based blood ritual,” Ian says, leaning back in the uncomfortable plastic chair, which squeaks rudely. “It wasn’t too specific, but generally things like this are attached to a person or an object. Given that those involved are all long dead, it seems as though it must be an object.”
“Could it be both?” I ask, grabbing a cup of coffee from one of the many urns set up in the fragrant, cheap looking little deli. “She used Juniper all those years and seems attached to me as well.”
“It could be, but it seems that the link throughout the generations would weaken considerably. To get this powerful she would have needed a constant source of energy throughout the centuries,” Ian says with a sigh, tapping tiny sugar packets against the table rhythmically.
“Like centuries of being summoned by unknowing girls at sleepovers?” Kayla asks pointedly, letting her braids fall free from the hat they’d been confined in.
“Well, yes, exactly like that,” Ian says, his mouth dropping open with wonder and then a delighted smile. “Excellent point.”
“Girls originally began invoking her based on the legend that she would tell them who they were going to marry. It was an irresistible thing to groups of kids before television, I guess,” Kayla explains. “Like tea leaves. Anything occultish was fairly thrilling, I suppose.”
“So she’s just had a constant stream of free energy to gather at her disposal since the 18th century?” I say, sipping the brew and wincing. It tastes as though they charred the beans before grinding. Ian knowingly throws me a pile of the sugars that he’s been playing with. “Why is she just now striking like this?”
“A certain set of conditions must have been met,” Ian remarks. “We are missing information.”
“And we still have no idea what to do about it,” Kayla points out, grabbing my coffee and sipping it and immediately recoiling. “God in heaven, that is terrible. You’d think with plastic furniture they’d be able to afford better coffee.”
“Bad coffee and raisins in the carrot cake?” Ian laughs. “It seems like all Bishop does well is exporting ghosts to mirrors across the world.”
“Kona has coffee, Key west has pie, Baltimore has goddamn delicious crab cakes and we have Bloody Mary,” I snort, dumping creamer in and stirring until the whirlpool in my coffee turns it milky. “I need to get out of this town.”
“I think it’s time we see Mario,” Kayla recommends quietly. “So we can all get out of here.”
“He lives just over in Revere,” I tell them. Mario works in construction and my job has put me on sites with him throughout the years, even if we usually don’t work directly together. We’d always been friendly though distant, and in my drinking days we had shared beers occasionally after jobs. I’d generally always been too drunk to recall the occasions, but he’d always seemed nice enough and had never once brought up the past, at least while I was lucid. That aside, he is still not someone I’d want to anger.
“What happens if he did what he did while completely himself?” Kayla asks, her shrewd eyes resting upon the both of us. “Are we just assuming he was possessed to some degree?”
“I don’t know him beyond my two encounters with him at
