“You have to face the music sometime,” he said. “Don’t worry—they’ve been serving me for months. They’ll still feed us.”
“And spit in our food,” she said.
“Where is your faith in the goodness of humanity?” he joked as a waitress she didn’t recognize came over with two glasses of water and two menus.
Casey could feel the locals staring at the two of them. She hid behind her menu until she heard Finn chuckle.
He couldn’t have missed the sour looks they were getting and seemed to be enjoying it. “They can’t eat you,” he whispered, still chuckling.
She peered at him over the top of the menu. “You should know.” The items to order hadn’t changed in all the years her grandmother had brought her to this café—the only one in town. Only the prices had changed. She closed her menu and put it down, concentrating on the man sitting across from her as a distraction.
“You were going to tell me the real reason you’re here, why someone invited you to this...reunion and how you knew Megan,” she said quietly. “You haven’t been here looking for a ghost.”
Finn didn’t bother to pick up his menu, just pushed it aside, as he leaned forward and locked gazes with her. She stared into those sparkling eyes and realized he was about to tell her the truth whether she was ready for it or not.
“I grew up mowing lawns.” He nodded affirmation as if she had questioned that. “My father owned a landscaping business. I knew I didn’t want to do that the rest of my life, so I worked hard in school and college and started my own business.”
“That was all in the news after you disappeared.”
He smiled at her impatience. “I’m getting there.” The waitress returned. “Want a milkshake?” Finn asked Casey impulsively. “Chocolate?”
She shook her head and turned to the waitress. “Ice tea, please, and I’ll take the baked-chicken salad with vinegar and oil.”
Her companion looked crestfallen before he ordered a chocolate milkshake and the chicken-fried steak with fries. He grinned over at her. “If you’re nice, I’ll give you a bite.”
Casey shook her head but couldn’t help smiling. “You really are incorrigible,” she said as the waitress left, taking the unused menus with her.
“But you’re glad you came to dinner with me, aren’t you?”
She couldn’t help but smile and admit she was. With the waitress gone to put in their orders, he continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “Then I worked more years, nose to the grindstone, to make the business successful. One day I was offered more money than I could count for that business. I took it, not realizing how it would feel when suddenly I didn’t have that challenge anymore. I’d worked hard since I was fourteen. Suddenly I didn’t have a job. I had so much money that I didn’t have any reason to get up in the morning unless I felt like it. I didn’t have...a goal. I was questioning everything about my life. My father had died a few months before that, my mother right after him. I was alone with too much money and too much time on my hands.”
“I’m sorry about your parents,” she said, offering condolences and wondering where he was headed with this discussion and if he would ever get there.
“My father and I were especially close since we used to work together. He and I used to take care of the Broadhurst estate.” She felt her eyes widen before he added, “Megan lived there before she took a summer job at your grandmother’s hotel. Before she was murdered.” He shrugged. His gaze felt electric as it settled on her. “She and I had gotten close for a while back then. So, lost and at loose ends, I decided to solve her murder by coming to the hotel, and if I got to see her ghost, well, that would be something, too, wouldn’t it?”
Casey laughed before she realized he meant it. “You’re serious.”
CHAPTER SIX
“WHEN I WANT SOMETHING, I go after it,” Finn admitted, enjoying being with Casey. While he hadn’t thought he wanted an old, haunted hotel, he definitely was intrigued by the owner.
“That at least answers one of my questions,” she said. “You really thought you could accomplish what the state investigators couldn’t? Just like that? You decided to solve the cold case that no one else could. I suppose you thought you’d find the killer hiding in the hotel?”
Finn laughed. It wasn’t the first time a woman had questioned what they took as conceit. Except with Casey, he wasn’t insulted. “Megan’s killer was never apprehended. I thought the answer might be here.” He shrugged. “It was worth a try.”
Worth a try? “You’re telling me you spent months looking for clues?”
“I had some time on my hands. Anyway, I loved exploring the hotel, looking in lots of nooks and crannies, learning about the hotel—and you—from your grandmother’s journals.” She blinked in obvious surprise. “You knew that your grandmother kept journals, right?”
She shook her head as if to clear out the cobwebs. “I knew my grandmother was old-school. She used registration books instead of a computer because she liked doing things the way they’d always been done. But she kept journals?”
“There was a journal for every year that she ran the hotel. And an entry for every day at that. I found a stack of diaries in a cabinet in the office, kind of hidden in the back. It was interesting reading on those lonely nights. Through those, I learned about the hotel, its history, your grandmother’s love for it—and about you and her love for you.”
“I was wrong. This could get worse,” she mumbled under her breath.
He could see that all of this had hit her hard. He didn’t know how to soften the impact. She hadn’t expected to find him in the hotel—let alone discover the staff from that summer planned to spend the weekend with her.
“The hotel’s history is fascinating,” he said, hoping
