It. (rasatabula) wrote in repose, @ 2017-07-21 12:48:00 |
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Entry tags: | *log, connie gunster, jack penhaligon |
Connie & Jack: B & B
Who: Connie and Jack
What: 'Baking'
When: Waaay backdated
Warnings: Nada.
Connie was covered in flour and the last few hours were a complete blur. She remembered waking up, she remembered driving to school at the Capital, she remembered- wait no. That’s not how it went.
Connie woke up around 6am. She looked at herself in the mirror and saw brown hair, pale blue eyes and a thin mouth. The wild white hair was gone and there was no sign of the Gunster smile. She was good at being polite, at being friendly, but that mad scientist edge was finally pressed out of her. She put on a simple flower dress, a blue cardigan and she packed up her sourdough starter to take to school. She walked outside, she got in the car and she turned on the radio. The radio man said:
“I’ve done everything this world has to offer. I've read every book. I've burned every book. I've won every game. I've lost every game. I've appeased everyone. I've killed everyone. Sets of numbers... Lines of dialog...” Connie turned off the radio. She drove in silence. She glanced at the rear-view mirror and saw that her hair was white again.
At school, everyone was making their dough. It was a weird process of adding flour until the dough doesn’t need flour anymore and if you add too much then you’ve ruined everything. Connie had asked many times for an exact measurement, but she was told that she had to feel for the right consistency. The bread needed to be elastic, but not sticky. Pliable, but not dead. That perfect state that allowed the yeast to grow. She was at her work station, folding dough and slamming it down like she was dunking on the table. Each slam, she could feel the clock tick slower, each fold it became a heartbeat longer. Before she knew it, her and the bread were stuck in time for hours.
The voice said: “One day, he vanished without a trace. They say he shattered across time and space. Ha ha... how can I say so without fear? I'm holding a piece of him right here.”
Connie was back in her car. She didn’t check her phone until she was back at the B&B and Jack wanted to bake cookies. Something about the B&B felt safe, like the ghosts there could stop whatever weirdness was seeping into her skin. The kitchen itself felt like a haven. It was large and covered in old tile. There were a few industrial style things that she had insisted on being built in like a larger sink and a better oven. But, for the most part, it looked like a kitchen found in a Victorian mansion.
She quickly checked the mirror to see that her hair was still brunette. It was. Why did she think it changed? Connie started to pull out the measuring cups, the mixing bowls, the powdered sugar. She preheated the oven and she waited.
Jack didn’t bloody care about cookies. It was a peculiar Americanism, like Thanksgiving, men wearing padding to play rugby and the flat music in shopping malls. Cookies could be bought far more easily than they were made and it hadn’t been a happy repast from childhoods previous. If he needed to remind himself of that fact, he had the lingering discomfort of Newt’s sobs aged four. But it was a great deal safer than sitting in his room and contemplating laying hands on whatever would get him good and blotted and a great deal easier than contemplating the colossal headache of a year’s worth of mixed signals. Neither were especially appealing when you looked at the whole of it (the alcohol was deeply appealing, point of fact, but not the aftermath) and when he made it into the kitchen he looked a couple of steps up from shit, but still a recent relapse away from ‘good’.
He looked for the familiar dandelion tuft of hair and perhaps that was why. Recent accommodation on an uncomfortable step in close proximity to a friend doing her level best not to fall apart and Jack wanted to know who exactly Connie was. God knew Dahlia couldn’t explain it without reverting to the deeply familiar and the somewhat trite of the forlorn.
But no white hair. Just dark, and clattering about with measuring cups and he paused in the door. “Is this a reverse makeover?” Jack was not subtle.
Connie was in the middle of trying to brush flour off her body with one hand while the other held her apron. She looked up at him and smiled, but it wasn’t jack-o-lantern like he would have been used to. It was small, holding everything together with popsicle sticks. “It’s much scarier when I’m all covered in white, trust me.” She managed to get the apron on and then walked over to him, giving Jack a quick hug even if he didn’t ask for one. A little flour from her cheek got on his shoulder. “I promised my brother and my almost-girlfriend I’d be more normal, so I dyed the hair brown. This was my original hair color, you know.”
She ticked her pointer finger back and forth and then walked over to the island in the kitchen where she had set up all the bowls. “Can you guess the secret to a perfect sugar cookie? It’s not sugar.” Connie lifted that finger in the air like eureka and grinned at him. This time a little more Gunster. “It’s almond extract! But, you can’t get regular store brand. I made this myself.” She walked over to the corner and produced a dark brown glass bottle. She waved it in the air and was very proud of herself for it.
Right. Well. Jack looked at her blankly, even as he dusted the flour from his shirt. Be more normal. He was near bloody certain Dahlia hadn’t asked for any such thing. Dahlia was hardly normal herself, so if she had, she had no bloody right to. Connie’s smile was, what Jack could remember of it, frankly unnerving. Now it looked small and quiet, much like she was apparently trying to be. It looked thoroughly uncomfortable.
“Did it grow white, or did you dye it?” The hair. She was on her way to the island, and the smile she produced for the secrets of sugar cookies that Jack gave no actual shit about looked a little more illuminated. Jack shoved both his hands in his pockets and looked at her and her waving of homemade extracted almond and thought very briefly about not meddling at all.
“How do you extract almonds? Hold them down and squeeze? It’s Dahlia, isn’t it? Your almost-girlfriend.”
“It grew white.” She didn’t bother trying to make up a story. “Here’s a pro tip: don’t touch machines that you don’t understand.” Connie thought that was extremely good advice that most people naturally followed. It was just the weirdos that didn’t bother. “But, I think the white hair reminds people of who I am- who I was. So, I thought brown was a lot more normal. People will look at my hair and think- oh! Check out that normal looking girl!” She had no clue that changing her hair color wouldn’t change a thing. Connie was always going to be a weirdo, normal hair or not.
She was really glad he asked about the extract, but the joke made her think he wasn’t taking it seriously. Connie did her best to sell the idea that making your own extract was cool: “It takes two months normally.” Do not say normally, oh no you already said normally. “You put almonds at the bottom and then fill the bottle up with vodka and wait!” She swung the bottle back and forth again, proud of herself for making something most people wouldn’t even bother with. “It tastes better when it’s homemade. Everything does.”
Connie was smart, but socially she was an idiot. Jack had mentioned Dahlia and it made her wonder if he was there with alternative motives. She imagined Jack and Dahl in a dark room together, talking about how weird and horrible Connie was. He didn’t care about the almond extract, he wanted to talk about Dahlia.
“Maybe I should try to get Dahl to press them next time. Actually, I’ve never made her bake with me.” Connie said in passing, already reaching for the large mixing bowl to give to him.
“A machine turned your hair white?” It wasn’t unbelievable. There wasn’t much that was left unbelievable, when you thought about this town, but Jack looked at her, his face thoughtful and perhaps a little more open than he’d intended. “I’m not sure that normal’s something on the surface. Do you like the brown, or did you like the white?” Which was rather more the point, even if it was more than his life’s worth to comment on the choices a woman made to her appearance.
He hadn’t a thought as to how long it took to make almond extract. Surely it was less complicated. And less of a waste of good vodka. But she looked happy enough about it, and he held out a hand for the bottle just to demonstrate an appreciation for homemade almond extract. Jeans smeared with flour now, shirt dirty and asking about white hair and almonds. Good bloody grief.
“Perhaps not. I can’t picture her in a kitchen, can you?” Certainly not cookie-baking. Rage, possibly, microwave-cooking likely. “More likely to take it out on the oven if it isn’t perfect than to adjust the heat-settings.” This was dry as sand.
“A machine turned my hair white.” She confirmed with a nod and then pointed to where there used to be a flash of blue behind her ear. “Blue, too. Don’t mess with machines.” Sage advice that she knew she’d never truly follow. Her powers didn’t let her leap far into the future, but she knew that those machines would come back to her one way or another. Or, she’d go back to them. She could change her hair, she could stop using her powers, she could even give up everything and it wouldn’t matter. Connie knew one day she’d be back in that glowing closet doing science again.
Jack actually held his hands out for the bottle and she smiled for real this time. The Gunster smile was unsettling in its own way, but it was real. So, that was something. “Thanks.” It was hard to get anyone to spend time with her without being actively worried that she was going to break. He felt like a safe third-party and if he was worried about her, at least he was good at hiding it.
“Dahl’s always ready to trash something before trying to make it work.” Connie spoke plainly before she could figure out a nicer way of saying it. She was new at relationships and Dahl probably wasn’t the best pick for her first run.
She gave him the bottle and Jack unscrewed the top to sniff. He wasn’t entirely sure what it was meant to smell like - fresher almond? - and he was listening to the explanation of hair color that turned white and then was dyed brown and none of it made a particular part of sense that didn’t give him a headache.
He didn’t think she’d break. Of the two, Jack had a sneaking suspicion Dahlia was more fragile than Connie, the kind of high-strung that balanced on a dog-whistle note as precarious as it might be to shatter. Connie’s smile broke a little of the surface-tension of that far too ordinary response and Jack put the bottle down on the table near the bowls, palms on the table.
“Are you talking about cookie baking, or you and Dahlia?” Blunt. Jack had none of the subtlety of his younger brother nor, indeed, Cat. He didn’t edge, he stepped. “Because observing from my staid and elderly corner, you two seem to be able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.”
Almond extract was supposed to smell like too much almond. It tasted like it too, like someone tried to squeeze a thousand almonds into an itty bitty bottle. When Connie was small, she loved how almond extract made cookies taste and so she thought that chugging a bottle was a really great idea. The consequence was her spitting out the whole bottle and having to learn how to make a new one before- oh wait no her parents didn’t care. Her mom ran away and her dad barely stocked the shelves enough to have spaghetti every night.
“Wow, right to the point.” Connie looked at Jack like he invaded the coy nature of the baking space. “Jeepers creepers.” She kept pale blue eyes down at the recipe which she already knew backwards and forwards. “You’re really close with Dahl, huh? That’s really good ‘cause she’s never been able to make friends that easy.” Connie started mixing the dry ingredients together in a big bowl, pointing at ingredients near Jack that she needed. “Do you guys talk about me a lot? Were you curious to meet the big bad Gunster?”
She didn’t flash a smile. She looked up and there was no Gunster blue fire in her anywhere.
Baking, or indeed, parents didn’t feature particularly in Jack’s past. The memories had rinsed the town through of any suspicion that families had been wholesome, hearty or whole for much of the place and his sympathies might have been tweaked into twinging for Connie had he known the track on which her thoughts were running. But he had what lay in front of him, and he wasn’t coy.
“The big bad Gunster?” When Jack repeated it, it had the vague air of disconnection with the statement, reading back a line in a book rather than resonation with the text itself. He looked at Connie and the faded look to her now he’d walked them up to the edge of the cliff that had been there, even if Jack was the only one who had known it, and reassessed.
“I know Dahlia reasonably well,” he said, truthfully. He didn’t know much about the woman other than on the peaks and troughs of her moods. “I don’t know you. Apart from you saying you think she wants you to be almost-normal. What isn’t normal about you?” Jack was watching her, with the evident interest in Connie, rather than an appendage to an already-known friend.
“Well, I’m normal now.” Connie said out loud and then again in her head. It sounded weird, false. She thought about how everyone thought Dahlia was good for her, that everything was fine here in this Repose and she wondered again and silently if she stepped into a new reality. Patrick told her no, that she misunderstood people, but how could she get something so wrong? She wanted to be normal in this normal Repose. “My family comes from a long line of weirdos. Dahlia never liked it much and so I tried to keep it to myself. Now, I think it’s better if I just cut that part out completely. Start over. Hit the reset.”
Her family, her father’s legacy. Both things that defined how Connie saw herself for so long. But, everyone around her couldn’t handle it. They were scared. And, when Connie tried to hide the scary bits from them, they got mad at her. So, no more hiding. No more anything that they couldn’t handle. Take all the spooky bits out. “So, first we’re going to sift the dry ingredients. It’s important to put it through this sifter to get the clumps out.” She held up a tin sifter. “Isn’t interesting? It’s the same design someone in the 1800’s would use. There’s newer ones out there, but you can’t beat something that works.”
Jack was too old for shifting far off his own axis of understanding and self-awareness. He knew what he liked and what he didn’t, and there was a gulf of difference between wallowing for a few years and tearing up his own pleasures permanently. Perhaps Connie wanted to be somebody else, although it didn’t sound much like it, but it wouldn’t bloody last. He’d seen a handful of them pass through AA, people who thought that pitching up and affirming they were addicts would mean sweeping out whoever they were and introducing somebody shiny in their place. He was too selfish to tell them not to bother, but he could have done.
Connie rattled around with the sifter, and Jack loped over until he was stood at her elbow, peering at the recipe. “I imagine rather a lot of thought went into it the first time around, which makes re-invention difficult,” he said with dry sympathy for the original.
“Are you going to snipe at me if I tell you it sounds like a walking disaster to try and make yourself over for anyone? You think Dahlia wants you to be normal, and presumably your brother too. If you’re miserable and you’re not you, do you think that’s who either of them want?” Jack deliberately schooled reasonableness into his voice. He picked up the flour, and held it out to her.
“I have no idea how to measure this, but my capabilities here suit an oversight role rather than hands-on,” he said with more seriousness than any of the rest of it.
Connie shook her head. “Your advice is logical, but it’s incorrect.” She looked down and there was a streak of white right down the middle of her hairline, like fingers trying to crack her skull open. “People tell you they don’t want you to change, they like who you are, but it’s a lie. If who you are is unsettling, if it’s difficult for them, it’s easier for them if you change. I think I’ll have a bad time no matter what I do. Crazy scientist loner who works at the B&B or mild-mannered family woman. Either way, I’m not going to have it easy.”
She looked up at him. “You care about Dahlia and I think that’s great. Do you talk to her often? Dahl and I barely talk, that’s how it’s always been. If I get talking, I upset her.” Connie shook her head and blinked, one, two, three before she realized she was crying into the cookie dough. She quickly wiped her tears and shook her head. “I’m sorry, I think I messed up the cookies.” Connie looked up at him, electric blue eyes and smiled. “Game over.”
The flour was useless. The entire cookie-making rig was up and Connie’s head was bowed low enough Jack could see the proof that whatever machine turned hair white, it was doing its damndest to shake off the residue of feigned normality, the half inch of snow-white root. He let her tell him all the reasons why it was impossible not to try to take a red pen to her own personality, and then Connie was looking up at him, as plaintive as the day Dahlia had sat sobbing on her own steps.
Christ.
He had a shocking suspicion that the two of them were as bad at this as one another. Not that Jack had enough room to be comfortable enough to judge, but as witness to one another’s determination to wrench their hearts out, he felt very bloody old. He put down the flour and he stepped gingerly close enough to put a (very awkward) arm around her shoulders.
“Sometimes if it’s worth hearing, it’s worth being upset over.”
Connie wasn’t expecting any kind of affection from the man. She viewed him as an advocate for Dahlia and so any kind of empathy towards her wasn’t worth the effort. And, she knew how bad that sounded. She knew her and Dahlia was probably already over. Connie had a way of destroying relationships before they even started. Her friendships? Weren’t that great either. She mumbled, “No, you don’t have to.” When Jack put his arms around her shoulder, like he was doing it out of obligation. But, then she turned and wrapped his arms around his middle for a full-fledged hug. She tried not to cry on his shirt.
“There isn’t anyone like me, I don’t know who to talk to about any of this stuff.” She sighed and sniffled. “I tried to be normal today. I went to baking class and sat in a room full of normal people with normal problems. And, I still couldn’t escape what’s happening to me. I ruined everyone’s bread just by existing.” She shook her head and laughed. Connie took a step back and let go of him. “That’s not your problem, though. I’m sorry for getting upset. I’ll make it up to you someday.”
Jack was a dreadful advocate, if he’d come as an advocate at all. It had largely been curiosity, for the woman who had near sparkled good humor from the front desk and how she connected to the acerbic, sharp-nosed woman who had, it had to be admitted, become something of a friend. Connie twisted until she was wrapped around clean blue cotton and he patted her shoulder with all the awkwardness of a man who had grown up in a public all boys’ school.
“What do you mean, there isn’t anyone like you?” Jack dug a handkerchief out of the depths of his pocket, yet more white clean cotton that Connie would probably laugh at as much as Dahlia had, and handed it over in response to the suspiciously wet sound in her throat. “Who gives a rats arse about normal? This town isn’t normal. Dahlia certainly isn’t normal. Your brother might be, but I have significant doubts. What is it that’s happening to you?”
Connie stepped back and Jack observed her with mild concern. “Make it up to me for getting upset? I’m not remotely bothered.” He didn’t look it, either.
“Someone like me.” Connie took the handkerchief and smiled at it before wiping her eyes. “Someone who wants to learn how to bend the source code of this world even if it’s not safe. Even if the last guy who tried to do it destroyed himself and his family in the process. There’s no one like me, who can do the things I can do. Who sees the things I see.” She blew her nose and tucked the handkerchief away in her apron. “There’s a whole different world out there, beyond anything you’ve ever seen before and I’m the only person I know who wants to go find it. Dahlia doesn’t want to, Patrick hates the idea that he might not be normal. They’re my people, so I have to try and keep myself from chasing after that dream. My dad did it alone and he’s- he’s worse than dead. That could be me.”
Her hair went completely white. It was a gradual thing, like slow electricity zig-zagging through strands of mousy brown. “You should be bothered.” Connie smiled at him and then started gathering all the ingredients, bowls and spoons. “You just wanted to make cookies and now you’re aware that the person who runs this joint is someone with powers and can be less-than emotionally stable.” She smiled at him, though, with zero hint of losing her cool again. Connie liked to keep her shit together and had pretty good practice at it. Only recently with all the drama was it hard for her to always stay above water.
“Emotional stability is a foreign concept,” Jack stared at her hair, blinked, and stared again.”I’m sorry, I don’t think that’s supposed to happen.” But christ, it resonated. The desire to see more than what was immediately at the end of your nose. Dahlia, Jack judged, had spent so long in Repose that it had silted around her ankles, she loathed it but she held fast to it. “What makes you think Dahlia wouldn’t go with you, if you wanted to?”
Her father was worse than dead. It sounded vaguely menacing, but Connie also had hair that turned itself back to its original color within minutes, so Jack grappled with the concept in parallel. “Do you mean you need either of your people along for the ride, if you want to go for it? Connie, love if you’re meant to go for it, you have to. You can’t stultify yourself down to your marrow to fit a box. You’re meant to make yourself happy.”
He shrugged both shoulders. “There are people all over the bloody place with pasts and presents and futures that are utterly weird. I’m as normal as it gets, which is depressing.”
“I want someone who wants to go on adventures with me, not someone who does it because they love me and are worried I might die.” Connie closed her eyes and beamed at the idea. “Someone who is passionate about danger and adventure and weirdness. Someone who can see what I can do and thinks it’s neat instead of really scary.” She let herself day dream about it for a full second before opening her eyes. “Dahlia has never been like that. She’s grounded. Maybe it would be good to have someone like that along for the ride, but lately I’ve been discouraged.”
“You’re so lucky you’re normal. Normal is wonderful. I’d trade all this in to be normal if I could.” Connie assured him and grinned. “There’s nothing depressing about it. Having an itch like I do? That’s depressing.” She took her apron off and inched her finger at him so he’d follow her outside. She needed some fresh air and baking was just not happening right now. Connie unlatched the backdoor and stepped out into the B&B backyard. It was close to getting a little wild out there. The grass hadn’t been mowed and the entrance over to the carriage house looked like it would be swallowed up by weeds soon enough. But, there were flowers, too. Some bright blue just like Connie’s eyes.
Oh, wanderlust. Jack was acutely familiar with wanderlust and all the ways the trappings of home felt constrictive and dull, as if the color had soaked out of them and left them gray and ashen in the seeking of adventures. But Dahlia, he could picture sat on those bloody steps. Dahlia, who Jack was comfortably certain, hated Repose and bland and dull.
“First off,” because in for a penny, in for a sodding great pound. It would make, he decided, an excellent recounting to Newt. Newt, because Cat would laugh her bloody head off, “Dahlia loves you. You, not normal, Stepford you. She’s known you for decades. She’s loved you for decades, by the looks of it. So this whole thing of somebody wanting to dial you down to nought, turn you off, I think it’s bollocks. Dahlia is a bloody boxer, so she’s probably comfortable with danger. But you don’t know unless you ask her. Genuinely ask her. It’s easy to let assumptions fall through the cracks.”
He contemplated the bright expanse of blue sky, hands in his pockets now. “You know, I know that itch. I know it extremely well. It and I used to be best friends. Not your sort of danger,” Jack’s voice idled on that a little, no, it had never been that sort of danger, but it clearly was these days, “But an itch. I think it’s easier, to think about what you want from somebody if there were a somebody carved out to fit you. I used to think she,” She, the mythical She, shaped from thin air with the careless wave of one of Jack’s hands, “I used to think she would sleep under canvas, might have been a photographer, might have been somebody better at taking adventure and distilling it down into shite that made people sit up and listen. Then I thought she gave absolutely no shits about my sort of adventure, but would have her own, would be madly passionate about it.” A brief sort of smile, tugged at the corners. That clearly hadn’t bloody worked, had it?
“But it’s harder, when you’re looking at a person and wondering how your life fits them. How who you are fits them, and how who they are fits you. It’s harder, than carving out a person to fit. Christ knows, it’s easier though, than trying to carve yourself out to fit them. It’s not all sunshine and roses, Connie, but it’s a damn sight more real. Are you scared Dahlia doesn’t actually want what you have to offer or who you are, or do you not want her because she doesn’t have what you want? Very different, you see.” He sounded rather more kind than he might have done before: positive influences rubbing off.
“Dahlia doesn’t like the spooky parts, the stuff I can’t explain, my legacy.” Connie shook her head. “We’ve talked about it and she told me she has a hard time handling it. The same goes for Patrick. I’ve been keeping this side of me from them for a long time and now that it’s all out, it’s hard for them.” There wasn’t a hint of blame for them. She blamed herself and she blamed her father for passing his love for science down to her. If she hadn’t gone out to look at his machine all those years ago, maybe things would be different. Two normal kids just trying to learn how to be adults without a parent figure in sight.
“And, it’s not just that.” Connie hadn’t really confessed this to anyone. She had tried to explain, but no one really understood so she kept the feelings to herself. She sighed. “I didn’t like how she talked to me. When we were friends, it never got like that. Dahlia accused me of hurting Patrick by trying to protect him. I raised him, I kept my father from ever hurting him. Dahlia talking to me like that- it broke me up inside.” She shook her head. “Dahlia might care about me a lot, but she doesn’t understand me.”
That much, Jack saw, was clear as bloody crystal. The way Connie and Patrick were he didn’t understand. There had been staff, when he had needed what passed for parenting. Newt too, probably. They hadn’t come together like satellites in the swing of circuitous orbit, they had spread, distanced over time and various stages of abandonment. But Connie and Patrick were coupled together, a force major.
“All right,” Jack agreed, both hands back in his pockets and his back to the door to the B&B. It smelled fresh out here, clean and he looked at Connie candidly, blue eyes very clear and shrewd. “It sounds like it was a serious bloody misstep. Sometimes navigating the ground between friendship and what else there might be comes with pitfalls, things you don’t know to see. Have you told her that? Because to me, it looks like the two of you are trying to work out what you want, how you fit, utterly independently of one another, you’re hurt by one another without actually talking to one another about it. Which looks to be bloody hard.”
He shrugged, and he leaned back against the nearest wall, the brickwork rough under his shoulderblades. “Some parts of people are difficult to understand, hard to grasp. Not necessarily getting it isn’t a death sentence, it just means getting used to those parts being there. You need to feel like you can talk to her about you, without holding back. So does she. You’re not going to work out whether she can cope with it without her, and she’s not going to figure out how she’s fucked up without you talking to her and telling her. So tell her how you feel. All the messy, dirty parts of how you feel.” He smiled, “And do it instead of baking bloody cookies.”
“And, it doesn’t help that I’ve never been in a relationship before. I don’t know if jumping from zero relationships to dating my best friend was a great idea.” Connie thought it would make it easier, but there was too many emotions. She wanted to preserve the good stuff that she and Dahlia had and yet there were parts of the woman that Connie didn’t like anymore. That she was afraid of. That she was hurt by. Connie didn’t know if she deserved to feel hurt or if she was so weird and bad that she actually needed to be yelled at and treated like shit to learn how relationships worked.
“I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen. I don’t know if I can ever talk about me all the way through without making her unhappy.” Connie nodded. “I’ll try to tell her how I feel though. Might as well give a shot since the alternative isn’t working at all.” She turned to smile at Jack. “Thanks. You know, Dahl is really lucky to have you around. I know I’ve said that before but it’s worth repeating.” Connie reached to take Jack’s hand, squeezing it and smiling at him before stepping away. “I’m going to go home. If anyone needs something at the B&B, tell them to ask the ghosts.” She waved and started off towards the neighborhood.