Phantoms of Fall (The Haunting Ruby Series Book 2) (5 page)

I had no idea where I was going, but I threw on some
sneakers, grabbed my phone and walked out of the mansion.
It wasn’t until I was half way there that I realized I was
heading to the mausoleum. It didn’t hold the same terror for
me that it used to, so when I got there I sat down on the steps
fearlessly.

Why did I come here? As I pondered that question, I
felt the vibration of my phone in my pocket. Pulling it out, I
saw that I had a new text from Zach.

“Almost done—can I c u 2nite?”

Quickly, I messaged him back. “Yes—wanna do s’thin
special 2nite?” I hoped he would read between the lines and
know what I meant by the word “special”. I leaned back
against the steps and waited for his reply.

“Everything we do together is special.”

Dammit!
The gentleman act was starting to wear a
little thin. Did he have no hormones whatsoever?
Or was
I
the abnormal one?
My phone vibrated again.
Maybe he
finally got the hint I dropped.
I checked the message
excitedly.

“Rita wants u 2 stop by. Says it’s important. Luv u!”

Rita Darcangelo.
She helped us deal with the spirits
that were haunting Rosewood.
Without her help, I would
probably still be getting attacked by Scarlet—if I were still
alive at all, that is.
I owed her a lot, but what could she
possibly want from me now?
It couldn’t be money—when
Dad learned of the assistance she gave me, he offered to pay
her but she declined. The last time I saw her she was staring
at the destruction Scarlet caused with a troubled look on her
face. At the time, I figured she was just disappointed in me
because she
thought
I
disobeyed
her
instructions.
She
warned Zach and me that the energy we had together was
nothing but fuel for the ghosts. No kissing and definitely no
sex—those were the rules and we followed them. Maybe she
just wanted to check up on me, see that everything was still
good here. Yes, that had to be all it was.

Since I still had time to kill, I decided to go put Rita’s
mind at ease. I returned to the house, grabbed my keys, and
let Shelly know where I was going. It was my first solo outing
behind the wheel and I was a little nervous as I pulled out of
the drive.
But once I was cruising down the road, I was
overcome with a sense of freedom.
Nothing could stop me
now. Nothing.

Zach taught me well, but I was still relieved to find
two open spots in front of Rita’s candle shop, Something
Wick-ed. I pulled straight in instead of parallel parking and
climbed out onto the sidewalk. I didn’t hesitate a second
about coming to see her. Until now. Now I was inexplicably
nervous—like I was about to take a huge calculus test I didn’t
study for. If she hadn’t been placing a “Help Wanted” sign in
the window as I approached, I just might have run for it. But
she saw me instantly and opened the door before I could even
place my hand on the handle.

“Ruby, you got my message! Thanks for coming.” She
was as friendly as ever, however an air of concern seeped into
her words.
And concern from someone like Rita was, well,
concerning
me.

There were no customers in the store and as I stepped
inside, she turned the sign from “open” to “closed”. The
trepidation I felt on the sidewalk just turned to full blown
fear. According to the hours posted in the window, the shop
should have been open for another two hours. What could
she possibly want with me?

“Let’s have a seat in my office. We need to talk.”

We need to talk.
The four most feared words in the
English language. That was how you prefaced breakups or
breaking the news about someone’s death. And since neither
of those applied to Rita and me, I had no idea what she was
about to lay on me. All I knew was that it couldn’t be
something good.

Rita sat down in her black leather office chair and I
took a seat across the desk from her.
There was still a
cheerful smile on her face but I could sense something bad
lurking behind it.

“So Ruby, can we talk about what happened last
week?” She leaned forward on the desk, chin propped on her
hands. It suddenly felt like I was in a psychiatrist’s office, like
she was about to silently scrutinize every one of my words
and facial expressions.

“Sure, but I think I already told you everything that
happened that night. What else do you want to know?” I tried
to remain calm but I could feel my defenses slowly building.
She never made me feel anxious before—why now?

“Did you see anything? At any point during the
haunting did you actually see any of the ghosts?” The tone of
her voice was intense and I didn’t know what to make of it.

“Yeah, lots of times. Why?” What difference could
that possibly make?

 

“Did anyone else see anything?” Rita leaned further
over her desk toward me.

I had a seriously bad feeling about this. “No. Why?” I
recounted to her my shock when Rachel claimed not to see
the entity the night of the séance. It went straight through
her—how could she have missed it?

Rita sighed and slumped back in her chair. “And you
had a near death experience last year and
again
in
the
fountain, right?”

“Yeah.” Whatever point she was trying to make, she
needed to hurry up and make it.
Or I had an even better
solution—drop it altogether.

“I hate to have to say this to you, but I don’t think that
was the last brush with the paranormal you’ll ever have. I
think your near death experience opened you up to the other
side—opened up Pandora’s ghost box, in a sense.”

No, that couldn’t be. She had to be wrong. But even as
I tried to deny it, my world started to collapse in on me. I
spoke to her with misdirected anger. “What makes you think
that? How could you possibly know anything about me?”

She looked at me with sorrow in her eyes. “I know
more than you want to think I do because I can see them, too.”
6. The Worst Christmas Present Ever…
I sat numbly in my chair as she told me her story.

“I was eight years old when it happened.
It was
Christmas Eve and I was playing with some friends down by
Drucker’s Pond. We were having a lot of fun when some older
kids showed up. They started running out on to the ice and
daring us to do it, too. They challenged us to a game to see
who could go out the furthest.
I was scared, but I watched
each of them run out and run back and I convinced myself
that I would be fine. But when my turn came….”

She paused long enough to sweep the emotion back
under the rug.
I knew that metaphorical rug all too well.
“When my turn came, I went out just a little further than the
girl before me.
I felt the surface start to crack, but there
wasn’t time to react. I plunged into the icy water and started
to sink. I kicked my way back up, but I’d drifted too much and
I couldn’t see where the break in the ice was. I beat on it with
my fists but it wouldn’t give way. I couldn’t breathe. The next
thing I knew, everything went....”

“White.” I finished the sentence for her and she
nodded her head in agreement.

“Suddenly, I was standing outside of my body, outside
of the water. I watched as they ran for help, certain that it
wouldn’t arrive in time. A sense of pure truth came over me
and I was at peace with what was happening. A policeman got
to me first and he dove in after me. I watched as he tried to
resuscitate me and then with a snap I was back in my body.
Everyone said I was so lucky to be alive. I thought so too until
the next day.”

My anger was gone. She really
did
understand me and
what I went through. “What happened the next day?”

“Well, Christmas morning I went downstairs to open
my presents and I saw my grandmother standing behind the
tree. The only problem was that my grandmother died earlier
that year.” Even though it happened years ago the horror of it
still showed in her expression. Would I look the same way as
I retold
my
story twenty years from now?
I hoped it was
possible to put such heinous memories so far behind me that
they were no longer painful but it didn’t look like it happened
that way for Rita.

I never knew any of my grandparents. Dad’s parents
died before I was born and my mother’s parents hated my
dad.
My mother was a ballet dancer with the Philadelphia
Ballet Company but she gave up her career to have me. Her
parents thought she was throwing away years of hard work
and blamed it all on my dad. She chose him and me and they
never forgave her for it.
After she died giving birth to my
sister, my dad tried to contact them in the hopes that they
could make peace, if not for his sake then at least for mine.
They never responded.
But most grandparents I knew were
loving
and
kind.
At least her first encounter with
the
paranormal wasn’t as frightening as mine was.

“That must have made things easier for you—for the
first ghost you see to be someone you knew and loved.”

Her lips wrinkled into a wry smile. “Oh, but it wasn’t.
My grandmother was a horrible, wretched old woman. When
I misbehaved, my mother would tell me stories about how she
was abused as a child to make me appreciate the fact that she
was a better mother than hers was. My grandmother wasn’t
all chocolate chip cookies and knitting yarn. She was mean
and frightening.
She would take the belt to me if I even
looked at her the wrong way. And there she stood, with her
wild and wiry gray hair and dark evil eyes glaring at me from
between the branches.
I screamed bloody murder and ran
back upstairs.”

“Oh my God! What did your mother say when you
told her?”

“She didn’t believe me. She made me
go back
downstairs
and
open up my
presents.
My
grandmother
glared at me from behind that tree the entire day. I still get
chills just thinking about it.” She held out her arm for me to
see the goose bumps clearly formed along its length. For the
first time ever, I was actually glad I never knew any of my
grandparents.

“Was she the only ghost you ever saw?” I hoped
against hope that she would say “yes”. But of course, she
shook her head no.

“She was the only one I saw for a while so I thought
that—as scary as she was—she was the only one I would ever
have to deal with.
But I was wrong and it got especially bad
when I was about your age and I fell in love for the first time.”

Zach! I was so wrapped up in her story that I didn’t
take into account the full ramifications of what she was telling
me. Did this mean that I was doomed to die a virgin? Theory
confirmed—Misty
did
have a voodoo doll of me hidden
somewhere in her nest.

I swallowed hard.
Thoroughly unconvinced that I
actually wanted to hear the bad news, I asked for it anyway.
“What happened then?”

“His name was Kevin,” she said and smiled wistfully as
she spoke his name. “He was gorgeous—tall with light brown
hair and blue-green eyes. He was on the basketball team and
I thought he was the cutest boy I’d ever seen. It was our
senior year of high school and I went to every game so I could
cheer him on. There was a dance one night after a game and I
almost died when he asked me to dance. I fell in love with
him so fast that I didn’t even think about what would happen
if he found out about my dirty little secret.
But just like what
happened with you and Zach, our relationship caused the
activity to go off the charts. One night while I was kissing him
on my mother’s blue plaid couch, my grandmother showed
up. And this time she had the energy to do something she’d
never done before—she slapped me hard across the face and
called me a whore.”

“What did you do?” I struggled to think how I would
have handled that situation if it had been me but came up
blank. How exactly do you explain something like that?

“I broke down in tears and told Kevin the truth and he
was simply wonderful. He believed every word I told him—
just like Zach believed you.”

There was something in the way she spoke of him that
suggested she still loved him. “So did you stay together? Did
he help you with your problem?”

“For a while. But the more I loved him, the worse it
got. It broke my heart every time I saw the worry on his face.
I just couldn’t go on hurting him that way.
So the night of
graduation, I broke up with him. I couldn’t tell him the truth
because he would have insisted that he could handle it so
instead, I told him I didn’t love him anymore. I broke that
boy’s heart but it was for his own good. I haven’t seen him
since. But I
have
seen plenty of ghosts and I’m afraid you will
too.”

No. This couldn’t be happening. She was wrong—she
had to be wrong. I couldn’t face the possibility that the events
I endured over the summer would repeat themselves. What
about Zach?
He was great about what happened over the
summer, but how would he react if I told him that it could
possibly happen again—and again? He would stand by me,
but for how long?
And at what cost?
My anger returned.
How dare she lay this load of crap on me!

I stood up abruptly, sending my chair to the floor with
a loud bang. “Thanks for the story, but it has nothing to do
with my situation. Rosewood was haunted—not me.”

I turned to walk away as she called after me, “I’m
sorry! I was only trying to help, Ruby!”