Time to change the topic.
“Arabella, what kind of birthday party do you want?”
“You’re planning it?”
Sabrina nodded.
“Now I know it’ll be good. The dads aren’t good at parties for girls.”
“They know that. That’s why they asked me. So, what must you have?”
Arabella scrunched her face, giving it proper thought, while Lilly and Oscar had some ideas.
“Dinosaurs,” Oscar said.
“Puppies,” Lilly added.
“Octonauts!”
“Frozen.”
“It’s Arabella’s party, and she gets to choose. When it’s your birthday, you can have those things,” Sabrina said.
“I want a glamping party.”
Sabrina snorted.
“Glamping? Do you even know what that is?”
“Fancy camping with lots of pillows and pretty tents.”
“Yes, that’s kind of it.”
“And fireworks.”
“Glamping and fireworks. Got it.”
Sabrina eased around the corner toward her parents’ home, a large old house just a few blocks from the Wisconsin Dells downtown, where the street was lined with inexpensive T-shirt stores, fudge shops, restaurants, gift stores, bars, and unexpected attractions like Wizard Quest and ax throwing. Ideas for the party tumbled into neat rows in her mind, ready to be put onto paper, then made into reality. She hoped Cal and Brendan were ready for this.
Like Molly, her parents’ house was over the century mark. Lined with tall oaks and maples, the street had houses ranging from ramshackle colonials to grander homes converted into bed-and-breakfasts to new homes where older residences had been knocked down.
Sabrina pulled the car into the driveway. Mrs. Randolph’s cat sat on the warm blacktop in front of their garage, having found the one sunbeam filtering through the towering trees in the yard. He must have gotten out through the gap in the screen door again, using his head like a battering ram. She reached across Molly to the glove compartment and pulled out a roll of duct tape, threading it on her arm like a bracelet. The kids in the back seat got themselves unbuckled and scampered to the house, ready to tell the tale of Sabrina’s blossoming black eyes.
Sabrina got out of the car, and the cat flopped over onto his side as she approached. Blood rushed to her head when she bent over at the waist, sending a new round of throbbing pain to her nose. She gave the cat a quick belly rub and scooped him up, his body limp in her arms like a loose bag of sand. Mrs. Randolph didn’t like him outside with the busy traffic on nearby streets, but he staunchly believed the sunbeams were of much higher quality in the driveway. Sabrina had already wrangled him back inside twice this week.
“Come on, Mr. Bennett, time to go home.”
Molly followed her, blinking herself from inside the car to Sabrina’s side.
“You can’t ignore them forever. Those souls need you,” Molly said, ignoring the cat. Mr. Bennett didn’t like her much, so Molly chose to pretend he didn’t exist rather than feel rejected when he hissed at her. They had settled into a truce of mutual ignoring.
“The other ghosts have my mother, and the girls will be old enough soon. They can’t wait to join the family biz.”
Sabrina tried to squish the cat back through the hole in the screen, but Mr. Bennett didn’t care for this plan. It went as smoothly as putting toothpaste back in the tube, but with more squirming and fur. Sabrina gave up, opened the door, set him on the floor, and shut it before he could escape again. Using the duct tape, she sealed the opening. After one attempt to slip back through the hole, Mr. Bennett sat on the other side of the door and meowed his disgruntlement to her. The duct tape wouldn’t last long. She’d need to fix the screen.
“You can help Mrs. Randolph but not help a few ghosts with their unfinished business?”
“You know why.”
“You aren’t a pip-squeak anymore. You can handle annoying ghosts without people noticing. And Ray’s no heel. He doesn’t seem like the type to mind the occasional visiting specter.”
“We aren’t going to discuss what Ray would or wouldn’t mind. It’s not going to happen.”
Sabrina didn’t want to think about Ray. She only wanted a shower.
“Ray’s a good name.” Molly’s face got dreamy.
“Sabrina?” An imperious voice interrupted her fantasies of hot water and thick lather. Behind her stood a small wrinkled woman. Her gray hair was streaked with strands of dark brown and pulled into a tidy twist. She wore an expensive Chanel suit coat and skirt, and a hazy glow blurred her edges like someone had dragged an eraser around her. Out of instinct, Sabrina stepped back and landed on a sharp stone.
“Damn.”
“Language, young lady.” The woman pulled herself up taller. Then Sabrina recognized her.
“Madam Hendricks?” She was the grandmother of a former classmate—and had always insisted on being Madam, not Mrs. It was all you needed to know about her and her family. Sabrina sighed and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Really? Now?”
“So it’s all true,” Madam Hendricks said as she studied Sabrina with new interest, then held her arms in front of her, inspecting them in the daylight, stretching far enough that her fingertips disappeared into Sabrina’s elbow. Sabrina shivered at the icy touch.
Well, shit. Sabrina didn’t want to deal with this. She stepped out of reach.
With the Houdini cat problem temporarily solved, Sabrina tossed the roll of duct tape through the car’s open window, grabbed her bags from the trunk, and said, “Yep. You’re dead. Follow me.” Then she walked inside her parents’ house with Molly and Madam Hendricks trailing behind like ducklings.
4
Ray’s judgment in real estate was similar to taste testing cake flavors; he knew instantly if he loved it or if it was too sweet or too dense. That was how it was with The Otter Club when he’d first visited while he was in college. He’d known immediately how he could improve it, what needed to be fixed, and what needed to stay exactly the same. He brushed a hand over the varnished logs that formed the porch railing, absently checking for snags that might give a guest a splinter, but mostly savoring the silence. After the noisy waterpark earlier in the day, he welcomed the quiet, which he’d only have for a few more hours before the restaurant opened.
He took a deep breath. The solitude and peace filled his lungs, the air scented with the rich aromas of dark soil and growing greenery. Surrounded by stately pines and the occasional birch or poplar, the restaurant overlooked a curve of the Wisconsin River and provided diners with expansive views up and down the water until it twisted around a bend, a path it had carved out over thousands of years. The river was wide and slow enough at this point that people occasionally thought it was a small lake or large pond until one of the touring ducks—the vehicle, not the animal—puttered by.