The Dead Romantics (40)

“I guess they would be.” For a few steps, I mulled over the question. What to tell him, and what to leave out. Though, what was the point of lying to a dead guy? “When I was thirteen, I helped a ghost solve his own murder. Before that, the whole mediator thing was kind of a family secret, but when your town paper writes ‘Girl Solves Hometown Murder with Ghosts,’ it kind of blows that out of the water.”

“So you became a local celebrity?”

I barked a laugh. “If only! No one believed me, Ben. Bestcase, they thought I was doing it for attention, worst case they thought I had something to do with the murder. Imagine being thirteen and on the witness stand and having to say, ‘A ghost told me.’ It was . . .” I tried not to remember much about that year if I could help it. The articles about me, the weird news stunt, the people calling me a liar. “Anyway, most people thought it was just a wild story. I guess it makes sense—I’d wanted to be a writer ever since I was little. I like words. I like shaping them. I like how the stories you create can be kind and good, and I like how they can never fail you, if that’s how you make them.” I kicked a rock, and it skittered off into the grass. “Or, you know, in theory.”

I bit my thumbnail as we walked on in silence. The only sound was my footsteps soft on the grass.

After a while he said, “I liked that about your first book.”

Surprised, I turned to him. “Rake?”

“No, your first book. What was it—Ardently Yours, I think was the title?”

My eyes widened. “You didn’t.”

“Why is that so surprising?”

“No one read that book, Ben. It never left its first printing.”

“I assure you I did.”

I wasn’t sure how much of that I believed. First Seaburn said he read it, then Ben—two people who didn’t know each other. Once my dad had said, “Don’t worry, buttercup, your book will find the people it needs to,” but I didn’t believe him.

I was beginning to second-guess myself.

We mingled among the tombstones. I knew where Dad’s plot would be. It was already sectioned off at the top of the hill, under the large oak tree where the crows perched. I sat down on one of the stone benches throughout the cemetery, and Ben took a seat beside me.

I outstretched my hands toward the graveyard. “So? Worth it, right? One of the best views in Mairmont.”

He pressed his mouth into a thin line, and his lips twisted a little. “I mean, it still isn’t worth the trespassing charge but . . . it’s nice.”

I bit in a grin, and pulled my feet up under me to sit cross-legged. The sky unfurled in front of us, infinite and dark. The stars were much brighter here—so bright I almost forgot that you didn’t need light out here in nowhere. The stars gave you all the light you needed. “Dad used to sneak in here with me when I was a kid. We’d stroll the graveyard. He called it his exercise. Sometimes when the ISS would pass overhead, we’d come out here and watch it. We’ve seen loads of comets and space junk falling in the sky. You really can’t beat a view like this.”

“No,” he agreed. “You kind of forget in the city how many stars there are. I grew up in Maine where there were a lot of stars, too.”

“Ann’s in Maine,” I pointed out. “Maybe you were neighbors and didn’t even know it.”

“There’s a lot of writers in Maine. How do you know I wasn’t neighbors with Stephen King?”

“Good point.”

“Has anyone famous visited you as a ghost?” he asked.

“Famous?” I tilted my head in thought. “No . . . not that I know of. Most of the people I dealt with were from Mairmont, and I really didn’t talk to ghosts in New York, so I wouldn’t know. You’re a weird outlier, come to think of it. You died in New York but you’re haunting me five hundred miles away.”

“I’m wondering the same thing,” he mused, rubbing his chin. “I never imagined my afterlife would be walking cemeteries at midnight in the middle of nowhere.”

“My ex hated this type of thing.”

“What—sneaking into cemeteries and performing séances to summon the dead?”

“Wouldn’t that have been fun? And no. He wasn’t ever really into this scene. I mean, you aren’t, either, clearly,” I added, motioning to his rolled-up shirtsleeves and neatly pressed trousers, “but he wouldn’t have even entertained the idea. Even if he knew I liked it, he wouldn’t have asked.”

He cocked his head. “True, he isn’t really the graveyard type. I always thought it was strange how he wrote a contemporary gothic horror.”

I stiffened. “Right—you know him. Lee Marlow.”

“We are—were—work associates,” he clarified, frowning as he had to correct himself to past tense. “We both got into publishing around the same time, so I saw him at functions—I recognized you when you walked into the office the other day,” he added. “We never really crossed paths, though.”

No, but I was never going to tell him that I recognized him, too, when I first saw him the other day. “Was that also why you were at that writing bar the other night?”

“Colloquialism? Yeah. I was there at the bar getting drinks with him because apparently he wanted to vent about the font they’re using in his book.”