chapter three

chase

The Banyon Manor had been high on the list of places Sean and I most wanted to explore since we started this whole ghost hunting thing. We’d been denied permission to enter it a total of three times, and even though I was perfectly comfortable trespassing at the abandoned mansion, Sean was too fearful of getting arrested.

For someone who spent all of his free time hunting ghosts, he was afraid of everything.

We’d given up hope, attempting to push it far from our minds. And then the goddamn Blakely Brothers descended upon the place, giving their eight million subscribers a complete tour. It made us livid, to know these out-of-state hacks came into our county and got access to the one place we’d been pursuing for years.

As it turned out, the property had switched ownership, which somehow flew under our radar. Once we got over the embarrassment of another YouTube channel beating us to the punch, I contacted the owner, who gave us permission to explore the house and its surrounding grounds for just two hours.

“It’s an eerie feeling,” I said at the center of the foyer, slowly turning the GoPro on myself, “stepping into the foyer of the Banyon Manor. Echoes of its tragic history almost seem to… reverberate through every creaking floorboard and shred of torn wallpaper. And here we stand, where-”

“What torn wallpaper?” Sean asked, tucking his thumbs beneath the straps of his backpack while eyeing the walls around us. “Everything looks pretty modern in here.”

Sighing, I closed my eyes in annoyance. But then again, this was the kind of banter our subscribers liked. I knew it would make the final edit. So, I shook my head before attempting to speak again, describing the historical yet modernized room we stood in. Yet this time, I stumbled over my words.

“Don’t call me sweetheart.”

So far that night, I wasn’t sensing any ghostly presence. The only thing haunting me was the sound of Meghan’s voice from earlier that day. That and the way she smelled. It gave me a small sense of pleasure to know she was still using that goddamn Bath & Body Works spray she used to ask for every year for her birthday.

She probably had someone else to buy it for her, now.

Stepping up on the first stair, I turned the GoPro back on, with Sean breathing loudly just behind me. I opened my mouth to speculate about poor Ruth Banyon’s last ascent up these very stairs, but the words never came. My mind went blank. And there was Meghan’s face again, occupying every square inch of my brain until there was no room for anything else.

“Fuck,” I muttered, clenching my eyes shut like that would somehow help.

“What? If it’s about the wallpaper comment, I was just fuckin’ around.”

“It’s not you. It’s-” I leaned back against the curved wall beside the stairs. “I’m just not feeling it tonight.”

“You’re not feeling it,” he repeated with a doubtful stare. “Tonight, at the Banyon fucking Manor? Bro. Do you know how hard it was to get away for the night? I’m putting in so many hours at the store, and between this and planning Comic Con, Erika’s going to kill me. I’m not as flexible as I was before the baby, man.”

Sean had an infant at home, which often threw a wrench in our plans. I sort of hated myself for the way I resented that baby. Dimitri was cute, I’d give him that—but Sean and I had less time to shoot now. And when we were together, Sean was usually exhausted and spent half the time talking about the kid’s diaper blowouts and acid reflux.

Why did people have babies, anyway?

The Woodvale Comic Con was the other thing occupying most of Sean’s time. I halfheartedly agreed to help him with it when he first came up with the idea a year ago, assuming it would resemble something like a small vendor fair in the high school gym, but the thing just kept getting bigger and bigger. Now that he’d somehow roped in a local science podcaster to help us build hype, we’d switched venues to a small convention center, and we still had to turn interested vendors away. We were in way over our heads.

For the past eight months, Sean had been relentlessly attempting to get Ethan Killian to make an appearance. He was a C-list celebrity, but a god among nerds like us because his show Starlight had such a devoted fandom, despite getting canceled after one season. Sean got in contact with Ethan’s publicist somehow, and he'd been emailing the woman for months, simply trying to get yes or a no. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting Ethan Killian to come to Woodvale, Indiana.

“What’s with you today?” Sean asked, closing the pull-out screen on his camcorder. “Did you go on a Wikipedia spiral again? Is it Mothman? It’s Mothman, isn’t it.”

“No,” I said, wishing I hadn’t spent an hour rambling to him about cryptids of North America a week ago. It was high time I learned to keep my hyperfixations to myself. “It’s not Mothman.”

“Then what-” Sean stopped himself short, smacking his lips. “Ah. The Times moved into your building today, and Meghan’s got you all worked up.”

I didn’t want to talk about her, so I turned away from Sean, gazing up the stairs into the dark hallway above. “I’m not ‘worked up.’ Today’s just an off day.”

“Did you talk to her?”

I drew in a slow breath. “A little bit.”

Though I wasn’t looking at him, I could feel his eyes on me. Sean was around back in my Meghan days. In fact, he met us at the same time, the day his comic bookstore opened and I dragged Meghan there to see what it was all about. He was there through the break-up, even renting the studio apartment above the comic bookstore to me when I had nowhere else to go. He’d been using the space for storage.

And, as a matter of fact, he still was—but I’d gotten so used to the commercial shelves and spare comic book boxes, I wouldn’t know what to do without them. The Venom cardboard cutout no longer made me nearly shit my pants in the middle of the night, either. I lovingly thought of him as my roommate and dressed him up for every holiday.

He was currently wearing Mardi Gras beads.

“Great,” Sean continued. Ignoring him, I started to walk up the stairs, knowing I couldn’t let my emotions squander what might be our only opportunity to explore this place. Sean followed, his footsteps heavier than mine. “Every time you see that woman, you get so fucked in the head for the next three to five business days.” I opened my mouth to argue, but I knew he wasn’t wrong. “Guess you’re going to have to get used to seeing her, huh?”

I didn’t know how I could.

Because I still got this lump in my throat every time I saw her. Despite my best efforts to play it cool when our faces were inches apart earlier that day, I was crumbling on the inside. I could tell she wanted me far, far away from her, but all I could think about was how much I missed being even closer.

“Hopefully we won’t encounter each other much more than we already do when we’re out on assignments. Just coming and going. It’ll be fine.” I cleared my throat, stepping up to the landing at the top of the stairs. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up the second my feet reached the hall floor.

Behind me, Sean fell silent, and we both turned on our cameras. He and I were pretty in sync when it came to sensing ghosts, and I knew he was feeling it, too.

I licked my lips and began to speak, my words coming back to me now. “We are definitely not alone here,” I whispered, taking a few careful, backward steps down the hallway, where the floorboards creaked beneath my feet. “But the question is—is it Ruth Banyon soul still lingering within the walls of this house? Or is it her violent husband, Willie, searching for his next victim? And might his next victim be… Sean?”

I turned my camera on Sean, whose eyes were as big as saucers as they darted back and forth. He took a couple of steps away from the stairs. “I’m not about to let some ghost push me down the stairs! No sir, not today.”

Laughing, I started to forget all about my encounter with Meghan, remembering just how long I’d waited to be standing in this very spot. But just as I took a few steps toward what I assumed was the bedroom where the Banyons had their final argument, Sean’s phone rang loudly behind me, startling us both.

I shut off the GoPro. “Damn it, Sean.”

He winced, looking at his phone screen. “It’s Erika.”

With a sigh, I turned away to hide my annoyance. I had no grounds for irritation. With a baby at home, I should pretty much expect Sean to be an on-call father. And sure enough, that was exactly what this phone call was about. “A hundred and two?” I heard Sean say with a gasp. “What do we do? Did you give him Tylenol?”

And just like that, our Banyon Manor exploration came to an abrupt end, and it wasn’t even my fault. Sean needed to get home to help Erika with Dimitri, who was running a fever. I didn’t know anything about babies and fevers, so I just nodded my head and said, “We’ll figure something out. No worries.”

Sean quickly packed up and peeled out of the driveway, leaving me standing alone in front of the old house. I looked up at the balcony, dropping my eyes to the patio below, where Ruth Banyon met her demise. It didn’t look like that far of a drop, but she must have hit her head just right on the stone.

All I could think about in that moment was how I’d told Meghan I hoped she got hit by a semi and died in a fiery crash, and how those words couldn’t have been farther from the truth. Her malicious response made me smile, though. That eat-shit-and-die look she so loved to give me only made me want to provoke her even more.

I had a personal rule for my interactions with Meghan, though. I would never tease her unless she initiated it. I always started out civil and respectful when we encountered one another, allowing her to be the one to say something mean first. It usually didn’t take very long, and once she started in, I gave myself a free pass to let her have it.

She was so hot when she was mean to me.

**

“Did it ever occur to you that all the people within a quarter mile radius don’t want to listen to your white boy rap?”

That meanness was off to an early start the next morning outside of Woodvale Middle School, where Meghan and I coincidentally arrived at the same time. We were both there to cover a student’s reading of an essay that won them a statewide contest. I joined her on the walkway and said, “You used to know ‘Ch-Check It Out’ by heart, so don’t even pretend you hate my music.” I had one specific memory of her rapping that song while curling her hair in the bathroom we used to share.

“Sorry, it got a little played out after three years of heavy rotation in your car,” she said, flipping her hair over her shoulder before ringing the buzzer by the door. I kept my eyes fixed on the back of her head so I wouldn’t be tempted to keep stealing glances at the back of her black skirt.

“Well,” I said, “we can’t all listen to sad girls who sing like they downed an entire bottle of cough syrup before recording.”

“You just don’t have the emotional capacity to understand the lyrics, and you know it.”

“Maybe I could understand the lyrics if they’d fucking enunciate.” I mumble-hummed along to the melody of the only Lana Del Rey song I could remember. “What even is that?”

Meghan twisted her body around and squinted at me, her gray-blue eyes as icy as her soul. “If she repeated ‘intergalactic planetary’ a billion times in a row, would that help you understand?” she snapped, sporting her infamous go-jump-off-a-bridge look. It made my heart beat a little faster.

“Depends. Will she open her mouth the whole way when she sings it?” I asked with a grin.

“You’re so-”

We were interrupted by a buzz from the speaker in front of us, and an “Um… hello?” from the school receptionist. I had a feeling she’d heard most of our argument.

“Hi, Anna,” Meghan said, suddenly unable to look at me. “It’s Meghan from the Woodvale Times and Chase from WWTV. Here for Jordyn’s speech.”

“Oh, yes! Stop at the front office for your visitor passes.” The door in front of us clicked, and I held it open for Meghan, noticing the pink tint in her cheeks. I could tell she wanted to kill me, but she held it together while we got our passes from the front office, even politely signing my name for me on the visitor log.

We were then ushered toward the center aisle of the auditorium, where I quickly set up my video camera on its tripod, and Meghan pulled out her Nikon camera. The newspaper let its photographers go a couple years ago, and Meghan had been doing a pretty decent job of filling their shoes, as far as I could tell. At the very least, I’d noticed she’d been getting better.

We stood shoulder-to-shoulder as twelve-year-old Jordyn Ellis took the stage, wowing the audience with their speech about the bullying they’d endured as a non-binary middle-schooler. They didn’t appear to be reading from a paper, either—did this kid actually have their speech memorized? The auditorium around us was silent, save for a couple of knuckleheads in the very back, whose teacher couldn’t get them to stop giggling. Sarah Gardner, the principal of Grissom Elementary, was sitting near us in the crowd. At first it didn’t make sense that she was there, but Jordyn mentioned her by name as the first teacher who made them feel like they mattered. Meghan and I watched Sarah pull a tissue from her purse and dab her eyes.

“I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a non-binary kid in a town like this,” Meghan whispered close to my ear so the mic wouldn’t pick it up. It sent goosebumps down the right side of my body.

I swallowed. “No, I’m sure it hasn’t been easy for them. Woodvale doesn’t seem like a very progressive place to grow up.”

“It’s not,” Meghan confirmed. She would know—she grew up in Woodvale, and I didn’t. She never liked to talk about her youth much, but I knew she was bullied in high school for being a little on the weird side. If those assholes could only see her now.

Just as I opened my mouth to share that sentiment, Meghan seemed to come to the realization she’d accidentally been a little too nice to me and took an enormous side-step away, as though my closeness was causing her physical pain.

We didn’t talk for the rest of the assembly, in which two other students read their runner-up speeches. It was clear to see why Jordyn’s essay won the contest, because the other two nearly bored me to death.

Finally, the principal took to the stage to wrap everything up, and Meghan and I made our way to the nearby choir room where we were told we could interview Jordyn. With my camera bag draped over my shoulder, I opened the classroom door for Meghan, who nodded a thank you. For a second, our eyes met in the doorway, and then she took me by surprise when she said, “Hold on, Chase. C’mere.” She yanked my arm back through the doorway until we were standing alone in the narrow hallway between the stage and the choir room. I waited, confused, as she dropped her own bag to the floor and reached up to adjust my collar. “Do you even look at yourself in the mirror before you leave in the morning? Jesus.”

I was too stunned by her sudden touch to respond, too distracted by the tiniest hint of a smile on her lips as she ran her fingers down both sides of my collar to straighten it just right. I would have loved to have answered with some snappy comment, but she stole the breath from my lungs with this gesture.

“But I’m guessing you grabbed this blazer from your backseat five seconds before we walked in, didn’t you?”

She still knew me a little too well. “Maybe,” I answered, smiling from one side of my mouth.

As she slid her fingers around the back of my neck to lay my collar perfectly, I swallowed, wishing for the hundred-thousandth time I’d never let her go.

“Not exactly fresh… attire,” Meghan said, her gaze meeting mine for a split second before she stooped to pick up her bag. The Beastie Boys reference nearly brought me to my knees, and she knew it, too, judging from the smirk tugging at the corners of her plum-tinted lips.

So. Goddamn. Mean.