Where Wicked Starts by Elizabeth Stuckey-French

Author:Elizabeth Stuckey-French
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781938126277
Publisher: Engine Books
Published: 2014-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

NICK

Taylor’s black sheriff’s hat has a ketchup stain on the brim, but his badge looks real. Around the corner, on a dark side street, he goes into some long hot-air number about a woman who’d hung herself on the top floor of the college dorm when it was still a hotel, and how college students to this day see a figure hanging in that room, etc.

Pinky and Four Eyes are thrilled and ask tons of questions.

Luna whispers nervously to me, “He’s making this up.”

Maybe not, I’m thinking. She might have been bullied. She might have felt a stain all over her body—humiliation in the extreme. And when you feel that, you think it will never go away.

Four Eyes punches his answers into her iPhone. Could Taylor get in trouble with Ghost Authorities?

Four Eyes says, “What was the name of the girl who woke up and saw the ghost hanging in the middle of the night?”

“Mary Catherine Walsh,” Taylor says. “And the year was 1972.”

Nathan isn’t so impressed. “Shit, man, that sounds like something out of a TV movie,” he says. “Somebody offing herself. Who cares? Hit me with something scary. You’re livin’ in the zombie era.”

“Young man,” says the prim ghost-buster lady Pinky. “We’re on this tour for research purposes, and we’d appreciate it if you’d behave yourself.”

“You’ve got to be freezing,” Four Eyes scolds. “You don’t have enough clothes on.”

“What is this—kindergarten?” Nathan says.

“You can always leave,” Luna says, a lilt in her voice, like she surprised herself.

Nathan throws up his hands. “Hey! Back off, girls.”

“Settle down, folks,” Taylor says. “Don’t upset the deputy if you know what’s good for you. Next I’m taking you to a haunted bed and breakfast where a horrible double murder occurred.”

“Oh goody,” says Pinky and she adjusts her pink scarf so that it pools around her face like an inner tube.

There are at least a dozen B&B’s in Coquina Bay, but naturally Taylor turns and heads straight for the Sha-Na-Na. Is this really on the tour? Or is he trying to scare me and Luna? I want to trust him, but Luna doesn’t. Why would I? She’s so skittish around him. Push-pull. Love me, don’t. I plan to tell him to fuck off if he makes her cry. It’ll be my first time. I practice saying it to myself. Other girls do, but I keep thinking my mother will know and, according to Louise, I’m sort of stuck at the age I was when my mother died. Saying fuck off, I think, will bring me up to fourteen or more and impress the hell out of Luna.

The B is a few blocks away. By the time we get there I’m frozen and want to leave the tour and disappear inside. To my stash of candy and my safe bed and my books and my apps. I need to distract myself. It’s been twenty-four hours since I submitted my feet for a pedicure and met Maeve’s big brother, Joe. Fortunately Alicia did my pedicure.

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