“Did you find what you were looking for at that bar?” he asked after a moment.
“Somehow, yes. Managed to book Elvis for the funeral.”
He gave a start. “Presley? Is he . . . a ghost?” he asked in an almost whisper.
Oh, why was that charming? Why was that so charming?
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from grinning, because I was still annoyed with him. “No”—I took out a poster from my back pocket and unfolded it to show him exactly which Elvis I was referring to—“but he’s the next best thing.”
He held a hand over his mouth to hide a laugh. “An impersonator? For a funeral?”
“You didn’t know Dad,” I replied, pocketing the poster again.
“He sounds like a riot.”
I smiled at the thought of Dad going to watch Bruno perform before his Thursday night poker games—and then my smile faded as I remembered that he never would again. I folded my arms over my chest and said curtly, “He was.”
“Right—yes. Sorry.”
We walked the next three blocks in silence, passing the bookstore with a poster of When the Dead Sing by Lee Marlow, and I lingered only for a moment. Only long enough for Ben to glance back to see why I’d stopped, and then I made myself put one foot in front of the other, and ignore the poster, the release date. Only a few more months before the whole world read my story ruined by his words.
“Oh, look! Annie’s books.”
“What?”
I stared through the window at the stacks of romance novels, with Ann Nichols’s new books at the top. The ones I wrote—Midnight Matinee, A Rake’s Guide—all of them. Dad walked by this bookstore every day on his daily lunch breaks to Fudge’s. He must’ve seen this display, these books. I wondered if he ever ducked into the store and bought one. I wondered if Mom loved the dry humor in Nichols’s new ones. Mom and I never really talked about books after mine failed. I didn’t want to talk about books at all after that.
I turned to keep walking, when Ben backtracked and nodded his head toward the door. “Let’s go in.”
“Why?”
“Because I like bookstores,” he replied, and stepped backward through the closed door.
I had half a mind to not follow him, but a part of me wondered what section he gravitated toward. Literary? Horror? I couldn’t even imagine him in the romance aisle, towering and broody in his pristine button-down shirts and ironed trousers.
The bell above the door rang as I stepped into the cozy bookstore. The woman behind the counter, Mrs. Holly, had been there for twenty-odd years. She looked up from her book with a smile. “Well, I’ll be damned! Florence Day.”
Even my local booksellers back in Jersey didn’t know my name, but it seemed like a decade away couldn’t erase me from small-town memory. Everywhere I went it was “Holy smokes, Florence Day!” like I was Mairmont’s local celebrity. Well, I guess I was.
“Hi, Mrs. Holly,” I greeted.
“What’re you in for?”
Have you seen a ghost float through, by any chance? Six foot sexy, with just the slightest hint of nerd? I wanted to ask, but instead went with, “Just looking.”
“Could I help?”
“I don’t think so,” I began, before my eyes caught the pop-up on the counter for When the Dead Sing by Lee Marlow. PRE-ORDER TODAY! the cardboard stand-up announced, with the picture of the cover—a run-down Victorian mansion with a Wednesday Addams–looking girl standing in front of it, unsmiling. From one of the windows peered a ghoul of some sort, demonic eyes and sharp teeth.