Chapter 3

It was already 8:00 pm when I met up with Tony.

He was my saving grace, the one who'd hooked me up with the trucker job. We'd met over a month ago at a dinner party. A few party-goers had conspired to get him drunk.

I couldn't stand their antics and downed a few drinks on his behalf, sparing him. When he sobered up, he thanked me for looking out for him.

He hooked me up with a new job after hearing my story. Given that I'd moved to Belford without money or connections, he offered me a place to stay in his vacant apartment, which was the one I lived in now.

He was always in a jovial mood when I saw him, but when he registered my arrival, he greeted me with a plain, "Hey."

But the pleasantries didn't last. "I let you have the apartment for free, Caden. You could stay or leave for all I care, but why'd you go to the management complaining about ghosts? How the hell am I supposed to put that apartment up for lease after this?"

I knew Tony was unhappy. It was all I could do to appease him and wait out his tirade. When he'd calmed down, I smiled bitterly and gave him a run-down of what I went through last time.

When I finished speaking, I scratched my head. "Pretty wild, huh? I didn't think I'd see a ghost in this day and age. I had a damn hard time believing it myself."

But Tony didn't mock me in the slightest, and instead leveled a long, hard look at me. "I heard a few stories about Mabel's death. Could someone have set this haunting up as a prank on you?"

Tony's words struck me where it hurt. Mabel had fallen from the stairs after missing a step and died from her injuries. The cops had come and ruled out the possibility of a homicide, yet rumors of my having anything to do with her death still went around.

"I believe you're innocent, but I suggest you find out whether Mabel had a twin sister or something. Maybe one of her family members fell for a rumor and decided to avenge her by staging a haunting."

I nodded quietly. Last night's incident had been sudden, and I'd been too scared and anxious to notice details beyond the obvious. There was no telling if the creature from last night had been a human or a ghost.

As I considered this, Tony's words began to make sense.

After all, there were no such things as ghosts in this world.

Mabel had been abandoned by her parents at a young age and grew up in an orphanage. I didn't know much about her past, let alone whether she had a younger sister.

I stayed at Tony's house for a night, then returned to Ashdale the next morning.

Mabel would drop by the orphanage in Ashdale once a month before she passed. She said she'd grown up and gotten so much charity during her time there. It was only right, she claimed, that she gave it back to society now that she was capable.

She invited me to tag along on every trip, but unfortunately, I'd only been here once before we were married.

The elderly orphanage director, Agatha Harmon, scowled at the sight of me. Upon hearing the reason for my visit, she grew even more reticent.

"Look, Agatha, Mabel slipped and fell by accident. Don't hold that out against me!" I tried to explain, knowing Mabel's death was like an open wound to Agatha.

"Slipped and fell to her death? That's rich, coming from you!"

Venerable as she was, Agatha almost never let her anger get the better of her. And yet, a simple sentence from me was all it took for her to break character.

She pointed at my nose, looking like she'd want nothing more than to bite my face off.

The seconds ticked by, and my patience wore thin. I settled for my last resort. "Agatha, according to the rules and regulations, I, as Mabel's next of kin, have the right to look at my spouse's records, right?"

Agatha's face went white, then darkened like a storm cloud. She had always been proper, and Mabel said she was a stickler for rules. So, as much as she hated my guts, she still tossed the orphanage records at me.

I lunged for it, my knees hitting the ground. I stayed like that and flipped through the pages until I found Mabel's name. The information on the page spelled out the answer to my question in clear, unambiguous letters: "Only child. No siblings."