CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I just couldn’t believe it. I sat cross-legged on the floor and rifled through the rest of the bag but it was all the same. So much loss in one place.
Suddenly the door to the body chute swung open, snapping me back to the danger, to the fear, and I screamed as I tried to get to my feet, nearly falling into the hole.
“Perry!” Dex cried out as he appeared in the doorway, looking down at me in amazement, flashlight in hand. “Are you hurt? Oh, thank f*ck you’re here,” he said as he took a step toward me.
“Get back!” I screeched, trying to get to my feet. I put my hands out in front of me. “Stay away from me!”
He looked absolutely bewildered, sticking the flashlight into his jacket pocket, but I wasn’t buying it.
“Baby, it’s me.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, my heart getting another workout. “Yeah, well I thought it was you earlier too.”
“I ran into Rebecca,” he said. “She’s gathering up our stuff and meeting us down here. She told me what you guys saw. You saw my doppelg?nger.”
“How do I know you’re not the doppelg?nger?”
He cocked his head and frowned. “Because, baby, I’m me. And I’m yours. Ask me anything if you have to. Or f*ck, let me tell you a few things.”
“Stay away, I’m warning you.”
“You know, you’re awfully cute when you get all threatening and stuff.”
“I mean it.” And I did. I think.
“That doesn’t mean I won’t start flapping my mouth. I know you, Perry Palomino.”
He took two steps forward, eyes never leaving my face, and I staggered backward only to hit my back against a counter. He raised his palms at me. “I can tell you that you hum Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star to yourself as you brush your teeth and I think it’s completely adorable. I can tell you that when you eat, you like to get equal amounts of each different food on your fork with every single bite. Drives me f*cking crazy. I can tell you—or show you—exactly how you like to be kissed, how you like to be touched, what I do to make you come in five seconds flat.”
With his palms still up, he came forward another step. “I can tell you that I’m head over heels in love with you. That this…” He paused and breathed in deeply, his eyes glittering. “What we have, it consumes me. It devours me. And it scares me more than anything we have ever encountered, because if I ever lost you, if I ever had to live without you, I wouldn’t be whole. You, Perry, have my heart. You are my heart.”
My breath hitched as I was lost in his words, lost in his eyes as they looked deeper into me than ever before.
“Do you still need convincing?” he asked in a low, husky voice, taking another step forward.
I didn’t. I knew this was Dex. My man, right in front of me. Still, I could never pass up the opportunity to hear him say these wonderful words, to hear him speak from his soul.
So I nodded. I needed more convincing.
His mouth ticked up into a smile. “Well then…”
He briefly closed his eyes, exhaled through his nose, and shook out his limbs. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he was nervous as hell.
Then he got down on one knee.
For a moment I was completely puzzled, like what the f*ck is he doing, why is getting on his knees? My first thought was that it was something sexual and kinky. My second thought was that something was scary and wrong. After all, we were in an abandoned post office; the door to the body chute was still open, and a storm was raging outside.
My third thought was…holy shit. Holy shit! Is he proposing to me?
“I was waiting for the right time,” he said, staring intently at me, his voice shaking slightly, “but you’re right—I do have shitty f*cking timing. So I might as well embrace that. And so, here it goes.”
He reached out for my left hand, never taking his eyes off me.
I felt like I was about to black out.
This couldn’t be happening.
This had to a dream. A beautiful, crazy, amazing dream.
I needed him to pinch me.
Instead he said, “When I first met you, I knew, somehow, that you were going to change my life. I just didn’t know in what way. I didn’t know that you’d make me love you. And most importantly, I didn’t know that you’d make me love me. Baby, you make me see the good in myself and the good in everything on this damn earth. You chase my ghosts away, and…” He cleared his throat, and to my surprise, I saw his eyes were watering.
Oh f*ck. Please don’t cry, Dex, cuz I will f*cking lose it.
He swallowed hard, blinking tears back. “And you bring me peace. I can’t thank you enough for being in my life. And I want you there for the whole journey. Through everything—the good and the bad, the batshit crazy and the sane, the scary and the sexy. Especially the sexy. Just you and me, baby, until death do us part.”
Somehow I found my voice. “Even though we’ve only known each other for eight months?” I asked quietly, afraid of his answer.
But he just smiled up at me. “Time has no bearing on the truth. And what we have, that’s true as f*cking anything.” He gave my hand a squeeze and reached into his pocket.
I sucked in my breath, feeling all my emotions flood me at once, and watched as he took out a beautiful, sparkling ring, and held it poised at my finger. He gazed at me, and it was like I saw every moment we had with each other captured in his eyes.
“Perry Palomino, kiddo, baby—will you be my wife?”
I didn’t even have to think about it.
“Yes!” I blurted out in a sob as the tears started coming. I put my hand to my mouth, trying to control myself, but it was useless. I was a goner. “Yes, I will be your wife.”
A single tear rolled down his cheek, which he didn’t wipe away. His face broke out into the most breathtaking smile I had ever seen, a smile of absolute pure joy, the same joy that I felt bursting out of me like hot butterflies. He slid the ring onto my finger and it sat there perfectly, like it was custom made for me, vintage-style with shimmering stones that sparkled like heaven.
“It was meant for you,” he said, voice still choked up. “Just like you were meant for me. My future wife.” He got to his feet and cupped my face in his hands. “My god, I’m going to do whatever I can to make you happy.” >
I smiled, sniffling back the tears. “You can start by pinching me. This doesn’t feel real.”
He grinned cheekily. “Oh, I’ll show you how real this is.” He kissed me passionately, just the way I loved to be kissed, and reached around to grope my ass. He snuck in a pinch, a wonderfully sharp pain. Yup. That hurt. And this was real.
I buried my head into his neck as he held me close to him, our bodies melding into each other, giving each other support and strength.
Holy f*ck. Oh my god. Dex just asked me to marry him.
I was going to be Mrs. Declan Foray.
Me.
Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.
“How you feeling?” he murmured, pulling away and gazing down at me. He wiped the tears away from under my eyes.
“I feel like I’m going to die from excitement,” I said. “I feel like I want to tell the whole world we’re getting married.” I pulled him close to me and kissed him. “I feel like I want you to show me that thing where you can make me come in five seconds flat.”
He groaned lustfully. “My fiancé is a wild one.” He slid his hands under my shirt, feeling my skin. “Unfortunately, I do think we should probably get the hell out of here.”
I nodded. I’d been so over the moon, so crazy overwhelmed about his proposal that I had completely forgotten where we were. Damn f*cking reality. I pulled away and looked over at the body chute’s door. “How did you find me anyway?”
He glanced at it over his shoulder. “Rebecca told me that you disappeared into the autopsy room. I figured if you were going to find a way out, you would go through the chute. I went through on the first floor and just kept walking, calling for you.”
My chest tightened at the memory of the doctor, the sounds that the bad thing was making in the tunnel. “Did you see anything?”
He shook his head and tucked a strand of my wayward hair behind my ears. “No, nothing. Then I came across the little woodpile in there, and it looked like you might have wormed your way through it.”
“And Rebecca is back at the school alone?”
“She should be here any minute. As soon as I found you, I said we were getting the f*ck out of there.” He glanced down at the mailbag near the hole in the floor. “What’s that?”
“Something very interesting,” I informed him. I went over to it and bent over to pick it up. My ring gleamed on my finger as I did so and I did a whoop of joy inside my head.
I was engaged!
Oh man, it was going to take a long time for me to get used to that.
I brought the mailbag up for him to see. “This whole bag is filled with letters written by patients, letters that never made it to their final destination. In every one of these, a child is telling their loved ones that they are scared for their lives, and that abuse is happening in the hospital. Obviously, whoever was working here at the post office didn’t want these letters to see the light of day. But now, they’re going to have to.”
He frowned, turning an envelope over in his hand. “What are you going to do?”
“We’re going to take this down to the museum and give it to Gary Oldman and whoever else works there, and we’re going to make sure that this comes to light. I want every single letter to be read and I want everyone to know the truth of what happened at Sea Crest.”
“This is getting to be a very Scooby-Doo ending.”
I shrugged. “Call it what you want, but there was a grave injustice done here. If we can expose this place, maybe then the haunting will stop. The demons, Shawna, the doctor, they all seem to be held here like they’re bound by a grudge or revenge, eaten up by what happened. Even Shawna is keeping Elliot here, preventing him from moving on. I don’t know, but I bet once these patients are recognized for what happened to them, the ghosts will leave. And people like Brenna and Jody, everyone in the school, they will be safe.”
Dex smiled shrewdly.
I gave him an odd look. “What?”
“I think you found your calling, Mrs. Future Foray.”
I couldn’t help but grin at the way he addressed me. “What do you mean?”
“You know the story of the Warrens, don’t you? They were the couple—a married couple—who were responsible for investigating the Amityville case, the Perrons, the Smurl haunting. They founded the New England Society for Psychic Research. They didn’t just hunt ghosts; when they could, they banished them, like a mini exorcism, or something like it. Encountering a truth, figuring out the reason for the haunting, and then fixing it.”
“So you’re saying that could be us?”
Now it was his turn to shrug. “I don’t know. I’m just saying, if we aren’t going to be chasing ghosts for entertainment, maybe we can use our, um, abilities, for something good.”
“Meaningful.”
“That’s right,” he said with a nod and took the burlap bag from my hands. “And I think this is a good start.”
The sharp blast of a horn from outside startled the shit out of us. We looked out the window to see the Highlander running outside. Seconds later, Rebecca came running up to the door, pounding on it.
Dex swung the bag over his shoulder and we hurried over before Rebecca hurt herself trying to break it down. Unfortunately, the door was bolted shut.
Lucky for me, I was marrying an extremely strong man.
“Get back,” he yelled through the door before taking a step and kicking it off the hinges with one go. F*ck that was hot. F*ck, I was lucky.
Rebecca stared down at the splintered door that was lying beside her then snapped her gaze up to us, eyes wide. “Impressive, Dex.”
“Do you wanna know what else is impressive?” he asked as he grabbed my hand and led me out of the building toward her.
“I don’t want to know,” she said with a grimace.
“This!” he boasted, holding up my left hand and flashing the ring at her. “She said yes!”
It took a moment of shock before it hit her. “Bloody hell!” she exclaimed. “Congratulations!” She ran toward us with open arms, engulfing us both at once. She started jumping up and down, making us jiggle. “I’m so happy for you!” She squeezed us hard and then pulled back, her eyes moist. “I’m serious. This, this couldn’t have happened to better people than you two. You’re meant for each other.”
“Thank you, Rebecca,” Dex said warmly. “And congratulations to you and Dean.”
I raised my brows. Rebecca looked at me accusatorily even though I hadn’t said a word to Dex about it.
“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “Perry didn’t tell me anything. I don’t have to be a genius to figure it out, either. I’ve seen the way you’ve been around him lately.”
She bit her red lip. “How do you know I’m keeping it?”
He gestured to her face. “Because despite the fact that you’re scared, you’re glowing. You’re also happy. You’ve wanted this for as long as I’ve known you.”
“I don’t know what Dean’s going to say,” she mumbled, looking away.
“I don’t know either,” he said. “But knowing Dean, he’s going to be okay. You both are, no matter how this plays out for you. You’re going to be a wonderful mom, you know.” He pulled her closer to him and kissed the top of her head. Even after everything I’d learned, there was something pretty special about their relationship, and I could see now, it really was like they were brother and sister.
She looked at me and smiled shyly. “Let me see the ring again.”
I held it out for her so she could ooh and ahh over it. Then we headed for the Highlander, mailbag in tow, and drove off down the road, away from the school and sanatorium, from the demons and the death.
I went there as Perry Palomino and I was leaving as the future Mrs. Declan P. Foray.
***
Even though it was after five in the evening and the storm had covered the town in a blustery shroud of wind and rain, there were still signs of life in the local museum. You could see Oldman working at his desk in the quaint wooden building with its blue seascape mural on the outside. We got out of the car and ignored the CLOSED sign, pounding on the doors until he opened them.
He invited us in for tea and some shortbread cookies while we told him what had happened to us at the sanatorium. I told him about my encounters with Shawna and the bad thing and Elliot, and when he seemed to have absorbed all of that, Dex plunked the mailbag down on his desk.
It was like it was f*cking Christmas. Oldman was in historical heaven as he poured through all the envelopes, bringing out the letters and reading them. I could see he was crushed that the allegations of murder and abuse were true, even though they didn’t seem to have happened when his grandmother was working there. Still, it was a tough truth to swallow.
The good thing was that Oldman was loyal to the truth and to the hidden events of history and promised us that he would keep us updated in the coming weeks as to whether the discovery of the letters would help to end the hauntings. He had a feeling they would, just as I felt the fear dissipate the moment I found them in the post office. He said he would make a formal announcement through the museum and the local paper, attributing the find to me and Dex. I didn’t think it was necessary but I didn’t protest either. For once, I wanted to be known publicly for something that didn’t involve me screaming my head off on camera. I wanted to be known for something more respectable.
And, if I’m being honest here, I wanted something to impress my damn parents with.
Because, as we got back in the car and headed up to Seaside where we’d be spending the night in a hotel, I knew my parents weren’t going to be very impressed with the fact that I was engaged.
They were going to be more upset than they were before.
And suddenly it all came back to the fact that after everything I’d been through so far, facing my parents was going to be the scariest thing of all.