“He was probably self-medicating. Wow. He tried to kill his own father because he thought he was covering up evidence of alien abductions. And that wasn’t the first time he’d been arrested for something violent. Looks like each time it was because of a delusion. He died there in 1973. Hanged himself.”
“Poor bastard,” I muttered. I knew what it was like to not know if you were crazy or not. For the longest time people told me Wren wasn’t real, and for a little while I let myself believe them. Bell Hill Psychiatric Hospital cured me of that. If it hadn’t been for Wren, I probably wouldn’t have survived.
Then again, if it hadn’t been for my sister, I wouldn’t have been admitted. But I didn’t blame Wren. She couldn’t control what we were any more than I could.
“Okay,” Ben began. “We know he’s part of the Haven Crest haunt. Now what? It doesn’t say where he’s buried.”
“They had a special plot for suicides,” I said. “Or, his family sounds like they might have been well-off—maybe he’s buried in a family plot somewhere.” That was going to be really inconvenient, if it was the case. “It might not even be his bones anchoring him here if he died after the hospital started cremating patients to conserve plot space. Do we know when they started doing that?” I was scrolling through the file to see if it said anything. Ben went back to the bed and sat down with his laptop, clacking away at the keys.
“Google says Haven Crest started cremating their dead in 1980. Our guy’s gotta be in the ground, then.”
“I’ll check that cemetery layout we found when we went after Bent.” I paused, my hands dead over the keyboard. “I’m sorry,” I said, glancing over my shoulder.
Ben frowned. “For what?”
“That Bent wasn’t the end of it. That there’s a new ghost and a new danger for me to put you guys in.”
He stared at me, his eyebrows coming together in a frown. “None of this is your fault.”
He was sweet to say that. “Maybe not, but I feel like I attract trouble, and my friends just get swept up in it.”
“That ghost—Woodstock, Thurbridge, whatever his name is—came looking specifically for Kevin. That’s not on you.”
“But why Kevin?” I asked. “Why didn’t he come for me?”
My boyfriend shrugged. “Maybe he thought Kevin would be an easier target.”
“Maybe.” It was as good an explanation as anything I could come up with, but it still didn’t sit well with me. Maybe I just made things more complicated than they needed to be.
But I had a very uncomplicated solution brewing inside the thick walls of my skull. And it was one I wasn’t going to share with Ben. I wasn’t going to share it with anyone until I had proof, because at that moment, it was driven by nothing more than paranoid suspicion.
“Wren’s been spending a lot of time at Haven Crest lately. I’ll show her Thurbridge’s photo and see if she recognizes him.”
Ben closed his laptop. “Does that bother you? Her spending time there?”
It was serious conversation time—not like killer ghosts weren’t serious. I closed my computer as well and got up from the desk to join him on my bed. He took my hand in his. He was warm and strong. All he had to do was hold my hand, and I felt like I could take on the world. Or at least the ghosts in it. I wasn’t sure I liked that he had that much power where I was concerned, or that it felt so good.
“Yes,” I admitted. “It bothers me a lot.”
“Because of Bent? Or because of something else?”
We both knew what “something else” was. “My prejudice against mental hospitals? Yeah, that’s some of it. A lot of it, actually. Mostly I worry that being around that many ghosts will make her want to be one of them.”
He looked at me like I was speaking backward. “She is one of them.”
“No. She’s not.” I tried to pull my hand away, but he held tight. It wasn’t enough to hurt me, just to keep me from withdrawing like I wanted. “She’s not like them. I don’t want her to be like them.”
“Like them how?”
“Crazy. Mean. Dangerous.” My gaze locked with his, and I hoped he could see me pleading for him to understand. “She’s never been alive, Ben. She doesn’t even have that to keep her from becoming something dark. The longer ghosts hang around, bitter and lost, the more they become monsters.”
A little smile curved his mouth. “She’s got you.”
I snorted. “If Wren goes bad, I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop it. But I can’t ask her not to spend time with other ghosts. Noah seems to really like her, and she really likes him. She wouldn’t ask me to leave you. I can’t ask her not to see him.” But I wanted to. I really, really wanted to.
Ben’s expression softened. “You’re afraid you’re going to lose her.”
“Well, yeah.” Hadn’t I just said that?
“No, I mean you’re afraid she’ll pick Noah over you. That he’ll be more important than you are.”