Parrish

  “What?” I asked again.

  Jefferson rubbed the back of his neck, looking very put out.

  “I’ll get some money for us,” he finally said with a deep sigh, his shoulders slumping considerably.

  “How?” Brighton asked skeptically.

  A grin broke out across Deacon’s face, as if he suddenly found the entire situation overly amusing. “He has to talk to his mum.”

  Chapter 3

  “Sadie?” a muffled voice called on the other side of the heavy door.

  My breath came out in visible puffs in front of me and I closed my eyes against the sound, hoping I could block it out. The cool air danced across my skin, leaving goose bumps wherever it went and helping me to calm down.

  A knock thumped, trying to pull me from my moment of peace, but I ignored it.

  “Sadie? Did you get locked in there again?”

  I emitted a deep exhale that turned into a grunt of frustration.

  “I’m fine, Steph. I’m just getting some vegetables for Dan,” I called, lying through my teeth and figuring I should actually grab the vegetables in question if I wanted to look convincing.

  It had been a long day at work, and when things got too overwhelming between the hot kitchen and the angry customers, I’d step into the freezer to cool off for a minute. I knew I still had some flour in my hair from the bag Dan had dropped when he slipped on a puddle I’d “apparently” forgotten to mop up, but I was too tired to dust it out.

  Allowing myself one more long-suffering sigh, I grabbed a bag of chopped green peppers and opened the freezer door to see Steph standing there with a big grin on her face.

  “Someone left something for you at the host’s podium,” she said brightly.

  “A good something or a bad something?” I asked hesitantly.

  It was either a tip (unlikely) or a letter of complaint from the man I’d accidentally spilled soda all over.

  Yeah . . . it had been that kind of day.

  My feet hurt, my back ached, and I was only twenty minutes from going home to be bothered by two overgrown children about ghosts. Not that I minded the ghosts part—the overgrown children part was the kicker.

  “A letter,” she answered with an air of scandal, raising her eyebrows at me and handing the letter over before grabbing the peppers and turning to leave.

  The envelope was thick and cream-colored, just like it had been yesterday. And just as before, it held only my name on the front. Suddenly I didn’t need to sit in the walk-in freezer to feel cold. This letter was all it took.

  “Steph, who left the letter?” I asked, holding my breath.

  “I asked the hostess but she said it was just sitting on the podium. She must have missed whoever dropped it off,” she said as she left, sounding incredibly nonchalant about something we never encountered.

  I ripped the envelope open but stopped short of pulling the letter out.

  “Should I wait for everyone else?” I wondered aloud, trying to ignore the eerie fact that our mysterious benefactor knew where and when I worked, and still hadn’t been seen by anyone.

  Shaking my head to clear my thoughts, I pulled the letter out, discarding the envelope in the garbage can. I took a breath to steady my nerves before looking over the note.

  “Southampton, England. May 27th, 1936.”

  I read it again, raising an eyebrow at the lack of information. If this person wanted us to accept their offer, they weren’t exactly doing a very good job with the whole “work orientation” thing.

  I racked my brain, trying to find what this ambiguous clue meant. It didn’t seem like a historically important date from what little information I remembered from my history classes.

  “You can’t come back here,” I heard Steph calling in a panic, snapping me out of my thoughts.

  “Sadie!” Brighton said, sprinting around the corner and almost tripping in her heels.

  Jefferson and Deacon were right behind her, Deacon looking excited and Jefferson looking like his normal intense self.

  “Did you get one?” she asked, panting and clutching her own envelope against her hot pink blouse.

  “Yeah, but I have no idea what it means.” I grabbed Brighton’s wrist and directed them out the back door so Steph didn’t have a panic attack.

  It was rainy in the alleyway, but at least we’d be able to talk in private and not sound like a bunch of nut jobs to any eavesdropping restaurant workers.

  “Did you get our funding?” I asked Jefferson, who had his chin tilted toward his chest so that he was looking up at me through his eyelashes.

  He turned his head to the side and cracked his neck loudly before answering, not caring that the longer he took to answer a simple question, the longer we’d be standing out in the rain in a dirty alleyway.

  “I acquired sufficient monetary resources,” he answered in his thick British accent, talking like a legal disclaimer so that we wouldn’t press him further on the matter.

  That was fine with me.

  “I’ve already gotten work off.” Brighton beamed, even though she probably shouldn’t have been so excited about missing work for something that would most likely leave us broke.

  Or more broke than we already were, I guess.

  “Me too,” Jefferson said, looking over at me and letting his lips pull up into a smirk.

  Funny.

  “I guess this means we’re really doing this,” I said, not sure how I felt about that fact. “Do we have any idea what this first clue means, though?”

  Brighton and Jefferson both wordlessly pointed to Deacon, who looked proud of himself.

  “The Queen Mary,” he stated simply, wiping his hands on his gray T-shirt.

  I let my mouth open in a look of shock. The Queen Mary was kind of the golden goose of paranormal investigation, or at least it was to me. Living in Oregon, I was so close to it, but had never gotten the chance to actually visit the ship that was supposed to be haunted. This new job wasn’t looking so bad all of a sudden.

  “That’s not even that far!” I exclaimed.

  “We’re not going to the Queen Mary,” Jefferson interrupted, sounding like I had missed something obvious.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Jefferson seems to think the clue is referring to the port the ship originally sailed to when it departed from England on May 27th, 1936.”

  “In New York,” he confirmed with a slow nod.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I told him, wondering how he could ever think that. “It’s obviously referring to the ship itself, which is in Long Beach, California, so that’s where we’ll be going.”

  “You’re not the group leader,” he said.

  “You’re not the group leader either,” I snapped, tired of him trying to pull nonexistent rank.

  “It is called the Parrish Society,” he stated evenly with a grin, trying to get under my skin.

  “Just because a letter called us that doesn’t mean it’s our official name.”

  “Yeah,” Deacon said, surprising me with his agreement. “Besides, if we’re the Parrish Society, I could be the leader.”

  “We are not calling ourselves the Parrish Society,” I said. “And we’re going to Long Beach.”

  “When did she get so bossy?” Deacon asked Brighton.

  “Actually, Sadie,” she began, “I kind of agree with Jefferson. I think the clue might be referring to the port in New York.”

  I narrowed my eyes at Brighton for her disregard of our unspoken “never agree with a Parrish” rule.

  “Sadie, are you going to collect your tips before you clock out?” Steph called out the back door, saving Brighton from my glare.

  “Since you guys drove all the way down here, you might as well stick around and give me a ride home,” I said, figuring we could revisit this discussion later—after I gave Brighton an extensive lecture about agreeing with Jefferson.

  I narrowed my eyes at
the Parrish in question before walking back toward the restaurant.

  “Go ask for time off,” Jefferson said. “We’re leaving for New York tomorrow.”

  ~

  That night, I lay in bed with my eyes trained on the ceiling, my normal insomnia making it impossible to sleep despite an exhausting day at work. Somehow I’d managed to take the next two weeks off of work, though I could tell my manager wasn’t happy about it, and part of me worried I wouldn’t actually have a job when I got back.

  And all because of a stupid letter that we probably shouldn’t be trusting in the first place.

  It wasn’t good when your only proof of something’s validity was the fact that you couldn’t prove where it had come from. That didn’t exactly bode well.

  My suitcase sat at the foot of my bed and I played with a loose string on my quilt, balling it up in my fingers and then untangling it, only to repeat the action again and again. Something wasn’t sitting right with me. Insomnia kept me up at night, but it didn’t give me the sinking feeling in my stomach that I couldn’t quite get rid of.

  New York wasn’t right. I was sure of it. We were supposed to investigate the actual Queen Mary in Long Beach, although I wasn’t sure how to convince Jefferson and Brighton of that, since they knew how much I’d always wanted to investigate that location. If I said anything, they would just think I was making excuses to see the amazing and unsettling ship.

  A creak in the floorboards startled me, and I sat bolt upright in bed, looking around the room like I had the night before. Tonight I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but my nerves wouldn’t let me lie back down and try to sleep. I needed to do some research of my own to convince my friends that we needed to go to California tomorrow, not New York. The only problem was that Brighton and I had left our laptop in the Parrish boys’ apartment so that they could review footage on it.

  Pulling an oversized sweater on over my tank top and shorts, I gingerly let my bare feet touch the wood floor in my bedroom, willing myself to stay still for a moment. It was a primal and childish fear to worry about that space underneath your bed, but I always hated planting my feet right in front of it, sure that one day a hand would reach out and grab my ankles. Forcing myself to sit like that for a moment was my own form of therapy—of facing my irrational fear.

  After several seconds (and no ghoulish hand grabbing my ankles to pull me violently under the bed), I stood and walked quietly through our apartment, grabbing my key to the boys’ apartment on my way out. No matter how much they annoyed me, it was nice having them so close. Maybe “nice” wasn’t the word . . . it made things convenient, anyway.

  Trying desperately to be quiet, I turned the key in their lock and entered the dark apartment, closing the door and standing still for a moment to let my eyes adjust from the bright lights in the hallway between our apartments. The boys’ place was chronically messy and always smelled like cinnamon for some unexplainable reason, but they kept the computer in the living room, so it was relatively easy to find. I picked my way across the hardwood floor—stepping on countless shirts that I hoped were clean—until I reached the desk and started up the computer.

  I didn’t think it would be all that hard to make a case for myself. After all, why in the world would a ship port be haunted? It made much more sense for the ship itself to be haunted. Pulling up countless search tabs, I tried to find anything helpful.

  There were pages and pages of ghost stories from tourists about the Queen Mary: people who claimed to see the footsteps of children in the now empty pool, ghostly figures wandering the long hallways, and sounds of a party that didn’t exist. The more I read, the more I was convinced we needed to go to the ship, but I couldn’t find anything to make my case against New York.

  Trying a different strategy, I looked up the maiden voyage of the ship, hoping it would shed some light on its first destination.

  “New York,” I whispered into the darkness. The glowing computer screen blinded me and made the rest of the room pitch black and impossible to see. “All it says is New York,” I repeated in annoyance. “What port did it sail in to?”

  “I’m sure Deacon knows,” Jefferson whispered in my ear, so close to me that I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t heard him breathing before.

  I spun around in the desk chair so fast that I bumped heads with him, although my smarting forehead didn’t stop me from smacking him across the arm as hard as I could. He backed away from me, mumbling something under his breath and holding his forehead in his large hands.

  “What is your problem?” I whispered harshly, angry at his lack of normalcy. “You scared me to death.”

  “Obviously not,” he retorted, pulling up a chair beside me and still rubbing his forehead. “I was just watching you for a while to see what you were up to.”

  “Why can’t you just be normal?” I asked him.

  “I’m not the one popping into someone else’s apartment at three in the morning without permission.”

  He had a point.

  “Not that this is the first time you’ve done this,” he went on, confusing me to no end.

  “What are you on about now?”

  “You know, the late night chats you randomly decide to have at the most inappropriate times?” he said.

  “Yeah, you must have been dreaming. That’s never happened,” I promised.

  I think I’d know if I stooped to the level of coming to Jefferson for “late night chats,” unless I was sleepwalking or something.

  “I was looking for a way to prove you wrong,” I said primly, resisting the urge to rub my own sore forehead.

  “That’s kind of a fool’s errand,” he said, though he rested his elbows on his knees and leaned closer to the computer screen as if he were interested in what I had found.

  I noticed, with some surprise, that he was wearing a collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and slacks. Did he just sleep in his Tim Burton attire? The boy was seriously weird.

  “Jefferson, you know the Queen Mary is way more likely our destination than the port it sailed into. It doesn’t even make sense for us to travel that far.”

  “Go on,” he said.

  Was Jefferson Parrish actually admitting that I might be right? Because letting me go on seemed dangerously close to possibly agreeing with me.

  “Let’s say I’m wrong about Long Beach,” I began, excited to make my case. “Doesn’t it make more sense to go there first anyway to see if that’s where we’re supposed to be instead of driving all the way to New York only to find out we’re wrong? California is so much closer.”

  He stared at me for a long time in the darkness, his huge, unblinking eyes reflecting the computer screen. If I hadn’t known any better, I would have thought he had somehow managed to fall asleep with his eyes open. I almost opened my mouth to speak, but he finally blinked and shifted his weight, letting me know he wasn’t completely vacant in there.

  “If you think that’s what’s best, Sadie, I trust your opinion,” he said.

  “Really?” I asked skeptically. “Because that doesn’t sound like you.”

  I knew I was being a brat, but he was always making my life difficult—it was nice to return the favor every once in a while.

  “You haven’t led us astray before,” he said with a shrug. “Besides, I kind of ruined our last investigation when you almost had something. I figure I owe you one.”

  He was right. He did owe me one. But it was weird to hear him admit it out loud. What had gotten in to him?

  “Plus after the incident last week I really owe you one,” he said, looking like he didn’t think he was at all in the wrong for making himself a key to our apartment, letting himself in, and then putting locks on all of our windows.

  Because that was a totally normal neighborly thing to do.

  “Okay,” I said slowly, and a bit more suspiciously than I had intended.

  “You should get some sleep. We have a long d
ay ahead of us,” he said, standing to leave. He placed his hand on my shoulder and gave it a quick squeeze before walking away. “And don’t forget to turn off the computer. Without jobs, I’m not sure how we’ll pay the electricity bill.”

  I stared straight ahead at his retreating dark form with a puzzled expression, touching my shoulder that he had grabbed and wondering what in the world had just happened.

  Chapter 4

  “I love road trips,” Brighton said for the millionth time.

  It hadn’t bothered me the first time she’d brought it up, but ten hours into our twelve-hour drive, it seemed a bit excessive. Not to mention the fact that being stuck in Brighton’s Jeep with the Parrish boys for so long had completely shot my nerves.

  At first, the two boys debated the merits of provoking ghosts while investigating versus asking planned-out questions for them to answer. That had quickly escalated into Deacon getting mad at Jefferson and saying that the only reason his mom had given them money was because she liked Deacon (which was a complete lie) and felt bad that he had to live with Jefferson (which was probably true). Eventually, both boys grew tired of arguing and fell asleep in the back seat, with Deacon snoring lightly and Jefferson’s head tilting to the side in an extreme angle that made it look like his neck was broken, his limp head bouncing up and down with every bump we drove over.

  “They’re kind of cute when they’re sleeping, aren’t they?” Brighton asked, turning around in the passenger’s seat to look at the boys. “You know, when they aren’t opening their mouths and making you want to kill them? They enjoy picking on you a little too much.”

  “Just tell Deacon you want to marry him already,” I said with a snort.

  Brighton grinned and threw a magazine at me which I easily ducked.

  “Driving!” I shouted.

  “What about you and Jefferson?” she asked, waggling her eyebrows at me conspiratorially.

  “Wow. Yeah, that’s the last thing on earth that will ever happen,” I said emphatically. “Ever!”