Just Another Day in My Crazy Life

My phone buzzed in my pocket on the way out the door, and I shifted my purse and coffee to my left hand to dig it out, only to find it was a spam call about my car's extended warranty. I didn't even own a car worth extending a warranty on, but apparently that never stopped anybody.

That's when the wind caught the screen door and slammed it shut behind me, and I jumped hard enough to send hot coffee sloshing down the front of my shirt.

Dadgummit!" I peeled the fabric away from my skin and dug through my purse until I found a crumpled takeout napkin at the bottom. It did approximately nothing.

That's also when I realized my keys were still sitting on the kitchen counter, right where I'd set them down to answer a phone call from a robot.

I stood there a second, coffee-stained and locked out, and had a long talk with myself about whether today was worth getting out of bed for in the first place.

My sister June was still upstairs asleep, but short of an earthquake, nothing woke that girl up before ten. And since earthquakes weren't exactly common in Mossy Creek, Louisiana, I was on my own.

The morning already had that thick, syrupy Louisiana heat to it, the kind that made your clothes stick before you'd even gotten anywhere. Cicadas were tuning up in the oaks, and somewhere close by a mockingbird was doing its best car-alarm impression. It was barely eight in the morning and already promising to be a scorcher.

I circled the house checking windows, trying to look casual about it in case a neighbor glanced over. The last thing I needed was somebody calling Sheriff Broussard to report a break-in at the Turner place — he still hadn't let me live down the last time that happened, and that had been an entirely different, entirely more embarrassing story.

"Come on," I muttered, shoving at another locked window. "One of y'all's gotta be open."

Our house was a big old Victorian that had been in the family for generations, the kind of place Granny Piper used to say had "character," which was her polite way of saying the floors sloped, the doors stuck in humid weather, and half the windows didn't want to cooperate even when they weren't locked.

Thinking about Granny gave me that same little tug it always did. She'd been gone two years now, having passed just a few days after her hundredth birthday, and some mornings it still didn't feel real. She'd left me the house when she passed — on the condition that my sisters always had a place there too, because Granny never did anything without a catch attached.

Finally, I found one unlocked window. Of course it was hers.

Nobody had touched that room since the day she died. I loved my great-grandmother — we shared a name and, according to everybody in the family, a stubborn streak a mile wide — but I couldn't stand being in that room. Every time I tried to go in and dust or air it out, I got the distinct feeling of being watched, and the hair on my arms stood straight up like I'd rubbed a balloon on it.

But my keys weren't going to fetch themselves.

"In and out," I told myself, hauling myself up onto the sill. "Ten seconds."

The window screeched in protest going up, loud enough that I winced. I threw one leg over, then the other, and tumbled through in a decidedly unglamorous heap.

The room hit me the way it always did — hot, dim, and thick with the smell of lavender sachets that were still tucked in the closet even though nobody had refreshed them in two years. The heavy curtains were drawn, so the only light came from the window I'd just crawled through. Granny's four-poster bed sat made up under the quilt she'd hand-stitched seventy-some years back, and her wall of porcelain dolls stared out from behind glass like they were keeping score of something.

I crossed the room toward the door as fast as I could without actually running, because running would've meant admitting I was scared, and I refused to give the room that satisfaction.

Halfway there, I heard it — a slow, creaking sound from behind me.

I froze. Turned. The rocking chair by the window was moving. Gently. Like somebody had just gotten up out of it.

Nobody was in the chair.

"Okay," I said out loud, mostly to hear a human voice, even if it was my own. "That's a normal, explainable thing that chairs do."

The rocking slowed. Stopped. The window I'd climbed through wasn't even open enough for a breeze to reach it, but I decided not to think too hard about that particular detail.

"Alright, alright, I hear you," I said to the empty room, hands up like I was surrendering to a chair. "I'm going, I'm going."

As I yanked the door shut behind me, I could've sworn I heard a laugh — soft, warm, unmistakably pleased with itself. It sounded exactly like Granny's laugh, the one she used to give when one of her pranks landed just right.

"Not funny, old woman," I called through the door, even as the corner of my mouth twitched up despite myself. If Granny really was still hanging around, haunting her own house was exactly the kind of thing she'd think was hilarious.

The grandfather clock in the hall chimed, and I groaned. Running late — again. My family owned the café, which technically meant I couldn't get fired, but it also meant Grandma Clara had zero patience for tardy Turners setting a bad example.

I peeled off my coffee-ruined shirt, grabbed a black one with SOUTHERN COMFORT CAFÉ stamped across the front, and yanked it over my head.

"At this rate I should just wear black permanently," I muttered, snatching my keys off the counter — the same counter, the whole reason for this entire ordeal — before heading back out the door, considerably more careful with the screen door this time.

Outside, the yard was doing its ordinary morning thing. The old magnolia at the edge of the property swayed a little in the breeze, and a cardinal shot between branches like a little red exclamation point. I climbed into my Jeep, dropped my keys once on the driveway for good measure, and finally got the engine turning over.

"Focus," I told myself, backing out. "Normal day. Normal, non-haunted, non-eventful day."

The drive to Southern Comfort Café wound through moss-draped oaks and past the old cemetery that dated back before the Civil War, a route I usually loved because it gave me fifteen quiet minutes to wake up properly. This morning my brain kept looping back to that rocking chair, but by the time I pulled into the gravel lot behind the café, I'd mostly talked myself into a good mood about it. If my dead great-grandmother wanted to rock in her old chair and cackle at me, that was honestly very on-brand for her.

The smell of beignets and chicory coffee hit me the second I stepped out of the Jeep, and just like that, the morning felt normal again. Grandma Clara was already elbow-deep in dough — she refused to let anybody else make the beignets, on account of none of us having "the touch," despite four generations of Turner women hearing that exact same line.

"Piper, that you?" she hollered before I'd even gotten the door open. "Get in here, girl, we got prep to do before the lunch crowd shows up!"

I grinned and pushed inside, tying my apron on as I went. "Sorry I'm late. Locked myself out and had to climb in through Granny's window."

Grandma Clara's hands didn't stop rolling dough, but her eyebrows went straight up. "You went in Piper's room? Alone?"

"Didn't have much choice. June sleeps like she's being paid for it, and I needed my keys."

"Mm." She dusted flour off her hands, unhurried, the way she did everything. "Well, since we're on the subject — your great-grandmother paid me a visit last night. In my dreams."

I stopped mid-apron-tie. "She what?"

"Said to tell you to watch yourself." Grandma Clara said it as plainly as she'd report the price of flour going up. "Said there's changes coming, and not all of 'em good."

I stood there a beat, holding my apron strings, trying to decide if I should be spooked or just impressed at how casually my grandmother relayed messages from beyond the grave over pastry dough.

"Grandma, you and Granny are gonna give me a complex."

"Wasn't my idea, take it up with her." She nodded toward the ovens. "Now go get that tray of pies in the display case, we open in twenty minutes."

I did as I was told, because arguing with Grandma Clara had a worse success rate than arguing with a brick wall, but the whole time I was arranging pies I kept turning it over — the chair, the laugh, now this. Granny had never been one to sit quietly and let things happen, dead or alive, so if she was making the rounds through people's dreams, she clearly had something on her mind.

I'd just gotten the pies settled in the case when the front bell jingled, way too early for us to be open.

"Sorry, we're not—" I started, then stopped when I saw who it was.

Logan McCain stood in the doorway in his fire department uniform, hair a mess, green eyes crinkled up at the corners the way they did when he was pleased with himself. Assistant fire chief for Mossy Creek Volunteer Fire, my best friend since roughly the second grade, and — for the last six very good months — my boyfriend.

"Morning, beautiful," he said. "Figured I'd catch you before the rush."

I came around the counter and let him fold me into a hug. "You're supposed to be sleeping after a night shift."

"Missed you more than I missed sleep." He grinned down at me. "Besides — big day tomorrow. I wanted to see your face before all the fuss."

My stomach did a happy little flip. Twenty-one tomorrow, and I'd been trying, badly, to play it cool about it for weeks, especially since Logan had been dropping hints about some kind of surprise.

"You're impossible," I said, going up on my toes to kiss his cheek. "Now go home before you fall asleep standing up."

"Yes, ma'am." He gave me a lazy salute on his way to the door. "Seven tonight, still good?"

"Wouldn't miss it."

He waved on his way out, and I stood there grinning after him like a fool until Grandma Clara cleared her throat from the kitchen doorway.

"Get back to work, lovestruck," she said, though there wasn't a lick of real scold in it.

I laughed and went back to the pies, and if I hummed a little while I worked, that was nobody's business but my own. Whatever Granny was trying to warn me about, it could wait. Tomorrow I turned twenty-one, I had a date with the best man in Mossy Creek, and for the first time all morning, things actually seemed to be going my way.

Maybe twenty-one wouldn't be so bad after all.