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One
Jake
Christmas ornaments.
Christmas tree.
Mr. And Mrs. Claus lawn figures.
I rest my hands on my hips and do another quick scan around the basement storage room. Seven. Seven boxes of Christmas decorations… but no Halloween decorations.
This can’t be right.
I climb the stairs, brushing my dusty hands on my jeans as I go. “Hey, Anna…” I say as I reach the ground floor.
“Kitchen,” I hear.
I follow her voice down the hall and pause in the doorframe. Anna sits at the kitchen table with several files stacked around her. She holds a photo close to her face, squinting to get a better look at it. Her usual ponytail dangles over her right shoulder and my eyes briefly follow the point of her hair toward her cleavage.
“Hey,” I say, “where do you keep your Halloween decorations?”
“We don’t have Halloween decorations,” she murmurs, still stuck in her work.
I lean back. “Excuse me?”
Anna glances up. “We… don’t have Halloween decorations,” she repeats.
“What? Why not?”
She exhales, chuckling lightly. “Is that bad?”
I step closer to the table. “You have three boxes labeled Christmas ornaments but no Halloween decorations? No skeleton window clings or — or — or fake spiderwebs? Motion activated spiders that jump down and scare people when they walk by?”
She cringes. “Ew, no.”
I blink. “Ew?”
“Jake, honestly…” She sets her photo down. “I don’t celebrate Halloween.”
My jaw drops. “You don’t celebrate Halloween?”
“I’m a homicide detective,” she says with a shrug. “I see scary things all the time. I don’t need to set aside one day out of the year to experience things I see every day.”
“But I love Halloween!” I say. “Some of my best childhood memories — actually, my only good childhood memories — are of me and my brother scaring the crap out of each other. Trick-or-treating for hours. Bingeing through piles of candy…”
“And throwing up for the next two days?” she jokes.
“It was awesome.”
She laughs. “I get it. I do. But… I’m sorry. I just don’t do Halloween.”
I slide into the chair across from her, my shoulders sinking in disappointment. “I feel like this is the kind of thing you tell a guy about before you get engaged.”
She reaches out to slap my arm but I catch her wrist, quickly bringing it to my lips.
“What about Charlotte?” I ask.
“Charlotte is literally five-years-old,” she says, taking her hand back. “Trust me, she has no idea what she’s missing.”
