Page 23 of Ghost in the Cupboard

“I can call around,” Max offered. “I’m sure, given enough time, I could find the owner, if it’s that important to you.”

“No,” I said, waving him off, though I really wanted to know, “don’t go to all that trouble. Calling all over town is just as easy for me as it is for you.”

Max shrugged. “Well, if you change your mind, let me know. I’ll do what I can.”

“Thanks, Max,” I said.

With a wave and a smile, he left me beside his truck and headed up to the automatic glass door at the front of the small grocery store. Under the shade of the awning, his keys jingled as he unlocked the door and reached up to the turn the switch to “automatic.” As he stepped through the door, he shot me another smile and then headed off to start his day.

I finished my energy drink as I took in the building. Like many of the other buildings on the main thoroughfare, the two-story red brick building was a landmark with historical significance. Presently, the renovated bottom floor housed a small grocery store and the second floor stood vacant. No one cared about the building, save the man who ran his business out of it.

The ten-by-ten stone smokehouse that had been built to the side of the building decades ago was now a secondhand homewares and furniture store. All of these facts were known to everyone in town. Anyone could have set the cupboard outside at night for Max to find when he came into work in the morning.

No one lived downtown proper anymore. Not really. And the only all-night business was the Gas & Go and the Wash-A-Teria. The laundromat wasn’t staffed at night, solely self-serve. So, whoever was working overnight at the gas station was my best bet if I was to look for witnesses. It was possible that someone doing late-night laundry might have also witnessed the cupboard’s drop off.

If Sal had listened to me, she had moved the unhoused folks into Doc Stephens’ old officer building the previous night. That’s the information I’d passed along to her, anyway. Sal and I worked together to make sure that during the cold months, the unhoused from her camp knew which abandoned buildings were safe to sleep in overnight.

Sage Grove had no real police force, but county officers would do a nightly drive through town, to make sure everything looked safe and sound. Once every other week, they’d do a more thorough check of town, checking out abandoned buildings, stopping and checking with residents to make sure everything was copasetic. When they came to check out buildings, Caleb would watch out for them. He’d pass long which buildings had been checked, and I’d pass that along to Sal. They never checked the same building in the same week, so once a building had been checked, it was a safe sleeping spot for the unhoused folks for at least a handful of nights.

Before Doc Stephens’ office building, Sal had all of the folks from the camp sleeping in an abandoned house on the outskirts of town. However, it had a mold problem and it was so dilapidated that sleeping outside wouldn’t have been much different. None of them would have seen the cupboard dropped off since they were nowhere near town center.

Basically, as I destroyed my kidneys with chemicals and caffeine outside the grocery store, I could conclude that finding the previous owner of the cupboard would be incredibly difficult. Unless Caleb had seen something, I was going to have to start asking around. Even though Sage Grove presently had less than a thousand residents—and dwindling—asking around could take forever unless I got lucky.

I walked back to Gas & Go and my car with an empty can and clearer thoughts. Where the cupboard had come from didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. It wouldn’t help me get the ghost out of my house any quicker. But someone had put my name on the cupboard, which was concerning.

Like most sane people with the knowledge, experience, and know-how, they had a ghost and they wanted to get rid of it. Obviously, everything else was incidental. My worrying about the details of where, why, and how the ghost had ended up in the cupboard didn’t matter. Especially since those details would be nearly impossible to acquire.

Get rid of the ghost before it gets comfortable.

That would be my goal.

I tossed the empty energy drink into the back floorboard of my car and hopped into the driver’s seat. Getting to The Lunch Counter to start prepping for the meal of the day would take my mind off of things. However, when I rounded the corner to drive down to the diner, the mob waiting outside told me my day wasn’t going to get easier.