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Jasper and I steered clear of the heavy topics for the next half-hour. In the meantime, we had plenty of blueberry muffins to scarf down, and we did so while going over all of the fine details required to transform The Red Barn into the darkest, creepiest, spookiest event in the history of Sutton Woods.
Jasper sketched out his vision for the cake he’d designed—a two-tiered beauty with faux blood oozing down the sides. It was horrifying and disgusting—everything we could possibly want (and then some!). And I knew it would taste as great as it looked. If he could bake a cake even half as delicious as the cookies, brownies, pies, and muffins I’d already eaten in the last week, then I had no doubt that this was going to be the best birthday cake we’d ever tasted.
We tied our ideas together, starting with my designs and incorporating the supplies he’d picked up while I was grounded. He’d put in a massive order for black balloons, rented a couple of fog machines from a local Halloween shop, and he’d even collected some spooky faux spider webs to drape from the beams.
“Would you want to help me carve some pumpkins?” I asked.
“You mean accept more responsibility?” He feigned shock. “Haven’t I done enough for you?”
“Oh, you’re cute,” I said. “Keep pretending like you don’t want to help, and I’ll just do it myself.”
“Of course I’m going to help.”
“Good.” I winked. “I want to line the path down to the barn with as many as we can get our hands on. Roz’s dad volunteers his weekends to drive the tractor for the haunted hayrides down at Mavis Farms. He’s going to bring us some freebie pumpkins. I don’t know how many we’ll end up with, but we’ll make do with whatever we can get. Worst case scenario, we change directions and use them for interior decor.”
“Centerpieces?”
“Something like that, yeah.” I nodded. “He’s dropping them off later today.”
“That works. What about the rest of the supplies on your list?”
“Mom recycled everything. All of the tables and chairs are stored in an equipment storage behind the barn. They’ll need a good cleaning before we can use them, but they should be in decent shape since they haven’t been exposed to the elements. I have tablecloths and decor by the truckload in the basement. She stored everything in trunks and totes. We’ll have to do a little digging, but I’m sure we can pull everything we need from her archive.”
“Can we take a look? See what we’re working with?”
“Yeah,” I pushed back from the table. “We’re going to have to start bringing stuff up anyway.”
Jasper followed me through the hall and over to the basement door.
Once downstairs, I stopped to admire the open floor plan of our cozy, chic finished basement. I hadn’t been down there in months. Sometimes I’d sneak down while Dad was at work, just to be among the things that’d once made my mother so happy.
I didn’t have a choice but to sneak; when I wanted to feel close to her, I had to do so discreetly, because the basement was off limits. Dad didn’t want anyone near Mom’s things or poking around in her space. He wanted everything to remain the way she’d left it.
I wasn’t even sure he’d gone down there once in the three years since she’d died.
“Beautiful, huh?”
“Yeah,” he nodded, a little less enthusiastically than I’d expected, considering the reaction I’d gotten when I’d first showed Carter last year.
Mom had transformed our basement to fit the comfortable and organized vision in her mind. And it was decorated as beautifully as every one of her parties.
“It was her office,” I explained. “When the business took off, she needed a place to conduct meetings and do all of the behind-the-scenes stuff. The Red Barn generated most of our income back then. She had something special here.”
I stopped at the wall and showed him some pictures—pointing out both Mom and Lucy, even showing him a few childhood photos of myself.
I couldn’t help but love this place—the room I’d spent so many hours in, watching her work, helping her pull together some of her greatest visions. I loved everything about this room from the sleek white-painted walls to the lush carpet beneath our feet.
“There’s an unfinished section off the back wall there.” I nodded to a door behind her desk. “That’s where she kept the storage and supplies.”
I followed him back through the door.
There were rows and rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves along every wall, and a few creating aisles in the center of the room, as well. Each shelf was stocked with multiple totes full of supplies.
“Everything’s organized by occasion,” I said. “Birthdays, weddings, retirement parties, reunions . . . the list goes on and on.”
“Your mom was a beast.”
“She was,” I agreed, stopping at the section in the back. “And completely type A, fortunately for us. I think this is where we’ll have the most success.”
Jasper and I pulled boxes and totes off the shelves for twenty minutes, sifting through the supplies and decorations. We’d already begun to create a separate box, specifically to hold the Halloween-themed items we wanted to use for Carter’s party.
Every now and then, Jasper’s eyes would gravitate behind me, and finally, after noticing his distraction for the better part of ten minutes, I leaned into his sightline.
“What?”
“Can I admit something?” he asked, nodding behind me, and I turned to find the hot water heater looming in the farthest corner. “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable because I know it’s a sensitive subject, but—”
“Would you even know how to fix it?”
“Would you be mad if I told you it’s already fixed?”
“What do you mean?”
“I know, okay? I broke in. It’s creepy, and rude, and I was wrong. I violated your mother’s space.”
“You’ve already been down here? You came down here without me?”
“The muffins were in the oven, and I had some spare time.” He shrugged. “I didn’t realize how sacred the space was. I just wanted to take a look.”
“But,” I turned around, looking to the hot water heater again. “You fixed it?”
“I can’t take the credit. The circuit breaker tripped. I reset it. That’s all I did.”
“And that’s it? It’s working now?”
“Lucky for you, it was the easiest fix in the book.”
I stood staring at Jasper, somewhere between awe and confusion.
“Are you mad?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Thank you, Jasper. Really. I don’t know what to say.”
“It was nothing,” he promised. “Easy fix.”
“Yeah, but how embarrassing is it that I didn’t even know how to fix the easiest problem in the book? And what would you have done if it hadn’t been easy? Would you even know where to start with something more complicated?”
“I suppose it depends how complicated we’re talking.” He shrugged. “My dad wasn’t around growing up, so I had no choice but to learn how to do this stuff. I was the man of the house. I had a mother to look after, you know?”
I smiled. “It’s sweet that you took care of her.”
“Someone had to,” he mumbled, dusting off his hands. “What do you say we carry this stuff upstairs and out to the barn so we can—”
“Change the subject?”
“Bingo.” He smiled.
We knelt back down to the floor, collecting each of the items we’d pulled from the shelves.
Slowly, my hands stopped working, and I looked to him, watching as he organized the supplies into a box. He must’ve felt my eyes on him, because he slowly turned to me, and a small grin stretched on his lips.
“What?” he asked.
“I’m going to miss you.”
“You sending me away?”
“No.” I shook my head. “When all of this is over and you go back to Cedar Lake . . . it won’t be the
same around here without you.”
“Ah, look at you, thinking of the future,” he said, and I smirked.
If only he’d known how much I’d been thinking . . .
“All I’m saying is that I’ve liked having you around, and it’ll be strange when you’re gone.”
“Lucky for both of us, I have plenty of reasons to visit.”
“You think you will?”
“You think I should?”
“I do.” I nodded. “I want you here.”
“Then I want to be here.”
Jasper held my stare, and his smile slowly faded. Inch by inch I sensed him leaning in, and I gravitated closer to him as if pulled by some force I wouldn’t dare fight. Our lips inched closer, and I held a breath, bracing myself for this blissful moment.
And then there was a crash, a shattering sound that echoed through the unfinished stretch of basement.
Jasper and I jumped, our heads snapping in the direction of the clatter.
Dad stood in the open doorway between the storage room and the office, a toolbox and its contents spilled on the concrete floor at his feet.
“Oh god,” I whispered, closing my eyes.
This time I’d royally screwed up, and I didn’t even need Dad to read off the charges against me. But if he did, they’d sound a whole lot like this: skipped school, violated his no visitors rule, went into the forbidden basement, touched Mom’s things, and to wrap it all up nicely, got caught in a compromising position with the last person he’d want to find in a dark room with his daughter.
“Go.” Dad pointed to the stairs. I didn’t hesitate; I wouldn’t even try to make my case. Once upstairs, we could talk rationally. But right now, I needed to do as I was told.
Jasper and I turned out of the storage room, Dad following closely behind as we walked through the office, up the stairs, and back to the main level.
Once at the top of the stairs, Dad saw Jasper right out the front door, slamming it in his face before turning to me.
“You won’t see him again.” He glared at me from where I stood halfway up the steps. “And you’re grounded—again—because clearly you haven’t learned to follow the rules.”
“You’re mad, I get that. But let’s not be unreasonable. I know I screwed up. I—”
“You are not allowed down there!”
“I’m sorry, what?” I pointed to the basement, shocked that his biggest frustration right now was about where he found me, and not the other five thousand things he should probably be mad about. I thought to remind him that I had skipped school, just to point out how stupid his argument was. “That’s why you’re mad?”
“You know the rules, Ally. The basement is off limits.”
“Then what were you doing down there?” I asked, remembering the tools that had scattered at his feet. “What are you even doing home? Surely you didn’t have an attack of conscience, leave work, and suddenly decide to fix what’s been broken at home for the last two months?”
Guilt rested at the pit of my stomach the moment his expression changed. Great. That’s exactly what he’d done. It was effort. He was trying to do something to prove himself while I was away so that I would come home from school and see that he’d stepped up; he’d tried. And I’d screwed up.
“You think it’s easy for me to go down there?” he asked.
“No, I don’t.” I allowed restraint to get the best of me. I refused to hurt him any more than I already had. I could say a lot of painful things, but where would that get us?
“The party’s canceled,” he said, eerily calm. “You’re done—you, Melanie, Rosalind . . . Jasper. You’re all done. I’ve given you multiple chances, and you’ve continued to break my trust. I won’t overlook this behavior for a second time. You won’t get another chance.”
“No,” I said, lifting my finger to his face. “That’s where you’re wrong. I won’t let you do this.”
“You don’t get to make that decision. Now go to your room. We’re done here.”