Light My Way

Nancy gets the call in the morning, just after she’s finished her morning coffee.

“Hey, George. What’s up?” She holds the phone between her ear and her shoulder, grateful for the interruption. She doesn’t regret her decision to move out, away from her dads’ smothering attention, but Icarus Hall can feel too big, too eerie, too lonely, all by herself. She needs a case, she knows. She needs to stop wallowing in everything that happened with Temperance, with the tsunami, with the near-opening of the Veil.

On the other end of the line, George sighs. “I think we have a situation here, and we could use your help.”

“Staffing help or investigation help?” Nancy asks. Both options are equally likely, considering the way The Claw has had trouble keeping waitresses right now with the summer tourist season in full swing.

“Just get over here,” George says, and the irritated snap of her voice is comforting. It can’t be that bad if George only sounds annoyed.

“Be right there,” Nancy promises.

---

The Claw is empty when Nancy arrives. It’s well before opening, but there’s usually a gaggle of cooks in the kitchen doing morning prep at this time.

George bursts out from the back office as soon as Nancy makes it to the bar. “Took you long enough,” George grumbles. Nick pushes his way out of the office behind her, a frown crossing his face. It’s always been easier to read his moods than George’s, and not just because Nancy was with Nick for a while. George hides every one of her vulnerabilities underneath layers of bitterness and sharpness. Nick, for all that he’s been through, doesn’t carry the same sort of armor.

“You didn’t specify it was an emergency,” Nancy says.

“We think we’ve got a ghost,” Nick supplies. It does not escape Nancy’s notice that he still uses the royal ‘we’ when it comes to him and George working together.

George lets out a heavy sigh and says, “I don’t know why they can’t, I don’t know, go bother that new Italian restaurant in town from time to time.”

“This one decided to leave cryptic messages on the bathroom mirrors,” Nick explains.

“Are you sure you didn’t just piss off the newest dishwasher?” Nancy asks, because she’s learned it’s always best to go for the least outlandish theory first so they can cross it off early.

“Just come and take a look for yourself,” George says.

The backrooms of The Claw haven’t changed in the month since Nancy was last here -- it still smells like an odd combination of cooking oil, soap, and raw fish -- but there’s also a new bright pink towel on the bench in the locker room and a duffel bag she doesn’t recognize leaning against one of the walls.

The sole employee bathroom still smells strongly of the bleach that George likes to use when she does deep cleans, and it’s strangely comforting in a way that Nancy would not have ever expected. When she looks at the mirrors, she can see why George called her in.

The mirrors are fogged over, even though the room doesn’t feel humid enough for them to be. It’s that contrast that really makes it eerie, the oddness of something that shouldn’t be possible and yet nonetheless is right in front of them right now.

In the middle of the mirrors is a scrawled out message. A finger has traced words in the condensation: “IT HURTS.”

“I don’t think it would kill them to be a little bit less cryptic,” Nancy says. She’s hoping that one day they’ll run across a spirit that is organized enough to leave them an itemized list.

Nick snorts at the joke, and even George grins at it. It feels good to be back here, a case to solve, her friends at her side. The past few weeks havebeen nothing but tedium, long hours of reading whatever books she could find in Icarus Hall, browsing the internet, listening to podcasts. It feels like she’s waiting for something. Maybe for the rest of her life to begin.

“So,” George says. “I really don’t need another angry spirit scaring off our customers. Where do we start?”

---

They start by searching the Claw from top to bottom. They had a chat with Bess -- who is away on some sort of historical society retreat for the week -- and she suggested that they try to find the anchor for this particular spirit. “It’s probably something new that we haven’t seen around until recently or else we would have met this ghost before,” she tells them before going on some sort of rambling dissertation about ghost attachments and emotion-object theory that Nancy partially tunes out. If she needs to know more about it, she’ll ask Bess for another explanation later.

George officially closes the Claw for the day, which has been a regular enough occurrence over the past few years that no one bothers to question it. Nick takes the storage room, freezers, and kitchen. George handles the front of the restaurant. Nancy gets the locker room and back offices.

She combs through the office first, but it’s George’s safe haven, and the only thing that’s new from the time Nancy worked here are the law books that have been here for weeks. It feels-- she’s not sure what she’s going to do if, when, George disappears off to school to study law the way she wants to. Nancy knows Nick will let them use the Claw if they need to regroup again in the future, but it’ll be different without George. It will just be another part of Nancy’s life that will have moved on without her.

The locker room is emptier than it looked at first glance because no one came in today, so Nancy pokes through the detritus. The duffel bag is full of gym clothes. The towel has a ketchup stain on it. She flicks open the closed lockers, making a note to break into the ones with locks later if this first pass doesn’t work out.

In one of the unlocked lockers, she finds a worn denim jacket and an old Walkman. The hair on the back of her neck prickles as she reaches out to collect them. Nancy’s had enough experience with the supernatural to know better than to ignore the tickle in the back of her head. This is something important.

When she lifts the Walkman, it jumps to life in her hands. The spokes of the cassette player begin to spin even though she hadn’t pressed any of the buttons. A crackle of static fills the air. A song begins to play. The music is not coming from the Walkman or the headphones attached to it. It seems to echo through the locker room, coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once. The song is something bright, peppy, with a tinge of guitars that makes it sound distinctively 80’s.

At the sound of the noise, George and Nick rush in. The lyrics start up, and even though Nancy doesn’t quite recognize the song, she does recognize the singer. “Is that Whitney Houston?” she asks, scrunching her face up in concentration.

“Yeah, it’s one of her earlier ones,” Nick says as Whitney begins to sing about uncertainty in love, about wanting someone and not knowing if they love you back.

Nancy fiddles with the Walkman, pressing buttons to see if it will make the music stop, but of course it doesn’t. The air crackles with an unearthly energy. A wind fills the room, blowing Nancy’s hair into her face. The music seems to get louder, the yearning in Whitney’s voice getting more aching. There’s a flash of light, and the wind blows in a new stream of -- something -- small rectangular pieces of paper that pelt the three of them. Nancy raises her arms to protect her face and does her best to keep her breathing steady. For a ghostly attack, this is actually pretty mild, all things considered. They just need to ride it out to see what the ghost wants.

The song finishes. The wind dies down. Nancy lowers her arms. During the mini-storm, Nick had rushed to George’s side, shielding her with his larger body. It’s probably an instinctual response, some sort of remnant of their time when they were engaged, were dating, but Nick doesn’t quite let George go, even after the danger has passed.

“Are you all right?” he asks her, and his concern is written clear across his face.

George nods and ducks her head, avoiding his eyes. “I’m fine.”

Nancy has known for a while that they still have feelings for each other, no matter how stubborn they like to be about it, and she’s wondered at times how long it will take for them to finally admit it again. She swallows around the lump in her throat that feels uncomfortably like jealousy. She’s not sure of what, exactly, because they’re good together, really good together. Maybe it’s just because of Ace, because of that curse hanging over their heads. Maybe she’s just missing that sort of closeness, that intimacy, for herself.

“Well,” Nancy says to try to break the awkwardness of the moment. “I guess we know what the anchor is.” She holds up the Walkman for further inspection.

“I think Jonny, the new busboy, brought that in a week ago,” George says. “He’s really into thrift stores and estate sales.”

Nancy pops open the Walkman to pull out the cassette tape. It’s not a professionally made one. In ballpoint pen, someone has written on the front sticker, “For Nicole.” She will have to see what’s on it and who this Nicole is.

“They’re photographs,” Nick says, and Nancy looks up to see Nick and George collecting the papers from where they’d settled on the floor. She bends over to pick one of them up herself. It looks like it was taken in a booth of a restaurant or a night club of some sort. Three faces caught in the glare of the camera flash. Two of them, a man and a woman, are leaning towards one another, and a third person, a woman, seems to have been captured mid glance, half turned towards them and half turned away. All three of them are Asian, black hair, dark eyes. The two women have different haircuts. The one leaning towards the man wears hers long and straight. The other has hers cut short into something of a bob. Is one of them Nicole? Nancy turns the photograph over, but all that’s written on it is, September 1989, Portland.

The information is useful, but it’s still frustratingly vague. George says, “I think they’re all of the same people?” She hands Nancy the photos she’s collected. Nick does too. Altogether, there’s only about ten photographs in total, even though it seemed like there must have been dozens of them swirling in the wind earlier.

She looks at the first photograph on the stack. The people in it look younger, maybe teenagers here. One of the women -- girls, here -- has her arm thrown around the other, standing in a field, the sun shining overhead. They are both smiling broadly at the camera, smiles wide enough that their eyes are squinting. They look happy. The photograph is labeled, July 1986, Bangor.

Nancy looks at them and wonders who they were, what their stories are. She became a detective because she loves learning things, loves taking all the fragments of a story and figuring out how they all fit together into a cohesive whole. People leave so many pieces of themselves behind. Their lives leave imprints on the people and places around them.

She runs a finger over the faces of the women, tracing over their features which have been frozen in this particular moment in time. And then she’s hit with a wave of emotion so strong that the room spins and everything goes dark.

---

Nancy wakes up crying. Her face is wet. Her chest feels hollow, like she’s being choked by grief. She’s all too familiar with the sensation, but she can’t place the source of it. All of it is too much, too alien, to be her own, undirected and all-consuming.

“You’re awake!” George says, rushing to her side. “Are you okay?”

Nancy is not okay. The loneliness feels like it’s eating her from the inside out. She grabs hold of George’s arm, desperate for some contact, any contact. And this is George. Despite the distance between them at times, Nancy has known George her whole life.

George doesn’t protest as Nancy pulls her into a hug. She does wrap her arms around Nancy’s body, murmuring something soft and soothing into Nancy’s ear as Nancy presses her face against George’s shoulder. George isn’t a large person, but she’s warm -- the warmest thing in the entire room -- and Nancy clings to her. Nancy doesn’t know how to let her go.

“Hey,” another soft voice cuts through some of the fog. “We’re here for you.” That’s Nick, come up behind her. His hands press against her back, a grounding presence, and she knows his touch. She’s missed it, in much the same way she misses Owen’s and Gil’s -- and even Ace’s, for all that it had only ever been illusory.

It helps, having them close and comforting. But also, it hurts. It hurts to be part of them and yet separate. These aren’t her emotions, but that doesn’t mean they don’t feel like her own, filling up every bit of her until it’s strangling her. She’s had just enough experience with magic messing with her head to know what it’s like when it’s happening to her.

She closes her eyes, tries to focus on her breathing, holds onto George even tighter.

And then, ever so slowly, the feeling drains away, bit by bit, until all that’s left is an aching exhaustion. She lets out a sob into the scratchy wool of George’s sweater, more out of relief than anything else. George’s hair smells like floral shampoo.

When she pulls back, George is looking at her with concern, but it’s the kind that feels supportive instead of overbearing, the way her dads might be if they were here. George asks, “Ghost?” The softness of her expression is lovely in a way that feels precious in its rarity.

Nancy nods. “I think so.” The only conclusion that makes sense is that the mirrors, the music, the photographs, the ghostly possession, are all connected. She just needs to figure out how. She just needs to shake off this whole incident and focus on solving the case. “Let’s get to work.”

---

They start by pinning the photographs to the corkboard that George has stashed away in the storage room. Nancy wants to see them laid out in chronological order, wants to see if she can piece them together into some sort of narrative.

She considers trying to call Ace in, but he’s out on a camping trip with his dad, awkwardly trying to patch up the remnants of their relationship, and the cell service out in the woods is sketchy at the best of times. This doesn’t seem like an all-hands-on-deck sort of ghost, anyway. It hasn’t tried to kidnap or kill anyone, at least not yet, and they’re all old hands at this by now.

The photographs span the course of almost a decade, from the years 1984 to 1991. In the earliest picture, one of the girls is sitting at the piano on a stage during what seems to be a recital. There’s something about the framing, where the camera must have been somewhere in the audience, that seems to indicate that a parent was probably the photographer. It’s the sort of photograph that Carson Drew would have taken if Nancy had ever had piano lessons.

The last picture, the most recent one, is a parallel of the first. A musical performance on a stage, but this time in some sort of night club, shrouded partly in darkness, but still lit by the harsh glare of the stage lights. The woman with long, straight hair is singing into the microphone at the front. Her eyes are closed, her mouth open mid-note. The other band members are harder to make out. A man next to her plays his guitar, head bent. There’s a keyboardist in the background -- maybe the same woman as who was playing the piano? -- though her back is to the camera.

Another photograph is of the three of them posing in front of a band poster, making exaggerated facial expressions and throwing up ironic peace signs. The poster reads ‘Model Minority’ in a big blocky font. The date on the poster reads, June 14, 10pm. Nancy notes it down as a lead for more research.

The other ones are less specific, three friends spending time together, laughing and smiling in various configurations. Arms thrown around shoulders on picnic benches during a school lunch. Dressed for a school dance, eyes glowing red in the camera flash.

Nancy looks at them, and she feels an odd ache for her own high school days, a surge of nostalgia that she never expected to feel herself.

“They look happy,” Goerge says. A frown is crossing her face. Not so unusual for her, but Nancy can see the furrow between her brows. George’s high school years were shitty and isolated, Nancy remembers. She was constantly working and trying to take care of her sisters and her mother at the same time.

Nick comes up behind her, close enough to touch her, but he keeps his distance, now. His own high school experience was idyllic in comparison to either of them. He had been a popular football hero, well liked.

The three of them wouldn’t have been friends in high school. They were barely even friends after high school. It was only the vagaries of fate, murder, curses, and some light hauntings that bound all of them together, Bess and Ace included. Nancy can’t imagine them not being in her life, not anymore.

Nancy says, “It’s good to have friends.” The words feel awkward in her mouth. She’s never been the best at comforting people, which is one of those skills she probably should have cultivated over the years.

“Yeah, you’ve got us, now.” Nick adds on.

George turns to give him an unreadable look. “Do I, really?” There’s a challenge in her voice, and it feels like there are all sorts of unspoken things underneath her words.

“Yes,” Nick says, and his expression is a mix of complex emotions, open and hurt and determined. “I know things have been-- weird and difficult between us lately, but we’re still-- we’re still friends, right?”

George’s mouth twists into something that looks like it’s trying to be a smile. “Yeah, we are. It’s been-- I miss you. I’m sorry I messed it all up.”

Nick sighs. “It sucked, you know, hearing what you said, after everything we went through together.”

Something pained crosses George’s face. “Everything was so messed up that year, and you were the only good thing about it, but then I fucked that up, too.”

Nancy turns away from them. She knows they have a bunch of things they need to get through to find themselves on the other side of their almost-marriage and subsequent breakup. It feels as if she shouldn’t be here. These are George and Nick’s issues, and Nancy won’t get in the middle of it. She’s never fit into the configuration of their relationship before. There’s no reason that should change now.

But then Nick is at Nancy’s side. “Hey, you all right? I don’t think we meant to get into it right here.”

Nancy blinks. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she says, but when she wipes at her face, her cheeks are wet. She doesn’t remember crying, but this could be some sort of emotional spillover from the ghost feelings from earlier.

Nick raises a skeptical eyebrow at her. “You know we’re here for you, too, right?”

“Yup,” Nancy says, and her voice rings with false brightness. She hates the weight of Nick’s attention right now, when everyone’s emotions feel stripped down and raw.

“Okay,” Nick says, though he doesn’t sound entirely convinced. “As long as you know.”

---

They have a bit of a breakthrough when George recognizes the band name. (“Victoria had one of their t-shirts, I think,” she says with a squint and a frown. “She liked to wear them while hungover.”) That leads to a call to Victoria, who is sober enough to give them some necessary background.

“Model Minority were such a big deal when I was a kid, because they were the only Asian American band in Maine,” Victoria explains over the phone. “They were the coolest people any of us had ever known, and all of the Asian kids would do our best to sneak out of our parents’ houses with fake IDs in order to go to their concerts.”

“But they never made it big,” Nancy says, because even George, who knows about half the Asian American population of Maine, had never heard of them.

Victoria sighs, loud enough to be audible. “There was a car accident. I think only one of them -- I think her name was Nicole? -- managed to survive it.”

Nancy bites at her bottom lip. “Do you remember when that was?”

“Early 90s, I think. It’s been a while.”

“Like 1991?” Nancy asks, looking at that last photograph, marked March 1991.

“I couldn’t tell you,” Victoria says.

That seems to be the limit of the information she has, so George gives her a curt goodbye and hangs up.

“Looks like we have to comb through the 1991 obituaries,” Nick says with a sigh. “I was hoping to get to the youth center sometime today.”

“We have a ghost haunting our restaurant,” George points out, more than a little testily.

Nick just smiles at that, his expression wry and fond. “I’ll let Addy know I probably won’t be in for a few days. I think she’ll let me have a pass because she knows how the ghosts get.” He turns to look Nancy straight in the eye. “Thanks for helping out with this.”

“Just wait until you see my hourly rate,” Nancy tells him, because she doesn’t know how to deal with the weight of his gratitude right now, when she hasn’t even solved anything yet. There’s still too many questions.

“We’ll pay you back in burgers,” George says.

---

The three of them spend several hours pouring through newspaper archives at the library, where about half of the newspapers have been digitized and half haven’t. Nancy flips through the microfiche while George and Nick wrestle with figuring out the correct search terms on the computer. They settle into the quiet, focused energy of every one of their research sessions, only speaking up when there’s a new tidbit of information, and Nancy finds herself soothed by the clack of keys, click of mice, and the satisfying shick of drawers opening and closing.

Nick is the one who manages to find the references to the traffic accident that managed to kill two and injure three on a highway just outside of Horseshoe Bay in October 1991. From there, they manage to trace back to a few obituaries in the Penobscot Bay Pilot for one Austin Chen and one Margaret Lee. They died young and tragically at the ages of twenty-two and twenty-one, though there’s nothing in their brief biographies that sound particularly notable except that it doesn’t mention their band at all, instead referring to them as ‘passionate musicians.’

That gives them the identities of two people in the photographs. Their grainy newsprint pictures match the faces of the man and the woman with the short bob-cut. The other woman in the trio is not referenced at all, and it just makes her feel even more ghostly, even further out of reach.

None of their digging turns up anything about the band itself. No one in Maine felt the need to write about a small rock trio amongst a sea of other local bands for their local papers. That leaves them to start searching through old high school yearbooks. Austin Chen and Margaret Lee graduated from Belfast High School in 1988, where they were two of the only Asian American students. There was a third, though, one Nicole Kwan. Nancy spends a moment staring at her yearbook photo. The smile pasted on her face is awkward. Her sweater has big sleeves that feel very much of that era. Her hair is as long and as straight as it is in all the other photographs they have.

It wasn’t too long ago that Nancy and George also graduated from high school, and she imagines some other person looking through her own yearbook decades in the future. What would Nancy’s face look like to them? What would they see?

“So, we’ve got our three suspects,” George says as Nancy prints out the relevant articles so they can put them up on the corkboard when they get back to the Claw. “Who do we think is our ghost?”

“Nicole,” Nancy says without hesitation. It’s the only explanation that makes sense. The Walkman with a mixtape made for her, the aching loneliness of being the one left behind.

They haven’t been able to find any news or information about her after the accident. No obituaries, no social media profiles, not even a vague missing persons report to be found. What happened to her? In theory, she should still be alive right now, living out her fifties, maybe with a family and a job and a house, possibly even a cute dog.

And instead she’s haunting the Claw.

Maybe she’s not even a ghost now. Maybe this is just some other sort of psychic echo, and Nicole Kwan has just gotten married, changed her name, and is living in some version of idyllic bliss. But it doesn’t seem likely. Bess told them as much when she instructed them to go looking for an anchor.

“What do you think happened to her?” Nick asks as they walk back out through the parking lot. The sky is overcast, and there’s the lingering threat of rain.

Nancy shakes her head. “I don’t know, but I guess it’s up to us to find out.”

---

When they get back to the Claw, it’s already the early afternoon. Nancy gives them all tasks. George needs to call up Jonny, the busboy, and find out which thrift store had the Walkman to see if they have any trace of how it got there in the first place. Nick is in charge of listening to the mixtape to see if there’s any information to be gleaned from the other song selections.

Nancy herself is responsible for getting in touch with any remaining friends or family and seeing if they have any information on Nicole’s fate. She spends the next hour flipping through the photocopied yearbook pages and searching through Google and Facebook on her laptop, trying to find phone numbers, email addresses, and Facebook profiles of the people listed there. It’s grueling, thankless work. She gets hung up on more than once. A lot of people only barely remember Nicole, Austin, or Margaret and have no idea what happened to them after graduation. Nancy copy/pastes the same email multiple times and sends them all off into the ether, hoping they get at least one response.

She’s just about to take a break, rubbing at her eyes and at her temples, when she catches sight of Nick falling out of his chair. He had been sitting at one of the Claw’s tables, scribbling notes into a notebook as he wore Jonny’s flimsy plastic headphones while George went into the office to make her own phone calls.

It would probably be comical if it wasn’t so sudden and so inexplicable. One moment, Nick was sitting there, head bent and expression focused. The next moment, he was crashing to the floor. Nancy rushes to his side.

“Nick?” Nancy asks. Nick’s eyes are closed. His expression is as slack and as peaceful as if he had just spontaneously fallen asleep. His chest is still rising and falling with steady breaths. She places one hand on his shoulder, careful, just to see if she can rouse him into wakefulness.

As soon as she touches him, Nick’s eyes snap open, and there’s something foreign and strange in his expression. Nancy startles back, some instinct pulling her away.

She takes a deep, steadying breath, meeting Nick’s gaze as he sits up. “Nick?” she asks again. “Are you okay?”

Nick blinks once, twice, and gives his head a shake, as if he is trying to reorient himself. He pushes himself into standing. “I think so,” he says.

Nancy asks, “What happened?” She doesn’t know what’s going on here. She needs to proceed with caution.

Nick gives her a half-smile, which almost feels normal, but there’s something off about it. “I was-- everything hurt for so long, but-- you’re here. You’re actually here.”

This isn’t Nick. Nancy knows that in an uncomfortable bone-deep way, but the ghost recognizes her somehow, and Nancy figures that the easiest way to deal with this is to go along with it. “Yeah, I am,” Nancy says.

“I-- I thought you were gone. You both were, and--” Nick continues, taking one step then another towards her.

Nancy holds still. The ghost, for all of its intense emotions, hasn’t been dangerous or violent, at least not yet. She doesn’t want to be the cause for it to change its tune. “I’m right here,” she says, carefully.

And then Nick is right in front of her, close enough to touch. “I missed you so much, Maggie,” he says, barely louder than a whisper, before he kisses her.

It takes Nancy by surprise, and she freezes up under the press of his lips to hers, but then some part of her, some long-buried instinct, leans into it. This isn’t Nick, but it’s still the familiar solidity of Nick’s body, the same scent of Nick’s soap and cologne, the familiar taste of Nick’s mouth. Nancy hadn’t realized how much she missed these things until she got them back.

She comes to her senses all too quickly, though, and she yanks back, ducking her head and resisting the urge to wipe at her lips. It’s not fair that this mistake can make her feel like she’s being unfaithful, to Ace and to George, even though neither of them have claims to her or to Nick.

“Oh,” a voice says behind her. Nancy turns to see George standing in the entrance to the back rooms. Her expression is unreadable, but it’s clear that she saw the whole thing.

“George, I--” Nancy starts, but Nick interrupts.

Nick says, “This is wrong.” He’s shaking his head as his eyes dart around the Claw. “It’s-- it’s another trick. She’s-- I’m supposed to be dead. I need to--” He looks straight at Nancy. “You’re not Maggie.”

“No,” Nancy says. “I’m not.”

“Please,” Nick says, his eyes wide and pleading, “it hurts.”

Nancy takes a step towards him, not so fast that it might spook the ghost that’s inside him. “Nicole, we’re just here to help,” she says. “You need to tell us what we need to do.”

Nick looks at her, tilts his head to the side. He opens his mouth to say something, but then his expression shifts, and he blinks. “Nancy?’ he asks.

Nancy breathes out. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“Oh good,” Nick says. He sags, slumping into the nearest booth, like all the energy has been drained from him all at once. George is right there, by his side, almost immediately. She grabs hold of one of his hands. Nick shoots her a grateful smile. Nancy does her best not to dwell on it.

“What do you remember?” Nancy asks instead. “Did Nicole tell you anything?”

“It wasn’t really like she was in my head. All I got were feelings, mostly. Nothing specific.” Nick rubs at one of his temples and lets out a sigh. “I do remember kissing you, though. Sorry about that.” His smile is rueful.

Nancy hates the sight of it, but she can’t let herself dwell on that feeling, that burning in her chest that he might be embarrassed by it, that he might regret it. So instead she focuses in on the issue in front of them right now: their friendly, neighborhood ghost. “She said something about this being another trick.”

“We know ghosts can get confused,” George offers, “not know where or when they are.”

“But she wants something from us,” Nancy says. She starts pacing, the way she always does when she needs to think. Her nerves are jangling under her skin. She feels like they’re so close to something, but she doesn’t know what that is. “I think we need to find out what happened to her.”

“Well, she doesn’t feel like she’s in any sort of condition to tell us,” Nick says. “It’s not too early to start drinking, right?”

---

Nick decides that he really needs a nap, so he downs a drink of water and goes out to his truck. George doesn’t try to stop him. Neither does Nancy. She knows what the emotional hangover from this particular ghost feels like, and it is not fun.

When it’s just her and George again in the quiet Claw, Nancy grabs hold of George’s elbow. “Look, George, about what just happened--” she starts.

“It’s okay,” George says, and her expression is calm. “I get it. It’s just-- ghost things. I had Odette flirting and occasionally macking on Bess. I know what it’s like. And you saw how spectacularly I managed to mess things up with Nick, anyway.” There’s always been this edge to George, this self-possession and resilience, that Nancy has always admired. She has always been able to take the hurt and the pain and turn them into something that makes her untouchable. But Nancy doesn’t want that version of George right now. That version of George isn’t someone who could ever let Nancy see her honestly.

“That doesn’t mean you don’t get to have feelings about it,” Nancy says, because she definitely had feelings when George and Nick became a thing the first time around. They weren’t fair feelings, and they were her own problem anyway, but she still had them.

George says, “Is this-- are you asking my permission to date Nick again?” Her eyes narrow, but it’s not quite anger that she seems to be feeling.

“No,” Nancy says, because that’s not what she’s trying to get at here. There’s Nick, yes, but there’s also George, and she wants them to be happy. She’s okay if they’re happy together, but also-- she liked kissing Nick again, and she liked the feel of George’s arms around her, and some part of her hates the idea of them leaving her out, leaving her behind.

“Then what is this about?” George asks.

“I don’t know,” Nancy admits. “I just wanted to make sure that things were okay between us, even with-- even with all of that.”

George gives Nancy’s arm a squeeze. Nancy feels the warmth of her hand, even through the fabric of her shirt. “We’re okay,” George says, and the smile she gives Nancy is startlingly soft and startlingly sweet.

---

When Nancy gets a chance to check on her notifications, she discovers that she has an email from another graduate of the class of 1988 by the name of Alison McKenna.

It reads:

I did know Nicole Kwan. We grew up in the same neighborhood, and my family was friends of the Kwans. We weren’t ever close. She only really ever hung out with Austin and Maggie. After high school, the three of them decided to skip out on going to college and focus on music instead, which I know the Kwans were really upset about. After the funerals, the Kwans were hoping she would apply to universities and settle down, but she got into a huge fight with them and stormed off. None of us have heard from her since.

“So she just… disappears?” George asks. She’s frowning over Nancy’s laptop.

“Something else got to her, probably,” Nancy says, fiddling with a pen as she tries to put the pieces together. “Someone else. Whoever it is that she’s convinced is trying to trick her.”

“And what’s the deal with her and Maggie?” George continues on. “That kiss was definitely not platonic.”

Something in Nancy’s stomach swoops, a reminder of what it was like to have Nick pressed up right against her, those old feelings rising up again. She turns back towards the corkboard, where the photographs are still laid out in neat, chronological order. “But she also dated Austin?” Nancy asks. She touches a picture of the two of them together. The two of them are standing in front of a statue of Elvis. His arm is thrown over her shoulder, and he’s looking at her like she’s the only person in the entire world.

George comes up to stand next to Nancy. Their shoulders brush, which means Nancy can feel it when George shrugs. Nancy wants to lean into it, but she doesn’t. “You can date more than one person in your life,” George says.

“That must have been awkward, what with all of them being so close and all.” Nancy says, twisting her lips into a grimace.

George snorts. “We’re really not in any position to judge others for having vaguely incestuous dating within friend groups.” She shoots a small grin in Nancy’s direction.

She has a point. “Fair enough,” Nancy says.

---

Nick comes back looking a lot better after his nap, just in time for Bess’s check-in from her retreat. He grabs one of the chairs between George and Nancy at the table where Nancy has placed her cell phone face-up and on speakerphone.

Nancy does her best to fill Bess in on all of the details, catching her up on all of the new information they’ve discovered since they found the anchor.

“Wait, so you’re telling the ghost was almost lucid when she was possessing Nick?” Bess asks. “Much stronger than when she was possessing you?”

“Yeah, when I was possessed, it was just feelings, sensation. Nick actually talked to us,” Nancy says.

“You definitely didn’t say anything when you were under,” Nick supplies. “It was mostly just a lot of crying.”

It probably shouldn’t be funny, but the last few years have warped Nancy’s sense of humor, so she ends up huffing out a soundless laugh.

Bess says, “And you also mentioned that she disappeared after a very emotionally fraught event, too?” She makes a small noise, barely audible on the phone’s speakers, the one she makes when she’s deep in thought.

“Yeah, the email said she left right after the funerals,” Nancy says. She tries not to get her hopes up too high, but this is what Bess does now, apparently. Lots of witchy things. Things that can help them unravel the supernatural side of their cases.

“So this might be a long shot,” Bess explains, “but I think she might have been turned into a Focus. I saw something about it in one of Temperence’s books. A spellcaster can keep a spirit trapped in a moment of intense emotion and feed off the emotional energy for their own magic. Once the anchor is no longer in use by the spellcaster, the spirit can begin to regain its own consciousness.”

The three of them in the room share a look. It’s the best lead they have. George asks, “What do we do, then? How do we fix this for her?”

Bess sighs. “I mean, I think all we can do is what we do for any other ghost. Find a way to give her some peace.”

“That’s not exactly a lot to go on here, Bess,” Nick says. He rubs at his face.

“Well, I don’t know! If she’s possessing some of you, maybe you can just ask her?” Bess says. Her impatience bleeds into her voice, the sound of it clear even over the tiny phone speakers.

“It’s a better idea than anything else we have,” Nancy admits. “Thanks, Bess. We’ll let you know if we need anything else.”

“You better,” Bess says with a huff. “Half of the people here are fascinating, and the other half are incredibly dull, and it’s impossible to tell which ones are which.”

----

After they say their goodbyes to Bess, George stands up. “I’ll do it,” she says, glancing towards the Walkman, where it’s still sitting on the table Nick left it on.

“George, no,” Nancy says, reaching out to grab her arm. “I can do it.”

George shrugs her off. “You and Nick both got a turn,” she says with a wry smile. “I’m feeling left out. And besides, I can handle this. I had an eighteenth century French woman living inside me for over a year, remember?”

Nancy tries to smile back, even though the effects of Odette living inside George’s body were no joke. “Yeah, I do.”

“I’m pretty sure all I need to do is touch the Walkman, too,” George says. “That seems to be the common thread between what happened to you and Nick. I think Bess is right, and she’s getting stronger.”

“She hasn’t pelted us with any more photographs, so I am hoping she’s feeling a little more chill,” Nick says.

George sits down at the table with the Walkman. She slides the headphones over her ears. Because Nancy is watching her, she can see the moment that it happens: the way George slumps for a moment before catching herself on the edge of the table. George -- or Nicole in George’s body -- looks down at her own hands, turning them and studying them with an expression of fascination and a bit of awe.

Nancy takes a step forward. “Nicole?” she asks. She needs to approach this with care, in case she upsets Nicole into doing something drastic. But she’s also thrumming with an impatience she needs to fight down. She has questions she wants answered.

Nicole takes a deep breath before turning to face her. “Hi,” she says. Her smile is awkward and hesitant, not one that looks comfortable on George’s face. “I’m-- this isn’t my body, is it?”

“No,” Nancy says.

Nicole says, “Sorry about earlier. I’m still trying to figure out how all of this works.” She shrugs her shoulders.

“That’s fine,” Nancy says. “We just want to help you. Can you tell us what happened?”

“I-- the last thing I remember before-- it was the woods. I was so upset after-- and I just wanted to go out there. Austin loved going hiking in the woods, even though me and Maggie hated it. I was just there to get away for a little bit, away from it all, a place where it could feel like just me and the music, but then…” Nicole trails off. Her expression gets far away.

“You mentioned a ‘she’ earlier,” Nancy prompts.

“I only ever heard her voice. I don’t even remember how it happened, but it was just-- it felt like I was stuck in that moment in the hospital, after the accident. When the doctors told me I was the only one who survived. Just, that moment over and over and over again. I couldn’t get out. And then-- and then I saw you, and you said my name, and everything was too confusing, and I thought that maybe I had-- that maybe I had managed to escape.” Nicole starts to cry, and it’s awful seeing the agony of every emotion she has written across George’s face.

She grabs the chair next to Nicole, puts her hand on Nicole’s -- George’s -- shoulder. Nick takes the chair on the other side of her, another source of comfort. Nancy says, “You did, though. You did escape.”

Nicole sniffs, and Nancy can see the way she’s trying to smile, even through the tears.

Nancy continues, “We want to help you find peace.”

Nick says, “Do you have any idea how we could do that? Is there anything you have left to do?” His expression is so open, so kind. It’s a reminder of why he has a youth center full of children who would do almost anything he asks.

Nicole shakes her head. “I don’t know. I just-- maybe you could bring me back to them?”

“Yeah,” Nancy says, already planning out a trip to visit every cemetery in the Penobscot Bay region. “You loved them.”

Nicole wipes at her eyes, trying to dry them with the sleeve of George’s shirt. “So much,” she says. “And now it feels so--” She glances up and catches sight of the corkboard, still covered in photographs. She leaps to her feet, lurching forward, shaking off Nancy’s hand, so that she can take a closer look.

“You managed to conjure them when you first showed up,” Nancy says. “They helped us figure out what happened to you.”

She watches as Nicole reaches out to touch one of the earlier photographs with a gentle sort of reverence. The three of them standing awkwardly in front of a high school, backpacks strapped to their backs, uncomfortable smiles on their faces. Nicole says, “We were so young. And I-- it feels like I wasted so much time.”

“What do you mean?” Nick asks. He’s come up to stand next to her, studying the photograph that she’s touching.

“I dated Austin on-and-off through high school. I loved him in a way that made me feel crazy from time to time. But Maggie-- we’d been friends our whole lives. She was the most important person in the entire world to me. I didn’t think I was-- like that. I thought I couldn’t be like that, because I loved Austin, too.”

“A bizarre love triangle,” Nick says, knowingly. It feels so out of left-field and nonsensical that Nancy shoots him a confused look. Nick just smiles and walks back over to the table, picks up his notebook, points to the last song on his list, which reads Bizarre Love Triangle, New Order.

Nicole laughs through her tears. “Maggie was the New Order fan. She was always trying to get us to cover Joy Division, too, but Austin always argued that their music was too depressing. It was only a few months before-- when we managed to talk it out, and we decided to-- try it. All three of us. It was the happiest I’d ever been. I had the two of them, and the two of them had me, and they had each other. It wasn’t-- it wasn’t how we were told it was supposed to work, but worked for us.”

Nancy thinks of the conversation she had with her dad, about soulmates. She thinks of how her heart had felt like it was tearing itself to shreds over Ace, over what they could have been. Her dad had smiled at her, she remembers, and he had said that maybe we don’t have just one soulmate in life. She thinks of the smell of George’s hair and the taste of Nick’s lips. She thinks of all the people she’s lost and the impossible ache of what if that has haunted her for months. She looks at Nicole’s smile on George’s face and at the fond amusement in Nick’s expression, and she knows what she needs to do.

But it can wait.

Nancy says, “I’m glad it did. I think I know how to bring you back to them.” She points at the Walkman, still sitting on the table. “This should be the anchor that’s keeping you here. We can bring it to them, their graves at least, let you be with them again.”

Nicole’s lips -- George’s lips -- curl into something of a smile. “I’d like that,” she says. “Thank you.”

She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath in. When she breathes out, she’s George again. As soon as George’s shoulders sag, Nancy leaps forward to pull her into a tight hug. “Hey,” George says. “I’m back.”

“Yeah,” Nancy says into her shoulder. “You are.”

---

It’s been a long day, and the sun is setting when Nancy and Nick start putting away all the stuff, preparing the Claw for its reopening tomorrow morning. George begged off early due to her ’extended ghost duty’ and because Jessie apparently wanted her help with something at home.

“Hey,” Nick says as he unpins the photographs from the corkboard, stacking them up once again into a neat pile. “I know this one got to you a bit. I think George knows it, too, but she hates talking about feelings.”

Nancy sighs. She should be good at this. She’s always been good at putting her head down and going after the things she wants. It shouldn’t feel so difficult to talk about it now. “I felt bad for them,” she says. “They were so young when they lost everything.”

“Life’s not exactly known for being fair,” Nick says. He raises his eyebrows at her, because he knows that lesson better than most do.

Nancy says, “I just-- I was thinking of what Nicole said, about wasting time when you already know what you want.”

That seems to bring Nick to a halt. He stops rearranging the chairs and turns to give Nancy his full attention. “And do you? Know what you want?” he asks her. There’s a hesitation in his voice.

“Yeah,” Nancy says. “I do.” She moves closer to him, reaches out to grab hold of his hand.

He lets her, but his mouth is pulled into a flat, uncertain line.

Nancy says, “George, too. I-- she’s part of what I want, too. Is it-- Is this something you could want?”

Nick lets out a long breath. Nancy thinks about letting herself melt into his touch, about feeling the rise and fall of his lungs against her cheek. “Yes,” Nick says. “I could definitely want that.”

“And George?” Nancy asks.

“Don’t tell her I told you this, but she’s always had a bit of a crush on you,” Nick says. His smile is small and sly.

Nancy grins back. There’s a bright, fizzy feeling in her chest. “We’ll have to work it all out, the three of us,” she says, but it feels like a formality after everything they’ve already said to one another.

“After all we’ve been through? That part’s going to be easy,” Nick says, and he gives her hand a squeeze.

---

The sun is bright overhead and the grass is very green when they finally visit the cemetery where Austin Chen and Margaret Lee had been laid to rest. Nancy and George are carrying flowers. Nick is carrying the Walkman. It’s a quiet day. The only sounds are the cars driving down a nearby road and the chirps of birdsong in the trees.

The two graves are side by side. Neither of their tombstones are ostentatious, but both are etched with the years 1970-1991. Nancy places her flowers on Austin’s grave, and George places hers on Maggie’s. Nick digs a small hole with his hands in between the two of them and buries the Walkman between them. Nancy holds George’s hand through it all and resists the urge to cling. They’ve come so close to losing each other so many times.

When Nick stands up, he brushes the remaining dirt from his jeans. “Should we say something, you think?” he asks.

George shakes her head. “Nah, I’d like to think that where she’s going, she can speak for herself.” She smiles, and the sight of it in the sunshine makes her glow. It’s an open smile, generous and free, in a way that George only gets when she’s around the people she loves.

Nancy leans over to brush a kiss against George’s smiling mouth, a reaffirmation that they’re both alive, that they’re both here. She turns to do the same to Nick, and he cups her face in his hands as their lips meet. Nick doesn’t kiss George, but he throws his arm over her shoulders, drawing her body closer so it can lean against his. Nancy can feel her chest swell at the sight of it, the sight of them together, knowing that there’s a place for her, knowing that she’s not on the outside looking in .

“I think we’re done here,” Nancy says. “I think we can go.”

“Yeah,” Nick agrees. “I think you’re right.”

And so they go.

FIN.