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On the gusty afternoon of April Twenty Third, the first year after the bombs, a soggy, raggedy clothed figure approached Jericho's med centre. She stood for a moment, staring up at the clinic's shape silhouetted against the unusually dark afternoon sky. She had traveled on foot for weeks, not certain exactly of her final destination but focusing on this building as the place she would figure out her next move.

She went inside, keeping her hood drawn close around her face, not noticed in particular by anyone as she stepped around burnt down votive candles, dodged a hunched figure coughing, and ignored a receptionist who barely looked up. The Jericho med centre had certainly seen better days.

She had seen many places looking in worse shape than this one, though, and she continued walking, searching for that one person she knew would be there, working tirelessly through any calamity that had befallen this place and the country around it. As she passed a row of windows along the side of an office, she glanced at her reflection in the mirror. Her journey had worn her out but she was still recognizable to herself. It was a good sign; a sign that her plan would work.

She found an office after searching a few hallways, and it had the correct name attached to the door, but it was locked. She frowned. She turned, glancing at the nearby bulletin board to search for clues as to the whereabouts of the one she'd come all this way to find.

Footsteps squeaking on the floor behind her alerted her to someone approaching. She turned quickly and the hood she was wearing slipped from her head. Her red hair fell to her shoulders.

Kenchy Dhuwalia jumped and gave a small shout, spilling the coffee he'd been holding carefully as he trudged down the hallway. "You!" he said in a tense, fearful voice. "You?" His hands were suddenly shaking, and so was the half emptied coffee cup.

The figure standing a few feet in front of him looked back calmly, appraisingly.

"What are you doing here?" he whispered when she didn't move. "Why are you haunting me? It's not my fault!"

She was curious about this fearful man. She took a small step closer to him, and he took a step back, holding up a hand in warning. "I did what I could to save you, you know I did! I did my bloody best! Don't come closer!"

She took another step. It was too easy.

"Why me? I'm not the guy who left you! Why are you taking this out on me?" He was almost up against the wall now. She made a move to take another step, and his eyes widened. He turned and quickly bolted sideways, down the hall.

Reaching, by habit, for the locket around her neck, Sunday Hendrickson stared after him in confusion. He had looked like he had seen a ghost. He had said she'd died. That meant...

With a sickly feeling of dread, she pulled her hood tight over her head, obscuring her face as much as possible. She continued down the hall, hastening her search, until she came to the second set of votive candles, this one arranged near a side entrance, with a framed photograph mounted on the wall. She took a breath and looked at the face in the photo. It was like looking in a mirror.

"Damnit!" she muttered. Spying a piece of paper tacked to the notice board nearby, she glanced furtively down the hall. It was clear. She grabbed the paper and stuffed it into her jacket before making a hasty getaway out the door. She walked for a few blocks before she found a safe place, a small park, to sit and read. Plunking herself down on one of the swings, Sunday Hendrickson smoothed out the piece of paper and began to read her sister's obituary.

The bare details were there. The community mourned the passing of Dr. April Green, born 1972 and died 2007, along with her unborn child. She was survived by her loving mother-in-law, father-in-law, and brother-in-law. She would be remembered for her dedication to helping those in need, her compassion, her sense of...this was where it slipped into the details the reader did not care to take note of. Crumpling the paper and sighing to herself, Sunday thought bitterly that the passing of her sister signaled the ruination of her entire plan. It was time for a plan B.

Pushing her feet against the damp gravel, pumping her legs until she was swinging, Sunday began to think. April being dead upon her arrival was something she hadn't anticipated and it put quite a wrench into things. The worst part was there was nothing on which to focus her wrath. Through the miles and miles she had covered, her one and only focus had been getting to April. It was entirely anti climactic to discover she'd somehow been done in. The doctor had said it hadn't been his fault, and it hadn't been the fault of the guy who'd left her. The paper had said it had been a pregnancy complication. So April had really been done in by that baby she'd always wanted. Sunday could still hear her sister's eleven-year-old voice whispering excitedly about running around after a gaggle of kids some day. She would smile smugly if there was any satisfaction in hearing April hadn't gotten what she wanted for once, but there was none. April was dead and gone, and that was worse than alive and anything else because she was not there to be hated. She was not anywhere. You couldn't direct wrath at something not there.

But the doctor had mentioned someone else, someone else who was hauntable, and so, presumably still there. The guy who left April. That had to be Eric Green, the man Sunday had avoided marrying in her last attempt to intrude upon her sister's life. As her thoughts strayed to him, she felt the beginnings of a smile twitching at the corners of her mouth.

The years had not been particularly kind to Sunday, especially the year after the bombs. It seemed as though the world around her had suddenly become the chaotic farmhouse in which she had been raised, with its hordes of people desperately clawing at scraps of food, fierce battles over pieces of personal property, fists and feet and homemade weapons appearing around corners in the dark of night, and horrible things happening to people who slept with both eyes shut. Because she had been raised in such an environment, she knew how to survive, and cling to survival she did, for the first few months. By the time winter hit South Dakota, she was feeling the effects of surviving on her own for so long.

She had been doing just that for as long as she could remember. She had tried to cut herself off her in adult life. She had left the farmhouse, shortly before Elmer and Inez Hendrickson died and their farm was bought and bulldozed to put in a strip mall. She'd used the tiny amount of money that had been divided up into seventeen, after the taxes owing had been taken care of, for a deposit on a room in a decrepit two story. She'd worked a string of jobs, from counter girl at the Candy Castle to customer service representative at a bus line. She'd even worked a few years at Denny's, until that fateful Christmas Eve she'd dumped a hot turkey dinner, gravy and all, into the lap of an old man who'd asked her why she looked so gloomy on such a magical night. She cut off her contact with the rest of the family the best she could, bouncing around through a series of bad relationships, and of course the disastrous attempt to reunite with her twin sister. She hadn't been certain she wanted to take April's place permanently, as was suggested by the bride's in-laws, but she had wanted to take something from her, the twin who had always received everything. She'd wanted to take something for herself. After being kicked out of the church that day, her anger and malice towards her sister had only grown.

By the time of the bombs, Sunday was completely without contact from anyone in her earlier life. Scrawn, (who had no longer been called Scrawny after she had hit fourteen and shot up in height, but whose limbs had stayed in accordance with her nickname enough for her to keep most of it) used to send her letters, keeping her up to date on the goings on of the family, telling her Monty had gotten paroled again, Galadriel had broken up with her second husband, but had moved onto a third man, another carnie to boot, and that Bobby was working a hot dog cart, apparently pleased the hot dogs were free now. The letters had stopped a few months before the bombs, however. On Sunday's last biannual visit, she'd let Scrawn's eldest drive when they'd gone for ice cream, and they'd hit a fire hydrant. Scrawn had shrieked about preteens being allowed behind the wheel and about Sunday wanting to kill her child, and that had been Sunday's last visit. The letters had kept up for a little while, but then they had stopped.

The world that she lived in after the bombs left Sunday in a permanent animal mode, fighting continually for her next meal, her next chance to sleep unencumbered by intruders. A human can't live like an animal for long without awakening some animal impulses, and Sunday's became a thirst to do harm. They were unconscious at first, but she began to notice them, with each moment hunger gnawed at her, each moment she ran or hid in a desperate quest for safety. As others around her descended into herd animals, pushing and shoving blindly as they gave in to their instincts, Sunday became like a predator, focusing and channeling her wrath to a specific purpose.

She wanted to go somewhere familiar. To someone familiar. She considered looking up one of her adoptive siblings, but she hadn't known many of their most recent locations. She wouldn't want to head up to federal prison she'd last heard Betty Ann was housed in, which would likely be worse than the city where she hid. She wouldn't be able to find Tobias' mobile home easily and she wasn't sure he could quite satisfy her wrath. Scrawn's last letter had come from Minneapolis, and she'd heard a rumour it was gone, so Scrawn and the kids were all likey just as gone. Going over a list of her adopted siblings was really only a formality, because there was one person on her mind once the world turned into a swarming pit of hell. Her mind seemed to gravitate towards that one person with whom she had always felt a torturous connection, and soon enough, her feet began to gravitate in the direction of her sister's last known whereabouts. In the dead of the worst winter South Dakota had seen in decades, Sunday set out on the migration trail, led by a sense of familiarity combined with the usual jealously and angst that she channeled all towards her more fortunate other half.

As she sat in the deserted playground, having finally reached her sister's hometown on what would have been their thirty-fifth birthday after a desperate, perilous journey, Sunday clenched the swing's chains in her fists and glowered. Somehow, her sister had managed to die before she got there, and now, there was no focus for all of her restless energy. Once again, things had tilted against Sunday's favour, and she was the sister sitting alone in a strange town with no one and nothing upon which to bestow all of her feelings, and April was the sister who had escaped into blissful nothingness. It wasn't fair.

As she thought again of the last time she had tried to steal her sister's spotlight, her mind settled again on Eric Green, the groom she hadn't been able to bring herself to marry. He was alive. He was hauntable. But where was he? The obituary hadn't mentioned him at all. What had gone wrong? Sunday felt an irrational irritation towards her sister again. If only April were there she could answer these questions herself. Now, instead of being able to usurp a living beloved daughter-in-law and country doctor, Sunday was taking over for a ghost, and finding out what she needed to know next would be more of a challenge. She stood, tucking her locket inside her jacket once again, and began the trip back to the med centre.

Kenchy Dhuwalia was standing outside the clinic's back exit, letting the light rain hit his face and hoping it would settle his nerves. He'd known doing this job was getting to him, pretty much since he had been dragged away from his bar stool to fill in as a doctor again, weeks earlier. He hadn't known just how addled his mind had become until he'd experienced that awful hallucination earlier. After seeing the surreal spectre, he'd retreated into the linen closet to sit in the dark and reel over things without the suspicious glances from Jessica and the other staff, who would certainly take it as a sign his dependency issues were interfering with the job. He wasn't altogether certain that wasn't the case, himself.

As he stood in the crisp air, taking deep breaths, he tried to put into practice the relaxation technique that helpful nurse's aide, Jenny, had suggested to him earlier in the week, focusing on a specific image in his mind. He chose a calm, sunny beach, and tried to make himself hear the waves crashing in his mind, feeling slightly ridiculous all the while. He was interrupted by a voice. "Where did he go?"

He turned, and nearly jumped out of his skin. The ghost was back, standing a few feet away, pulling back a black hood to reveal her pale features.

"Wh- where did who go?" he stammered.

"Eric. He left me. Where did he go?" she asked.

"After you - died - he went to New Bern. To think about things," he said quickly.

She shook her head in frustration, advancing towards him. "Where'd he go before I died? After he left me?"

Kenchy was so shocked at hearing her speak, in the same voice he remembered from their brief interactions in life, that it didn't occur to him to wonder why she didn't remember. Later, he would suppose that perhaps the trauma of death left her with some sort of psychological upheaval that made remembering these details challenging.

"He went to Bailey's," Kenchy choked out.

"Who's Bailey?" she asked.

He held his hands up for a moment, as if to fend her off, looking around wildly for an escape. The step he took backwards put him up against the wall. She stepped forward, reaching a hand towards his throat.

"Bailey's Tavern," he said weakly.

"What?" she asked, grabbing his shirt collar in her fist. He barely dared to breathe as he found himself staring into her startlingly blue eyes. He didn't want to send this terrifying vision in the direction of Mary Bailey, who had never turned him away when he'd gone looking for something to soothe his nerves or someone to listen to him. But none of this was his fault, and as she tightened her ghostly grip on him, he panicked.

"He moved into the bar!" he practically squeaked. "He moved in, okay?"

Glaring at him as though he had murdered her pet bunny, she said nothing, letting go of him roughly, turning and vanishing around the corner. He stared after her, gaping for a moment, and sank down to a crouch against the wall, rubbing his temples. He chuckled at the irony as he wished he could go immediately to the bar and realized that would be the worst place to escape to at the moment.

Sunday headed immediately to the bar, remembering vaguely from her last trip into town that there had been a bar near the centre of the downtown. Not certain what she would find there, she was beginning to piece together a hypothesis before she even glanced in the window. The bar was fairly quiet at this time of day, and the liveliest people in there seemed to be the two women clinking glasses on either side of the bar. One sat on a bar stool, sipping from a glass in between animated descriptions of something or other. The woman behind the bar was listening, interjecting occasionally while wiping glass jars with a cloth. Sunday squinted as she watched her work. She was certain her hypothesis was correct. Eric had left her sister to move into the bar, and in with the bartender.

Sunday watched the curly-haired, denim-sporting home wrecker checking on other patrons, retrieving more jars from the back, and returning to her conversation with her friend, feeling her loathing of the other woman rising. How dare she steal from April! How dare she take April's place! Sunday had tried to do it herself often enough, but that was understandable. No one else was supposed to treat her sister that way. And what did this whiskey peddler have that Sunday didn't? How had she succeeded where Sunday had failed? This woman was the exact opposite of April, in every way Sunday decided as she studied the barmaid through a foggy pane of glass. She determined she hated the marauding mistress even more than she had pledged to hate her sister, for she had won, somehow, and bested them both. That was not to be tolerated. April was hers to torment, and this other woman had stolen that too. Sunday continued to spy, hating her sister's husband's paramour, hating her hair and her walk and the way she balanced glasses on a tray. She watched, hating, until she could see her, and her friend from the bar, coming towards the door. She retreated around a corner, spying with the expertise she'd acquired over years in the Hendrickson household. It seemed the two were exchanging goodbyes.

"Well, good luck," the thieving mistress was saying.

"I'm going to need it," the other was saying with a nervous giggle. "But I'm going to do it for Stanley. 'Til he comes home, I'm going to handle things."

The parasitic paramour nodded. "You'll do fine. And he'll be home soon."

The non Eric stealer nodded herself. "So will Eric. They all will."

The stealer affected a brave smile. "Yeah. Have a good night."

"Thanks. You too, Mary." The non stealer gave a quick wave and walked away.

The stealer turned to go back inside. Sunday smiled in the shadows. She had a confirmation, a name for the homewrecking Mary Magdalene, and a new target.

Sunday considered her first attempt at haunting Mary Bailey a success. Sure, the pyjama clad, tousle haired bartender had only laid dazed eyes on Sunday for a few seconds, but Sunday had seen her eyes widen in surprise and heard her sharp intake of breath. It was a good start, she thought to herself, and it was best to take these things slowly. She'd hide in waiting, watch the bar for a while, until the other woman had convinced herself it was a dream, and then she'd make a second appearance.

The next day, just as Sunday had been congratulating herself on her clever idea to wear a white dress she'd found in one of the stores she'd broken into after dark, and as she sat watching the bar, planning her next ghostly appearance, she found it was her own turn to stare in wide eyed shock. The bartender was walking around the side of the bar, carrying a toolbox in her bandaged hand, and walking close behind her was none other than Johnston Green, former father-in-law of the dearly departed twin sister Sunday was avenging. This was a development Sunday hadn't foreseen, and she panicked as she watched Johnston Green helping Mary Bailey check the back windows. Johnston Green smiled at his son's other woman, and touched her arm briefly as he went by her in the alleyway, just as Sunday had seem him do with April before. As they were going back inside, Sunday had another shock when Johnston Green stopped in the doorway for a moment and looked out at the street. He couldn't have seen her from her hiding place across the road, but she had an unnerving feeling he was sending her a warning look. This building and this bartender were not to be messed with. It was just like the warning Johnston Green had given her once before, years ago, and though it had infuriated her then, she had backed off. She sighed and kicked at a stray can as she made her way back up Main Street, along the back way, behind the stores.

Sunday stayed away from the bartender, knowing she was under Johnston Green's watch, for the next two days, and then something happened in town that made her think it was best to lay low for a while anyway. As the town prepared to defend itself from an invading neighbour, and then as the friendly ASA troops moved in and started imposing order, Sunday retreated to an abandoned farm outside town. She'd seen how things progressed when the army got involved, during her travels, and so for a few months, she kept her distance, but kept an eye on things. This was how she came to decide two things. The first was that Mary Bailey made a difficult mark, as far as haunting went. She was not often alone, usually surrounded by friends and customers, and when she was, she often seemed lost in thought. More than that, it was like she was determined not to notice that someone was watching her. Sunday had first tried to begin a campaign of spooky but subtle haunting, watching but never getting close, when she found out that Johnston Green was dead and Bailey's tavern was unprotected. Mary Bailey didn't seem to pick up on Sunday's presence flitting around, or at least, didn't seem to connect it with the dead doctor she'd stolen from. She usually could be overheard blaming disgruntled bar patrons or New Bernians or animals or the weather. But it didn't matter. In the course of watching the bartender from a distance, Sunday made a second decision. She decided Eric Green, who had returned from New Bern to live cosily ever after with his bartender, was a better target.

Eric Green had seemed a less exciting target at first. Sunday had grown up watching Betty Ann and Galadriel steal hapless boys from each other every other week. She'd long believed girls were the catty backstabbing thieves, and the men they fought over were helpless dummies being yanked back and forth like a coil of rope in a tug of war. She expected Mary to be the one harbouring all consuming guilt that would be easy for a ghost to tap into, but soon enough, she noticed Eric was the one getting spooked. After a while, it was too easy and too satisfying not to target Eric each time she made a quick appearance or spent an evening spying. She switched her surveillance from the woman to the man, finding out his habits, his schedule, and what it took to scare him.

As the months went by, Sunday played with her target like a cat teasing a mouse.

She timed her appearances so that he would be the only witness, and so that she could slip away before he could catch her, darting expertly through the back alleys she'd gotten to know. After years of teasing Scrawny and Bobby and the other kids smaller than herself, she knew exactly how to pace it, building up the ghostly behaviour, dialing back, and building it up again. She could see Eric Green getting more spooked each day, and over time, she could see how his live-in lover, his brooding brother, his patient parent, and his friends and coworkers were beginning to regard him with concern.

Sunday was amused each time Eric goggled after her retreating form, peered nervously around corners, or jumped and tried not to shout out loud, but she got bored with the same old things over time, so she grew more creative. Every now and then she'd head over to the small bungalow where she knew the British doctor was staying, to try out a new ghostly behaviour on him. He was even better at hiding the fact he was having ghostly visions than Mary Bailey had been, and he began visiting the bar more and more frequently, peering fearfully over his shoulder as he went through the door.

Sunday saved her best stuff for Eric. The laundry had been too easy, though she couldn't help a few gleeful giggles from escaping her lips as she stomped on Eric Green's dress shirts. She hadn't been certain what she was going to do with the glass bottles the bartender had left outside so temptingly, but thinking of April banishing her from her fairy tale wedding and perfect life, Mary casually toasting jars of moonshine with her friend the day Sunday turned thirty-five alone, and Eric Green in every memory she had of him, she smashed the entire box. The glass made a satisfying sound as it hit the ground. Even Mary had seemed a little unnerved as she discovered the broken bottles outside her door, but she'd managed to shrug it off as a non supernatural event, as usual.

The roses had been fun, inspired by the late night horror films Sunday and the other kids had snuck downstairs to watch some nights when Elmer and Inez were sleeping off a few beers. Sunday had pricked her skin yanking the roses out of the town hall rosebush, but it had been oddly soothing to tear at the green stems. The little girl glimpsing her was unfortunate. The child had smiled up at her with a grin that reminded Sunday of Scrawny when April told her her hair was pretty. Realizing the child recognized someone she thought was April when she squeaked out "Dr. Green!" Sunday had scowled and hastily finished her task. Fortunately, from her vantage point behind the dumpster later, she saw that people believed the child even less than Eric's family believed him. And Eric's face was especially white as he stared down at the flowers.

By the time the bartender made an honest man out of Eric and married him, Sunday's job was getting easy. She only had to show up the first night of their quick getaway to have him sufficiently paranoid for the rest of the time there. She made her appearance as he struggled with the booze and the bags, and retreated into the woods, only venturing back towards the cabin a few times over the next two days, to break branches or hide the forgotten champagne in the car. She had no interest in what was going on inside that cabin, beyond the fact she was certain Eric would be worrying about ghostly interruptions. She spent the two days camping out in an abandoned hut a few hundred yards away, thinking to herself about how well she had done in stealing April's identity this time. Her sister, so beloved by all in life, was now, for all intents and purposes, a vengeful spirit ruining Eric Green's life. Really, she was taking out all three of her targets at once, with the ricochet effect it was having on the nearly exasperated new wife and the tarnishing her sister's radiant reputation was getting. But something about it wasn't entirely satisfying. Eric was growing more and more disturbed by her presence, and those around him more irritated, but they were supporting him still. That was the problem with this darn town, she thought to herself. After everything she'd seen them doing these past few months, she'd seen how annoyingly intertwined they all were. No matter how crazy Eric found himself becoming, he had these people to keep him grounded.

It was then that Sunday found herself formulating the next part of her plan. It didn't begin as a logical thought, but bloomed more so out of that same feeling she'd had after the bombs, the need to do harm. It was growing in her, expanding, and as she thought back over her grand scheme of haunting, she set her sights towards a grand finale that would be as big as her desires for vengeance.

In the weeks that followed the wedding, Sunday continued to torment Eric Green, but now she had a more specific plan to set into motion. She observed the newly weds, their family and friends, and drew inspiration as the town began to decorate for Halloween, their second since the bombs and a perfect day with which her grand finale could coincide.

The night before Halloween, she watched the couple on the stoop of the back door of the bar, carving a pumpkin in the waning light and laughing over their plans for the holiday. They had already been obliviously decorating the front of the bar earlier in the day, even Eric blissfully unaware for once that he was being watched. It would all be too easy. As they wiped their hands on their jeans and went inside, leaving the jack-o-lantern on an overturned box in a relatively sheltered corner of the building, Sunday rolled up her sleeves.

The morning of October thirty first, Mary Bailey awoke early, feeling a strange sense of fluttering anticipation in her stomach. Over the breakfast table, she and Eric discussed the evening's Halloween carnival on Main Street, the party they'd be attending afterwards, and their plans to retrieve the ancient decorations from the hall closet to add to their storefront's display. Deciding she needed some air, Mary said that she was going downstairs to check out the decorations already being hung on Main Street by the team of volunteers who were setting up for the festivities, and Eric said he'd be along shortly, clearing their breakfast dishes.

Mary was smiling as she made her way through the bar room and out the front door, but her smile quickly turned to an expression of shock. She was still standing there a few moments later as Eric came out the door, taking a moment to realize she wasn't smiling over at the bales of hay being arranged into a maze in front of town hall.

"What is it?" he asked, putting a hand to her shoulder and stepping close to her, feeling his foot slip a little on the sidewalk below. He glanced down to see that he was standing in a smear of orange goo, that the goo formed a trail to where their pumpkin lay, a few feet away, smashed into pieces. He groaned, shaking his head. "I'm sure Mom'll have another one we can carve tonight, if you want."

Catching his eye, Mary shook her head, nodding in the direction of the wall.

Their decorations were gone (the skeletons would be found later, dismembered, in the dumpster behind town hall, and the paper spider would never be seen again), but what stood out about the Bailey's storefront that morning was the message someone had written across it overnight. As Eric spotted the huge, menacing letters scrawled across the bricks in black charcoal, he gasped himself, and instinctively gripped her shoulder tighter.

The words on the wall that left them speechless read "Cheater, cheater, Pumpkin eater. Had a wife and couldn't keep her."

After the two had stood in shock, a still contrast to the bustling activity farther up the street where the maze was being constructed and the decorations hung, Eric broke the silence as he stepped back, gently pulling Mary with him.

"Why is she doing this?" he muttered, his eyes on the offending rhyme still, and Mary wasn't sure he was even asking her.

"What she?" she asked. "We don't even know who -"

"It's her again," he said, a bit of a quaver in his voice. "But she's never done something like this before."

"Her?" Mary squinted at the defaced wall again, as if trying to will herself to see something else there. "It was probably kids. You know, mischief night, night before Halloween. Someone's idea of a pretty lame prank." Her words were logical as usual but her tone of voice was less dismissive than it usually was when Eric tried not to bring up the ghost. She actually seemed uneasy herself, and Eric tried to wrap his arm around her, but she stepped forward, bending down to survey the destroyed pumpkin.

"I don't like it," he said, looking from the wall to the trail of pumpkin, to the crouching form of his wife. "I really don't like it. She's really starting to sound threatening."

"Whoever it is is trying to sound threatening," Mary countered, a growing irritation in her voice, but she continued to look down at her jack-o-lantern mournfully. "It's probably just...someone who's pissed off. Could be anyone. Those kids I wouldn't serve last week. Who knows."

Eric stood in contemplation for a few moments, before bending down to tap her shoulder. "I think we should go stay with Mom for a few days."

She looked over her shoulder at him. "Eric, I can't leave, just because someone -"

"It doesn't matter what's going on, the bottles, the roses, this...I think we need a few days away. See if...whoever it is will back off and leave us alone." He knelt one knee carefully against the sidewalk, wrapping his arm across her shoulders. "Please, Mary. Can we try? A few days at least? We're going there tonight anyway, it won't make a big difference will it?"

He could see her debating with herself. Could tell she was angry at the thought of being driven out of their home by something as ridiculous as a smashed pumpkin and a silly, albeit creepy, rhyme. But he knew she was getting weary of his own barely hidden anxiety lately, and he was worried about the toll it was taking both of them. "I'm telling you, it's probably just kids," she said.

"How about we file a report?" he asked. She raised her eyebrows doubtfully. After everything that had happened a few months ago, reports and other details of ordinary life in town seemed strange to most people, but they had being trying to get back to some semblance of order.

"No, I don't think we need to do that," she sighed.

"I just want to see what happens if we get out of here for a few days. Maybe whoever it is," he frowned, but continued, trying to sound convincing and comforting, "will get bored when we're not even there to torment."

She was silent. He rubbed his hand along her back. "We could have some peace and quiet for a few days. It could be nice."

He could see her weighing irritation and fatigue again. "Okay," she said finally, leaning her head against his shoulder. "A few days and we'll see."

"Okay," he agreed, kissing her temple. "How about I go in and pack the bags? You know, Mom'll probably be glad we'll be there to help her decorate."

Mary smiled. "I'm sure she's already got the place in full Halloween spirit. But I'll pack myself a bag. Last time you did it for both of us I ended up wearing your old shirt every night."

Eric shrugged. "I thought it looked good on you."

Mary rolled her eyes but smiled as they stood. She stopped, standing in silence again as she looked back up at the writing covering her establishment.

"I'll get the bucket," he suggested. She nodded, adding "I'll get the soap."

A few minutes later, they were back outside, managing to shake off their nervous tones as they scrubbed at the charcoal graffiti, talking and even smiling as they anticipated heading over to his mom's that night, for the party that would be happening as the 'whole gang' gathered for Halloween.

From her hiding place between a clump of bushes and Town Hall, Sunday smiled too. They would all be right where she wanted them, and it was shaping up to be a Halloween night to remember.

 

 

 



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