Mocha Mayhem

Chapter Four

Naturally, I reacted calmly to the sighting of an actual ghost on the resort's dock. I gasped and nearly dropped my beer bottle. From the sound of a clunk on the hardened sand, Sam did drop hers.

"The fu—" Her voice drifted off as she stepped closer to the dock. Just as we had seen in Spooky-Pants' cell screen, there was a wavy, ghostlike figure standing at the end of the dock. The girl faced away from us, seemingly floating a few inches above the rough wooden boards beneath her bare feet. She was wearing a fitted T-shirt and cutoff jean shorts, but, other than that, it was difficult to make out any identifying features. She appeared see-through, as I'd imagined ghosts to be, and colorless. I could see the lake, trees and setting sun through her silhouette, but, at the same time, it looked almost like I could reach out and touch her. It was probably the freakiest thing I'd seen since the time I accidentally walked in on my half-naked parents in the living room one terrifying early morning. The image (the ghost image, that is) stayed there for about five beats, and then, just as quickly as the phantom had appeared, she vanished. If only I could scrub the image of my parents on the couch so thoroughly.

I shook my head slowly as if to clear it. Judging by how they felt, my eyes were likely bulging out of my skull. My foot felt damp in my flip flop and I realized Sam's beer had spilled over my heel. "Ew," I muttered, slipping my foot aside and attempting to rub it dry on the sand. It was now beer-sticky and sand-coated, so that was clearly an improvement.

Samantha found her voice first. "I did not expect that."

I snapped out of shock. "Why not?" I asked Sam. "I mean, Spooky-Pants did warn us about the ghosty girl."

Sam seemed to snap out of it herself, glancing down at the sand and quickly snatching up her now-empty beer bottle. "Sorry," she muttered as she noticed the tragic state of my right foot.

I shrugged.

"I honestly did not expect to see anything. Especially after the way Andrew Johansen talked about his mom. You know what I mean?"

"How he basically called her a scaredy-cat in a more polite way? Uh, yeah, that didn't escape my notice."

"So, what's the deal? This thing's real?"

"This thing's real," I affirmed. I shook my head slowly and looked all around us. The beach was still empty, the sun now dipping low enough to consider the remaining slivers of sun twilight. "Unless we both hallucinated the same vision, brought to us courtesy of your local Wisconsin brewery..."

Sam greeted that idea with an eye roll. It was a bit difficult to see in the twilight, but her tone let me know she was rolling her eyes like mad. "I doubt it was the beer, Jords."

"Well, did you see the same thing I saw?"

We compared notes for a few moments, noting the supposed ghoul's appearance, dress, and how long it seemed to be there. We finally reached the unsettling conclusion that we had indeed seen a ghost just chilling at the end of the dock for approximately five seconds before vanishing back to well...wherever it is ghosts hang out when not chilling on random docks.

Sam kept shaking her head, though. "Nope. I refuse to believe this." She marched through the sand toward the wooden dock.

I cringed slightly, not exactly eager to step onto a haunted dock. (Visions of being grabbed through the wooden slants by a rotten ghostly hand flickered in my mind's eye.) Still, I felt it my duty to follow my pal through thick and thin, cold case or hot investigation, good times and decaffeinated disasters, so I ploughed through the sand after Sam.