This is Halloween by Sarah Branson

Juliet “Jules” Lockwood had sworn exactly six times since leaving the highway and crossing the Blue Spruce Hills town line. All six had been silent. All six had been necessary.

She pulled her Subaru into the gravel lot beside the Blue Spruce Hills Community Clinic and sat there longer than necessary, hands wrapped around the steering wheel like the car might attempt escape without her. Outside, the October sky was an intense blue with a few white clouds scudding across it. A carved pumpkin grinned from the clinic’s front step. Orange lights shaped like leaves were looped around the porch railing. Just up the street, a plastic skeleton swung from a telephone pole, rotating haphazardly in the wind.

Jules stared at the skeleton. The skeleton appeared to stare back.

She opened the car door, stepped out onto the gravel, closed her eyes, and took a deep inhale. Wood smoke and baked goods, harvest-sweet with cinnamon and nutmeg. It was, Jules thought grimly, aggressively charming. She took a step and nearly collided with a man holding a cardboard tray of coffee.

“Oh! Sorry!” he said, immediately steadying both the tray and her elbow with equal care. He was tall and laid back, with dark hair that the wind had done something unrequested to and kind brown eyes, soft and patient, the sort of eyes that suggested the person behind them listened when you talked. He wore a canvas jacket the color of cedar bark and was smiling with the easy confidence of someone who had nowhere to be and was fine with that. “You must be Jules.”

She froze. This was… unfortunate. Because those eyes were going to be a problem. She recognized his type immediately, the way one would recognize a load-bearing wall, structural and quiet, that the whole room organizes itself around without anyone quite noticing. Those eyes reflected the sort of steadiness that belonged to men who stayed. She had believed that about someone once. Believed it comprehensively and inconveniently, and at considerable personal expense. Never again.

“I’m Eli Matthews,” he said, and held out the coffee tray. “Town historian and unofficial town greeter. I brought options. Decaf, regular, and one with oat milk, because the clinic called ahead and…” he paused, reconsidering his own sentence, “okay, I asked Margaret at the post office, who asked Clara at the bakery, who said she had heard that you’d mentioned oat milk to someone at the gas station in Lehighton.”

Jules stared at the tray. “That’s a significant intelligence operation for a cup of coffee.”

He smiled, a little sheepishly. “Small town. We have patterns.” He glanced at the pumpkin on the porch. “Also, it’s October. We take hospitality seriously in October.”

She reached for the oat milk coffee. Behind her, someone cleared their throat very distinctly — the throat-clearing of someone who had been waiting a respectable amount of time and was now done waiting. Jules’s hand tightened around the cup.

She recognized that sound. She knew it the way she knew a change in barometric pressure, in her teeth, at the base of her skull, in the specific cold that moved along her spine when something was present that had no business being present.

Absolutely not. I am not doing ghosts again.

She turned slowly.