Michael Cross has been able to see spirits for as long as he can remember, and he uses this gift to help ghosts move from this world to the next. Sometimes, people don't realize that they're dead, and Michael has always tried to keep his wits about...
A/N:back and better than ever after a global pandemic, about 600 minor crises and quitting my job, and ulysess eating all of my fucking files twice!! said program has also stopped letting me paste text directly from it so i have to circumvent it through notes. i'm definitely switching programs when i can bc why the hell am i paying $50 annually for THAT?? some notes i will eventually delete: i realized, while planning for this chapter, that i have been using the terms "college" and "university" interchangeably and had to look up the actual difference. after doing so, i have concluded that in order for it to be as small (think maybe 2000-5000 students) and as rigid as it is, st. anne's would have to be a college and not a university. any mentions of it as a university will eventually be corrected. i had to tweak the guzman interview last chapter just a tiny bit, too, as i realized that i forgot to actually give michael benjamin ortega's contact information (joseph mentions him as an important figure, but doesn't give michael a number or email address, and his appearance in this chapter necessitates the exchange of actual contact info). ...also, i have gone back and made andrew shorter. this is because i realized that both guzman twins are supposed to be considered rather small, but 5'4" is a considerably average height for a young woman— it would make maria two inches taller than me, in fact, which would make referring to her as "petite" feel strange. so the twins have been shrunk down to 5'1". very smol. as noted, andrew doesn't look quite THAT short at a glance because of his hair and his shoes. michael would probably have guessed that andrew was closer to 5'3" or 5'4".
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Michael walked a bit too fast as soon as he was free of the Guzman estate. He half-jogged down the sidewalks until he found the safety of a park, where he sat down at a bench inside of a gazebo, only then noticing just how worn out he was. It was a good thing he was used to walking everywhere, or else the foot traffic of this case alone might kill him.
He did nothing but sit there for several minutes. He had to do something of a mental reset, or else his abilities might have been hindered by the negative energy that clung to him. He wasn't usually so tense. Something about the Guzmans had unnerved him in a way that he didn't have the words to explain.
His next stop, once he had recovered, was his hotel. Cell phones had made the world an easier place to navigate, and he had no trouble summoning another ride. He was there in about twenty minutes.
The hotel rested on a corner of some kind of shopping and dining district in the center of town, framed on either side by the businesses that continued on in either direction, and was hardly big enough to qualify as a hotel. Michael would have mistaken it for an old theater, or perhaps a bank, if not for the sign that hung above the entryway. Still, it was relatively inexpensive, and it was close in proximity to many of the town's important buildings.
There was only one person in the lobby, as there had been when Michael had briefly dropped off his luggage hours earlier. He sat behind the check-in counter and looked bored as he tapped away at a laptop. He was in charge of the place. He'd had to lay off a lot of employees and often took to manning the front desk himself. "Worthington," he had said, "is an expensive place to live. When you hit a financial bump, you hit it hard." Michael, coming from a place like New York City, could easily understand that.
