by Jenn Burke
I’d been kidding myself with the idea that clothes—no matter how well they highlighted my motherfucking assets—could guard me against the truth Hudson wielded as casually as the pen in his hand. Almost three and a half decades had passed, and Hudson was right—I’d essentially remained the same. Same job, same apartment, same habits, even the same family supporting me—Lexi’s, who had never and would never abandon me.
But...thirty-three years had come and gone, and another thirty-three would, and another, and I’d still be here. He wouldn’t. So fuck him.
Okay, no. That was a shitty thought. No matter how much Hudson’s attitude was pissing me off, I’d never wish harm on him. A world without him would be lesser for it.
I sat in the chair opposite Hudson and attempted to draw my knees up to my chest, but the damned pants were too tight. Casually, I stretched out like that was what I meant to do all along. Hudson’s arched brow said he saw through my ruse, but whatever. I lifted my head, steeling myself for what was to come. “I was doing my usual—”
“And by that, you mean breaking and entering as a ghost.”
“There is no breaking in my job. Only entering.”
“As a ghost.”
“Yes, as a fucking ghost. You know this.”
“Merely getting my facts straight.” Hudson gestured for me to continue.
“I saw a guy strangle her.”
“In the hallway?”
“No.”
“In the stairway?”
“What the hell is wrong with you? No. You know where it happened.”
“Your statement is missing some significant details.”
Oh, I wanted to go ghost and hover directly over him so he’d never be warm again. “Fine,” I bit out. “Let me start from the beginning.”
I did, telling him all the details—everything, from how many steps it took me to get through the wall (six), to how many rooms I’d checked out (everything on the first floor, but I hadn’t gotten to the second) and how I’d come to be in the study when Meredith and her murderer burst inside.
“What was his body type?”
A bit of tension in my gut loosened as I realized he wasn’t going to press me for a true description—he remembered that I didn’t see things the same in the otherplane. “On the high side of average. Taller than me and big enough to hold her down.”
“Hair? Short, long, dark, light?”
“Dark.” Though that could mean anything from black to auburn in the otherplane. “I think it was short. Nothing dangled around his face, but he could have had it tied back at his neck or something.”
“So he straddled her, strangled her, and then what?”
I crossed my arms again, but this time it was for warmth. “He got up and helped himself to a drink. It was...cold.”
“The temperature went down?”
“No. I meant the gesture. Heartless. He didn’t give a shit that her body was right there.” I shuddered. “He acted like it was his house.”
“A boyfriend, maybe?”
“Meredith was a lesbian. She and her wife divorced recently—that was why I was there.”
“Her ex-wife hired you?”
“Meredith’s lawyers did, actually. Something about breach of contract or lack of good faith or something. They wanted to know if Meredith and Julia had gotten back together.”
“I’m not sure how that’s their business.”
I’d thought the same thing, but it wasn’t up to me to tell my clients they were assholes.
“So what did you find?”
“Plus-size lingerie drip-drying in the main-floor laundry room that could have belonged to the ex—it was her size, I think—but I didn’t see anything else on the main floor.”
“So she’s a bigger lady? Could she have been the murderer?”
I considered that, but almost immediately shook my head. “From the pictures I’ve seen of her, Julia has the size and probably the strength to overpower Meredith, but the person I saw definitely didn’t present as female. Julia does.”
“Did you see anything else? Anything in the bedroom?”
Despite my preference to not slip into people’s bedrooms, for this task I would have—if murder hadn’t interrupted me. “I didn’t make it upstairs.”
Hudson tapped his pen down the list of notes he’d taken. “Well, that’s a whole lot of nothing.”
Which is what I’d said to Lexi, but the condescension in Hudson’s tone made me grit my teeth. “I told you what I saw. Do what you want with it.”
Hudson looked up from his notes and smirked, his eyes sweeping over my form again. “Don’t you mean do what I want with you? That’s the reason for the clothes, right?”
There was an echo of the sexy, self-satisfied expression I’d seen more than once when we were dating, the barest reflection to tie it back to what I remembered. But Hudson’s face was colder, less welcoming, and I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. I had to go with not, given what he’d said earlier.
Maybe, when I’d heard the initial smile in his voice over the phone, I’d thought—But no, not with Hudson looking at me like I was nothing more than a piece of meat.
He rose, tucking his notepad away with a grace I’d forgotten he had. His motions were brisk, efficient, and deliberate, as though he were buttoning up more than his jacket. Did he wear his suit like armor, the same way I wore my club clothes?
But why would he need armor if I meant less than dirt to him, as his words suggested?
“What?” he said as he caught me eying him. “You’re not even going to try to seduce me after getting all dressed up?”
Maybe his hostility was because of our history, our breakup, or maybe it was because I hadn’t changed, but even oblivious me could take a hint when I was beaten over the head with it. The warmth on the phone had been surprise, nothing more. He didn’t want me. He didn’t want anything from me except my statement on what I’d seen. His words—his tone—hurt and I was done with trying to envision heat where there was none.
I pushed myself out of the chair and moved over to the door. “Get out.”
That smirk widened. “Did you think I’d fall all over myself to get you back into bed? That we’d pick up where we left off?”
I raised my gaze to meet Hudson’s and opened the door. “I thought we could be friends,” I said, proud that my voice was so even. “But you’re not someone I’m interested in seeing again.”
“Good. Remember that.” Hudson stepped into the hall, but paused before I could close the door. “Wes—”
I waited, held in stasis by a single soft note in his voice that took me back to the grocery store where we’d met. They’d torn it down ages ago—it was a parking lot now. Kind of oddly parallel.
One corner of his mouth crooked up—his usual smile, not the smirk I was beginning to hate. He tipped an imaginary hat in my direction. “Stay out of trouble.”
Chapter Three
Moving on would be a lot easier if I could stop seeing Meredith everywhere.
Every time I opened social media or a website or turned on the news or even opened the paper—because yes, that habit was one I hadn’t lost over the past eighty-five years—she looked back at me. Some of the pics were candid, featuring her smiling and laughing at recent galas and gatherings. Others were professional images, headshots or stills from the movies she’d starred in. One or two were pictures snapped when she was in the midst of divorce proceedings with her wife—one of the first major celebrity LGBTQ couples in Canada to have a high-profile split. I cringed when I saw those ones, certain that Meredith would have hated to have her splotchy skin and red-rimmed eyes splashed all over major news networks.
I hadn’t known her—I didn’t know any of my targets. But seeing her face everywhere, seeing the spectacle the news was making out of a horrible event, was getti
ng to me.
The police hadn’t released much information other than she’d been murdered in her home, so the news outlets were full of guessing games. They didn’t seem to care if their reporting hurt anyone. I wanted to scream at them that her last moments were horrible, that they should stop making shit up.
But like when I’d stood in Meredith’s study and watched the last tremors of her dying body, I did nothing.
I pushed aside every annoying article, every tweet, every Facebook post all day long, determined to research my next job. It was an easy one—slip into one of the secure condos in a downtown highrise belonging to a CEO, or CFO, or C-something-O, and grab a pair of earrings his ex-lover had accidentally left behind. First I had to confirm the earrings were actually hers, because I wasn’t your run-of-the-mill thief. I recovered things—there was a difference, despite what Hudson had always thought.
And that was the other subject I was trying hard not to dwell on—Hudson. Specifically how much he’d changed.
Luckily—or unluckily—a YouTube notification left over from my research into Meredith distracted me. There was a new video from a local channel. I shouldn’t watch it—I knew it would piss me off. But I clicked Play, anyway. The video featured Meredith’s ex-wife Julia trying to dodge reporters’ increasingly invasive questions about the murder—all while bawling her eyes out—and it was the last straw for me. I closed my laptop.
I could have stopped this. Or tried, anyway.
Folding over my desk, I rested my forehead against the chilly metal surface of my computer. Images of Meredith’s murder flashed through my mind. What I’d not done...what I’d started to do. What I could have done.
The coward’s way of inaction was not new to me. I’d learned that skill after getting kicked off my parents’ farm at sixteen. Backing away from confrontation, placating people who’d do me harm, finding the path of least resistance—that was how I survived in the rough environment of rural Alberta in the late 1920s. Running was always better than fighting, particularly when you were a skinny nothing of a boy. It had kept me safe more than once.
But I wasn’t a child any longer, despite Hudson’s insinuations the night before. I hadn’t taken action to help Meredith as she died, and the information I’d provided to Hudson was less than useless. But maybe it wasn’t too late to do something.
Like snooping. I could snoop with the best of them. Maybe if I ghosted back to Meredith’s house, I could find something the police missed. Probably not—I was no investigator. But the maybe of me being able to help lifted some of the weight off my chest, which convinced me it was something I had to do.
* * *
Meredith’s mansion looked a lot different at night. The last time I’d been here, daylight had delineated the weathered gray stone, a solid mass against the budding peridot of the grounds and the sapphire sky. Now the structure blended into the darkness surrounding it, even as it was lit from within. Every window glowed, and people in suits and white protective gear flitted in and out of sight behind them.
The cops were still here? It struck me that I had no idea how long it took to clear a scene, particularly not one this large. Or maybe the information I’d given Hudson—the fact that the killer felt at home in Meredith’s house—had convinced them to check everything.
It didn’t matter. They wouldn’t see me as I conducted my own investigation, anyway.
I began in the bedroom. The study had been my original thought for a starting point, but my feet wouldn’t move in that direction. It wasn’t logical, but my brain kept asking what if he’s still there?
I hadn’t ventured into the large master suite on my last visit, so it was free from the taint of memory. The soothing blue-gray color of the walls reminded me of Lake Ontario on a stormy summer day. The room had already been examined by the techs, if the sheen of fine fingerprint dust on every hard surface was anything to go by. The pristine white bedcovers on the king-size four-poster bed were turned back on both sides, but any dents left in the pillows or mattress had already evened themselves out. The walk-in closet was huge but neat, with everything in its place. There weren’t any obvious empty spaces, but that wasn’t surprising. I doubted anyone would murder someone for a pair of Jimmy Choos.
Some dresses in the closet didn’t appear to be Meredith’s size. Were they Julia’s? If so, added to the lingerie I’d found the day before, it was evidence that the exes were maybe back together, but I’d already informed my clients that I was unable to complete the contract due to the circumstances. There was no way I’d be able to explain how I’d sneaked into a house crawling with cops—and besides, it was a moot point now.
I drifted through room after room on the upper floor, but found nothing that even remotely resembled a clue. No evidence that a man shared this space—no clothes, no jewelry, no toiletries. It matched what I’d told Hudson, that Meredith didn’t have a boyfriend, but it was still disappointing. All six of the guest rooms had a stale air to them, as though the cleaning staff, and now the cops, were the only ones to venture inside them in months. Why anyone would have a house so big that some rooms never got used was something I couldn’t fathom, but I was from a very different generation and social status.
The last room on this floor was dedicated to music. The walls sported extra sound-proofing, and instruments of all kinds hung from hooks or sat on racks—guitars, both acoustic and electric, woodwinds, even a flute. A grand piano crouched in one corner. For the first time, I spotted dust not of the fingerprint-finding variety—though there was that too. So Meredith didn’t want her cleaning staff in here. Because of the potential fragility of the instruments on the walls, or because she’d wanted this to be solely her space?
I’d never know.
A stack of books and single sheets of music sat on the sideboard beneath the wall-length window. With a bit of effort, I manipulated the pages and the books from the otherplane, rifling through them to find any clues. Some books were easier to flip through than others due to their degree of wear.
In the fourth book, I found something—a pink “missed call” sticky note acting as a bookmark. It was dated January 8, roughly five months ago. The note said only “Call Jim” with a little doodle beside it. I tilted my head back and forth, trying to determine what the doodle was. The way the figure’s arms were drawn, it reminded me of the “Walk Like an Egyptian” dance from the eighties. There was no indication who Jim was or what number to call, and given that it was from so long before, it hardly counted as a clue. Obviously the techs agreed, since it was still here.
Disappointed, I started downstairs. I was about to step into the kitchen when I heard Hudson’s voice. The low, rumbly tone froze me in place in the hallway, out of view, as surely as Lexi’s ice spell once had. (It was a good thing I couldn’t die and that my skin had healed from the frostbite, or she would have had to learn another spell to regrow toes.)
“What’s the latest?”
Shaking off my paralysis, I crept forward so I could peek around the corner into the kitchen and see who Hudson was talking to. Or their shadow-selves, anyway. My otherplane vision was as murky as ever—murkier, since the shadows in the kitchen were exceptionally dark and dense. But I’d recognize Hudson’s shape anywhere. He leaned back against the granite counter, looking over the people in the dining room across the hall, and the smaller figure beside him—a woman, I assumed—mirrored his posture. She was under the bright kitchen workspace lighting and her gauzy figure was paler than Hudson’s.
“Nothing,” she said. “We’re finding prints, but the analysis so far is that they’re all people who were expected to be here. Meredith, her ex, her cook, the maid...no one out of place.”
“What about the decanter and glasses in the study?”
“Clean.” She shrugged as Hudson turned to her, probably to give her the evil eye. “What? I dunno where you got the idea that the dude helped himself to a drink, bu
t the decanter and glasses were completely clean and in their place.”
I stepped forward, an automatic protest on my lips, before I remembered it would be useless. But I knew what I’d seen. My brain wouldn’t make that up. The killer must have wiped down his trail of fingerprints. Or...had he been wearing gloves? Was that a detail the otherplane had stolen from my observation?
The second figure moved off toward the study and I considered following her...but Hudson started for a dark room off to the side of the kitchen—probably the pantry—and that was weird enough to prompt me to trail after him. I slipped past the door as he closed it. Why would he—
“I know you’re there, Wes.”
Holy shit. Hudson didn’t flick on the lights, but I could feel him staring at me as though he could actually see me in the darkness, through the planes. An impossibility. I took a step back, intending to slide through the closed door.
“Don’t you dare move.” Hudson’s voice was low but full of fire. Full of threat.
Pfft. What was he gonna do, arrest me? I flowed back into reality and glared at him—or tried to. Dark room was dark.
“How did you know?”
“I saw a wrinkle.”
“Bull.”
Fabric rustled and I imagined Hudson rolling his shoulders in a shrug. “Maybe because I was watching.”
“Watching for me? That makes no sense.” Especially after how we’d left things at our last meeting.
“You know, a lot of perpetrators come back to the scene of the crime.”
“Wha—Oh, fuck you.” I waved a hand to dismiss his insinuation. “You know there’s no way—”
Hudson latched on to my flailing arm and jerked me toward him. “Do I?”
For the first time, fear raced through me, making my heart pound and stealing my ability to speak.