“It’s not what you tell him. It’s what he’s supposed to tell you.”
“Aargh!” I slapped my forehead in frustration. “You’re not making any sense.”
“Maybe not.” His face turned serious. “I’m sorry. This was supposed to be fun. A date.” He smiled. “Let’s start again. Tell me why you’ve moved to Red Grove.”
“Ugh. It’s a long, sad story. Believe me, we’d be better off talking about Prudence.”
“Hey, all I’ve got is time. And since I have few memories of my own, I’d enjoy hearing yours. Unless, of course, you’d like a play by play of my dusting.”
I pressed a finger into my lips, eyes darting around the room. I craned my neck to eyeball the living room. “You cleaned today.”
“Yes.”
“The whole house?”
“Yes,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “I saw your note in the dust on the dresser upstairs. ‘Clean me.’”
I leaned forward pressing my hand into my chest. “That note was a reminder for me! I thought you slept during the day.”
“I did for a little while, but then I knew you would appreciate the help.
“I do. I really, really do,” I said emphatically.
“So, pay me back. Tell me how you ended up here.” Elbow on the table, he leaned his head into his hand.
I thought about it. I guess if he wanted the whole sorrowful tale, I’d give it to him. After all, who was he going to tell? “I’m broke. My dad is letting me stay here for free. Sure, it’s a commute, but I don’t really have a choice.”
“The first night I met you, you were wearing scrubs and answered the phone for St. John’s Hospital. You’re a nurse, right?”
I nodded.
“If you have a job, why are you broke?”
“My ex-boyfriend took all of my money.”
Logan crossed his arms over his chest, his form rippling with his concentration. The way he held himself seemed almost lawyer-ish. I felt like he was interrogating me. “A man stole your money. Did you go to the police?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I have all night. Hell, I have eternity.” The ghost’s molecules shifted to his smile, as if the energy from his feelings were driving his physical form. For a moment, his mouth and teeth glowed, flashing at me in the dim light of the dining room. Then the expression faded to the same opaque as the rest of his body. The Cheshire cat act was a bit unsettling.
Was I actually doing this? Was I actually going to have a personal conversation with a ghost from my attic? I guess I was. “I met Gary in a bookstore a few weeks before graduation. I’ve always had a thing for books, the smell of them, the feel of the pages in my hands.”
“I remember books,” Logan interrupted, his hand extending toward me. “I think I liked them too. I remember one called Great Expectations.”
“One of my favorites.”
He brought two fingers to his chin. “Please continue. Tell me about this Gary.”
“Anyway, Gary was a poetry major working at a bookstore near Washington University, where I went to college. He seemed different from the other boys on campus, like he was above all the drinking and stuff. Plus, he acted totally into me. Like, absolutely fawning.”
“You are a beautiful woman, Grateful. Anyone would be attracted to you.”
I deflected the compliment by shifting my attention to the drapes. “He asked me out to this poetry reading at a local coffeehouse. I still remember how I felt when he read his poem, something about ravens circling the sun.”
Logan winced.
“What? It was dark and romantic. We ended up in bed together.”
His eyebrows shot toward the ceiling.
“Don’t judge, okay? We had a thing. I’m telling you, it was like love at first sight.”
The ghost spread his hands to the sides, palms up. “How could I judge? I don’t even have a body. I’m in no position to tell you what to do with yours.” He chuckled, and the sound was infectious, burrowing into my breastbone and buoying the memory with the lightness of social acceptance.
“Actually, you’d be right to think it was too fast. I should’ve waited. We graduated and, as you might expect, Gary couldn’t find a job. Not a huge market for second-rate poets, unfortunately.”
“Go figure.”
“He moved in with me. I’m not sure when things headed south. I think he felt emasculated because I was paying the bills. Eventually he said he couldn’t go on the way things were and that he wanted to start his own business, a nonprofit bookstore that would take in donated books and sell them to fund literacy programs. It sounded like a worthy investment. So, I gave him every cent in my bank account and my credit card number for start-up expenses. Handed it right over.”
“Let me guess, no bookstore.”
“Nope. He took out the maximum cash advance against my card and split with the money. I never saw him again.”
“And you couldn’t claim he stole it because…”
“I’d given it to him. No contract. No loan papers. I trusted him in every way with every part of my life.”
Logan frowned and folded his hands across the table, an all-too-human movement that made it hard to remember he wasn’t alive. “You can’t blame yourself for loving someone, Grateful. I may not know who I was in life, but I do remember that there are some things that just happen to you. That’s why they call it falling in love. You fall. It’s an uncontrollable act of gravity that has nothing to do with choice and everything to do with fate.”
“You’re pretty smart for someone without a brain.”
“Ha, ha. I have a brain. It’s just decomposing wherever my body happens to be.”
I giggled, but the thought made me gag a little. “But see, I caused him to steal my money. It was the blonde paradox.”
“What the hell is the blonde paradox?”
“I’m blonde, right? And sort of look like Barbie. Well, that attracts men because their caveman brain thinks I’m more fertile. But then they assume I’m stupid due to societal stereotypes about blondes and ironically become less intelligent in my presence. It’s like my looks are toxic to a healthy relationship.”
“Let me get this straight. You think that because of the way you look, men are drawn to you primarily for sex and then treat you like crap due to the same good looks.”
“It’s science.”
“I think it’s bullshit.”
“Really.”
The level of concentration necessary for whatever he was thinking about must have been steep, because he flickered at the edges. Silence stretched out between us. By his expression, he was turning something over in his mind, trying to think of something to say. I crossed my arms over my chest and braced myself for a judgmental commentary.
Finally, he said, “You know what your problem is?”
“My house is haunted and I’m broke?”
“No. Your problem is that you’re still angry at Gary for what he did. But instead of turning that anger outward—toward Gary, where it belongs—you’ve focused it inward and convinced yourself that what happened was your fault.”
I rolled that around in my brain. “Gary’s gone. What are you proposing? One of those letters where you write out all of your angry feelings and then never send it?”
He grinned and waggled his eyebrows. “I think I have a better idea.”
* * * * *
I poured myself a glass of wine and tried to wrap my head around what I was about to do. Logan had asked for a picture of Gary. I’d burned most of them but I had one left, a wallet-sized that had survived in the hidden pocket of my purse. My ghost had transformed his sandy blonde hair to Gary’s saddle brown coif. His green eyes were now blue. And although I could tell that the shape of his head was slightly off, Logan could’ve been Gary’s twin.
We’d moved downstairs, and I’d balanced a piece of plywood against the brick wall across from the wine cellar. With his arms extended to the sides, back pressed to the plywood, Logan
goaded me on.
“Come on, Grateful. I promise it won’t hurt me.”
“For the five hundredth time, this just seems wrong.”
“Get over it. It will help.”
To my side was a block of knives from the kitchen. This was Logan’s idea. Why not play along? I gulped down half my glass of Shiraz. After testing the weight of each of the wooden handles, I selected the largest one. I think it’s called a chef’s knife. I removed it from its slot.
“That’s what I’m talking about, Grateful. Hit me! Say to me what you want to say to Gary.”
I raised the knife over my shoulder. “You used me!” I yelled and tossed the blade as hard as I could. It tumbled through the air, stabbing through Logan’s abdomen and reverberating in the plywood behind him. My eyebrows shot up in surprise at the accuracy of my throw.
“Yes!” I said, pumping my arm. I had a hidden talent.
“Gah!” Logan clutched the section of his stomach the knife had passed through as if in pain.
My hands shot to my mouth. “Did I hurt you?”
He chuckled. “No. I was just acting to make it more realistic.”
“Good, because I’m starting to enjoy this.” I raised another knife. “Gary, you stole my money. All of my money. How could you do that to me? I thought you loved me.” I hurled the knife. It passed through Logan’s crotch.
“Wow, Grateful, let it all out—”
“Because of you, I lost my home and my self-respect!” I heaved three at his head, one after the other. “Because of you, Gary, I lost my ability to trust. You asshole. I hope you rot in hell.” The knife rotated from my fingers and sliced through Gary’s image, right where his heart should have been.
Logan didn’t move. There were so many knives through his ghostly form, it reminded me of a Road Runner episode when you know the Coyote should be dead from the anvil but he’s not. I was suddenly overcome by the generosity of what Logan had done for me. All of the anger I’d been carrying inside was gone, thrown away with so many knives.
I cleared my throat. “Thanks, Logan,” I said. “I think I want you to be you again.”
He stepped away from the wall, shaking off Gary’s image like a dog shakes off after a swim. Once he was Logan again, he came to stand in front of me. I leaned my hip against the pool table.
“Did it help?” he asked.
“It did.”
Our eyes met, and there was a connection. I’d never felt anything like it before. It wasn’t exactly attraction, more like déjà vu, like we’d known each other before or something. He must have felt it too, because he leaned toward me and touched his ethereal lips to mine.
The feeling was incredible, a vibration more than solid contact. Colder than a human kiss, it was also more complex, as if the wind had blown through a crack in the wall or a feather had brushed my lips—sweet and sensual. And then it was over. My ghost dematerialized in a flash of light.
“Sorry,” his voice echoed around me. “I couldn’t hold myself together.”
A mist hovered above my head. I tilted my face up. “I’ll take that as a compliment. It’s way past my bedtime anyway. See you tomorrow?”
“Well, I’m not going anywhere.” The mist filtered up through the vent.
I approached the plywood board and started prying the knives from the wood.
Chapter 8
Good Morning
Alone in my bed that night, I slept better than I had in a long time. I didn’t even dream until the early morning hours. In that space between sleep and awake, I was running through the cemetery. Logan was up ahead, calling for me. He needed help. He needed me. But something was behind me, at my heels with panting breath and heavy footsteps. Just before I reached Logan, a hand gripped my shoulder. I twisted my head around. Rick was behind me, naked and panting. His eyes were black as coal. He tackled me under the elm tree where we’d had lunch and took me from behind, sliding into me and driving his hips home.
It might have been a scary dream, but it wasn’t. I had the overwhelming feeling that I’d wanted Rick to catch me all along. That we were two pieces of a puzzle, fitting together in a way that was right.
Then I woke up.
Logan had made me coffee and an omelet. It was steaming hot when I reached the kitchen. Either he had amazing timing or, more likely, had watched me shower and dress. As much as it should have bothered me, I wasn’t angry. But I had to quell a pang of guilt sitting in my kitchen, eating his breakfast, having just dreamed about another man. I told myself I was being silly. Logan couldn’t have boyfriend/girlfriend expectations. He was dead for God’s sake.
“Thanks, Logan,” I said, spooning the eggs in. I was usually a Pop Tarts-for-breakfast kind of girl. I wondered what my body would do with these newfound vitamins and minerals.
“I did a load of laundry too.” His disembodied voice came from beside the stairs, but I couldn’t make him out at all.
“Logan, you don’t have to do my cooking or my cleaning.”
“It gives me something to do.”
I smiled in the direction I thought he was in. “I appreciate it. I can’t cook and I’m a shitty housekeeper.”
“There’s a way you can pay me back.”
“How?”
“Meet me again. Another midnight rendezvous?”
My heart warmed at the thought of another date with Logan. None of the usual stress applied. It wasn’t like a real date. It was more like meeting with Michelle. With no sexual expectations to get in the way, I could enjoy getting to know Logan for who he was—a sweet, thoughtful ghost and friend.
“I’d love to,” I said. I washed down the omelet with a swig of the coffee he’d made.
“Good,” Logan said in a pensive tone. “Because I have to talk to you about Prudence.”
I swallowed my coffee wrong and burst into a fit of coughing. “You sound serious,” I said between coughs. “Should I be worried?” Prudence scared me. The memory of her glowing torso still gave me goosebumps.
“No. Nothing to worry about. But it’s a long story. I’ll tell you everything tonight.”
“Sure.” Why would I worry? Prudence assaulted me and probably wanted me dead. Another day in paradise. I eyeballed my watch. “Shit, I’m going to be late.” I stood, lifting my plate from the counter.
“Leave that for me. Go ahead. Get outta here.”
“Thanks, Logan.” I grabbed my keys and took him up on his offer to clean up.
* * * * *
The hospital where I work is thirty minutes from Red Grove. I hopped into my Jeep and peeled out of the driveway, hoping I could still make my shift on time. The sight of Rick painting the cemetery fence shirtless had me slamming on the brakes before I could say “gonna be late.”
“I hoped I would catch you this morning,” Rick called, dropping the paintbrush into the pan at his feet and walking toward me. “Would you have dinner with me tonight?”
I was having trouble concentrating. The memory of my dream from that morning was fresh in my mind. My body responded just thinking about it.
Rick stopped a few feet from me and closed his eyes. He took a deep breath. Fast as the flutter of hummingbird wings, he was leaning in my window.
“How did you do that?” I asked.
“Do what?”
“Move so quickly just now?”
“If I was quick, it was for good reason. A man should never keep a beautiful woman waiting.”
My cheeks blazed.
“Dinner tonight?” he asked again. He licked his full lips.
My mouth began to form the word yes, but I caught myself. “Um. Sorry, no. I can’t. I’m working late, and I have to catch up on some sleep.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’re having trouble sleeping? I have some herbs—”
“No,” I said too quickly. I shook my head and smiled. “I’m fine, really. I’ve just been distracted with the move and everything. Haven’t got to bed at a decent hour.” Hell if I was going to invite another foot-s
tink bouquet into my residence.
He nodded, but the twist of his mouth told me he didn’t quite believe my excuse.
I couldn’t tell him about Logan. Not only would it potentially mark me as a lunatic, but I had a strong gut feeling that I shouldn’t. My intuition had never let me down before. “How about tomorrow night?” I countered.
“When can I expect you?”
“I get off at seven,” I said. “I can be there around eight.”
“Then eight it is.” The corner of his mouth lifted and for just a moment I sensed something. Call it premonition. I’d known this man and I would know him again. The feeling passed as quickly as it had come, and I realized I’d unconsciously leaned through the window and kissed him.
I removed my lips from his and smoothed my scrubs. “Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“Never apologize, mi cielo. Not for that.”
I nodded, but I wasn’t at all sure I agreed. I had a nasty habit of losing control with Rick. Visions of calling in sick so that I could show him exactly what I’d dreamed about played out in my head. My heart picked up its pace. All of my girl parts petitioned for amnesty from my brain as I silently repeated: I need my job, I need my job.
As if he could hear my thoughts, he raised an eyebrow and smiled wickedly. He stepped back from my Jeep. “See you tomorrow, Grateful,” he said.
I regained my composure and waved goodbye, then accelerated, hopelessly late for work.
Chapter 9
Gary
St. John’s is a modern hospital with windows that take up the entire wall and big, airy spaces that defy the claustrophobic feel of older buildings. But the fact that you could see the parking lot from the hallway to the ICU did not bode well for concealing my lateness. Luckily, Michelle raced to meet me at the doublewide, automatic doors to my unit.
“I’ve been covering for you. You’re ten minutes late.” She grabbed my purse from me and tossed it into the break room where our lockers were without regard for the contents. “You have three-oh-three and three-oh-four, cardiac arrest and pneumonia. Vitals are normal. You’ve been at the blood bank for three-oh-three.”
The Ghost and The Graveyard (The Monk's Hill Witch) Page 6