by Vivien Dean
He’d slept poorly. The air between him and Cruz had been cordial enough after their tour of the grounds, but he’d been preoccupied during dinner, unwilling to engage every time his father tried shifting the topic to some aspect of Brody’s life. Cruz had been right about one thing in his analysis. Brody didn’t trust Loren’s decisions. He hadn’t since the year after his mother’s death, when Loren insisted Brody get into therapy to deal with his grief issues. Loren had refused to listen, because he’d already decided what the problem was, and literally nothing had changed in the decades since. The last thing Brody needed to cope with during the next two weeks was his father’s ideas about everything Brody was doing wrong with his life.
That tension had prevailed in the evening, when Cruz tried again to coax him into being a part of the sweeps he would conduct today. “I’m the outside perspective,” Brody had finally said. “You’re not going to suck me in so it’s easier to sell your snake oil.”
Cruz had backed off, but not before Brody saw the hurt he then successfully squelched. In fact, the more Brody witnessed, the harder it became to believe Cruz had ulterior motives. His demeanor was direct and generous, his answers to all of Loren’s queries logical. He respected every boundary Brody had thrown in his way. The only time he’d seemed less than forthcoming was when his phone rang and he excused himself for the rest of the night to take it.
Brody would’ve loved to have heard that conversation. Anything that could shed light on this astounding man might help him understand how Cruz could be so certain his ghost-hunting techniques would work.
When he went to bed, Brody spent ten minutes ransacking the bathroom in search of medication that would knock him out. He hadn’t anticipated spending the night, and the sleeping pills he sometimes counted on to get any surcease were in his nightstand back in Philly. The best he could find was some out-of-date cough medicine with codeine in it.
It worked. For a while.
At two, the sensation of tickling along his arm woke him up. He cast one baleful look at the light spilling through the open en suite door and muttered, “Leave me alone.” Pulling the blanket over his head, he rolled over into a ball and went back to sleep.
Well, he tried to. Between the bathroom light flickering on and off, the extractor fan on the shower getting turned on, and the kicks from underneath the bed, he finally had to give up around five thirty.
The irrational part of his brain blamed his bad night on his father for not letting this whole mess go. But then the image of the inimitable Loren Weber cowering in fear squelched it. Brody wouldn’t wish the disturbances on anyone, let alone someone he loved. Loren was only looking for ways to find peace again. Nobody understood that mentality more than Brody.
Thirty minutes of body weight exercises, twenty minutes of personal grooming, and a lukewarm shower later, here he was, standing sentinel at his bedroom window, wondering how much more time he had to kill before going downstairs for coffee wouldn’t look weird.
A soft knock came at his door.
Brody gritted his teeth and ignored it.
When a second knock came, he closed his eyes and imagined his lab, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth like he’d learned in his yoga class. Calm. Focus on anything else. It’ll stop.
“Brody?”
Cruz’s low voice shattered the peace. Brody jerked away from the window, then chastised himself for thinking the worst. He crossed the room in long strides and opened the door to find a freshly showered Cruz standing on the other side.
His hair was a mess of damp curls, making him look even younger. The baggy sweats and the backpack slung over his shoulder didn’t help with that image either. His wash-softened black T-shirt boasted a slogan that would’ve been just as at home on his Volvo—Instant geek: just add coffee—but Brody was more interested in the way it stretched over his surprisingly broad chest. Why did Cruz have to be gay? It was hard enough not to fall for his charm without thinking about what he might be like under other circumstances. Brody needed to keep a clear head as far as this ghost hunter was concerned, but like the rest of his life often proved, reality wasn’t nearly so simple.
Cruz smiled. “I heard you start moving around in here almost an hour ago, but when you didn’t answer, I thought my ears were playing tricks on me.”
Odd. He would’ve thought Cruz would’ve gone straight to more ghost antics. “Dad bought new mattresses since the last time I spent the night. It’s too soft for me to get comfortable now.” Only a partial lie. The mattress was new—he didn’t dare risk prevaricating on a detail his father could expose with a simple comment—but it was exactly like Brody preferred—extra firm. He’d switched from soft beds the first time he’d almost been smothered in his sleep. “What’re you doing up so early?” he asked, redirecting the subject off him.
“I’m not a big sleeper. I’ve been up since four.”
How wonderful would it be to only need a few hours’ rest? “What’ve you been doing?”
“Surfing online, debugging some code. The usual.” He tilted his head toward the stairs. “Since you’re up, I was hoping you could show me where everything is in the kitchen so I don’t have to wait for Ramona to get here or your dad to get up. I’m dying for a cup of tea.”
“Tea.”
“Green, actually.”
“Not coffee?” Like a normal person went unsaid.
Cruz grimaced. “Nah. I went off it when I was growing up. One of my chores back then was to have a pot ready for Mom when she left for work, and she drinks the strongest, blackest swill you can possibly imagine. I haven’t been able to stomach it since.”
He was vegetarian too, a detail Brody had discovered at dinner last night. The way he lived, he seemed more likely a product of Seattle than urban Philadelphia.
“I hope you brought your own, then, because there’s no way Dad has any.”
Cruz’s smile returned. “Never leave home without it.”
With a good excuse to abandon his bedroom, Brody led the way downstairs, through the darkened hall, and into the kitchen. For an older home, the kitchen was remarkably open, with a gigantic island that served as a breakfast, lunch, and supper bar whenever Brody was home. The appliances were top of the line too, though Ramona had disabled the voice feature on the refrigerator not long after Loren bought it because it weirded her out. Brody couldn’t blame her. The world was rife with oddities and strangeness. A kitchen didn’t need a talking fridge to make it worse.
“Kettle. Cups. Silverware,” Brody said, pointing out each in turn. He then went straight for the Keurig. Cruz might not want coffee, but Brody sure as hell did.
“How is it you can take so much time off work to shadow me for the next two weeks?” Cruz asked once he filled the kettle.
“The joys of never taking vacations. I can cash them in for emergencies without anyone giving me a hard time for it. What’s your reason?”
“I didn’t have to ask for time off because I’ll be putting in my hours remotely. That’s why I brought my laptop.”
He must’ve misheard. “I thought you worked full-time.”
“I do.”
“That’s forty hours. On top of what you’re going to be doing for Dad. That’s insane.”
“It’s not. I’ve held at least two jobs at a time since I turned sixteen, so you don’t have to worry about me shirking my responsibilities here. I’m used to it.”
It hadn’t even crossed his mind that Cruz might shortchange his father. “I’m starting to understand why your ex was complaining.”
Some of Cruz’s good humor fled. “I just do what I have to do.”
“Am I out of line if I ask why?” He remembered too late that Cruz didn’t like discussing money. He grimaced. “Scratch that. I am. Never mind.”
“It’s no secret,” Cruz said, his voice low and thoughtful. “I told Loren, so I might as well tell you too. I help my parents out financially. That’s one of the perks when you’re the oldest in a large
working-class family.”
Ouch. He kept forgetting Cruz’s background was different than his.
“You’re not exactly a slacker either,” Cruz commented when Brody took too long to ponder the mire he’d wandered into. “Research at Perelman is a big deal.”
The last thing he wanted to discuss was his work. He turned to the coffee machine and silently willed it to go faster. “It doesn’t feel like it when that’s what I was always working toward.”
“Do you have an area of expertise?”
“I spend most of my time on cerebrovascular disease.”
“Like a stroke?”
“That’s the effect, not the cause.”
“So… brain bleeds, then.”
“Not just those. Embolisms, thrombosis… they’re all valid forms. Anything that messes with blood flow to the brain. I’ve been working on the effect of microbleeds on cognitive impairment.”
“Wow. You literally save lives with your work.” Cruz sounded impressed, but Brody didn’t want to turn around and see it for himself. It was harder to lie about altruism when he had to stare the person in the face. “Is that what pushed you into your field?”
The Keurig spit out the last of his coffee, and Brody yanked it off the machine. As he reached for the creamer cups next to it, one of the hazelnuts rolled off the top of the stack. Brody snatched it before it could hit the counter, praying Cruz hadn’t noticed.
“I’ve always liked figuring out how things worked,” he said. He took another of the creamers before it fell off too. “Like your sweeps. Have you let other people tag along to watch while you do them?”
“Most people with ghosts want to be as far away from the process as possible.”
“I guess that’s understandable. If you believe in ghosts, facing them could be scary.”
“The problem with that,” Cruz continued, “is ghosts get bolder when they think they have more power over their physical domain. It makes evictions harder.”
The kettle whistled. Quiet ensued when Cruz picked it up, but the silence niggled rather than calmed. Brody glanced over his shoulder, but Cruz had his back to him, presumably fixing his tea.
A drawer slid silently open. With his heart lodged in his throat, Brody darted forward to slam it shut.
The sudden sound startled Cruz into whipping around. Hot tea splashed over the rim of his cup, and he hissed in pain as he quickly switched hands and sucked at the burned skin.
“Damn it,” Brody muttered. He hurried to the sink and dampened a paper towel with cold water. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
When Brody offered him the wet compress, Cruz set down his tea to take it. The cup immediately tipped over, splattering its contents everywhere.
Cruz jumped back to avoid it spilling onto his bare feet, while Brody snatched up the cup before it could crash to the ground. “Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the grave today,” Cruz commented.
Rather than scared, he sounded amused. “You think this is funny?” Brody said. Once the cup was safely in the sink, he started mopping up the hot tea before anything else got spilled. “You could’ve been seriously burned.”
Cruz edged out of his way. “If you knew how many things I’ve had thrown at my head, you’d see this is nothing in comparison.”
“This was just an accident.”
Cold air enveloped his bare arm. Though Brody steeled against the familiar chill, Cruz noticed the goose bumps rippling along Brody’s skin and grasped his wrist to stop his cleaning.
Brody barely breathed as Cruz passed his free hand through the air over the tense muscle, then again underneath it. The pounding of his heart muffled everything else, wrapping him in its cocoon until he feared he wouldn’t be able to hear Cruz when he finally did speak.
The gaze that lifted to his was grim, the full mouth a firm line. Without letting go, Cruz stepped closer and repeated the sweeps through the air around other parts of Brody’s body—his shoulder, his chest, the top of his head. When he reached Brody’s face, he hesitated, his fingertips scant inches away.
Nobody had been this close to him in over a year and certainly not this intimate. He should yank his arm free and complain about invading personal spaces, but the gentleness of Cruz’s touch made that feel like he’d be lying. He didn’t want Cruz to let go. Warmth exuded from Cruz’s body, heat to dispel the ice that seemed like a permanent embrace. He’d be a fool to want to lose that, even if it had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the moment.
“Do you still think ghosts don’t exist?” Cruz asked.
The compassion in the soft query nearly broke him. “No,” Brody whispered.
Cruz released him then, and his momentary peace disappeared, the tilt of his everyday existence jolting back onto its cockeyed axis. On reflex, he steadied himself against the counter but almost immediately let go again and squared his shoulders.
Cruz wasn’t scared. He faced ghosts all the time. He survived. Brody could learn a thing or two about courage from a man like that.
Cruz picked up the kettle and started refilling it. “The one thing I don’t understand is why none of this showed up the last two times. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Obviously, your friend made a mistake.”
“Not a snowball’s chance in hell. Etienne’s a pro. Missing it once could be a fluke, but twice? No way.”
“Maybe the ghost was on vacation. I hear hell is nice this time of year.”
Though he meant it as a joke, Cruz didn’t laugh. “Ghosts.”
“What?”
“Ghosts,” he repeated. “Plural. I think there’s more than one.”
What little strength he’d found dissolved. “But you haven’t done your sweep yet.”
“True, but we had simultaneous physical manifestations in multiple locations yesterday. We might not be able to see them, but ghosts still have rules of physics they have to live by.”
When Cruz said things like that, it was hard not to start doubting him again. “The words ‘ghosts’ and ‘physics’ do not belong in the same sentence together.”
“I didn’t say it was physics as we understand it. But everything in this world has laws of motion and energy they have to abide by.” With the second kettle of water back on its base to boil, Cruz fixed his attention on Brody again. “You’re a scientist. You have to agree with that.”
“The American education system might be flawed, but there is no way you learned about supernatural science in ninth-grade biology,” Brody argued.
A twinkle appeared in Cruz’s eyes. “Actually, it’s more suited to chemistry.”
“Semantics. And you’re changing the subject.”
“No, I’m trying to show you it’s not as crazy as you seem to want it to be. Look at your field, for instance. I’m sure there are facts you take for granted that weren’t even considered a possibility ten, twenty, thirty years ago. All I’m saying is that we learn in a whole host of ways. Through school. Through practice. Through communication. You might not have ever considered the possibility of ghosts having their own reality before now, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t out there, that it didn’t exist.”
“When did you realize it was real?” He’d asked a similar question before they’d gone outside yesterday, but the issue of money had disrupted what should’ve been a much more straightforward interview. Now he needed to hear what Cruz had to say. The power of conviction wasn’t enough.
“In college. When Etienne and I became friends.”
Brody listened to Cruz weave a tale about this ghost hunter from the South, about a childhood marred with tragedy, with growing fascination. It was more than how this Etienne had learned to take the loss of his sister and turn it into something that could actually help people. It was the way Cruz told the story, his obvious respect for his friend tailoring his words, his empathy a beacon that drew people in.
Drew Brody in.
Was it part of the game? If he still believed Cruz was a c
on artist, he would say yes. It was an excellent way to lure the mark into the web, misdirect his attentions while the grift happened elsewhere.
But Cruz knew too much. He’d felt the same temperature displacement Brody had. He treated the ghosts with an unwavering deference. True, he could’ve used the science argument as a verbal sleight of hand because he understood how to cater to his audience, but such a calculation seemed way too duplicitous for the man who stood in front of him.
“It was a mistake for me to try to stop you yesterday,” Brody said when he was done. “You really do sound like you know what you’re doing, so if you want my help with the sweeps, you’ve got it.”
Cruz shrugged. “There’s no such thing as mistakes. Just happy accidents.”
Brody reached for his coffee cup, then stopped. “Did you just quote Bob Ross to make me feel better about being such an ass?”
Cruz shot him a crooked smile. “That depends. Did it work?”
He took a moment to seriously consider it. “Yeah.” He laughed. It even felt genuine. “It did.”
Chapter Five
WITH everything set up for the sweeps, Cruz had no more excuses to keep stalling. What if he mucked it all up? The house definitely had ghosts. The time with Brody before breakfast proved it. They were interacting in ways that made Simone look lazy. But what if he couldn’t read the hot spots correctly, or they decided to mess with him and take off to wherever they’d been when Etienne had come to the house?
For that matter, where did they go? He’d been serious about the question when he posed it to Brody. When they’d spoken yesterday, Etienne hadn’t had any theories about it, but that was before the ghosts had tried scalding Cruz. Was this level of activity normal? He couldn’t even call Etienne to tell him the new details because Brody had stuck to him like glue ever since. That was Etienne’s fault, actually. He was the one to encourage the science education angle. It was meant to make Brody feel better, but now it was getting in Cruz’s way.