"How was it done?" I asked.
"Done?"
"Yeah. The method. Bullets, poison, what?"
She reacted as if she'd swallowed something sour. "You know, this is my life we're talking about here."
"Sorry. Just used to cutting to the chase. Comes from the old days when I was a cop."
She nodded. Down the hall, the singers were starting into another hymn. I felt my anxiety swelling. Billie was right. If I didn't take a vacation soon, I was going to become a murderer myself one of these days.
"Car crash," she said. "Somebody messed with my brakes."
"You sure it wasn't an accident—you know, car trouble?"
She glared at me. "Do you think I'd be here if I thought it was an accident?"
"Sorry."
"I was there. Everybody may think the reason I ran into that brick wall was because I'd had too much to drink, but I know what happened. I know how the car just started going faster. For no reason. And it was a Bentley! Brand new!"
"A Bentley? What kind of money did you come from anyway?"
"Come from? What, a girl like me can't just earn it on her own?"
I didn't say anything.
"I could have earned it, you know," she said. "I did graduate from Yale. Daddy may have helped me get in, but he certainly didn't earn those grades. I earned them all on my own."
"All right, easy. So you earned the money on your own, then. Fine."
"I said could, Myron. I didn't say did. I didn't ask to be born into this family. It's just my life."
"What family are we talking about here?"
She simmered silently, as if she was debating about whether to take offense to my comment, then shrugged and said, "You ever heard of Thorne Pharmaceuticals?"
"Oh. You're that Thorne family."
She nodded, kneading her handbag. Thorne Pharmaceuticals—I didn't know how big they were exactly, but judging by how often their commercials about male erectile dysfunction played just during the few hours when I watched late-night TV trying to kill my insomnia, I assumed they had to be big.
"My father is one of Morgan Thorne's seven grandsons," she explained. "The way my great-grandfather set it up, all the descendants have a certain percentage of company shares. Mine's a pretty small slice of the pie, but still, it adds up."
"I'll bet," I said.
"So there's no problem with me paying you whatever you want."
"Uh-huh. And now that you're no longer, um, able to sign checks, how do you propose to do that?"
"I figured you'd ask that. My father will pay you."
"He's a Sensitive?"
"What?"
"I mean, he can see you?" It was the second thing she'd said that made my spine straighten. I was a pretty rare breed. Extremely rare, in fact. As far as I knew, there was nobody else like me on the planet, somebody who could see all the ghosts all the time. Still, there were occasional flesh-and-blood humans who had could see specific ghosts, sometimes briefly, sometimes for quite a long time. Mediums, psychics, clairvoyants, people with the second sight—there are lots of words for these folks, though in my experience, the vast majority were phonies, charlatans, and con artists. In the ghost world, the real ones were known as Sensitives, though it wasn't surprising that Karen, as a new arrival, hadn't yet heard the term.
Her eyes took on a distant cast as she contemplated my question. "I don't know," she said. "He's very distraught about my death. Sometimes, when he's very sad and not too drunk, I'll whisper to him how much I love him, and I think, maybe …" She shook her head. "I don't know. Probably just wishful thinking on my part. But he will pay you. There's some things that only he and I know. If I tell you them, he'll believe your story."
"Mmm," I said, trying not to show my skepticism. Billie always claimed I was too soft on the payment side of things. I'd been stiffed too many times, to use a very apt word.
"I really, really need your help," she said.
"Yes, you've said that."
"I have to know if he killed me, Myron—and if he did, then why. I can't rest in peace until I know."
"Well, who rests in peace anyway? That's one of the first things I learned about you folks—there isn't a whole lot of resting going on."
"It's just a figure of speech. I—I even brought his picture. So are you going to help met?"
Her voice had grown tense. I couldn't blame her. I was being pretty obtuse, even by my standards. The thing was, I knew full well the real reason she wanted to hire me, and it wasn't to find out why he'd killed her. The real reason was to find out if he'd really loved her. That was the burning question on her mind, and why she needed me rather than a detective from her own kind. She needed somebody to talk to him, somebody he could talk to, and that wasn't going to happen with my transparent counterparts.
Love is a messy business. If I've learned anything, before and after I became the freak show I am, it's that questions of the heart can never be fully answered to someone's satisfaction. I knew that better than anyone.
"I already bought the tickets," I said.
"I told you, I'll reimburse you for any—"
"I really wish I could help."
I said it with enough finality that it cut short the argument. She nodded sadly. Outside, the rain had mercifully stopped, as had my off-key singers down the hall. Thank God for small miracles. Well, thank somebody for small miracles. Nobody knew if the Big Guy really existed—on either side of the great divide.
That was the bitch about dying. You still didn't get all the answers.
"Well, thank you for your time," she said, rising abruptly.
I rose along with her. "I really do wish you all the best of luck."
She turned away without comment. I thought that was it, I'd never see her again, but then I did something stupid. Before she made it to the door, my curiosity got the best of me.
"You have his picture, huh?" I said.
She looked at me. "Yes," she said, a hint of her hope in her voice. "Do you want to see it?"
A thousand voices inside me screamed to say no. I'd already made my decision, so it would have been the prudent thing to do. Of course, being too prudent was one of the chief reasons my life had ended up the way it had. Sometimes, I'd learned, it was better to be impulsive and follow your instincts.
I shrugged, and she snapped open her purse. I still thought it odd that ghosts carried on as if their world were as physical and real as ours was, when I figured they could imagine just about any kind of world they wanted, but old habits probably died hard—or didn't die at all, to be more literal. She pulled out a 3-by-5, one of those glossy head shots that were more the province of actors than businesspeople, and held it out as if she wanted me to take it. But of course I couldn't take it. It may have been real to her, but it was no more substantial to me than she was. Ghosts were always forgetting this.
Instead, I merely leaned in, smiling, arms behind my back, with the kind of polite display of attentiveness that a person engages in when inspecting some new piece of jewelry a friend is particularly proud of—which may have been why the man's picture, when I finally saw it, hit me so hard.
There may have been some small part of me that knew there was at least a tiny chance I'd recognize the person in the picture, but I never in a million years expected this.
It was the man who'd shot me.
~continued~
To read the rest of
Ghost Detective,
please visit your favorite
online retailer.
Or find out more at
www.scottwilliamcarter.com/ghost
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A Shroud of Tattered Sails: An Oregon Coast Mystery (Garrison Gage Series Book 4) Page 28