Dead People

by Edie Ramer

  Her body was an idiot. It needed chocolate, not sperm.

  As if he read her thoughts, he smirked. “I’ll be in the tower. Come up anytime.”

  Cassie turned to Tricia. “Are you ready?”

  Tricia’s gaze darted to Luke and back to Cassie, a puzzled frown between her eyebrows before she gestured toward the room to the right of the foyer. Northern light filtered in through a boxed window, onto an oak floor. The furniture was formal, made for unbending spines instead of ones that slouched, for people who sipped tea instead of chugging down beer.

  “It’s the guest parlor,” Tricia said. “Luke doesn’t use it. Mrs. Shay didn’t use it much either. She didn’t have many guests.”

  Footsteps thudded away from them. Cassie kept her gaze on Tricia’s flawless face.

  “Were you here often with your mother?”

  “Sometimes. I usually stayed in the kitchen. Mrs. Shay had a lot of knickknacks and my mom was afraid I’d break something. Mrs. Shay would’ve taken it out of her paycheck. She was nasty that way.”

  “Sounds like this house attracts nasty owners,” Cassie muttered.

  Tricia’s jaw dropped.

  “Kidding. What’s the next stop on the tour?”

  Laughing uncertainly, Tricia started down the hallway, her pink-and-silver running shoes silent on the Oriental runner. She paused by the family room.

  Cassie kept walking. “I’ve been here and in the library. This house must be a pain to clean.”

  “When my mom worked here it was.” Tricia’s long legs outpaced Cassie’s, and she led the way toward the back of the house. “Luke and Erin only use a few rooms. The two bedrooms, the kitchen, the library, the sunroom. He fixed up a playroom for Erin, with a dollhouse and everything, but she doesn’t go in it. I would’ve loved something like that when I was a kid. It must be nice to have a rich dad.”

  Lengthening her stride to keep up with Tricia, Cassie pictured Erin’s pinched face but kept her mouth shut. Maybe her own childhood colored the way she looked at Erin. Maybe Erin was happy.

  They turned the corner into the kitchen. Cassie set her purse on the counter and slung her sweater over a low-backed chair by a built-in desk. A heavy wooden table with two benches dominated the dinette side. Tricia pointed out the Sub-Zero fridge and a shiny stove with built-in burners. In the corner, Cassie spied her favorite cooking appliance. The microwave.

  But what drew her was the view from the dinette window. Yellow and orange-leafed trees dotted the back yard. A weathered pier jutted over the lake, a small boat tied to it, bobbing slightly. The waters that looked murky at dusk sparkled in the sunlight. Across the lake she spotted a few houses and wooded lots.

  The view made an ache in her heart. It felt like home, which was insane. Home was a converted warehouse condo in Chicago a few blocks from the lakefront.

  “...mom would’ve loved this stove,” Tricia was saying.

  Cassie turned away from the hypnotic motion of the water, dismissing the odd ache. Her hormones must be acting up again. “How much land comes with the house?”

  “About five acres.” Tricia wrinkled her nose again. “I wish I wrote hit songs and made tons of money. Luke was married to Vanessa Desidero, you know.”

  “Is she a model?” The name sounded familiar and the rock guys seemed to go for skinny women who loomed over them. The must-have accessory for the modern rock gods.

  “You don’t know who Vanessa Desidero is?” From Tricia’s aghast expression, Cassie knew she wondered what cave she’d crawled out of. “She’s the lead singer of Dirty Secrets. Well, she was before she became a junkie.”

  Cassie stilled. So that was why Erin emanated sadness.

  Leaning toward Cassie, Tricia lowered her voice. “It was in all the papers. She overdosed and almost died. Erin was placed in emergency foster care for two weeks. Luke had to take a paternity test to prove he was her father.”

  “Poor kid.” Erin’s childhood made Cassie’s seem not so bad.

  “Yeah, but she’s a poor, rich kid. Still, she’s only ten. It has to be hard on her, separated from her mother.”

  Cassie’s eyes stung. Why was she turning into a leaky faucet? She never did this. Useless things, tears.

  Just because her mother had died twenty-four years ago—when she was the same age as Erin—was no reason to lose her self-control.

  This place... Cassie shivered. It was doing something to her, thinning the walls she’d erected around herself.

  “What’s next?” She strode out of the kitchen, wishing she could walk straight out of the house and keep going until she hit Illinois.

  “There’s the sunroom.” Tricia gestured at a sun-filled room next to the kitchen, with rounded walls and long windows.

  “This is in the tower?”

  “Uh huh, the first floor.” The soles of Tricia’s tennis shoes padded on the wooden floor. Cassie trailed Tricia to the back staircase, narrower than the front one.

  “What happened to Mr. Shay?” Cassie asked.

  “He died of a brain aneurism when I was three.” Tricia ran up the steps. She reached the second floor and beamed down at Cassie. “Mr. Shay was too nice to be married to Mrs. Shay. That’s what my mom always said. I’ve seen his photos. He was tall and blond and good looking.”

  “Like you.” Cassie caught up to Tricia on the second floor hallway.

  Pale pink tinted Tricia’s cheeks as she gestured at the stairway flowing upward another flight. “Luke uses the tower room as his studio. Here’s his bedroom.” She walked a few feet to an open door and stopped. “Erin’s is down the hall. They both face the lake.”

  “Erin’s bedroom is in the other tower?”

  “There’s only one real tower. The other one is for looks.” Tricia stepped back from the doorway. “I haven’t gotten to this floor yet, and he’s messy.”

  Cassie peeked inside at a king-sized bed and a chest of drawers. A pair of jeans lay on the floor. The bed sheets were rumpled, the royal blue cover trailing on the wooden floor. A restless sleeper. He’d said Isabel’s ghost didn’t trouble him, but maybe his own ghosts kept him awake.

  A stack of books sat on the dresser. Craning her neck, she read the titles. Fathering for Dummies. The Single Father. The Single Dad’s Survival Guide. The Collected Wisdom of Fathers.

  “Coming?” Tricia asked.

  Cassie cleared phlegm from her throat and followed Tricia.

  Erin’s bedroom was decorated with fluffy white rugs dotting the mellow wood floor, white lacy curtains, a bedspread dotted with butterflies, and cheery yellow walls designed to make a little girl happy.

  Picturing Erin’s sad little face, Cassie wanted to tell Luke it wasn’t working.

  Tricia lifted a framed photo from Erin’s nightstand. “Vanessa Desidero. Isn’t she beautiful?”

  Even with burgundy-streaked platinum blonde hair and vampire eye makeup, the thin-faced woman possessed an eerie beauty. Cassie leaned back. Easy to imagine the woman in the photo gazing at her reflection and chanting, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall...”

  Tricia set the photo back on the nightstand and pointed at a closed door. “There’s Erin’s bathroom. She’s kind of odd. I don’t think I’ve seen her smile once.”

  Cassie shrugged. If Tricia thought Erin was odd, it was a good thing she hadn’t known Cassie when she was a child. Especially after her father married TWM. The Wicked Stepmother.

  But she’d turned out okay. Like Joe said, she was well-adjusted for a live person.

  “Does Isabel show up here?” Cassie gestured at the room.

  “You’ll have to ask Erin.” Tricia wound a strand of hair around her index finger. “She doesn’t confide in me, not yet. But she will. Kids love me. That’s why Luke hired me. It’s just taking Erin longer than most.”

  Cassie bit her lower lip. Tricia was making it about her, not Erin. But so what? Living children weren’t Cassie’s concern.

  She frowned. Something unnatural and unusual and uncomfortable w
as happening to her. More unnatural than talking to ghosts.

  She was starting to care.

  Cassie shivered. If she ignored these new feelings, maybe they would go away. “I wonder why Isabel shows herself to Erin and Luke, and not you. You’re the one who knew her.”

  Tricia grabbed another strand and started plaiting the two. “I’m her housekeeper’s daughter. Way beneath her notice. Like ankle level.”

  “She sounds like—” Cassie stopped her words and glanced around. She couldn’t feel anything in the room, but ghosts could be sneaky, ectoplasmic things.

  “A bitch. And she was. My mom cried like a baby at her funeral. And do you know what Mrs. Shay left her? After twenty-five years of service? A crappy five thousand dollars.” Her mouth wobbled. “She’s at the medical center now. Cleaning toilets.”

  Cassie glanced away, giving Tricia time to compose herself, listening to Tricia sniff. Don’t cry, she thought. After a moment, she faced Tricia again, just as she wiped the back of her hand across the pinkened tip of her nose.

  “My mom can tell you more. I’ll call her.” Tricia pulled a cell phone from her pocket and punched in numbers, turning her back to Cassie. Seconds later, Tricia was talking, every few words drifting to Cassie.

  “...ghost...Isabel...Luke...money...” Her voice rose. “Mom! Oh, all right.” She wheeled around and handed the phone to Cassie, her lower lip pouting. “My mom wants to talk to you. I’m going back to work. This is the last of the rooms being used. You can bring my phone to the kitchen when you’re done.”

  “Will do. Thanks for everything.” The next moment she was alone in the girly-girl room. “Mrs. Windmeyer? I’m Cassie Taylor. Would you tell me about Mrs. Shay?”

  “It’s Miss Windmeyer, but you can call me Darleen.” The voice was slightly lower than her daughter’s. “I can’t talk now, I’m off to the yarn shop and then to work. How about tomorrow morning? You can come over to my place.”

  Cassie stepped to the desk to grab a pen and scribbled Darleen’s phone number and address on a Post-It. Talking to Darleen might help her to understand Isabel better.

  She thanked Darleen, then shoved the phone in her pants pocket and turned to leave. She stopped, frozen.

  Luke Rivers stood in the doorway, a hand on each doorjamb, blocking her exit.

  Chapter Six

  The fuck you look Cassie gave him made Luke want to laugh, but he’d laughed once today and didn’t want to overdo it. “Learn anything?”

  “I learned you hired a decorator with no imagination.”

  “An expensive decorator.”

  “In that case, she robbed you.”

  He leaned against a door jamb and crossed his arms over his chest, lowering his eyelids to study her beneath his lashes.

  Her eyes looked hard, but her body looked soft. Everything about her was rounded. Her face, her lips, her eyes, her breasts, her ass. Despite her roundness, or because of it, she was pretty. Hell, who knew what made a woman pretty? He sure didn’t.

  “You charge a hell of a lot more than the decorator,” he said, and wondered at the coolness of his voice, when he felt anything but cool.

  She smiled, showing her canines. “I’m worth more.”

  “You wanted to talk to me.” Knowing she was coming to his tower studio had made him restless, too unsettled to concentrate on his music. Forcing him to seek her out.

  “I did.” Her eyes flickered. “I do.”

  Sexual energy throbbed in the air, pounding a rhythm in his blood that sent it flowing downward.

  Too damn bad. His blood would have to redirect. The therapist had said Erin would feel threatened by any relationships he entered into, at least for awhile. Erin would feel as if he were betraying Vanessa. A bunch of crap, considering all Vanessa had done. But emotions weren’t logical.

  Uncrossing his arms, he straightened. The therapist had nailed that point. His emotions right now weren’t even close to logical. And Erin’s bedroom wasn’t the place to talk.

  Any bedroom wasn’t the place to talk to the pretty ghost buster.

  “Shall we talk downstairs?” Her right hand brushed her hair back over her ears, her left hand rubbed the spot above her breastbone.

  So, she felt it too.

  “The library.” He stepped back into the hall and started downstairs without waiting to see if she’d follow. He listened, though, hearing the slap of her shoes on the carpeted treads, the slight rasp of her breath, the expectant hum of the walls.

  A tune started in his mind—slap, rasp, hum, slap, rasp, hum. Words formed. Go away, curvy girl, far away from here. Come back again some other year.

  His shoes clomped on the downstairs hallway, the tune stopping. He felt as though he were being chased but didn’t want to run. A memory popped into his mind. Sixth grade, one of the big kids, in the school playground with Amie Kinsale.

  He’d been the one chasing Amie. But he felt the same now, the speeding heartbeat, the lightness in his head, the heaviness in his groin.

  Sixth grade had been a hell of a year.

  He left the library door open. Less closed in. Less intimate.

  He pulled out one of the four mahogany chairs at a square table and plopped down, then gestured at the chair kitty corner to him.

  “I’m talking to Isabel’s housekeeper tomorrow morning.” Cassie passed the chair he’d indicated and sat across from him, her narrowed eyes challenging him to mention it. “I can ask her.”

  His suspicions, lulled by her roundness and her contrary attitude, returned with a slam in his gut. “Why talk to the housekeeper when you could ask the ghost herself?”

  “I hope she’ll come to me soon, but if she doesn’t, I’m curious.” She paused, frowned and gave a quick shrug, as if she’d finished an argument with herself. She looked straight into his eyes. “I’m wondering why everyone says Isabel’s cause of death was a heart attack when the reality is, she was killed.”

  He held himself still, showing no reactions, letting her words sink in—“the reality is, she was killed.”

  “What the fuck is this?” He heard the anger in his voice, his words punching out of his throat. “Some kind of scam? Are you for real?”

  She stared at him long and hard, not saying anything. Then she smiled but her eyes seeped with sadness. She slid the chair back. “If you doubt me, I’ll be happy to refund your down payment.”

  “All of it?”

  “All of it.” She got to her feet.

  “You’re serious about the murder?”

  “I don’t joke about death.”

  Shit. He was from southern California. This wasn’t the way it was done. She was supposed to be bluffing. He was supposed to back down and talk her into staying. And if he didn’t, she was supposed to refuse to give him back any money.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  She remained standing.

  “Sit down.” His voice deepened. He stared at her, compelling her to sit. “Tell me more about it and I’ll decide.” When she didn’t move, he continued, “Look, I don’t blindly believe what anyone tells me.”

  Her eyes flickered first, then her shoulders relaxed and her breath shushed out. Finally, she sat. She held out her hands, palms up. “Every dead person I’ve talked to has been killed before his or her time.”

  “What if she was killed accidentally?”

  “Was she?” She dropped her hands and sat back. “You told me she died from a heart attack. What else do you know about it?”

  “I didn’t ask for details.” His suspicions about Cassie and her profession rose again. His manager’s wife had told him Cassie was one of the two top ghost hunters and the real thing—but he didn’t believe in ghost hunters, busters, whisperers. Whatever they called themselves.

  A conundrum, because before he came to Wisconsin he didn’t believe in ghosts either. Once you were gone, you were gone. Dust and bugs or ashes and charred bones. No second chances, no next life.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d been w
rong.

  “Tricia would know the details,” Cassie said.

  “I’ll get her.” He stood, glad for something to do instead of asking questions.

  When he stepped outside the library, he saw Tricia turning into the hall, coming from the direction of the sunroom. She clutched a gray feather duster as though it were a weapon.

  He lifted a hand, and she hurried toward him, her expression eager. Not holding anything back, especially her attraction to him.

  “Tricia, would you join us in the library,” he said, not a question.

  Her step quickened to a lope, her eyes shining, her mouth slightly open. He’d seen that same rapture on a thousand faces when he stepped off a stage, all the girls eager to be with a guitar player, especially guitar players who wrote Grammy-winning songs.

  No wonder he preferred the fuck you look Cassie gave him. At least she saw him as a man.

  He turned into the room, not waiting for Tricia. Cassie was giving him her “I don’t like you” look again. He snorted a laugh.

  Tricia’s step sounded behind him as he sat again. Stopping at the end of the table, Tricia beamed at Cassie before gazing at him with her star-struck eyes.

  “How did Mrs. Shay die?” he asked.

  The shine in Tricia’s eyes dimmed, two lines indenting between her eyebrows. “Heart attack. I thought you knew that.”

  “Could you give us the details?” Cassie asked.

  “It wasn’t unexpected. She was in the family room, watching TV.”

  “She was an older woman?” Cassie asked.

  Tricia nodded vigorously. “The obituary said she was sixty-four.”

  “Ah.” Cassie didn’t look at him and smile, but Luke sensed she wanted to.

  Fan-fucking-tastic. Now he was imagining things.

  He drummed his fingers, wanting this over with. Wanting to go to his studio and make music. A tune was forming in his brain, words simmering, ready to boil over.

  “Did she have heart problems before her attack?” he asked.

  “I guess. She was seeing the cardiologist at the clinic where my mom works now.”