It's a Ghost's Life

by Erin McCarthy

  “It’s rude.”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Burke. I was just trying to back you up. About Bailey’s sinning with Marner and all. I mean, living together and not getting married?” He gave a low whistle.

  Hilarious. He was just so hilarious. I needed to change the subject.

  “Grandma, Ryan says I have a quota. I need to solve a certain number of murders a month.”

  “Well, that’s a corker,” she said. “Seems a little difficult to manage that. Who gave the order? Because if it came from the big guy you have to take it serious.” She made the sign of the cross. “Otherwise I’d negotiate.”

  I assumed by “big guy” she meant God, but I didn’t want to ask specifics. “I’ll look into it.”

  “So how’s it going so far this month?” she asked.

  I made a buzzer sound. “Nothing. The only murder I’m aware of is Vera’s and I haven’t figured anything out with that. Plenty of suspects but no evidence.”

  “Where did the money lead you?” Ryan asked.

  I was driving but I glanced at him in the rearview mirror then realized that his reflection was much weaker that way. He was almost vaporous. It was a startling reminder that he wasn’t actually alive. Which I knew but this was a weird kick in the teeth.

  Putting my uncomfortable thoughts aside, I gave a shrug. “Vera left five grand to fifty people. I’m not sure about the rest of the details of the will. I assume her personal possessions she didn’t designate in the will go to her niece and nephew, along with her condo.”

  “Oh, didn’t I tell you?” Grandma piped up. “That lawyer told me Vera left the condo to me.”

  I swiveled my head so hard I felt my car float to the right. I corrected my driving but then glanced quickly at my grandmother. “What? That condo is worth six hundred thousand dollars!” Maybe Vera had it mortgaged to the hilt but I doubted it.

  “Is it? I never knew that. But there was a note for me with the will. Vera wrote that she was leaving it to me so I would be more independent.”

  What the what? That was just crazy. Sure, they were good friends, but that was a lot of real estate. Though it sounded like Vera had plenty of cash and little affection for her niece and nephew. “Why didn’t you tell me this the other day?”

  “It slipped my mind. I had no intention of moving in there. I don’t want to live alone.”

  I didn’t want Grandma Burke living alone either. “That’s fine, but we need to sell it or rent it or something. It needs to be dealt with. How are Eva and Steven supposed to get her stuff out of there? Or actually, is it the lawyer who catalogues that stuff? Since I’m guessing all fifty people in her will were given a personal item as well.”

  “Beats me. Talk to the lawyer. I’m just an old lady. I still have a flip phone.”

  That amused me. “That’s not even true. You have an iPhone. You should consider getting an Alexa too.”

  “And have that woman listen in on everything I’m doing? Forget it.”

  Because my grandmother was doing so many furtive and scandalous things? But I guess that wasn’t the point. “You think Big Brother is watching you?”

  “Somebody is listening to those things. Probably robots, but still. Privacy is privacy.”

  I wouldn’t know what privacy was any more since I had ghosts dropping in like spiders and Grandma moving in with me.

  Speaking of intrusive entities.

  “You’re not doing a very good job investigating this case,” Ryan commented.

  “I’ve been busy!” Seriously busy.

  “Not working. Yesterday you were shopping online for new furniture while watching some British baking show.”

  Okay, that was true. But to be fair to me, I needed to furnish Grandma’s new bedroom. “I was shopping for work. I am a home stager, if you recall.”

  Just the thought of my business, “Put It Where?” made my shoulders shoot up to my ears. Business was slow and here I was planning a vacation to Florida and moving my grandmother in with me. Brilliant strategy. Not.

  A thought occurred to me. “Wait. How do you know what I was doing? I didn’t talk to you yesterday.”

  “I didn’t want to interrupt you.”

  “Ew. Don’t stalk me, you weirdo.” I pulled into my driveway and put the car in park. I looked back at him. “Seriously. Don’t do that.”

  Ryan’s normal grin was completely missing. “Then get on it, Bai. Seriously. There’s a lot riding on this.”

  The tone of his voice unnerved me. He sounded angry. Or maybe just tense. “What do you mean?”

  “What do you think?” He just shook his head. “This isn’t a joke to me. This is being stuck with no control, no power, nowhere to go. No life. Don’t you get that?”

  I was stunned. Of course I got that. But how could I really understand it? I couldn’t. I felt a flush of heat in my cheeks, ashamed that I was annoyed with his showing up unannounced when in reality I could do whatever I wanted with my days. Ryan couldn’t.

  “I’m sorry. You’re right. I have pushed this aside. I didn’t realize how much it meant to you.”

  I had been busy with personal circumstances but that wasn’t fair to Ryan. Or Vera.

  “It means everything.”

  Nodding, I said, “Got it. What should I do? Start talking to people close to Vera?”

  “Call the boy toy,” Grandma said. “He’s shady.”

  It wasn’t like I thought Colin was going to confess to me, but I figured if I made him nervous, he might slip up and do something stupid to implicate himself. “I can do that.”

  “See if there is CTC footage going in and out of Vera’s condo complex. If she was shoved outside, someone had to go through those gates. It’s gated, right?”

  “Yes.” I should have thought of that. Though why the hell anyone would let me, the home stager, see that footage was beyond me. I needed to cook up a lie. Pretend to be a relative.

  “Look into the bingo girls too. There was some bad blood a few months back,” Grandma said.

  “Vera played bingo? That seems so out of character for her.”

  “Oh, she didn’t play to win, she just played for the gossip and the man-hunting.”

  I had my hand on the door handle to open it but that gave me pause. “Women man-hunt at bingo?”

  “At my age, women hunt for men everywhere. The odds aren’t in our favor.”

  “I would have thought bingo guys were too old for Vera.”

  “This conversation is making me uncomfortable,” Ryan said. “Can we not talk about the old lady’s love life?”

  “Old people make whoopee, kiddo. I hate to break it to you,” Grandma said.

  I love the term whoopee. I think we need to bring it back.

  “I never said they don’t. I just don’t want to talk about it.”

  Ryan was clearly in a mood today.

  “Do you know the bingo ladies?” I asked Grandma, attempting to regain a modicum of control.

  “Yes. I introduced her to them.”

  “Oh.” That made sense. “Were they at the funeral?”

  “Of course. Bad blood doesn’t change that.”

  “When is the next bingo session? We should go.”

  “It’s Friday. I’m in.”

  Jake was going to love me for that. We were supposed to go play darts on Friday night. Not that he should mind. I was basically a liability to him anyway. Initially I had fallen for the idea of being a couple competing together against other couples, but the reality is I have noodle arms with zero aim. I’ve hit everything from the wall above the dart board to the bartender. Don’t worry, he wasn’t seriously injured. Just a nick on the forearm. Jake’s pride was more damaged than anything. His cop friends all have sporty girlfriends, which is so not me.

  I got out of the car and went around to help my grandmother. The driveway was icy as usual and her bones were like onion strings.

  It was a good thing I wasn’t working much (yeah, right) because I had a ton of phone calls to make.
I got Grandma in the house and settled in watching ancient episodes of Touched By An Angel and started working the lines.

  First I called Eva, playing the sympathy card. I assumed she was back in Florida, but I wasn’t sure.

  “How are you doing?” I asked, injecting concern into my voice. “I heard about the will.”

  Eva clearly needed to rant so she didn’t even seem to think it was odd that I was calling her. “Isn’t that just insane? I mean, what was Vera thinking? My God, she basically gave money to people off the street. Now I’m just debating if we chalk it all up to her being mean-spirited and let it go or pursue legal recourse.”

  Mean-spirited? So, Eva thought it was mean-spirited to generously gift fifty people with money? I suppose she meant mean-spirited to keep it from her and her brother. “Surely she left you something,” I said, trying to gain more information.

  “We got the life insurance but that was only three hundred thousand. Split in two after taxes that doesn’t add up to much. We’re basically both out an additional five hundred thousand between the condo and the money she just tossed around. Not to mention all her personal assets. She had some quality jewelry and handbags, as you know. She only gave me a dozen items.”

  I’m not sure what world Eva lived in that a hundred and fifty thousand dollars “didn’t add up to much.” The majority of the population would probably disagree with her but clearly she was ticked off to be receiving way less than anticipated. “Did you decide to do an autopsy?”

  Now I was really being ballsy but what did I have to lose? She was a thousand miles away from me and presumably couldn’t harm me. Plus she was very loose-lipped.

  “I asked for a very basic autopsy. Toxicity report, primarily. I think we’re going to find she had a stroke or overdid her medication. She was really too old to be living alone, you know.”

  Maybe. I also suspected it had never dawned on Eva to have Vera go live with her in Florida. “It will be nice to have closure,” I said.

  “Also, if it proves she had a stroke say, months ago, we can contest the will.”

  Nice angle. I wondered if it was a red flag that Eva was so open about her greediness. No killer would be so open about her desire for money, would she? Or maybe she thought it just made more sense to be honest? No. I was pretty sure I could eliminate her from my suspect list. Her brother I couldn’t reach any conclusions yet, but Eva had been in Florida and wasn’t even attempting to hide her desire for Vera’s cash and possessions.

  It took another ten minutes of listening to her complain before I could get off the phone. I decided that calling Colin was way too aggressive. I had no angle, no reason to call him. Instead, I figured he was probably using social media. Maybe I could establish an alibi for the night Vera died. Eva had given me Colin’s last name so I started searching various sites and apps.

  Within a few minutes I clearly saw that on that Saturday Colin had been busy all through the evening and late at night. He’d gone to dinner downtown with three friends, then to a comedy club, and later, on to a trendy bar geared toward customers in their forties and fifties. Colin seemed to have a lively social life, with lots of friends. Every weekend he was doing something. Antique shopping, dinner and drinks, the theater.

  Given the timestamps on his posts, with GPS marking the location, I didn’t see how he could have killed Vera, unless he’d gone over there at 2 a.m. and somehow convinced her to get out of bed and go outside. That seemed far-fetched.

  Who did that leave me? I pulled my blanket tighter around me as I sat at the kitchen table.

  It seemed like it only left Pam, the housekeeper, and Steven, the nephew.

  Or someone yet unknown.

  Not one of the bingo ladies. They were all Grandma’s age and half didn’t even drive anywhere. Besides, there was no motivation other than revenge for a falling out and that seemed far-fetched.

  If this were the sixties, I imagined I could come up with lots of enemies who might have wanted to kill Vera, but now? It didn’t seem like a lot.

  Though it did occur to me that if someone in the will knew they were getting five grand, desperate times might call for desperate measures. Eva had said it was basically people off the street and maybe it was. Maybe it was handymen, the neighbor, her personal shopper at Saks. Who knew?

  The will opened up a suspect list fifty people deep.

  Well. Forty-seven people deep.

  I was pretty sure I could cross Alyssa and Grandma off the list. And myself.

  So how did I go about finding who was listed in that will? A quick online search confirmed that I could go to the courthouse and request to see it once it went into probate. Given that the lawyer who called me was probably the executor of the estate, I imagined it had already been filed with probate.

  Shoving my laptop across the kitchen table, I rubbed my arms. All of this research made me want caffeine.

  Coffee. My spirit animal.

  Because I was freezing from the harsh reality of January weather, and because Grandma assured me she could be alone for a few hours without being in danger of setting the house on fire or locking herself out in the snow (which she thought was way more funny than I did), I drove three blocks to my neighborhood coffee shop. I could have walked, but that would be insane or for people who love winter. So, in other words, people who are not me.

  I wanted a cup of hot coffee and I wanted an environment that wasn’t my house to attempt to read the book Alyssa had given me. Ryan was right—this was serious business and I needed to stop bumbling along and at least attempt to improve my skills in communicating with the dead. Because currently it was mostly me being annoyed when ghosts didn’t respect my boundaries. I felt like a haggard mother with three toddlers. Nothing was going to change about the situation so maybe I needed to change myself.

  After ordering a latte the size of my head, I find a two-seater table in the corner, with my back to a pony wall. Ever since I was kidnapped and hit by a car, I’m a little funny about having my back exposed to the room. I surveyed the crowd, which was thin for a Thursday. But it was only four, so maybe that was why. Post-lunch crowd, too early for the after-dinner people. I’m not sure what is so appealing about sitting in a room full of wood and the scent of coffee beans with strangers, but I find it very comforting.

  More daydreamer than academic, I don’t read as often as I could. I tend to wander off in my thoughts mid-sentence. My sister was a huge reader as a kid but I was more into controlling my environment. You can’t control a story in a book and that always seemed risky to me. But nonfiction was different. I should be able to handle facts.

  Except this wasn’t a book of facts. It was a guru-style spiritual book written by someone who claimed to have answers but couldn’t possibly have answers, given we weren’t dealing with science or stats. I was on page two still when the barista yelled, “Bailey!”

  It felt like I’d been reading for an hour, not five minutes. I stood up, leaving the book on the table to claim my spot, along with my puffy coat and fuzzy hat. I took my purse with me because my mother had trained me well on the ill-intent of the human species, not to mention I was still smarting from the massive bill replacing my cell phone that was lost, aka stolen, at the funeral.

  The barista was in his early twenties and was the very definition of bean-pole. He was there frequently when I came in, and friendly to me. Today he’d put a flower in the foam of my latte.

  “You look cold,” he said. “Think about spring.”

  “Thanks, it’s beautiful.” It made me smile.

  That smile fell right off my face though when I turned around and spotted the tight sweater guy Alyssa and I had seen the week before. My shoulders stiffened and I paused with my cup raised midway to my lips.

  This was a different coffee shop in a different neighborhood. What were the odds that this guy would be at this exact location when I was there?

  Marner always told me he didn’t believe in coincidences. I wanted to, because that was e
asier and safer. But I couldn’t quite get myself to accept that this had happened twice, given that he was someone I had seen at Vera’s funeral as well.

  Seemed more than a little sketchy.

  He hadn’t spotted me so I dropped my gaze quickly. He was standing at the community bulletin board seeing a flyer and I fast-walked past him to my table. Was it my paranoid imagination or did it look like my book was shifted a little? I could have sworn I had left it tilted a little to the left and now it was sitting straight in front of the chair.

  My heart was racing but I knew I had to play it cool. I sipped my coffee too fast and burned my tongue. Wincing I forced myself to open the book and read. I read the same page three times without comprehending a single word. Finally, when it seemed enough time had passed, I ventured a furtive glance around the room.

  Tight Sweater Guy seemed to be gone.

  I swiveled all the way around boldly and still no creepy guy. Well, actually, he wasn’t creepy it just was creepy he popped up everywhere I was. But he wasn’t there anymore. I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or further creeped out. Was he a ghost? Had I lost my ability (wait, what ability?) to decipher who and what I was seeing?

  Back to the book. I needed help, clearly.

  Now that I was focused, something jumped out at me right away. That the role of the medium is two-fold: to be comfort and reassurance to the living that there is an afterlife, and to help the deceased move on if they want to. I mean, that’s a pretty big deal in terms of both. Because if people have reassurance their loved ones are okay, wouldn’t they have an easier time in life? Live a more peaceful existence? It seemed highly likely and that was a powerful gift.

  I’ve never thought I had any particular gifts other than accessorizing. I was an okay Irish dancer, an okay student, an okay singer. But nothing that made me stand out or that people heard/saw/felt with awe.

  It was kind of cool to think that maybe I had a talent. That maybe I could hone my skill to a glossy shine. And bonus. It wasn’t a selfish talent. It would help others, so score.

  I skimmed a few more chapters and learned about opening myself up and meditation. My coffee got cold, so I slapped the book shut and put my coat on.