My thoughts were interrupted by Clarence’s hacking laugh. I glanced in my rearview mirror to check on him.
This time he wasn’t laughing, and I had a nasty hairball to clean up when I got home.
“Ugh, that’s disgusting. Why my leather seats? Couldn’t you keep that mess in your seat?”
He shot me a little side-eye as he coughed one last time. “No. If you’re going to make me ride in a booster seat like a kid, then I’m puking on your leather seats. Besides”—he rubbed his jaw along the edge of the cushioned carrier—“this is mine now. Who pukes in their own bed?”
I’d learned quickly that having a loose bobcat in the car, even one possessed by a dead man, was not a good idea. After two near-miss accidents when he’d crawled over me to get a better look out my window, I’d set up some travel rules. One of those rules being that Clarence was only allowed in my car if he was buckled into the booster-seat-like carrier I’d bought for him. He claimed he found it demeaning, but it looked like it was growing on him.
“We gonna ask Bobby why he wants you getting down and dirty with his old lady?” Clarence asked in a studiously nonchalant tone.
“Bobby?” I checked my rearview mirror, but Clarence wouldn’t look me in the eye. I knew there’d been something suspicious going on. “You’ve been chatting with our ghost?”
No wonder the guy was sticking around. With my housemate egging him on, he probably thought he had a chance of catching my ear.
“Maybe.” Clarence cleared his throat. “You gonna make me eat that crap cat kibble if I say yes?”
My relationship with Clarence consisted of a series of negotiations, bribes, and compromises, with me doing most of the compromising and bribing and Clarence mostly threatening me with bobcat urine and hairballs placed in strategically unpleasant places. I only threatened to bop him on his kitty nose when I’d lost all patience.
Once he’d squirmed enough to make me feel a little less peeved about the hairball cleanup in my near future, I said, “No, not yet. But you—you’ll lose fresh-meat privileges if you don’t fess up now. And in Clarence speak, that means telling me everything, leaving nothing out that I might consider important.”
“Can it wait till we get home? The smell of cat yak is making my stomach turn.”
Teeth gritted, I cracked his window and stepped on the gas. Felicide was sadly out of the question. Death of the cat’s body was unlikely to have any effect on Clarence other than leaving him without a physical presence. The real loser in that scenario was an innocent animal.
The point was moot, because I was vehemently opposed to physical violence against helpless animals—which was exactly what that bobcat was when Clarence was removed from the equation. I tried not to think about that poor animal, trapped inside its body without any control of its own actions. That just made me angry as hell, which didn’t help the situation.
Clarence was an unanswered question on many levels. He didn’t have the same expiration problem that most ghosts had. It was known to happen in some instances. I didn’t know why, just that some ghosts—like Clarence—persisted, but most did not. An even more intriguing question was his possession of a nonhuman body. A human ghost inhabiting a nonhuman body hadn’t occurred within my experience, and possession shouldn’t be possible for extended periods of time. The bobcat was Clarence’s permanent host. Mind boggling.
Clarence was an enigma.
An odor rolled through the car, and it wasn’t hairball funk. “Ugh, what is that foul stench?” Then I realized what I’d said and clarified, “That fouler stench.”
Clarence smirked at me in the mirror. “Yesterday’s fish. Better out than in, right?”
A hairball-puking, air-polluting enigma who’d thieved a bobcat’s body. And he was all mine to care for, supervise, and prevent from harming others. Joy.
“In answer to your question, no, it is not ‘better out than in’ when it smells like that.” I cracked the remaining windows and mentally scratched fish off the grocery list. “And I will not wait till we’re home to hear about you and Bobby.”
After some grumping and growling, he relented. “He’s good company. Better than some people. We watch . . .” Clarence muttered something unintelligible.
“What was that?” But I already knew the answer. Clarence thought he was sneaky, but I’d found him out last week. When he hesitated, I said, “No liver for three days.”
“Okay! Give a guy a break. Who knew Geoffy boy was into torture? No liver, humph.” He sniffed. “We like to watch The Great British Baking Show together. There. Are you happy?”
I couldn’t help it; a chuckle slipped out. “I already knew. I just wanted to hear you admit to wanting to watch something besides pornography.”
“What? How? Oh, it was that late night binge last week, wasn’t it? I knew doing the overnight marathon was a risk, but it was too good a chance to miss.” He sniffed again, and I hoped he wasn’t about to spray cat snot on my leather seats just because he was a little embarrassed. “It’s a good show. And there are hot babes.”
“I haven’t seen it.” Not entirely true, but I wasn’t about to make him feel any better. “So, about Bobby?”
“He was a mechanic, died about three weeks ago, and has been haunting his old lady—and us—ever since.”
Sylvie Baker hadn’t looked like a recent widow in the throes of grief, but one could never tell.
“And why would a dead man want a stranger to sleep with his wife?” I asked.
“Well . . . that’s a little complicated.”
My trouble radar, finely honed after years spent interacting with the dead, the dying, and the people surrounding them, was pinging like mad. “Spill, Clarence.”
“Bobby might have been involved in some
