As I thought about the town and how different it was from where I lived with Rick, I remembered that for the most part, Roger had been the only lawyer in Mystic Hollow.
Now there were none.
We popped open our car doors and climbed out. I tucked the leather gloves in my back pocket before we crossed the parking lot in a hurry, so we weren’t as noticeable. We were each holding the nitrile gloves, and I had a flashlight tucked in my armpit as well as a few of the other accessories Deva had provided. When we approached the small building, music assaulted our ears. “What the hell?” I whispered. “Should we run?”
“There are no cars here,” Deva said, looking around. “And the one who might be here, playing music, has just died. My gut says it’s tied to whatever is going on with Beth. But I guess the other alternative is that the town teenagers heard he was dead and decided to have some unsupervised fun.”
“So… we just march into some kind of dead guy party?”
She shrugged. “If we want answers. And we’ll just act like old, confused ladies, who went in the wrong building, if we run into trouble.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Are we really old enough to play that card?”
“If they’re teenagers,” she waves off my comment. “We could be forty or eighty to them. Everyone is just old.”
She had a point. So, maybe, the strange party person was connected to this case. Or a bunch of teens we could kick out and get our info. Either way, I hoped we weren’t being dumb by not just running the heck out of here
The front door was cracked open. Deva and I donned the nitrile gloves and each of us held a flashlight and a little can of pepper spray. “Remember,” she whispered. “If you have to spray it, don’t do it in my direction.”
I nodded. “Let’s go.”
We walked in as slowly and quietly as we could. The small front hallway was empty with all the music coming from a room in the back.
Switching on our flashlights, the beams of light bouncing off the dark walls, we hurried toward the source of the noise, then threw the door open and shined our flashlights in.
A dozen or so ghosts froze mid-dance and stared at us in horror. The music kept bumping away but none of them so much as twitched as though Deva and I were T-Rexes and could sense movement. My gaze traveled over the crowd of ghosts. Each of them was a shade of gray, ranging from almost black to almost white, but never quite reaching either, and glowing ever so slightly just like the ghost on my porch. They all drifted a foot or so off the ground and their bodies faded in a way where it wasn’t clear if they had feet or not.
Deva sighed as they disappeared one by one. They didn’t pop out of existence all at once like a blink and they were gone kind of thing, it was more like when you looked at a bright light and looked away you could still see it in a way, but eventually it faded. A couple of them hung around giving us grumpy looks. “Come on, guys,” she said. “If you let us ask a few questions we’ll leave you to it.”
I looked at my friend in surprise. Could we just casually chat with ghosts? I had no idea how any of this stuff worked, but it seemed strange.
My mouth opened to ask Deva exactly that when one older man rolled his eyes but floated over. His form seemed to bob like a duck on the surface of a lake as the waves moved it along, or like he was walking on the moon, like gravity just didn’t really affect him anymore. If I hadn’t already become Karma, had witches as friends, reversed a siren curse, and scolded shifters, I’d be freaked out.
Okay, so I was still a little freaked out.
He glanced at me, as if he knew how uncertain I felt, before looking back to Deva. “What is it?”
“We’re investigating Roger’s death, and his partner, Cliff, who is still missing.” Deva’s words were calm and measured as though she was trying not to scare him.
He squinted his eyes at us. “You should really just let this go.”
Oh, that wasn’t suspicious. Not at all.
“Listen, if we don’t figure it out, Beth could be in danger,” I said, jumping in before he could fade away as well.
The ghost snapped his gaze back to me and sighed. “Okay. I do like Beth. She was always so nice to us. And never worried about us partying here when they were closed.” He sort of hissed and faded a bit. “It’s a shame, really.”
“What’s a shame?” Deva asked. “What do you mean?”
Worry coursed through my chest making my heart beat a staccato rhythm and my breath freeze in my lungs as I waited for his answer.
The ghost faded a bit more. “Whatever killed Roger will definitely come for Beth.”
Then he disappeared.
“Shit,” Deva hissed. “We have to go.”
I nodded, when someone suddenly screamed “Boo!” behind me.
Shrieking, I dove away from the person and went flying over a spinning office chair on my back. For one brief moment, the air was knocked out of me, and I was like a turtle on my back, lying unable to move, and then I sucked in a deep breath. Breathing hard, I scrambled to sit up, even though my back was killing me, then glanced at a young ghost who was already starting to fade again.
“That was mean, Oliver!” Deva shouted, shaking her fist at him.
The ghost, who was apparently named Oliver, pouted. “No one ever lets me have any fun!”
“Fun?” I screamed the word, climbing to my feet. I
