The Ghoul Next Door

“Why would I be mad?”

  He shrugged. “I know you got really burned out on them, but I miss doing readings. It’s fun.”

  “It can be,” I agreed. “But it can also be crazy draining.”

  “So can chasing spooks.”

  I sighed and looked at the two of us in the mirror. Heath was so exotically beautiful, with his jet-black hair, high cheekbones, deep-set eyes, and square jaw. He’d acquired a thin streak of white hair at one temple and it made him even more striking. “I think I might start up again,” I confessed.

  He cocked his head. “Reading for clients?”

  I nodded. “We could really use the money.”

  His arms wrapped tighter around my waist. “Let me take that on,” he said. “I can make enough over the hiatus to cover us.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “Oh, it’s all on you, huh?”

  He went back to nuzzling my neck. “I just don’t want you to do something that’s hard on you,” he said sweetly. “I don’t mind it, so let me do it.”

  But I’m not the type to let someone else do all the work. I’m a fifty-fifty sort of gal. “I can take a few clients,” I told him. “And if we both work at it, we’ll have double the money and we can spend some time in Santa Fe in the fall before the show starts up again.”

  Heath had agreed to spend the summer with me in Boston even though his mom and family were back in New Mexico. And it hadn’t even been my idea—he’d offered. It’d meant the world to me.

  He backed up and turned me around to face him. “You’d come to Santa Fe again to hang out?”

  The last time we’d been in Heath’s neck of the woods, it’d been a wee(eeeeeeee) bit intense.

  “I would,” I said, reaching up to pull him in for a kiss. “If I get enough clients, we could relax about our cash flow for a change.” We’d been paid well by the network that hosted our ghostbusting show, but living in Boston was superexpensive and I always worried about my long-term finances.

  “Okay, babe,” Heath said. “But the minute it gets to be too much for you, stop, okay?”

  I grinned. “I’ll be fine,” I assured him.

  Heath left and I checked my phone. I had a message from Courtney. Trying her back, I was relieved to reach her. “Have you come up with a plan to help us?” she asked.

  “We’re working on one,” I told her. “But before we jump in, we’ll need to know exactly what we’re up against. We’d like to sit down with your brother and interview him, if he’s open to it.”

  “He will be,” she said quickly, and I could feel her relief vibrating through the phone. “Would you three like to come over to my place tonight? Steven and I are both off in a few hours.”

  “Actually, we’d prefer to interview Luke in a public setting.” Courtney was quiet and I knew she must have been wondering why I didn’t want to talk with Luke someplace private, so I explained our concerns. “The three of us have dealt with some of the nastiest, most dangerous spooks on the planet, Courtney,” I told her. “And we’ve learned to be cautious when dealing with something that doesn’t act like your run-of-the-mill spook.”

  “There are run-of-the-mill ghosts?”

  I chuckled. “Yes. Most spooks are actually quite harmless. They just get stuck between worlds, and their confusion can sometimes make them disruptive. Usually all it takes to deal with them is some gentle coaxing.”

  “But you don’t think that’s what we’re dealing with here,” she said.

  “No,” I confessed. “I think we’re dealing with something much darker. And because of that, I think that Heath and I could be vulnerable. This spook has attached itself to a person, and these types of spirits can be very fickle. Because Heath and I are mediums, we could be quite appealing to a spook like the one haunting your brother, and until we know more about who or what this shadow man is, neither Heath nor I am willing to risk having the ghost latch onto us.”

  Courtney was quiet again.

  “I know that may seem cold,” I said, hearing the words I’d said echo in my mind. “But, Courtney, something like this ghost could really become an issue for us, and we’ve taken so many risks in the past couple of months with the scariest, most demonic spirits you could ever imagine that Heath and I have to set some clear boundaries. We’re no longer willing to put our lives or our sanity on the line.”

  “I understand,” she said, and I felt that she did. “Where and when would you like to meet Luke?”

  I turned in a half circle to eye the clock over the stove. “Would five o’clock at the hospital work for you?”

  “That’d be perfect,” she said. “Luke is here in the waiting room trying to take a nap. I think he’ll be thrilled to talk to someone who understands what he’s going through.”

  “Good.”

  We finalized where to meet and then I called Gilley.

  “I’ve been trying to call you!” he yelled the moment he picked up the line on his end.

  That took me by surprise. “Why? What’s happened?”

  “I’ve got a reporter calling the office nonstop!”

  My eyes widened. Uh-oh. “Which reporter?”

  “A Kendra something . . . I don’t know,” Gil said impatiently. “She was full of questions about who you are and how you could know so many details about some lady who was murdered in the park. Which brings me to my next question: What did you say to her, M.J.?”

  I covered my eyes with my hand and sighed. “Nothing,” I began.

  “Oh, this can’t be nothing. Seriously, what’d you say?”

  “I’m on my way,” I told him, avoiding the question, and clicked off without even telling him about the meeting set for later with Luke, Courtney, and Steven. I found Gilley back on the phone when I walked through the door of the office. My inner suite door was shut and I could hear Heath’s voice waft faintly from inside. I figured he was still in with his client. “Can you hold, please?” Gilley said tightly before putting the phone to his chest. “It’s your new best friend,” he said. “Kendra.”

  I shook my head vigorously.

  Gilley nodded his head just as vigorously.

  We did that back and forth with each other until we were both dizzy. “I’m not talking to her!” I whispered.

  “She won’t quit calling!” he whispered back.

  “Tell her I’ve left the country again.”

  Gilley leveled his eyes at me. “I’m sure she’ll believe that.”

  “I’m not talking to her, Gil.”

  Gilley put the phone back to his ear. “Kendra? Sorry about that. Listen, M.J.’s feeling a little indisposed at the moment and she can’t come to the phone. I’ll have her call you back just as soon as she’s feeling better, okay?”

  I breathed a huge sigh of relief as Gil hung up the phone. “Thanks, honey.”

  Gil reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a nail file. As he inspected his nails, he said, “Spill it.”

  I told him about what’d happened at the park and he stopped filing the second I said that I’d made contact with Bethany. His eyes got wider the closer I got to the end. “Did they record everything you said?” he asked me. I couldn’t tell whether he seemed panicked or excited.

  “I think so.”

  “This could either be really good for our business or really bad,” he told me.

  I sat down in one of the wing chairs that made up our lobby’s seating area. “They might not even air it,” I said.

  Gil cocked an eyebrow. “That reporter has called me three times in an hour, M.J. I doubt she’ll just let it go.”

  I tapped my knee thoughtfully for a minute. “You know what bothers me?”

  “That you picked that blouse to go with those jeans?” Gil said. “Or that you have no sense of style when it comes to handbags?”

  I looked down at my perfectly functional brown pocketbook.
“What’s wrong with my handbag?”

  “You got it at a”—Gil paused while he made a choking sound—“discount retailer six years ago.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Who died and made you Tim Gunn?”

  Gil snapped his fingers. “Make it work!”

  “Anyway, what bothers me is something Bethany said.”

  “The dead girl?”

  I nodded. “She said that on the night she died, she heard footsteps behind her, but when she turned to look, there was no one there.”

  Gil’s brow shot up. “Another ghost?”

  “Yeah. But, Gil, when I was connecting with her spirit, I didn’t sense anyone else in the ether.”

  Gil shrugged. “Maybe he or she didn’t feel like showing themselves.”

  I agreed but something else was actually bothering me. “You know what’s even weirder?”

  “The fact that you won’t wear a belt even though clearly that’s the big thing missing from that outfit and the only way that blouse could possibly work with those jeans?”

  “Will you leave off my wardrobe?” I snapped.

  “Sugar, now that we’re back in the States, you need some help getting your closet in order. I mean, Molly Ringwald called. She’d like her wardrobe from the eighties back.”

  “Gil,” I growled.

  “Sorry. Continue. And then let’s go shopping.”

  I inhaled deeply and let it out sloooow. “The weird thing is that Courtney said her brother heard disembodied footsteps following him everywhere he went. And I can’t afford a new wardrobe.”

  “This is New England,” Gil replied with a wave of his hands. “The only place more haunted is Europe. There’re disembodied footsteps all over the place. And you can afford to go shopping because I’ve spent all the time I wasn’t talking to Kendra booking you appointments.”

  My eyes bugged. “You’ve already booked me some appointments?”

  Gil leaned over to look at his computer screen. “Thirty, to be exact. And there’re twenty more in my in-box that I haven’t had a chance to get to yet.”

  My mouth fell open. “Thirty?”

  Gil rolled his eyes. “Chill out, M.J. They’re not all on the same day. In fact, I’ve scheduled you the next ten days off, giving you plenty of time to talk yourself into doing them again.”

  “How did we already get thirty appointments on the books?”

  “I sent out an e-mail to all of your old clients. They’re replying in droves.”

  I blinked furiously for several seconds, crunching some numbers and trying to calculate how much extra cash that’d be.

  “Seventy-five hundred bucks, honey,” Gil said, as if reading my mind. I squinted at him. I’d come up with a different, lower, figure. “I gave you a fifty-dollar raise,” Gilley added. “You’re a TV star now. And you can command it.”

  I groaned. “What’s my schedule so far?” I worried that Gil would try to pack them in.

  He clicked his mouse and pivoted the screen toward me. “You have twelve a week, honey. Four readings a day, three days a week. A bit like the old days.”

  I used to read for clients Monday through Thursday, but my maximum then was six a day with a three-day weekend. It was crazy intense and it used to drain the life right out of me. I saw that Gil had set my new schedule up for Monday through Wednesday, with readings scheduled every fifty minutes from noon to four with ten-minute breaks in between. “You’ll have to eat lunch before you show up for work, but I thought this would work for you.”

  I nodded. It’d work well, I thought. “Okay,” I said at last. “Just remember, no matter what the response is, don’t book me beyond the end of August and no more than twelve readings a week.”

  Gil saluted. “Now, can we go shopping?”

  I eyed my watch. It wasn’t even noon. “What about him?” I asked, nodding toward the door to my office, where we could hear laughter. Heath must be having a good time with his client.

  “He’ll be fine,” Gil said, getting up to come around and grab my elbow. “He’s got two more clients after this, and lots of time in between. He can handle it.”

  With that, we were out the door.

  • • •

  Three hours later I was crying uncle. Loaded down with far too many shopping bags and a credit card that was almost too hot to hold, I tried to get Gil to listen to reason. “My feet hurt, I’m hungry, tired, and I still have to go home and change before we meet Luke and Courtney!” (Okay, so maybe my argument wasn’t exactly laden with “reason.”)

  “Just one more stop,” Gil called over his shoulder as I shuffled along behind him.

  I glared hard at his back. He’d been saying that for the past three stores. “Gil,” I whined. “Come on!”

  But he wasn’t listening. He was scooting into yet another store. I thought about leaving him, but he had the car keys. With a (huge) sigh I trudged into the store and almost came up short. All around me were racks and racks of gorgeous handbags. My eyes darted around until I spotted Gil, already talking the ear off one of the sales associates. As I headed toward him, two other associates saw my shopping bags, and when they blinked, I swear I saw dollar signs in their eyes.

  I kept my head down and hurried over to Gil. “Try this on,” he said before I could even get a word out. In an instant the shopping bags were pulled out of my grip and a gorgeous black leather handbag with plenty of brass accents was draped over my shoulder. Gil stood back and tapped his finger to his lips. “Maybe,” he said.

  “I like it,” said the salesgirl.

  “It might be a little big,” Gil replied. “If it hits her too low or too wide, it makes her look hippy.”

  “I like it,” Salesgirl said again.

  “Try this one,” Gil suggested, plucking the handbag off my shoulder and replacing it with another equally beautiful bag.

  “I like it,” Salesgirl repeated for the third time. Clearly she was a one-hit wonder.

  “The first one was better,” Gil said. My opinion had stopped mattering four stores ago. So I just stood there stiffly as bag after bag was draped over my shoulder until finally Gil made the decision to go with the first one. I blinked wearily and lifted the price tag, nearly choking on the gasp that came with it. “Holy freakballs! Gilley! Four hundred and fifty dollars?!”

  He stared at me like he couldn’t understand why I was so upset.

  “Four hundred and fifty dollars!” I repeated . . . perhaps a little louder than I should’ve.

  The confusion on Gil’s face lingered.

  “Honey, the bag I came in with only cost me forty dollars!”

  Gil pursed his lips and looked at me with disapproval. “Sugar,” he drawled. “This is Michael Kors, not Michael Kohl’s.”

  “Should I ring that up?” Salesgirl asked Gil, even though I was the one holding the credit card.

  “Yes, please,” Gil said, reaching for the card. I held on to it firmly and Gil and I had a tug-of-war in the shop for ten seconds before he poked me in the side and I let go.

  Just when I was about to yell at him that I wasn’t buying a four-hundred-dollar anything, my cell rang. Looking down, I saw the call was from Heath. “Hey,” I said, still glaring furiously at Gil. “Did you get our note?”

  “That you went shopping? Yeah, I got it. And Gil’s been texting me the whole time.”

  “He’s been texting you?” I repeated. “What’s he been saying?”

  Heath cleared his throat. “You wouldn’t like it.”

  My narrowed eyes became slits, and I mouthed, “You’re dead!” to Gil. He shrugged nonchalantly and turned away.

  “So, are you guys heading back soon?”

  “Definitely. This is our last stop or I’m going to threaten to return everything we got. Did you want to try and grab dinner after we meet with Luke and Courtney?”

 
“Uh, sure, but that’s not why I’m calling.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Gilley hand Salesgirl a belt before he twirled in a circle and began to head toward the clothing section. Trying to shift the phone to my shoulder while I picked up the bags, I asked, “Oh? What’s up?”

  “You’re on TV.”

  I dropped the phone. And the bags. Gil glanced over at me, smirked, then went back to sifting through the clothing. Grabbing the phone off the floor, I said, “Sorry—did you say we’re on TV?”

  “No. I said you’re on TV. Did you do a reading for a reporter this afternoon about a girl who’d been murdered?”

  I felt the blood drain from my face. “Son of a bitch!” I hissed.

  “I take it that’s a no?”

  I shook my head. “What exactly is happening on the broadcast?”

  “Well, the reporter, Karen something—”

  “Kendra,” I corrected, pinching the bridge of my nose with my fingers. “Kendra Knight.”

  “Yeah, Kendra, she says that she had a, and I quote, ‘bizarre’ encounter with a woman named Mary Jane Holliday who claims to be a world-renowned psychic.”

  “I never claimed any such thing!”

  By now Gil had left the clothing rack and was making his way toward me—obviously sensing that something was wrong.

  “Not my words, babe,” Heath said. “Hers.”

  “Yeah, sorry. Okay, what else?”

  “Well, she says that she thought at first that you were trying to pull some stunt on her to promote your show debuting on cable TV in a few weeks, but then she did some checking into your background and also what you said on camera. She replayed the tape a couple of times and says you seemed to have intimate knowledge of the murder of a woman named Bethany something that no one but the police or the girl’s family had knowledge of. And by that, she meant that there was a bottle of wine chilling in a bucket at the girl’s apartment, and that she had a cat named Sprinkles, but none of that was public knowledge.”

  I didn’t say anything at first, wondering if there might be more, but Heath didn’t add anything, so I finally said, “Did it make me look really bad?”

  Heath sort of chuckled. “Actually, I think you’ve converted a skeptical reporter into a believer. She said that at the moment where you started telling Bethany to look for the light, all of the charge was sucked right out of the battery of the camera and both she and her cameraman heard some sort of buzzing sound. She played that part of the audio back a couple of times and you can definitely hear something electric happening.”