Page 10 of A Midsummer Night’s Ghost (Murder By Design #8)

TEN

Running away would have been a great strategy except my car was in the opposite direction.

Science said we had a fight or flight response in stressful situations.

It was safe to say that my body always reacted with flight.

But it also had me turning off the main road and running down a side street of residential homes that was probably forty houses long. It was the road to nowhere and I’d panicked and taken it.

I didn’t have to look behind me to know the guy was still following me.

He made it very clear by yelling, “Hey, stop! You’re not going to get away with this.”

His voice sounded harsh and irritated.

Why was he annoyed? I was the one being forced to run down the sidewalk in kitten heels. I cut down someone’s driveway, hoping they had already left for work as I went straight into their backyard.

Unfortunately, they had a fence blocking access to the yard abutting theirs.

Fortunately, it was chain link.

Taking a deep breath, I stuck my foot into the links and hauled myself up.

“Are you serious?” the guy yelled from the bottom of the driveway. “You’re trespassing!”

The man chasing me was worried about trespassing? Apparently, he was very layered. “I am not. I’m looking for my cat,” I said, in case the homeowner was listening or had a camera pointed at their backyard. “Come help me.”

“What? No way. I have charges on me right now. I can’t be on someone’s property.”

“Good to know.” Especially since I was stuck. I had one leg over and one leg was left behind. I couldn’t sit on the fence because of the rust and some random spiked bits sticking up and I couldn’t seem to figure out how to get the lingering leg over and where it needed to be.

“Do you need help?” he asked.

Thank goodness I was wearing pants. This would be downright dangerous in a skirt. I debated. The tattooed bad guy boyfriend of the aggressive blonde seemed genuinely concerned I might injure myself. Yet at the same time, he was the one chasing me in the first place.

Right? He was chasing me. I think.

Maybe not.

Huh. That would be embarrassing if he wasn’t.

“I thought you can’t come on someone’s property.”

“I will if you’re stuck. I can’t just leave you hanging like that.”

Was he being chivalrous or trying to lull me into complacency?

Maybe I was just paranoid.

“I need help. Just give me a hand.”

He was a big man and the closer he got the more I regretted my decision. Or really, all of my decisions.

I decided it was best to continue with the original plan of going into the yard behind me, putting a fence between us. Not that it would stop him if he wanted to attack me, but it would give me a few precious seconds to run and use my phone to call for help.

“Look,” he said, as he offered me his hand so I could balance better on the fence. “I don’t know who you are or what you think you’re doing, but it was really uncool of you to tell Joy that James was dead.”

James’s ex-wife/girlfriend’s name was Joy? Talk about an oxymoron.

Then again, in all the bar photos she had looked plenty happy. She just wasn’t happy with me. Or Alyssa.

“I thought she knew. I didn’t mean to be the one to deliver bad news.” I was huffing and puffing a little as I dropped down over the opposite side of the fence, squeezing the guy’s hand for support harder than I would have liked to.

That was a very me thing to have to do—lean on my attacker for support.

I looked up at the guy as I released his hand. “You knew, didn’t you? I mean, the date is tattooed on your arm.”

“What are you talking about?”

Wait. Maybe that was the other guy. Now I wasn’t even sure which scary man belonged to which scary woman. “Who is your girlfriend?”

“Joy.”

So that meant he wasn’t the guy with the tattoo. Because he belonged to Mean Blonde.

But…

“I thought Joy was with James.” I brushed off my butt and checked my crossbody bag to make sure it was still zipped. It was, so I was confident my phone was where it should be, tucked inside.

“She is. Was. She’s cheating on him with me. Was.” He rubbed his beard. “Look, it’s complicated. Because of the kid and their history and…” He frowned. “I don’t have to explain myself to you.”

“You really don’t. And I don’t have to explain to you either.”

“Just leave Joy alone.”

“I have no intention of ever seeing Joy again. But ask your friend about his tattoo.”

With that, I backed up and promptly tripped over a tree root. I didn’t fall but I did stumble and my great parting statement was ruined. At least in my mind. This guy probably wasn’t the least bit interested in my mysterious vibe I was trying to pull off.

“This is messed up,” he muttered.

“Tell me about it.” I backed up. “Hey, do you like slushies? Do you and James go for slushies together?”

“What?” He looked at me blankly. “Is that some kind of kink? Or a drug nickname I don’t know about?”

“No. I mean slushies.” I made a gesture like I was sipping from a straw but then I realized that could be misinterpreted.

His face turned red. He makes a growling sound.

Definitely misinterpreted.

“Bye!” I took off down the driveway, clinging to the fence line in case the homeowner had a security camera.

By the time I got back to my car, glancing over my shoulder repeatedly, I was out of breath. The man didn’t come over the fence after me and he hasn’t even tried to cut me off back at the coffee shop where we started. I didn’t even know what that meant.

Hopefully it meant he was not a killer, just somehow caught up in Joy and James’s domestic drama.

It had to be exhausting living in that kind of relationship turmoil. I wasn’t cut out for that. I liked my very stable and ordinary relationship.

Unlike Ryan when he had been alive.

I wondered if I had accidentally conjured him, because the second that thought popped into my head, he appeared in the passenger seat of my car.

“Hey, Red. Running late?”

“Yes.” I was radiating anxiety and muttering about the fact that no one would let me pull out into traffic. “Why won’t anyone let me out? So rude.”

“No one has to let you pull out. It’s active traffic. Just wait until there’s a gap.”

“I need to be at work in six minutes. I shouldn’t have met up with Sara this morning.”

“Sara? Is that the hot but crazy one?”

“I don’t think she’s crazy. Just a little stressed out.” I strained my neck to see how many cars were coming down the road. “Come on, come on.”

“You’d know something about stress. Or creating stress that doesn’t need to exist.”

“Easy for you to say. You don’t have bills to pay.” There was finally a gap so I turned the wheel and hit the gas.

Ryan mimed holding out for dear life. “Slow down there, Nascar.”

“Haha, you’re so funny. But seriously, Sara Murphy is just going through a transition. She had to leave New York because she ran out of money and she’s living with her parents. That’s stressful.”

“I honestly don’t care about Sara Murphy.”

I turned left on a side street, hoping to avoid hitting red lights on my way to work. I picked the street that had a school on it, so suddenly I was down to twenty miles an hour and stuck in a carpool line.

I said something I wasn’t proud of.

“I don’t really like you having a job,” Ryan said. “You’re much more tense now and that’s saying a lot.”

“One, I’ve always had a job. I just had more flexibility before. Two, you’re mean.”

Ryan laughed.

“Sara wants me to direct the play at the senior center.”

“That sounds boring.”

“It sounds stressful.”

“You don’t need more stress.”

“Thank you, I appreciate that.”

“You’re really not very emotionally capable of handling much.”

I shot a glare at him.

“Eyes on the road! There’s kids everywhere!”

He startled me so much, I slammed on my brakes automatically. “Where?”

Both of our heads jerked forward when the car suddenly stopped. The car behind me tapped my bumper.

Well, that was just great.

“Get out and see if there’s any damage,” I told Ryan.

I kept my head resolutely forward, not wanting to get into a confrontation with a Karen when I was already late for work.

“Now I’m your errand boy?” he asked.

But he did poof out of the car and reappeared a few seconds later. “There’s no damage. Not even a scratch.”

“Good. Then I’m going to pretend it didn’t happen.”

“She was looking at her phone so I’m not sure she even noticed.”

“That seems safe.” I rolled my eyes.

Once I was finally out of the log jam of grade school kids, while listening to Ryan complain that his parents never once drove him to school, I was five minutes late to work, which meant I only had ten minutes before my first client appointment.

Ryan was strolling next to me, talking the entire time.

“Hi,” I said to my boss, Claudia. “Sorry I’m late. I went down a street that has a school zone in it, not thinking.”

Claudia just smiled, briefly glancing up from her phone. “No worries. You ready for the Fishers?”

Ryan was standing behind Claudia looking down at her phone. “She’s reading TMZ,” he told me.

“Yes, yes, I am,” I said with assurance. “New kitchen. It’s going to be amazing. I’m going to go pull their samples now.”

“Great. Let me know if you need anything. We have a team meeting at two. It should be on your calendar.”

“Excellent. I’ll be there.” I rolled my eyes at myself as I walked away. “You’re very distracting,” I murmured to Ryan.

“What’s that?” Claudia asked.

“Oh, nothing. Just talking to myself.”

As I went into the showroom, I opened my notes on my phone and started pulling out samples based on the Fishers questionnaire they had filled out. “Have you seen James?” I asked Ryan as I worked.

“No. I don’t go anywhere without you. I’m either with you and I’m there.” He pointed vaguely in the direction of up.

Whatever that meant. “I thought maybe he was there too, in one of your afterlife classes or something.”

Ryan made death sound like community college and working for minimum wage all wrapped up in one. He didn’t paint a pretty picture. But he hadn’t been granted access to the upper level yet because he wasn’t finished doing whatever it was he was supposed to do, which was always vague and ever changing.

I thought it was reasonable to assume James might be hanging around with him, a couple of afterlife underachievers.

Ryan didn’t say anything. He just wandered around one of the showroom kitchens, rubbing his jaw. He looked pensive.

I didn’t like his vibe. I had a feeling he was withholding information from me.

He’d been weird ever since James had shown up.

“Why are you gracing me with your presence today then?” I asked. “If you don’t know anything about James?”

I was in dangerous territory talking to him at work. I ran the risk of looking like I had an invisible friend at twenty-eight, which would cast doubts on my professionalism.

“I don’t think I should tell you.”

Way to drive me insane. “You have to tell me.”

“There are people coming in,” he said.

Great. Now I was going to have Ryan’s caginess in the back of my mind throughout this whole appointment.

“We’re not done with this conversation,” I hissed. “Meet me at my house at four.”

Jake wouldn’t be home yet and Grandma would be napping.

This was what my life had come to—talking to a dead guy in secret when my boyfriend was at work and my grandmother was sleeping.

Maybe I was a little dull.

Then again, I’d spent the morning hopping a fence.