Page 2 of A Midsummer Night’s Ghost (Murder By Design #8)

TWO

My heart sank at Ryan’s words as I grabbed Grandma Burke by the elbow and hauled her to her feet. “Another dead body?”

“Yep.” He gestured for me to step a few feet away from Grandma. “At the senior center.”

Oh, no. “Someone my grandma knows?”

“How would I know who your grandma knows?”

“What are you two talking about?” she demanded. “I may be hard of hearing but I’m not stupid. You’re both wearing the don’t-tell-the-old-lady look.”

“Do we do that often enough that it’s a look?” I asked, bewildered. “You act like we’re keeping secrets from you left, right, and center.”

“Don’t evade, Margaret.”

“Fine. There may be an issue at the senior center, but I don’t have details so let’s just get in the car and go.”

As we stepped off the porch, a rousing gust of wind blew my curls into my face. Since I was holding onto my ancient grandmother for dear life, terrified she’d fall, I couldn’t swipe them away. I just had to cough and splutter my way around feral hair until we got to my car, in our new two-car-wide driveway. The improved parking—especially come February—made our dated kitchen with the burnt orange built-in can opener and wall mounted Seal-a-Meal worth it.

My previous house had a very skinny and super short driveway that fit just one car, so I was thrilled not to have to park on the street anymore in bad weather, a regular spring occurrence.

May in Cleveland is like a promise ring. Good intentions, but not an actual commitment. May was just trying to buy time, put you off before you demanded eighty degrees and sunshine. Some days were balmy with blue skies, others were gray with gusting winds and precipitation.

Today had been both. It started out with blue skies and was now determined to test the stability of patio furniture and tree branches everywhere.

“Whoa, you guys have a lot of boxes to unload still,” Ryan commented.

“Don’t let Jake hear you say that.”

“He can’t hear me, remember?”

Right. The whole ghost thing.

I really did forget sometimes.

Once we were all in the car I asked, hopefully, “Is this a regular death? Like someone who was one-hundred-and-one and their heart gave out?”

Ryan scoffed. “You know that’s not our department. We’re Homicide.”

This lady doth protest. “No, we’re not. You are. Or you were. Whatever. Why does this keep happening?”

“Murder? Because people are dicks.”

I mean, true, but couldn’t everyone take a breather and enjoy the spring thaw?

“I don’t know how many more murders I can stumble across without needing some serious therapy,” I told him.

“Who got whacked?” Grandma asked, fussing with her seat belt. “I hope not Sara Murphy. She’s so young.”

“Sara Murphy?” Ryan leaned forward from the back seat right as I glanced behind me to check for traffic before I backed up.

My face melted into his and it felt like I’d sucked on seventy-five mints simultaneously. Cool air shot across my lips and into my mouth.

“Ah! Jesus, don’t do that.” I scrubbed my lips and chin.

“Don’t take the name of the Lord in vain,” Grandma said.

“Yeah,” Ryan agreed. “And don’t even pretend like you weren’t just trying to kiss me.”

“I was not trying to kiss you! I didn’t know you were there.” I hit the gas harder than I intended and all of our heads whipped forward. “Sorry.”

But he was right. That had been like a kiss. A weird, ghostly and creepy peck from a dead man I had once fancied myself in love with pre-Jake Marner.

Ryan liked to refer to my life prior to dating Jake as BJ, which allegedly meant Before Jake, but we both knew that’s not what he really meant because he was super mature that way.

The facial collision had been an accident, but it still felt weird and oddly intimate in a way that made me uncomfortable. Determined to ignore it, I said, “What do you know about Sara Murphy?”

“She’s hot, right? I think I remember her from high school. A bonfire, some Pbrs, a little country music playing in the background…”

Ryan’s sentence trailed off and I glanced at him in the rearview mirror as I drove. He looked strangely melancholy and it bothered me. “You didn’t even know me in high school. I doubt you knew Sara Murphy.”

“How do you know who I knew in high school?”

“Do you know who I knew?” Grandma Burke asked.

Ryan took the bait. “Who?”

I didn’t. I already knew where this was going.

“Phil Donahue.” She preened as if she was personally responsible for his talk show success. “I dated him. We had math class together.”

There it was.

“Grandma, you did not. He went to St. Ed’s, which is all boys.” We’ve had this conversation like twelve times already. She never even met the man. But at this rate, in another two years, he would be her secret first husband.

“Ryan, just tell me it’s not Sara.”

We weren’t exactly friends in high school but we weren’t rivals or enemies either. It was more like she was there, in everything, surrounded by popular girls. I was not in that group of girls. I wasn’t unpopular, I was just background noise. Elevator music. You’re vaguely aware of it, and might hum along to it, but you forgot about it the second the elevator doors open.

“It’s not Sara. It’s some guy named James Kwaitkowski.”

“Never heard of him,” Grandma said.

Me either.

We all fell into speculative silence about one James Kwaitkowski and his unfortunate fate.

“The files don’t tell you anything?” Grandma asked.

“Nope. Just DOA.”

“When did you ever listen to country music?” I asked Ryan, stuck on that. He was always a heavy metal guy.

“At bonfires when I was trying to get with hot girls named Sara. Or Nicole. Or Jessica.”

I was sorry I had asked. “Right. What was I thinking?”

“That you wished you were a hot girl.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Fortunately, I’d grown into my face. More importantly, I’d grown into my fashion sense. I could dress my thin frame like nobody’s business now.

“Bailey was a late bloomer,” Grandma said. She reached out and patted my knee.

“Thank you, Grandma.”

“And she has a good personality.”

Ryan let out a crack of laughter from the back seat.

There was a coroner’s van at the senior center when we pulled in and one cop car.

“Meat wagon’s here,” Ryan said, in his usual compassionate way.

“It seems kind of quiet for a homicide.” I bit my lip as I looped around the parking lot. I’d been trying to score a handicapped spot for Grandma, but all six were occupied with cars. You had to be on the ball at the senior center to score those prime spots.

“It really does,” Ryan said, craning his neck to see who was in the patrol car. “That’s just a beat cop. I don’t see any detectives.”

It also occurred to me that if there was a vicious homicide at the senior center, Jake would be calling me right now and telling me to come home. He didn’t always know about homicides when they happened, depending on who got assigned the case, but everyone at the station knew me and my family, for reasons good and well, maybe a tiny bit infamous.

My mother was a well-known, tough-as-nails prosecutor. I had also done a brief stint as an evidence tech in my early twenties, before I realized I don’t like to wear clunky shoes or collect saliva from combative suspects or from dead bodies. Then there was the whole serial killer thing, where I’d been held captive, chained to a mid century modern rattan patio set for a couple of hours, which had gained me some notoriety.

And possibly by the fact that I tended to have an abnormally large number of dead bodies pop up in my immediate vicinity.

Plus, I was dating Jake.

All of these factors (and maybe more, who knows) meant I was heavily on the CPD’s radar and Jake was often informed of what his mother deemed my antics . As if I were trying to stumble across corpses.

Though I supposed no one would know where I took my grandmother for Shakespeare in the gymnasium, especially given it was in a suburb, not Cleveland proper.

Ryan promptly disappeared from the backseat, something I was pretty sure I would never get used to. I jumped a little and blew out a breath, before getting out of the car and walking to the building with Grandma Burke.

No one stopped us or threw up crime scene tape as we were walking up the sidewalk, so I figured we were in the clear. Maybe there was a clerical error in the afterlife and there was no homicide.

Inside the building, we could hear the tinkling of piano music and voices. Distracted, I kept looking left and right, waiting to suddenly see the ghost of James Kwaitkowski shuffle in front of me. We made it all the way to the gymnasium without incident.

Normally, I just dropped Grandma Burke off at the gym doors and took off, leaving her the autonomy of time with her peers. But I was both avoiding Jake’s mother and too curious about what Ryan had said to just drop her off and go home. Though I wasn’t sure I could manage two hours of sitting through line reads. I’ve never been a huge Shakespeare fan and there was a coffee shop right across the street. I’d rather drink a latte than listen to Mrs. O’Malley pretend to be under the influence of a love potion, while Grandma mocked her acting skills. As happy as Grandma was to be Young Athenian Girl, she was also annoyed that her rival in all things, Maggie O’Malley, had a bigger part.

“Bailey? Bailey Burke?”

Sara Murphy.

There she was. Smiling and squinting in my direction.

“Oh my gosh!” She came over and enveloped me in a warm hug.

I don’t think Sara had ever hugged me in high school, but a funny thing happens once you graduate and move on with your lives—suddenly you have a bond that didn’t exist before simply because you were forced to be educated alongside each other at sixteen.

“Hi, Sara. How are you? I heard you were back from New York.”

She pushed her long glamorous waves (hair extensions, they had to be) off of her face and laughed. “I can admit it—New York chewed me up and spit me out. I’m back home with my tail between my legs. I couldn’t afford over three grand a month for a three hundred square foot apartment with mice living in the walls.”

“Yikes. Well, welcome back.”

“Thanks.” She beamed. “How are you? Are you married?” She glanced at my ring finger. And seemed to notice my outfit, which was leggings and a huge sweater over a ratty T-shirt emblazoned with the name of the dance school I had gone to until I was seventeen. There were bits of cardboard box and dust all over me.

“No, uh, not married.” I felt the need to explain my outfit. “But today is actually moving day. My boyfriend and I bought a house in Fairview and we’ve been hauling boxes all day. I’m exhausted and totally need a shower but I didn’t want my grandmother to miss her play practice.”

“You bought a house? Congrats! Who’s your boyfriend? Someone from high school?”

I couldn’t think of a single guy we knew from high school that I would want to live with. “No. He’s a homicide detective. We were friends for years, then, you know… sparks.”

Sara didn’t need to know Jake and I had trauma bonded over our grief for Ryan.

Frankly, I liked to pretend that never happened.

That me and Jake were together via a meet cute, like we bumped into each other at the airport after not being in touch for five years and bam, sparks.

Telling people I got drunk and cried all over him, insisting our dead friend hadn’t committed suicide, wasn’t nearly as romantic.

“Homicide detective? Oh, wow, that’s hot.”

Okay, Paris Hilton.

I had no idea what the heck to say to that. I’d never once thought of homicide as hot. “How about you? Married? Boyfriend? Girlfriend? Both?”

Sara laughed and slapped my arm. “Oh my gosh, you were always so funny, Bailey.”

No one had ever called me funny.

“No one special in my life. Plus, I’m living with my parents.” Sara was laughing again, but it sounded slightly maniacal. “Oh, and directing a geriatric play. Winning at life, that’s me.”

More laughter. Tinny and high-pitched.

Sara Murphy was a former high school it girl on the edge.

Feeling awkward, I said, truthfully, “I think it’s amazing you’re directing this show. My grandmother loves it. She’s been practicing her one whole line every day for a week.”

“It’s court ordered community service,” she said flatly.

Um…

“Sara!” a gravelly voice bellowed from near the stage. “Let’s go!”

Sara rolled her eyes. “George, the pianist. He’s full of himself.”

“I’ll let you go. Great to see you again, Sara.”

Lie.

Sara Murphy was scary now.

I was questioning if I should actually be leaving my grandmother alone with her.

“Can you believe our ten year reunion is this summer? Are you going?”

“I guess?” I posed it as a question because I had given zero thought to it. I was more preoccupied with sorting my life out.

“Why are the hot girls always crazy?” Ryan asked.

“Jesus!” I jumped. I shot him a look of annoyance.

“What?” Sara asked, bewildered. She took a step back away from me, like I was the one who was a little off.

I bent down and slapped at my ankle. “Something just bit me. Must have been a fly. Hey, do you know why the coroner’s van is outside?”

“Oh, I guess the janitor died. They found him in the supply closet. Heart attack or something, I don’t know. I never met him.”

With that, she turned and strolled away, a sway in her hips that I had never mastered.

“I guess if she didn’t meet him, he doesn’t matter,” I mused to Ryan.

“She’s exactly my type,” he said, rubbing his jaw. “Sexy and crazy. That woman has restraining order written all over her. Too bad I’m dead or I’d totally go for it.”

He wasn’t even lying. Alive, Ryan had stumbled from one hapless dating disaster to the next. If a woman was fragile or violent, he was right there buying her a drink. It was a terrible gift he’d had.

“I don’t remember her being like that in high school. She always seemed put together, sure, but also genuinely sweet.”

“A decade changes people.”

“I’m exactly the same,” I declared confidently.

“Even wearing the same T-shirt,” Ryan agreed.

I rolled my eyes. “Come on, let’s go figure out this James Kwaitkowski thing.”

I wasn’t trying to disguise the fact that I was talking to what most people would perceive as thin air. Now that people talk on their phones all the time with airpods, most people didn’t think it was odd I was speaking aloud to no one. All hail the blue tooth.

“Did you hear what she said about court-ordered community service?” I asked as I headed for the hallway. “Is that really a thing? Unleashing criminals on seniors who may or may not have dementia?”

“I have no idea. I never paid attention to any of that. I just liked the take down.”

That didn’t surprise me. “You’re a questionable human being.”

“Ah, the real question is, am I even still a human being?” Ryan raised his eyebrows up and down. “Who am I, Bai? That is the question.”

Since I highly doubted Ryan was referencing an ancient philosopher and was just trying to be entertaining/annoying, I didn’t answer. I just pushed open the auditorium door and went into the hallway.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” he said, pretending to brush off my T-shirt. “That’s more you than me. Damn, you’re filthy.”

“Stop, that’s weird,” I said, still thinking about that strange moment in the car when our faces had melded together.

“Get back, demon!” a man’s voice suddenly burst out.

It should have been more unnerving than it was.

But with a heavy sigh, I turned, fully expecting this was my introduction to one James Kwaitkowski, recently deceased.

Fresh spirits are always a little kooky, and it seemed the senior center janitor was no exception to that rule.