Page 5 of A Midsummer Night’s Ghost (Murder By Design #8)

FIVE

“What am I looking at?” I turned the small white sensor over and over in my hands.

Jake took it from me. “Just sit down while I do this. You look tired.”

“I am tired.” I was also always willing to sit down.

I recently took a job at a home remodeling company for a number of reasons.

My staging business, “Put It Where?” was struggling because in the hot real estate market no one bothered to spend money on staging. It wasn’t necessary for a sale. You could have filthy forty-year-old mauve carpet and asbestos basement floor tiles (like our newly purchased house) and it wasn’t a deterrent. The entire house could be filled with dirty diapers and if it was in the right neighborhood there would still be multiple offers on it.

So my staging income had shrunk to almost nothing.

It also turns out that when you want to buy a house in a hot real estate market there is no patience for self-employed buyers in the mortgage process. Sellers want a fast close and there is no time for massaging a loan for someone whose income goes up and down with no pattern. That takes senior underwriters, creative lenders, and closer to forty days to close instead of the current preferred two weeks. I needed a stable paycheck to prove I was house buying worthy so I was back to punching a virtual time clock.

The job wasn’t bad, really. It turns out that the other effect of higher interest rates and competitive prices is that people who don’t have to sell, don’t. They stay put and remodel their houses. It was fun to put my design skills to use helping residents work out their home improvement dreams in a ten thousand square foot design center.

But it also meant that I had regularly scheduled hours and I wasn’t used to that.

Neither was Grandma Burke.

She refused to go to adult day care or my father’s, so Jake and I were spending the night after Alyssa helped me unpack installing an integrated smart home security system aka granny cams. If she falls she can tell Alexa she can’t get up.

Or as it turned out, Jake was installing the security system.

“I’m officially thirty,” Jake said. “I’m working on our house on a Friday night.”

I glanced around at our still half-unpacked kitchen and told myself I could only sit for five minutes, then I really needed to tackle organizing the utensils drawer. “We are very domestic these days. All we need is a dog.”

Jake paused and shot me a hopeful look. “Can we get a dog?”

I laughed. “No. Not with Grandma. Dogs are notorious for tripping the elderly.”

He wrinkled his nose. “Good point.”

“Hey, do you know Alyssa’s husband?” I asked, leaning onto the kitchen table.

“Are we really calling him that with a straight face?” Jake asked, tapping the screen on the command center tablet for the system.

“I’m following her lead.”

“No, I’ve never met him. Your mom probably knows him. He’s done some prisoner transfers and testified in court a few times.”

“Interesting.”

“Not really.” Jake kept fiddling.

“Do you want to go to dinner with them?”

“No.”

That made me laugh. Jake was always honest.

“Why not?”

“Because by the end of the month this marriage will be over and I’ll have wasted a night making small talk with some dude I’m never going to see again.”

“She really likes him though.”

“You’ve said that about the last three guys she dated.” Jake pressed a button and a loud wailing sound ripped through the room.

I jumped. “Geez Louise, that’s loud.”

“That’s the point.” He tapped the screen and the noise stopped.

“That’s loud enough to wake the dead,” Grandma Burke said, shuffling into the kitchen. “Or give me a heart attack.”

“Waking us up is the point. Heart attack is not.” Jake kept fiddling. “I’ll turn the volume down slightly.”

I wasn’t sure that was a good idea given that Grandma Burke had hearing loss but I didn’t want to point that out in front of her and offend her.

“Why are you two kids home tonight anyway?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be out having fun? Going to a ballgame or a dance club now that you’ve had dance lessons?”

“We had three dance lessons,” Jake said. “And I sucked at it. I almost broke Bailey’s ankle twice.”

“It’s true,” I told her. “We’re not going out because we wanted to get this system installed so you have it if you need it.”

“This is for me?” Grandma stood in front of the cabinets and eyed them, mystified. “Why? And where is my tea?”

I stood up. “Because of that. You’re in a strange house surrounded by boxes you could trip on and you don’t know where anything is. Jake and I both have to work tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow is Saturday,” she pointed out.

“It’s a busy day for remodeling design appointments and for death. What can I say?” I started rummaging around in our cabinets trying to find the tea. We (okay, me) had just shoved food into them in an attempt to get some boxes emptied and out of our walking path. Now I was staring at a cacophony of dried goods that might tumble down like an avalanche at any given moment. Add that to the to-do list.

“Your grandfather never worked on Saturday.”

Lucky him. “He also had a secretary and martini lunches. Times have unfortunately changed.”

“I can’t imagine you trying to work after having a lunchtime martini.” Jake grinned as he came over and kissed the back of my head, reached around me, and pulled down the tea I was looking for. “You can’t even have a glass of wine without either dancing on a table or sobbing.”

I frowned at him. Just because all of that was true, didn’t mean I wanted it pointed out. But Jake looked so… capable . He was wearing sweatpants and an Ohio State T-shirt, socks on his feet, making this house a home for us.

Good grief, I was in love. It struck me at the oddest moments.

I stared at him too long. He frowned back. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I just think you’re cute.”

Jake rolled his eyes. “Is this a diversionary tactic so I won’t ask you why you were at Danny O’s last night with Alyssa?”

I almost dropped the box of tea bags. “Um, no, of course not. How did you know that?”

“It’s a cop bar.”

“Isn’t every bar a cop bar?” Grandma asked, taking the chair I’d vacated at the kitchen table.

“Probably,” I told her.

“One of the guys I work with saw you and said there was a bit of an incident .”

I filled a mug with hot water and put it in the microwave. “I wouldn’t call it an incident. Just some woman thought Alyssa was looking at her boyfriend. Which she wasn’t, by the way. Because she’s married and he was gross.” Unkind of me, but true.

“Was that before or after you were asking about James Kwaitkowski?”

Dang it. “Who was the spy?” I asked, genuinely bewildered. No one had looked like a cop. “Not that I was doing anything that couldn’t be reported back to you, but it’s weird to feel like I’m being watched or something.”

“Nice deflection. No one was watching you. He saw you and told me because he was concerned.”

That explained the guy we thought was following us.

“James Kwaitkowski is the janitor at the senior center who died on Tuesday in the supply closet. I saw his ghost when I dropped Grandma off for play practice.”

“We had a bad rehearsal that day, too,” Grandma said, apropos of nothing. “Maggie couldn’t remember any of her lines. She’s no Titania.”

“I saw that he liked to hang out there, so I just wanted to see if any of his friends were there. Which they were. And his ex-wife who is currently his girlfriend. And the one guy had a tattoo on his forearm of a skull with the date of James’s death. Isn’t that odd?”

“Why didn’t you just tell me that? I could have gone with you.”

I carefully pulled the hot mug out of the microwave. “You would have gone with me? And not thought I was crazy?”

“Yes. I thought we had established this. I believe you see ghosts. I want you to be safe. I want to help you when you need help. That’s what being a partner means.”

See? Heart eyes. All day long. The man was perfect.

“Thank you. I’ll try to do better at sharing. But this happened out of your department.”

“But in county. We can still access some of the information.”

“Cool.” I dipped Grandma’s tea bag in the mug.

He nodded. “Cool.”

I nodded with him and repeated, “Cool.”

“Wow, another fun Friday night in the Marner-Burke house,” Ryan said, strolling into the kitchen.

“Where did you come from?” I asked.

“He was laying on your bed,” Grandma said. “I saw him when I was going down the hall.”

“You were laying on our bed?” I demanded, outraged.

Jake rubbed his chest like he had heartburn. “There was a dead person laying on our bed? Jesus.”

“It was Ryan,” Grandma told him.

“As if that makes it any better,” Jake muttered. He turned toward the living room, presumably in the general direction he thought Ryan was. “Stay out of my bedroom, Conroy. I’m not kidding. That’s too far, man.”

Ryan made a face. “I had a rough few days. I needed a nap.”

The fact that fatigue was a factor in the afterlife was very depressing to me.

“What have you been doing? I haven’t seen you since Tuesday. I have questions about this whole James thing.”

“So do I. This whole class A thing is driving me nuts.”

“What is a class A?”

“Undetermined death but already moved on.”

I stared at him. “Then why is his ghost still here?”

“Because he only thinks he hasn’t moved on. That’s why he can see me. But he hasn’t moved on because he’s holding himself up. He’s still in the waiting room, so to speak. Because he’s not paying attention.”

“Isn’t there like a kiosk he can check into? Figure out what hallway he’s supposed to go down?”

“Not until we figure out what caused his death.”

“You said homicide, but now you’re saying undetermined. There is no way for me to figure that out. I’m not the medical examiner.”

Jake was clearly listening, but he was also rearranging the food in the cabinet. It always unnerved him to see me talking to what appeared to him as thin air. I understood the coping mechanism.

“Get me a look at the autopsy report,” Ryan said. “We need to get this sorted out because this guy is driving me crazy. He follows me around holding his fingers out like a cross. I haven’t slept in three days.”

“Ghosts sleep?” Grandma asked. “That’s interesting.”

“More of a figure of speech.”

“Why is holding his fingers out like a cross?”

“He thinks Ryan is a demon.”

“Oh, sure, sure.” She nodded like that was a no-brainer.

“Not sure,” Ryan protested. “Grandma, you know I’m not a demon.”

Now she was Grandma to him?

“I know, dear. But death is scary. You just need to be patient with James and hold his hand through this transition. That’s your job.”

Jake sighed into the cabinet.

I think he was wishing we’d gone out dancing instead.

Ryan sighed too, running his hands through his hair. “You’re right. But patience was never really my thing, you know that.”

“I certainly do.”

Ryan shot me a look. “Not helpful, Bai.”

“You’re not being helpful to me, either. I’m kind of busy right now.” I gestured to our disastrous box-filled mid century museum we called a house. “I have a lot on my plate, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“This house really is ugly,” he said.

“Thank you for repeating yourself. Just tell me what I’m supposed to do. I already talked to James’s wife and she clearly didn’t know he was even dead, so she didn’t kill him. He has three other ex-wives, but I feel like if they wanted him dead, they would have done it a long time ago. And the weird guy at the bar has no name.”

Even if he did, I was feeling contrary right now with Ryan. He was not being a particularly good friend at the moment, dead or not, and I felt mildly (a lot) petulant.

I put Grandma’s tea down in front of her.

She held it up to Ryan’s nose so he could take a deep sniff, his eyes closed, face a picture of human longing.

Which made me feel guilty.

“Fine. I’ll see about the autopsy report. But stay out of our bedroom.”

Ryan gave a wink, clearly recovered. “You’re the best. Have a boring weekend—oh, wait, you already are.”

I immediately felt less guilty.

“Can you get me an autopsy report for James Kwaitkowski?” I asked Jake.

He sighed again, the deep sigh of a man questioning his love for me. “Already on it.”