Page 52 of Say Yes to the Death

Preferably about his mystery brother. Or why his mom was such a raging bitch. Maybe he would be more open if he had more wine.

He leaned back in his chair, looking utterly at ease in a foreign country. “All right. I once played Peter Pan in a school play.”

“Shut up,” she said, a bit louder than she intended. She leaned forward and bumped the table, sloshing the wine in her glass. A couple at the next table turned to stare at them. Claire paid them no attention. “Please tell me there were green tights involved.”

Luke smiled mischievously. “There may have been. Now you return the favor.”

“But I want to hear more about the play. What grade was this? Did you have to kiss anyone? Did you wear pants or was your package just snugly supported for all to see? Are there pictures?”

It would almost be worth opening up a line of communication with Rachel to score some pictures of Luke in green tights.

He crossed his arms. “Your turn.”

“Fine, let me think.” She propped her chin in her hand. Her glass had magically refilled itself, and she took another sip. “Okay, this is going to sound silly. Even though my mother is clearly unhinged and I think most of what she says is either completely made up or derived from just paying attention and making educated guesses, there have been times where she has inexplicably known things that she couldn’t have known.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Like what?”

Claire shook her head. “Countless things. Where a departed family member of someone we never met buried a collection of gold coins. The combination to a safe in some inherited mansion in Tennessee. The location of a secret will from someone’s grandfather who had almost certainly been murdered by a family member.” She ticked the encounters off on her fingers. “I started a blog for her side quests—that’s what we called them—when I was in middle school. That’s how she ended up getting her TV show.”

Luke narrowed his eyes. “There has to be some kind of logical explanation.”

She shrugged. “She claims the ‘veil’ is thin around her.”

“I bet.” He clearly was not convinced. “To be fair, there have been zero ghosts in my car since the sage incident. Claire Hartley, paranormal enthusiast,” Luke said, smiling to himself. “You learn something new every day. What about your dad? Is he paranormally inclined as well?”

She thunked her glass onto the table. “Roy grew up in Guatemala before moving to Miami as a teenager, so he has some pretty unique superstitions. He swears that he saved a middle school girlfriend from a sisemité.”

“A what?”

She shrugged. “It’s like a big murder gorilla or something.”

“Interesting. And your biological father?”

“He might as well be a murder gorilla,” she muttered, spreading her napkin on her lap and digging into the basket of bread. Shopping had left her starving. And she didn’t want to talk about her bio-dad.

“How did he feel about your mom’s—uh—abilities?”

“Oh, he loved them. That’s why they’re still together to this day,” she said through a mouthful of bread. He was totally prying. But maybe if she opened up a little, he would reciprocate.

He buttered his roll and stared out the window.

Screw it. It was worth a shot. “He left when I was five. A few days before my sixth birthday. I barely remember him, but I doubt he put much stock in my mom’s career.”

“You must have been devastated.”

Claire shrugged. “Charlie hates him to this day, but she was sixteen when he left. It was different for her. Like I said, I only remember snippets of him. But I do remember what happened after he left. My mom couldn’t afford the mortgage on her own, so we had to sell our house on the lake and move into this tiny apartment full of spiders. Charlie had to take two part-time jobs to help out. Our front door didn’t even have a real lock. We used to move the couch in front of the door every night before bed.”

“That does explain some of her obsession with personal safety.” Luke reached across the table and held Claire’s hand. She was eighty percent sure that hand had some butter on it. “Did you ever hear from your dad?”

She shook her head. “Years later, my aunt ran into him at the grocery store with his new family. He married a cashier from a health food store, and his daughter—my half sister, I guess—is almost exactly six years younger than me,” she said, withdrawing her butter hand. She had spent so much time and effort suppressing all thoughts and memories of her biological father that she had almost forgotten she had a half sister wandering the earth. It wasn’t her fault that their shared father was a skeevy adulterer. What was she like? Maybe that was a question that didn’t need an answer.

“He sounds like a dirtbag.”

The waiter arrived and set two plates in front of them. It smelled amazing, but the meal was still a mystery. Screw it, the time for subtlety was over.

“Yep. Well, now that I’ve told you my deep dark family secret, spill. What’s the deal with your brother? Did he steal your girlfriend? Crash your first car? Give you a wedgie at school?”

“That wasn’t part of the agreement.” Luke cut into the meat on his plate more aggressively than was necessary for such a tender-looking cut.

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