Page 13 of My Blind Date is a Ghost

The detective looks at me again, taking me in. His eyes roving over every inch of my face. I want to avert my gaze. It feels indecent to be making such strong eye contact with him. But I can’t help it. It seems to see me, really see me. And it is such a glorious feeling. After more than two hundred years of people looking—and walking—right through me, being seen is such a relief, I could almost cry with joy.

“I know I know you,” he finally says. “Where have we met before?”

“My name really is Cora Barnes,” I say, “and you know me from…there.” I point up to the portrait.

The detective looks up and then back at me. He squints at me, and then the painting. “You do look a lot like her,” he says.

I can’t help but chuckle. “Because it’s me,” I say.

He looks from me to the painting again. “So, that’s not really an old painting? It’s one of you in an old style?”

I can’t help but laugh at the fact that he’s not getting it. Beverly and Sophia laugh too. It takes Beckett a minute, and then he starts chuckling too.

“Oh, I get it. Are you a vampire or something?”

“I’m not a vampire,” I say. “Or a zombie, before you ask.”

“What are you then?” he asks.

“I’m…a ghost,” I say simply. As much as I’d like to say I’m just a normal, living, breathing human, that doesn’t really tell my story. It’s not really who I am. Yes, I am a normal, living, breathing human, but I’m also about two hundred and seventy years old. I can’t pretend those centuries when I was stuck between worlds didn’t happen to me. Didn’t change me. Didn’t make me the person I am today.

Beckett reaches out and touches my arm. It is so unexpected, I gasp at the contact. I realize that he is actually the first person to touch me since I regained my corporeal form.

“Well, you are the firmest ghost I’ve ever met,” he says with a chuckle.

“I thought aliens were your thing, Detective Dawson, not ghosts,” Sophia says.

“Okay, fine. I’ve never seen a ghost before.” He looks back to me. “Are you sure?”

“I died in 1788,” I say. Then I point to the floor, next to the counter. “Right there is where I died. Or, where I was killed, I should say.” I pick up my coffee and walk around the counter. “I was killed by a werewolf, Jeremiah Holland. He was executed for my murder a week later by hanging in the town square. I wasn’t there to see it, though. I hadn’t quite…woken up yet.”

Detective Dawson is speechless as he stares at the floor.

“My mother owned this shop,” I say, turning and walking down the aisles, Beckett following me. “She had been in Boston that day, talking to a publisher about carrying some books in our store. But I was used to running the shop myself. I’d spent much of my life here, except for the years during the war when I worked as a newspaper correspondent.”

“The…the war,” Beckett says. “The…Revolutionary War.”

“Yes,” I say. “That was a…a truly terrible time. The worst bloodshed I’d see until the Civil War a century later.”

“You saw it?” he says, hanging on my every word. “You saw all of it?”

“I did,” I say matter-of-factly. “I’ve lived, in a way, through every significant moment in this nation’s history. Seen a lot of it for myself. But I was always called back here. I was always called back home.”

“But…but you are very much alive, Miss Barnes,” he says. “I can see you, touch you, hear you. You aren’t dead anymore. You’re alive. I think Beverly is right, we need to find out how this was possible.”

“No,” I say simply.

“But, we can—”

“No!” I say more firmly, and the lights in the shop brighten and dim before returning to normal. I can feel my hair lift from my shoulder for a quick moment as static electricity washes over me.

“Did you do that?” Beckett asks me.

I shake my head. “I don’t know. When I was a ghost I could interact with the world around me in such ways. But I have no idea what it means to be a living ghost.”

“Don’t you want to find out?” he asks. “Don’t you want to know what happened to you. Why you are here? Maybe someone out there has the answers.”

“No, I don’t want to know,” I say.

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