Page 16 of The Accidental Ghost

“But it hurts just the same,” Marty said softly. “Nina can be a horrible beast, but there isn’t an animal that doesn’t love her, doesn’t get the best of everything because she’s their owner. She had Waffles’s wheelchair specially made in Germany. Believe me when I say, Blanche couldn’t have landed in a better place even if she’d tried.”

Licking her lips, Ralph nodded, so weary and beaten. After a week of freefalling, of floating from room to room in Nina’s castle with no one to hear her thoughts and fears, it was good to be with people who knew she was there.

“Thank you,” she whispered before straightening.

Aside from getting Blanche, coming here had been a mistake. It only made the deepest part of her feel a sorrow she’d never known before, except for maybe when her mother was dying.

Her mother…

Was death the way everyone romanticized in books and movies? Would she see her mother if there was an other side?

Her heart clenched. Right now, there were other more pressing things to deal with. Like where she would end up and how she would get there.

She forced herself to focus on her surroundings. To take one last good look at the place she’d called home.

Ralph loved her little apartment, filled with all the things she’d treasured. Her favorite books on a rustic wood shelf by her small flatscreen TV. The old but well-loved steel-blue couch she and Blanche sat on when she ate her dinner. The warm, fuzzy, moss-green and cream blanket they cuddled under, currently draped over the arm, just the way she’d left it.

Her itty-bitty kitchen with shaker-style cabinets she’d painted in cottage blue. The window overlooking a park, where she’d spent some time growing ferns and violets. They sat on a wooden sill she’d stained herself.

Now it was all just one big mess. The police had obviously searched her things for information, but had they fund anything useful?

Then she heard one of the women gasp. She floated to where the sound came from.

Her bedroom.

Yikes.

“Looks like they tossed the shit outta your bedroom, too” Nina commented, tucking Blanche under her arm.

Marty nodded, her dangly earrings catching the light shining in from outside. “I’ll say.”

If they’d turned her living room and kitchen upside down, her bedroom bore the brunt of it.

“Don’t touch anything,” Wanda ordered. “If the police come back, we don’t want anyone to know we’ve been here.”

Her mattress was flipped upward, the pretty linen comforter in pale pink and beige tossed in the corner, along with her ruffled pillows.

The folding doors of her closet were pushed open and knocked off their tracks. All of her clothes were thrown on the hardwood floor, the pockets of her pants turned inside out.

Her wicker nightstand and dresser drawers were open and emptied, some still askew in their slots.

Ralph’s nod was slow. “It makes sense they’d search this room, I guess. This is where my laptop was kept. And I keep all the invoices and transactions for the store in my nightstand. I guess the police were looking for clues to my killer?”

Her voice sounded dead to her ears. She felt so removed from the scene laid out before her. This was her safe haven, torn asunder, and she didn’t know how else to deal with it but to shove it aside in favor of her sanity.

Someone had murdered her, and that was that. She wasn’t even sure if she wanted to know who’d killed her.

Yet, her apathy troubled her.

Wiping her hands together, Ralph decided it was time to end this. The whole time she’d been hoping the answer to her afterlife was here, but nothing had changed. She was still Ralph the Ghost with no particular place to go.

“I guess that’s it, huh?”

Shamus, who’d remained in the background for most of the time they’d spent in her apartment, came to stand beside her. “Are you okay, Ralph?” he asked, his voice husky and low.

“Did you find anything that might help you figure out what kind of ghost I am and why I’m still here?”

He looked down at her, his green eyes shimmering. “Nothing I can see that’s obvious. And oddly, there are no other ghosts around you. You’ve been gone a week. Usually…”

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