Page 20 of A Midsummer Night's Ghost

Glancing back, I saw she was right. One of the guys seated at the bar was walking toward us, gaze drilling into me.

“Yikes.” I obediently slid in the car and once she was in, I made sure the doors were locked before pulling out of the parking lot. “So…?”

“It was a date. Tuesday’s date. Day, month, year. New ink, still shiny from lotion. With a skull. Now why do you think that is?”

My heart started to hammer. “Because he already knew James was dead. It was a memorial tattoo gotten right after James died.”

“Bingo. That guy knew.”

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 thecurrent 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?”

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