Page 1 of A Midsummer Night's Ghost

ONE

I’d been threatenedat the hands of madmen at least three times in the last six months and survived.

Yet it was now obvious what was going to kill me. I was going to be crushed by moving boxes in my own house.

“Grandma Burke, why do you have so many books?” I asked, huffing and puffing as I struggled up the porch stairs with yet another box undoubtedly filled with ancient Harlequin novels. “You don’t even read paperbacks anymore.”

She read on her iPad with the font set at twenty-five.

“These are classics,” she replied, lounging like a tiny Celtic queen on the wicker sofa, feet crossed at the ankles, face turned to the balmy May breeze. “From when I was in my smut era.”

Did my Irish grandmother just make a Taylor Swift reference?

You never knew with her.

She was equal parts old-school and TikTok trends. She’d been given the power of voice command on her phone and our smart home management devices and she took that seriously, bossing Alexa around, texting with wild abandon, and purchasing items she no longer needed or necessarily understood. If she ordered one more latte for home delivery andthen complained it had milk in it, we were going to have to delete her DoorDash app.

“Why do you have so many shoes?” Jake, my patient boyfriend, asked me, right on my heels, ironically.

He was double-boxed. Two boxes piled on top of each other because he was thirty and worked out an hour a day and liked to prove it. He looked good hauling boxes, I had to admit, competent and not gasping for air, unlike me, who was sweaty and winded.

“I think this should be a judgment free zone,” I said, not wanting to admit that my wardrobe took up a disproportionate number of the boxes we had been hauling into our new house all day.

Jake gave a snort and bypassed me on the porch with long strides, disappearing into our burgeoning living room. I dropped the heavy box on the porch floor and sat down next to my grandmother with a sigh.

“My arms are killing me.”

“Don’t joke about death, Margaret,” Grandma Burke said, patting my knee. “It’s no joke at my age.”

My grandmother was the only one who ever called me Margaret, which was actually my middle name. My parents named me Bailey, but that wasn’t Catholic enough for her. Irish enough? Sure. But it was worth nothing because it wasn’t a saint’s name. Since my father worshiped at the altar of the Church of Whiskey my name was divine in his eyes.

“Sorry, Grandma. You’re right. Death is no joke.”

Unfortunately, death seemed to follow me.

Jake, who everyone called by his last name, Marner, chose to deal in death—he was a homicide detective. Bodies were a puzzle for him to solve and he was great at his job. He was empathetic for the victims and their bodies and took great pleasure in putting away murderers.

I got no such satisfaction because seeing dead bodies wasn’t my choice.

I was a spiritual medium through no fault or request of my own.

My ability to see ghosts had just appeared one day, kind of like mold, in the form of my dead best friend, Ryan.

Poof.

He was just there, in my kitchen, talking like nothing was odd about the fact that he had been dead for six months and yet was still being a smartass.

After Ryan, the ghosts kept coming, like an otherworldly conveyor belt of needy spirits wanting me to listen to their sob stories. Which was fair. I think it would be terrible to be trapped in limbo and no one can see you. We all want to be seen.

However, the popping in and out thing was both startling and an invasion of privacy. I still hadn’t quite managed to set boundaries regarding my personal space.

Generally speaking, ghosts are socially awkward and I never wanted to push too hard because they had the ability to annoy me twenty-four/seven if I made them truly angry. Like the one guy who sat on the edge of my bed and sang pop songs in the middle of the night until I agreed to help him.

Also, I felt bad for them. Most were confused, upset, frustrated. Not sure what was going on or where to turn. Having me as their only point of contact wasn’t exactly reassuring for them. I was a novice spiritual medium at best.

“Are you taking me to my theater class?” Grandma asked. “It starts in an hour.”

I swiped my red curls back off of my forehead. I had remembered the class, but hoped she’d forgotten. The senior center was hosting a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was, to put it mildly, ambitious. Considering half of the cast couldn’t remember what they ate for lunch,it was a stretch to expect them to remember Shakespearean monologues.

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