Page 8 of A Midsummer Night's Ghost

My mother was a well-known, tough-as-nails prosecutor. I had also done a brief stint as an evidence tech in my early twenties, before I realized I don’t like to wear clunky shoes or collect saliva from combative suspects or from dead bodies. Then there was the whole serial killer thing, where I’d been heldcaptive, chained to a mid century modern rattan patio set for a couple of hours, which had gained me some notoriety.

And possibly by the fact that I tended to have an abnormally large number of dead bodies pop up in my immediate vicinity.

Plus, I was dating Jake.

All of these factors (and maybe more, who knows) meant I was heavily on the CPD’s radar and Jake was often informed of what his mother deemed myantics. As if I were trying to stumble across corpses.

Though I supposed no one would know where I took my grandmother for Shakespeare in the gymnasium, especially given it was in a suburb, not Cleveland proper.

Ryan promptly disappeared from the backseat, something I was pretty sure I would never get used to. I jumped a little and blew out a breath, before getting out of the car and walking to the building with Grandma Burke.

No one stopped us or threw up crime scene tape as we were walking up the sidewalk, so I figured we were in the clear. Maybe there was a clerical error in the afterlife and there was no homicide.

Inside the building, we could hear the tinkling of piano music and voices. Distracted, I kept looking left and right, waiting to suddenly see the ghost of James Kwaitkowski shuffle in front of me. We made it all the way to the gymnasium without incident.

Normally, I just dropped Grandma Burke off at the gym doors and took off, leaving her the autonomy of time with her peers. But I was both avoiding Jake’s mother and too curious about what Ryan had said to just drop her off and go home. Though I wasn’t sure I could manage two hours of sitting through line reads. I’ve never been a huge Shakespeare fan and there was a coffee shop right across the street. I’d rather drink a latte than listen to Mrs. O’Malley pretend to be under the influence of a love potion, while Grandma mocked her actingskills. As happy as Grandma was to be Young Athenian Girl, she was also annoyed that her rival in all things, Maggie O’Malley, had a bigger part.

“Bailey? Bailey Burke?”

Sara Murphy.

There she was. Smiling and squinting in my direction.

“Oh my gosh!” She came over and enveloped me in a warm hug.

I don’t think Sara had ever hugged me in high school, but a funny thing happens once you graduate and move on with your lives—suddenly you have a bond that didn’t exist before simply because you were forced to be educated alongside each other at sixteen.

“Hi, Sara. How are you? I heard you were back from New York.”

She pushed her long glamorous waves (hair extensions, they had to be) off of her face and laughed. “I can admit it—New York chewed me up and spit me out. I’m back home with my tail between my legs. I couldn’t afford over three grand a month for a three hundred square foot apartment with mice living in the walls.”

“Yikes. Well, welcome back.”

“Thanks.” She beamed. “How are you? Are you married?” She glanced at my ring finger. And seemed to notice my outfit, which was leggings and a huge sweater over a ratty T-shirt emblazoned with the name of the dance school I had gone to until I was seventeen. There were bits of cardboard box and dust all over me.

“No, uh, not married.” I felt the need to explain my outfit. “But today is actually moving day. My boyfriend and I bought a house in Fairview and we’ve been hauling boxes all day. I’m exhausted and totally need a shower but I didn’t want my grandmother to miss her play practice.”

“You bought a house? Congrats! Who’s your boyfriend? Someone from high school?”

I couldn’t think of a single guy we knew from high school that I would want to live with. “No. He’s a homicide detective. We were friends for years, then, you know… sparks.”

Sara didn’t need to know Jake and I had trauma bonded over our grief for Ryan.

Frankly, I liked to pretend that never happened.

That me and Jake were together via a meet cute, like we bumped into each other at the airport after not being in touch for five years and bam, sparks.

Telling people I got drunk and cried all over him, insisting our dead friend hadn’t committed suicide, wasn’t nearly as romantic.

“Homicide detective? Oh, wow, that’s hot.”

Okay, Paris Hilton.

I had no idea what the heck to say to that. I’d never once thought of homicide as hot. “How about you? Married? Boyfriend? Girlfriend? Both?”

Sara laughed and slapped my arm. “Oh my gosh, you were always so funny, Bailey.”

No one had ever called me funny.

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