Page 8 of Dead Ringer

“I’ll have one of the servants find a photograph for you.”

“Oh, good, you have a photograph?”

“Yes, the idol has been extensively documented.”

Oh boy, this just kept getting better and better.

“Great, thank you, Ma’am.”

She rattled off an address that seemed to have too many numbers in it, and I scrabbled to get it written down because something told me she wouldn’t be chipper if I asked her to repeat it.

“Be there at ten in the morning, sharp, Miss Rowe. Don’t be late.”

I opened my mouth to assure her that I’d be there with bells on, but a click and a double beep told me that she’d already hung up.

“Nice lady,” Cain grunted.

“Yeah, she’s swell.”

I dropped my head into my hands, staring at my fuzzy reflection in the lacquer of my desk. What a bang-up job I was doing. I lost the ghost I’d summoned, and my client already hated my guts. And now I was going to try to find some idol without a clue of where to start.

Great job, Darla. A real whiz bang, you are.

“Hey. Don’t worry. We’re going to find it,” Cain said with an encouraging smile.

“Yeah?” I didn’t raise my head. “How often do the coppers manage to track down missing and stolen goods again?”

The silence took on an awkward note.

“Well, you have to take in manpower, and that attention needs to be diverted to higher priority cases a lot of the time, and–”

“Is that copper speak for ‘not often’?”

Cain didn’t answer.

I felt like a heel. He was just trying to cheer me up, and I was doing a great impersonation of a raincloud, dragging down the whole mood. But I knew the odds. And, furthermore, folks don’t leap straight to ‘summon the dead and ask them where the idol is’ until they’ve exhausted pretty much any other option, even in supernatural circles. Sophia Erepto didn’t strike me as the kind of dame that asked for help easily, either. And that had to mean she was fresh out of options, which was why she’d come to me in order to reach her dead grandma.

My phone blipped at me, and I thought about ignoring the darn thing. But what if it was important? Horsefeathers, what if it was Ms. Erepto calling back? So, I scrambled for it, getting it up to my ear just before it was about to kick over into voicemail. “Hello?”

“Hey, Darla. Did I catch you at a bad time?”

A smile bloomed on my face. I couldn’t have held it back even if I’d tried. “Henner.”

Henner Tayir was my steady sweety. We’d been going out since I came back to life, and he was just the bee’s knees. I’d had a huge crush on him when I’d been dead, and maybe the reason for that had partially been that he was one of the only guys who’d been able to see me.

As the grandson of a witch, Henner didn’t have a whole lot of magic, but he had enough that he was able to see ghosts. And the rest of his abilities centered around the doo-dads he liked so much. Technology and the like. If something used electricity, Henner was a wiz with it. ‘technomancy’ was what he’d called it, and I’d taken that to mean magic with technological objects.

All in all, Henner was a stand-up guy. Thoughtful, smart, and a real looker. The fact was, given the chance, I think I could fall head over heels for him. He didn’t want to rush me though, while I was still coming to terms with being alive again, but I told him he wasn’t no runner-up or second place.

“It’s never a bad time to hear from you,” I told him.

Cain made a face.

I could hear the grin in Henner’s voice when he spoke next. “Well, that’s good to hear. I was calling because there’s a live band playing at the Half-Moon tonight, and I wondered if you might like to go with me?”

That put some starch back in my spine. I shot upright at my desk, smiling so wide, it made my cheeks ache. Drinks and dancing with a handsome man? And Henner being that handsome man? Well, shoot! Excitement hit my blood like a double shot of the giggle water. “Absolutely! What time?”

While Henner chatted, I was mentally planning out my outfit. This was exactly what I needed to try and wash away the nasty, bitter taste of failure on my tongue.

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