It's A Ghost's Life (Murder By Design Book 5)

by Erin McCarthy

  “What did you mean?” he asked, glancing back at the TV before blinking at me, obviously confused.

  “They say men like something shiny and new all the time. Am I shiny?”

  Jake opened his mouth and shut it again. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” His eyes drifted back to the basketball game.

  I sighed and picked up my gin fizz and sucked at the tiny straw. “You know what tomorrow is, don’t you?”

  “Sunday.”

  I sucked harder. “It’s the day Ryan died.”

  That got his attention. He swirled his stool to be facing me. “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know.” I didn’t. I had thought I was okay but I felt… weird. “Are you okay?”

  He nodded. “I’m still pissed and upset and I miss Ryan, but it is what it is.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Are we okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t we be okay?”

  I shrugged.

  Jake took my hand and caressed the back of it. “Babe, what exactly are we talking about? I know you had feelings for Ryan. But I thought we had moved past that.”

  Now I was the one who didn’t know what we were talking about. “Sure. Do you want fried chicken for dinner tomorrow?”

  He shook his head back and forth like a dog after a bath. “What? What the hell happened today? You go to lunch with the ladies and you come home broken.”

  He was trying to make light of all of this.

  Yet I couldn’t help but be insulted.

  I gasped. “That’s not cute or funny.” My phone hang on the bar top and I saw it was my grandmother. She was normally the only person I would answer when I was with my boyfriend. But given how our current conversation was going I probably would have answered a telemarketer.

  “Hello?” It was almost eleven o’clock. My grandmother shouldn’t even be awake. “Grandma, are you okay?”

  I could hear her sniffling, which instantly terrified me. I sat up straighter.

  “Oh, Bailey, it’s Vera.”

  “What about Vera?” I covered my left ear with my palm so I could hear her better. It was loud in the bar.

  “She’s dead.”

  My stomach dropped. I whirled around, half expecting to see Vera standing behind me in ghost form. “What?” I said, shocked to the tips of my pointed-toe boots. “We just spent the day with her!”

  “They found her in the backyard, frozen like a popsicle.”

  My jaw went south just like my stomach had. “Oh my God.”

  I smacked Jake’s leg. “Vera’s dead.”

  “Well, shit.”

  My feelings exactly.

  Two

  “What happened?” I asked Grandma. “Who found her?”

  “Her neighbor’s dog was barking nonstop so he went out his back door to holler at him and it set his motion light off. He glanced over at Vera’s and there she was—head first in the snow.”

  I shuddered. “Oh my God, that’s horrible. Why would she go outside like that?”

  “I have no clue. Her dog died last fall so she shouldn’t have any reason to go out in weather like this.”

  That was disturbing. It was January and freezing. The kind of weather where it feels like your lungs are crystallizing when you breathe outside. “What have the cops said?”

  “I don’t know. Bob, her neighbor, just called me and let me know and asked me if I knew who her next of kin was.”

  “Who is it?”

  “She has a niece who lives in Florida and a nephew in New York City. I don’t know about anyone else other than her stepson, but he’s in L.A. and not a blood relative.”

  I sipped my drink, feeling horrible. Obviously, it wasn’t a total shock that someone at ninety-five could die, but Vera had been fine that afternoon. It made no sense. “Can I do anything to help?”

  “Can you take me to church tomorrow? I want to say a prayer for her and I’d rather you take me than your mother. She didn’t like Vera.”

  Some days I wasn’t sure who my mother liked. “Of course. Ten o’clock mass?”

  “Eight.”

  I mentally groaned. I can’t say I’ve ever been close friends with the morning. “Got it. See you then, and, Grandma, I’m really sorry about Vera. She was a very cool person.”

  “Thank you, dear.”

  I could tell she was struggling not to cry. When I ended the call I turned to Jake. “That’s completely bizarre. My grandmother said Vera was in her back yard. Who goes into their backyard at night in the dead of January?”

  “Did she smoke?” Jake asked.

  “I don’t think so, but honestly, Vera is old school enough that if she wanted to smoke she’d do it in her house or her garage. She had one of those townhome-style condos. Her garage is attached and her backyard is a paver patio with a small patch of grass behind it. Thank God the neighbor’s dog was barking. He found her when he opened the door to yell at his dog and the motion light turned on.”

  “I’m sorry, babe.” Jake squeezed my knee. “That sucks. At least you got to spend time with her today.”

  I nodded, distracted. All I could think was that this didn’t make sense. “Don’t you think it’s weird?” I insisted.

  Marner is a homicide detective. I was surprised he wasn’t more suspicious. He paused for a heartbeat, then said, “Where did Vera live? Cleveland proper?”

  I shook my head. “Bratenahl.” It was a small enclave surrounded by Cleveland and Lake Erie, known for lakefront mansions and high-end condos.

  “Do you want me to call their department and get more details?”

  “Could you?” I asked, relieved. “This just feels… off.” I wasn’t sure what I was implying, exactly, just that Vera wasn’t outdoorsy in the summer. Why the hell would she be going for a stroll outside in the dead of winter. Ugh. Dead of winter. Poor choice of words.

  “I’m going to step outside and call them. It’s too loud in here. You wait here, babe. It’s too cold for you.”

  Jake was considerate about things like that. He knew I was a huge winter wimp. “Thank you. I love you.”

  His eyes got dark. “I love you too. Be right back.”

  Restless, while waiting, I went into my camera roll and pulled up the picture of Grandma and Vera that I had impulsively snapped that afternoon. My vision blurred and I pulled my vape out of my purse and sucked on it. Technically, you weren’t supposed to in the bar, but I’d seen like five other people do it already. I usually left it at home to resist temptation but now I was glad I had it.

  It was just too much. Vera had seemed so vibrant. So alive. Now she was gone. And tomorrow marked the one-year anniversary of Ryan’s death. I felt grief wash over me like an ice-cold wave.

  Jake came back while I was clutching my phone to my chest and sobbing.

  “Maybe we should go,” he said, gently. He lifted his hand for the bartender. “Sorry,” he told him. “I need to cash out. We got some bad news.”

  The bartender took one look at me blubbering and waved his hand. “It’s on me, no worries. Sorry for your news.”

  “Thanks, man.” Jake dropped some money on the bar top for a tip and helped me off my stool.

  Blind from my tears and making an embarrassing hiccupping sound I couldn’t seem to control, I stumbled in my high-heeled boots. Jake caught me.

  “Sweetheart, that is not what we talked about. Pull it together.”

  Whirling around at the sound of Vera’s voice, I saw her standing three feet away in a very plain nightgown and cheetah print boots. Designer boots. Expensive as hell. Two grand kind of expensive. “Vera.”

  Her hair and makeup were fully done up. She blew me a kiss and gave me a wink. Then she was gone. There was a time I thought I might get used to ghosts just dropping in wherever I was, but nope. It was like when you were chilling on your couch and a spider runs across your arm. You freak the freak out.

  But I also realized instantly that what Vera had just been wearing in front of me was what she’d been wearing
when she died. Every ghost who had appeared to me so far had been trapped in their final outfit (good reason to keep it classy, people).

  But now I knew something was shady. Vera would never step into a snowdrift in a pair of mohair high-heel boots. “What did the cops say?” I asked Jake as he gently but firmly pulled me toward the door.

  “They said it appears she was dazed and confused, stepped outside, and the door automatically locked behind her and she couldn’t get back in.”

  I clapped my hand over my mouth. “What? That’s horrible! Why wouldn’t she just go knock on the neighbor’s back door?”

  “They feel it was an episode of dementia.” Marner pushed open the door and waited for me to walk past him.

  I regretted not putting on my coat sooner. I shivered and shoved my arms through the sleeves. His response was troubling to me. Vera did not have dementia. She had her shit together more than half the people I knew. “That doesn’t make sense. She was totally lucid this afternoon. Just hours ago.”

  “Babe, she was old. The mind comes and goes at that age.”

  I zipped my coat up and yanked my hood over my head. “How long does it take to die in weather like this?” The thought of Vera out there, confused, freezing to death, made my stomach turn.

  “At her age? Probably not long considering they found her in a thin nightgown.”

  Here was my opening. “Was she wearing shoes?”

  He nodded as he unlocked his car and opened the passenger door for me. “Boots.”

  That was not specific enough. That could be anything from galoshes to snow boots to go-go boots. “What kind of boots?”

  Jake frowned at me. “I don’t know. Bailey, what are you worrying about exactly?”

  “It just doesn’t make sense,” I insisted. “Are they going to do an autopsy?”

  He didn’t answer me. Just shut the door and came around to the driver’s side. He turned the car on and cranked up the heat. Rubbing his palms together he turned to me. “They’re not treating it as a suspicious death. She was an old lady with a ton of medications in her kitchen and bathroom. Maybe she heard a noise outside, forgot it was January, forgot her door auto-locks, and didn’t know what to do. I don’t think there will be much of an investigation.”

  “Can we ask for an autopsy?”

  He shook his head. “No. Her family has to do that if the department doesn’t intend to.” He shifted into “reverse” and asked, “My place, right?”

  “Yes.” I didn’t want to be alone and we were only a few blocks from his apartment. I kept glancing in the back seat of his car, hopeful that Vera might appear. Marner might not like or totally believe that I spoke to the dead, but I could care less about his opinion on it at the moment. I needed answers from Vera.

  “Vera wouldn’t go outside in those boots,” I told him. “Those are Saint Laurent and they’re over two thousand dollars for a pair. She wouldn’t ruin those.”

  Jake sighed. “First of all, how do you know what boots she was wearing? I didn’t tell you that because the detective didn’t tell me. Not that I would know what the hell whatever French crap you just said is anyway. He just said boots.”

  “I saw Vera at the bar. She appeared behind us for just a second.”

  “Jesus,” was Jake’s response. “What are you saying you think happened to her? Someone threw her out the back door and locked her out?”

  “I don’t know what I’m saying.” I didn’t. Who would want to kill Vera? “Were there any signs of burglary? She probably has cash sitting around.”

  “They didn’t say that, no.”

  “So we don’t know for sure.”

  Jake paused. “No.”

  “Can you ask?”

  “Can’t you just ask Vera?” He waved his hand around. “Hi, Vera, nice to meet you.”

  “She’s not here now,” I said, frowning. “Are you even listening to me?”

  Marner snorted. “Oh, yeah, I’m listening to you. I’m hearing everything you’re saying.”

  He thought I was overreacting, clearly. I blew out a breath and tried to calm myself down. I didn’t want to fight with my boyfriend. Not when I had better things to do.

  Like solve Vera’s homicide.

  It had to be murder.

  I didn’t buy the dementia bit. At all.

  I would just have to pick my way around this delicately, with Grandma’s help.

  We pulled into the driveway of the duplex Marner lived in. His apartment was upstairs and we didn’t spend as much time here as we did at my house because his downstairs neighbors had just had a baby and they were cranky about my high heels and other, ahem, sounds that might drift down to them. My house in Ohio City is a free-standing Victorian. The neighbors are close, but we don’t share walls.

  As soon as he opened the front door downstairs, I knew the drill. Remove the high-heeled boots. I almost fell over trying to pull them off in the narrow alcove. Jake had hooks there for coats and I reluctantly divested myself of my puffy coat and hung it. Then I ran quickly up the wood stairs in my socks, intending to dive onto the couch and under a blanket.

  “Where are you going?” Jake asked. “I kind of thought we’d go right to bed.”

  I knew what that meant. “Forget it, Detective,” I told him. “I’m not getting naked. It’s three degrees outside.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “So no fun until the cold spell snaps? Are you kidding me? I can work around flannel, I swear.”

  As charming as that sounded, I wasn’t exactly in the mood. “In the morning, I promise. I’ll be all warm and cozy then. Honestly, I’m too sad right now.”

  That made him contrite. He came over and sat next to me and pulled me against his chest. “I’m sorry, babe. I didn’t realize how much Vera meant to you.”

  I snuggled against him. “It’s just that you know, you have this fascinating life, and then you die alone in the cold? It’s horrible. Did you know she was friends with Audrey Hepburn?”

  “Wow, that’s pretty amazing.”

  Jake was always pretty skilled at just letting me talk and showing the appropriate level of interest. Well, except when sports were on. But he let me ramble now. “She was married four times, but she used to joke it should only count as three because she married the same bastard twice. He was her second and fourth husband.”

  “How does that work? Geez.”

  “Apparently not well since it ended in divorce twice. But that never seemed to bother her. She painted her life as a great adventure instead of any sort of failure.” I loved that confidence she had. Vera really had been the person who rolled through her life without guilt or regrets. I wish. I could feel guilty for weeks for accidentally letting a door close in someone’s face.

  “That’s how it should be. So she went to Hollywood to be an actress?”

  “Yes. But honestly, I think she went more for the parties. I don’t think it ever bothered her that she never hit it big. She enjoyed everything she did.”

  Jake squeezed me closer. “You know who else did that?”

  I glanced up at him. Jake has a strong jaw and dark eyes. They were filled with tenderness right now. “Who?”

  “Ryan.”

  My heart squeezed. “Yeah. He did.”

  I half expected Ryan to show up and mock our sentimentality.

  When he didn’t, I kissed Jake.

  I was warmer already.

  Grandma wore black to church, of course. I sat through the mass with her, going through the familiar movements learned from a childhood of kneeling, standing, shaking hands. Growing up Catholic is like being in a club. Lots of rules and rituals. Plus bingo and doughnuts. The Ladies Guild sold doughnuts and coffee after mass down in the gaping basement reception hall slash bingo parlor. I remembered when they had banned smoking at bingo. You would have thought the plagues had descended on Cleveland. The eleventh being the Plague of No Smoking.

  “I want a crawler,” Grandma said. “They know to put one aside for me. If some snot-nose
d kid snagged the last one I’m going to be PO’d.”

  Keeping it Christian, as usual.

  “I can’t walk any faster,” I told her. “There’s no crowd control.” It was all ancients shuffling, kids zipping through legs, and soccer moms creating all their fellow PTA moms.

  Whenever anyone asked me if I was ready to have children, moments like the three-year-old wiping his tears on the back of his mother’s ass assured me I was most decidedly not ready. I was still in that selfish phase where I preferred my clothes minus bodily fluids from offspring, okay, thanks.

  Speaking of offspring, without warning I spotted Jake’s mother. Shoot. What the hell— heck, I mean, we were still on church grounds—was she doing there? She belonged to a different parish fifteen minutes east. There was no way out of it. She had seen me and was waving.

  Don’t get me wrong. I like Jake’s mother. I could even go so far as to say I liked Jake’s mother more than my own. She wasn’t judgmental like mine. She was kind, loving, baked lots of goodies, and laughed with abandon. She excelled at being a mother, and was a dream grandmother to Jake’s nieces and nephews, always willing to babysit but without being an interfering busybody.

  Thus, the problem.

  Jake was turning thirty in two months, and until me, I think she’d thought he was approaching his expiration date as a fresh husband. That he was souring and was going to be tossed in the “not keepable” marital trash. Ever since we’d started dating, she’d been telling me she didn’t understand why he hadn’t found a nice girl before me, that he was good-looking, right? To which of course I nod “yes” every time. She then lists his many virtues, but ultimately concludes at the end of this speech on each occasion that it was his job as a homicide detective that was scaring off women. “Except for you,” she then says. Every. Time. While patting my arm affectionately.

  She wants us married and procreating, STAT.

  He’s her only son and she’s worried he’ll morph into creepy aging bachelor.

  Or something like that.

  Normally I really don’t mind. I dodge the questions and implications but now I was feeling emotionally vulnerable because of Ryan’s death anniversary (if that’s a thing) and Vera’s, in my mind, sketchy death.