“Later,” I said.
She jerked her chin at me, smiled, then flew off, just before Gavin’s Jaguar roared out from the side of the house where the garage was, then down the driveway.
I took off after him, a ghost in the daylight.
A nightmare waiting to happen.
17
The first part of the day was uneventfuclass="underline" Gavin did go to work, and he was a bummer deal there, too. He buried himself in his computer, utterly ignoring me even when I tried to mess with him by blowing along his arms and chilling him, reminding him that he wasn’t alone.
But he was smart, this guy, and not only was he pretending I didn’t exist—he’d kept his office door open after asking a few of his designers to stay inside for hours as they worked on that Victorian aircraft/fire/dragon game.
That didn’t exactly stop me from trying to initiate a hallucination, in spite of his coworkers, but even that didn’t seem to be working today. He’d somehow found a way to block me even better than Amanda Lee.
The only interesting thing that boded well for the haunting was the fact that Gavin kept his phone in the corner of his desk, and he occasionally glanced at it, then up in the air, in my cold direction.
Every time he did, I dipped down and gave him another feel of my fingers over his skin.
Ghosts exist, I thought to him, like he could hear. Just ask Alicia Dantès.
After I touched him about fifty times—no joke, I was on a roll—he finally reached his limit, grabbing the phone and fishing a piece of paper from his jeans pocket as he walked out of his office, telling his employees he’d be back.
Had I driven him to falling into our mild trap?
I trailed him, recognizing that paper in his hand. Amanda Lee had written on it earlier in the day, and now I could see that it said “Alicia Dantès” just above the number of her disposable phone.
I could feel the tension in him as he went into the hallway restroom, then stared at the writing, then at the phone. After a few strained minutes, he cursed and dialed.
Since I could hear everything, I didn’t miss the barely concealed satisfaction in Amanda Lee’s voice as he asked her to come over tonight to do what she usually did with ghosts.
For the rest of the day, it was like Gavin was pissed at himself for giving in to superstition, and there were a few times he picked up the phone again and paced in front of his long office window as his employees watched him. But he never canceled the appointment, and he even called Constanza to let her know that they would have company tonight. Also, he left a message for Farah before retreating to the office’s bigger work floor, where he lost himself in other consultations with his employees.
Snore.
But when dusk seethed over his office building, he had to go home, and right after we stepped foot into the mansion’s foyer, Farah rushed to the door to stand in front of Gavin.
“I just got home,” she said.
“Good for you.”
“What are you doing, Gavin? What’s going on in the sitting room?”
“I left you a message about it.”
“My phone ran out of juice while I was running errands, and I haven’t plugged it in yet.” She was plucking at her designer lavender pencil skirt, obviously rattled by Gavin’s strange visitor. “Constanza said that you asked that stylist to come in and set up a table with a crystal ball.”
I guessed Amanda Lee had never talked to Farah today, owing to the fact that Gavin had gotten hold of her first.
“Yes, I did clear it, and if you think I’m out of my mind for doing it, I would say you’re right.” I was pretty sure he meant it. “It’s good that she’s already here. That means we can get this over and done with.”
“Get what over?” She looked freaked. “A séance?”
“If that’s what she’s going to do for us. And if you’d met with me last night instead of taking off to James’s, you’d know more about why Alicia Dantès is here. You didn’t listen to my message at all?”
“No. Constanza isn’t sure why there’s a crystal ball involved, either.”
These people might as well have lived in separate caves. I’d never known families like this in life, hadn’t known one could even exist except for on programs like Dynasty.
It just took being a ghost to find out that not every family was normal.
“This woman’s psychic,” Gavin said, “and when she delivered your clothes today, she felt something in this place.”
Farah hugged herself, looking around. I ate her fear right up.
Gavin wasn’t afraid, though. “Wendy and I have been aware of strange things going on here, too.”
He gave her a searching glance, like he was asking her if she’d felt anything. Farah shook her head, but I could tell she’d been asking herself what that chill was last night. What had been following her.
What might’ve chased Rum Tum Tugger away.
Gavin seemed impatient as he ambled over to the sitting room’s entrance with me flying well above him and, sure enough, Amanda Lee was in there, dressed in her businesswoman-in-glasses costume again, smoothing a linen cloth over a big round table. A sketch pad and a pen waited on it, along with a crystal ball.
She was going all out.
When Farah dragged Gavin back into the foyer to further discuss this with him, I cruised into the room, to Amanda Lee.
“You can thank me for having Gavin call you today,” I said. “I think I irritated him enough so that he reached his wits’ end.”
As the murmur of Gavin and Farah’s chatter crept into the room, Amanda Lee only looked sidelong at me with a faint smile. I guessed it wasn’t time to converse with the ghost yet. And when she fixed a significant glance on the other side of the room, I understood why she wasn’t speaking to me.
Wendy Edgett was standing by a fireplace, staring straight at me. Or, at least, where I would be if I existed.
“Is that her?” she asked Amanda Lee, who only kept smiling, except mysteriously now.
Good God, this girl was sharp for a nonseer.
“I do sense a presence in the room,” Amanda Lee said in her Virginia lilt. “How did you know?”
Wendy only shrugged and knit her eyebrows together. She had slung her dark hair back into a high ponytail except for her pink streak, which framed her face on both sides. She was still wearing her school uniform. “You can say there’s a sort of… I don’t know. A cloud that I can barely see.”
I tried not to have a cow. She could kind of see me?
“Who is she, Ms. Dantès?” Wendy asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
It was weird watching and listening to them like I wasn’t even here.
Outside the room entrance, Farah’s voice got panicked. She was asking Gavin to not dabble in this “dark stuff” with psychics and séances.
Grudgingly, I had to respect a man who wasn’t so macho that he was beyond accepting help when he needed it. Then again, maybe Gavin was just desperate to “get rid” of me. I would be, too, if I had something giving me waking nightmares.
Wendy was shaking her head, sending Amanda Lee a sheepish look. “Farah might not be interested in all this, but I sure am.”
“Not everyone is, and I assume that includes your sister.” Amanda Lee gave one final neat-freak swipe to the tablecloth, then adjusted her glasses. “It’s hard for some people to accept that their house has been occupied by something uninvited. Farah’s just one of them.”
“This place has always been full of uninvited stuff.” Wendy crossed her arms over her chest. “Can’t you feel that?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
I floated closer to Wendy, kind of sorry for her. I’d been lucky during my teenage years—accepted, befriended, having a loving family without siblings who made me feel like crap.