“All right.” I felt bad intruding on his privacy even if it might be for his own good. I met his eyes. “You should know that I’m not fae or werewolf, but I am something. That’s how I knew you were fae—and that’s why I might be able to do something about your ghost. I’m giving you my secret because I stole one from you—and I’ll be asking you for more. You should have at least one of mine in return.”
Rick looked at me, then nodded. He glanced at Zack. “Our introductions were truncated. I’m Rick Albright. Lisa, you’ve obviously met, and I’ve met Ms. Hauptman.”
“Zack Drummond,” Zack introduced himself.
Rick nodded. “All right.” He looked at me. “You’re in charge.”
“Lisa said your wife has been haunting you since her death,” I told him.
He nodded. “I thought ghosts were supposed to be attached to the place they died, or at least someplace important to them. But it doesn’t matter where I am. In airports. Business meetings.” He blanched, drank the soda water in one smooth gulp. “Sometimes she looks alive. I’ll look over, and she’s eating at the table next to me.” He looked away from us and kept talking more and more quietly. As if noise would make the images more real. “Or walking down the road. Sometimes she’s . . . in pieces. Just like when I came in from a night of drinking and found her body cut up in our kitchen. Some of her was in the sink, some of her was . . .” He stopped speaking. “Excuse me,” he said, and walked rapidly out of the room.
Zack and I could hear him vomiting. We waited for him, Lisa visibly torn because she wanted to follow him.
“Sorry,” he apologized as he returned.
“Why don’t you show us around the house,” I said. “Tell me if you see her, and I’ll tell you if—”
And standing behind him was a woman who was almost six feet tall, a stunning redhead with bright blue eyes and a sad mouth. She reached out and ran a hand over his shoulder.
“Well,” I said. “I don’t think that will be necessary. What was your wife’s name?”
“Nicole,” he stared at me, then looked behind him. “You see her? She’s not there.”
“She’s wearing a camisole,” I said. “Blue with embroidered black flowers and a pair of black yoga pants.”
“That’s what she was wearing when she was killed,” he said. “All the newspapers reported it.” His eyes narrowed at me in sudden suspicion. He turned all the way around, looking through the ghost I saw as if she weren’t there. When he faced me again, he said in a low voice, “There were photos of her clothing in one of the books.”
“What about your intuition?” asked Lisa in a small voice. She was responsible for bringing me here.
His mouth softened.
“Nicole,” I said.
She looked at me—and then straightened when she could meet my eyes. “I can’t leave,” she said.
I nodded. “What are you doing?”
“I can’t leave,” she told me sadly, running her hand down his arm.
“He didn’t kill you?” I asked.
She looked at him, bewildered. “I can’t leave.”
There wasn’t a lot of intelligence left. The kind of haunting that Rick had described, brutal and powerful, just seemed beyond her.
“Rick,” I said, still looking at her, “did you kill your wife?”
“What do you think?” he said bitterly. “Do you think she’d haunt me otherwise? The case against me was dismissed, you know, because my money ensured that no one could prove my guilt.”
Sometimes people learn to lie so well I can’t hear it in their voice, especially if they’ve had years to practice or even come to believe their own lies. But I had to get a yes or no answer even to try.
“Did you kill your wife, Mr. Albright?” I asked again.
“I can’t leave,” his dead wife said again, and leaned her head against his shoulder. “I can’t leave.”
He shivered, but I don’t think he felt her. “Yes,” he said coolly. “Of course I killed her.” He looked at Lisa when she gasped. “You have to know it,” he said harshly. “If I hadn’t been filthy rich, I would’ve rotted in prison for the rest of my life—or sat on death row until someone decided to pull the lever.”
“Werewolves and Mercy,” Zack said conversationally, “can tell when you are lying.”
“What Zack means to say, Lisa,” I told her, “is that that was a big fat lie. Not the part about being rich having saved him—but the part about his having murdered his wife. Which leads to the question—why, then, is she haunting you, Rick? All she can tell me is that she can’t leave.”
Zack stared at me as if I were speaking Greek, but Lisa took a big shaky breath. “I knew it,” she said. Then she walked over to Rick and shoved him. “That’s for trying to make me think you’re a murderer. Stupid.” Then she turned back to me. “So why can’t she leave?”
I shrugged. “I’ve run into a few different kinds of ghosts.” I used to think there were only three kinds, but I’d expanded my knowledge a bit over the past few years. There are more things in Heaven and Earth and all that. But some things still held true. “One of the most common kinds that I’ve seen are repeaters—ghost that seem to reenact the same events over and over.”
“Traumatic events,” said Zack.
I nodded. “Usually. But sometimes just everyday things. Habits. They don’t interact with the real world much. The appearance of body parts—that fits with a repeater, except that she didn’t die here in the hot-tub room, right? And repeaters are usually tied to places, not people.”
“It’s his fault,” the ghost said.
“No,” I told her. “He didn’t kill you.”
“It’s his fault,” she said again. “I can’t leave.”
“Is he holding you here?”
She stared at me. “It’s his fault. It’s his fault I died.”
I don’t know if the dead can lie or not. I just didn’t think that this ghost had enough . . . personality left to lie.
I looked at Rick. “How could it be your fault that she died?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
The hair on the back of my neck started to tingle, and my ears popped like I was on an airplane in rapid descent. A sweet scent from my childhood drifted to my nose as well as the sharp scent of ozone—lightning just before it strikes. I didn’t know what it was, but it didn’t feel like anything very healthy. And the first rule in my sensei’s rules of combat is—run.
“Everyone out of the house,” I said.
I followed my own advice and started for the door. I grabbed Lisa’s upper arm as I moved. I didn’t run, but I wasn’t waiting for flies to gather, either.
Zack took my lead and, as he walked by Rick, he put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him along. Rick didn’t struggle so much as hesitate, but Zack was a werewolf—so Rick came with us.
So did Rick’s dead wife.
Even with the ghost tagging along, I felt better with the door closed behind us. Which meant whatever was unnerving me, it wasn’t Nicole Albright.
“Tell me,” I said, “about the times you saw your wife when you weren’t here. When was the first time?”
“If you’ll tell me why I just got hustled out of my own home,” Rick said.
“Something happened,” Lisa said. “I don’t know what, but a whole marathon of people were jogging across my grave.”
“Did you feel anything?” I asked Zack.
“The spike of emotion from you and a moment later from Lisa,” said Zack. He was kind enough not to say that what he’d smelled was terror. “But I smelled something different . . . not sure what it was. Sweet.”
“Bubble gum,” I said.
And Rick’s pupils contracted.
“That means something to you?” I said.
“My mother.” He half laughed. “She had this shampoo that was supposed to be pomegranate or something. She paid a fortune for it. But to me it always smelled like pink bubble gum.”