There was no home-cooked meal that night. Marner got called in to work and canceled on me. Then I didn’t hear from him or anyone who was no longer living for three days. Three blissful days where I had zero contact with the spirit world or any reminders of murder. Life was normal, albeit a bit boring. I have to say, I welcomed it being a little dull.

Hannah was still stuck in processing for whatever reason, and I wondered if it had something to do with her body not being found. Ryan was being cranky over me refusing to get involved in Hannah’s missing person’s case and had not been around. Twice I got a glimpse of Phil watching me from a distance, which was creepy, but he didn’t try to approach me again, and I appreciated he kept a minimum sixty feet between us as a rule of thumb.

Especially when I was on the Lakewood home tour with my mother. Now that would have been awkward, having a ghost trailing me from house to house. Every other September the historical society hosts a dozen homes on a walking tour that displays renovations, restorations, and gardens. I dug it, because I loved seeing ideas on how to blend modern living with the historic integrity of old homes. It gave me ideas for more effective staging of older houses. My mother appreciated the gardens more than the homes because she wasn’t into anything vintage. She preferred her own house, built in the eighties, to anything that could be called a character home.

But as usual she had an opinion on everything and most of it was critical. It served her well as a prosecutor, her ability to say whatever she thought without concern for anyone’s feelings, but when you were mingling with hundreds of ladies who lunch, and potential clients for me, her voice felt like a gunshot in a monastery.

“Someone loves the dollar store,” she said in a Tudor that had an overabundance of dried floral wreaths. Aside from the vertical potpourri, it was a beautiful house, with thick woodwork and flagstone floors in the sunroom.

“Mom,” I murmured, glancing around to see if anyone had heard her.

“What?” She feigned ignorance.

“You’re being a little loud.”

She ignored me and pointed to the sideboard in the dining room. “Really? They roped this off?”

I decided my best course of action was to wander away and pretend I didn’t know her. So much for mother-daughter quality time. She wasn’t even trying to be funny in her critiques. I could allow for a sense of humor, but she was just being prickly. Of course, she looked fantastic doing it. My mother always looked like a million bucks and ten years younger than she was. Maybe her sour attitude had preserved her. Like pickling in vinegar.

Growing up I’d told myself that my mother had seen too much as a prosecutor to be Susie Sunshine, and that was true. But part of it was just her personality. She was the quintessential glass half-empty personality.

Across the room, on the other side of a baby grand piano, I saw a woman I recognized. Marner’s mother. I had only met her a couple of times, at occasions like Ryan’s funeral, but I wasn’t sure if she would recognize me, so I hesitated to speak to her. But when she turned and saw me, she smiled. “Bailey, hi, how are you?” She reached out and squeezed my arm.

“Hi, Mrs. Marner, I’m good, how are you?”

“Good. I’m here with some of my friends from the Ladies’ Guild at church. St. Luke’s.”

The addition of her parish name amused me slightly. I guess your parish was a calling card, or at the very least told someone who you might mutually know. “Oh, that sounds fun. I’m here with my mom.”

“So are you seeing Jake tonight?” Her dark eyes were curious.

“Hmm?” I asked, startled. “Uh, no.” I was actually meeting Nick for our coffee date. Despite the fact that I hadn’t heard from Marner in days, I still felt guilty about it. Having his mom asking me point blank if I was seeing Jake had me at a seven on the scale of so awkward.

“I saw on the news about those body parts. Jake told me you were the one who found them. Honey, that’s just horrifying.”

That was when I saw that Phil was in the kitchen, hovering between a young mother in yoga pants and her bored husband. Phil shifted too close to the mother, who had her daughter in her arms, and the toddler started screaming as she tried to draw away from Phil.

Interesting. Babies and me. That’s who could see the dead. Maybe dogs too. I wondered what that said about my mental state.

“It was horrible, but I haven’t heard anything about who it was or what the police think. I don’t know if they’ve even declared it a homicide.” I hadn’t asked and the cops hadn’t been in touch with me.

“Oh, haven’t you heard?” She dropped her voice and murmured, “They found the head.”

I felt the blood drain from my face. “Oh, that’s just awful. Oh my gosh…” For some reason I was speechless. Probably because if Phil really was the victim, I knew what he looked like, and the image of his head detached from his body had popped into my mind unbidden. Once there, I couldn’t shake it, and it was a brutal thought that reminded me all too clearly that I had been in danger wandering around out there.

“I’m sorry, Bailey.” Mrs. Marner looked upset. “I didn’t mean to shock you. Sometimes I don’t know when to shut up.”

Phil and my mother were both moving toward me from opposite directions and for a second, I thought I was going to have a legitimate panic attack. But then I steeled myself against it. I needed to keep it together. I wasn’t in danger. I was on a freaking home tour, surrounded by elderly women and fine furnishings. Nothing bad was going to happen to me here.

“No, don’t worry about it. I just hadn’t heard that they had…made progress. I just feel so bad for the victim.” I made eye contact with him over Mrs. Marner’s shoulder. “Someone must be missing him very much.”

Phil looked troubled. His jaw and mouth worked but he didn’t actually speak. He was a good foot taller than Mrs. Marner, and he looked a little menacing, but for some reason, I trusted he would do nothing. My mom approached and I had to do introductions and then the ladies guild members joined in and they were all talking about the use of chintz in the dining room and I was off the hook.

I got swept along the tour in a tide of chatty women. I refused to speak out loud to Phil even when he followed me, hovering just a few feet behind me. Finally when we left the house, the final one on the tour, I turned around as we walked down the driveway. He stood in the arched doorway, people walking through his body. As each one passed through his spectre they all shivered and glanced around, smiles falling off their faces. A man glanced up at the corner, like he was expecting to see a heavy fan positioned there, and then shrugged when he saw nothing.

Phil caught my eye. Then he slowly lifted his arm and made a slicing motion across his throat with his finger. One end to the other. I wasn’t sure if he meant himself, or if it was a threat aimed at me. Either way, I swiveled my head around and rushed the rest of the way down the driveway.

After parting ways with my mother, I called Marner. “They found the head?” I asked as a greeting.

There was a pause. “Yes. How do you know that?”

I started my car and pulled away from the curb. “I saw your mother on the home tour. She told me.”

“You saw my mother?” He sounded appalled by that. “Jesus.”

“Yes, I did. First she asked me if I was seeing you tonight, then she informed me the police found a head. Where? Why didn’t you tell me?” I wasn’t sure why it mattered, but somehow the discovery of the head made it real. It wasn’t an industrial accident or a rubber hand, it was a real person who had been brutally murdered.

“It was partially buried about a hundred yards from the arm and thigh. Coroner ruled it a homicide. Death by decapitation.”

“Wait, so the person was alive when his head was cut off?” Egad.

“Yes. They might have been drugged. It’s hard to say at this point, and no, I can’t tell you anything else. That’s all the department is willing to share at this time.”

“I’m not a reporter,” I snapped.

“And I’m not a detective on this case because of the conflict of interest.”

I refused to acknowledge that or the fact that he hadn’t called or texted in three days after canceling our plans. Was this what being involved with a detective would be like? He would always be vague and tight-lipped about work? Because that was annoying.

I almost said, “Tell that to Phil,” but at the last second I realized I wasn’t supposed to know Phil’s identity. I caught myself before I crammed my foot so deep into my mouth it would take a crane to pull it back out. That would be bad. So, so bad. My heart was racing from the terror of almost having said something I couldn’t explain and making myself sound certified. Holy cow.

Opening my glove box I pulled out my vape and took a drag.

Marner heard me sucking on it and blowing out. He didn’t give me a hard time the way Ryan did. He just sighed. Like I had disappointed him. Or maybe the situation frustrated him. I wasn’t sure.

“I guess I’ll just go online and see what I can find out,” I said, which was a little passive-aggressive, but I wasn’t sure what else to say. “I’ll talk to you later.”

“Bailey.”

“What?”

Another lengthy pause. “Nothing. Just be careful.”

Marner said more without words than with. I knew he worried about me. But I didn’t want to be his problem. I wanted a partner. His sentiments made me feel sad instead of reassured.

“Sure. Talk to you later.”

Nick of the balcony above the river was a nice guy. We met at Phoenix Coffee in my neighborhood and chatted easily for an hour. I’d lied and told him I was meeting my parents for dinner so I could duck out after sixty minutes just in case it got weird or I was bored out of my mind. It felt slightly like a job interview, but otherwise it was fine. Mildly entertaining, but not life changing.

Even though he was probably my type, I couldn’t say that I was attracted to him. He seemed a little vanilla. He was wearing another golf shirt and he was very tidy, which really made my disinterest ridiculous. I should have been jumping up and down that here was a man who clearly loved a good crease. Yet I was just not quite feeling it, and the only reason I could think why was Marner.

“So that’s how I got kicked out of St. Ed’s,” he said with a laugh, referencing an all boys’ high school. “It’s stupid how cool we think we are at sixteen.”

I smiled, even though I had only been half-listening. “I don’t know. I knew I wasn’t cool. I was always wound tight. It’s in my DNA.”

He sat back in his chair and studied me for a minute. He had gray eyes. They were so pale they seemed a little vacant, which was disarming. But his smile was warm and his voice was even, casual. Even charming. “So there aren’t any cops here. Is there any particular reason a nice girl like you were wandering around under a bridge by the river? I can’t wrap my head around it. That’s just not a place people stroll. If it’s personal, tell me to buzz off, but I just keep getting this tightness in my gut when I think about what could have happened to you.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, I sound like I’m reprimanding you. I don’t mean to do that. It’s just you seem so…”

“What?” Idiotic? I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear his answer.

Nick took a sip of his coffee. He seemed to be wrestling with what to say. “Beautiful. That’s what you are.”

Well, that didn’t suck. It was nice to have someone call me beautiful after all the crap I’d been getting lately about being too skinny, too pale, too flat-butted.

“And petite and vulnerable. I just have this reel going in my head that if I hadn’t stepped out onto my balcony maybe something horrible would have happened to you.”

That touched me. He looked genuinely torn up. I could see where he was coming from. Most likely I would have the same response. I reached out and touched his hand briefly.

“Thanks. It’s nice to know that there are still people in this world who give a crap about a total stranger. I don’t know what I was doing there,” I said, and it was honest enough that it came off sounding very convincing. “I just had a rough day and I wanted to look at the water.”

“Bad timing, huh?”

“That’s an understatement.” I hesitated to discuss it further with him, but then again, he was an innocent bystander like me and who better to talk to? “I went online and looked for information about it. It seems they found a few more pieces, including a man’s head.”

He nodded. “I saw that too. I guess I don’t see the point in killing someone and cutting them up and then leaving all the body parts where someone can find them so easily.”

I shivered. “It does smack of a serial killer, doesn’t it? It’s like he wanted the body to be found.” I rubbed my lipstick stain off the mug in front of me. The coffee shop had a cozy vibe, with warm wood tones and lots of windows, but I shivered in the air conditioning. “There was no blood at the site, was there? I mean I don’t think the guy was dismembering a corpse in the field anyway, so he clearly put the body there.”

“I didn’t even think about that. I can’t say I’ve ever given murder a whole lot of thought.”

“Me either. I used to be an evidence tech for the police, straight out of college. My mom is a prosecutor and I thought I wanted to follow in the family business, so to speak, working for justice, but I hated it. I never had a murder case though. Mostly drugs and robbery and things like that. It wasn’t as glamorous as I imagined. Mostly I dusted for fingerprints and collected processed cheek swabs.”

“You didn’t like the puzzle of solving a crime?”

“It wasn’t solving a crime. You’re not the detective. You’re not the scientist processing evidence. You’re just the person in between who has to catalog everything from the scene to the computer to the lab.”

“I can’t say much about boring jobs.” He grinned. “I’m a CPA.”

“I’m one of the few women in the world who actually find that sexy. I love organization.” I just making casual conversation, but it occurred to me that could be misconstrued as flirting.

He did seem to take it that way because when I said I needed to leave to meet my parents he asked me out again. And because I am a people pleaser (thanks, Mom) and never know how to say no, I said, “Sure, that would be great.”

I left giving myself a mental face palm.

When I got home, Hannah was sitting on my couch. “Hi,” she said. Her knees were up to her chest and her shirt was tented over them. She was hugging her shins.

I wished like hell that 1) she had called first, if such a thing were possible and 2) she could wash the mascara off her cheeks. There was something so morbid about those black streaks marring her alabaster skin. Hannah was a beautiful girl, with the sort of exotic good looks I had always envied. For all the media claims that men liked a fiery redhead, in reality they would pass kinky curls and freckles over in a heartbeat for a busty blonde or a slick, raven-haired goddess.

“Wow, hi, Hannah.” I glanced around. “Where’s Ryan?”

“I don’t know. He’s mad at me for falling off the wagon and for dating someone else, and he kind of stormed off.” She put her chin on her kneecaps.

I dropped my purse on my end table and sat down next to her. I had to admit, I was debating how quickly I could get rid of her. I didn’t know Hannah. I was tired. I wanted to be alone. She was dead. You know, the usual reasons you don’t want company.

“So what’s up?” I propped my feet up onto my coffee table, breaking my usual rule of no shoes on furniture. For the home tour I had worn the world’s most adorable yellow pumps and a white floral sundress. “Is everything going okay with your processing?” I mean, what else do you say to a ghost who is hanging out like she has every right to be chilling on your couch?

Hannah shrugged. “It’s whatever.”

Helpful. Not. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No. Can we just binge watch something on Netflix? I can’t turn the TV on, so I’ve just been waiting for you to get home.”

So we were having a girls’ night whether I wanted to or not. Fabulous. “I need to catch up on Shameless.”

“Eww, no, not that show. I want to watch Orange is the New Black. I never finished season three.”

I was trying really hard to remember that Hannah had been murdered, therefore the last week had been rough on her. But at the same time, like wasn’t that more than a tiny bit rude? If I were a jerk I would just refuse to watch what she wanted, or even better, not turn the TV on and just leave. But that’s not me. So I just silently put on her show and went to go make myself a salad for dinner.

Two hours later, I was getting restless. “Do you want to go somewhere, or do something?” I asked Hannah. I knew the rules seemed to be that she couldn’t go anywhere that I wasn’t, which seemed a bit unfair to me, but no one had asked my opinion on the whole thing.

She just shook her head. “No, I’m good. This is so nice to just be chilling out for a change.”

Because life was so hard even after death? That wasn’t reassuring.

“Can you make some popcorn?” she asked. “I just want to smell it.”

“I’m not sure I have any.” I wasn’t a huge popcorn fan. It made my stomach hurt because I had no ability to stop myself once I started and I usually ate the whole bag. I was like a goldfish—I would eat it until I exploded.

“Can you check?” She gave me a pleading look.

It must be nice to just want what you want and be willing to ask for it until you got it. I had no clue how to do that. Because if I did I would ask her to leave so I could watch what I wanted on TV in my bed in my PJs.

I went into my kitchen and managed to find a box of microwave popcorn that had two pouches still in it. I had no idea how long they had been in there, but it didn’t matter because no one was going to eat it. Stale was irrelevant to smell. My phone started ringing in my hand. I had brought it into the kitchen with me as a matter of habit. It was Marner. I realized I wasn’t even sure why he had called me earlier. He’d never really said. I had been the one to bring up the head.

Needing a break from Hannah anyway, I answered. “Hello?”

“Hey, uh, they found a woman in the river that matches Hannah’s description when they were dragging for more body parts. Her neighbor reported her missing two days ago after a steady parade of people came looking for her.”

I ripped open the plastic on the popcorn and chose my words carefully. “Do you think it’s her? Did you see the body?”

“I don’t know what Hannah looks like. They’re seeing who they can find to identify her.”

“I’m not doing it,” I said vehemently.

“No one asked you to. Calm down. She clearly has friends and family who have been looking for her.”

“Oh. Well, that’s good I guess.” I put the popcorn in the microwave.

“I just thought you’d want to know since you were concerned about her.” There was a pause and I knew what was coming. “Why were you so concerned about her, again?” he asked. “You never really said why you thought she was missing, or how you would know that. Or how you knew her, for that matter, aside from maybe three words exchanged at Ryan’s funeral.”

My best bet was going on the offense. “I feel like you’re constantly accusing me of something, but you won’t say what it is.”

“Okay. I’m accusing you of being dishonest.”

There it was. Right out in the open and it stung. Not being able to tell him the truth about anything was wearing on me. I felt dishonest. I felt sneaky. And I hated that. It was not natural for me and it made me want to avoid any contact with someone who I had to lie to—like Marner. “That’s the conversation we keep having. So here’s the thing, Marner. If you think I’m lying, and you think I’m lying about lying, then stop calling me. Because that’s all you seem to say when you do call me.”

“You want me to stop calling you?” He sounded hurt.

Where did he get off being hurt? “You’re calling me a liar! And you haven’t even once so much as mentioned what it means that you randomly ask me to do something with you, but you’ve made zero attempts to kiss me after that one time.”

That was taking it too far, I knew it. He was going to retreat faster than the guys in the running of the bulls in Spain. Hands up, head down, run like hell.

“Are you mad that I canceled the other night? I had to work.”

Our communication sucked, and it was always going to suck until I could tell him the truth about seeing dead people. “I know that!”

“I have to go,” he said.

Boom. There it was. He was running. “Oh yeah, what are you doing tonight?”

“Not competing with a dead guy for a change.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” He thought all of this was about Ryan?

“Exactly what you think.”

“Well, enjoy your night off then,” I said, sounding as snippy as I felt. “I didn’t realize being with me was such hard work.”

We had officially descended into a high school relationship. This was ludicrous.

“It’s exhausting, that’s what it is.”

Oh no he didn’t. I hung up. I just did it. I’d never in my entire life ended a phone call without saying goodbye and I did it impulsively. I instantly felt guilty, but I stuck by my decision and didn’t text an apology. It wasn’t a good time to date Jake. I couldn’t be honest, he was right, and that was not sitting well with either of us. I needed to sort out my whole “seeing the dead” thing first before he and I went there. Well, we probably never would know. It was done. Finito. Over.

That thought had me reaching for the bag of popped corn and tearing it open, disregarding all warnings about hot contents. I burned my hand and didn’t care. I shoveled a liberal handful into my mouth and chewed.

“Hey, Hannah, here’s your popcorn,” I said, going back to the living room, determined not to feel sorry for myself. At least I was alive.

But Hannah was gone.

The only evidence she had been there was Orange is the New Black playing on my TV.

I finished the episode she and I had been watching and I polished off the entire bag of popcorn, just to prove my point about lack of control. As my intestines rebelled against the effort required to digest corn, I flipped to a different show and actually regretted that I didn’t have dinner plans with my parents like I had told Nick.

Saturday night was never so dang exciting.

I licked salt off the bag and regretted all my choices.