DevilMayRide

Read on for a sneak peek at the next
Ghost Dusters Mystery,
coming from Obsidian in December 2009.
The cemetery had smelled of freshly mowed grass. Sadie would’ve preferred the pungent stench of body decomposition. She had shifted uneasily from one foot to the other and skipped her gaze over the cluster of family and friends, then glanced upward at the gunmetal sky. She had looked everywhere but at the casket that rested on straps waiting to be lowered into the gaping hole beneath it.
The priest’s voice had droned on about how the human body was merely a shell.
Tell me about it, Sadie had thought, swallowing a thick lump of emotion.
If anyone knew souls weren’t attached to their bodies, it was Sadie. She lived that truth nearly every day. While Scene-2-Clean, her trauma-clean company, mopped up the physical mess of death, Sadie dealt with the spirits who needed help moving on to the next dimension.
In the back of her mind Sadie thought her firsthand knowledge of spirits and the ethereal dimension should give her comfort at the funeral of a loved one. It hadn’t.
Sadie had let out a small, sorrowful sigh, and then Zack’s hand found hers. She had tensed at first, then relaxed and linked her fingers with his, offering him a grateful smile before turning her gaze to the crowd. Her sister, Dawn, balanced her one-year-old son on her hip and leaned into the embrace of her husband, John. When Dawn’s eyes met Sadie’s the pain was so raw that Sadie had to look away.
The priest had wrapped things up by offering solace to the bereaved, and then everyone walked back to their cars. A few paused to comment softly to Sadie, but their words of comfort had dropped like stones at her feet.
She had been eager to leave the cemetery, but once they’d arrived at her mom’s house and mourners arrived for the wake, Sadie just wanted to escape. A couple hours of small talk had felt like a lifetime. Finally, when they were down to just family, Zack tracked down Sadie as she sipped coffee alone in the kitchen.
“Your mom’s asking where you are. Why don’t you come into the living room with everyone else?” Zack asked.
“I’ll be in there in a minute. I need to use the washroom first,” Sadie replied.
She quickly walked down the hall and wondered how long she could successfully stay hidden in the main bathroom before someone came looking for her. She’d successfully held her emotions together all day. It was a constant battle not to break down, but she just didn’t want to lower her wall. Not yet.
She used the toilet, flushed, and walked to the sink to splash cold water on her face. She glanced up at her reflection in the mirror and took in the dark circles under her eyes, and then ran damp fingers through her short-cropped hair.
“I liked it better when you had it long,” a deep male voice said quietly from behind her.
Sadie squeaked in surprise and whirled to face the man.
She gasped. “Wh-what the hell are you doing?”
“Oh, I know,” he said, holding up a hand. “You’re a grown woman. I shouldn’t be sneaking up on you in the bathroom. It’s unseemly.”
“It’s not that. . . .” Sadie said. She slowly shook her head from side to side and tried to come up with an easy way to say what needed to be said. “Dad, you’re dead.”
Her father tossed back his head and laughed with a throaty guffaw that reminded Sadie of childhood Christmas mornings and Sunday picnics. Tears burned her eyes but she blinked them away.
“It’s true, Dad. You’re dead. Gone. We just put you to rest at Memorial Cemetery.”
“I didn’t raise you to be a fibber, young lady.”
Sadie sat down on the toilet seat and blew out an uneasy breath. “You had a heart attack watching Leno.”
“I always knew Jay’s monologue would kill me,” he said with a snort. At Sadie’s deadpan face he took a step forward and reached for her. His hand dropped straight through Sadie’s shoulder, but he didn’t appear to notice. Sadie shivered with the revulsion that always coursed through her body when spirits attempted to physically touch her.
“Have you had a hit to the head? A fever?” he asked.
Sadie looked up into her father’s gray eyes and shook her head.
“No, Dad.” She locked eyes with him. “I’m serious.”
“That’s ridiculous! How can I be dead? If I were dead, we wouldn’t be able to have this conversation.”
“So you’d think,” she commented drily. At his confused look she took a deep breath and blurted out, “I can see and talk to the dead. Those who haven’t gone over. It’s a little gift I adopted after Brian died. I see a lot of spirits doing trauma cleans. I try and help them.”
“You’ve been hanging out with that weird psychic friend of yours too much,” he growled, shaking an angry finger in her face. “Or you’ve been working too long cleaning up crime scenes. What kind of job is that for a young woman, anyway? Who on earth has ever heard of a pretty young thing like you mopping up people’s bodily fluids after they’ve been left to rot and—”
“Stop,” Sadie pleaded quietly. She pinched her eyes shut. “Please. Just stop. Don’t make this harder than it already is.”
“You need to talk to someone. A shrink or something. Guess we should’ve gotten you some help after your brother killed himself, but—”
“This isn’t about Brian. This is about you!” Sadie shouted. “You’re dead! Haven’t you wondered why you haven’t been able to talk to anyone for days, not even Mom? All the people that have been in the house for the last few hours were here for your wake.”
“That’s crazy talk.” He puffed out his cheeks and walked over to the small bathroom sink. “You’re saying I’m a ghost. Well, according to all the old movies I’ve seen, if I were a ghost I wouldn’t be able to see myself in the—”
He stopped short because there was no reflection staring back at him in the mirror. The look on his face was first one of astonishment, then fear. His reaction knifed painfully through Sadie’s chest.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“But—but how can this be?” he murmured.
He reached his fingers out to touch the mirror but they simply passed right through. Then he looked back over at Sadie and quickly vanished. Sadie knew her father’s spirit wasn’t gone for good. There’d been no shimmer. When the spirits she met left for the next dimension permanently, their shapes always shimmered around the edges before slowly dissipating. A quick disappearance like this only meant he’d left the area or was no longer visible to Sadie.
Sadie spent a moment gathering her thoughts. She’d naturally assumed she’d never see her father again.
“You okay in there?” Zack’s voice called from the other side of the bathroom door.
“I’ll be right out,” Sadie replied.
She heard Zack walk away, then waited a beat to see if her dad would return. When he didn’t, she stepped out of the bathroom and walked into the living room to find Dawn hoisting one-year-old Jacob into her arms while John snagged the diaper bag and various toys off the carpet. All the other guests were gone.
“You’re leaving?” Sadie asked.
“It’s time for his nap,” Dawn replied.
“He could nap here,” Sadie said.
“It’s just easier if he’s in his own bed,” John explained.
“Maeva and Terry did a great job catering the wake,” Dawn said, shifting Jacob onto her other hip. “They said to say good-bye to you. They were in a hurry because Terry has to cater a wedding in a few hours and Maeva was holding a séance at her psychic café at four o’clock. She said she’ll call you later.”
“Where’s Mom?” Sadie looked around for her mother.
“She went to lie down,” Dawn said. “I think she took one of the sedatives the doctor prescribed.”
At Sadie’s worried look Dawn added, “She’s going to be fine.”
“Her husband of forty-eight years just died. I don’t think ‘fine’ is the word that covers it,” Sadie said, snarkily.
“Easy.” Zack placed a warning hand on her arm.
“That’s not what I meant,” Dawn said reproachfully.
“What your sister meant was that we’ve been with your mother practically every second since your dad died. We know she’s hurting, but she’ll have to be alone eventually,” John stated softly.
“But she shouldn’t be alone today,” Sadie insisted.
“We can stay longer,” Zack said. “We’re not in any rush.”
But Sadie was in a rush. She didn’t want to deal with the naked grief that shimmered in her mom’s red-rimmed eyes. Mostly she didn’t want to deal with her dead father, whose ghost was for some reason camping out in the bathroom.
“You’ve been avoiding spending one-on-one time with Mom since it happened,” Dawn said accusingly.
“I have not,” Sadie protested, but at Dawn’s piercing glare she relented. “Okay, maybe I have, but—”
“Look, I get it,” Dawn said huffily. “But we all miss him and we’re all hurting. You don’t have the market cornered on pain.”
“I never said I did.”
“Well, then don’t act like it.”
“You two knock it off,” Dad chimed from the hallway. “Your squabbling will wake up your mother.”
“Shut up,” Sadie hissed.
“You shut up!” Dawn retorted angrily.
“Let’s go,” John said, taking a now whimpering Jacob from Dawn’s arms and heading for the door.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Sadie protested lamely, but she didn’t want to follow that up with, I was talking to our dead father, who finally decided to come out of the bathroom. It wasn’t until Dawn and her family had left in a huff that Zack spoke.
“So your dad’s ghost is here with us, huh?”
“Yup. This day just keeps getting better and better,” Sadie said sarcastically.
“Wait a second,” her dad spoke up. “You mean to tell me that this guy knows about you being able to talk to ghosts, but you didn’t bother telling me or your mother?” His voice was colored with hurt.
“Sorry. It’s not the kind of thing I felt comfortable talking to you about,” Sadie said to her father. To Zack she said, “He’s miffed that I never told him about the talking-to-the-dead thing.”
“Hell, sometimes I wish you’d never told me,” Zack said, slumping into an overstuffed chair. At Sadie’s angry glare Zack cleared his throat. “I’m kidding. Really. I love everything about you. Your whole communicating-with-ghosts thing makes life, um, interesting.”
“Huh.” Sadie said.
“Tell him to get out of my chair,” Dad said. “I’m dead a few days and that man thinks he can just sit in my chair.”
“That man is Zack Bowman, my boyfriend, whom I live with. You don’t have to act like you’ve forgotten who he is,” Sadie retorted.
“Your dad never did like me,” Zack said, folding his arms angrily over his chest.
“He’s right,” Dad said.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, he just didn’t like the idea that we were living together without getting married,” Sadie said to Zack. “Right?” she said to her dad.
“And I don’t like him sitting in my chair.”
“It’s not like you’re sitting in it,” Sadie said with exasperation.
“Oh yeah?”
Dad walked over and sat right on top of Zack. Of course, Zack had no idea that Ron Novak was sitting sort of on him and kind of through him. Sadie looked over at her father and could see right through him to Zack. It was a surreal image that gave her an immediate headache.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Sadie said with a sigh.
“I just can’t deal with this right now. Maybe I’ll get home and find there’s a message from a nice simple suicide to clean up. That would be nice.”