Chapter 1
Bee
“You would tellme if I were a ghost, right?” I asked Deckard before blowing out a hot breath on the café window. The tip of my finger made little snowflakes in the fog.
“Aren’t you trying to clean that window?” he responded.
I spun to threaten my best friend with the bottle of glass cleaner. He flinched behind the safety of his laptop. He was a bit of a coward like that.
“You’re avoiding the question,” I said.
“Put the spray down.” He held up his hands in surrender.
I spun back to the window I was, in fact, meant to be cleaning.
Grizabella’s Café had been a pretty busy work day despite it being New Year’s Eve. Lots of locals and tourists alike spent their new Christmas cash in the many eccentric shops of downtown Slippery Slopes, New Mexico. It had slowed down now and I wandered around, very ghostlike, attempting to straighten up the cat café.
Anticipatory adrenaline made me restless. Maybe because I hadn’t made plans for the night, or perhaps that magic that came with the end of one year and the hopes of a new one beginning.
Or the three mochas I’d consumed during my six-hour shift.
Upstairs, the owner, Mel, was warming up her vocals on her piano by singing a rendition of “Memory”—a little on the nose, to be honest. She did that for the tourists. Occasionally, she’d hit a high note that would cause all the cats in the café to meow in unison.
Except for Einstein, the fluffy ginger cat currently chasing a piece of paper stuck to his tail in circles?—
“Oop.” He fell off his wall perch. “He’s okay.” Sure enough, Einstein got back up with an annoyed sneeze and walked over to one of the beds lining the café floor.
All my homies at Grizabella’s were fosters from the local no-kill animal shelter, Whisker Wonderland, and were available for adoption. Between Mel and I, somebody was almost always here to keep an eye on them and feed them. I usually took the opening shift and her the closing. Sometimes, Ellie from next door at Trailside Treats would come in and check on them too if need be. They stocked the pastries we offered.
Grizabella’s was one of the two local cafés, in case you preferred your lattes sans cat hair. Just kidding, there was no hair in our coffee.
Usually.
“Deckard, I’m serious,” I said, wiping away my breath snowflakes. Ghosts couldn’t make breath drawings, right?
He turned from where he was perched on his stool, working on his laptop as always. He tilted his head with his classic half-smirk that drove the ladies wild and his brown flop of hair that fell into his eyes. He held my focus with his one green, one blue eye.
“I guess it depends on if I thought it would make you sad,” he said.
I sighed and went to set the rag and cleaner on the counter. That’s so typical. Trying to protect my feelings. But I was completely fine. This was why I didn’t tell him about my parents leaving on their newest adventure on Christmas Day and being alone all week. He’d just give me that sad, pitying face when it wasn’t even sad. My parents had me late in life, retired by my graduation, and have since lived their best life by cruising it up around the world most of the year.
Deckard looked at the half-cleaned, streaky window and back at me. “Aren’t you going to finish?—”
“If I’m a ghost, you should tell me. That’s what friends do,” I said.
“Okay, Bee, if you were a ghost and I was aware of that fact and also not a ghost, I would tell you. What’s this really about? Does this have to do with your obsession with that statue?”
“I’m not obsessed.” I shrugged, getting that prickly feeling when he tried to dig for information from me.
“You’ve asked everybody in town about it.”
“You don’t think it’s weird that we have a giant statue in the middle of town, and nobody knows who she was or why we have it?”
“Everything about Slippery Slopes is weird.”
“That’s fair.”
“So you’re okay?”
