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Not me, Cam silently answered her. And she wasn’t as sure as Avery that she was actually thriving amid all this mess. Just then, a text buzzed on Cam’s phone. It was from Francine.

Read through all the stuff from the library, the message read. Not a ton that seems relevant, but wanna meet for burgers and beers to go over it all?

Cam was hit by a flash of inspiration. It was time to gather the team: Avery, Francine, Birdie—and Ada. Got a better idea, she punched into her phone. Meet me at Birdie’s at 7.

Cam turned to Avery, forming a plan that took the shape of a list in her mind: parsnip soup (she had all the ingredients with her in the kitchen), margarita makings (lime, tequila, Cointreau—all on Birdie’s shelves), four women, and one ghost.

“Summer Sister?” she asked. “Are you ready to raise the dead?”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Later that night, as Cam squeezed limes in Birdie’s kitchen, she felt like she was getting ready to host the most awkward dinner party ever. Hey everyone, she was about to say, meet this dead lady I’ve been making contact with. That was weird, right?

She figured her grandmother would take it all in stride. If there was anyone who was up for the prospect of a visitor from the beyond more than Francine, it was Birdie. Her grandmother was a practical sort, Cam knew, and not prone to flights of fancy. But Cam had never once seen Birdie thrown for a loop by anything.

Avery had seemed skeptical, too, at first, though she seemed to go along with it once Cam had convinced her that she was absolutely sure she hadn’t hit her head and that she wasn’t seeing things that weren’t there. Still, actually encountering Ada would show them all that this was really, truly happening. And as a bonus, maybe they could get more information from their ghost.

The margaritas would help smooth things over. As she mixed up a pitcher, she realized she had probably been subliminally inspired by the scene from Practical Magic where Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman danced around the kitchen at midnight with their witchy aunts. The movie, which she was pretty sure she and Avery had watched on Birdie’s clunky old TV on a VHS tape, was one of Cam’s few touchstones to the paranormal. And it had ended happily, right? I mean, once they dealt with the psycho undead guy they had buried in the garden? At least Ada didn’t seem homicidal. She was just a woman who badly needed… something.

Birdie and Avery came into the kitchen, as if on cue.

As Cam had predicted, Birdie took the news of a ghost without batting an eyelash. She reacted as if Cam had just informed her that she was bringing a friend from work over for cocktails.

“You know that guests are always welcome here—living or dead!” she laughed. “How funny. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was Avery who had told me she had met a ghost. She’s our free thinker, our hopeless romantic. But my practical Cam? Why, I wouldn’t have expected that in a million years.”

Cam just smiled as she pressed a margarita into Birdie’s hand. “Here’s to surprises,” she said.

She had rimmed the glasses with a mixture of sugar and salt and, inspired by finding a stub of herbs in the crisper, garnished them with sprigs of cilantro. (She made a mental note to make this recipe another entry in the master list for Izzy’s cookbook—maybe with the addition of cucumber slices?) Avery went to answer the rap at the door, holding her drink aloft to join them in a remote toast.

“Hi, I’m Francine. You must be Avery!” The two women embraced as if they were age-old friends, and Cam sidled over to their new guest with another full glass. Parsley was circling the room in excitement, clearly sensing that something was afoot.

Birdie had turned on music, and she came over to greet Francine, who she apparently knew because it was Silver Cove and Birdie made a point of knowing everyone.

“I guess I don’t need to make introductions,” Cam said, taking Francine’s leopard-printed coat and handing her the cocktail.

After a bit of chitchat among the women, Cam cleared her throat and clinked her glass. It was time to get down to business.

“So, ah, I invited you all here tonight to meet someone,” she started. “This has been as big a surprise to me as it probably was to you. But I wanted you three to see it—or I should say her—for yourselves. Before I summon her, or try to, I’ll tell you what we know about her so far. Her name was Ada Poulson, and her married name was Ada Merriweather. She was married to Marshall Merriweather, the famous author of Stormy of Silver Cove. She apparently acted as his secretary, and the book was published less than a year before she died of influenza at twenty-two. They didn’t have children. We think she was daring for her time and place—she lived in Silver Cove, after all, not Manhattan. And she wrote this beautiful, funny cookbook.”

Cam turned to Francine. “Was there anything else in the research from the library that you want to add?”

“I was just struck by how little we know about her, based on what was in the biography of Marshall and the few newspaper articles,” Francine said. “And of course anyone who actually knew her in her lifetime died ages ago.”

Cam explained how it would work. She would open the book and cook the soup recipe. If it had been like the other times before, Ada would make her presence known.

“Ready?” Cam asked.

“Absolutely,” Avery said, offering her cousin a nod of encouragement. Cam sensed that Avery wasn’t 100 percent convinced, but she appreciated how her cousin was willing to at least indulge her.

“Wait a sec,” Francine said, throwing her hand up. “What if… I don’t know, she’s one of those evil ghosts? I mean, she looks like a nice enough person, and I am totally here for this, but I’ve watched horror movies, and raising a spirit does not always go so well.”

Cam considered that point. She couldn’t explain why, but she just had a feeling that whatever Ada had come to do, it wasn’t destructive. But then again, it wasn’t like Cam was some paranormal expert. And now she had dragged her grandmother, cousin, and friend into the mix. “Okay, the last two times it’s happened, when I shut the cookbook, she disappeared,” Cam said. “So if things start to go sideways, I’ll just close it quickly.”

“You mean like if she makes a move to ghost-murder us?” Avery asked, looking slightly worried.

“Something like that,” Cam answered. “So we’re good?”

The women nodded.