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My gaze slid over toward Danny, who hadn’t moved. As I stared at him, he shook his head slightly, that same smile playing around his lips. It seemed that although I could see him, no one else could.
In fact, when the man and woman approached the counter, stacks of books in their hands, the woman walked right through him. Somehow, I managed to prevent myself from gasping out loud, although I could feel my eyes widen.
Luckily, my customers didn’t seem to notice anything strange about my reaction to their arrival, or maybe they’d expected slightly odd behavior from the owner of a New Age shop. Whatever the reason, they just thanked me as I handed over their bag of books, and then they headed out.
On other days, I would’ve been pretty happy about making almost two hundred dollars on a single sale, even if the store wasn’t technically supposed to be open. This afternoon, however, I had far more important things to worry about.
Although I was pretty sure I already knew the answer, I went ahead and asked the question anyway.
“Am I the only one who can see you?”
Danny nodded. “I think so. I mean, I went by my house earlier just to check on things, and my housekeeper came out the front door and walked right through me. I think she was there to make sure everything was locked up tight, since she’s the only other person in town who would have a key.”
That made some sense. Very likely, Henry Lewis had sent her over to secure the place just in case any looky-loos or sensation-seekers decided to stop by.
Well, since it seemed as though I was going to be stuck with Danny Ortega for a while, I figured I might as well try to be methodical about all this.
“Do you mind if I sit down?” I asked, and he shook his head.
“No, that’s fine.” Looking a bit wistful, he added, “I wish I could.”
“You can’t sit?”
“It doesn’t seem that way. I can’t really react with matter at all. See?”
And he reached out a hand and passed it through the display case like the case was made of air. Seeing his browned fingers move through all the objects inside as though they weren’t there made a little shiver run down my spine.
“So,” he went on, seemingly untroubled by the way he’d just waved his hand through solid matter, “that means I can’t sit. Luckily, since I’m dead, my feet can’t get tired.”
I reflected there seemed to be a few upsides to the afterlife. Or rather, I knew death was nothing to fear, that people either returned to this world to live out their next existence, or they finally passed beyond the karmic wheel to spend the rest of eternity in the summerlands, the way my Grandma Ellen had. In Danny’s case, though, it looked to me as if his murder had caused him to be earthbound, destined to remain here until he could clear up the mystery of who’d done this to him.
Or rather, until I could. While I knew he wasn’t in pain, I also understood that it couldn’t be very comfortable to be wandering around Globe in limbo like this.
I got out the little notebook I used for jotting down inventory notes and other miscellanea, and took it and a pen over to the folding chair I had placed near the dressing area. Close by was the glass coffin with the doll inside that I’d set up as part of my Halloween decorations. I tried not to look at it, at its pallid reminder that the grave waited for all of us in the end.
Well, it had seemed like a good idea at the time.
Danny, however, didn’t seem to be taken aback by the ghoulish décor. “You did a really good job with the Halloween decorations,” he said as he followed me over to the dressing area. “But I suppose someone like you would be all about Halloween, right?”
I decided to ignore the “someone like you” comment. “I do like Halloween,” I said lightly, and sat down on the wooden folding chair. Holding the notebook on my lap, I flipped to a new page. “I suppose we might as well start at the beginning. Who do you know who would want you dead?”
Rather than be offended by the question, he flashed me a cocky grin. “How much room do you have in that notebook?”
“Seriously?” I responded.
He waved a hand. “All right, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit. But I wouldn’t mind pinning this on my ex-wife — I know she’s still bitter that I got the house in the divorce.”
I had to admit the arrangement did seem a little odd. A lot of the time, the wife would get to stay in the family home, especially if there were children involved. However, while I didn’t know a heck of a lot about Danny Ortega — although I guessed I was going to learn much more than I wanted to in the near future — I did know that he didn’t have any kids.
Since it didn’t seem to me as if there was much I could say that would offend him, I asked, “Whydidyou get the house?”
“Because I was the one with a job here,” he responded easily. “Alison commuted to her job in Mesa.”
That was a heck of a commute. Or rather, I suppose it would seem that way to me because it was at least fifty miles to Mesa. But back in L.A., I knew people who spent two hours on the freeway each way to work, so the hour drive to Mesa paled in comparison.
“Do you really think your ex had anything to do with it?” I asked. “Was she at the party?”
“No,” Danny said at once. “Josie couldn’t stand her — Alison made a comment when we were buying the house that she didn’t think Josie had really earned her commission, and that was enough for her.”
