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“You’re going to make me touch that, aren’t you?” Ward asked, sounding cranky.
“You got a better idea?” I asked him, pointedly. I wasn’t going tomakehim touch it, but unless the ghost could tell us who or what the bone belonged to, I didn’t have another way of determining species without sending it to a lab. And a lab meant calling Dan or the local PD.
“No,” Ward muttered, then snorted, presumably at something said by a dead person. I’d have bet Archie, since Rosemary Carlisle hadn’t seemed—from Ward’s description, anyway—to be terribly amusing.
I raised an eyebrow at him when he looked over at me.
“Archie suggested he could attempt to talk me through reanimating it,” Ward replied.
I was pretty sure my face communicated how horrifying I found that idea. “Can youdothat?” I asked, really hoping the answer was no.
Ward shrugged. “I’ve never tried,” he replied. “And, before you ask, I’m not terribly keen on trying now, even if Archie thinks it would be, and I quote, ‘good fun.’”
“You’re a sick bastard, Archie,” I said without bothering to look for the ghost.
“He says ‘Tell Puck he’s a party pooper.’”
I arched my eyebrow again. “Puck was a fairy,” I pointed out. “Not an elf.”
“I’m not going to repeat that,” Ward said, his cheeks turning slightly pink. He wasn’t talking to me.
I burst out laughing, totally able to read between those lines. “Fine, Archie. Puck it is.”
“I hate both of you,” Ward muttered.
I swore I could hear Archie cackling. But I can’t actually hear ghosts, so it was probably just my imagination.
Having finished his food, Ward looked down at me and held out his hand. I took another bite of sandwich, then used a clean napkin to pick up and hand him the bone.
His shoulders almost immediately relaxed when it hit his hand. “Not human,” he reported. “Any idea what it is?” he asked, turning it over and studying it now that he knew it wasn’t metaphysically attached to a dead person.
I shook my head. “Nope. I can ask Mays, though.” I took the bone back, still using the napkin, and set it beside me before going back to my sandwich.
Ward was looking confused, but his attention wasn’t directed at either me or the mystery bone.
“What?” I asked.
He shook his head and held up a finger, needing to concentrate on whatever was happening on the metaphysical plane. I ate my sandwich and waited.
“Rosemary is very upset about the fact that the bone wasn’t human,” Ward said, finally. “She thinks that ‘they moved it.’”
“Moved what?” I wanted to know.
“I’m going to guess something that wasn’t an animal.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“Which is why Rosemary is upset. Because she knew—or met? Knew of? Knew of the person they supposedly buried there.” Ward’s brow furrowed again, his eyes fixed on the empty space where the ghost presumably was. “She keeps saying shethoughtthey were buried there, and then the raspberries were put there later. But—” He grimaced. “This honestly doesn’t make a lot of sense? She keeps saying they were under the berries, but it also sounds like this happened years ago, and she’s not that dead.”
Something I’d heard while observing at the FBI’s A-branch clicked. “Wait, she said she was a medium?”
“Yeah?” Ward looked over at me.
“What if she’s wrong?”
He cocked his head to the side. “Kinda hard to be wrong about seeing dead people, Hart.”
“What if what she’s seeing aremurders, not dead people?”
