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TWELVE
The next morning, Alethea deleted the dating app off her phone, before spending the whole weekend writing the literature review for her thesis. When her cousins texted her to ask about the date, she just told them it was a waste of time.
Monday morning, it was all hands on deck at the dig site, and the week went by in a whirlwind of work, punctuated by quick trips to the supermarket or one of the nearby lunch bars. On Friday, she decided to go back to the same restaurant as her disastrous date, just to pick up takeaway. For a moment, she thought she spotted him, before a family trooped through to their table, blocking her view. When the family were seated, the guy was gone.
She must have imagined him, Alethea told herself, as she paid for her order, thanked the server, and left.
That might have been the first time, but it certainly wasn't the last. She began to see him everywhere – at the supermarket, at the lunchbars, even outside the cemetery, but every time she tried to get a closer look, he vanished, or it turned out not to be him.
Like the cemetery didn't have enough ghosts haunting the place, she'd had to invent a new one.
"Are you all right?" her boss, Jeremy, asked. "You just seem...jumpy. You didn't believe the security guard's story, did you?"
"What story?" She must have missed it.
"This morning when we got in, I caught him telling some of the staff that he'd seen a kilted Scotsman playing the bagpipes every night this week, only when he went up to him to tell him he wasn't allowed on the property, the Scotsman vanished into thin air. He's making it up, I'm certain of it."
Alethea managed a watery smile. So she wasn't the only one seeing ghosts. "No, I'm not worried about some piper in a kilt. I've never seen him, and seeing as I'm staying only a couple of streets away, I'd have heard the bagpipes from my place. Well, unless it was last night, and then all I heard was the couple from downstairs having a screaming match over whose turn it was to take out the rubbish. I'm surprised neither of them ended up in one of the rubbish bins this morning."
"God, if the neighbours are that bad, you should move."
Alethea shrugged. "I'm housesitting for my parents, while they're overseas, so I can't. Besides, they don't argue every night. Just bin night. It's free, and walking distance to work. I used to live in a share house with a few of my cousins. They were way noisier, and I guess I kind of got used to it."
She should probably call them, if only to tell them what had actually happened on her date. She'd been getting increasingly curious messages from the girls all week.
On the weekend, she promised herself. There was too much work to do before then.
