“Sure,” I replied, and made my way to the front door to answer it.
A letter? What kind of letter did Dad want me to read for his funeral? I didn’t like the sound of that. For all I knew, it could’ve been mortifying stories from my childhood he’d been keeping as blackmail—like the time I got a marble stuck up my nostril and then shoved a marble in the other one because I was afraid my nose wouldn’t look even. Or the time Carver was playing in a coffin and it closed on him. Or the time Alice thought she was a witch and gathered all the stray cats in the neighborhood as her familiars and they ate the neighbor’s canary. He was that kind of person. And he definitely was the kind of person to include a PowerPoint presentation in the letter, too.
And that just made me miss him more. He couldn’t be gone, could he? He—he could still be here. As a ghost. Lingering. He had unfinished business, didn’t he? He hadn’t said goodbye. He couldn’t be gone. I hadn’t talked with him enough, laughed with him enough, soaked in the stories he had and the cryptic wisdom he espoused and—and—
When I opened the door, I didn’t see anyone at first. Just the porch and the moths that fluttered around the porch lights, and the rocky cobblestones that led to the sidewalk, and the soft streetlights and the wind that rushed through the oak trees.
Then a crow cawed in the oak tree out front, and my eyes focused, and barely—barely—I began to make out an outline. Of a shadow. A body—
A man.
A ghost.
My heart leapt into my throat—Dad?
No—it wasn’t. The man was . . . too tall, too broad. Slowly, like adjusting the focus on a pair of binoculars, the shape took form, until I could see most of him, and my eyes traveled up to the face of the towering stranger, framed by dark hair and a chiseled jaw. It only took a moment to recognize who he was—
Well, who he had once been.
I paused. “Benji . . . Andor?”
And he was most definitely dead.
8
Death of a Bachelor
BEN’S GAZE FELL on mine as soon as I said his name. His eyes were dark and wide and—confused. The slightest crease between his eyebrows deepened as he recognized me. “M-Miss Day?”
I slammed the door closed.
Oh, no. Oh no, no, no.
This wasn’t happening. I didn’t see anything. It was a trick of the light. It was my overworked brain. It was— “Florence?” Mom called from the parlor. “Who is it?”
“Um—no one,” I replied, my hand curling tighter around the doorknob. The faintest outline of the figure still stood in the doorway, shadowed in the stained glass. He wasn’t gone. I closed my eyes, and let out a breath. Nothing was there, Florence.
No one was there.
Not your dad, and not the crazy-hot editor who was most certainly not dead.
I opened the door again.
And there Benji Andor stood as he had before.
Ghosts didn’t look like they did in the movies—at least from my experience. They weren’t mangled, flesh rotting off their bones. They weren’t pale as if some unfortunate actor had a bad run-in with baby powder, and they didn’t glow like Casper. They shimmered, actually, when they moved. Just enough to make them look a little wrong. Sometimes they looked as solid as anyone living, but other times they were faded and flickering—like a lightbulb on its last wire.
Benji Andor looked like that, standing on the welcome mat to the Days Gone Funeral Home. He looked like how his memories remembered him, the night in Colloquialism, his dark hair neatly gelled back, his suit jacket fitted to his shoulders, his black slacks pressed. His tie was a little askew, though, just enough to make me want to straighten it. My gaze lingered on his lips. I remembered them, the way they tasted.