“Yes, well, would that I could.”
“Probably wrong choice of words. See you on the other side!” I pulled the rest of myself over and dropped down onto the grass. I was only 55 percent sure that he’d follow me—was he really such a stickler for the rules? He was dead. “Just walk through the wall, my dude,” I called over to him. “You’re a ghost—”
A moment later, he stepped through the wall and shivered. “That feels so weird,” he complained, dusting invisible lint from his crisp button-down shirt. “I don’t like it. It tingles. In weird places.”
I headed up toward the path that looped the whole cemetery, and called back to him, “You’re a terrible ghost.”
“It wasn’t as though I applied for this role. What if we get caught?”
“If I get caught,” I corrected, “then I’ll run. You’re a ghost. No one else can see you.”
He caught up in a few quick strides, and fell into pace beside me. Lee never did that. He always expected me to match his. “Right,” he said, “about that. I have questions.”
I took a deep breath. “Okay. I’ll try to answer them.”
“Can you summon ghosts?”
“No.”
“Do you exorcise them?”
“No. Like I said earlier, most of them just want to talk. They have good stories. And they want someone to listen.” I shrugged. “I like listening—don’t give me that look,” I added, sensing his gaze on me, as if he was trying to puzzle me out. As if I had surprised him.
He quickly looked away. “Is this . . . post-living part of your life a family business?”
I laughed at that. “No. My family owns the funeral home in town, but only me and my dad can see spirits. Ghosts. Whatever you want to call them—you. I don’t know why. Maybe it has something to do with the funeral parlor? Who knows.”
“Is that why you left? Not to be too forward,” he added quickly, realizing that, in fact, it was a little too forward. “I just . . . picked up on it. People are surprised you’re home.”
“I guess they would be.” For a few steps, I mulled over the question. What to tell him, and what to leave out. Though, what was the point of lying to a dead guy? “When I was thirteen, I helped a ghost solve his own murder. Before that, the whole mediator thing was kind of a family secret, but when your town paper writes ‘Girl Solves Hometown Murder with Ghosts,’ it kind of blows that out of the water.”
“So you became a local celebrity?”
I barked a laugh. “If only! No one believed me, Ben. Bestcase, they thought I was doing it for attention, worst case they thought I had something to do with the murder. Imagine being thirteen and on the witness stand and having to say, ‘A ghost told me.’ It was . . .” I tried not to remember much about that year if I could help it. The articles about me, the weird news stunt, the people calling me a liar. “Anyway, most people thought it was just a wild story. I guess it makes sense—I’d wanted to be a writer ever since I was little. I like words. I like shaping them. I like how the stories you create can be kind and good, and I like how they can never fail you, if that’s how you make them.” I kicked a rock, and it skittered off into the grass. “Or, you know, in theory.”
I bit my thumbnail as we walked on in silence. The only sound was my footsteps soft on the grass.
After a while he said, “I liked that about your first book.”
Surprised, I turned to him. “Rake?”
“No, your first book. What was it—Ardently Yours, I think was the title?”