Page 7 of A Midsummer Night's Ghost

“How do you know who I knew in high school?”

“Do you know whoIknew?” Grandma Burke asked.

Ryan took the bait. “Who?”

I didn’t. I already knew where this was going.

“Phil Donahue.” She preened as if she was personally responsible for his talk show success. “I dated him. We had math class together.”

There it was.

“Grandma, you did not. He went to St. Ed’s, which is all boys.” We’ve had this conversation like twelve times already. She never even met the man. But at this rate, in another two years, he would be her secret first husband.

“Ryan, just tell me it’s not Sara.”

We weren’t exactly friends in high school but we weren’t rivals or enemies either. It was more like she was there, in everything, surrounded by popular girls. I was not in that group of girls. I wasn’t unpopular, I was just background noise. Elevator music. You’re vaguely aware of it, and might hum along to it, but you forgot about it the second the elevator doors open.

“It’s not Sara. It’s some guy named James Kwaitkowski.”

“Never heard of him,” Grandma said.

Me either.

We all fell into speculative silence about one James Kwaitkowski and his unfortunate fate.

“The files don’t tell you anything?” Grandma asked.

“Nope. Just DOA.”

“When did you ever listen to country music?” I asked Ryan, stuck on that. He was always a heavy metal guy.

“At bonfires when I was trying to get with hot girls named Sara. Or Nicole. Or Jessica.”

I was sorry I had asked. “Right. What was I thinking?”

“That you wished you were a hot girl.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Fortunately, I’d grown into my face. More importantly, I’d grown into my fashion sense. I could dress my thin frame like nobody’s business now.

“Bailey was a late bloomer,” Grandma said. She reached out and patted my knee.

“Thank you, Grandma.”

“And she has a good personality.”

Ryan let out a crack of laughter from the back seat.

There wasa coroner’s van at the senior center when we pulled in and one cop car.

“Meat wagon’s here,” Ryan said, in his usual compassionate way.

“It seems kind of quiet for a homicide.” I bit my lip as I looped around the parking lot. I’d been trying to score a handicapped spot for Grandma, but all six were occupied with cars. You had to be on the ball at the senior center to score those prime spots.

“It really does,” Ryan said, craning his neck to see who was in the patrol car. “That’s just a beat cop. I don’t see any detectives.”

It also occurred to me that if there was a vicious homicide at the senior center, Jake would be calling me right now and telling me to come home. He didn’t always know about homicides when they happened, depending on who got assigned the case, but everyone at the station knew me and my family, for reasons good and well, maybe a tiny bit infamous.

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