Page 33 of A Midsummer Night's Ghost

I would not react, I would not react…

“Plus, she has great ti?—

“Ahhh!” I screamed to get him to shut up.

My mom jumped. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I saw a spider. A hairy one.” I glared at Ryan.

He just laughed.

EIGHT

“Mary doesn’t even knowher lines,” Grandma sniffed, as we entered the auditorium.

Her friend was on stage opposite Clifford Jackson, who was waving his hands dramatically and holding a knife.

“Thisbe!”

His voice was as shaky as his stance. I was a little concerned he was going to drop that knife on his foot.

“I think she’s supposed to be dead in this scene,” I said as I walked with Grandma to the front of the room.

She was completely capable of the hike solo, but I was a hoverer. I couldn’t help myself. I lived in fear of her getting a broken hip.

“She's half-dead anyway,” Grandma said unkindly.

I shot her a look of censure. “That’s harsh.” Though not inaccurate. Mary was slumped over in a chair.

“She’s the one who does her makeup like a funeral home director had his way with her corpse.”

I didn’t know what was going on with Grandma lately, but she was in her feisty phase. It concerned me a little. Wasn’t that a sign of dementia? I made a mental note to do some online research on increased crankiness in seniors.

Glancing behind me repeatedly, I kept expecting James Kwaitkowski to pop up and start shouting, “Demon!” but Ryan wasn’t with me so maybe I would be spared.

Once I had waved to Sara Murphy, who wasn’t particularly chipper today, and deposited Grandma in the front row of the auditorium seating next to her friend, Anne, I went back into the entrance of the senior center.

Given my lack of fashion lately, I had dressed with extra care that morning, leaning into the librarian academic trend. I had on a long plaid skirt, a blouse with a bow, and very smart and modestly sexy Mary Jane platform heels. It was an adorable look, let’s be honest, but the shoes were loud. The click-click of my heels was echoing down the institutional-type hallway to the janitor’s closet. It took me opening three random doors before I found one that was locked, which seemed like a good bet.

I pulled a pin out of my hair and did fast work with the lock. Over the past few months, I’d become something of an expert on picking locks after a hairy incident where I’d been trapped in a hoarder’s dining room and maybe gone a place or two I shouldn’t have on other occasions. Legally speaking.

I didn’t think this would be illegal. No one could say with any certainty that the door had been locked and it was a public place. I could argue I’d thought it was the restroom or the classroom where they taught GED classes to adults a couple of nights a week. I wasn’t really worried about being caught by an instructor, a senior, or the janitorial replacement.

My biggest fear was that somehow Jake had sniffed out that my curiosity was in overdrive after the autopsy report and would magically know I was snooping around and he’d pop up from behind a broom.

I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t told him my concerns about James’s death given that he had offered to give me the report and done so quickly, but it was probably because he was solidlyin the let-the-police-handle-it camp and I was on the side of nobody-has-time-for that.

I’d done some quick research of antifreeze—let’s hope no one ever looked at my browser history—and it said it could taste sweet, though manufacturers sometimes added chemicals to it to make it taste less desirable, presumably to prevent children from accidentally drinking it.

But mixed with something? It seemed possible that you could ingest a fatal amount if it was in something that would mask any bitterness.

Slipping inside the janitor’s closet, I closed the door but not fully, because if it locked from the inside, I didn’t trust myself not to panic.

It only took me three minutes of running my eyes over the shelves to discover a styrofoam cup resting on a higher shelf, with a straw stuck in it. I undid the bow on my blouse and used the long loose ends to reach up and pull down the cup to take a look at it. I sniffed above the straw. Definitely something sweet.

The liquid dried on the straw was sticky and blue. I rattled the cup. Just liquid. But I suspected given the gas station name on the cup it was originally a slushie that had melted.

It would be an easy way to hide antifreeze in a sugary blue icy drink.

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