Page 124 of Mess With Me

Ford kicks me back.

“Okay, so now that everyone’s here,” Sasha begins, laying her hand on my thigh under the table, “who wants to talk ghosts?”

She offers to hand the floor to Jude, who lived and breathed the Eleanor Cleary mystery last year, but Jude insists she take it away. I’m shocked Jude’s given up an opportunity to grandstand, but that’s before I notice him grinning at his phone. He must be giving Nora the play-by-play, even though it’s the middle of the night in London. I’m not surprised. Jude’s said before that neither of them sleeps well without the other.

For the next while, everyone listens, rapt, while Sasha talks about the story so far.

“So,” she finishes ten minutes later, “we know Eleanor and James spent a year hiding out in Switzerland while Eleanor’s husband disappeared to several of his mining operations around the Middle East and Africa—fathering several illegitimate children, I should add—then came back stateside after Eleanor gave birth to her baby.”

“And gave baby Clea up for adoption,” Jude says.

“Clea’s short for Cleary, right?” Glo asks.

The whole table falls silent.

“What?” she asks. “It isn’t?”

“Damn,” says Jude. “Even Nora didn’t pick that one up.”

“See? This is why I invited you,” Sasha says. “I don’t know if it is, but it would make sense, especially since she might suspect she’d have no way of finding her again later.”

I lean over to Ford, who’s closer to me now that he’s made room for Glo. “Beautifulandsmart. Out of your league, buddy.”

“You can go ahead and shut the hell up,” Ford says through his teeth as Gloria turns around and they smile at each other.

“Although why would Eleanor want her baby to keep her shithead husband’s name?” Sasha asks.

“Right. Also, why didn’t she just leave him?” Gloria asks.

She and Sasha exchange a look I’m not quite sure how to read. They did a lot of that back at my place, too. I don’t know how she managed it, but it’s like the two of them are sisters already.

“I don’t think it was easy to do back then,” Jude says.

“Yeah. Especially when her husband would have made her life a living hell,” Ford adds. “Her husband would have had all the money and all the power. He could have found a way to take James away from her, leaving her fending for herself and her baby alone. Scorned, no doubt.”

There’s a bitter edge to his voice. Ford was raised by a single mom who died when he was a teenager, leaving him to care for his little sister.

“Even though he was a serial adulterer?” Gloria says to him, looking at Ford as if seeing him for the first time.

“Yeah, he would have changed the narrative,” he says. “Happened all the time back then.”

Gloria shakes her head. It sounds like she’s got experience with something like this, too.

Sasha squeezes my hand under the table, her eyes on her friend. I guess she knows how I feel about assholes.

“So how soon after they got back to the states was Eleanor murdered?” Gloria asks.

We can all hear the emotion in her voice.

The funny thing about this Eleanor Cleary ghost story is that it seems to touch everyone who’s been a part of it in a different way.

“Within a month,” I say, wishing I could go back in time and kick a certain oil baron’s ugly ass.

We’re all silent then. Sasha leans into me, and I curl an arm around her, stroking her arm with my thumb. “It’s all so fucking tragic,” I say.

“Hear, hear,” Ford says, lifting up his beer.

“To Eleanor,” Sasha says.

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