Page 42 of Ghostlighted
“No.” I swallowed. That would probably affect me more than Avi. In fact, itwasaffecting me, if my cold hands were any indicator. I was just pretending to ignore it. “It’s… You’ve seen the scarecrow from above, right?”
“Yes.” He drew out that word in his typical fashion. “So?”
“It’s… Well, it looks like Carson. I don’t know if you—” Avi’s laugh cut me off, and I scowled. “What’s so funny?”
“You think the scarecrow is Carson?” Avi could barely get the words out.
I scowled, because this level of hilarity was hardly a proportional response. “Yes. It has the same hair. The same clothes. The face shape is a little different, but then, it’s straw-stuffed burlap.”
“The scarecrow isn’t supposed to beCarson,” he wheezed. “It’sLiam.”
I blinked at that. “Liam? Really?” Come to think of it, the later photos of Liam in Sofia’s house—the ones where he was a blond—did bear a striking resemblance to the scarecrow. The face shape was definitely right. “Do you mean he and Carson actuallydressedalike?” I couldn’t keep the revulsion out of my tone.
“Oh my god, it was practically auniformfor them.” Avi took off his glasses and wiped his eyes with a palm. “I’m not sure either of them even owned a pair of jeans or a single graphic T-shirt. For them, it was all about designer labels and name brand logos. I think they liked to pretend they were at an elite private school so they could look down on the other kids.”
“Figures.” I gestured toward the garage. “I’m heading over there to grab the hose. Give a holler when you feel like you’re about to poof.”
Instead ofheadingover, I backed away, keeping a close watch on Avi’s expression for any sign of discomfort. When I reached the far edge of the garden, within five feet or so from the hose bib, Avi suddenly vanished.
“Well, crap,” I muttered.
An instant later, he was beside me, a rueful expression on his face. “The sensation doesn’t graduate. One moment I feel a twinge and a tug, and then I’m back in the house.”
“That still gives us good information.” I squinted at the property line where he’d been standing. “How far would you say that is?”
He rolled his eyes. “I was a writer. Oren’s the one with spatial awareness. He could judge distances within an inch.”
I cut a glance at Avi. He was looking back across the yard too, just as I’d been, and this was the first time I’d heard him make a comment about Oren that sounded almost absent and not as though he was trying to hold his heart inside his chest.
It occurred to me that getting out of the house, engaging in other activities, investigating his own abilities, might be more necessary for Avi’s well-being than I’d considered. At home, he had nothing to distract himself from his grief.
Not that I imagined he’d get over Oren’s loss any time soon, if ever, but I made a vow to myself to involve Avi in more… what? Enrichment activities? The house caged him in a way, and though he wasn’t an infant by any means, he was still learning about himself and his world, much like a baby would.
I hoped the EVP equipment would arrive on schedule, because giving Avi the tools to make choices about his new reality had just shot to the top of my to-do list, and my reasons for making him my unofficial assistant at the Manor changed, too.
While helping Ghost-with-a-capital-G was important, it was no longer my top priority. My top priority was helping the ghost-with-a-lower-case-g.
My top priority was helping my friend.
Chapter Fifteen
Sofia’s yellow and green striped garden hose was loaded onto one of those automatic retracting drums and had an industrial strength gun-type nozzle. All respect to Ricky for making the watering process both sturdy and efficient. I unrolled enough of it to reach the garden, but just as I pressed the trigger, I got distracted by the glint of silver on Birch Street. Consequently, I doused my shirt instead of the cucumbers.
“Crap!”
Avi snickered. “I’d offer to help, Maz, but I haven’t unlocked my quick-dry function yet.”
“Very funny,” I muttered as I set the hose down, my soaked T-shirt clinging clammily to my skin. The sun wasn’t up high enough to offer any warmth, but that didn’t seem like an excuse for the shiver that ran from my nape to my tailbone. “This is what I get for making an early start.”
“What happened? Does the hose have a leak?”
“No. I just have lousy aim.” And I thought I saw something that should be impossible. Yeah, itshouldbe impossible, but, you know, trust but verify. “Gotta check on something.”
I hurried down Sofia’s side yard with its long bed of perennial herbs, then stopped before I cleared the wall to peer around the corner.
Now I knew the shiver had nothing to do with my alfresco cold shower, because a silver Porsche was drawing up to the curb in front of my house in exactly the same spot it had parked a month ago.
“How can he be out of jail already?” I muttered. “And how can he possibly have his car?” Taryn had told me that Carson would have to liquidate his assets to pay the fines and damages for copyright infringement, let alone the fines for threatening me with a gun. Had he found some way to protect some of them from seizure?
