phin had used the very last towel in the bathroom.
Unfortunately, I didn’t realize this until I was stripped down to my underwear, staring into the empty linen cupboard. Even more annoying, I’d done laundry yesterday, and downstairs was a dryer full of clean towels that I hadn’t yet put away. The fact that this was equally my own fault did not help the situation a bit.
Dammit.
I closed the cupboard and took inventory. Fifteen different kinds of Goodnight Farm soap? Check. Running water, right out of an ancient well and smelling slightly of sulfur? Check. But not so much as a washcloth.
My clothes lay in a filthy heap at my feet. I really didn’t want to put them back on, and I couldn’t put on clean ones until I had washed off the dirt and dog slobber. Opening the bathroom door, I started to holler for Phin to bring me a towel … then remembered she’d taken the Trooper into Barnett.
I drummed my fingers on the doorframe. My only choice was to walk downstairs to the laundry room in my undies. Okay, so every curtain in the house was open. But my underwear, covered in cheerful red cherries with bright green leaves, was more modest than many bathing suits. Plus, there was no one within miles of the house.
There was Uncle Burt, though he generally hung out—when I sensed him at all—downstairs, away from the guest room. Even as a ghost, he was quite polite.
Too bad he couldn’t bring me a towel. When I was a kid, I’d made a game of testing the limits of his ability to move things. He was pretty good at turning lights on and off, but I’d never seen a physical object move more than a few inches, and only out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t know if it was a universal rule or just Uncle Burt’s, but my eight-year-old self had figured out that ghosts operate best at the edges of your sight and in the space between blinks.
That was before I realized that most of the world didn’t see magic or ghosts at all. At least, not that they admitted, if they wanted people to take them seriously. I’d learned that lesson the hard way.
In the upstairs hall, the pine floorboards were smooth under my feet. Then down the stairs, through the living room, with its oak beams and limestone fireplace. By chance I glanced out the window to where Stella was parked just outside the wooden yard gate.
And then I stopped, because there was something next to my Mini Cooper, and it was not Aunt Hyacinth’s beat-up SUV.
It was a cow.
A half-grown calf, really. My aunt didn’t have cows, so this guy was trespassing, which was inconsequential next to the fact that it was also scratching itself on Stella’s bright blue fender. Scratching its ass on my graduation/early birthday present to myself, bought with years of savings from after-school jobs.
I leapt to the window and banged on the glass, scaring Pumpkin the Pomeranian, who was snoozing on the couch, half to death.
“Hey!” Bang bang bang. “Get away from my car!”
The calf didn’t move, except to keep scratching.
“Son of a—” I whirled and sprinted through the kitchen to the mudroom. Nudging dogs out of the way, I shoved my feet into the oversized Wellies and straight-armed the screen door, sending it crashing against the wall.
I clattered down the steps. The goats watched me, chewing leaves unfazed as I went flying by their pen. If the cherries on my underwear tempted them, I was too furious to notice.
Varsity soccer had made me fast on my feet, even though the too-big boots slowed me down. When I banged open the wooden gate, the calf looked unconcerned, until it realized I was still coming.
It took off, and I took off after it, running across the pasture like William Wallace in Braveheart. Except in panties and a bra, which sounded like a Monty Python sketch but had become my life, thanks to my sister, who had obviously left the second gate open so the neighbors’ bovine could mosey onto Goodnight land, and don’t think I wasn’t going to let her hear about it.
Stupid cow. Waving my arms, I chased the animal almost to our barbed-wire fence, where I realized the calf wasn’t half grown at all. It was more like one-quarter grown, and its mother was big. Big, and also on our side of the fence, and pissed that I was yelling at