I See You So Close (The Last Ghost #2) - M Dressler

PART ONE

THE GHOST

1

“So what do you do for a living, hon?”

For a living. Such a curious expression. The woman beside me, driving the car, means what work is it that I do to keep body and soul together, as they say.

I don’t know how to answer that. When you’re dead, you don’t work in the usual way.

My job is to keep always one step ahead of the ghost hunters. Of course, the woman sitting next to me doesn’t know that. She picked me up by the side of this mountain road, where I’d raised my thumb to her, because I look as alive as anyone, as alive as she does in her downy white jacket. If you look a certain way, you’re seen as no threat. She pulled the car over and leaned across to open the door, and by her face I saw she’d even taken pity on me, because this body I wear, with its thin blue coat, makes me look small and weak, under a haircut bobbed blunt and short, like a child’s. She likely thought: I needn’t be afraid of this girl standing at the edge of the woods. I might even help her.

And it’s true that if you, the living, are kind to me, and treat me well, you’ll have no reason to fear me. But if instead you decide a young woman standing pale and cold and all alone and small and needing a lift is someone to take advantage of, well, you’re going to run into a bit of trouble. The last driver who stopped for me—a grubby, grabby man who thought me an easy mark—I left making better acquaintance with the bottom of a lake, his hands pounding against the window glass.

Such beautiful lakes and trees they have here, so high up in the mountains, much like we had on the coast. The leaves and the pine boughs quiver and quake as the sun drops its work for the day. It makes me feel right at home.

“I’m in housekeeping,” I answer the pleasant woman beside me. “I tidy and clean things.”

“Hard work?” she asks, nodding and turning her wheel on the twisting road.

“Sometimes. Sometimes not.”

“I’m an office manager,” she tells me.

“Is that good work?”

“Used to be. Not so much anymore. They’ve got me doing the jobs of two younger assistants who left. Plus my own job. You know, what can you do? Things change.”

They do. I used to be an ordinary ghost—a spirit tied to a place, a haunt. Now I have this body, this flesh to call my own and to travel and touch the world with. Imagine what that’s like. How it might feel, after being invisible, erased, holding on only with your will, for a hundred years and more, to at last find you have a way, again, to fill space. Though, to be sure, when I wear this body I can’t flit or fly as easily as my ghostly self can. I can feel the scrape of this veined armrest beside me. The cloth of the seat at the back of my head. The folded collar of this coat. But I feel the weight of this skin, too, and the pressure of the one who died so that I could take it. She was young and bright and she didn’t deserve to die. No more than I did.

“All you can do is take a break from life now and then,” my new, unknowing friend goes on, “so me and some of my girlfriends, we’re taking off work and meeting in Reno, gonna let off some steam. Do you like to gamble?”

I took a chance and stole a body to escape a hunter. I’d say I do.

“Yes.”

“Come with me the whole way,” she says, nodding certainly. “If you want to. No trouble.”

She’s one of the kind living. Though she seems suddenly tired, clutching the wheel. She sighs and says, after a moment, “Don’t mean to be pushy, though, hon. Everybody’s got their own way they’re going. I know that.”

I thank her and tell her that at the moment I’m looking for something peaceful and out of the way.

“God, I hear that.” She laughs a little. “I need that sometimes, too. Just want to cut myself off from everything, check out, lie low. You’re in the right stretch of the Sierra Nevada for some good downtime. There’re such pretty little towns hidden up here. Just let me know where you want to jump out, Miss . . . I’m sorry, is