Not if I beat you to it.

  I shot him what I hoped was a look of disbelief. “Right. Isn’t there road kill somewhere waiting for you to dine on it?”

  “You don’t believe me? I have the offer right here on my desk.”

  “Sure you do.” As much as I wanted to see for myself, I kept my gaze locked on the computer screen.

  His chair creaked. His boots hit the floor with a thud. “See for yourself, Blondie.” He strolled over and held the offer in front of my face.

  With a key-click, I hid Cornelius’s offer behind my email inbox so Ray wouldn’t see it.

  Focusing on the paper shoved in my face, I noticed that the offer price was for several thousand dollars more than the asking price. I also noticed there was no signature on it.

  Then I saw the name of buyer: George Mudder.

  What?!

  I read it again.

  Why would George want a hotel? Did he plan on moving the funeral parlor to Main Street? There was no way the town would approve that, would it?

  Maybe he was planning on getting out of the funeral business. Where had he gotten that kind of money? From selling body parts? Drugs? Something worse?

  What could be worse than selling drugs and body parts?

  Ray’s desk phone rang. He returned to his desk, taking George’s offer with him. “Ray Underhill,” he said into the receiver.

  I stared at my screen, my fingers paused on the keys as my brain churned on the fact that George Mudder was Ray’s buyer and what that meant in the theft scheme I had imagined for the Mudder brothers.

  “Sure, I’d be happy to take the mayor of Deadwood’s call,” Ray said extra loud, obviously for my benefit.

  Looking away from his big, stupid I-win-you-lose grin, I stared at my screen without really seeing it. What was I doing before I found out about George and the hotel? Oh, yeah—Cornelius.

  I returned to my own offer letter and clacked away as fast as my fingers would go. Until Ray had a signature on that offer, I still had a chance on taking the lead in this race.

  Twenty minutes later, Ray had finished his schmoozing, grabbed today’s paper from outside the front door, and headed for the bathroom. As soon as he closed the door, I printed out the offer paperwork.

  I knocked twice on the bathroom door on my way out, yelling, “Tell Jane I’ll be back after lunch,” and then raced out the back door.

  I called Cornelius on my way over. “I’ll be there in five minutes with the offer for the hotel.”

  “Yes.” He sounded all deep and creepy, giving the “s” an extra long hiss at the end.

  Yes? I didn’t realize I’d asked a question.

  “Who is this?” he asked.

  I laughed. Then realized he was serious. “Cornelius, it’s Violet. Your Realtor.”

  “Oh, good. For a moment I thought you could be one of the ghosts we reached out to last night.”

  “A ghost? Calling your cell phone?” Seriously? Must I be a human beacon for the nearly deranged?

  “I did mention that I am a ghost whisperer, didn’t I?”

  I pulled the phone away from my ear and shook it. Then after a deep breath, I said into it, “You mentioned it in passing.”

  “Excellent. I’m going to need you to bring me a protein shake.”

  “Right now?”

  “I can’t focus without protein.”

  Maybe that explained why this train of conversation had jumped off the tracks. But where was I going to find a protein shake in Deadwood?

  “I prefer vanilla-flavored,” Cornelius said, “but strawberry will work, too. Don’t you just love the smell of strawberries? It reminds me of my investigation of the Strawberry Hill Mansion Museum in Kansas City and the Lady in Red apparition there who is quite chatty with guests, especially those of us who can converse on her plane of existence. Although, she seems very depressed about being dead.”

  “Uhhh, okay then. I’ll find a shake and bring it with me.”

  I’d have agreed to bring him a chunk of the moon if it meant I’d get to cram a signed offer down Ray’s throat before the day was out.

  I hung up. Now where was I going to find a vanilla protein drink?

  Doc.

  I knew from hands-on experience that he was in tip-top muscle shape. He’d surely have some protein drink.

  When I called him, he didn’t answer. Damn, that would have been a great excuse to break the ice between us.

  Who else would have protein drink mix? Cooper? Or did he drink eggs like Rocky Balboa for protein? No, he probably just ate a live hen full of un-hatched eggs every morning.

  I gave up, did a u-turn, and headed up to the Piggly Wiggly in Lead.

  An hour later, I knocked on Cornelius’s hotel room door, vanilla protein shake in hand.

  Safari Skipper opened the door. Déjà vu.

  “Hi, Miss Parker,” she held the door wide as I slipped by, and then followed on my heels. “Did you have any more wicked nightmares last night?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “That’s a bummer.”

  How nice that someone appreciated my terror-filled dreams.

  Cornelius sat at the round table, the vanilla-scented candle snuffed out. A pair of over-the-head earphones took the place of his one-horned Viking helmet today; dark sunglasses hid his eyes.

  I dropped into the chair next to him and put the protein shake and offer paperwork on the table.

  He looked at me and lowered his sunglasses. “Hi, Violet!” he yelled.

  I jerked back.

  Slipping off the earphones, he said, “Sorry about that. I forgot I had them on.”

  “Were you listening to the recording from last night?”

  “No. I like to start my day with polka music.”

  “Polka?”

  “Yes, the beat really revs me up and opens my psychic ears. It’s a trick I learned from my grandmother, who was the famous ghost whisperer from New Orleans.”

  I just smiled, because laughing hysterically in his face might have seemed rude. “I’ve brought the offer paperwork. We just need to come up with an amount and have you sign this, then I’ll take it back to the office and send it to Tiffany to show to her client.”

  “Perfect. How much should I offer?”

  More than George Mudder.

  “Do I come in with a full price offer,” he continued, “or should I lowball it?”

  Neither would be enough.

  I hesitated, chewing on my lip.

  Ethically, I was at a fork in the road. Because I knew what Ray’s client was going to offer, I needed Cornelius to come in higher in order to be considered. However, telling Cornelius a certain amount that would guarantee we’d win over Ray and George was kind of like cheating, even though Ray had showed the offer letter to me of his own free will.

  If Jane found out that I knew Ray’s offer price ahead of time, would she figure out that I purposely had pushed Cornelius to place a higher offer? Would that be grounds to consider replacing me with someone more honest? More moral? Less apt to get involved personally with clients?

  But, if I didn’t push Cornelius higher, George would end up buying the hotel and I’d most likely end up out on my ass.

  Either way, my job was at risk.

  I cleared my throat. “Well, I’m not supposed to give you advice, but I’m under the suspicion that there might be another party interested in this property. So, I think we need to make your offer as strong as it can be.” Hint, hint, hint.

  His eyebrows flat-lined under the weight of his frown. “Why didn’t you tell me someone else wants this place before now?”

  “I just recently learned about it.”

  He stroked his pointy goatee. “What if I come at ten thousand over? You think that’s enough?”

  Yes! “Most likely.”

  I grabbed a pen from my purse, wrote his offer amount down and handed him the pen. “You just need to sign here and then initial here and here.”

  Taking the pen, he stared down at the document for a bit too long.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, my heart picking up speed. “Did I spell your name wrong?”

  “My name is correct.” He removed his sunglasses and set them on the table. “Tell me something, Violet. Last night during the séance, you said you saw an entity in your nightmare?”

  I leaned back, crossing my arms over my chest, not sure where this was going, but not liking it, anyway. “Well, I don’t know that it was what you’d call an entity.”

  That thing, whatever it was, was not some ghost. Not that it was real or anything. It was just another one of my nightmares, only in IMAX 3-D format.

  Cornelius raised one black eyebrow. “Was this entity once a man who went by the name of Wolfgang?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  I choked on my own spit—and Cornelius’s question about Wolfgang.

  After a minute of coughing, and then a couple of slurps of stale black coffee from a mug offered by Safari Skipper, I found enough breath to answer him.

  “No, there was no man named Wolfgang,” I lied straight-faced, eye-to-eye.

  There was no way I was going to feed Cornelius’s idiosyncrasy. Plus, admitting I saw Wolfgang would only make him start poking and prodding me more, distracting him from the task at hand, which was buying this damned hotel and helping me keep my job.

  “Hmm, that’s odd,” was all Cornelius said. “When I listened to the recording of the séance, you mentioned his name.”

  Then he signed the offer letter, and I did my best not to skip out of there like I was off to see the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

  Ray’s SUV wasn’t in the parking lot behind Calamity Jane’s. Whew! The tightness in my chest eased, making me realize that as much as I looked forward to beating him at this game, avoiding confrontation was fine and dandy with me this afternoon.

  Jane sat behind her desk, cursing into her phone as I walked by. I dropped my purse onto my desk and grabbed Mona, whose smile widened to match mine when I showed her the offer. The two of us hovered outside of Jane’s open doorway until she ended her call with a slam of her phone.

  She stood and grabbed the bottle of Jack Daniel’s that was on her filing cabinet, then noticed us standing there. Her focus bounced to the bottle in her hand, and then back to us.

  She shrugged and put the Jack back on the cabinet. “It’s either drink heavily or kill the bastard, and my skin tone is too fair to pull off an orange jumpsuit.”

  Unsure of whether to open that can of worms further and let her vent or change the subject to something less drink-inducing, I opted for the positive and held up the signed letter.

  She waved us inside her office, where I noticed the underlying smell of alcohol not fully masked by her flowery perfume. She hadn’t been joking about the drinking. The dark circles under her eyes reinforced my suspicion. I kept the smile on my lips to hide my concern.

  Her eyes narrowed as she tried to see what the paper said. “Is that what I think it is?”

  I looked at Mona, and she nudged me. “It’s your party, Violet; you get to do the crowing.”

  “Cornelius Curion has made an offer on the Old Prospector Hotel.” I placed the paper on the desk in front of her.

  The corners of her lips creased slightly—her attempt at a smile, I guessed. “This is wonderful, Violet. Are you confident in his financial abilities to follow through on this?”

  Absolutely not. “Definitely.”

  “Have you contacted the seller’s Realtor?”

  Tiffany. Ugh. Why couldn’t Doc’s ex-girlfriend have gray skin and scales and reside on another planet? “Not yet, but I will as soon as I fax this over to her.”

  “Have Mona take one last look through the offer first to make sure you have all of your ‘i’s’ crossed and ‘t’s’ dotted.”

  Did she just say … ? I glanced at Mona, who shook her head slightly.

  “Then fax it,” Jane continued, “and go out to lunch on me.”

  “You should join us,” Mona said.

  “Not today. I’m not very good company. I wouldn’t want to bring you down.”

  We turned toward the door.

  “Oh, and Violet?” When I turned, she added, “I need you to fill in for me this afternoon down in Rapid.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I signed up for a workshop given by the South Dakota Real Estate Commission about proposed rule changes for brokers, but I need to run out to Gillette.”

  “Wyoming?”

  She nodded and handed me a Post-it note with an address and time. “Just go listen and take notes for me.”

  Damn it. I had planned to attend another viewing tonight to try sneaking a peek into the windows of the Mudder brothers’ garage-crematorium. This day job was seriously cramping my funeral parlor spying efforts.

  Mona and I returned to our desks. She looked over the offer letter, nodded, and smiled at me like a proud parent.

  I faxed off the offer and gave Tiffany a call. She answered with her annoyingly sexy-smoky voice and promised to get back with me within forty-eight hours with a “Yes” or “No” from her client.

  Jane’s Rapid City workshop crimped the celebration lunch plans for Mona and me. After waiting for a table, I had to scarf down everything the waitress placed on the table before me, and then run out the door leaving Mona to take care of the bill with the company credit card.

  I sped home, calling my mom on the way to see if it was okay if I dropped the kids off to go swimming for a bit.

  “Sure, your sister just finished skimming the pool.”

  Crap. I momentarily had forgotten Satan’s concubine was holing up in the spare bedroom. “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”

  “Violet Lynn, you’re being silly. I’m here. I’ll keep my eye on them just as I always have.”

  In spite of my sister’s presence on the property, I agreed to drop them off. It wasn’t my mother’s fault that her youngest offspring craved the life of a soap opera villainess. Besides, Aunt Zoe could really use the afternoon off.

  How much corruption could my sister brainwash the kids with in one afternoon? I didn’t like the answer my brain came back with and decided to stick with consulting the Magic 8 Ball rather than the other voices in my head.

  The kids didn’t waste time getting ready to leave when they heard they were going swimming at Grammy and Grandpa’s place.

  The ride down to Rapid was loud and windy, thanks to the Picklemobile’s loose muffler and open windows. Layne had “called” the window seat, so I let Addy run the radio, which picked up only AM stations.

  “Mom?” Layne yelled above the whistling wind and crackle-filled version of Johnny Horton’s twangy Battle of New Orleans. I turned the volume down just as Johnny powdered the gators’ behinds.

  “What?”

  “Have you considered homeschooling us?”

  I glanced over at him, unsure where this was leading. He stared down at the book in his lap: Ghostly Tailings. A Snapshot of the Past.

  “Is that the book my friend Doc helped you find at the library a couple of weeks ago?” I asked, delaying my abrupt “No” to his other question.

  He nodded.

  “I thought you were done reading it.”

  “I wanted to go through it again.”

  If I hadn’t been fully awake and pushing when Addy and then Layne entered this world, I’d believe the doctor switched out my real son with the baby of a NASA engineer. Then again, his sperm donor of a father had been going to college to be a scientist.

  I focused on the road and returned to his question. “No, I haven’t considered homeschooling you. Why do you ask?”

  “He’s scared to go to school next week,” Addy butted in.

  “Shut up!” I saw Layne elbow his sister out of the corner of my eye, almost hitting her cast. “I am not.”

  “Layne, stop hitting your sister. Addy, zip your lips and let your brother speak for himself.”

  “I’m just trying to help,” Addy said.

  I shot her a yeah-right look. “Layne, is Addy right? Are you nervous about going to your new school next week?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Why? Is this about meeting new kids, because you’re really good at making friends.”

  That wasn’t entirely true, since he tended to keep his nose buried in books more than engaging the children around him, but I was his mom. Sugarcoating the truth was in my job description.

  He shrugged again and looked out the open window. The wind ruffled his hair, making him look even younger than his almost ten years. I resisted the urge to reach out and brush my fingers over his still-boyish cheek.

  Instead, I asked, “Are you concerned about training a new teacher on your homework style?”

  Layne preferred to give long, detailed, elaborate answers on all of his homework, including his art projects and basic math problems. Each year, we went through a few weeks of teachers’ notes repeatedly telling him to cut back on his long-winded responses until they gave up and just let him do his thing.

  Addy, on the other hand, preferred to keep everything short and sweet, if she answered at all. As Doc said, she hadn’t fallen far from the tree.

  “Maybe.” He sighed, the weight of his young world rising and dropping with his broadening shoulders. “Mostly I’m worried about you.”

  I blinked. “Me? What are you talking about?”

  “This is a pivotal year for us.”

  Pivotal? The kid must be reading the dictionary in the bathroom again. I swallowed a chuckle. “Why is fifth grade pivotal?”

  “Before you know it, we’ll be looking into colleges.”

  Addy blew a huge pink bubble and popped it with her own fingers, and then giggled.

  He might be thinking about college. His sister, on the other hand, had a few years of being a “kid” yet to stumble through.

  “You’ll be wondering what you are going to do for the rest of your older years,” Layne continued.

  My older years? Nice. As forty crept nearer, I preferred to think that old meant ninety and I wasn’t even halfway there. Layne was jumping the gun about half a decade with this little prophecy of his, and I had a feeling there was something more to it than homeschooling and me getting more wrinkled.