“Are you okay?” Skipper asked, steadying me when I faked wooziness.

  “Yeah, what happened?” I asked.

  “You screamed and fell again,” Butch said and leaned over Doc. “I think you knocked your friend out cold, babe.”

  Skipper giggled. “The next séance we do with you, I’m bringing a spare pair of underwear.”

  The next séance? Oh, hell no. I was cashing in my séance playing chips after tonight.

  Cornelius stared at me, his expression a mixture of concern and astonishment. His gaze lowered to his laptop and his jaw fell open. “Sweet Mary Jane,” he said, bending over his keyboard. A huge grin spread his mouth wide. It was the first time I’d seen him smile on both sides of his cheeks. “Would you look at this?” His finger raced over the keys.

  What?

  A groan from the floor interrupted my curiosity.

  I squatted next to Doc, noticing the red welt right below his right eye where my elbow had connected. I grimaced. That was going to leave a mark. I grabbed his hand, squeezing.

  His eyelids flickered open, his dark gaze bouncing around until it landed on me. “What happened?”

  “I had another episode,” I told him, squeezing his fingers again, imploring him to go along with me until I could get him out of there. “I accidently knocked you down when it hit me.”

  “It?” he asked, his eyes searching mine.

  “The ghost girl,” I said.

  “Big Lips Lolly,” Skipper clarified.

  “It hit you?” Doc asked.

  “Uh … yeah.” Crap, had he forgotten that the whole reason we were here was for me to fake contact with a ghost in exchange for a sale? Come on, I hadn’t elbowed him that hard.

  He touched the mark on his cheek bone, wincing. “Then what hit me?”

  “She did,” Butch tattled, pointing at me.

  I reached up and smacked his finger away. “It was an accident.”

  Doc’s eyes narrowed for a fraction of a second. “An accident. Right.”

  Butch helped Doc into a chair.

  Skipper turned on the lamp next to the couch. “That was so cool, Ms. Parker. You really can talk to ghosts, huh?”

  I just smiled at the silly life-sized Christmas tree ornament. It was that, or kick something, knowing that my Realtor reputation had just hit an all-new low. Homestake Mining Company hadn’t delved so deep.

  “Violet,” Cornelius said from behind his laptop, his voice breathless. He tugged on his goatee. “You need to see this. It’s incredible. I haven’t seen this many spikes in paranormal activity since we channeled in the Amityville house.”

  I looked at Doc, but he had his head in his hands. I didn’t think he was laughing this time, not with the way his shoulders drooped. I reached out, noticing my own unsteady fingers, and touched the back of his neck. He was burning up.

  “I need to go,” I announced. I had to get Doc out of there before he had another major quake roll through.

  “Already?” Cornelius asked, his expression sad like I was going home and taking my toy with me. “I thought maybe we could try again.”

  Ha! I’d sooner jump off the edge of the Open Cut mine.

  Rubbing my stomach, I moaned. “I think I’m going to be sick. It happens every time I do one of these things.”

  “Talking to ghosts makes you sick?” he asked. “Interesting.”

  Not really. I nodded and groaned again for good measure. “Butch, will you help me get Doc into the elevator.” No way were we trying those stairs with him in this condition.

  “I’ll call you later,” I told Cornelius. When he frowned at me like I’d suggested flying to the moon via jetpack, I added, “To discuss the sale of the hotel.”

  The lights clicked on behind his eyes. “Oh, right. Yes, call me at eleven-thirty-two.”

  I opened my mouth to ask him why that particular exact time, and then thought better of it and led Butch and Doc into the hall.

  Butch rode down in the elevator with us “just to make sure.” I thanked him and turned down his offer to help us out to the Picklemobile.

  By the time we left the casino, Doc’s color was coming back, especially the red and now purplish-blue spots on his right cheek. The lines around his eyes seemed deeper, but his focus was strong, especially when it landed on me.

  I smiled like a cheerleader at a pep-rally and bit my tongue all of the way to the pickup, not wanting anyone to hear the barrage of questions stacking up behind my closed lips.

  When I moved to open the pickup door for Doc, he didn’t object, just crawled inside. He settled onto the bench seat next to me with a sigh, his head resting against the back window, his eyelids closing.

  I shut his door, breathing a sigh of relief. We’d made it, in and out, Doc’s secret still intact. I needed a drink.

  Climbing behind the wheel, I shut my door and just stared at him. The overhead parking lot light added an orange tint to his skin.

  “What?” he asked, his eyes still closed.

  “You okay?”

  “I will be.”

  “What happened back there?”

  “I’m not sure. I got slammed.”

  “I thought you said you could handle her.” I grimaced at how accusing that sounded. To make up for it, I caught his hand and laced my fingers through his.

  His lips curled. “I could, but not all of the others.”

  “Others? What do you mean?” Had Wolfgang been there? Had I really been able to channel something? Someone?

  “At first, I sensed her there—just her,” he explained. “The next thing I knew they were everywhere.”

  “They?”

  “Yeah, Violet.” He opened his eyes, holding me in his sights. “They.”

  I had the feeling he was looking for doubts from me. I didn’t allow any to surface and just went with what he claimed. “How many are we talking here?”

  “There were too many coming at me too fast to count. It was like being engulfed in a wave of … of … Christ, I don’t know.” He closed his eyes again. “I have to sort it all out in my head.”

  “You were engulfed. Then what happened?”

  He smirked. “Then I was waking up on the floor with you on top of me, everything throbbing, especially my cheek.”

  My face warmed. I rolled down the window.

  “And not in the good way that you usually make me throb,” Doc added.

  “Yeah, that was something, huh?” I laughed. It sounded canned.

  “It’s my bad luck that you don’t hit like a girl,” he said.

  I didn’t pinch like a girl, either, but there was no need to bring that up now.

  He rubbed his forehead. “I can’t believe you hit me.”

  “I had to. You were convulsing right there in front of everyone. I had to cover for you.”

  “By punching me?”

  “Technically, I elbowed you.” When he just frowned back at me, I explained, “I needed a distraction. It was all I could think to do.”

  “You could have … I don’t know, flashed them maybe.”

  I had wanted to distract them, not psychologically damage them. After two kids, my fun bags had sagged into sad sacks.

  “That would distract me plenty,” Doc continued.

  “But that wouldn’t have helped you, though.”

  “As opposed to how much giving me a black eye was helping.”

  I scoffed. “I didn’t give you a black eye.”

  But he was right. I had. The blue-purple bruise was spreading north, circling under his eye. Shiznit. I’d miscalculated my aim.

  He grinned. “Morticia Addams gave me a black eye. How fitting. Gomez would be turned on by that.”

  No comment. I jammed the key in the ignition and revved the engine.

  “What’s next, Tish? Whips and chains? A vice clamp? Electrocution?”

  “You should be so lucky.” I backed out of the stall and turned onto the street. “Where to?”

  “Home, please.”

  I nodded. “So, what do you think? Is Cornelius a ghost whisperer like he claims?”

  Doc didn’t answer. When I checked on him, he was frowning out the front window, rubbing the back of his arm—the one I’d pinched.

  “A ghost whisperer,” Doc repeated, as if rolling the title around on his tongue to see how it tasted. “He wasn’t doing much whispering, just chanting.”

  True.

  I made a right, heading toward Doc’s place. “You know, that was all he did last time, too,” I told him. “It’s what put me to sleep.”

  More silence from Doc, his hand still rubbing his arm. I had the feeling his mind was still processing tonight’s events, his hard drive chugging.

  I turned left up into the Presidential District. A couple of minutes later, I pulled up in front of his house.

  “But it was after his chanting began that I started feeling funky,” he said as if there’d been no pause in the conversation.

  “I thought the prostitute was already in the room by then.”

  “Make that funkier.” He pushed his sleeve up and turned his arm, peering at his skin in the dim lights from the dashboard. “Violet, why do I have a big bruise on my arm?”

  Yeah, about that … “Maybe you hit something when you fell.”

  I could feel his eyes on me. “Where else am I going to find bruises?”

  Opting for distraction by seduction this time, I reached over and ran my fingers up his inseam. “Who knows, but I could kiss them all better.”

  His hand stopped mine before I reached pay dirt. “Tempting, Boots. But you can’t finish what you start.”

  Was that a challenge? “Oh, but I can.”

  “Not tonight you can’t.”

  “Why not?” Did he know something I didn’t?

  “Your kids are waiting at home.”

  I knew that, but after ten years of always being there for them every night, a little separation time was good for all of us. At least that was what Aunt Zoe had informed me when I first moved in with her months ago and resisted her initial babysitting offers.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but we could be quick.”

  “I don’t want quick, Violet. Not after the other night.”

  The night I stayed over? What was he saying? Had I been bad in the sack? No, I was pretty sure he enjoyed himself, too, even if our actual sack-time had been more like wall-time. So, what then? I was afraid to read too much into his words, especially after he’d left Tiffany for reading him all wrong.

  “Okay. So, where do we go from here?” I asked, which was my brilliantly subtle way of asking him if he was falling for me as hard as I was for him without actually putting my heart on the line.

  “Well, about that.” He paused for a gut-wrenching couple of seconds. “I’ve been thinking, and—”

  My goddamned, freaking cell phone rang.

  “Ignore that.” I grabbed it, saw Cooper’s name, hissed at it, and hit the reject-call button. “You were saying?”

  He raised one eyebrow. “Who was that?”

  “Cooper.”

  The other eyebrow lifted. “Why would Detective Cooper be calling you at this time of night?”

  There was no jealousy in his tone, at least none that I could detect. It sounded more like curiosity.

  I thought about the last time I’d talked to Cooper, which had been with Harvey acting as mediator, and shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s probably about the head. What were you going to say?”

  “The head? What head? The corpse’s head?”

  “Yeah. So, what were you thinking about regarding you and me?”

  “The corpse’s head?” He sat upright, frowning at me. “What about it?”

  “They found it.” Who cares about the head? I wanted to know what Doc was thinking about us.

  “What? Why didn’t you tell me they found the head?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I was distracted by the pending séance.” Getting through the whole séance had been front and center in my thoughts since I heard the news, which wasn’t much yet thanks to Cooper’s unwillingness to let Harvey tell me more on the phone.

  “Who else knows about the head?” Doc asked, his tone a little terse.

  How should I know? “Harvey, Aunt Zoe, the Deadwood Police Department, maybe Reid,” if Cooper shared information with him. “Oh, and Natalie.” I’d texted her about it before I’d hopped in the shower to prepare for the séance.

  Doc opened his mouth, acted as if he was going to say something, but didn’t and pressed his lips together instead, shaking his head. Then he removed my hand from his thigh and pushed open his door. Before I could do more than gasp in surprise at his abrupt departure, he shut the door behind him.

  I shoved open my door and poked my head out between the cab and window frame. “What are you doing?” I asked as he rounded the front of the pickup and walked toward his front porch.

  He turned around, walking backward. “Go home, Violet.” He sounded disappointed on top of tired.

  “What did I do?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary. I’m just starting to get fed up with being the low man on your totem pole. Especially after tonight’s fun and games.”

  Speechless, I watched him climb the porch steps, unlock his front door, and disappear inside without even a wave goodbye.

  But, but, but … He was not the low man on my pole.

  “No fair,” I said, my chest burning from the frustration. He’d sidetracked me with that comment about him thinking about us, and then he didn’t even give me a chance to explain how little I knew about the whole head thing.

  I sank back into the driver’s seat.

  “No fucking fair!” I yelled and beat the crap out of the steering wheel.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Wednesday, August 22nd

  “Mom,” Addy’s voice echoed in my head. “Mom, wake up.”

  I opened my eyes and stared into her light brown eyes just inches from mine. Her head rested on my pillow, her smile as bright as the sunshine streaming in from the window behind her. She smelled like bubblegum ice cream, all sweet and innocent. A chicken feather was stuck in her hair, fluttering ever so slightly.

  She reached out and traced my forehead. “Why are you in my bed, Momma?”

  Her bed?

  Then I remembered yesterday in a rapid-fire slideshow—me at Doc’s place, Cornelius in jail, lunch with Cooper, news about the kids’ father, the stairwell with Doc, the séance disaster, Doc and my totem pole, Natalie’s sleep monologue, my insomnia, and finally Addy’s bed—a soft-sheeted refuge guarded by teddy bears.

  “Oh, crudmongers.” I covered my eyes, groaning. My life was tangled up into such a big clusterfuck.

  Addy snuggled into me, her cast digging into my ribs a little, her blonde hair making my nose itch. I blew the chicken feather free.

  “Did you come in here because something scared you?” she asked.

  I thought about Doc and the way my chest had ached last night after his rejection. “Yes.”

  “Were you afraid of being all alone in the dark?”

  Of just being all alone, dark or light. “Definitely.”

  “Me, too, sometimes.” She trailed her fingers down my arm, tickling me, and then looked up at me. “Me and Elvis will always be here to keep you company, Momma.”

  I watched her blink, soaking up her words. She was right—well, so long as I didn’t manage to psychologically damage her until she hated my guts and wrote a screenplay titled, Mommy Dearest II. No matter what happened with Doc and Natalie, with my job, with anything, I’d always have Addy and Layne to kiss it better and make everything all right.

  I squeezed her against me. “You promise, Adelynn?”

  “Cross my heart,” she mumbled into my old T-shirt.

  “Good.” I threw the sheets back and lowered my feet to the floor. “Let’s go eat some breakfast.”

  I needed to catch Natalie before she left for work. Addy’s promise prompted me to get busy on something I’d been putting off.

  Then, I wanted to get into the office. On the phone with me last night at eleven thirty-two on the dot, Cornelius had agreed to add thirty thousand dollars to his previous offer, coming in at fifteen grand more than Ray and George. I planned to have our new offer in Tiffany’s hand as soon as she entered her office this morning.

  Downstairs, Aunt Zoe and Layne were at the breakfast table planning how to spend the kids’ last day of summer vacation. I scooped up and pretty much inhaled a banana nut muffin from the dozen cooling on the counter, agreed to join them all for a picnic later out at Pactola Dam, and then headed up the stairs to catch Natalie. She was brushing her wavy brown tresses in the bathroom when I found her.

  I leaned against the doorjamb and watched her in the mirror. It was kind of a déjà vu moment, replaying the same scene from many years throughout our past as we preened to go out to eat, drink, party, or just complain about life and men. Only today’s version came with more of a melancholy feel due to what I needed to tell her. There was no way to go about this without hurting her feelings.

  “Hey, you,” she said, pointing the brush at me in the mirror. “You left me all alone again last night. Where did you end up?”

  “Addy’s bed.”

  “Ay Chihuahua. She kicks hard.”

  “Yeah, but Layne plays rugby in his sleep.”

  “Pick your bruiser, eh?” She exchanged her hair brush for her toothbrush.

  Unsure where to begin, I just blurted out. “I think it’s time for me to fly solo at night.”

  She paused in the midst of brushing her teeth and grinned at me in the mirror, looking like a rabid beauty queen. “If that’s your way of saying you want time alone with a vibrator,” she said through a mouth full of toothpaste, “don’t let me get in your way. Go to town.”

  I chuckled in spite of my apprehension about my task.

  “Although,” she paused to spit in the sink, “I’m sure Detective Cooper would be happy to perform some community service on you if you’d just ask.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Nat, Cooper isn’t into me.”