I think I might be in a pickle, I muttered into my hands.

  We’ll find the idol, Cain said in that gruff way he had when he was trying to be comforting, but clueless about how to actually do it. I’ve tracked down more than a few things in my day.

  His words actually made me feel better. Cain had been a copper, after all. Finding stuff was part of the job, wasn’t it? The Pinkertons used to, all the time. At least I had someone on my side to help me.

  Ice crawled through my veins like a hard frost at the thought. Cain was only with me because Taliyah had hired me to channel him so she could get things at Haven Hollow sorted out. So, if I lost my job… would I lose Cain, too?

  I was just getting used to having the big galoot around! He was surly, and gruff, and a real bear about emotional stuff like his family, but… if he were gone.

  I’d miss him.

  Well, heck. I guessed I’d better find that idol.

  Unfortunately though, my best lead on the whole caper had just skedaddled out through my wall and off into Haven Hollow somewhere. And if there was one thing Cain didn’t have any experience with, it was tracking down a ghost. But if I wanted to find the idol, and I did, then I needed to have a little chit-chat with the last person to have had it in their possession.

  So, if I were Magda Erepto, where would I go?

  Too bad I didn’t know anything about her life.

  Now, for me, it would have been easy. When I was still dead, I craved people. The hustle and bustle. Cutting a rug and drinking the giggle water. I’d gone from being an actress, a rising star, one big part away from making it, and then—boom!—I was dead.

  And then it was a long, long time of loneliness.

  Actually, ‘lonely’ wasn’t half of it. I went from all eyes being on me, to being invisible. Literally.

  Magda had looked like a respectable enough dame, though. A real blue stocking. And from what I understood, she’d only been dead a couple days; she hadn’t even had a chance to get used to being dead, so she might not be as desperate for company as I’d been.

  Which was probably for the best, since Haven Hollow, ironically, didn’t have much of a nightlife. No night clubs, no speakeasies, no high fallutin ballrooms. Well, except at the hotel. But I doubted very much that Magda Erepto was eager to jitterbug through the night with a bunch of ghosts.

  Maybe I was thinking about things wrong. I mean, I was focusing on Magda, because she was the last person to have had the idol. But the idol was the thing Sophia really wanted. And we were banking hard on her grandmother knowing where it was, but what if she didn’t? What if this idol had been taken or misplaced after Magda had crossed over? Well, then we’d be barking up the wrong tree and wasting valuable time to boot.

  Hmm, so maybe it was best not to focus on finding Magda, but to focus on finding the idol instead?

  I sat down in my desk chair, feeling like I’d already run ten miles without ever actually taking a step.

  “Hey, Cain?” I said out loud. “What’s the best way to find something that’s gone missing? Official like, I mean.”

  There was a ripple in the air, and Cain’s translucent form suddenly popped into existence on the other side of my desk. The sunlight made him look a bit wavy, like I was looking at him through water. He drifted down to sit in one of the client chairs and folded his hands on the desk between us.

  “The best was to locate something that’s gone missing, is to track it from where it was last seen. You need to start at the scene of the crime.”

  The scene of the crime. Which would be Magda’s home, probably. I winced. Great. I was off to a roaring start, since I didn’t even know where that was.

  No way around it. I needed more information, and I only had one way of getting it.

  A few clicks at my computer, and someone up there must have been smiling on me, because Sophia Erepto’s appointment was actually listed on my books. I’d been worried that Mr. Howard had just told her to show up without ever having entered her information. And that would have meant I’d have to go to him for her number, and then I’d have to make up some baloney reason I needed to talk to her again.

  Not that it was much less painful to be able to dial her directly.

  The icy, “What.” That I got when the line picked up wasn’t exactly promising.

  “Hello, Ms. Erepto. Ma’am. It’s Darla Rowe...”

  “Who?”

  “From Spook Society? We talked just a couple minutes ago?”

  It was silent on the other end of the line, and I had to resist the urge to smack myself. If only I didn’t have a cell phone, but one of those old heavy-duty numbers from my day, I could have knocked the receiver into my head and put myself out of my own misery for an hour or so.

  “I know who you are, Miss Rowe. I’m assuming you’re calling me because you’ve miraculously found my grandmother or my family’s idol?”

  I winced. Off to a great start already.

  I cleared my throat. “Um, no ma’am. I’m, ah, well, I just wanted to ask if it was possible for me to visit the last place the idol was known to be? To see if I can, uh, pick up on something. Oh! And maybe you could give me a picture of it, or some sort of description of the idol?” I mean, really, that wasn’t asking for so much, was it?

  It was quiet so long, I couldn’t help but wilt a little. All I could hear over the line was the smooth sound of a fancy car’s engine. What was I going to do if she said no? I mean... she wouldn’t say no, surely? She wanted the idol, or she wouldn’t have come to us in the first place. So why not give me a little help in finding it?

  “Then you haven’t located my grandmother’s spirit and asked her where it is?”

  “Well, I thought it would be a better idea to have two avenues open to me in order to find the idol. Yes, I will still try to find your grandmother’s spirit, but I also thought I could try to search for the idol, itself.”

  “With what? Ghostly help?”

  “Yes, something like that,” I answered, not interested in telling her about Cain. Better to let her think I was getting random ghostly help in locating the item.

  “Fine.” The word dropped like a stone in a well. “You may come to the manor tomorrow morning. We’ll be holding a wake for grandmother, so the rest of the family will be distracted.”

  “Manor?” I mouthed it to Cain.

  His eyebrows beetled down over his eyes, and he looked like he’d bitten into something sour.

  “I’ll have one of the servants find a photograph for you.”

  “Oh, good, you have a photograph?”

  “Yes, the idol has been extensively documented.”

  Oh boy, this just kept getting better and better.

  “Great, thank you, Ma’am.”

  She rattled off an address that seemed to have too many numbers in it, and I scrabbled to get it written down because something told me she wouldn’t be chipper if I asked her to repeat it.

  “Be there at ten in the morning, sharp, Miss Rowe. Don’t be late.”

  I opened my mouth to assure her that I’d be there with bells on, but a click and a double beep told me that she’d already hung up.

  “Nice lady,” Cain grunted.

  “Yeah, she’s swell.”

  I dropped my head into my hands, staring at my fuzzy reflection in the lacquer of my desk. What a bang-up job I was doing. I lost the ghost I’d summoned, and my client already hated my guts. And now I was going to try to find some idol without a clue of where to start.

  Great job, Darla. A real whiz bang, you are.

  “Hey. Don’t worry. We’re going to find it,” Cain said with an encouraging smile.

  “Yeah?” I didn’t raise my head. “How often do the coppers manage to track down missing and stolen goods again?”

  The silence took on an awkward note.

  “Well, you have to take in manpower, and that attention needs to be diverted to higher priority cases a lot of the time, and–”

  “Is that copper speak for ‘not often’?”

  Cain didn’t answer.

  I felt like a heel. He was just trying to cheer me up, and I was doing a great impersonation of a raincloud, dragging down the whole mood. But I knew the odds. And, furthermore, folks don’t leap straight to ‘summon the dead and ask them where the idol is’ until they’ve exhausted pretty much any other option, even in supernatural circles. Sophia Erepto didn’t strike me as the kind of dame that asked for help easily, either. And that had to mean she was fresh out of options, which was why she’d come to me in order to reach her dead grandma.

  My phone blipped at me, and I thought about ignoring the darn thing. But what if it was important? Horsefeathers, what if it was Ms. Erepto calling back? So, I scrambled for it, getting it up to my ear just before it was about to kick over into voicemail. “Hello?”

  “Hey, Darla. Did I catch you at a bad time?”

  A smile bloomed on my face. I couldn’t have held it back even if I’d tried. “Henner.”

  Henner Tayir was my steady sweety. We’d been going out since I came back to life, and he was just the bee’s knees. I’d had a huge crush on him when I’d been dead, and maybe the reason for that had partially been that he was one of the only guys who’d been able to see me.

  As the grandson of a witch, Henner didn’t have a whole lot of magic, but he had enough that he was able to see ghosts. And the rest of his abilities centered around the doo-dads he liked so much. Technology and the like. If something used electricity, Henner was a wiz with it. ‘technomancy’ was what he’d called it, and I’d taken that to mean magic with technological objects.

  All in all, Henner was a stand-up guy. Thoughtful, smart, and a real looker. The fact was, given the chance, I think I could fall head over heels for him. He didn’t want to rush me though, while I was still coming to terms with being alive again, but I told him he wasn’t no runner-up or second place.

  “It’s never a bad time to hear from you,” I told him.

  Cain made a face.

  I could hear the grin in Henner’s voice when he spoke next. “Well, that’s good to hear. I was calling because there’s a live band playing at the Half-Moon tonight, and I wondered if you might like to go with me?”

  That put some starch back in my spine. I shot upright at my desk, smiling so wide, it made my cheeks ache. Drinks and dancing with a handsome man? And Henner being that handsome man? Well, shoot! Excitement hit my blood like a double shot of the giggle water. “Absolutely! What time?”

  While Henner chatted, I was mentally planning out my outfit. This was exactly what I needed to try and wash away the nasty, bitter taste of failure on my tongue.

  When I hung up we said our goodbyes, Cain was scowling in his seat, his arms crossed over his chest.

  “I thought we had a case to work,” he grumped.

  “We do.” I grabbed up my purse, fishing out my car keys. “But we can’t do anything about it until tomorrow. Unless you think Ms. Erepto would be happy to let us break in and snoop around her grandma’s place tonight?”

  Cain didn’t answer, just continued that manly sulk he was so good at. That was what Wanda called it: when it was all jutting jaws and sullen silences from a man.

  “Look, how about I leave the ring at home? I can put on one of those cop shows you like so much.”

  Cain glared at me. “I don’t like them; they get everything wrong! That’s not how police work goes. They don’t even know proper procedure!”

  I hummed, reaching for the door. “And yet, you watch every episode.”

  Cain rolled his eyes. “Fine.”

  I sailed out the door then, my ghostly Mr. Grundy tailing along in my wake. I didn’t let it get me down, though.

  I had a date.

  With a super swell guy.

  Chapter Four

  The next morning, I sat in my car staring up at the biggest dang house I’d ever seen in my life.

  I’d been to some fancy parties in my day, Hollywood bashes, where all the pretty young things gathered to rub elbows with producers and actors and musicians. But this place, put most of those mansions to shame.

  No wonder the street address had so many numbers, the place probably had its own postal code.

  Erepto Manor wasn’t actually in Haven Hollow. It was a pretty decent drive away, which just made me cringe harder about how the other day’s meeting had gone. Sophia Erepto had come all that way to Spook Society to see me, and I’d lost her grandma on top of her idol.

  I dropped my head onto my steering wheel.

  If you give yourself bruises on your forehead, people are going to ask some uncomfortable questions, Cain said from the back of my head.

  I groaned and sat back, nervously twisting his class ring around and around again on my finger.

  Just looking at Sophia, I’d known she was a dame with money. It wasn’t just what she’d worn, but how she’d worn it, how she’d walked, talked, the whole package. Plus, she’d referred to her house as ‘the manor’ so that was a pretty good tip off, too. I just hadn’t quite expected this.

  I’d even gotten up early, just to make sure I put together the right outfit. It needed to be something classy, all black, but also nothing with too much va va voom, if you get what I mean. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to impress a bunch of people I didn’t know and probably would never see again, it was more that I needed to blend in. I needed to be invisible, just another guest at the wake, so that I could nose around without making folks ask too many questions.

  I flipped down my sun visor to check my makeup in the mirror for the third time. I still had to be careful with lipstick, or it bled into the corners of my mouth. A bold lip never gave me that much trouble in my twenties.

  I’d actually been in my twenties when I’d kicked the bucket, thanks to that rotten bum, Frank. When I’d come back, I’d been the same age I’d died. But the problem with ‘no one’s ever done this before’ magic, was that no one knew exactly what would happen to me. Wanda had been as shocked as I was when I’d started aging. And fast.

  It seemed like my body was trying to catch up, like all the years I’d hung around as a ghost were suddenly trying to pile up on me all at once, and since that would have made me approximately forty years past dead again, it was kind of a problem.

  Lucky for me, Poppy, that wonderful dame, came through for me yet again. She whipped up a potion that managed to stop the years from taking their toll. The potion couldn’t reverse the years I’d already aged though, so basically I’d woken from my dirt nap as a twenty-something, skipped the rest of that decade, and my thirties, and landed smack dab in what we estimated to be my early forties.

  It was rough, at first. One big change after the other landed kind of like a sucker punch. It felt like Frank had robbed me of my youth all over again.

  But ultimately, it wasn’t so bad. It was better than being dead, that was for darn sure. What were a few lines at the corner of my eyes and a couple of strands of gray at my temples compared to a century trapped with my killer? Nothing, that’s what.

  I did still need a bit of a defter hand when it came to my lipstick, though. Everything else looked good: neutral eye shadow, just a hint of mascara from a fancy little tube. No more having to rub a pinch of soot into Vaseline jelly for this girl, no sirree. There might be less music and dancing, but the modern world was pretty peachy keen.

  I squared my shoulders and took a deep breath. I just had to walk in there, and then I could sneak off and snoop around. I’d just think of it like another acting gig, pretending to play a part.

  So I slipped out of the car, straightened up, and pretended I had a glass of water on my head in order to keep my spine as straight as a broomstick. At least the heels helped with my strut. Walk like you’re exactly where you belong, and most people will believe you. It’s when you hesitate that they start to notice and ask questions.

  Exhibiting a confidence I didn’t necessarily feel, I joined the crowd of extremely fancy mourners that were flooding into the manor. In a way, it was a lot like the Hollywood parties I’d been to. The guests weren’t there because of the host, not really. They were there to see and be seen, and to show off the fact that they’d warranted an invitation. It made me a little sad for Magda, really. Her wake felt more like an all-black business meeting than a celebration of life.

  Cain’s class ring didn’t exactly blend in with the caliber of jewelry the women inside were sporting, but I wasn’t willing to take it off or store it in my purse and risk losing it.

  The foyer was just inside the front doors, which were held open by soberly clad servants, and the whole place felt more like a museum than a house. The busts and small statues on display columns, combined with the marble floors and lighting, made me half expect to see a group of tourists bustle through while a guide explained how such and such’s nose was a perfect example of third-century nostrilism, or something.

  I stifled a giggle at my own joke. It definitely wouldn’t do to start laughing. I mean, it was a wake, after all. And something told me this crowd wasn’t really big on the guffaws, even in less somber times.

  Back to the ‘house’, it reminded me a bit of Henner’s house. He’d inherited a giant old pile of a manor on the outskirts of Haven Hollow, though he never once called it that. While Henner’s place was piled high with stuff from previous generations, including clothing, artwork, and books (not to mention his gadgets), Erepto manor seemed to be stuffed with priceless statues and artwork.

  I’d take Henner’s cozy hoarder’s nest over this pristine, sterile and hollow house, hands down. The place was giving me the heebie-jeebies.

  Follow the crowd. The main gathering seems to be through that door, over there. Cain made my left pinky twitch slightly.

  It had been weird at first, letting Cain have control of my body. Also, extremely uncomfortable. Don’t get me wrong, I’d gotten zozzled a few times, to the point where my feet didn’t want to do what my brain was telling them. Having Cain in control of my body was a whole other thing. But the more time we spent together, the easier we seemed to fit. Like two boulders rubbing together until they wore a groove and fit like puzzle pieces.