Chapter Thirty-Three
IN THE PAST, I’d experienced the dubious pleasure of being knocked out of my body.
As a psychic medium, I remembered the separation, though my mortician friend who’d shared the experience recalled it more like a baffling dream.
Maybe it happens more often than people realize, and they chalk it up to an ill-advised midnight snack.
Without a high-level psychic medium around to see the split, how would they even know?
“That’s it,” Sarah’s body said, “I’m outta here.”
“Who is that and why does she look like me?” her spirit demanded. “Oh my god, it is me! Am I dead?”
“Jacob, stop her body,” I said—belatedly realizing how messed up it sounded when he and Boswell both gave me a big double-take. I sighed and said, “I’ll take care of her…etheric.”
I’d almost said “her spirit.” But her living ghost was freaked out enough as it was.
Even though Sarah’s etheric body was wearing the same schleppy outfit as her physical body, it looked a lot more like her old Instagram photos. It wasn’t a physical thing. It was the light in her eyes—the blah-ness was gone and she looked like herself again.
And herself was having a major meltdown. “What did you do? I was just standing there with you randos staring at me and suddenly now I’m dead? WTF?”
“I definitely heard a ghostly voice,” Boswell said.
As Jacob took off after Sarah’s body, explaining to her in his calmest tones that she needed to stick around while we figured everything out, Sarah’s emotional ghost was reeling in implications.
“I’ll never see the Northern Lights? I’ll never backpack across Europe?
I’ll never have my own fragrance? This cannot be happening to me! ”
“Calm down for half a second and listen,” I said. “You’re not dead. We just need to reunite you with your body.”
“I knew it,” Boswell pointed at Sarah’s etheric form. “There is something here—and no one can deny that the landlord keeping my security deposit return was entirely unjustified.”
Sarah swung her baffled attention to him. “Is that the guy who un-alived me?”
“No one else can see her,” I told Boswell, then turned to Sarah and repeated, “You’re not dead.”
“I will never swim with dolphins!” she wailed.
Boswell said, “See? How could anyone sleep in the same room with all that moaning?”
“You,” I told Boswell, “stop helping. Shut your mouth. And for crying out loud, don’t touch me.”
Boswell gave me a sullen look. I swung around to etheric Sarah. “And you—if you see something that looks like a mystical door, or portal, or interdimensional thingamajig…I don’t care how hard it pulls. Don’t go through it. Or else the dolphin swimming is off the table for good.”
Sarah knuckled etheric tears from her eyes. “I’ll do my best.”
“Fine. Then let’s go get your body back before it does something we all regret.”
A head poked from Haskel’s back door as we all thundered past on our way out. “Is everything okay? I heard shouting.” From inside his apartment came a familiar haw-haw-haw.
“All good,” I lied through my teeth as we pounded down the balcony stairs. Jacob only had a couple minutes head start, but as we spilled into the alley, he was nowhere to be seen. I got him on the phone. “Where are you?”
“She’s heading for Walgreens.”
“On our way.” I headed for the main drag full-tilt.
I outpaced Boswell immediately, but Sarah’s ghost kept up with me easily, probably because she wasn’t obeying any laws of physics.
And her body would be breaking its own laws, since bodies were notorious for putting their own needs first, and to hell with everyone else.
I spied Jacob across the parking lot. He’d trapped Sarah in the revolving door—good thinking—but then a self-important rent-a-cop sauntered out and played the knight in shining armor. Jacob released the door, and Sarah’s body hurried into the drug store.
“I’m gonna have to ask you to vacate the premises,” he was telling Jacob, one hand on his pepper spray, as I sprinted up.
“I’ll get Sarah,” I told him. “You do damage control.” And I swerved past security and dove through the handicap door. I skidded to a stop just inside the store, trying to see which aisle she’d gone down, but the shelves were too high. “What do you usually get at Walgreens?” I asked the ghost.
“Mascara, maybe? But only if I can’t get to Sephora.”
Okay—makeup. Where was it now, anyhow? Every time I went to a store thinking I’d just grab one thing quick, the second I walked through the door, I’d realize they’d moved it all around since the last time I was there. And this time was no different.
“The dolphins will be extinct by the time you get your act together!” Apparently ghost Sarah was still keeping up with me just fine. “They’ll all be swimming in cans of tuna.”
“Where the hell is the makeup aisle?”
“To the left, obviously, where the Lanc?me display is!”
I ran toward the towering image of a gauzy woman looking off into the distance and making a perfume face, then caught myself before I barreled into a shelf of tester bottles and came out smelling like Florida Water.
“Over there by the nail polish!” Sarah said. I looked around. “By the ba-a-ack,” she whined, as if I couldn’t possibly be more hopeless. “And don’t let it get any of that cheap stuff, it’ll chip off before I’m even done painting my toes.”
The body wasn’t picking out a new color, though. It was grabbing a nail clipper from the display. Sarah’s spirt realized what it was doing just a second after I did, and she let out a horrified gasp.
Her body opened the packaging with her teeth, dropped the wrapper on the floor, clicked the handle into position, and proceeded to snip off a fingernail.
“Stop me!” her ghost bellowed.
If the body got itself arrested for shoplifting, at least I’d know where it was. But I’m sure the office would have a field day with that. And then I remembered that technically I was no longer on her case. Good thing Jacob still had the security guy distracted.
Sarah’s body took little notice of me, as it was focused on giving itself a more practical manicure.
“Why aren’t you doing anything?” her ghost whined.
“Why don’t you get in there and stop it yourself?” I countered.
The notion must not have occurred to her until I said it. The body held up her left hand and considered her newly-clipped nails. Then set to work shortening up the pinky. As it did, the ghost squared her shoulders and charged.
And bounced out the other side.
The body switched hands and started to clip the right.
I made a “keep trying” gesture at the ghost while I tried to figure out how to stall the body. “The store won’t take kindly to you doing your grooming in aisle 7. Why don’t we pay for those and head back home, and you can clip away to your heart’s content? I’ll even throw in an emery board.”
Sarah’s body gave the final finger—appropriately enough, the middle one—a solid clip. “Nah. I’m good.” She dropped the clippers on the floor and walked away.
“Fine,” her ghost yelled at it. “I’ll just get acrylic nails and—where the hell do you think you’re going?”
The body was in no particular hurry, but it was moving with purpose. The spirit and I hustled to keep up with it. “Why did you clip your nails?” I asked it.
Sarah’s body ignored me, but her spirit answered. “Because they’re a total pain, that’s why. But now I’ll be stuck going around with man-hands!”
Dramatic, much? “You don’t have man-hands—now what is it…? Uh-oh.”
As Jacob and Boswell caught up with us, the body was heading for the office supplies. Not a concern if it was hoping to grab a notebook and write a strongly-worded letter. But no such luck. It went right to the scissors.
“Don’t you dare!” Sarah’s ghost hollered. She hurtled toward it and dove in. Reunited, Sarah said, “Ohmigosh!” and dropped the pair of chunky plastic scissors it had grabbed off the rack.
And then the spirit staggered out the other side.
“Why didn’t you stay in there?” I demanded. Neither Jacob nor Boswell asked who I was talking to. Jacob knew me well enough…and apparently Boswell was medium enough to sense it.
“I couldn’t!” the spirit wailed, with ghost tears streaming down her face. “Because the second I got in there, all I could think of was Zach…and how he hit me…and hit me again….”
They say the body keeps the score. But in Sarah’s case, the fragment wasn’t missing a trick.
The moment Sarah’s spirit left her body, her physical expression had gone blank. Guess that was one way to unburden yourself from a painful memory. Or so I thought…until it reached for a box-cutter.
Boswell made an “ack” noise and backed into a cardboard display of packing tape.
“Just put down the knife,” Jacob said, very reasonably, “and we can talk about whatever’s bothering you.” He’d left his sidearm holstered, but was easing a zip tie from his pocket.
The body ignored him and picked open the plastic bubble holding the blade to the hangtag with her freshly-clipped nail.
It was a cheap disposable tool with a plastic handle and a blade that was scored to snap off a fresh section each time it dulled.
Those things went dull after just a couple of uses. But this one was right out of the box.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” Jacob said urgently. “Whatever help you need, we’re here for you.”
I circled around to disarm her. I’d been trained for this, so I knew right where to focus, and exactly where to grab.
Time didn’t really slow, but it felt that way to me as adrenaline dumped into my system and sharpened my senses.
It would take a very precise timing, but I was in flow, and all I had to do—
A jolt.
My heart lurched as I saw with stunning certainty that I’d misread everything.
I was so sure I was not only a seasoned cop, but the biggest, baddest medium known to man, that I forgot one basic thing: ghosts are scary.
Horror squeezed at my innards and crumpled me all up, and I thought I might never inhale again.
And then I realized…it wasn’t even my fear.
It was Sarah’s.
And she was trying to get in my skin.
White light blasted through my crown chakra and I shoved her right back out.
I felt the fear leave me like I’d shed a coat of fire ants. This was what she’d left behind in the bedroom? Maybe she had been better off without it. Meanwhile, here in the drugstore aisle, her body grabbed a hank of its own hair and started sawing at it with the box cutter.
“What’s going on?” Jacob snapped—because my back had arched like I’d stuck a fork in a socket—and I let out a puff of frigid air that curled in the sickly green fluorescent drugstore light. “I’m fine,” I snapped, then whacked the boxcutter out of the body’s hand.
The body huffed and grabbed another one off the display.
“Somebody do something!” the ghost wailed.
Boswell tilted his head. “Now, I definitely heard a voice. Is this Walgreens haunted, too?”
Too late, I realized he should have kept his mouth shut.
Or, better yet, he should have stayed in his van and worked on his tinfoil hat.
Because while Jacob was busy trying to disarm Sarah’s body without taking a boxcutter to the face, and I was tripping on white light, the focus of Sarah’s ghost landed squarely on him.
She stuck out her etheric tongue at me and hopped inside.