Chapter 6 #3
She frowned up at him, now much shorter back in her own barefooted body. “The list. Can I at least change clothes first, or
am I stuck in a nightgown for all eternity?” She pinched her satin skirt’s hem and let it flutter around her thighs.
He quickly averted his eyes after he stole a glance at her thighs. “Afraid so. The inability to move anything from the living
world extends to clothing. The same as your body is in the state it was when you passed, so is your outfit.”
“Huh. So, is that what you were wearing when you died?” She nodded at his still rumpled clothes.
He glanced down and straightened his tie. “No. Things are different at the administration. It’s more like what life is like
here when you’re alive.”
“So, it’s a choice, then. To not iron your shirt.”
“I—” He began to offer another factual response, and then realized she’d insulted him. She shot him a teasing smile. He smiled back. “Would an Austenian hero iron his shirt?”
“Probably with higher likelihood than a poetry professor. Were irons even around in the 1800s?”
“I believe they’ve been around since late BC.”
“Are you sure you’re not a professor?”
“Like I told you, I have no idea.”
Dell stopped walking and placed her hand on his arm. They were two houses down from hers. A few news vans were still parked
at the curb, with a handful of reporters milling the sidewalk. They must have been waiting for someone to return, or perhaps
someone was still inside the house.
“You really don’t know what you did before you died?” she asked Cole.
He glanced at her hand on his forearm. Her palm had landed below his rolled sleeve, so it rested on his exposed skin. The
sensation was warm. A look of vulnerability filled his face. “Not anymore. It has faded since I’ve been waiting for my case
to be investigated. I see things in bits and pieces, but it’s hard to know what’s real anymore.”
The sad note in his voice put an ache in her chest. “I’m sorry. That’s awful.”
“Yeah. It’s a really special kind of torture.”
“Will you remember when you . . . move on?”
“Rumor has it, yes.”
She wasn’t entirely sure she believed him but didn’t get the chance to further push because a woman burst around the corner
and came charging at them from up the street. Dell reeled on reflex before she remembered they were invisible.
The reporters instantly perked up and watched her approach.
“Do you know her?” Cole asked.
Dell watched the woman continue to all but run at them. She wore a mishmash of clothing: sneakers, sweatpants, a camisole,
and a designer trench coat open at the front and flapping in the breeze created by her rush. Her hair was bunched in a scrunchie,
and her pink, puffy face said she’d been crying. She looked like she’d rolled from bed and pulled on whatever was closest.
“Actually, yes,” Dell said when she recognized Nikki, an aide from the mayor’s office, stomping toward them. She held her
phone in one hand and kept worriedly biting her plump bottom lip. Dell had only ever seen her in a skirt suit and heels, but
even without makeup and her golden hair bouncing in styled curls, she knew her face. “I wonder what she’s doing here.”
Thinking it was an odd coincidence she was on her street, and she might blow right past them, Dell found herself blinking
in shock when Nikki turned and pushed reporters out of the way to climb the front steps, like she knew the path well.
“Ma’am, who are you?” one of the reporters asked. “Why are you here?”
“Can you tell us anything about what happened inside?” another demanded.
Nikki shoved her way through them, trying to shield her face. “No comment,” she snapped.
“Who is she?” Cole said as he hurried after Dell.
She’d quickly sped up to follow Nikki up the stairs.
“She works with Tommy in the mayor’s office. I don’t know what she’s doing here, unless Evelyn is still inside.” She looked
over her shoulder and didn’t see the mayor’s SUV. Even her parents’ cars were gone. Everyone must have gone to the hospital.
“Ma’am, are you related to the owners?” a reporter called out. “How do you know them?”
Nikki ignored them and stopped at the front door to knock. Then she rang the doorbell and knocked again.
Dell marched right up beside her and studied her face. Her skin, still supple with the youth of someone in her twenties, was
pale and waxy. Smudges of leftover mascara rimmed beneath her teary eyes. She’d chewed her lip hard enough to peel back a
little flap of skin. She all but vibrated with nerves while she waited for someone to answer the door.
Dell didn’t think anyone was home, but when Tommy opened the door, and Nikki almost collapsed with relief, the feeling in
Dell’s dead chest nearly knocked her down.
“Oh, thank God,” Nikki blurted.
“Nik, what are you doing here?” Tommy said in a rush. He nervously looked at the reporters and then pulled her inside. The
door slammed in Dell’s shocked face.
“I knew the son was still home!” one of the reporters said. “He never left with the rest of them.”
“Who do you think she is to him?” another asked.
“I bet she’s the mistress.”
Dell stood there gaping and trying to process feelings that were at once overwhelming and only half there. Still, even blunted,
the shock felt like a sword through her middle.
“Um, Ms. Rodgers—” Cole attempted to say from where he’d joined her on the porch, but she silenced him with a glare.
Without a second’s hesitation, she stepped through the closed door and found herself in the entryway of her house, inches
from her fiancé wrapped around another woman.
“I’m sorry,” Nikki blubbered into his chest. “I know I shouldn’t have come, but I saw on the news”—she cut off with a hiccup—“that there was a body, and then—” Another gasp and a hiccup.
“And then you weren’t answering your phone, and I was so worried.
I just had to—” She buried her face in his chest again.
The shard of Dell’s brain still clinging to hope this dramatic scene was simply one worried coworker being comforted by another
died like the rest of her when Tommy gently petted Nikki’s hair and kissed her temple.
“I’m fine, baby. I’m fine,” he soothed her. “My mom took away my phone, so I couldn’t call you. But I’m okay.” They continued
to tug at each other, caressing and soothing until their mouths met, and Dell had to look away.
A raw rage rattled around inside her, tempered only by shock but still at a powerful enough voltage to make her suddenly understand
how someone could commit a crime of passion.
“Can a ghost murder someone?” she numbly asked Cole as her fiancé continued to make out with another woman right in front
of her.
He gave her a tortured look. “Ms. Rodgers, I don’t think harming her will—”
“Not her,” she said with fire in her veins. “Him.”
They continued to kiss, softly whispering to each other in between, and Dell knew this was not new. The way they touched each
other, her hands on his chest, his on her waist, in her hair, said they knew each other’s bodies well.
The rage bubble inside Dell popped and gave way to something like . . . relief?
But still.
“I’ve been dead for two hours, Tommy! What the fuck?
!” She swiped at him and regretted not feeling the resistance of her hand meeting his flesh.
She wanted to hurt him. She wanted to tear the ring off her finger and saw him in half with the stone.
“How can you do this to me?!” she shouted, and shoved him.
But her hands sank through him. He shuddered, and Dell remembered what Cole had
said about major organs.
She punched at him, aiming for his heart, his liver, his lungs. Anything she could get her dead hands on. It was a shot to
the pelvis that finally made him pull back from Nikki.
“Baby, what’s wrong?” Nikki asked when he stumbled and held a hand to his forehead. “Are you okay?”
He shook his head and blinked a few times. “Yeah. I’m just not feeling so great all of a sudden.”
“Maybe because you’ve got your tongue down someone else’s throat while your fiancée’s dead body is still warm, you asshole!”
Dell said, and shoved him again. Her usual levelheadedness was nowhere to be found, not with evidence of infidelity glaring
at her like the burning sun. There was no benefit of any doubt to be given.
“We are done!” she screamed. “I want you out of here. The wedding is off!” She shouted as if he could hear her. But her voice only echoed
to her and Cole’s ears. The fact made her even more furious. Furious enough to reach for the hand-painted ceramic lamp on
the nearby table and hurl it at the floor like a spiked football. She hadn’t even realized what she’d done until it shattered
against the wood.
Tommy and Nikki jumped sideways.
“What the hell?” Nikki yelped. “Did that lamp just fall over?”
Tommy eyed the shards on the floor. He was still barefoot in his pajama pants. “How did that happen?”
Dell was heaving breath and trembling. Cole cautiously approached her.
“How did that happen?” he asked with wide eyes. “How did you do that?”
It wasn’t until that moment she fully realized she’d broken the laws of ghost physics. “I don’t know,” she said, still fighting
for air she didn’t even need. “Got really fucking mad?”
“Wow,” Cole said in awe. “That shouldn’t be possible. Not for a novice, anyway. The dead can only touch stationary objects
like the floor, beds, couches. You shouldn’t be able to move anything from the physical world.” He pulled out the rule book while Dell fought to calm herself.
Tommy and Nikki suspiciously eyed the mess on the floor. Tommy ruffled his mussed hair with a sigh. “Look, I need to head
to the hospital. My mom is running damage control as best she can, but things are probably going to get messy for a while.
I need you to lay low, okay?”
Nikki looked up at him with giant weepy eyes, still nibbling her lip, now swollen from kissing him. “What happened, Tom Tom?”
Tom Tom?
Had Dell had a functional digestive system, she would have thrown up at the nickname.
Tommy placed his hands on Nikki’s slight shoulders and gave her a sad look. “I don’t know, but when I woke up this morning,