Dying For You by MaryJanice Davidson Page A

be dead was saying. Tom remembered Jack Carroll well: It was seeing him alive in a new body that was surprising. Jack had been dead for decades, devoted to his sister, and stuck in a beat-up Victorian in St. Paul. “As you can see, we have a rather large problem.”
    “Who are you calling large?” the ghost said crossly.
    “Heh,” Tom said aloud. It was downright alarming; he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He had a dozen questions for Jack and didn’t care; the ghost was a thousand times more interesting.
    What a damn shame he’d been hired to get rid of her.
    “So, what’s the problem?” he asked her.
    “You mean, besides my untimely demise?” she replied. “I mean, I know how self-absorbed you probably think I am—”
    “You and every other ghost I’ve met.”
    “Not that you should make snap judgments, but don’t you think I’m entitled? Just this once? I mean, I’m dead!”
    “And you shouldn’t be here,” he reminded her, inwardly thinking,
Of all the luck
.
    “Tell me!”
    “Oh,” he said.
    “Tell her,” Mrs. Carroll interrupted (not that she knew she was interrupting), “that we’re so sorry, and we’ll do whatever she wants. What does she want?”
    Tom waited. The ghost (he groped for the name and found it: Nikki) waited. Jack and Cathy Carroll waited. Finally, Tom said, “Aren’t you going to answer her?”
    Nikki started. “Oh. Right. I guess I was waiting for you to say ‘They want to know what you want,’ and then I’d answer, and you’d tell them what I said, and then they’d answer, and…you know.”
    “You don’t speak English anymore? You lost your hearing when you lost your head?”
    “Okay, okay. Tell ’em I’m fine. You know. Relatively speaking.”
    “She’s fine,” he said.
    “But boy, this is going to get old, quick.”
    Normally, yes. He almost literally had to bite his tongue to stop from saying, “Naw, not this time.”
    “Don’t you want to go to your cabin and freshen up, or whatever?”
    He had; he’d forgotten his urgent need for a piss and a shower the second he’d spotted her, but now the urges came rushing back. “Yeah,” he said.
Oh, you’re impressing the hell out of her! “Yeah.”
“
Naw
.”
Great!
    On the heels of that thought:
Why do you want to impress a stranger? A dead stranger?
    “Well, I can wait. I mean, it’s been a couple of months. What’s another hour?” She smiled, flashing perfect Americanteeth. “I bet you’ve talked to people who’ve waited a lot longer.”
    That was true. But normally he didn’t mind in the least making the dead wait. God knew they didn’t hesitate to impose on him. But somehow, it seemed particularly awful to keep this woman waiting. Seemed awful to picture her moping around in the sand, hermit crabs crawling through her feet and the wind blowing right through her, and nobody seeing her, nobody at all.
    He bit his lip and said, “Thanks. But I can freshen up anytime. You—what do you need?”
    She looked surprised. “I dunno. What anybody wants, I guess—to make their budget, to get good gas mileage.”
    “That doesn’t help us.”
    “Nikki,” Cathy was asking, “what happened?”
    “An accident,” she replied. “I’m getting kind of vague on the details. I guess it doesn’t matter, right? Dead is dead.”
    “An accident,” Tom told the Carrolls.
    Mrs. Carroll was rubbing her little potbelly and looking anxious. “But is she—but you’re okay now? I mean—nothing hurts?”
    “Not a thing,” Nikki assured her friend. The shorter woman was looking a foot and a half to the left, but Tom didn’t have the heart to tell her.
    “If this were a movie, I guess we’d start looking for her killer.”
    “No!” Nikki nearly shouted. “Don’t worry about my killer. Stupid thing’s probably a hundred miles away by now, anyway. Don’t hurt it.”
    “Shark?” Tom asked, and was immediately sorry when Mrs. Carroll—Cathy—looked