Superstition by Karen Robards

cop. Barney Fife, tall, dark, and brooding, was standing at the rear, arms crossed over his chest, shoulders propped against the wall. He was watching her with a sardonic twist to his mouth: She hadn’t made a friend there. He was probably planning to pounce on her once the broadcast ended and haul her off to jail—which, at the moment, was the least of her worries, she decided as her gaze scanned the group. Their expressions ranged from worried to bored to skeptical. Unfortunately, there was not one enthralled face in the lot.
    The flushing sound she heard in her mind was her career going down the toilet.
    She had always felt uncomfortable in this house, Nicky reflected dismally as she trailed Leonora through the hall, doing her best not to trip over the myriad cables that snaked across the floor, courtesy of the Twenty-four Hours Investigates crew. As a young girl, she had been inside it on several occasions when her parents had socialized with the people who had owned it way before the Schultzes. At the time, she’d thought her discomfort had been due to the inferiority she had felt as a scrawny, freckle-faced nonentity who was simply awkward at the parties that were Livvy and Leonora’s lifeblood. Now she wondered if it had something to do with the house itself. There was still a vibe—a dissonance—in the atmosphere that made her skin feel almost clammy.
    Or maybe it was because the crime hit too close to home. She hadn’t known any of the victims or their families—Leonora had remarried, and they’d moved away to Atlanta years before the Schultzes had come to live in the Old Taylor Place. But since Tara Mitchell and the other girls had been around Livvy’s age and the island was the place that Nicky and Livvy and their mother had always thought of as home, the crime had been a major topic of conversation within their family when it had happened. Though the details had faded over the years, the crime had resonated with Nicky, and it had remained part of her internal landscape ever since. When Twenty-four Hours Investigates had been looking for a blockbuster crime to feature, it had popped back into the forefront of her mind.
    And the rest, as they said, was history.
    So here she was, taking charge of her life, going after what she wanted, making a grab for the brass ring—and the sad fact was that she was falling flat on her face. She knew, from the expression on Karen’s face, from the sidelong glances being exchanged among the crew, from her own experience with what went on behind the scenes, that the feedback they were getting from the control-room producers, who were in Chicago watching right along with the audience at home, wasn’t good.
    “Nothing’s happening!” they were probably screaming into Karen’s earpiece at this very moment. “Do something! Fix it! We need action !”
    The thought made Nicky’s stomach knot. One ghost. Please, God, just send us one ghost. Casper, where are you when you’re needed?
    Nicky had never known her mother to fail to find a ghost when she went looking for one. Usually, ghosts practically pushed one another aside in their eagerness to come through for her. But not tonight. Oh, God, not tonight. Wasn’t that the way life worked, that the one time Leonora’s link to the Other Side went on the blink would be on live TV, with her daughter’s professional life on the line?
    “Leonora is now entering the kitchen,” Nicky said to the folks at home, just loudly enough so that the microphone would pick it up. She hoped it didn’t also pick up the despair that she was starting to feel. They were looking for ghosts in the kitchen ? That was, in a word, pathetic. She had never in her wildest imaginings expected to get this far; she’d been sure that way before now they would have encountered enough otherworldly presences to fill up the hour, and more. Lucky thing she’d had the whole house prepped, just in case Leonora’s sometimes-unpredictable wanderings brought