Suddenly she laughed. "You haven't changed a bit. If you didn't bring anything suitable, you can borrow something of mine. The guy who's coming is actually pretty well house-trained for a cutthroat businessman. I think you'll like him. I've got to do some inventorying and run to the grocery store." She tilted her head so her son could see her mouth. "Chad, would you take Mercy to the guest room?"
He gave me another wary look, but nodded. As he went back inside the house and started up the stairs, Amber told me, "I'd better warn you, my husband is pretty unhappy about the ghost. He thinks Chad and I are making it up. If you could manage not to mention it at dinner in front of his client, I'd appreciate it."
THERE WAS A BATHROOM ACROSS FROM THE ROOM I WAS staying in. I took my suitcase and went in to scrub up. Before I stripped off my grimy shirt, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Sometimes ghosts only appear to one sense or another. Sometimes I can only hear them - sometimes I can smell them. But the bathroom smelled like soap and shampoo, water, and those stupid blue tablets some people who didn't have pets put in their toilets.
I didn't see anything or hear anything either. But that didn't keep the hair on the back of my neck from rising as I pulled off my shirt and stuffed it into the plastic compartment in my suitcase. I scoured my hands until they were mostly clean and brushed the dirt out of my hair and rebraided it. And all the while I could feel someone watching me.
Maybe it was only the power of suggestion. But I cleaned up as fast as I could anyway. No ghostly writing appeared on the walls, no one appeared in the mirror or moved stuff around.
I opened the bathroom door and found Amber waiting impatiently right in front of the door. She didn't notice that she'd startled me.
"I have to take Chad to softball practice, then do some shopping for dinner tonight. Do you want to come?"
"Why not?" I said with a casual shrug. Staying in that house alone didn't appeal to me - some ghost hunter I was. Nothing had happened, and I was already jumpy.
I took shotgun. Chad frowned at me, but sat in back. I didn't think I impressed him much. No one said anything until we dropped Chad off. He didn't look happy about going. Amber proved that she was tougher than me because she ignored the puppy-dog eyes and abandoned Chad to his coach's indifferent care.
"So you decided not to become a history teacher," Amber said as she pulled away from the curb. Her voice was tight with nerves. The stress was coming from her end, I thought - but then she'd never been relaxing company.
"Decided isn't quite the word," I told her. "I took a job as a mechanic to support myself until a teaching position opened... and one day I realized that even if someone offered me a job, I'd rather turn a wrench." And then, because she'd given me the opening, "I thought you were going to be a vet."
"Yes, well, life happened." She paused. "Chad happened." That was too much honesty for her though, and she subsided into silence. In the grocery store, I wandered away while she was testing tomatoes - they all looked good to me. I bought a candy bar, just to see how much she'd changed.
Not that much. By the time she'd finished lecturing me on the evils of refined sugar, we were almost back to the house. She was feeling a lot more comfortable - and she finally told me more about her ghost.
"Corban doesn't believe we're haunted," she told me as she threaded her way through the city. She glanced at my face and away. "I haven't actually seen or heard anything either. I just told him I had, so he'd leave Chad alone." She took a deep breath and looked at me again. "He thinks Chad might do better at a boarding school - a private place for troubled kids that a friend of his recommended."
"He didn't look troubled to me," I said. "Aren't 'troubled' kids usually doing drugs or beating on the neighbor's kids?" Chad had looked like he'd rather have stayed home and read than go to play ball.
Amber gave a nervous half laugh. "Corban doesn't get along very well with Chad. He doesn't understand him. It's the old Disney cliche of a quarterback dad and bookworm son."
"Does Corban know he's not Chad's father?"
She hit the brakes so hard that if I hadn't been belted in, I might have become better acquainted with her windshield. She sat there in the middle of the road for a moment, oblivious to the honking horns around us. I was glad we were in a stout Mercedes rather than the Miata she'd driven to my house.
"You forget," I said blandly. "I knew Harrison, too. We used to joke about his eyelashes, and I've never see eyes like his since. Not until today." Harrison had been her one true love for about three months until she dropped him for a premed student.
Amber started forward again and drove for a little until traffic settled down. "I'd forgotten you knew him." She sighed. "Funny. Yes, Corban knows he's not Chad's father, but Chad doesn't. It didn't used to matter, but I'm not so sure. Corban's been... different lately." She shook her head. "Still, he's the one who suggested I ask you to come over. He saw the article in the paper, and said, 'Isn't that the girl you said used to see ghosts? Why don't you have her come over and have a look-see?"
I figured I'd been pushy enough, so I asked a question that was less intrusive. "What does the ghost do?"
"Moves things," she told me. "It rearranges Chad's room once or twice a week. Chad says he's seen the furniture moving around." She hesitated. "It breaks things, too. A couple of vases my husband's father brought over from China. The glass over my husband's diploma. Sometimes it takes things." She glanced at me again. "Car keys. Shoes. Some important papers of Cor's turned up in Chad's room, under his bed. Corban was pretty mad."