Over the next twenty-four hours, the chill in my lips spread through the rest of my body. It was uncomfortable to say the least. Especially when every time I shivered, I thought about kissing Damon.

Or maybe thinking about kissing Damon was what made me shiver in the first place.

Either way, the icy cold was a constant reminder that I was a dope. Thinking I could kiss a ghost and come away unharmed was bad enough. Recognizing that I was falling in love with that ghost…

I dashed the thought away and tried to look on the bright side. As so often happens in Cleveland in the fall, the temperature dipped considerably that night, so when I arrived at work the next day bundled in wool pants, a turtleneck, and a sweater, nobody questioned it.

I tucked my hands up into the sleeves of my sweater, but it was hard to type that way, and I had a monthly report to prepare on the tours I’d given. I was getting nowhere fast.

Which was pretty much the same place I was getting in my investigation.

Call it coincidence or karma or maybe it was just an accident. No sooner did the thought pop into my head than Damon showed up in the chair across from my desk.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Sure.” When I smiled, my mouth hurt. “The swelling’s down and my lips aren’t bleeding anymore.”

“But you’re freezing.”

“That’s the downside of the Gift.” I was too uncomfortable looking at Damon so soon after thinking about what he was doing to my self-composure (not to mention my common sense), so I typed a quick description of the tour I’d conducted for the fourth graders. Not to worry, I wouldn’t dream of causing Ella apoplexy, so I left out the part about how six of them refused to get off the bus because they didn’t want to step on dead people. I didn’t mention the kid who we thought was lost and was found wedged between two headstones he shouldn’t have been climbing on in the first place, either, or the four others who decided they were hot, took off their shoes, and went wading in the pond behind the chapel.

When I was done, I hit enter a couple of times, signaling that the paragraph—and with any luck, the conversation—was finished. “I’ll be fine by tomorrow.”

“You’ll be warm by tomorrow.” Leave it to a poet to pick up on the subtle difference. Damon was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that was torn at the neck and had a picture of Lyndon Johnson on it. His hands flat against his thighs, he leaned forward. “What are we going to do, Pepper?”

Damon wasn’t talking about the investigation, but I did so not want to go where I knew he was headed. Acting dumb was better than taking the chance of being caught by the magic of his voice. Or the simmering sensuality that lit his dark eyes when he looked at me. That road led nowhere. Except to Popsicle Land.

And I was already cold enough.

“We need to find out if and how everything that’s happening now has anything to do with your death. That seems like the key to me. I don’t know if Quinn believed me or not,” I said. “I mean about how Vinnie’s death and the attack on Alistair might be related. He’s hard to read.”

I left it at that and hoped Damon would, too. We’d had our little heart-to-heart about Quinn back at the Rock Hall, and I didn’t need to rehash it all. I skillfully deflected the conversation back where it belonged. “There’s got to be a connection. It’s all just too coincidental.” Careful with the tips of my nails (I didn’t want to chip my toffee-colored polish), I drummed my fingers against my desk and tried to make sense of it all.

Thirty seconds of that kind of thinking, and I was more confused than ever.

I slapped my hand against the desk. “Maybe I should just ask Vinnie,” I said.

I was kidding.

Until I thought about it for a moment.

“Hey!” I jumped to my feet. “I’m the one with the Gift. Maybe I should just talk to Vinnie!”

Damon nodded. “That’s a great idea. Go ahead. Do it. Contact him.”

Now that I was on the spot, so to speak, I fumbled around for the right way to approach things, and believe it or not, I was actually embarrassed when I wasn’t sure where to start.

“I’ve never tried to do this before,” I told Damon, making excuses because excuses were better than admitting that, Gift or not, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. “I mean, I’ve never tried to contact a ghost on my own. Not until I knew the ghost, anyway. I’m not sure what to say to Vinnie.”

“Just talk.” Damon got to his feet, and we stood facing each other, the desk between us. “Maybe just say hello.”

“All right.” I scraped my palms against the legs of my wool pants. “Vinnie! It’s me, Pepper.” I sounded as unsure of myself as I felt, so I put a little more oomph in my words. “Hey, Vinnie! Come on, I need to talk to you.”

Nothing.

I tried a different approach. “Pepper to Vinnie, Pepper to Vinnie. Come in, Vinnie.”

More nothing.

Damon said, “Let me try,” and went through the same routine.

He got the same results.

Disgusted, I glanced around my smaller than small office and headed for the door. “Maybe we just don’t have the right vibes in here. We might have better luck out in the cemetery where there are more dead people.”

Anxious to prove the theory, I hurried outside.

Like I mentioned, it had gotten considerably cooler, and though the sun was shining, I wasn’t surprised that there weren’t many visitors in the cemetery. A snappy breeze blew in from the north, rattling the trees that surrounded the office. I didn’t want to attract any attention, so I crossed the parking lot and zipped down a road lined with oak trees. At a place where that road split off, left and right, I gauged my distance from the office (and from anyone who might look out the window), took the street on the left, and ducked into the closest section. There was a 1940s bandleader buried nearby, and a couple of times the summer before, I’d led visitors to his grave. I knew that not far away, there was an empty bit of land surrounded on all sides by monuments taller than me. I skirted the statue of a weeping woman and stepped onto the patch of grass. I was completely alone, except for Damon, of course, and with all the privacy I needed, I raised my voice.

“Hey, Vinnie. Are you around here somewhere?”

I didn’t get an answer to my question, and as crazy as it seems, I felt I needed to justify my lack of results. “You know, Vinnie’s body is being shipped back to California,” I told Damon. “I read it in the paper this morning. Vinnie was front-page news. They said once the coroner is done with him, he’s going to L.A. to be cremated. His first, second, and third wives are already fighting over the ashes. Maybe since his body isn’t around here anywhere, his spirit isn’t, either?”

“I don’t know, I’m not exactly sure how it all works. I’ll give it a try again.” Damon closed his eyes and stood as still and as quiet as the angel on the monument nearby. He looked like an angel, too—a fallen one—and because that was something I didn’t want to think about when I was supposed to be concentrating on contacting Vinnie’s spirit, I closed my eyes, too.

I didn’t open them again until a couple of minutes later when I heard Damon sigh. “I can’t feel him anywhere near,” he admitted.

“Great.” It wasn’t, and I knew it. I stomped out of my hiding place. There was a flat gravestone nearby, and I sat down on it. “Talking to Vinnie is exactly what we need to do. He might be able to tell us who killed him, and that might tell us something about the attack on Alistair, too. I wonder if we could do a séance or something.”

I didn’t know squat about how to conduct a séance, so before Damon could take me up on it, it was a good thing I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. For once, I was happy to see the ghostbusters.

They were prowling around an ornate mausoleum with pink and gray granite columns and an intricate iron door, and since they didn’t look especially excited, I figured they weren’t getting much in the way of readings. Hoping to keep it that way—at least for now—I told Damon to take a powder and hurried over before the busters decided to climb into the SUV parked nearby and head to another part of Garden View.

“Hey, what’s up?” I waved and called to them.

I wasn’t surprised to see Dan with the group and carrying a Geiger counter. I was surprised to see him looking like the Dan of old. Gone were the ignite-my-fantasies jeans and the black leather jacket that creaked and crinkled every time Dan moved. He was dressed much as he had been back in the days when I thought he was nothing more than a brainiac doing research at a nearby hospital, in brown polyester pants, a blue sweater, and gray windbreaker. He’d fallen in with the geek crowd, and he was apparently proud of it.

I figured Brian, the leader of the hunters, would be most susceptible to my suggestion, so while the others were busy taking temperature readings, snapping pictures, and playing with their tape recorders, I talked to him.

“I need your help,” I said.

He didn’t seem surprised. Then again, I suppose it goes along with the territory. When you’re a ghost hunter, nothing much surprises you. “You want to conduct a hunt?” he asked.

“Something like that. I want to get in touch with Vinnie Pal.”

This was my carrot on a stick, and it wasn’t hard to see why. If the ghost hunters were dead set (pun intended) on finding Damon’s ghost, then finding evidence of Vinnie’s would be part of the package and bring them even more prestige in the eyes of other ghost-hunting dorks.

Brian’s eyes lit, and he waved the rest of the hunters over. When they gathered, Dan somehow managed to end up right next to me. Did he know more than the rest of them about ghosts? I wasn’t sure, but as the Magic Eight Ball would say, all signs seemed to point that way.

“What’s the best way to find someone who recently died?” I asked him.

It was clear that as leader of the group, Brian felt it was his responsibility to be their spokesperson, too. Before Dan could answer, he jumped right in. "That can be tricky,” Brian said, and when he did, he sounded like he was repeating something he’d read in a book. “Sometimes the recently deceased aren’t available for a while.”

This was not news I wanted to hear and I wasn’t willing to settle for it. Something told me Dan wouldn’t be quite so wed to the party line. I turned his way so that there was no mistaking the fact that he was the one I was addressing.

“We could try, anyway, couldn’t we?” I asked Dan.

He peered at me from behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “Trying implies that you believe in ghosts.”

“And if I say I do, then can we try?”

He didn’t take my admission (such as it was) as an outright surrender. But he didn’t argue, either. “Brian’s right,” Dan said, “it can be a challenge. But…” He strung me along just for the hell of it. “We might have some success. If we had access to the place the person died.”

I thought of Vinnie’s penthouse condo. And the doorman who knew me on sight. I couldn’t say I was certain that I’d be able to get past him, especially with a bunch of ghost hunters in tow, but I did know it was worth a try.

We set a time—eleven o’clock—and a place to meet—the service entrance of the condo building. After that, I hurried into the office, told Ella I needed to take an early lunch, and headed to the store. I needed a tape recorder, batteries, and a digital camera.

I was going on a ghost hunt.

 

As it turned out, it didn’t matter if I knew the doorman, or not. He wasn’t on duty that night. In fact, nobody was. To people in real cities, like New York or Chicago, this would probably seem a little odd. But we were talking Lakewood, Ohio, here, home of a private boys’ prep school, dozens of mom-and-pop stores, and hundreds of the kinds of bars where everyone really does know your name. We were just over the western border from Cleveland, but apparently osmosis doesn’t apply to crime. People feel safe in the suburbs, and high-priced or not, the lobby wasn’t staffed at night.

This was good news, yes? It meant that when the ghost hunters and I trooped into the elevator, nobody challenged us.

But of course, there’s the whole cloud-and-silver-lining thing. No questions asked; that was the silver lining. We discovered the cloud upstairs when we realized the door to Vinnie’s condo was locked. Of course.

“I thought you said you could get us in here.”

Apparently geeks with their hearts set on ghost hunting can get a little testy. Brian’s words were sharp. They were aimed right at me.

I defended myself. “I did get us in. Into the building. Last time I was here, the door was open.”

“But the cops never would have left it that way, would they?” Brian said this like I was solely responsible for the oversight. Since I wasn’t, I didn’t take it to heart. But I wasn’t going to take it lying down, either.

“You’re the one who wants to find Damon’s ghost,” I reminded him. “You know this is a perfect opportunity. If you contact Vinnie Pal, you might be able to get him to tell you how to find Damon.” I looked around at the other busters, too, just so they didn’t think they were going to get off the hook easily. “What do you usually do when you go somewhere to look for ghosts and you can’t get in?”

“We leave. It’s the legal way to handle things.”

“It’s legal when you have a key.” Dan pushed his way to the front of the group. In fact, he didn’t have a key, but surprise, surprise, he did have a set of lock picks. He sized up the lock, rummaged through the picks, and got to work.

Call me paranoid, but as he worked, I noticed Dan had thought of something none of the rest of us had. He was wearing surgical gloves, and even with them on, his fingers were quick and nimble. He never hesitated or fumbled, and realizing what it meant, my stomach went cold at the same time my curiosity turned white-hot. This wasn’t his first time.

When the lock snapped open, Dan stepped back to allow the other ghostbusters into the condo. I waited until they were all inside. “Want to tell me how you learned to pick locks?” I asked Dan.

Unlike the other ghost hunters who were in the darkened living room spreading out the equipment they’d be sharing, Dan had brought a backpack of his own. He slipped it off his shoulder, put the lock picks away, and took out some gizmo that reminded me of a…well…a gizmo.

When he made a move toward the condo, I stopped him, one hand on his arm. “First it was karate, now it’s lock picking. What else do you know how to do?”

He looked down to where my fingers were bunched around the sleeve of his windbreaker. When he looked back up at me, his eyes reflected the mellow light from the lamps over the paintings in the hallway. “You’d be surprised.”

“Yeah, I bet I would. Just like I was surprised when I realized you were following me last summer. Just like I’m surprised to find you hanging around with these guys. You told me you were a research scientist. You said you were conducting a study. About my propensity for hallucinatory imaging. Remember? You said my behavior was aberrant.”

Dan shrugged. “You’re the one who wants to talk to Vinnie Pal’s ghost. That sounds pretty aberrant to me.”

“And you’re the one who seems to think you can make it possible for me to talk to his ghost. Maybe I’m not the only one with aberrant behavior issues.”

“Have you checked them out?” Dan glanced into the condo, and when he looked at the ghost hunters, he smiled. When he looked back at me, though, he was as serious as a heart attack. “The thing that interests me, Pepper,” he said, “is that you never questioned if it was possible. You said you wanted to contact Vinnie’s spirit and you asked for my help doing it. But you never doubted it could be done. That tells me a lot. A lot about you. How many ghosts have you had contact with?”

I wasn’t expecting a point-blank question, so I wasn’t ready with an answer.

Dan read through my hesitation. “I thought so,” he said. “We need to talk. But not here. Not now.” One hand on the small of my back, he ushered me into the condo. I noticed that someone had straightened up. The cutout of the naked lady was still there (bathed in moonlight, as luck would have it). So were the beer cans. But the City Roast coffee cups were gone.

Before I could think what this might mean, we were met by the ghost hunters, who, even in the dark, didn’t miss a trick.

“Is that an electromagnetic field detector?” His eyes on the gizmo in Dan’s hands, John rushed forward. “That’s way cool. We haven’t saved up enough for one of those yet.”

Dan offered his. “Take this one,” he said. “I’m going to do a little work with my digital voice recorder.” He grabbed my hand. “Pepper’s coming with me.”

 

Okay, so I admit it, spending a couple of hours in a dark penthouse apartment with Dan hanging on to me wasn’t all bad. I never even had a chance to take out my new camera or my tape recorder, and I didn’t care. What was disappointing, though (to me and certainly to the ghostbusters) was that when it was all over, we had nothing to show for our hunt.

A couple of hours later, we were gathered in one of those bars I mentioned earlier. Everyone there really did know Brian’s name. Maybe the fact that he was a regular had something to do with how many ghosts he’d claimed to have seen on other hunts.

“Nothing,” he said, scrolling through the last of the pictures on Angela’s digital camera. “We got no EVP, no temperature readings that were interesting, and no photos, either. Let’s call it a night.”

John, Theo, Angela, and Stan didn’t argue. They gathered up their equipment, drank the last of the pitcher of beer Dan had ordered and paid for, and then they were gone.

Dan had been sitting four seats away from me at the bar. He slid down and took the seat beside mine. “Disappointed?”

“More like bored.” I yawned. “How many times were they going to go through those tapes they recorded tonight? There wasn’t anything on them but the sounds of them shuffling their own feet.”

Dan didn’t seem to hold it against the ghostbusters. “You never know,” he said. “Part of the process of finding paranormal evidence is following scientific procedure.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“Yes, I really believe that’s the way things should work.” A smile crinkled one corner of Dan’s mouth. “No, I don’t believe they actually do work that way. Not always, anyway. Case in point: You don’t follow scientific procedure. And you’ve still made contact.”

It was late and I was tired. As if that wasn’t enough of an excuse to avoid the subject, there was the whole bit about Dan, who he really was and what he really wanted. Sure, he’d saved my life once upon a time, and honest, I was grateful, but frankly, the fact that he’d been able to do it—skillfully and efficiently—left me with more questions. Until I had answers, I wasn’t ready to talk. Not about my Gift or the goings-on on the Other Side.

There was an inch of lite beer left in my glass. I swirled it around. “You’re convinced you know a lot about me. You want to tell me how?”

“I showed you the photo of you and those two ghosts. And if it was anybody else standing with two white, misty shapes, I would have dismissed it as an interesting but insignificant photo. But then I thought about your brain scans. Your occipital lobe is different from other peoples’, Pepper. You’ve got more activity there, and to me that means you’re far more attuned to the paranormal. Deny it if you like, but in that photo, I can see it in your eyes. You’re aware of the ectoplasm streams in the room with you. You’re talking to them.”

I remembered the picture. And the brain scans, too, come to think of it. I knew he was right. I took a sip of beer, put my glass on the bar, lifted it, and took another sip.

“You don’t trust me, do you?”

Dan put into words what I’d been thinking.

“How can I?” I asked him. “You haven’t exactly been Honest Abe. I’m not even sure who you really are.”

“That’s fair.” His own beer was gone, and he rolled the empty glass between his palms. “I can tell you this; there’s a lot more going on in the field of paranormal research than you can even imagine. We’re making real breakthroughs every day. You could be the key to it all, Pepper. I’d like to see you on our team.”

“Our team?” It was beginning to sound like a Mission: Impossible movie, and I didn’t like it one bit. “Something tells me you’re not talking about Brian and the boys.”

“And Angela, don’t forget.” Dan’s smile was fleeting. “I can’t tell you more.”

“And in exchange for I can’t tell you more, you expect me to spill my guts.” I slid off the bar stool. “I won’t bother saying goodbye. I guess I’ll see you around whether I want to or not.”

“Pepper!” I’d already turned away when Dan’s hand clamped down on my arm.

I was surprised at both the force and the power of his grip, and just as I turned to tell him to keep his hands to himself, Dan backed off.

“I’m sorry,” he said, but he wasn’t talking about the way he grabbed me. I knew that right away. “I expect you to trust me, but I haven’t given you any reason you should.” He reached into his backpack and took out the tiny digital recorder I’d seen him use back at the condo. He pressed it into my hands. “Here. Maybe I can prove to you that I’m worthy of your trust. No strings attached. Take this and see if it helps.” He took a cocktail napkin from the bar and the pen the bartender had left nearby when she wrote out our bill, scribbled a number on it, and gave me that, too.

“That’s my cell. You make the next move, Pepper. Until you do—until you’re ready—I swear you won’t see me around. I’m going to leave the ghost-hunting group and I’m going to stop following you. Maybe then you’ll believe I’m worthy of your trust.”

And without another word, Dan walked out of the bar.

It was getting close to closing time. I knew I should get moving, but I didn’t want to wait until I got home to see why Dan thought the tape he’d recorded was interesting.

Eager to find out, I slipped into the nearest booth and turned on the recorder.

“Is there anyone here?”

That was Dan’s voice. Like I’d seen the other ghost hunters do, he asked a question, then waited a long, long time to give the spirits a chance to answer.

This time, there was no answer.

“Can you tell me your name?”

Dan’s voice again and again, a long pause with no answer. In fact, the only thing I heard was me mumbling in the background, but then, we were in Vinnie’s magic room, and it gave me the creeps. I was anxious to get out of there.

“Vinnie, are you here with us?”

Listening to the tape was like reliving the whole ghost hunt. And the ghost hunt was as exciting as watching paint dry.

The bartender made the last call.

I moved my finger to flick the recorder off.

That’s when I heard a voice.

“Yes. Here.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Even though it was a rough whisper and the words were drawn out and labored, the voice was unmistakably Vinnie’s.

I swallowed hard and waited for Dan’s next question.

“Vinnie, if you’re here, can you give us a sign? Tell us something, something about what happened to you here.”

Another pause. I held my breath.

“It hurt.”

A shiver skittered across my shoulders.

“Do you have anything to say?” Of course, Dan didn’t know he was getting any of these answers. He couldn’t have known, not until we were done with the hunt and he was down at the other end of the bar listening to his own recording while the rest of the ghost hunters messed with their equipment and their big-ol’-nothing results. “Do you have a message for us?”

“Careful. Danger. The group…” Vinnie’s voice faded. I bent closer to the speaker, but the only thing I heard clearly was me mumbling a curse. It must have been when I slammed my knee into the wall as I was stumbling around in the dark. I couldn’t hear Vinnie again until my grumbling subsided. “One,” he said. The single word was as drawn-out and anguished as a howl. “One more will die.”