It made no good sense not to change the name of a business because the locals, and old locals at that—the Garnet Bakery had apparently gone out of business during the Korean War—knew where it was.

  “I bet you think that’s weird, huh?”

  I was leaning more toward ridiculous.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “Oh, yes, every word,” I replied, taking the turns as Delly directed.

  “You should talk more,” she commented after several minutes of silence.

  “Do I need to talk? Can’t you read my mind?”

  “No, no, you’re confusing a medium with a psychic,” she imparted indulgently, like we were having a serious conversation. “I have these sort of flashes of intuition, and I can speak to spirits and ask questions if they want to talk to me, but I can’t predict the future or give you the winning lottery numbers or anything.”

  Nothing practical. “And you see auras.”

  “Precisely,” she agreed. “Besides, giving out the winning lottery numbers to others would be cheating the people who were meant to win, and holy shit, can you imagine the karma?”

  I could imagine myself at home instead of on this whack-a-doodle assignment.

  “I’m sorry my mother was so nosy about where you were staying, but she was not wrong when she told you that the Claiborne is a terrible hotel and you should steer clear of it. Lots of deaths there over the years. You’ll never get a drop of sleep with all the talking the spirits will want to do.”

  Before we could leave, Delly’s mother had wanted to know where I planned to sleep that night and was horrified when she heard where my reservation was. “I’ll take my chances,” I stated resolutely.

  “And also,” she explained with a grimace, “it’s really not a good hotel. Like, a ton of people got food poisoning there last summer.”

  “Yes, but it’s the only hotel in town,” I reminded her, done discussing where I would sleep. “Okay, so where?”

  “Take a left at the light,” she replied softly. “You know, you should just stay with Benji. I mean, he needs you to watch him twenty-four seven anyway, and his house is small, but it’s right on the river, and he says it’s soothing at night.”

  “River?” I had missed a few things, skimming through my information packet. “I thought the town was on Neacoxie Creek.”

  “No, we’re on the Skipanon River, which is a tributary of the Columbia River, and it crosses through Rune, and some houses are right there on the water,” she informed me. “Mom says that she and Dad looked at a house there a long time ago, but it’s expensive upkeep, making sure your house doesn’t get swept away when the rains come.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Benji’s renting now, but what he really wants is to buy a cottage in the Odal Woods.”

  “And what do you think about that?” I asked.

  I didn’t care, but I’d been told more than once that not listening to others was right up there with not remembering names. The issue was, I was very much a bullet-point guy. Hit me with the important bits in as brief and succinct a conversation as possible and I was happy. The whole having a deep, introspective talk about, well, anything, was enough to give me hives. My father often said that someday there would be someone, not a member of my family or a friend, who would hold enough of my interest to make me stop and pay attention. Not so far, and I had enough friends, so I had started ignoring most people. Was it a good way to be? No, but it was expedient, and I leapfrogged over a lot of the clusterfucks my buddies—both men and women—got caught up in. I was a fixer in my personal life, as well as professionally.

  For family and friends, I was the guy you took with you when you needed muscle to move stuff, put the fear of God into someone, or plain old resolve whatever the issue was. At work, I went out on the jobs where the problem and solution were clear as day. No one weeded through crap and got to the heart of the matter faster than me. I liked to put things into the win column as expediently as possible. So the whole discussion on where Benji lived now, where he wanted to live in the future… I didn’t care, not even a little, but I couldn’t imagine I’d be seeing much more of Delly after today, so I let her talk.

  “Sian thinks it’s too far from town, and she worries that there’s no internet up there,” she explained, not answering my question, which was what she thought, not Sian.

  “Sian sounds like a smart woman,” I commented. If there really was an issue with Benji Grace, to get Jared Colter to send a fixer out here to investigate was quite clever. She’d spun a good enough tale to capture the man’s attention, and my boss was not someone who could ever be called gullible. Whatever this was, he’d heard something that piqued his interest and concern.

  “Plus, you know,” she said, her voice falling to a whisper, “the woods are haunted.”

  Why not?

  “I suggested we all go in together on the Stabler Manor instead.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “We could turn it into an office on the first floor and all live together on the second.”

  “That seems reasonable,” I remarked, just to be saying something. “How big is this manor? Is there enough room for all that?”

  “There is. I mean, I’m saying manor because that’s what it’s been called for ages, but it’s a mansion. It’s gigantic. More castle than anything else.”

  “There’s a mansion in this town?” This was a surprise. Rune was a tiny town situated between Warrenton and Gearhart, close to Seaside, and from the dossier Owen, our research/tech guy, had given me, people were reliant almost exclusively on tourism, most of the retail culminating from visitor sales. Rune had a large number of art galleries that featured local painters, potters, and sculptors in a wide variety of mediums. There was a slew of restaurants, occult shops, crystal and gem stores, the marijuana dispensary, one place to get coffee, the Daily Grind, that stayed open round the clock and was next door to the medical clinic, a couple of pubs, and all manner of quirky, whimsical boutiques and apothecaries. It wasn’t a fishing town, a lumber town, or anything else as far as I could tell.

  “Shaw?”

  I’d tuned out on her. “Sorry, go on about the mansion.”

  “Well, the Stabler family, they used to be in lumber, and they owned all the land. They would cut down the trees and then use barges to move it all downriver to the mill. The logging industry was big here.”

  “Not anymore?”

  “No. The family lost all their money when the stock market crashed, and that was it. They picked up and left Rune.”

  “You know a lot about the history of your town.”

  “They teach it to you in school. It’s so boring.”

  “I bet.”

  “The manor is run-down now, but I know we could fix it up and make it work.”

  “And what does everyone else say?”

  “That just because we’re in the ghost business doesn’t mean we want to become them.”

  I chuckled. “Sounds like the manor house might not be all that safe.”

  “You have to be careful where you step is all,” she grumbled. “They need to have a bit of imagination.”

  It sounded like a sore subject.

  “Anyway, I think you should stay with Benji, because what if someone tries to kill him in the middle of the night?”

  “Well, I’m going to assess that,” I placated her. “We’ll see what threat level we’re at.”

  “When you meet him, you’ll want to protect him. I do. Sian does too. Even David Cotton, the mayor’s son, wants to take care of him.”

  “The mayor’s son, huh?”

  “And Javier Vega, who owns the brewery. He wants to make sure Benji’s okay too.”

  Lots of interesting new people.

  “And even though Christopher Rossi, who owns The Well, will tell you that he thinks Benji is nuts, he doesn’t mean it. He likes him too.”

  “And what’s The Well? A bar?”

  “Our favorite pub,” she apprised me. “I can go in there with you. They make really good food, but I can’t drink anything harder than root beer. I’ve tried to get Chris to lighten up, but he’s a stickler for the rules.”

  “Which is good,” I replied, turning to scowl at her. “How old are you, anyway?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Really?” That was the most astounding news of the day. She honestly didn’t look a day over fifteen.

  She nodded quickly. “I know I’m kinda old not to have a driver’s license, but Dave told me not to drive last year, so I didn’t.”

  “Dave?”

  She grunted. “Yeah. He haunts Starfish. That’s Sian’s apothecary, down on Main Street. It used to be a real estate office before she bought it, and before that, it was a brothel. There are two floors.”

  The way she was explaining things to me, like of course everything made sense, was going to make me start growling any second.

  “When Sian and Benji told the ghosts it was okay, they didn’t need to hang out anymore, they all left. Except Dave. He’s super nice, and he likes to walk around and look at all the candles and incense and stuff. He thinks Sian’s place fits in well between the marijuana dispensary and the health food store.”

  I cleared my throat. “Do, uhm, Sian and Benji go to the dispensary a lot?”

  “Oh, yes,” she assured me cheerfully. “They even asked Sian to help name the flavors, since she’s so good at naming products in her own store.”

  So stoned paranormal investigators. I needed to call my boss.

  “That’s another reason no one wants to buy the Stabler mansion with me.”

  I’d missed something. “Pardon?”

  “When I was telling you about the mansion, I forgot to mention that both Benji and Sian want me to go away to college.”

  Ah. “And you don’t want to?”

  “I do, but I’ve sort of back-burnered that whole idea because of the money. You saw where I live. We just don’t have it.”

  “That’s what student loans are for,” I chimed in.

  “Yeah, but it’s a lot to take on.”

  “It is,” I agreed. “What is it you want to study?”

  “I’d love to be a vet. I work part-time as a vet tech now.”

  I nodded, putting that away to solve. Get Delly into college. Check. Once a problem was presented to me, I always had to find a workaround. It was our mandate at Torus: leave every situation better than you found it. I would have to speak to Jared about her.

  “Okay, you need to take a quick left and a right, and it’s at the end of the cul-de-sac on the left,” she chirped at me, and I did as I was told. “We can park in the—oh no,” Delly gasped.

  I saw it then, what she was looking at. There was a man standing in the middle of three others who were playing keep-away with what looked like a camera bag. It was so fifth-grade I was momentarily stunned.

  “That’s Benji in the middle.”

  There was no doubt in my mind it would be.

  Pulling up to the curb, I barked at Delly to stay in the car with the windows up and the doors locked, and got out and went around the back before charging toward the circle of men.

  I was almost there when Benji dropped into a stance I was familiar with, having seen Nash use tae kwon do more than once.

  The first guy got his legs swept from under him and went down hard on his back, and Benji straightened, twisted away from the second guy, who took a swing at him, grabbed the camera case from the man who had the wind knocked out of him and was still lying there gulping like a fish out of water, as the third guy dived toward him. Benji would have been driven facedown onto the sidewalk, but I was there and caught the guy by the hood of his jacket and yanked him off his feet so he ended up sitting down hard beside his buddy, who had rolled sideways in an effort to pull more air into his lungs.

  It was not surprising that the second guy, who had thrown a roundhouse punch at Benji that he’d easily evaded, froze when he saw me, doing that thing people did where they looked slowly up my body, from my shoes to my face. The way the color drained from his was encouraging. It meant the fight was over.

  “I––” Benjamin Grace murmured, and I turned from the three men to him. “Thank you for stepping in.”

  “I think you had it under control, but three against one, unless you can see everyone and know where they are, is always a little dicey.”

  He nodded slowly; his gaze riveted on my face.

  Returning my focus to the men in front of me, I asked a reasonable question. “What the hell is going on?”

  It was my height that did it. People were always wary of how tall I was, and then of how wide my shoulders were. Normally I smiled, like I had at Delly’s mom, to put others at ease, but honestly, her mother hadn’t seemed concerned with me one bit. That was not the case with the three idiots who clustered together facing me.

  “This is my aunt’s house, Tabitha Fleming,” the guy I’d put on the ground explained angrily. He was skinny and looked a bit rough, like maybe he’d come from a bar and hadn’t showered or shaved in a couple of days. “And this guy is here trying to get money from her to clear a ghost that doesn’t exist out of her three-car garage.”

  “That’s incorrect,” Benji apprised me, his voice crisp, terse as he stepped in close to me, his hand slipping around my wrist to get me to look at him, which I did. “Sian and I were here to assess the situation, to ascertain if it was a haunting or not, but we never discussed a fee.”

  “It wouldn’t matter if you did,” I replied to Benji before refocusing on the man who had ostensibly come to make certain his aunt wasn’t bilked out of her hard-earned money. “I’m not going to stand here and debate the existence of ghosts with you. My grandmother believes, and she’ll spin you some yarns when she’s hitting the whiskey during the holidays, but what’s important here is that if, in the future, Mr. Grace gives your aunt an invoice and she pays him and you have anything less than a power of attorney over her finances, you have jack to say on the matter and need to step away from the situation, as it doesn’t concern you.”

  He stared at me with that incredulous expression kids got a lot when I stood towering over them. To a four-year-old, I was a giant.

  “Are we done?”

  “This faggot needs to stay away from her, both him and his whore partner.”

  I growled. It came out fast and loud, and all three took a step back. “If you keep harassing him, I’m gonna have to call the police.”

  “Is that right?”

  I scowled at him. “Who says that? Yeah, man,” I drew out the words, “that’s right. Go on and get outta here before I call the cops and have you and your friends arrested for criminal mischief.”

  He scoffed. “Gage ain’t gonna do shit,” he assured me. “We’ve been beatin’ the shit outta him since high school!”

  From the file I’d read, I knew Gage was the deputy there in town, but I had no idea he was toothless. “State police, then,” I offered cheerfully, knowing the entire time that the police would never get involved with any of this. But I was betting that these guys didn’t know that. They didn’t scream brain trust to me.

  “Why the hell would you—and what the hell is criminal mischief?”

  “Playing keep-away with the bag,” I clarified, clearing my throat. “That’s criminal mischief or, you know… taunting.”

  The way he was looking at me and then exchanging glances with his buddies, I could tell he was working it out in his head. Like, was taunting an offense you could get arrested for or something you only got in trouble for when you were playing football?

  “Or we can tussle,” I offered with the grin that my CO back in the Corps called unsettling. People always claimed to be terrified of me before they knew me, but that made no sense. I was a teddy bear as long as you stayed on my good side.

  “Is that right?” the guy repeated and immediately looked a bit sheepish that the same stupid retort had come out of his mouth twice in a ridiculously short period.

  I arched an eyebrow.

  “You know he goes all over town clearing out abandoned and unused buildings people call him about, and suddenly they’re not haunted anymore.”

  I crossed my arms. “Why isn’t that a good thing?”

  “Because they weren’t haunted to begin with!”

  “And you know this because you’re a trained paranormal investigator?”

  “There’s no such thing as a trained––”

  “Let’s agree to disagree, and you all just go ahead and leave, all right?”

  They were studying me. I was still standing there with my arms crossed, so I took a deep breath in through my nose, which made my chest appear just a bit bigger. That was it, they bolted down the street toward a Monte Carlo that had seen far better days. Hard to tell what the original paint color had been.

  Turning, I was faced with Benji Grace, who was closer than I expected him to be, nearly pressed up against me, so I took a step back to give him some room. I never liked to crowd people, not with how big I was.

  “Good morning,” he greeted me, which was odd since we’d been talking before, and now he was suddenly breathless.

  “Good morning,” I returned, grinning for some unfathomable reason. It was the strangest thing, but I felt like I knew him. Like we’d met somewhere before.

  His smile was brilliant as a few raindrops started to fall. “You must be Mr. James.”

  “Call me Shaw,” I ordered gruffly, noting that the guy I had come to protect wasn’t just a handsome man but a beautiful one. “And you’re Benji Grace, yes?”

  “Yes,” he answered, his smile, even as the drops steadily increased, remaining intact. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, even though, I must confess, I didn’t originally want you here.”

  I pointed over my shoulder, realizing we were about to be caught in a sudden squall. “Why don’t we go get in the––”

  “And not because of anything bad,” he continued, raking his hand through his hair, pushing the jet-black mane out of his face even as water dripped down his nose. “Let’s be clear, it’s always good to meet new people, but I didn’t want to waste your time.”

 

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