Read Online Brimstone by Rosemary Clement-Moore - Free Book Online Page B

returned his interest, but his infatuation was plain on his homely face.
    “Dude.”
    It took a moment to realize that someone was talking to me. I’m not the girliest girl ever, but no one has ever mistaken me for a guy before.
    “Dude.” The guy at the prompting stand repeated it until I turned. “Your ass is glowing.”
    “What?” Definitely not something I expected to hear in the normal run of things.
    “Your ass is glowing. Dude, what did you sit in?”
    I craned around to look. Sure enough, in the deep violet lamplight, the seat of my jeans glowed fluorescent blue.
    Great. A radioactive butt. What a topper for the wedding cake of disaster that had been my day.

9
    f inally, all those
CSI
reruns were going to pay off. As soon as I got out to my Jeep, I stripped off my jeans and tucked them into a plastic grocery sack, tying off the top to preserve the evidence. Of course, this meant I had to drive home in my underwear, but I had a ratty old wool picnic blanket in the back of the car. I wrapped it around my waist, and headed home.
    Beltline was the most direct road, but it was the main drag through Avalon, and always clogged with traffic. The street led past the most important places in town: the red brick downtown area, the university, my school, the hospital, and ifyou kept going it would take you to the mall near the state highway bypass, the “new” high school (built only twenty years ago), and the treeless subdivisions where my dad refused to live. Going south you’d pass the Wal-Mart, the bars that catered to people who wanted to drink more than dance, and eventually the lumber mill and the paper plant, thankfully far enough away that it only stank when the wind was very strong from the southwest.
    The upshot of this arrangement was that Beltline was the last road you’d want to take when you were bottomless in a topless Jeep.
    The back way home wound through a residential area, between a park and the west side of the university campus. There was exactly one traffic light on the route. I was stopped there, mulling over the glow-in-the-dark spooge, when I heard my name.
    “Maggie?” Justin MacCallum was loitering on the corner, wearing a sweat-soaked T-shirt and athletic shorts. His short hair stood up in damp spikes, which emphasized the clean, chiseled planes of his face. And the rest of him … Wow. Michelangelo could have sculpted those thighs.
    He smiled as though I hadn’t been in a total snit the last time he’d seen me. “I thought that was you.”
    “What are you doing here?” Not the most intelligent question, but at least I managed to drag my gaze up to his face.
    “I was running in the park.”
    “Running from what?” The light turned green and the car behind me honked. With a gesture to Justin, I pulled through the intersection and into the tree-shaded parking lot.
    I turned in the seat as he jogged over. “Actually, I have a question for you.”
    He looked surprised. But then, so was I. The words had sort of popped out of my mouth. My thoughts were going in a bizarre direction, and I would have rejected the idea completely, except maybe I still had my Nancy Drew thing going on, and good detectives don’t eliminate things without examining them from all angles.
    “Okay, shoot,” he said, with a crooked sort of smile.
    The afternoon was warm and humid, and the wool blanket was extremely itchy, but I tried not to scratch. “Is there really such a thing as ectoplasm?”
    “Ectoplasm?” His eyebrows shot up in surprise.
    “You know how in
Ghostbusters
, when the ghosts leave behind that slime when they touch something?”
    “Why are you asking
me
?”
    “Because you’re the one getting a degree in weirdology.”
    He opened his mouth to argue, then shut it, mulled over a few responses, and finally settled on, “Do you think you’ve seen a ghost?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe.” I’d begun thinking about phantoms when Karen told me about the shadow, even before I found the