is she here?”
He walked over to the cabinet, pulled out three glasses and walked over to the fridge, filling each one with ice. “She knows quite a bit about ghosts. I thought you might want to talk to her about the one you saw the other night. ”
“Are you insane? I’m not about to go around talking about something like that, especially to a complete stranger!”
“She said that you would say that,” he replied as he filled a glass with water.
“Excuse me?” I said as I took the tea pitcher out of the fridge.
Putting the glass on my kitchen table, he took the pitcher from me and poured some in the other two glasses. “She’s also psychic.”
“Then what do you need me for? She probably already knows who killed Stanley III. Let her go out there and tell them. Hey, does she know who killed Cliff Scott this afternoon? What do we need the police chief for? They should elect her to solve all the crimes in town,” I sarcastically replied.
Randy shook his head at me. “Really, Cam, go into this with an open mind. Just hear her out. I think she could be helpful.” He picked up the water and one of the teas and left the kitchen.
He might be my best friend, but there were times that I really wanted to give him a swift kick in the butt. I took my glass of tea and returned to the living room. I sat down on the opposite side of the couch from Randy; I was afraid if I sat near him, I’d strangle him.
“Randy tells me that you have a unique problem on your hands,” Jo said. “I’d like to hear more about it from you.”
“If he told you about it, then you know everything already.”
“But I still want to hear it from you, not secondhand. No offense, sweetie,” she said to Randy.
“None taken,” he smiled.
I wondered if he had the hots for the flower child. “I’m not his type,” she said. “He prefers blondes.”
“I think we need to lay a few ground rules here,” I said, putting my glass on one of my end tables. “I’ll concede, for my sanity’s sake, that you’re a psychic. I don’t need you to prove it to me. But I would prefer not to be subjected to having my thoughts read and said out loud before I can voice them. So as long as you’re here, please don’t do that.”
“Agreed, although I know you don’t really…” she stopped when I held my hand up. “Sorry. I have a problem sometimes accepting other people’s boundaries.”
“What exactly do you want to know?”
“Tell me your impressions of the entity you encountered at the Ashton house.”
“Living or dead?”
“Let’s start with the living first.”
“She seems relatively sane, considering she’s been living with a ghost for sixty years. Is it normal for someone to live in a haunted house for that long?”
“I’m not sure I would use the term ‘haunted’, at least not the way you mean,” Jo said. “Granted, he’s still living there, but he seems to be doing it in a peaceful manner, choosing to co-exist with living people instead of trying to chase them out. Was there any kind of relationship between the two of them when he was alive?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” I said.
“That sounds kind of…I don’t know, icky,” Randy said. “I mean, thinking that she stayed there because she was in love with him. That’s wrong on so many levels. I thought she was married.”
“Icky? Really, Randy? That’s the only word you could come up with it?” I teased. He grabbed one of the sofa cushions and hit me with it. “Yes, she’s married, at least she said she was. I didn’t see him when I was out there.”
“It might be worth looking into,” Jo said. “If they did have some kind of connection back then, it might explain why she stayed. Wonder what the husband thinks of living there?”
“I’ll ask the next time I go out there.”
“So tell me about Mr. Ashton. What does he look like?”
I gave her a detailed description. “His clothes are definitely 1940s style. I don’t know many people
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