She let out a growl of frustration. She was a psychic, gosh darn it. A powerful one. Sort of. The latest in a long line of gifted women. She could paint a damn wall and read a damn mind at the same time.
Mental pep talk complete, Riley stared hard at the wall and forced her hand to move the roller in the V-shaped coverage she’d seen on YouTube. She breathed—through her mouth—and covered decades’ worth of stains with a thick coat of eggshell-white stain blocker.
“What did the skeleton say to the bartender?”
“Ha! I got it,” she announced triumphantly as Gabe’s message finally floated into her brain.
“You have stopped painting again.”
“Damn it!”
“You are capable of great things, Riley,” her friend said. “You can do this.”
“I can do this,” she said through clenched teeth.
She focused on the white. The clean, fresh start that erased the past. A blank slate.
“I’ll have a beer and a mop.” The punchline was out of her mouth before she even realized it was in her head. She turned to find Gabe’s wide, proud smile.
“You have done well.”
“So have you,” she noted. Gabe’s wall was finished and perfect. And still not a dot of paint on him. Something rustled in the vent at the back of the closet. “Let’s get out of here and celebrate with breakfast.”
They cleaned up the paint supplies and headed downstairs. Riley wondered if they had any sesame bagels left. She’d worked her way through two bags of them in the past week alone, and for some reason, the craving was even stronger this morning.
She frowned halfway down the stairs. “Do you smell bacon?”
Gabe sniffed the air. “It does indeed smell more like breakfast meat than decomposing body,” he agreed.
She grimaced. They’d gotten the mess of a riverfront Tudor on half an acre for a steal. Mostly because of the guy who’d gotten murdered in the secret passageway and stunk up the place that summer. Her sister, Wander, still had to wear nose plugs when she visited to protect her psychic snoot.
Hoping that Nick had taken a break from his investigation to fry up some bacon, Riley hurried into the kitchen.
It was a large room with orange flowered wallpaper and a hodgepodge of cabinetry and counter tops that didn’t exactly match but also didn’t totally clash. The stove top was new, the oven was older than Riley, and the massive Kelvinator refrigerator was a throwback to the Jurassic age.
In the midst of old and new, the purple-haired Mrs. Penny had her orthopedic shoes propped up on the hideous yellow table in the middle of the room. Perky at eighty-one, Lily Bogdanovich waved a pair of tongs at them from the ancient stove where a pan of bacon sizzled. A fleck of glitter sparkled on the handle of the frying pan. Riley’s oversized dog, Burt, tore his hopeful eyes away from the bacon to wag his tail at them.
She sighed. “That explains where the dog went. What are you two doing here?”
“When I saw you mowing the yard between our houses yesterday, I just knew it was an invitation for breakfast,” Lily announced happily. “Your kitchen has better light for making breakfast.”
“But you forgot to leave a door unlocked for us, so I broke a window in the mudroom,” Mrs. Penny said.
She did not have the energy to waste today arguing with her neighbors about yard maintenance and visitation etiquette. Instead, she helped herself to a cup of coffee and headed over to the corner of the room, where three neatly labeled clipboards hung in a row. She plucked the one labeledRiley’s To-Do Listoff the wall and crossed offPrime smelly closetandTrain with Gabewith a flourish. Then addedClean up glass in mudroom. In a futile effort, she took Nick’s To-Do list off the wall, flipped back several pages, and addedReplace broken mudroom windowright underMow lawnandFix office door latch.
She wanted to crossMow lawnoff his list, however, since she’d already added it and crossed it off her own list, she decided it could stay on his for next week in hopes that he would actually at least look at the list.
“Your hair is looking exceptionally purple today, Mrs. Penny,” Gabe said to his elderly roommate. To help Riley become a better psychic, he’d moved in next door while Riley had been staying with the pack of geriatric troublemakers. Even after she’d moved out, he’d stayed as a babysitter, light-bulb changer, and fire-extinguisher operator.
“Thanks,” she said. “Your head’s looking pretty damn shiny today.”
“It is kind of you to notice. What are you making for breakfast, Lily?” Gabe asked.
Lily and her twin brother, Fred, were co-owners of the Bogdanovich mansion next door. Not only were they roommates, they also shared a hobby of recreating recipes. Some turned out okay, and some were natural disasters. The bacon looked safe, but Riley had concerns about whatever was smoking in the oven.
“Eggs, bacon, and Cracker Barrel hash brown casserole,” Lily announced, before glancing at Riley over steamed-up glasses. “You really need to look into getting more than one pan, you know.”
“Pots and pans are on the Buy It list.” Which was just as long as the Fix It list. Riley turned her attention to the woman with the makings of a chocolate goatee on her face. “Mrs. Penny, what are you eating?”
