For a woman who had been disowned by her brother after recently coming back from the dead, Sesame had been in an upbeat mood that morning. She’d regaled them all with her dream of a creepy ghost dog with glowing eyes sneaking out of her closet. Then she’d laughed herself silly while Tommy had recounted coming downstairs to fetch Sesame her morning rejuvenation tea only to find Riley and Nick still locked in the office.
The happy couple—and Wilhelm, who it turned out was from Harrisburg and had a townhouse ten minutes away—had taken themselves out to brunch to celebrate being reunited. Riley and Nick had celebrated their own reunion by going shopping.
They’d returned home with an SUV full of items off their Buy It list. After a not-so-quick quickie, she’d put the new items away while Nick, with Burt’s help, had tackled his toxic-waste dump of an office.
She eyed the last of their haul that remained on the kitchen counter. Six bags of gummy worms—a candy neither she nor Nick liked, which gave this round of inventory a better shot at surviving until trick or treat night.
“Where can I hide you?” she mused, then grinned when inspiration hit.
She carted the candy into her office, where she shoved it into the bottom file drawer behind her desk. None of their elderly neighbors liked bending over to pick things up, so the odds of one of them finding the sugary worms were slim.
Stash secured, she pulled out her chair and sat. Despite the mere four hours of disjointed sleep they’d managed on the couch in Nick’s office, she felt good. Happy. Relaxed. A sunny autumn Sunday full of shopping and home organization? What more could a girl want?
Well, besides her psychic powers back.
She grimaced. She’d tried twice that morning to drop into her spirit guide world, and both times had found nothing but a shadowy void.
In need of a distraction, she opened her emails and dealt with a few of them. There was a request for a surveillance job from a new client and an armed security gig. She forwarded both on to Nick, who was still making quite the ruckus in his office. That complete, she logged into social media and fiddled with the yoga studio’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.
A curious idea hit her. Not one whispered from a spirit guide, but one from her own consciousness. She typedSesame Hemsworthinto the search and found…nothing.
That felt off. If anyone was built for social media, it was Sesame. She tried a few other name combinations in case Sesame had combined her past life with her current life and still came up dry. There was nothing for Tommy Hemsworth either. Though she didn’t know what his pre-Sesame name had been.
Her fingers drummed on the keyboard as something nagged at the back of her mind.
Something Sesame had said last night.
Statute of limitations.
That was it. Riley typed the phrase into the search bar and added the wordarson.
Hmm. That was interesting.
“What are you doing?”
She jumped and shut her laptop with a snap.
Nick entered and dropped into the chair in front of her desk. “That definitely doesn’t make you look guilty, Thorn.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Sorry. I’m still used to eggshells.”
He wiped his palms on his jeans. “Lay it on me, baby.”
Riley opened her laptop again. “I was just thinking about what Sesame said last night.”
“The part where she told us she faked her own disappearance, or the part where she screamed her husband’s name and dented the drywall in the guest room?”
“The part where she said she had to wait for the statute of limitations to expire.” Riley turned the screen to face him. “It’s five years for arson. But she waited six years and change before coming home.”
“If you’re thinking she’s lying—”
She held up her hands. “I’m not calling her a liar. I just feel like there’s more she’s not telling us,” she said quickly.
“As I was saying. If you think she’s lying, odds are she is,” Nick told her. “The thing about dead people is the living tend to romanticize them. No one talks about Uncle Ralph being a cheapskate who hated the Irish in his eulogy. Maybe a little bit of that happened with Beth. She disappeared, and so did some of the memories of what a pain in the ass she could be. Now that she’s back? It’s kinda hard to ignore the fact that the girl is a stone-cold liar.”
Riley perked up. “Really?”
“Babe, this is the girl who paid off a fourth grader with pudding to take the blame when she set off the sprinklers in the elementary school to get out of gym class. She’s a mastermind at getting away with shit.”
