I grasped my chest, and looked at him, but he seemed completely unthreatening, like the dancing ghosts I’d met before. So, I tried to ignore the shaking in my legs and bent down, while keeping my eyes on the ghost, and picked up my phone. “Who are you? And what are you doing hanging around here?”
He kept flickering in and out, but when he spoke, at least I was able to hear him. “I’m Thomas,” the flickery man said, but the sound cut in and out with his image.
Thomas?TheThomas?
“You’re Daniel’s friend?” I asked.
My gaze moved over him. I’d known Thomas in high school, but not all that well. I’d just constantly seen him and Daniel attached at the hip. I’d never really paid attention to the guy, because, well, who would notice another man with Daniel around? But now, it kind of surprised me. He looked like a bigger, older version of his son. He even had the same pain in his gray eyes.
“I’ve been trying to warn you both. I was murdered. The man who did it is after you now.”
Wait, murdered, I thought he’d died in a car accident? And the killer was after us? That didn’t make any sense.
I opened my mouth to ask him to elaborate, but he flickered again and disappeared.
“What the heck?” I looked all around, but there was no sign of the ghost. “Thomas?” I whisper-yelled.
Daniel came out of the house then, his gun put away. “It’s okay, nobody is in there. I cleared the whole place.”
I hurried forward. “So, he’s okay?”
He winced and pulled out his cell. “No, Al’s dead.”
Wow. That wasn’t good. Not at all. “Recently?”
Daniel nodded gravely as he pressed his phone to his ear. “Yes,” he said, then spoke into his phone. “I need to report a dead body.”
Leaning back, I rested against the truck. I hadn’t even had a chance to tell him about the ghost, and I sure as heck wasn’t going to with him on the phone. Telling this man his beloved friend, and, my stomach clenched, the woman he loved, were murdered, was not something to casually tell someone.
This was just terrible. All of this.
What if the murderer who the ghost tried to warn me about was the one who killed Al?
I needed answers, and I needed them now.
Chapter Thirteen
Emma
“I’m going to run her home,” Daniel said to Sheriff Danvers. “I’ll be right back.” He hated that I was here, involved in yet another crime scene in Mystic Hollow, I could tell from the set of his shoulders and his clipped tone. To say Daniel was protective would be an understatement. There's a reason a man like him joins the police and it's to do with the sense of justice and honor that goes down to the very core of his being, but with that comes a healthy dose of wanting to be everyone's shield.
My neighborhood wasn’t far from Al's place, which creeped me out a bit, but at least that meant that Daniel wouldn’t be gone long. We walked back to the green truck, and I hopped in. Once both of our doors were shut I said, “There’s something else I need to tell you."
He turned over the engine, so the truck was rumbling quietly underneath us and looked at me warily. “What else?”
“While you were inside the house, a ghost appeared to me. He was almost as tall as you and even though he was a ghost I could tell that in life he had dark hair and a full, busy beard. His eyes seemed really pale gray as well, but I don't know if that was just from him being a ghost or what he actually looked like, and he had a scar on his cheek just here.” I pointed to the right side of my face, just over the cheek bone, but slightly off to the side.
Daniel swallowed audibly when he glanced at me and saw where I was pointing before he looked back at the road. “That was Thomas,” Daniel said in a soft voice. He glanced at me again when he asked, “He came to you?”
I nodded. “And I think he appeared on my porch as we left for our non-date, but I wasn’t sure until I saw him again. I thought at first maybe I was just remembering things I'd seen before, but he looked different from the last ghost.”
Daniel pulled off the small street and onto the main road, maneuvering past the police cars that were lining the area. “What did he do?”
“He spoke to me.”
Daniel glanced at me in surprise, his eyes which were dark in the evening light going wide. “He did? When he came to me his lips moved but there was no noise.”
“Well, this time, he was super flickery, like he couldn’t maintain a connection, but I could hear him.” Not that I wanted to think about it or was particularly eager to experience it, but seeing ghosts and what not I couldn't help but wonder what the afterlife was like. Had Thomas been at peace and then sensed a danger to Daniel and came to warn him? Or had he been roaming and restless?
