“You do not have time for this, Gina.” Rosaria had moved to the mirror directly behind me. I could feel the cold radiating off her reflection. “While you sit here drinking substandard tequila, my killer is out there. Free. Probably redecorating my house as we speak.” Her voice dropped to something close to a hiss. “I did not come back from the dead to watch you join a book club.”
“It’s not a book club,” I muttered.
Another silence. Three sets of eyes on me.
“You seeing her right now?” Lori asked. No alarm, no surprise. Just a straightforward question.
I sighed. “She’s in the mirror behind the bar. Criticizing your decor.”
Tammy turned to look at the bar mirror. “Huh. I knew I felt something. Tell her I chose every one of these chairs personally and they’re conversation pieces.”
“She cannot hear me?” Rosaria sounded offended.
“She can’t hear you,” I said.
“Ridiculous. I am speaking perfectly clearly.”
“You are being haunted,” Lori told me, studying my face with that careful intensity. “By a ghost with an agenda. That takes a toll. You need training before anything else.”
“I need to find out who killed her before she drives me completely insane.”
“Both,” Lori said. “In the right order.”
Rosaria made a sound of disgust and flickered. “The order should be my murder first and your little self-discovery journey second. Priorities, Gina.”
I opened my mouth to argue, then realized I’d be yelling at a mirror in a room full of women I’d met an hour ago, so I closed it again and finished my margarita instead.
Tammy had been quiet for a moment, her head tilted, eyes slightly unfocused the way they’d gone when she talked about seeing auras. Now she straightened, and the warmth in her face had shifted to something more serious.
“Gina, I’m looking at your aura right now. You’ve got a lot of grief on you, which makes sense, given everything. But there’s something else. Something dark. Attached.”
“Attached,” I repeated.
“That ghost isn’t just visiting. She’s anchored to you. Specifically to you. That’s not how it usually works—most spirits are anchored to a place, or an object. But she’s hooked into your energy like a burr in a sweater.”
The cold behind me intensified. In the mirror, Rosaria’s expression had gone very still.
“Can you get her off?” I asked, and was embarrassed by how small my voice sounded.
“Not without resolving whatever’s keeping her here.” Tammy looked at me with a gentleness that made my throat ache. “She’s not going anywhere Not until this is finished.”
Rosaria’s reflection met my eyes in the mirror. For once, she didn’t say anything.
She didn’t have to.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Starfall Baypolice station smelled like burnt coffee and old carpet, and the detective behind the front desk looked like he’d been marinating in both.
I’d spent two days arguing with myself about this. Two days of Rosaria appearing in every reflective surface in the cottage—the bathroom mirror, the kitchen window, the back of a spoon—demanding I do something. Two days of Lori’s voice in my head saying “training first.” Two days of staring at the ceiling at three a.m., thinking about my kids and my ex-husband’s family and the word “murdered” rattling around my skull like a marble in a tin can.
In the end, Rosaria won. She always did.
The station was tiny. It occupied what used to be a bank, and you could tell—the chief’s office was in the old vault, and the main room still had the high ceilings and marble floor of a building designed to make you trust it with your money. Now it held four desks, a watercooler, and a corkboard covered in community notices about lost cats and the upcoming lobster festival.
Only one desk was occupied. The man behind it was tall, broad-shouldered, with salt-and-pepper hair that was mostlysilver at the temples and a five o’clock shadow that looked like it had been there since about 2019. His suit was rumpled in the way that suggested he’d slept in it, or hadn’t slept at all. He was reading something on his computer and drinking coffee from a mug that said “World’s Okayest Detective,” which I suspected was not self-purchased.
He didn’t look up when I walked in.
