I did my best to keep an open mind.
I paced the bedroom, concentrating hard enough that sweat beaded on my forehead. Nothing. The closet was empty, the corners vacant, the air still. Not even a fleeting shadow.
“Anything?” Jacob asked from the doorway.
I shook my head. “Not a damn thing.”
Jacob turned to where our guest hovered uncertainly near the bedroom entrance. “What would your lab do in a situation like this?”
She shifted her weight, glancing between us. “I wouldn’t want to overstep. This is Agent Bayne’s investigation.”
Jacob gave her an encouraging nod. “But you might have some valuable insight.”
Plus, she was a psych, herself. “Fresh eyes couldn’t hurt,” I said.
She scanned the room and then gave a helpless shrug. “This isn’t the lab,” she said apologetically. “There are just too many variables.”
True enough. Most of the time, my life felt like one big, unpredictable variable.
I turned back to the room. The shadow I thought I’d picked up on last time had moved from the kitchen to the bedroom. The “woman” Boswell claimed to see had run into the closet. I positioned Jacob and Evelyn well out of the path and went in for another look.
Shifting my focus to my inner eye was routine by now, but performance anxiety rears its head whenever my talent’s not working in front of an audience. I can do this, I reminded myself. Hell, I spent years popping Auracels to stop doing this. But when I scanned the bedroom, I found nothing.
I stared so long, a niggling headache formed across the back of my head. Still nothing. Eventually, I huffed out a sigh and shook my head in disgust, and Evelyn said, “Maybe Mood Blaster would help.”
It wasn’t what she said, or the way she said it—kind and encouraging—but the fact that she was the first person who didn’t seem even the slightest bit embarrassed on my behalf over the silliness of the app.
I hesitated, and she added, “I’d really love to see it in action.”
There wasn’t much to see. I popped in my earbuds, called up the app, and dismissed level 18 to navigate back to the home screen. Binaural tones pulsed as I steered the rocket ship through the space rocks. But they felt less intuitive after the upgrade, and the competitive part of my brain that I swore didn’t exist wanted nothing more than to go back and round up more Floatalongs.
When I felt the slight disorientation that hinted I was in Alpha, I opened my eyes.
No ghost.
“Too many variables,” Evelyn said. “Even if the app is effective, there might be nothing here for a medium to see.”
Not to mention that some ghosts only showed up after dark, and repeaters are often tied to their time of death. I’d need to get hold of Boswell again and narrow down a timeline.
But did he take my call? Of course not.
“May as well wrap up for the day,” I said, pocketing my phone. “Right now, I’m getting a whole lot of nothing.”
Jacob nodded. “Back to the office, then? We can regroup, figure out our next move.”
We headed out to the car and set off. Soon, the neighborhood changed from quiet residential into the kind of mixed-use strip where you could get your taxes done, buy a bong, and have your eyebrows waxed in one block. We hit a red light and something wafted through the vents. Garlic, oregano, and the little burnt rim of a cup-shaped slice of pepperoni filled with grease.
I hadn’t even realized I was hungry.
Evelyn sat forward so fast, the seat-back creaked.
“That smells incredible! Wait—is it deep-dish? I’ve never had real Chicago-style pizza.”
A purist would say Chicago deep-dish is nothing whatsoever like actual pizza. The crust is too oily. The pie is too thick. And there’s way too much cheese.
As if there’s ever a possibility of too much cheese.
“I wouldn’t mind grabbing a bite,” I said cautiously, expecting my husband to shut it down due to his pathological aversion to dietary fat.
