I shrugged. “Jeffrey didn’t say anything about that today.”
Alice rolled her eyes. “We all know Jeffrey isn’t real.”
“Um. Actually he is.”
Ruth and Alice exchanged a shocked looked. “You’re kidding me,” Ruth said.
“I am not. Tallulah has a friendly spirit named Jeffrey who lives in her house.” I raked a strand of hair from my face. “I don’t know anything more about him than that because I didn’t get a chance to ask him, but that’s the truth.”
Ruth chewed on that for a moment. Finally she pressed her finger to her nose. “Well, I reckon I’m not surprised. We do live in Haunted Hollow.”
“I know,” Alice said, “but I didn’t expect it to be true. I just thought Tallulah was crazy.”
“Oh, she might still be,” I murmured, “but not when it comes to Jeffrey.” I rubbed my hands together. “Okay. What’s the plan?”
Ruth took a commanding step toward me. “You and your mother see if you can coerce the banshee into coming out and revealing anything she knows about the murder. Did she see what happened? That sort of thing. Meanwhile, Alice and I will video the whole scene and send it to that horrible Devlin Monk to see if he’ll retract the article he published today.”
Alice patted what looked like a ten-year-old video camera. “I’m all ready. This baby’s charged and full of juice.”
“What should I do?” Roan asked.
Tart quickly answered. “You wait here. With the vehicles.”
Roan hitched a brow at me. “Okay.”
Tart quickly added, “It’s better that way. Since we’re dealing with a feminine spirit, it might upset her if a man is present. She might not help us.”
Roan nodded. “Right,” he said flatly. He motioned with his thumb over his shoulder, pointing back to the G-Wagon. “I’ll just be over here if anyone needs a big hunky man to rescue them.”
I flashed him a bright smile. “We’ll be back soon.” But even though I smiled, it was obvious that my mother didn’t like Roan.
What was going on there?
What wasn’t there to like about him? He was tall, dark, totally dreamy and the second most sarcastic person I knew, second only to myself.
He was awesome.
But clearly my biological mother didn’t like him. Maybe she was just being overprotective. You know, she’d only just met me. Perhaps some sort of primal protective instinct was flourishing inside her.
And perhaps my imagination was getting the better of me. It made more sense that Roan had said something that upset her rather than my ex-nun mother was going allangry mamaon me.
But anyway, the four of us set off into the forest. Ruth mumbled about us not wearing any camouflage while Alice munched cookies and left a trail behind us that would’ve pleased even Hansel and Gretel.
When we reached the covered bridge, I motioned for everyone to stop.
“I know we’re all here for the same purpose, but we don’t actually know anything about this banshee. She might be violent. She might be angry. Why don’t y’all let me go on ahead and I’ll see if I can find her.”
I glanced at Tart. “You can help from where you stand, right?”
She wrung her hands with worry. “Yes, but it’s better if I’m close to you.”
I smiled. “Like I said, I don’t want y’all getting hurt. Let me see what she’s about, and we’ll go from there.”
“Perhaps she would like a cookie,” Alice offered.
I opened my hand. “I’ll offer it to her.”
Ruth gaped at me as if it was the craziest thing she’d ever seen, me taking a cookie for the banshee, but what she didn’t know was that I would eat the cookie myself.
