I smiled sadly. “Me neither. But I never expected to find out that my father had been using a spirit to keep money flowing into the company. That was a surprise to me, too.”
Her eyes pinched, and her mouth dipped into a sad frown. “It’s going to be so hard to find what we need—spirits hell-bent on creating chaos.”
Here, I smiled. “No, it isn’t.” I squeezed her shoulder. “There are plenty of them out there, Anita; all you have to do is listen. You have tons of options. You could make the team public and create a hotline for folks to call. Trust me, they’ll respond in the handfuls if there’s a place to report paranormal activity.”
“Go public?” Fear filled her voice.
I shrugged. “It might not be so bad. You never know what good can come out of it.”
Anita shuddered. “I came here to get Lucky and my equipment, and here I am discovering my entire world is crumbling around me.”
“Anita,” I said soothingly, “your world isn’t falling apart. This is just the beginning. Now instead of the team going after a spirit situation that’s rigged, aka Lucky, you can do good work. Help people.”
Hope flared in Anita’s eyes. “Help people?”
I laughed. “Yeah. I can tell you all about it.” I hooked my hands over her shoulders. “But first, can you give me and my friends a ride to our homes?”
The next morningthe entire town buzzed with the revelation about Birda. Haunted Hollow’s local celebrity was a fraud, even though the town was incredibly haunted. Didn’t make much sense, did it?
It was even on the local news channel. I was watching the reporter, who was set up outside Birda’s house, drone on about how the pictures were fake, when my phone rang.
Part of me hoped it was Roan, but when I saw the number, my hope quickly faded.
“Hello?”
“Blissful?”
“Hi, Tart, how are you?”
No, I hadn’t gotten around to calling TartMomor any variation of the word. She hadn’t raised me, so to me she was Tart. For better or worse she was also the woman who had ripped me away from Roan, even though it was supposed to be for the best.
“Your father and I were wondering if you would like to go out to lunch with us.”
“Will Roan be there?”
Tart hesitated. “I don’t know. I will see if Owen thinks it’s safe.”
“The two of you are hanging around each other,” I pointed out. “And nothing cataclysmic has happened.”
“We’re not becoming emotionally involved,” she said. “It makes a difference.”
Of course it did, I thought sarcastically.
But either way, I agreed to see both Owen and Tart for lunch. I spent the morning working with Alice and Ruth, figuring out a game plan for that evening.
“Have either of y’all figured out how we’re going to get Tallulah and Birda out of their houses for a few hours?”
I sat behind my desk at Southern Ghost Wranglers. I had my feet kicked up on the wood and my body stretched back. I may have looked comfortable, but inside I was a bundle of nerves.
Would my parents let me see my boyfriend? Gosh, it was so adolescent. I felt like a teenager hoping to see her forbidden love. How silly.
Ruth’s eyes sparkled. “I have an idea. I’ll get Doris to call Birda and Tallulah and tell both of them that her husband has discovered something important about Cora’s death. Doris said she could keep them busy for at least an hour. You know, they’ll have to eat some food and catch up and then Doris said she would accidentally forget what she was going to tell them.”
I glanced at Alice. She nodded. “It’s the best way. We can’t exactly call them. After all, Birda just had us arrested.”
“We can thank Anita Tucker for getting us out,” I said. “So that’s it, then? Doris will get both women out of their houses?”
Ruth nodded. “That leaves us about twenty minutes to search each house.”
