Page 21 of How I Met Your Murderer

Year of Expiration: 2025

Haunting style: hangs out in closets and small spaces, frightens people who open the door

Ideas to keep the peace: Figure out what killed him, if he’ll ever talk to me. Seems to still be in shock that he’s dead.

— Similar to Eric’s death? What’s the connection?

Entity Name: Eric James Crawford, the American, the Wildcard, Professional Nerd

Level: 4

Year of Expiration: 2009

Haunting style: Pulls my hair. Steals my stuff (my pin, sometimes my water bottle even though he can’t drink out of it). Whistles better than I can hold a tune. Imitates local bird calls: jays, blackcaps, magpies, wagtails, robins.

When you pay him a compliment, he looks so solid that I can’t tell him from the living. Funny, I can’t remember any sayings about ghosts and praise. Just him?

Ideas to keep the peace: I’m not sure yet. I’ve learned so much from him this past week, but I feel like I need to keep learning more about him. I can’t even say why, but I’m fairly sure there’s a line in The Handbook about trusting your gut on these things.

For now, I’ll stick with our little partnership. Keep it simple, like: he helps me, I don’t zap him.

eight

Mr. Brightside

Eric

Every night that first week, Raff had returned with his jacket, notebook and pen, and those silly-looking guns just after ten, come to collect on our standing arrangement.

I usually stayed out of sight but stuck close by while he went about his nightly duties: Filling a wineglass for Fiachra and leaving it in the cellar. Getting out a few jars of curry powder and a mixing bowl for Chef Máirtín. Reading to Brother Fintan in his tower. Politely knocking on Caoimhe’s office doors to see if Lorcan was about, though he never answered. Finally, opening the grand piano in the largest parlor so that Muireann could play her heart out.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to Raff right away. Far from it—I always had a list of things to tell him by the time he arrived, some unfinished conversation to pick up on from the night before. But if I could stay hidden and be patient while he settled the other spirits, I knew I would be rewarded. Eventually, he would return to the foyer, get down on his knees, and belt out “All Star” again. He had definitely been studying the lyrics.

He didn’t have to sing anymore just to get me to show up. It had been a joke, a silly dare that I had hoped he might take once. But I let it keep going and didn’t bother to correct him, because I loved hearing whatever he had in store for me.

It was a small thing, but I liked having something to look forward to again.

Time didn’t flow exactly like it used to when I was alive, so I couldn’t recall the specific date it happened, but it was sometime early in his second week when everything changed. It was the night he attempted some Christina Aguilera.

“Keep singing outside my window every night, and you really might get to see my tattoo,” I teased in a silky voice I had never had occasion to use in the afterlife. With Raff, the flirting didn’t feel forced or strange. It just . . . fit.

Like something I didn’t need to brace against for once.

“That so, Wildcard?” Raff cocked his head and frowned. He had started calling me that instead of Fecking American, probably because I kept calling him All Star, and I wasn’t about to complain. Wildcard was blunt, if honest. The afterlife had made me a little chaotic. “I’m trying to decide if that’s a promise or a threat.”

“Probably a little of both.” My laughter bounced around the foyer, a sound so infrequently heard until recent days that little Gráinne, a girl of about twelve with her raven-black hair in two neat braids like Wednesday Addams, poked her head out from under the stairs where she was hiding with a plastic Halloween skeleton in a bowtie and a few teacups.

She had warmed up to Raff, so while she usually hissed at the living or nibbled holes in their clothes, she raised one of the teacups in a toast to him before returning to her game.

“Time to check on the poltergeist in the attic, then,” Raff announced with a small sigh as he peered up the stairs. And up, and up. He was fit, so I knew he couldn’t be dreading the climb, which made me suspect that his knee was bothering him tonight.

I didn’t pry, though. I could wait for him to decide if he wanted to share that with me. Until he figured out how to help me move on, I had all the time in the world.

All the same, Raff squared his shoulders and started to climb. “So, Jordy was telling me about one of your games again earlier today. The Shattered Crown—the big one, as you call it. But I’d rather hear more about it from you,” he said, sounding slightly winded as he made conversation. He was definitely breathing through the pain.

I slowed my pace, hoping he would do the same.

Sure enough, he paused and turned to me, his cheeks ruddy with embarrassment. He always started blushing whenever one of us brought up my job in passing, but I didn’t ask about that, either—I didn’t really want to know what an ex-athlete like him thought about someone like me making money off a passion that had started with Dungeons and Dragons.