A New Lease on Death by Olivia Blacke

Author:Olivia Blacke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

RUBY

“Did you?” I asked. “Did you kill Jake?” Not that I thought she’d tell me the truth if she had, but it sure felt good to finally ask a straightforward question.

Shannon shook her head. “No. No, I did not. Did you?”

“No way,” I said quickly, taken aback. Why would anyone think that I would kill Jake? I barely knew him.

“Good. Now that that’s out of the way, why don’t you tell me what you’re really doing here?”

“I, uh…” My voice trailed off. Short of telling her that the ghost of the woman who’d killed herself in my apartment had told me that Jake’s death wasn’t random and that she had recruited me to help prove it for reasons I didn’t fully understand, I didn’t know what to say.

“Were you and Jake close?” she asked.

My cheeks flushed. “No, no,” I insisted. “Nothing like that. He’s not my type.”

“Really? Because you’re certainly his type.”

“Really,” I insisted. Shannon wasn’t the first person to tell me that. I wondered if what I’d interpreted as Jake’s niceness wasn’t something more. Which, yuck, no. Even if I was anywhere close to being ready to date again—which I wasn’t—Jake was old enough to be my dad.

“But you were friends?” Shannon pressed.

“Not really.”

“But you think that there’s more to Jake’s death than the police, the professionals, do?”

I thought about it for a minute. Shannon said she didn’t have anything to do with Jake’s death. Did I believe her? Maybe. Maybe not. If I told her that I thought Jake had been murdered, and she was the killer, what was the worst that could happen? Cordelia was by my side, and I’d already seen her in attack mode on the bus. I nodded. “Yeah, I do.”

Shannon took a swig of her beer. She put it down, then said, “Me, too.”

We stared at each other. Could I trust Shannon? She was being frank with me. I could return the favor. “I’ve got this feeling that Jake’s death wasn’t some random event. And if it wasn’t random, then it was premeditated. Murder. But the cops wrote it off like it’s nothing,” I said.

“Yeah, but why do you care?” Shannon asked. “You weren’t dating him. You weren’t friends. Why does it matter to you?”

I blinked at her. Why did it matter to me? Other than Cordelia asking me to look into it, I didn’t really have a reason. I could have said no. What was the worst she could do? But I wasn’t doing this because I was afraid to upset my ghostly roomie. I wanted to help her. And I wanted to help Jake. “Um, because?”

“Because?” Shannon let out a dry laugh. “And it has nothing to do with being worried that whoever did this to Jake is still running around your neighborhood, free as a bird. Free to kill again?”

“Now that you mention it…” Her logic was a lot better than mine.

“Jake was chivalrous, you know,” Shannon said.

Only, I didn’t know that. I barely knew him at all.

“He was a good guy, and he wouldn’t want you to put yourself in danger for him.

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