Ghosts Like it Hot by Erin McCarthy

Author:Erin McCarthy [McCarthy, Erin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Eight

How could I lose a man and a woman walking in broad daylight in a densely populated area, you ask?

Let me tell you, it’s not easy.

But apparently, I have mad skills. You should be jealous of how readily and handily I can lose focus and screw up a project.

We were in a more residential area, with a mixture of nice restaurants, upscale shopping, and adorable cottages.

I blame a boutique for losing sight of my mission. I didn’t want to stay too close to Mark so I had to meander and pretend to window shop. That was good detective work. Hang back. Except my pretend window shopping became very real when I spotted the most adorable macramé handbag with a walnut handle. I popped in to take a closer look at it (superfast, I didn’t even touch it, I swear, just glanced at the price tag) and when I came back out there was no sign of Mark.

Walking quickly in the direction he had been going, I cursed my love of the handbag. It wasn’t even my fault. I simply can’t resist the siren call of retail.

I fast-walked like a senior at the mall on Sunday morning, arms up and pumping, glancing down every side street left and right. No Mark.

Which meant he had to have gone into a street or a restaurant. Deciding to throw caution to the wind, I just started peering into shop windows and pulling open doors and sticking my head in. In the third shop, I actually saw him. He was at the counter, back to the door.

It was a shop filled with antiques and collectible coins. Expensive stuff that I knew nothing about. Once upon a time my Grandpa Burke had collected coins but I didn’t have a fond memory of him sharing that hobby with Jen and I. More like him spreading it across the dining room table with a magnifying glass and being grouchy as shit if we expressed any interest in what he was doing. One time, Jen, more precocious as a child than me, had dared to pick up one of the card sleeves that held a gold coin. She’d gotten a hand slap and her ass handed to her.

That had been the end of either of our interest in knowing anything about rare coins.

Grandpa Burke had been old school. He’s spent his entire adult life working in a factory, had gone straight to the bar after work, and went to church on Sunday. He’d given Grandma Burke four children and a head of gray hairs, though she had always described him as hard-working, loyal, and the love of her life. I didn’t doubt it, but sometimes I wondered if that was just because they never saw each other.

At any rate, besides Captain Mark, everything about the shop felt like I needed to be quiet and expect a hand slap at any given moment.

Captain Mark, from the snatches of conversation I heard, as I picked up a nautical sailor statue and studied it, was buying gold coins.

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