Excerpt

The first time Frank Garret sat down in the blue leather chair on the opposite side of my desk, I didn't know he was dead. My cousin Oliver didn't seem to pick up on it either, when he showed Frank in from reception. My new client wasn't looking great, mind you; he was obviously a man who'd been through some stuff. But he seemed as solid and well, alive as any other client I'd ever had.

Hell, more alive than some. And I didn't notice anything strange when we shook hands, except that his grip was cool and firm.

Oliver left us reluctantly, as usual—he hadn't quite grasped the concept of "assistant" as opposed to "partner" yet—and the client didn't waste any time.

"I need you to find my wife," he said, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, hands twisting a battered Jays ball cap nervously.

I thought, another divorce case, here we come, but I didn't say it. Before I could say anything, in fact, he held up a hand.

"I know what you're thinking, Miss Sheridan, but it's not like that. She doesn't even know I'm looking for her. And I promise you that she hasn't run away from me." He paused and glanced out the window, although there was not much to see on the other side but a dingy back alley. "Not deliberately, anyway."

The guy wasn't making a whole lot of sense, but I decided to hear him out. I didn't have much on the go, and these days I could track down a "missing" person in twenty-four hours or less if they'd used a credit card or checked into social media.

"Would you like a cup of coffee, Mr. Garret? Tea? Oliver will be happy to bring it." Oliver would fume to me afterwards that he wasn't the maid, but the clients don't need to know that.

He shook his head. "Call me Frank. I'd love one, but it's not possible. And I don't have much time."

"All right, we'll get to business, then. And please, call me Acacia." I pulled my notebook out of the drawer and wrote his name at the top of a blank page. "Your wife's name?"

"Ellie Garret. E.P. Wyse-Garret," he added. "The writer."

I felt my eyebrows lift slightly in surprise. E.P. Wyse-Garret was the acclaimed author of the Frankie and Ellie mysteries, featuring a wise-cracking and lovable pair of middle-aged sleuths based loosely on herself and her husband. Something tickled the back of my brain. She'd been in the news a few weeks ago, but I couldn't remember why. I'd been in the middle of the Medstrom case without a lot of attention to spare for local celebrity news.

"How long has she been missing?" Funny there'd been nothing on the newsfeeds about her disappearance.

"A month now," he said, misery twisting his features as he continued to mash the hat. "But look, you gotta understand, no-one else thinks she's missing. It's only me who can't find her."

I squinted. "So, she's on vacation? Or a writer's retreat or something?" I cudgeled my brain. What had that news item been?

He shook his head. "I don't know. She's not home, hasn't been there since just after—well, about a month. I don't have any way to contact her, but I need to. She needs me to. She just doesn't know it. And I don't have much time!"

His voice rose to a despairing wail and I stared at him, trying to get that news story back from my recalcitrant memory. And then the right mental file drawer opened. Weeks ago, Ellie Garret's husband Frank, inspiration for the beloved sleuth Frankie Pasquale, had been killed in a car accident.

He must have seen the penny drop behind my eyes, because his shoulders slumped even further. He seemed to...shimmer...a little, and for a second the chair back wavered into view behind him. "Yeah," he said, "I'm dead. And the Frankie and Ellie series will be dead, too, if I can't find Ellie. And you're my only hope."

~*~

I don't take on many ghosts for clients. Most of them are too caught up in the whole clanking chains and walking through walls schtick, even the ones who'd like you to find out who murdered them or whatever. It gets tiresome, and my job should never be tiresome. Olympia Investigations offers somewhat niche services to non-humans, along with our more mundane clients. I'd named my detective agency after my (100% mortal, as far as I knew) maternal grandmother, since the family quirk was generally acknowledged to have started with her. Whatever the provenance, my mother and her siblings, and now their children, are able to see, communicate, and interact with all manner of beings, many of whom slide under or past the radar of most humans. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, demons, fae...these make up a lot of my clientele.

Which is why my cousin Oliver was a decent choice when I decided I needed an assistant. He's arrogant, bossy, and wants to be a full partner even though he doesn't even have a PI license, but he has the requisite sense—sixth, seventh, who knows?— to deal with any client without freaking out.

But ghosts are rare, and ghosts who can appear normal enough to fool me into thinking they aren't dead are really rare. I was intrigued. First things first, though.

"All right, Frank, I do have to get this out of the way first. If you're a ghost, how do you propose to pay me?"

He nodded. "Thought about that. I feel certain Ellie will take care of it, but if she doesn't, I can direct you to a couple of places where you'll find items of sufficient value to cover the fees."

I frowned. "Items?"

"I lost a gold ring at the back of our garden once, digging flower beds for Ellie. Never could find the thing, and was Ellie upset—she'd given it to me. Now—I can see it plain as day. You could retrieve that and sell it." He shrugged diffidently. "There are a few things like that."

The possibilities of ghosts as lost item finders had never come up before. Interesting, but I shelved it for now. "All right, we can work with that. Tell me about your wife's disappearance."

He closed his eyes and wavered for a moment. "After—the funeral, she announced that she wouldn't write any more Frankie and Ellie books. I thought that was a terrible shame—and worse, those books are her livelihood! If she keeps writing them, I'm sure she can live comfortably off the royalties for the rest of her life. I could go in peace if I knew she'd be okay."

I nodded to encourage him.

Frank drew a deep breath. Or appeared to. Maybe it was just a habit. "I wanted to tell her not to be so foolish, to go on writing them. At first I didn't know why any part of me was still hanging around. Why I couldn't just go on to whatever's next. Then I thought it must be to give her that message. And—I couldn't bear to leave her. When I stayed close to her, I felt better. Stronger. Like maybe if I stayed close enough, long enough, I'd be able to, well, manifest. Talk to her." He got up from the blue leather chair and paced my small office. Looking closely, I could tell that his feet didn't really touch the worn brown carpet, but hovered an inch above it.

He stopped behind the chair and put his hands on the back, one still clutching the Jays cap. "It was like...like a physical hit, when I was near her. Like I was addicted to my wife." Frank chuckled nervously. "Sounds weird, I know."

I shook my head and smiled. "Not weird. Sweet. So did you do it? Appear to her?"

His face sagged. "I did, finally. A couple weeks after the funeral I felt like I was strong enough. I didn't want to be some see-through horror and frighten her. I wanted this." He gestured to his surprisingly solid-looking body. "I waited until she was alone, and I put all my effort into manifesting."

I could guess what was coming next. "It didn't go well?"

He shook his head. "She thought she was hallucinating, going crazy—I don't know what. I tried to calm her down, tell her why I was there, but she wouldn't listen. Ran out of the house crying, and drove off somewhere. I didn't have the strength to follow her, didn't know where she'd gone." He circled to the front of the chair and sat down again. "Then three days later, she came back with her sister. Ellie packed some stuff, they left, and I haven't felt strong enough to go hunting for her." Tears seemed to glisten in his eyes, and I wondered what would happen if they spilled over. Would they leave little ectoplasmic droplets on the carpet?

Frank sighed. "All my energy went into that meeting, and when it went south, it drained me. I've been hanging around our house, getting as close as I can to her things since then, building up the energy to appear to someone else. It takes a lot longer when she's not there physically. The energy for me to...er, feed on, is weaker. I didn't go to her sister, or her agent, or her editor, because I'm afraid it'll go down the same and I won't be able to come back from it again. If I could even build up enough energy to do all that. I need someone who can do it for me." He looked at me very steadily from blue eyes that, at the moment, didn't look ghostly at all. Just sad. "Will you do it for me? Will you find my Ellie?"

The dust in my office must have been particularly bad that morning. I had to blink my own eyes a couple of times to clear them. "Frank," I said sincerely, "I'll give it a try."

~*~