The Maverick - By Jan Hudson Page 0,34

is played.”

“I stole five dollars from my mother’s purse when I was about six. She never knew.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to buy a baseball card from Joey Hedgecroft in my first grade class. But I felt so guilty, I couldn’t, so I hid the money in my room. Taped it to the underside of a drawer. I think I must have gotten the idea from a TV show.”

Cass chuckled. “Is it still there?”

“Nope. I forgot about it, but I found it years later and sneaked the money back into my mother’s purse.”

“I swiped a nickel once. Someone had left a pile of change on a table in the café. I took a nickel to put in the gum ball machine. My mother caught me, and I tried to lie my way out of it. That made her even more furious, and she made me spit out the gum and wash dishes to earn enough to repay the waiter his nickel. That was the end of my thieving days. I almost died from humiliation. Sunny cried for me.”

“And you were how old?” Griff asked.

“About four I think. It was a good lesson. I suspect the incident helped shape the huge value I place on honesty. I think Sunny learned the same thing by observing my experience.”

“Crime does not pay.”

“You got it. I have no respect for sneaks and liars.”

“And lawyers.”

She grinned. “In most cases they’re the same thing. Present company excluded, of course.”

MAYBE IT WAS THE onions on her breath that did it, but Griff soon left, with only a brief kiss at the door. Odd. Very odd. The man was a sex machine. Maybe she shouldn’t have told him about Sunny and the ghost. Now he probably thought the family was weird. He likely would have croaked if he knew Cass had seen the Senator, too.

She called Sunny. “Are you alone?”

“Yes,” her twin said. “Ben and Jay left earlier. What’s up?”

“I have a question about the Senator. Didn’t you say his hair was gray?”

“Yes.”

“Sunny, when he died, his hair was dark brown, not gray. Why would it be gray now?”

“Hmm. Let me think about it.” After a moment, Sunny said, “You know, it seems his hair was darker when I first saw him. It’s grayed over the years, as it would have naturally.”

“Doesn’t it strike you as odd that a ghost ages? How can that be?”

“I don’t know,” Sunny replied. “Why don’t you ask him?”

Chapter Fourteen

Cass sat down at her computer, clicked on Google and typed in “ghosts.” She quickly scanned the first couple of pages and even went to several Web sites to check them out, but she found nothing helpful. Most of the stuff was about ectoplasm and orbs and mists and photographs that looked more like anomalies of lighting than ghostly presences. She tried “ghost hair” and found the listings even less helpful. Surely there was somebody around who knew about ghosts—real ghosts, not amorphous blobs.

Well, she’d always been one to rely on primary sources, so she turned off her laptop and stood up.

“Senator?” she whispered.

Nothing.

She walked to the front door, where she’d last seen him. “Senator?”

Still nothing.

Cass walked to her back bedroom and yelled, “Dammit, Senator, where are you when I need to talk to you?”

Nada.

She felt like a total idiot. So much for her ghost hunting exploits. She hadn’t actually seen a ghost, she told herself. Such things didn’t exist. Most of the people she’d read about on the Net sounded like nut jobs, didn’t they?

Her experiences had a perfectly rational explanation. She’d had some sort of brain blip and imagined the whole thing—like a mirage. A mirage—that was it, especially for Sunny. Her sister had always yearned for a father for as long as Cass could remember. For some reason, Cass didn’t miss having a dad as much as her twin did. Sunny’s desperate need for a father had conjured one up—like a thirsty man lost in the desert conjures up an oasis or a lonely child creates an imaginary friend.

Forget it, Cass told herself. Why had she become obsessed about an imaginary man and his imaginary hair? Who cared?

She had a stack of reading she needed to do for POAC. With all the chaos, she’d let her duties in the organization slide this week. After she dressed for bed, she plumped up three pillows against her headboard, climbed between the sheets and started reading the material Karen, POAC’s secretary, had dropped off yesterday. Cass had to be ready for a meeting with the board tomorrow