Came Back Haunted (Experiment in Terror #10) - Karina Halle Page 0,1

the same, no matter how many (or few) times I’ve seen her. After my mother died I saw her once a week. Now that I’ve gotten my shit together, that’s tapered off to once a month. Progress.

“Good,” I tell her. My answer is always the same too.

She gives me a kind smile, taking her time to observe me for a moment. I like that she does this, that she can glean things from me off the bat without having to talk about it. Sometimes I think she can hear my thoughts, but I haven’t dared ask her yet. How easy it would be to lie back and just let her sift around inside my brain and make things right.

She tilts her head, her blonde hair falling to the side. Dr. Leivo is surprisingly young. I’ve never asked her age, but she looks like she’s in her early thirties at most. “Good,” she eventually says, smiling again. “But things are different now, aren’t they?”

I look at her for a moment, wondering what exactly she was able to get from my expression. Then I suck on my lip while I think that over, because she’s right. Things are different from the last time I saw her.

I slowly nod. “Yeah. Some things have changed. Big things. Big changes.”

“Change is good, Perry,” she says to me. “Why don’t you start with the biggest change and we’ll go from there.”

I can’t help but smile. “The biggest change? Well, we’re selling the apartment and we’re moving. I don’t know when—we haven’t put the apartment on the market yet, nor have we started looking, but still.”

“Wow,” she says. “That is a big change. You’ve mentioned before that you wanted to move, right? That the memories…”

“They aren’t all bad memories,” I say quickly. “There are good ones too.”

But sometimes it feels like the bad memories have imprinted themselves into the floor. There’s a bloodstain on the hardwood that won’t come out, no matter how hard I try to clean it. Blood that bled from a dead girl, long after she died.

I bat the image of Abby out of my brain, hating that even though it’s been nearly four years since I saw her in the apartment, she still has a hold on me. But I guess that’s what happens when someone gets inside your soul like that.

“Perry,” the doctor says gently.

I snap out of it, give her a quick smile. “The apartment is fine, really. But yeah, I’ve wanted to move. The location is great, I really do love living downtown. The only thing is, it’s never quite felt like…ours. You know? Like it’s always been his, but never really mine.”

She nods. “So what motivated the move? Did you have a discussion with your husband or…?”

“Not exactly.” I suck on my lip again, letting the incredulous feeing wash over me. “We came into some money. A lot of money.”

She straightens up, crossing her delicate ankles in her cropped beige pants. “May I ask how?”

“Two weeks ago, just before Halloween, I’d been getting messages and emails from a man—Harry—who wanted to use our services. And I don’t mean like our video production services through Haunted Media. I mean…our abilities.”

“To see ghosts?”

“Yeah,” I say carefully, grateful that she said it. “He said he had a wife who died and he wanted us to talk to her.”

“Wanted you and Dex to talk to her?”

“Yes. And I ignored the messages because I thought he was a loon and the last thing I wanted to do was step back into that world. But he didn’t give up easily. He found out where we lived. Waited for Dex to leave the apartment and then accosted him. Told him the deal.” I pause. “Only what he told him, and what he hadn’t told me, was that he wanted to pay us one hundred thousand dollars.”

She blinks at me, mouth falling open. “You’re kidding me.”

I shake my head. “I thought the same. That it couldn’t be real.”

“A hundred thousand dollars to…”

“To just go into the abandoned house and talk to his dead wife.”

“And so you did it?” She looks surprised when I nod. “I know how often you talk about that life and how you’re so glad you’ve put it behind you.”

“I know,” I say with a sigh. “I know, and I really had to think about it. But…I don’t know, it was making Dex really happy. Like happier than I’d seen him in a long time. And that, plus the money, which we need, I