Dances With Ghosts - Erin McCarthy Page 0,1

my best friend, Alyssa, who had found it more intriguing than I had expected.

Otherwise, the information was on lockdown, so I didn’t have people knocking on my door wanting me to summon forth Uncle Leo. It doesn’t work like that. I can’t conjure.

After I triple-checked the front door to make sure it was locked and activated the alarm system on my phone that would tell me both if someone broke in and if Grandma decided to take a solo stroll around the neighborhood, I pulled my tote up over my shoulder. “Leaving her scares me.”

“She’ll be fine. She’s pretty sharp for her age.” Jake opened his passenger car door for me. “Besides, you have her on CCTV like the house is a casino. Every inch is covered.”

That was true. “Would it be an invasion of her privacy if I just sat and watched what she does while we’re gone?”

“Yes,” he said flatly. “She’s not a criminal, she’s your grandmother. What do you think she does? She plays with her iPad and watches all those British shows like Downton Abbey and Call the Midwife.”

That amused me. “You know what shows she watches?”

“She has the volume on at least a hundred. It would be impossible not to know.” He gave me a rueful look. “How many more of these lessons do I have to do? I have two left feet and you’re a swing dance star. I’m holding you back.”

He was, but I wasn’t going to admit that out loud. Jake dancing was like a bear on his hind legs. Rumbling, shuffling, intimidating. Then he would move without warning. My pinky toe was never going to recover and I was pretty sure he’d dislocated my shoulder on the one spin. He had no idea how strong he was, and he concentrated so hard on counting, he shoved me around with a vehemence I’d prefer reserved for other activities.

“Your mother bought five total. This is number four, so you’re almost off the hook.”

“The whole thing is dumb,” he said. “This is my mother’s plot to get us engaged. You should have told her no.”

That made me laugh. “We’ve already had this discussion and concluded you’re insane. I’m not telling your mother no. You know how you don’t like to talk about marriage with her? Guess what, I don’t either. Just dance. It won’t kill you.”

“It killed me.”

I jumped. The voice came from the backseat of Jake’s truck.

No. No, no, and no.

The voice was vaguely familiar and I had a sneaking suspicion… I turned around, bracing myself for a dead woman.

Yep.

It was our dance instructor, Carmen Fox.

Hair pinned up, wearing a black and red salsa costume, full makeup on. I was going to speak to her, but she disappeared, in that smoke routine I’d noticed spirits liked to do. They dissolved into a mist and were gone.

Shoot.

Jake’s mother was going to be really ticked off our dance instructor had been murdered.

Moral dilemma—did I tell Jake about the ghost or just let him drive to the studio and discover the body?

That would seem like a no-brainer but it gets hard to explain to people how you know someone is dead or missing when no one else knows. There was no way Jake could call a homicide in to the station when we weren’t even at the studio yet.

And there was at least a fifty percent chance that Carmen’s body wasn’t at the studio at all, despite what she was wearing. In my experience (I was up to at least seven ghosts to back me up on this data), ghosts appear in what they were wearing when they died. But it was possible Carmen had been killed at home on her way to the studio or in the car. Or heck, I don’t know, an actual dance competition.

I bit my lip and wrinkled my nose and pondered what was worse—lying to Jake or hoping like hell someone else had already found her body and it was nowhere near the dance studio.

My internal debate raged on as Jake pulled into the parking lot of the Tippy-Toe Dance Studio.

“Tippy-Toe,” Jake murmured, with a snort.

He did that every time we had arrived. This was the fourth time he’d just given that amused shake of his head. I knew my role. I was supposed to give him the Seinfeld line back. It was the episode where George wanted Jerry to steal the answering machine tape from George’s girlfriend’s apartment and he distracts her. George wanted the warning code word to