Grumbling, she picked up the heavy boxes using her legs, not her back, braced them against the house as she opened the screen door and unlocked the front door, then staggered in and set them down near the coffee table. When Enzo joined her, she said, “Maybe you should, ah, pass on, like Sandra.”

No, he said.

She sank onto the couch, head drooping into her hands. This whole thing wasn’t working well, trying not to talk to him and believe he didn’t exist. But she didn’t want him to exist. Didn’t want Sandra’s life.

It was easier to think she was going crazy, though that had her hyperventilating. Now tears did leak out of her eyes, dribbling warmth onto her fingers. After a minute she got up and started water for peppermint tea, then got a box cutter and opened the well-packed carton from the attorney.

The whiff of scent—more than just the perfume Clare had been finishing off—that consisted of Sandra’s lotions, the incense she used during her sessions, wafted around Clare, and she sat down on the floor and wept.

It is sad we are left behind, Enzo said. For once he didn’t come up and lick her or move into her body, making her even colder, and for that she was grateful.

“You can go on to be with her!” Clare assured him through sniffs, groping for tissues in her bag and blowing her nose.

No. You need me.

But she damn well didn’t want him. Didn’t want this. Even with all the money that came with this, this . . . stuff . . . that was tearing her apart. It had been only five days since she’d left Chicago and started seeing strange things. Not very long in general terms.

Long enough for her to doubt her sanity.

Anger warmed her, and she gulped back lingering tears and took out the inventory sheet. One line engendered dread: Twelve journals with miscellaneous dates in each volume. Hell!

Frowning, Clare pulled them out, one by one, all with colorful covers. She picked up one with a fairy dancing on the breeze that she remembered from a childhood visit. It fell open.

On the left hand of the page was a date ten years ago, on the right, about six and a half. Totally random entries, great, how was she supposed to research that! Then a sentence caught her eye:

I think Clare must be my heir. She doesn’t think much of me, but that doesn’t matter. Or perhaps it will be a child of hers or Tucker’s.

Goddammit! Clare dropped the book, opened the second box, and rooted around for hard copies of whatever Sandra had recorded. Lots of videos, one for each of her parents and them as a couple, one for her brother, her brother’s wife, their little girl, and her brother and sister-in-law as a couple and them as a family. Finally one for her, at the bottom. Why hadn’t the lawyer’s office put it on top?

She readied the video, went back to the sofa, and sat down. Enzo came to her feet, looked up at her, and whined. With a huge sigh, she patted the sofa and he leapt up and settled next to her, not draping himself over her legs, thank goodness.

Clare pressed the play button on the remote.

Sandra, with her orange hair, blue eyelids, pink cheeks, and red lipstick, looked old and sick and scrawny, stabbing Clare with guilt that she’d avoided her great-aunt for so long . . . just saw her on holidays when Clare’s parents were in the States, or when Clare went to her brother and his family’s. Clare had actually been the one who visited Sandra the least once she was an adult—and had been all the more surprised that she’d been named as Sandra’s heir.

Enzo wagged his tail and grinned. She looks GOOD!

Great-Aunt Sandra wore her favorite silk and cut-velvet scarf-jacket, deep blue with a sequined peacock and long tasseled fringe.

“Dearest Clare.” Sandra smiled, showing perfect and natural teeth. “It’s your weird great-aunt Sandra.” She laughed. “Bet you didn’t know that I knew you kids called me that.” She raised her red-brown penciled-on brows, but her eyes remained merry. “All the kids.” She paused and her old, soft face fell into folds. “As those of my generation spoke of my great-uncle Amos as ‘eccentric.’” Shaking her head, she sighed, then looked directly into the camera, with the wealth of her home showing behind her. Clare was suddenly reminded just how fabulous it had been to play in that house. Hide-and-seek had been amazing, and Sandra had been absolutely marvelous in her childhood. Clare swallowed hard.

She wondered if Sandra had ever wanted children, or if her “gift” had prevented her. Was that why Sandra’s house was so large? She’d expected to marry and have children?

Zach came to Clare’s mind. She could see him as a loner, for sure, even though yearning for him, his touch, his lips, his body in bed with her bloomed inside her, made her ache.

Would it be an addition of crazy to complicate her life with an affair with him? Probably.

Could she get emotionally hurt? Oh, yes. But Clare began to think that grabbing whatever she could of life, living it to the fullest, was worth any pain.

“By now you’ve had your gift a while and know that ghosts aren’t a figment of your imagination, and that they aren’t going away.”

Oh, no. No, no, no! Clare’s thumb slid over the remote, but Enzo knocked it from her hand. A solid object. Her mouth dropped open and she stared, and though he appeared like the dog she’d kept seeing with her peripheral vision, he stood on the couch and his eyes were that otherworldly dark with knowledge that squeezed her lungs empty.

Sandra’s voice jerked Clare’s focus back to the video, where she saw the hazel eyes she’d inherited go steely and the red lips thin. “And, lovey, brace yourself, because I have more bad news and this will come as a real shock for someone as repressed as you are.”

Clare tensed.

“There are great benefits to helping ghosts transition . . . both emotional and financial . . . the universe rewards you.”

Ha, ha, ha. Clare would snort, but the woman had died wealthy . . . and Clare had found out how her parents could afford to globe-trot—from a trust Great-Great-Uncle Amos had set up for his nephews and nieces.

Would she be doomed to being a spinster aunt, too? She really didn’t want to embrace the lifestyle of the eccentric or weird.

“Listen close, lovey. There are great rewards, satisfaction, and fulfillment that come with our gift.”

Maybe for others, but Clare doubted that for herself.

“But there are also costs.”

Oh, yes, the acid coating Clare’s stomach was back.

“And the greatest threat, the greatest cost comes if you don’t accept your destiny, if you ignore the ghosts.”

Cold seeped into the room as the specter of Jack Slade, short and slender, solidified in the doorway to her bedroom, staring at her with an inscrutable gaze. Enzo settled next to her, looking nearly solid. Listen! he commanded in that low reverberating tone, glare fixated on her.

Dizziness had her tilting, her mind swimming, and she finally took another breath, drew it deeply.

Listen. It came like the rumble of the beginnings of a mountain avalanche that would destroy her life.

FIFTEEN

AUNT SANDRA’S LIGHTER voice spoke words that seemed to pierce Clare and coat her bones with ice. “If you don’t accept your gift, you decline and die,” Sandra said. “I watched it happen to Uncle Amos’s brother, who inherited the gift first.”

Clare’s vision cleared to see Sandra’s lips twitch into an unamused smile. “Though Amos’s brother liked the money that came to him with the talent, fine. Just as, I believe, you do.” Her voice softened. “Don’t be hardheaded, lovey; accept the talent, our psychic gift.”