“I’ll look for your hoop,” Clare said. She blinked and blinked again, trying to slip into that other “sight.” The girl was much more defined than anything else . . . buildings rose, wavered, vanished . . . and what happened when there was more than one set? Clare didn’t know what had been here when the girl had been here.

I lost my hoop and my life when the moon was nearly dark, the girl said suddenly and from right beside Clare’s knee. Clare started.

“Oh.” There was timekeeping and timekeeping. A monthly ghost? Who knew? And Clare suddenly wanted this over. With another big breath, keeping her own eyes narrowed to focus that other world, she scanned the area. Yes, a hoop! A wooden hoop, about half the size of the girl, who, Clare saw, held a small stick. All right. She could do this.

You can do this! Enzo cheered.

Getting up, focused on the light gray hoop, Clare scuttled through real people and ghostly shades. Those who weren’t ready for her help? Weren’t at a time when she could help? Later, she’d think about all that stuff later. She had a job to do right now.

The wooden hoop lay on the ground. Could she touch it? Clare didn’t know, but she curved a hand around it. . . . like closing her fingers around a searing dry icicle. She clenched her teeth and straightened, feeling like she was ripping the object away from sticky ground.

A loud squeal came: I can see it! I can see my hoop!

There came little pattering footsteps and the girl grabbed the hoop. More ripping, this time like a layer of flesh from Clare’s palm as she released it. Tears stung her eyes at the pain. Setting her hands on the top, the girl jumped through the hoop, feet first. And disappeared.

Hoop and girl rippled in a shocking burst of color in what had become a sepia beige-and-brown world, then vanished.

Clare stood panting, her mind spinning. “Enzo?” she croaked.

Yes, Clare?

Clare settled her mind to pluck words from the chaos. Are there other, um, beings than ghosts? She wasn’t sure where that idea came from. But she was trembling now.

Yes, Clare, Enzo said in that deeper-than-doggie voice he used sometimes.

“O-kay.” Like you, for instance?

Perhaps. And like the one your great-aunt Sandra called John Dillinger.

“Clare, are you all right?”

It was Ted Mather who’d put his arm around her shoulders . . . and that was when she realized she was swaying. Darn it!

He didn’t smell or feel right, so she made sure her feet were under her and drew away. Her right hand still curled against pain, she took the couple of paces back to the bench she’d been sitting on that still held her bag. No one else had taken the spot and it didn’t look as if anyone had stolen anything. How much time had passed? To her it seemed like just a few minutes, but it could have been any amount of time. Any at all.

Her heart thundered, pulse rushing in her ears.

Ted followed. “You haven’t been looking good lately.”

For sure a clammy sweat covered her, too. Would that always happen? She used a controlled fall to hit the bench, swung her body around more as if she were a puppeteer than by control from her brainpan. She put her feet on the ground, straightened her spine, made her face pleasant, and looked up at Ted.

Not for long, since he dropped down beside her on the bench and she bit the inside of her cheek not to protest.

“I think I might have a summer cold.” She tried a cough, and it came out far too easily, and racking.

He frowned. “You should be home.”

“I’m in the midst of moving.” To her delight, her offer had been accepted and Arlene had set up the closing rapidly . . . three days. Clare had checked in with her brother, who’d been packing up the moving trucks from Aunt Sandra’s house—had Clare only left there a week ago? And he would have the truck bring everything to the new place on the same day.

She should be working on the move. She should be sorting stuff in her old home—the sentimental and valuable to keep, everything else to go to one of the thrift stores. She hadn’t packed her house with items . . .

“Clare!” Ted demanded her attention.

She twitched up a smile. “Yes, you’re probably right. I should go home.” She stood, and even though it wasn’t ladylike or professional, she needed a good stretch. Since she was a weird ghost-seeing person with no job, she had little image left and really worked her muscles, reaching her arms toward the sky.

Maybe she’d take up yoga. Great-Aunt Sandra had loved yoga.

After shifting her shoulders and shaking out her feet, she did feel more like herself—her changing self. Still, she managed a sincere smile at Ted. “Thanks for your concern, Ted.”

He offered her a bottle of unopened mandarin orange fizzy water. “Here, I got you this.”

“Thank you.” She twisted the top off, and drank deeply. “Very good, thank you.”

Shrugging, he said, “I didn’t want you to think I was a loon about that stage robbery. You’re right, I have to check better sources.”

She was the loon. The taste of the water went flat and her eyes went beyond Civic Center to focus on the skyscraper that had held her old office. Right now she yearned for some nice books to balance. “Everyone makes mistakes,” she said. Quitting her job hadn’t been one. She feared she wouldn’t be able to function in an office environment anymore, and someone else had needed her job to survive. She didn’t.

She wasn’t quite sure what all she needed to survive, but money wasn’t an issue anymore.

“You’re quite welcome for the water,” Ted said, but he looked disgruntled, as if he didn’t like her daydreaming.

“I feel much better. I think I must have made a turn in this sickness.” Not a sickness, not a craziness, just an affliction for the rest of her life. And she’d break up the time packing boxes with genealogical research. Aunt Sandra had lived into her nineties; what of the others who accepted the gift?

Ted’s deepening scowl impinged on her. “Thanks again. Take care,” she said.

“Yeah. Will we see you in the Western History reading room soon?”

He was not hitting on her. No such vibes, and even the thought . . . ewwww.

She’d have given him another cough if she hadn’t just said she thought she was getting better, and all too easy to start coughing and not quit. Instead she shook her head. “No, I think I’ll rest at home. I left the desk in the Western History room tidy enough.” The librarians and docents preferred to reshelve books themselves.

“You always leave your space tidy,” Ted said mildly.

“I like tidy,” Clare said. “Good luck on your studies and with your job for the prof.” She couldn’t recall the prof’s name, though Ted had told her twice. Her brain now had holes in it for sure.

Sweeping up the detritus of her lunch, she hurried back into the restaurant and deposited her recyclables into one of their bins, then headed back out. Ted was entering the library doors, and that banished a little tingle along her spine—not a good tingle as if she were with Zach.

She hadn’t called him. No reason to.

Forty minutes later she was picking up boxes at a liquor store at a small strip mall close to her current neighborhood and stacking them in her car. Driving around her area of town was much easier. Though she did see the tall figure of a Native American standing on a rise, wrapped in a blanket and staring west toward the mountains.

Clare would have to learn more about the tribes here.

“Enzo?”

The dog appeared around another car in the parking lot, though he hadn’t accompanied her earlier. Clare puffed out a breath.

He sat in front of her and scratched his ear with his hind leg, grinning. Hello, Clare. Hello! Long time I haven’t seen you! Hopping to his feet, he ran toward her, through her with a chill, licking her hand along the way.