“Looks like rain,” Cassandra says as she floats along beside me. Overhead, storm clouds are slowly gathering, and the unseasonably warm spring afternoon begins to turn chilly. A gust of wind blows through my light jacket, and I shiver. There’s something odd about this wind, something that raises the hairs on my arms and hollows out the pit of my stomach. Wish you’d brought an umbrella.”
“What do you care?” I glance over at her. “You’re a ghost. You don’t feel the rain.”
Cassandra rolls her eyes. “Of course I don’t, but you do.” She bumps my shoulder playfully, or tries to, but her shoulder passes right through my flesh. A shiver runs through me, as it always does whenever a ghost makes contact with me. It’s a bit like being plunged into a bucket of ice water, and the feeling doesn’t get any less shocking no matter how many times it happens to me. “You’re my best friend—the first real, flesh-and-blood friend I’ve had in over fifty years. I can’t let you catch cold and die.”
“How do you know I won’t end up right back here, next to you?” I tease as we approach the candy shop at the corner. “Maybe we’ll spend the rest of our lives haunting my apartment and terrorizing everyone who tries to move in.”
I expect Cassandra to laugh, but she shakes her head, looking uncharacteristically serious. “Nah, you’re not the type to cling,” she says. “Even if you died a gruesome death, I know you’d end up moving on.”
A somber mood falls over us, and thunder rumbles overhead as we stop to wait for the light. A prickle of awareness washes over me, and I’m about to mention it to Cassandra when a little boy wearing pinstriped overalls floats through the glass storefront, a giant rainbow-swirled lollipop clutched in his pudgy fist.
“Hello, Miss,” he says in his high, childlike voice. “Would you like any candy today? Black taffy is on sale for only two pennies a piece.”
“Sure, Sammy.” I smile as I dig a dime out of my pocket. “I’ll take five.”
His face lights up, and we make the trade. The ghostly taffies fall through my hand, sending another icy shiver through me, and the dime falls through his, landing on the cement with a ping. He doesn’t seem to notice though, just thanks me and disappears back into the candy shop.
The light turns green, and I cross the street.
“I don’t know why you never pick up the dime,” Cassandra says with a frown as we reach the other side. “It’s not like he would notice, and you didn’t actually get any candy, anyway.”
I shrug. “It still seems like cheating, somehow, to take it back. And besides, I’m sure someone else could use it more than me.”
Cassandra gives me a dubious look. “Seventy cents a week adds up, though,” she says. “When I was alive, that was enough to buy a week’s worth of deli meat.” She glances at my skinny frame. “And the lord knows you don’t eat enough as it is.”
I resist the urge to roll my eyes, knowing better than to argue with her. I don’t blame Cass for being clingy. She was murdered by her boyfriend in 1952, in the very apartment that I’m renting now, and it took so long for the case to be closed that by the time the murder was solved, she’d become too attached to the place and couldn’t move on. Every single inhabitant she’d tried to make friends with had run screaming, until I’d showed up, lured by the proximity of the location to campus and the cheap rent.
We’ve been living peacefully together for a year now, so peacefully, in fact, that the landlord had tried to raise the rent on me. I’d informed him that the place was still very much haunted, and Cass had been delighted to give him a demonstration, pelting throw pillows at his head and tossing the contents of my dresser drawers about the room. She’d made a bit of a mess in her enthusiasm, but it had been worth it—the landlord had given me a wide berth since then, and I had a feeling he wasn’t going to try to raise the rent for a very long time.
As Cass and I walk home, I stop to say hello to the ghosts on our usual route. There is Kitty, the flower peddler who mans a cart outside Delilah’s Bar, trying to sell bouquets and boxes of chocolates to the drunk husbands stumbling out who need to save face with their wives. I have no doubt she’d be doing a brisk business if they could sue her. Then there is Mrs. O’Leary, the cat lady in the fuzzy pink overcoat who sits at the park bench by the playground. There are always at least two or three cats keeping her company at all times, confirming my long-held suspicion that cats can indeed see ghosts.
One ghost is missing from our usual route—Mr. Nitti. He is a good old boy from the 1930s, gunned down by a rival mob gang while he was having lunch with his mistress at a little French café three blocks from my apartment. His mistress has moved on without a backward glance, but he stuck around, puffing on his cigar and regaling anyone who has the capacity to listen about his mobster days.
“Still no sign of him,” Cassandra grumps as we tromp up the stairs of my apartment building. “You’d think he would have said goodbye to us if he was planning to move on to the afterlife, wouldn’t you?”
“Maybe he’s just traveling for a bit,” I suggest as I unlock the door to my studio. A one-room apartment with a kitchenette, a double bed, a closet-sized bathroom, and a folding table that serves as both my desk and my dining table, it isn’t much, but it’s home. My decor is rather minimal, not having the funds to justify going all Pinterest-crazy with framed photos and styled bookshelves.
A hand-painted picture of Cinderella’s castle hangs above my couch, and various Disney figurines clutter my TV stand. Some might call my decor childish, but I agree with Walt in saying that imagination has no age limits. The bright colors and familiar characters make me happy, and remind me of the annual trips to Disney World I used to take with Dad.
As an ER doctor at Mercy Hospital in Chicago, he was busy more times than not. Our trips were something we both looked forward to all year, and those ten days at the most magical place in the human realm really felt like magic. Dad would go all out, booking fireworks shows and character dinners. We’d stay at the same resort every time, and knowing I’ll never walk into the grand lobby with Dad again tugs at my heart.
“Where would he go?” Cass asks. “It’s not like we can do much.”
“Maybe he just wanted to get away from the tourists.” The story of his death is a little notorious, and a popular ghost hunting group with their own TV show came by last Halloween in search of him. Mr. Nitti scared the crap out of those wannabe ghost hunters, that’s for sure.
“I don’t know,” Cassandra says as I set my bag on the chair. “He’s been gone for a week. That doesn’t seem like him.”
I bite my lip as I try to think of a comforting response. I understand why Cassandra is upset—he is the only ghost on our route who is capable of real conversations. Everyone else is stuck in a time loop, repeating the exact same words and motions day in, day out. It got a little tiresome after a while, especially when compared to Mr. Nitti’s fascinating tales. He’s also handsome, and Cassandra has a huge crush on him, which isn’t surprising—considering the way her life ended, I suspect she doesn’t have very good judgment when it comes to men.