“You know a lot about the history of your town.”
“They teach it to you in school. It’s so boring.”
“I bet.”
“The manor is run-down now, but I know we could fix it up and make it work.”
“And what does everyone else say?”
“That just because we’re in the ghost business doesn’t mean we want to become them.”
I chuckled. “Sounds like the manor house might not be all that safe.”
“You have to be careful where you step is all,” she grumbled. “They need to have a bit of imagination.”
It sounded like a sore subject.
“Anyway, I think you should stay with Benji, because what if someone tries to kill him in the middle of the night?”
“Well, I’m going to assess that,” I placated her. “We’ll see what threat level we’re at.”
“When you meet him, you’ll want to protect him. I do. Sian does too. Even David Cotton, the mayor’s son, wants to take care of him.”
“The mayor’s son, huh?”
“And Javier Vega, who owns the brewery. He wants to make sure Benji’s okay too.”
Lots of interesting new people.
“And even though Christopher Rossi, who owns The Well, will tell you that he thinks Benji is nuts, he doesn’t mean it. He likes him too.”
“And what’s The Well? A bar?”
“Our favorite pub,” she apprised me. “I can go in there with you. They make really good food, but I can’t drink anything harder than root beer. I’ve tried to get Chris to lighten up, but he’s a stickler for the rules.”
“Which is good,” I replied, turning to scowl at her. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Eighteen.”
“Really?” That was the most astounding news of the day. She honestly didn’t look a day over fifteen.
She nodded quickly. “I know I’m kinda old not to have a driver’s license, but Dave told me not to drive last year, so I didn’t.”
“Dave?”
She grunted. “Yeah. He haunts Starfish. That’s Sian’s apothecary, down on Main Street. It used to be a real estate office before she bought it, and before that, it was a brothel. There are two floors.”
The way she was explaining things to me, like of course everything made sense, was going to make me start growling any second.
“When Sian and Benji told the ghosts it was okay, they didn’t need to hang out anymore, they all left. Except Dave. He’s super nice, and he likes to walk around and look at all the candles and incense and stuff. He thinks Sian’s place fits in well between the marijuana dispensary and the health food store.”
I cleared my throat. “Do, uhm, Sian and Benji go to the dispensary a lot?”
“Oh, yes,” she assured me cheerfully. “They even asked Sian to help name the flavors, since she’s so good at naming products in her own store.”
So stoned paranormal investigators. I needed to call my boss.
“That’s another reason no one wants to buy the Stabler mansion with me.”
I’d missed something. “Pardon?”
“When I was telling you about the mansion, I forgot to mention that both Benji and Sian want me to go away to college.”
Ah. “And you don’t want to?”
“I do, but I’ve sort of back-burnered that whole idea because of the money. You saw where I live. We just don’t have it.”
“That’s what student loans are for,” I chimed in.
“Yeah, but it’s a lot to take on.”
“It is,” I agreed. “What is it you want to study?”
“I’d love to be a vet. I work part-time as a vet tech now.”
I nodded, putting that away to solve. Get Delly into college. Check. Once a problem was presented to me, I always had to find a workaround. It was our mandate at Torus: leave every situation better than you found it. I would have to speak to Jared about her.
“Okay, you need to take a quick left and a right, and it’s at the end of the cul-de-sac on the left,” she chirped at me, and I did as I was told. “We can park in the—oh no,” Delly gasped.
I saw it then, what she was looking at. There was a man standing in the middle of three others who were playing keep-away with what looked like a camera bag. It was so fifth-grade I was momentarily stunned.
“That’s Benji in the middle.”
There was no doubt in my mind it would be.
Pulling up to the curb, I barked at Delly to stay in the car with the windows up and the doors locked, and got out and went around the back before charging toward the circle of men.
I was almost there when Benji dropped into a stance I was familiar with, having seen Nash use tae kwon do more than once.
The first guy got his legs swept from under him and went down hard on his back, and Benji straightened, twisted away from the second guy, who took a swing at him, grabbed the camera case from the man who had the wind knocked out of him and was still lying there gulping like a fish out of water, as the third guy dived toward him. Benji would have been driven facedown onto the sidewalk, but I was there and caught the guy by the hood of his jacket and yanked him off his feet so he ended up sitting down hard beside his buddy, who had rolled sideways in an effort to pull more air into his lungs.