The Ex Who Wouldn't Die (Charley's Ghost Book 1) Read online

  Amanda placed a hand on his arm. “If you can’t be honest with me, you can’t walk me upstairs.”

  Emerson nodded gravely. “Very well. I’ll wait here and watch until you get inside.”

  Amanda got out of the car. Her father could be very stubborn.

  But so could her father’s daughter.

  She climbed the rickety wooden stairs of the old two story red brick building that housed her shop on the ground floor and her apartment on the second. When she reached the landing, she turned to wave to her father.

  He waved back but showed no signs of leaving. Irritated as she was with him, she couldn’t stop a slight smile at his protectiveness. Whatever his reason for withholding information about Charley’s family, it probably sprang from some absurd notion of protecting her. She couldn’t be truly angry with someone who loved her that much.

  She grasped the door knob and inserted her key in the deadbolt. The door was unlocked. Had she been so upset she’d forgotten to lock it the day she left for that insane ride to Charley’s?

  No, she distinctly remembered locking it then testing to be sure since she planned to leave town.

  Dawson had a spare key. Could he have come up for some reason then forgotten to lock when he left?

  Not likely. Dawson was OCD to the nth degree. When he closed up the shop downstairs, he always checked the door, sometimes two or three times. If he’d gone into her apartment, he’d have locked, checked, relocked and rechecked.

  Why was her door unlocked?

  He tried to kill you. He’ll try again. You’re in danger.

  Oh, for crying out loud! Why did she keep remembering that stupid warning from a pain-induced hallucination?

  She turned the knob forcibly and shoved the door open so hard, it slammed back against the wall.

  The place was dark, all the blinds down. That was creepy. The living room had great windows, and since this was the only two-story house on the block, she always kept the blinds open.

  She licked her dry lips and told herself to stop being silly. Dawson could have closed up if he’d been in there. He preferred a cave atmosphere to a glass house. The two of them alternately and obsessively opened and closed the blinds over the small windows in the shop downstairs.

  That had to be it. Dawson checked on her apartment and closed the blinds then inexplicably forgot to lock the door. Even Dawson couldn’t be one hundred percent OCD.

  She took a step inside, flicked on the light switch, heard her father’s car drive away, and suddenly had to fight a rising, irrational panic at the thought of being alone.

  She straightened her spine, closed the door behind her and turned the lock. She’d never been frightened to be alone, and she wasn’t going to start now.

  She was home. Home was a good place to be. She liked her home.

  Immediately upon moving in, she’d freed the hardwood flooring from the sculptured green carpet that had protected it through the decades. Coffee table, lamp tables and a large bookcase—garage sale treasures of different wooden hues and textures—gave the place an air of genteel antiquity. Her sofa blazed with brilliant bursts of red, purple, yellow and green, adding a bright, eclectic note to the room.

  Her home would never appear in Better Homes and Gardens, but the effect pleased her.

  Tonight the familiar aura of comfort eluded her. Something didn’t feel right even though nothing was wrong. Nothing was out of place.

  Except the unlocked door and those blinds.

  Get over it! she ordered herself. Check the closets and under the bed then have a glass of wine and relax.

  Tomorrow she’d open the blinds again. Not tonight. Not because she was frightened of what she might see outside. There was no reason to open them tonight when it was dark out there.

  She strode determinedly into the large kitchen with its white-painted cabinets and her old-fashioned enamel-topped table. Everything seemed in order there, except again the blinds were closed.

  Had to be Dawson.

  She took one of her mismatched crystal stem glasses from the cabinet, retrieved an open bottle of white wine from the refrigerator and poured a generous serving.

  She started back to the living room but paused to slide a carving knife from the wooden block. Not that she was nervous, but, hey, you never knew when you might need to carve a roast.

  This wasn’t the best neighborhood in the city, but she’d never been frightened in the two years she’d lived there.

  One night a couple of months ago two men had come to the door looking for Charley. They’d wakened her at one o’clock a.m. after she’d battled insomnia until midnight. When she told them Charley no longer lived there, they became belligerent. Rather than scaring her, they’d aroused her anger.

  She’d grabbed the hammer she’d been using to hang a picture. Brandishing it above her head while shouting her opinion of rude people running around in the middle of the night disturbing women trying to sleep, she chased them down the stairs, into their car, and halfway around the block before she came to her senses and went back to bed.

  She wasn’t usually skittish.

  Tonight something felt strange. Not scary, just wrong.

  Good grief. One little tumble down a mountain and she lost her nerve.

  She marched into the bedroom, flipped on the light and looked around.

  No one there.

  Of course not.

  Maybe the head injury had scrambled her brains and made her paranoid.

  She set her wine on the dresser, went over to the closet and yanked open the door, half-expecting to see a felon crouching inside.

  Have to be a skinny midget felon, considering the crush of clothes and boxes in the small closet.

  As long as she was in the vicinity of all those boxes, she might as well find that gun that damned Detective Daggett was so hot for. And once she found it, she could keep it on a night stand next to the knife. Surely this uneasy feeling would vanish when she was thus well-armed. She could even find the hammer that had put the fear of God and Woman in those rude men who’d wakened her in the middle of the night.

  She tossed the knife onto the brightly colored quilt on her bed then dragged one of the cardboard boxes from the closet and frowned. Granted, she didn’t pay much attention to the storage boxes, but she would have sworn the top box had been a computer paper carton containing sweaters instead of a sturdy liquor box marked Christmas decorations.

  Prickles darted up her spine.

  Some of the clothes Charley had left behind were in the middle of the rack rather than shoved to one side.

  Her heart rate went up a notch.

  She hauled out more boxes until she reached the one in the back of the closet...the one she knew contained the gun Charley gave her...and dumped the contents on the floor. A chipped crystal paperweight, some old CDs, a worn wallet, a tangle of ear buds and miscellaneous wires, USB ports, adaptors, a wide variety of paraphernalia, but no gun.

  She was mistaken about which box she’d put it in.

  No. The striped kitchen towel in which she’d wrapped it lay among the odds and ends.

  “I know who took it.”

  Amanda shrieked and shot to her feet, heart pounding loudly in her ears, wishing she’d found the gun and a few bullets or at least hadn’t tossed aside the kitchen knife.

  For an instant, her brain refused to register what her eyes saw.

  Charley stood on the far side of the room.

  Chapter Six

  Amanda’s immediate reaction was annoyance. Charley had managed to get into her apartment after she’d changed the locks.

  But Charley was…dead.

  The accident. Head injury. Hallucinations.

  Amanda closed her eyes firmly then opened them again.

  He was still there.

  “Yeah, it’s really me,” he said.

  He didn’t sound dead. His voice was normal, a bit less arrogant than usual, but definitely not sepulchral.

  She turned away and be
gan tossing things back into the box. If she was going to have hallucinations, why couldn’t it be George Clooney or an anonymous knight in shining armor? Even the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus would be preferable to Charley.

  “It’s no good ignoring me, Amanda,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere. I can’t.”

  Amanda tossed the last of the items into the box and closed it. But she couldn’t put it back in the closet. Charley stood between her and the closet door.

  “Damn it!” She dumped the contents of the box back on the floor then stood and confronted her hallucination. “Go away! Get out of my head! You’re dead, and my mother’s making plans to bury you!”

  Charley’s lips quirked in a grin she once found appealing. “That’s just like your mother. I’ll bet she wants to put me in one of those nice navy blue suits she’s always going on about.”

  “Don’t worry. I told her you wanted to be cremated, so I’m going to have you shoved—buck naked—into a blast furnace and reduced to ashes.” Amanda lifted her hands to her face. “Omigawd! I’m talking to my hallucination!”

  “Hallucination?” Charley looked shocked. “I’m not a hallucination. I’m your husband.”

  “No, you’re not! You’re dead. That ended the marriage deal.”

  “I might be dead, but I’m still right here, and you’re still my wife.”

  She’d heard those last words way too many times. Suddenly everything seemed all too real. Somehow Charley had managed to cheat death. Not surprising. He’d cheated everybody else.

  “Damn you, Charley Randolph! What kind of scam are you running now? Do you realize I’m being accused of killing you? And right now, that sounds like a damned good idea. Did you break in here? Did you take my gun? You did, didn’t you? I wouldn’t bring it to you, so you stole it. This time you’ve gone too far!” She reached for his collar, intending to choke him, but only until he turned blue.

  Her fingers closed on air.

  She looked at her hand then at Charley and frowned. “How did you do that? What kind of con are you up to now?”

  “Okay, it’s true. I’m dead. Sort of.” His grin widened. “Depends on your definition of dead.”

  Amanda backed away. “Stop that! This is not the time for your tricks, and I’m the wrong person to try them on. I know you way too well.”

  “No tricks. Check this out.” Charley disappeared into the wall then appeared again, smiling and spreading his arms. “Ta da!”

  Amanda swung at his shoulder. Her fist slammed hard against the wall.

  “Ouch! Damn you, damn you, damn you!” She rubbed her bruised knuckles. Slight-of-hand magic was one of Charley’s specialties, but never anything fancy. Pick a card. Look at this quarter I found behind your ear. Watch me get out of these handcuffs. Nothing of the David Copperfield variety…until now. What was he up to? And how was he doing it?

  A tiny wisp of suspicion niggled at the edges of her mind, a suspicion too absurd to be considered.

  “Sweetheart, you need to sit down so we can talk,” he said in his I can explain the perfectly innocent reason I was kissing that woman voice.

  “Don’t call me sweetheart, and I don’t want to talk to you.” She turned her back on him, trying to shut him out. She’d barely adjusted to his being dead, and now he was alive again. Typical Charley.

  She sighed as she realized she’d have to go through with the divorce after all, figure out some way to get him to sign those papers.

  “I know you don’t want to talk to me.” He sounded either a little abashed or a lot the con- artist. Amanda would put her money on the latter. “But you have to. I’m almost as confused about this thing as you are. Not having a body takes some getting used to. I could use your help.”

  Amanda spun back around to face him, ignoring everything he said except the last sentence, the only one that made sense, that sounded normal, sounded like Charley. “You want my help? Why should I help you?”

  “Because you’re a good person.”

  Amanda snorted, irritated, but a part of her was relieved. This was the Charley she knew, always working the angles. Simple con job. No fancy tricks. She didn’t like this Charley, but she was comfortable with him, understood him.

  She plopped into the wooden rocking chair in the corner of the room, leaned back and tented her fingers under her chin. “Start talking, creep, and if you say the right thing fast enough, maybe I won’t call the cops and have you hauled in for stealing my gun and…and impersonating a dead person.” She wasn’t certain the latter was illegal, but it sounded like it might be, certainly ought to be.

  Charley grinned. “I’d like to see them put me in handcuffs.”

  “Get to the point. What do you want to talk about, and how did you convince the police you’re dead? Whose body was in your apartment?”

  “Mine. It was my body. I’m dead.”

  “Fine. You’re dead. What is it you want my help with? Getting rid of the body?” She sat bolt upright. “Did you kill somebody?”

  “No! Of course not! But I know who did. The man who killed me is the same man who tried to kill you then broke into your apartment and stole your gun.”

  Amanda rocked back in the chair. “Let me see if I understand. You called me and told me if I’d bring you this gun in question that you’d sign the divorce papers. You didn’t sign the papers, so I refused to give it to you. Now I come home to find that same object missing and you in my apartment with some crazy story about a man who killed you, tried to kill me and stole my gun because, of course, you had nothing to do with my gun going missing.”

  Charley looked uncomfortable, an expression she hadn’t seen often on him. “That’s about the size of it. He took the gun because he thought it was his, but it wasn’t.”

  “It belonged to somebody else? You stole the gun you gave me? I’ve had a stolen weapon in my possession all this time? So that’s why you took it. You couldn’t have me turning it over the police if it was stolen.” She slapped her hands on the chair arms. “I should have known!”

  “No!” Charley protested. “I bought your gun. Totally legal. I can’t believe you think I’d give you a stolen gift.”

  “Yeah, you’re so morally upright, you’d never do anything like that. Why would this burglar think my gun was his if you didn’t steal it from him?”

  Charley looked down, refusing to meet her gaze. Totally unlike Charley. “I told him it was his. Then I tried to tell him the truth, that I never had his in the first place, but he didn’t believe me.” He shrugged. “So I told him you had it. I thought if I could get you to bring your gun to him, since it’s the same kind as his, he’d take it and go away and not kill me.”

  Amanda shook her head. “Charley, Charley, Charley. With your talent for making up stories, you should have been a writer instead of a con-artist.”

  Charley looked up, his expression wounded. “I’m telling the truth.”

  “Okay, fine, you’re telling the truth.” There was no point in wasting her breath arguing with him. “So why did this mysterious burglar think you had his gun in the first place?”

  “He’s not a burglar, he’s a murderer. Well, I guess he is a burglar now that he’s stolen your property. But mostly he’s a murderer. He killed a woman with the gun he thought I had.”

  “That’s enough of your lies.” She pointed a finger at him. “I am a murder suspect, and now you’re somehow involved in the theft of the item that can prove my innocence. You need to tell me what’s going on, and I don’t want any of your evasions and bullshit.”

  “The guy, Kimball, he thought I had his gun, the one he used to murder a woman, and he wanted it back. But I didn’t have it.” Charley smiled and spread his hands, palms-up, as if that statement should clear up the whole matter.

  “Kimball. So you gave this burglar a name,” Amanda said. “Nice touch. Why did this Kimball, this murderer and burglar, think you had his gun?”

  Charley’s gaze locked on hers. She had once found that blue gaze rive
ting. Now she knew him too well. He was formulating a story.

  “No! Do not lie to me, Charley Randolph!”

  “Yeah, about that.” He sighed and grinned ruefully. “I can’t.”

  “You can’t what?”

  “Lie.”

  “Really? You can’t lie? That’s pretty amazing. We won’t even discuss the times you lied to me about women and money. Let’s just talk about your family, about the stories you told me about being an orphan. Your father was murdered. Your mother died in your arms from a drug overdose. Little brother murdered by his foster family. Poor orphan Charley. No family.” She folded her arms. “Funniest damn thing, half the town of Silver Creek thinks you’re family.”

  Charley gave her his big-blue-eyes innocent look. “That leaves a whole half of a town that’s not my family.”

  Amanda leaned forward. “This is serious. I almost died in that motorcycle crash. There’s a dead man in your apartment, and the police think I killed you. Him! Somebody! I’m in trouble, and the evidence that could clear me is gone. You claim you know who stole it. You need to tell me the truth for once in your worthless life.”

  “About your motorcycle accident—”

  “Don’t change the subject!”

  “I was worried about you. I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to make it back to the highway. I helped you. I saved your life. Doesn’t that count for something?”

  “So you were there. They told me you couldn’t have been there because you were dead.”

  “Of course I was there. You needed me, and I was there.” He looked pleased with himself.

  “Oh, yeah, you’re always there when I need you.”

  “Maybe I haven’t been, but I will be now. I think maybe that’s what this is all about, this hanging around after Kimball shot me. I’m here to take care of you.”

  Amanda closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. Getting something out of Charley when he didn’t want to tell it was always painful and frequently futile.

  She gave him her sternest glare. Probably not as effective as his riveting gaze, but it was the best she could do. “Charley, either you tell me something that makes sense about this whole thing—the gun your friend stole, why you aren’t dead, what kind of scam you’re up to this time—or I’m calling the cops right this minute to report a break-in and a stolen gun.”