The Ex Who Glowed in the Dark (Charley's Ghost) (14 page)

She jumped on her bike and peeled out of the lot.

Charley appeared in front of her about three blocks away, waving his arms and trying to get her to stop. When she finally pulled up to a red light, he confronted her. “What are you doing? I thought we were supposed to be watching that guy.”

“You were supposed to report back to me as soon as you saw what he was up to.”

Charley rubbed the back of his neck and looked away. “I was waiting for him to finish the workout with that woman. I mean, it’s not like he was going to stop in the middle and go do something else.”

“And it’s not like I’m going to sit in the hot sun all day and wait for you to report back to me when we’re on a tight deadline to find Grant.” A car horn sounded behind her, and Amanda realized the light had turned green. She twisted the handlebar grip and rode away.

*~*~*

“We need to go back,” Charley insisted as he followed Amanda up the stairs to Dawson’s apartment. “We need to keep an eye on that guy.”

“Ha! You just want to keep an eye on his female clients.”

He grinned. “Are you jealous, Amanda?”

“Oh, Charley, it’s been a very long time since I’ve been jealous of your bimbos.” She rounded the second floor landing and smiled. “Besides, now all you can do is look. You can’t touch.”

“You can be a cruel woman, Amanda.”

She probably ought to stop talking to him. Anybody seeing her would think she was having a conversation with herself. Not that there was anybody on the third floor to see her except Dawson or the aluminum foil guy. She took the last flight of stairs as quietly as possible so Brendan wouldn’t hear her and come out again to zap aliens with his laser gun.

That effort proved unnecessary. When she entered Dawson’s apartment she saw aluminum foil covering the windows and Brendan sitting at the table with Dawson. The tinfoil guy looked up when she came in. “I want to help protect him from the aliens.”

She gave Dawson a lifted eyebrow,
What the hell?
look. He shrugged as if the man’s presence there was inconsequential.

Had Dawson become so desperate he would accept help no matter how off-the-wall that help was?

Apparently.

“Thanks, Brendan,” she said, “but we can handle it. My friend, the one you met this morning, he and his partner—I mean, his co-worker—are experts in dealing with aliens, and they’ll be here soon.”

“They don’t have my shield program.”

He indicated a laptop sitting on the table, and Amanda realized there were now four of them. They were multiplying.

“I wrote the program,” he continued, “and I’m the only one who has it, but I’ll share with Dawson because I know he’s not one of them since they took his brother too.”

“Too?”

Brendan nodded so vehemently his thick glasses slid partway down his nose. He pushed them back up. “They took my brother and me, but I escaped. That’s how I know so much about them. I can put up cyber shields as well as physical shields to protect Dawson.”

She looked at Dawson who again gave a slight shrug. Brendan was probably a harmless nut. But at this point, they didn’t need any distractions or outside influences, even harmless ones. “Dawson, I need to see you in Grant’s room for a minute. I have a question about one of his posters.”

“His posters?”

“Yes.” She headed toward Grant’s room.

“I’ll keep an eye on metal man,” Charley called.

Amanda continued down the hall to the second bedroom. She was dealing with a ghost, a guy who saw aliens and wore tin foil, and a stressed-out kid who was so desperate he was willing to consider alien protection provided by a nut job. She was the sanest one of the group, and that was a scary thought.

Dawson entered Grant’s room behind her, and she closed the door. “Aliens did not take your brother, that guy is not going to be able to help, and we don’t need him here in the middle of things right now.”

Dawson shook his head. “I know he’s a little different, but he did see the kidnappers. Maybe he and his brother really were kidnapped, not by aliens, but by the same people, and maybe he did escape, and maybe he knows something about them that will help us.”

Amanda looked at her friend, at the lines on his young face, lines that hadn’t been there two days ago. “I know you’re under a lot of stress right now. I can’t even begin to imagine how upset you must be.”

Dawson moved over to Grant’s bed and sank down, picking up the stuffed dog and holding it to his chest. “My brother’s the only family I’ve got. I moved to a city where I didn’t know anybody, and I’ve been afraid to make friends because I was afraid to trust anybody. It’s just been Grant and me for two years and now he’s in trouble and I don’t know how to help him.”

Amanda sank onto the bed beside him. “We’re going to find him. You’re going to get your brother back. And you do have a friend, me. When this is over, you’re going to make lots more friends. As far as family, I’ll be happy to share mine with you. What with birth family, adoptive family, and in-laws, I’ve got more than enough to share. Off the top, you can have my sister and my mother.”

Dawson gave a small hiccup of a laugh. It was better than nothing. “Thanks, but I think I’ll pass on both of them. Right now having Brendan here makes me feel more secure. He knows a lot about computers. We talk the same language. And
he saw the people who took Grant.”

“What the heck,” Amanda said, giving in. “If it makes you feel better, I suppose one more crazy person around here won’t matter.”

To her surprise, Dawson leaned over and gave her a quick hug. “I appreciate all you’re doing to help, Amanda. You are my friend.” He stood and left the room.

A warm spot settled in the middle of Amanda’s chest, a warm spot that had nothing to do with the broiling temperatures outside. If having the goofy little man there made Dawson feel better, she’d do her best to keep him there and see that he didn’t cause any problems.

She followed her young friend back to the living room.

“He did something with Dawson’s computer!” Charley said. “I tried to stop him, but I couldn’t! My hands just went right through him!
Don’t ever die, Amanda. It’s not as much fun as you might think.”

Chapter Thirteen

So much for Brendan being harmless.
Amanda charged over to where he sat. “What did you do to his computer?”

Dawson gaped at her in surprise. Brendan blinked rapidly behind his thick glasses. He
swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “I was just looking.”

“Looking at what?”

“I—I wanted to be sure he has enough RAM for my program to run.”

Dawson glanced down at his laptop then back up to Amanda. “How did you know he was on my computer? He wasn’t when I came back to the room, and you were behind me.”

Both men stared at her, waiting for an answer. She looked from one to the other.

Charley laughed.
“Time to acknowledge your husband’s help!”

Amanda
hovered a hand about an inch above the keyboard of Dawson’s computer, moving it back and forth. “I can feel the energy from his fingertips.”

Dawson put his hand beside hers.
“Really? That’s amazing. I can’t feel anything.”

“It’s a talent.
Inherited from Grandmother Phoebe.”

Dawson frowned. “That’s your mother’s mother and she isn’t related to you by DNA.”

“Yep. That’s why the talent’s so strange. Look at the time. Why don’t I go pick up some lunch? You boys carry on with whatever you’re doing.”

She grabbed her helmet, jacket and purse and dashed out the door.

Of course Charley followed. “Don’t leave him alone with that nut! I don’t trust him. He was doing a lot more than checking for RAM on Dawson’s computer.”

Amanda laughed. “How would you know what he was doing on the computer? You think RAM is a male sheep!”

“I know about computers. I can go inside them and make the pictures do wonky things. You can’t do that.”

Amanda rolled her eyes. Arguing with Charley was a waste of time and energy.

Her cell phone rang. “Oh, not my mother again!” But this time it was Sunny. Amanda answered as she walked down the stairs.

“Your mother’s on a rampage,” Sunny said.

“Which mother?”

Sunny laughed.
“The one who goes on frequent rampages. Seriously, Amanda, she’s worried about you. You haven’t been answering her calls, and your shop’s closed.”

“She went by my shop?”

“She’s worried. She called Irene and me to see if we’d heard from you.”

Amanda pushed through the outside door into the midday heat. “Damn! I hope you told Irene there’s nothing to worry about.” She’d already given her mother-in-law plenty of reason to worry a couple of months ago when she’d stayed with her while trying to prove Roland Kimball was a murderer. The first woman who’d ever baked cookies for her—other than her mother’s various cooks, of course—deserved some peace of mind.

“I told Irene and your mother that I saw you yesterday and we had an uneventful motorcycle ride.”

“Thank you for not telling them about the kidnapping. I don’t want to upset Irene or give Mom so many gray hairs she has to run to her hairdresser. Remember those strange people in the van who were following us? They may have been Grant’s kidnappers.”
As she walked around the building and over to her motorcycle in the parking lot, Amanda updated Sunny on the latest developments.

Sunny was silent for a long moment. “You followed a guy who just got out of prison? Do you think it was a good idea to follow a known criminal and spy on him?”

Amanda hesitated. She considered telling Sunny that Charley had actually done most of the following and spying, but after the disaster yesterday of trying to tell her about Charley, she decided not to revisit the topic right then. “I was never in any danger. Well, I need to run. I’m going to pick up lunch for Dawson. Can’t ride and talk on the cell phone at the same time.”

“Amanda, one more thing.
About Charley.”

Amanda looked at the ghost in question who was entertaining himself by teasing a small black dog. He darted toward the dog
who barked and backed away then, wagging his tail, trotted toward Charley and rolled over to have his tummy rubbed. Her ex could never get a role in a scary ghost movie.

“What about Charley?”

He turned at the sound of his name. “Dogs and cats can see me. Maybe I’m getting more real.” The dog stood up and extended a paw toward his hand.

“You said some things that concerned me.”
Sunny’s voice was quiet. Worried.

“Can we talk about this another time? It’s okay. I’m perfectly sane. Well, as sane as I’ve ever been.”

Sunny laughed softly. “Okay, we’ll talk later. Just be careful and remember I’m here when you need me. And please call your mother before she drives us all crazy.”

Amanda disconnected, shoved the phone in her jacket pocket then sighed and
took it out again. She dialed her mother’s number and breathed a sigh of relief when the call went straight to voice-mail. “You’ve reached Beverly Caulfield’s phone,” her mother’s slow, precise voice informed her.

Amanda drummed her fingers on the seat of her bike as she waited for the message to finish and get to the beep. Too bad there wasn’t a way to fast forward through messages longer than ten words. Amanda’s own was,
This is Amanda. Leave a message,
and she was thinking about taking out the
This is Amanda
part.

“I’m not available at the moment,” her mother’s voice continued, “but if you’ll leave a message, I promise I’ll call you back at my first opportunity. In the meantime, I hope you have a wonderful day.”

“Hi, Mom. It’s Amanda Caulfield. Dad probably told you that’s my official name these days. You can put it on the invitations or leave it off. Just don’t put Amanda Randolph on them. Do whatever else you think needs to be done. You have proxy for my vote. My shop’s closed because I’m taking a few days off. Hanging out with friends. Learning new uses for aluminum foil. Bye.” That should keep her mother happy for a while, thinking Amanda was doing something that involved making cute little decorations using aluminum foil. Anything was more acceptable in her eyes than motorcycle repair.

*~*~*

Almost an hour later Amanda made it back to Dawson’s apartment with a couple of boxes of chicken and French fries strapped to the sissy bar on her bike. She swept the kick stand down with a savage motion, climbed from the bike and yanked off her helmet. “What did you think you were doing? Why did you make all the chicken go stone cold so they had to fry up another batch?”

“I didn’t do it on purpose. It looked and smelled so good, I just wanted to see if I could taste it, and you know what, Amanda? I could! It was almost like eating. Surely you don’t begrudge me a little taste of fried chicken after all these months of having nothing to eat or drink.”

“If we go to a winery, are you going to dive into one of the barrels and stop the fermentation process with your cold just so you can have a taste of wine?”