Free Vanished by Kat Richardson

gaped and made a squeaking sound. “You mean like on Ghost Hunters ?”
    I only shrugged. People will fill in their own blanks if I keep my mouth shut and it wouldn’t hurt to let her think I might work for a spooky TV show if that got information flowing, though I felt a bit grimy for the ruse.
    She nodded to herself before speaking again. “I guess that’s not so strange. I mean . . . after what happened there, you’d think it would be haunted, right? Not that I’ve ever seen a ghost over there and my chiropractor is right in the office it happened in, you know.”
    “Really? So what did you hear about it?” I asked.
    Lila glanced around to be sure no one wanted her attention and then turned back to me and lowered her voice. “Well, back a while ago there was a doctor up on the second floor. Must be . . . twenty years ago—before I moved up from Long Beach, anyway. So, anyhow. He was having an affair with his nurse and then one day she just up and disappeared. No one knows what happened to her, but they say he killed her and hid the body somewhere. But whatever happened, she was never found, and one day he just shot himself. Dead.”

NINE
    It hurt to hear my dad described as a womanizing murderer. Even if I suspected he might be responsible for Christelle’s death—and with her ghost wandering the remnants of the office, there was no doubt in my mind that she was dead—it didn’t feel good to hear someone else say it. I decided to pretend that it really was not my father and Christelle she I was talking about, but some nameless doctor and his nameless nurse. That I could talk about without feeling queasy.
    I swallowed some water before speaking. “So he killed himself?” I asked. “It wasn’t his wife, or the girl, or her boyfriend who shot him?”
    Lila shook her head. “Not the way I heard it.”
    “Interesting. Do people see his ghost there? Or the nurse’s?”
    “Well, like I said, my chiropractor has that office now. I’ve never seen anything weird there, but . . . it’s funny how the room is always too warm.”
    “Too warm? Most people say ghosts are cold.”
    “Yeah, well, you’d think so. But this one’s warm. And there are noises at night.”
    “I couldn’t hear anything over the music in the studio,” I said. I hadn’t heard anything at all, not even the sound of Christelle opening the door, now that I thought about it. Usually the Grey is full of sourceless muttering and the singing of the grid, but except for Christelle’s voice, the general Grey buzz, and the zing of the flying energy balls, there’d been no sounds in the ghostly office. I’d have to take another look, but this time I’d try to get into the right layer of time and see if that made a difference.
    “Do you think your chiropractor would let me look around his office? After dark, that is. When the ghosts are more active.”
    “Oh, I think so. He’s a nice kid. Paul Arkmanian, that’s him.”
    I raised my brows. “Kid?”
    She turned her head and blushed. “Well, not really a kid you understand: He’s Sandros Arkmanian’s son,” she said, as if that not only made sense, but made him perfectly safe. On the sense side, I wasn’t so sure, but considering how tight-knit the neighborhood looked, maybe “safe” wasn’t so far out. Everyone knew everyone and everyone’s children, and they probably knew who was having an affair with whom, who was drinking too much, and who was dying of which tragic disease without their selfish kids ever coming around to visit. They’d all know who was “good folks” and who wasn’t. I’d bet the neighborhood ladies brought casseroles and baked goods around for christenings and funerals, too.
    Lila was glancing around the room again, her face lighting up as she waved a hand at someone, beckoning the person closer to our table. A burly, square-shouldered man got up from his own table and strolled over to us. He looked to be about six feet tall, mid-sixties, and