Free Nothing to Ghost About by Morgana Best

making good progress with the
story.”
    “ Good for you,” I said,
completely disinterested in her and her little story. She was so
sure it was going to open any door she wanted for her, and she was
probably right. “Anyway, thanks for that article. That was good of
you.”
    Anna waved her hand at me, as if she
were shooing away a fly. “Don’t thank me. Thank your accountant,
Basil. He’s the one who talked me into it.”
    I bit my lip.
    Ann smiled at me. “He’s really quite
funny, too, isn’t he? Still, he’s your accountant, so I’m sure you
know all about him.”
    “ Yes,” I said through
gritted teeth. “What did you want to ask me about?”
    “ Right.” Anna leaned
forward. For a moment I thought she was going to take out her tape
recorder and set it on the desk like she had done the first time I
had spoken with her, but she did not. “This isn’t off the record or
anything, but I just don’t want a digital copy of anything we’re
about to say,” she whispered. “I have a very good memory. It’s a
gift.”
    I nodded, once again intrigued, my
annoyance with Anna and her meeting with Basil forgotten, at least
for the moment. There was no need for her to whisper. After all, we
were alone in the building. My mother was at church praying for God
to help her take responsibility for her own actions, even though
they weren’t her fault.
    Anna looked down her nose at me as if
I were a cockroach or something equally distasteful. “Anyway, back
to Preston Kerr. What do you know about him?”
    “ I don’t really know too
much,” I said. “He was a funeral singer I hired online. I had been
told he had arrived, but I couldn’t find him, so I went looking for
him. When I was upstairs looking for him, I heard someone scream,
so I went downstairs. Someone else had found him in the bathroom,
dead.”
    “ He was
strangled.”
    She said it as a statement, rather
than a question, but I answered. “It looked that way to me, but
you’d have to ask the police.”
    Anna narrowed her eyes slightly.
“Okay, now to the funeral. It was for a man who had been hit by a
stolen car?”
    “ Yes,” I said. “A hit and
run. Someone might have been trying to kill him.” I wondered why
she asked. It had been all over the news.
    Anna smiled. Her smiles were always
small and full of malice, or at least they appeared that way to me.
“Trying? They did kill him.”
    I was irritated. “I meant that I’m not
sure if he was killed on purpose.”
    “ The police seem to think
he was,” Anna said.
    “ I’m not a cop,” I said
with a shrug.
    “ Who was at the
funeral?”
    I stared at the woman. “Who was there?
Lots of people were there. You were there, too.”
    “ I was only there in my
capacity as a reporter,” Anna said, “so I didn’t know the mourners.
Was anyone of importance there?”
    “ Who are you hoping was
there?” I asked. “You seem like you want me to say someone in
particular.”
    She shook her head. “Not at all. I’m
just curious.”
    “ Well, like I said, there
were lots of people there. I didn’t know them either, apart from
the deceased’s brother who organized the funeral.”
    Anna nodded. “I hear he’d had some
trouble with the law.”
    I knew that to be true as well, but
did not want to admit that to her. “He seemed nice enough to
me.”
    “ Who else was there?
Friends?”
    I nodded. “Of course. We don’t have a
guest list, though. We never do.” I thought I had better say that
before she asked for one.
    “ Anyone else? Any people
hurt by the deceased?”
    “ Hurt?”
    Anna narrowed her eyes once more. “He
had only recently been released from prison. Whoever murdered him
obviously had a problem with him, and whoever murdered him was
probably at the funeral. Did you see anyone acting suspiciously at
all?”
    “ I don’t know any of the
people who came,” I said. I did know Helen, the mayor’s wife, but I
wasn’t going to tell Anna. Helen had been robbed by the dead