Free Dead for the Money by Peg Herring

loudly inside a waking host’s head. Still, he’d had to get his point across to this trainee who was already breaking the rules.
    To his relief, Mildred did as ordered now, although she, too, might have been too exhausted to speak. The girl they now both inhabited seemed totally disoriented for a while, but gradually her heartbeat returned to normal and she stopped massaging her forehead. Their host would be fine, and it irked him that Mildred had made him lose his temper. Not like me at all, Seamus thought, but at least they were in. Mildred was silent. He hoped she was cowed by his disapproval.
    There was a span of a few seconds where only the lap of waves could be heard. Seamus shuddered when the girl formed the first thought he could comprehend. Crazy, she said to herself . I really am crazy.
    Her name was Brodie, and she was the child Dunbar had spoken of, the one he’d rescued from some horrible situation. Seamus saw right away that she would not be a useful host.
    The girl was odd. He had been inside a lot of heads, but he had never felt more resistance. It was what cross-backs called the Curse of the Teenage Girl. Young women just into puberty were notoriously bad hosts. In fact, they were lucky to have gotten into this girl’s head at all. Other cross-backs told stories of bouncing off young females and having to flounder back to their original host. Things got upset, knick-knacks went flying into walls, and there was a general feeling of atmospheric distress in the vicinity that gave rise to stories of poltergeists.
    If Brodie was relatively permeable right now, he sensed it was due to sadness. Grief hung on the girl like weighted netting. Everything she saw was filtered through sadness, dread, and fear. The cause of the grief he could guess at. The fear he did not understand, but her thoughts on the matter were closed, as if she pushed them away with continual, active effort. It had to be a gargantuan task, not to think at all about something that loomed so large in her mind.
    The only thought that came through clearly was that she was crazy. Then Brodie pushed that thought away too, and stumbled down the path, her mindstubbornly empty.
     
     
    “ S EAMUS —”
    “Millie, for the last time, shut up !”
    There was a poignant silence.
    “It’s Mildred.”
     

Chapter Six
    B RODIE FELT SICK , weighed down and nauseated, but she should have expected it. She’d been obsessing about Gramps’ death and her future, or lack of one. She hadn’t eaten much of anything over the last twenty-four hours. Gramps always said worry didn’t change anything. She tried to stop thinking about death and uncertainty, but it was not easy.
    She would stop thinking about anything at all. She would concentrate on her feet, watching them, steering them, hating them. It worked fairly well. Her mind stayed empty all the way down the steep incline, across the open meadow, past the barn, and up to the house. It didn’t help much, though. Her head felt too heavy for her neck, and her gut felt jumpy and kind of squishy.
    With nothing to do until the funeral the next afternoon (which she would not think about, would not !), Brodie wandered the house listlessly. Shelley was busy preparing for the guests who would come to the house after the service. She saw no sign of Briggs outside and guessed he was cleaning everyone’s cars so they’d be ready for the funeral procession. Bud was in Gramps’ office, talking to someone on the phone. Arnold hovered outside the room, obviously hoping to become useful to the new Mr. Dunbar. Arnold the Mouth was not Brodie’s favorite person. Gramps always smiled when she said that, explaining that Arnold was competent and had agreed to live in a small town west of everywhere. Likeable was not one of the terms in the job description. Scarlet would speak no ill of anyone in the household, but she did smile once when Brodie, told to use the word officious in a sentence, used it to describe her