An Uninvited Ghost Read Online Free PDF Page A

than I’d expected. While that wasn’t a complete surprise—the only ghosts I had ever been able to see were Paul and Maxie—it wasn’t anticipated.
    Luckily (depending on how you look at it), Melissa and Mom could see Scott McFarlane, so both they and the two resident ghosts could relay his expressions to me. But there was something strange about carrying on a conversation with someone who, to all your senses, was not there. Like talking to a ghost. Or something.
    Scott, who had a slight burr to his speech, said he was troubled by something that had happened recently, and he wanted Paul (and by extension, me—in fact, mostly me) to investigate.
    “Right now, the guests know I’m having dinner, and besides, they don’t need much out of me in the evenings,” I said. “So we can start, but if I’m called away, I’m called away. Is that all right?”
    Everyone in the room looked in the direction to Paul’s left, and then nodded, which I took to mean Scott agreed with my plan.
    I asked Mom for a general physical description of McFarlane, and she said he was “an older gentleman, I’d say in his sixties—oh, really? He says he was seventy-two when he passed away.”
    “I can hear him, Mom,” I reminded her. “I just can’t see him.”
    “You look much younger, Mr. McFarlane,” she went on, ignoring my rudeness. Scott thanked her. “You’re welcome. Anyway, he’s not a very tall man, but he looks fit. He’s wearing dark slacks and a white shirt with long sleeves and no collar. He also has on a knit cap and black boots.”
    “He sounds like a pirate,” I thought out loud.
    “Alison,” my mother admonished. “Mind your manners.”
    I exhaled. “Look, it’s making me crazy talking to someone I can’t see who’s in the same room with me,” I said. “Can you hold something, or wear something, so I can at least locate you?” I asked the air.
    “Like what?” Scott asked.
    “There’s that old jacket of Daddy’s that’s in the upstairs closet,” Melissa said. “Can we put that around his shoulders?”
    The last thing I needed was to have this spirit remind me of The Swine. “How about a bandana?” I asked, pulling a cloth napkin out of one of the kitchen counters. “Would that work?”
    The napkin, a red one with the standard bandana pattern around its edges, liberated itself from my hand, tied itself into a scarf shape, and started floating just north of the refrigerator, to Paul’s left.
    “I guess so,” I said.
    “I want you to feel comfortable with me,” something slightly higher than the bandana said.
    “Of course, and I want the same of you,” I said in Scott’s direction. “Please, tell me your story.”
    “Shouldn’t the child leave?” Scott said. “I’m afraid my story will frighten her.”
    “I’ve seen A Nightmare on Elm Street ,” Melissa said. “I didn’t get scared at all.”
    “No, but you did have to sleep in my bed for a week after you saw Pinocchio ,” I reminded her. “You kept having whale nightmares.”
    “I was three. And I’m not leaving.”
    “Go ahead, Scott,” I said. “Don’t worry about Melissa.”
    “All right, then, but don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Scott said. “I’ve been staying in a house a few towns over, in Avon. The place was abandoned ten years ago, and they were supposed to tear it down and put up a hotel, I think, but then the money went away. So I do what I do there. I don’t need much, being dead and all.”
    “So I take it that you are an experienced, um, spirit?” I asked. Maxie and Paul were still adjusting to their existence after their murders. “May I ask how and when you . . . passed away?”
    “It was entirely of natural causes, I can assure you,” Scott told me. “Cirrhosis, I think they called it. I drank a bit when I was alive. And that was just about eighty years ago.”
    “So, you said you want us to verify that something happened. What is that?” It was time to get to business. Whatever