Ghost Layer (The Ghost Seer Series Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

door, putting a little extra sway in her hips for Zach. He’d been gone six days.
    The electronic door lock released with a click, probably from Rickman’s desk, and she opened it and sauntered out, hearing Rickman say, “Let’s talk provisional terms, Laurentine. Zach, please stay on Clare’s behalf.”
    “Oh, very well,” Mr. Laurentine said. “And I suppose you want me to hire the ex-cop to look into a more than century-old death by accident.”
    “We’ll negotiate,” Rickman said smoothly. “But first, Ms. Cermak’s services . . .” The rest of his words were cut off by the door shutting, and the sass in Clare leaked out of her like air from a deflating balloon.
    Whatever Rickman charged Mr. Laurentine would be both too much and too little. Too much because she
had
to help ghosts pass on to whatever awaited them, or go crazy. Too little because money, no matter how much, didn’t make up for her life being totally screwed up now.

THREE

    A HALF HOUR later, after a ride home during which she hadn’t wasted any time checking out Curly Wolf and J. Dawson Hidgepath and the cemetery on her tablet, Clare went through the iron gate next to her large new-to-her home into the backyard. She walked down the red flagstone path set in thyme to her carriage house or, since her house had been built in the twenties, an early garage. She hadn’t visited the smaller building since the day she’d toured the property with her realtor, eleven days ago, and hadn’t paid much attention to the one-story-and-a-loft building.
    During the last week she’d been occupied in the main house, arranging her portion of Great-Aunt Sandra’s furniture, setting up a home office for accounting and perhaps tax preparation services, and a tinier office for her “ghost layer” psychic gift.
    Learning the rules for helping apparitions move on had not been going well. Enzo would sit next to her as she read books written by mediums and other psychics and shake his big head mournfully, saying,
It is not like that with us.
He’d been her great-aunt Sandra’s dog and was now Clare’s, to help her.
    She thought she’d rather have a cat.
    Great-Aunt Sandra’s jumbled journals didn’t help much either, assuming Clare knew items or procedures that she didn’t, talking about ghost laying in Sandra’s own personal terms, which made Clare’s brain hurt.
    But Great-Aunt Sandra
had
made another fortune for the family . . . as had Sandra’s predecessor, Great-Great-Uncle Amos. Sandra had compiled money both as a psychic consultant and, as she had told Clare in a video, because “the universe supports our efforts.”
    Clare had found that out from experience. At the end of her first case, she and Zach had found a gold coin that was so rare it was currently sitting in a New York City auction house valued at four million dollars. That still staggered her. Four. Million. Dollars. For one “case,” as Zach would call it. She still didn’t know how that worked.
    Unlike her great-aunt, Clare hadn’t intended to make the psychic thing a business, and yet here she’d been dragged into a paying job. Rickman had probably already negotiated her fee from Mr. Laurentine.
    Come ON, Clare!
Enzo popped out of the oak wood door of the small brick building.
    The Labrador was always cheerleading and she was always dragging her feet. That wouldn’t happen with any cat, real or ghost.
    She used key and keypad to open the door and walked in, and the sunny cream-yellow walls made her smile. Pretty light from high horizontal windows and the huge skylight in the roof of the nonloft part of the room illuminated the space. The shabby floral pastel furniture from her great-aunt Sandra’s secondary sunroom had been temporarily placed here by the movers. Clare recalled now that this team was also the one that had done the kitchen, and had been led by a woman. She’d done a good job, setting up a cozy conversational area near the small kitchen area, revealed by