A Date with the Other Side (Cuttersville #1)(14)
Author: Erin McCarthy

Shelby herded the group of six back toward the road and fought a sigh. Suddenly what she’d done for the past two years for kicks and to keep herself fed seemed frivolous at best, violating at worst. If there was no such thing as a ghost, then she was fleecing folks, even if they left her tour entertained. And if there were ghosts, well, parading people past them seemed rude. If she were dead and forced to hang around wearing the same clothes for hundreds of years, she wouldn’t want anybody staring at her.

Especially the clothes she was wearing now. Glancing down at her khaki shorts, with a stain of unknown origin on the cuff, and her brown tank top, she realized her wardrobe was downright sad. But there was no money to buy anything new, especially not if she was going to start worrying about the ethics of interpersonal relations between the living and the dead.

Who knows, maybe Red-Eyed Rachel had been trying to take a nap or something and there she was with her tour group. That would make anybody cranky.

Though maybe it didn’t have anything to do with spirits, but with her, Shelby Tucker, twenty-six years old and no future other than hanging out at the Busy Bee and scraping enough money together every month to eat artery-clogging food. She did not even own a car, and her seventy-year-old grandmother was housing her.

She hadn’t meant to be quite so aimless. When she was a little girl, her visions of the future had alternated between being a wife and mother, Wonder Woman with a less slutty outfit, and a vet. The vet would have been the smartest route to take, but she had told Boston the truth when he had questioned why she didn’t get a better-paying job.

While she was great with animals and could memorize things, she had been lousy at schoolwork growing up. Sucked raw eggs kind of lousy. By sixth grade they had figured out she was dyslexic, but it had been too hard to catch up, too difficult to retrain her brain to the extent that was required for higher learning.

Now she wished she would have tried harder, as she walked the group to the Bigleys’ barn, where a ghost cow was known to moo for grass he could no longer chew.

Boston was impressed with the Samson Plastics plant. It was clean, efficient, and appeared to be producing at peak productivity right there in the middle of nowhere, sandwiched between a dilapidated barn and a cornfield. Sure, there was a bit of a twang in the voices of the employees, but their T-shirts and jeans looked the same as any of the workers in the Chicago plant, and there was the same level of separation between management and workers on the line.

Unlike back in Chicago, though, he felt no sense of competition. Here, he was clearly top dog, the first VP from Samson ever to do more than pop in for a random visit. It had Bob and Phil spinning in circles trying to alternate between kissing his ass and pumping him for information.

Which he didn’t have.

Bob seemed a little more willing to speak frankly, so after milling around the plant introducing himself, studying some output reports, and checking out the makeshift office the guys had created for him in a storage closet, he sought out Bob.

“Hey, Bob, how’s it going?” Boston strode into his office and took a seat without waiting for an invitation.

Bob looked up from his computer and shot him a nervous glance. Boston could practically see the sweat forming and pushing out Bob’s busy glands. In the past, Boston had always enjoyed moments like this, when he knew that he was in control, that the meeting was his to manipulate however he intended. But watching Bob, Boston felt no such thrill. In fact, he felt something that might be . . . guilt.

Guilt? He straightened his spine. He had no reason to feel guilty. Who gave a shit if he wasn’t being completely honest with these guys? This was business, and he needed to protect himself, watch his back.

“I realize you weren’t expecting me, but the office you’ve given me doesn’t have an outlet. It’s a little difficult to conduct business without phone or Internet access.”

Bob swallowed. “Sorry, Boston, I didn’t notice that, but we’ll work something out, don’t you worry. If this is going to be long term, we can rearrange some staff.”

Boston heard the question in his voice, and he was about to imply that he was going to be watching Bob’s and Phil’s backs for quite a while, when his gaze fell across a picture on Bob’s desk.

It was Bob and a cute, round brunette with their hands on the shoulders of two Bob-looking boys, somewhere in that hazy age range of four to eight. Boston wasn’t around kids enough to pin it any closer, but the happy smiles of the family as they posed with a guy in a striped cat costume got to him.

“This your family?” He lifted the wood frame and studied them closer. The whole concept of happily ever after and family vacations was foreign to him and it made him curious.

Was it all an act? Or did people actually enjoy raising their children together? His parents certainly hadn’t. When they hadn’t been winging Wedgwood china at each other, they had been releasing their frustration in the beds of a staggering array of nannies and tennis coaches.

“Oh, yeah.” Bob relaxed a little. “That was this past April. We went to Disney World for a week. We had a great time. My boys, Bryan and James, they’re four and six, and they just loved every minute of it.”

“Who’s the cat?” Boston pointed to the picture before setting it back on the desk.

“It’s Tigger.” Bob looked at him like he was missing a majority of his brain cells.

“Tigger?” It sounded vaguely familiar but he was having trouble placing it.

“The bouncing tiger from Winnie the Pooh.”

Boston shook his head. It wasn’t ringing any bells.

Bob started moving his finger around and around. “You know, ‘Bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun’ . . . no? Must be a parent thing, you get to know all that stuff.”

Boston had the annoying feeling that he had missed out on something, and given the look of concern—okay, pity—in Bob’s eyes, he thought so too.

Boston was starving, but he couldn’t take another red meat-emphasized meal at the Busy Bee. He hadn’t seen that much grease since his mother had brought home her latest boyfriend, Fred, the casino owner.

So he entered the back door of the White House, off the gravel driveway where he had been parking his car, anticipating eating an apple for dinner. Despite Shelby’s intrusions and getting locked in the parlor on his second day as a renter, he kind of liked the fussy hominess of the house. It wasn’t modern or manly, which dominated his apartment back in Chicago, and there was no wine rack, but it was warm and friendly and big, with large rooms, high ceilings, and detailed woodwork that didn’t exist anymore.