LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Uh-huh…so when you say haunted, do you mean that something you’ve done has come back to haunt you? Or do you mean that you’ve been visited by Casper or one of his not-so-friendly associates?”

      “Casper? The cartoon character? Are you mocking me?”

      “I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “That was insensitive.”

      “What—? But…you fucking bitch!”

      “Excuse me? That was totally uncalled for!” I waited for Enrico to explain himself, but instead he must have thrown the phone down on the ground. I heard it clatter against a hard surface and in the background I thought I heard another noise—a squawking, like the sound of a distressed bird. “Enrico?” I yelled. “Are you still there? You owe me an apology!”

      But he said nothing. I heard another squawk, a loud thump and then the line went dead. “He hung up on me!” I snapped.

      “Well, what did you expect?” Leah shrugged and adjusted the frame once again. It was still crooked, but now it leaned toward the left rather than the right. “I heard your end of the conversation, Sophie. You were flippant with him.”

      “I was trying to engage him in friendly banter! And he didn’t just hang up on me, he also called me a fucking bitch!”

      “That’s extreme,” she admitted. “But…well, he is a chef. You know how they are—artistic temperaments and all.”

      “So what are you saying? That it’s okay to call women you’ve never met before bitches as long as you can make a good pâté?”

      “No, of course not, but—Where’s Jack?” We both looked at the empty couch. I immediately scanned the room for Mr. Katz and sighed in relief when I spotted him on the window seat. At that moment Jack came toddling out of the bathroom, buoyant and seemingly unharmed. “Mommy, Mommy! Auntie Sophie has sandbox and she hides chocolate in it!”

      “A sandbox?” Leah threw me a questioning look.

      “Um, noooo, but I do keep Mr. Katz’s litter box in there.”

      Jack’s mouth spread out into what might actually have been a shit-eating grin.

      “Call poison control!” Leah snapped.

      “But there’s nothing in his teeth,” I pointed out.

      “I save it,” Jack explained, still beaming. “See, I save for dessert.” His little fist removed and offered a cat turd to Leah, who stumbled back, aghast.

      “Put it back,” she screeched, “before you get some kind of weird cat disease!” She grabbed his arm and dragged him back into the bathroom, screaming something incomprehensible about antibacterial soap. I went to the doorway and watched her scrub his hands as he struggled to free himself.

      “What if Enrico doesn’t show up?” I asked.

      “Waiters on Wheels,” Leah said, too busy to look at me while she spoke. “Call and have them deliver appetizers from Sassi. But call him back first and try to smooth things over. Apologize to him for being insolent.”

      “Are you kidding me? He called me a fucking bitch!”

      Jack giggled and jumped up and down. “Auntie Sophie has potty mouth!”

      “Oh, yeah?” I said. “Well, I’m not the one who tried to eat out of a litter box.”

      “That’s it, we’re leaving.” Leah swooped Jack up in her arms and headed for the door, pausing briefly to retrieve her jacket and purse from my coatrack.

      “Don’t go,” I pleaded. “If Enrico doesn’t come there will only be nine of us and we need ten. You could be part of this.”

      “Thanks, but no thanks. Why don’t you call Mary Ann, I’m sure she’ll come.”

      “Mary Ann’s in Italy. She scored a killer assistant makeup artist job for Milan’s Fashion week and when she’s done with that she’s going to take a few extra weeks to do some Cathedral hopping around Europe. You, on the other hand, are right here. Come on, Leah, it could be fun.”

      “Sophie, I love you, but I absolutely refuse to make merry with a bunch of people at a séance.”

      “Fine, but if they call up the ghost of Emily Post you’ll be sorry!”

      “Emily Post isn’t dead,” Leah yelled over her shoulder as she walked out.

      I watched her carry my nephew down the stairs like a sack of potatoes. As a general rule I preferred to limit my time with the two of them to a couple of hours a week, but now I would have done almost anything to get Leah to stay. Bad things happened in threes, the unpleasantness exponentially increasing in severity. I was counting Enrico’s obscenities as one and I had a horrible feeling that bad thing two and three were going to pop up before the day was done.

      I tried to call Enrico back, but all I got was the steady and grating pulse of a busy signal. He had seemed so normal when we talked on other occasions, but apparently he had a dark side. I ordered food from his restaurant and it was delivered within an hour. After setting it up there was nothing to do but sit on the window seat and watch the colors of a sunset try to struggle through the dense fog. When the sky finally went black my doorbell rang. I hadn’t seen anyone walk up the steps. At that time I had been focused on my cat curled up on my lap. I pushed him off and he repaid me by dragging the tips of his claws across my thighs. It was exactly six-thirty. Whoever had come was punctual.

      I opened the door unsure if I was going to be greeted by Kane, Scott, Venus or a stranger. But all those predictions were wrong. The man in front of me wasn’t Kane or Scott, but I did know him. His pointed goatee and piercing eyes had made an impression on me years ago.

      “Jason Beck,” I exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

      Dena had so many exes it was hard to keep track of them all, but Jason had been more memorable than most. Perhaps it was his penchant for velvet (right now he wore velvet jeans and an open, untucked white dress shirt over a T-shirt that read Chaos Rules. But as original as his look was, it was his belief in vampires that had held my attention. Jason thought that Anne Rice was not a novelist but a biographer, and that Count Dracula was a lot more than a dead SOB who had earned himself a dubious place in Transylvanian folklore.

      “You’re the Sophie who’s buying this house?” he asked, sounding just as surprised as I was.

      I looked past him at the empty sidewalk and the silent street and tried to find the logic in our meeting. “You didn’t know I lived here?” I asked. “You came—to visit the house?”

      “I came for the Specter Society meeting.”

      Of course. I nearly slapped my forehead in a vaudeville demonstration of my own idiocy. “They told me a Jason was coming,” I said. “I have your name on a place card, but I would never have guessed it was you.”

      “And I never could have guessed that you would be hosting a séance. You’re not a believer.”

      I smiled wryly. “You want to know if I’ve ditched my…what did you call it? Oh, right, my spiritually closed-minded, excessively materialistic world view.”

      Jason smiled and cocked his head to the side. “Have you?”

      “It’s a long story,” I hedged. Scott had insisted that all of the members of the group must think that I’m a believer, but Jason had come through for me in the past, and despite our years of separation I counted him as a friend. I didn’t lie to my friends.

      I ushered him inside. He walked to the center of my living room and stared at the table. A cold breeze tickled the back of my neck, and I felt my skin prickle with goose bumps. For a second I thought the temperature had dropped for no reason, but that of course was not the case. I had been so overwhelmed by the surprise of Jason that I had forgotten to close the door behind him. I turned to do so, but my doorway was no longer

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