A Ghost of a Chance (14 page)

“Hi,” Isabella said again.

Keenan bolted up and placed his hands as stealthily as he could over the bulging hard on that was making a lump in his pants the size of New Zealand. When she glanced down, he was pretty sure it didn’t work.

“Dreaming about me, big boy?” Isabella’s tantalizing lips parted and she actually licked her lips. Keenan covered up by rubbing the still warm dream images from his head and the bright red blush residue from his face.

“Look.” Isabella sat on his coffee table, knee to knee, her chin down, twirling the ends of a crimson Indian scarf in her fingers. Jeans and a white peasant blouse had replaced the running suit. A thick shawl hugged her shoulders. “I’m sorry about this morning.” She lifted her face to him and looked very serious. Keenan preferred the happier face. “But you scared me. Can we talk?”

“Uh…” Words eluded him. He was still trying to get his wits wrapped around the fact that she was there. “Sure.”

But his confidence sloughed away leaving him exposed, as if his skin had fallen away from his ego. Isabella’s beauty was a distraction. He hopped up from the couch and headed for the bathroom.

“I’ll be right back.” As he moved through the house, he had never felt emptier. The house was silent, his insides twisted into icicle swirls, and for the first time in his life he began to doubt his own sanity.

Leaning against the sink, he pondered his reflection in the mirror. It would take discipline to get the chaos to melt around his cerebral cortex, so Keenan took his time, sorting everything out as neatly as he could.

He liked Isabella. No, he
really
liked Isabella. There wasn’t another time in his life he had fallen so hard or so fast for a woman. Sexual attraction aside, there was something about her that made him want to give up everything to be with her. It was almost like an addiction… a wonderful, mind-altering drug that sent his hormones into overdrive and played Twister with his emotions. Every time he got near her, problems, stress, even monotonous routines fell away like melting chocolate. He wanted to move in and shut the world outside.

But there was that troublesome problem again; he saw things. No doubt. But lately the thought that he might actually be crazy began to beat the hell out of his confidence. Maybe they weren’t real.

Like Thompson said, maybe Keenan needed help. A lot of help.

The only consolation from that thought was that he hadn’t actually cheated on Isabella… kind of. He shook his head, trying to force the glaring contradictions to get a grip on themselves.

Keenan focused on the water swirling down the drain. Was his life doing the same? Did he really want to put this wonderful woman through it all, drag her down with him? That gallant thought fought long and hard against the overpowering desire to be with her.

In the throes of that debate, Keenan made a decision and headed out to the living room.

Isabella was stretching (and very nicely too) to look closely at one of the few of Keenan’s paintings the thieves hadn’t taken. It was a portrait of a little homeless kid that lived in the underground beneath Keenan’s flat in Florence. Big blue eyes looked through black locks of hair like a puppy in a cage.

“His name was Anton.” Keenan crossed to the couch.

Startled, Isabella jumped back and whirled around. “Sorry. It’s magnificent, Kee. I had no idea how talented you were. If you can paint like this, why are you doing layout work?”

Keenan shrugged. “Fine art doesn’t put food on your table or pay the electric bill, unfortunately. You need to be or have a good businessperson to sell art these days. I know about as much about business as I do about raising pigeons.”

Isabella lifted one slim eyebrow and the opposite side of her mouth. “I know about business.”

Keenan appreciated the proposition. It added another check mark on the pro side of his growing list. The con side of the same list only had one item, but it was a damned big one.

Keenan let the silence ride and Isabella changed her tactics.

“Your place is very— how can I say this delicately— minimalist, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, apparently when the crooks were doing their eeny meenies, my house came up a moe.”

Isabella grimaced and gave him a sad frown. “Sorry.”

“Hey…” Keenan plopped down on the soft cushions and Isabella joined him. “Just another day in the sunshine.”

In a graceful gesture, Isabella lifted her hand to his face and stroked it with her thumb. “You poor darling. It’s been a hell of a weekend for you, hasn’t it?”

Knowing he was probably making the biggest mistake of his life, Keenan pulled away from her and scooted a little further to the right. “Isabella…”

“I know,” she said, folding her arms across her chest. “I’m moving way too fast. Occupational hazard. I’m sorry, Kee. I’ll slow it down a little.”

Wondering for an instant why moving too fast would be an occupational hazard, he put that aside and got to the meat of the thing.

“It’s not that.” Keenan turned his knees away and laced his fingers together. “Not to sound too cliché, but it’s me.” The words took on a life of their own then, animated by lack of sleep, jumbled nerves, and stale adrenalin. He didn’t have the heart to look at her. “I like you. I like you a lot. Probably too much. You are the most amazing woman I have ever met in my life. I’m probably one of the biggest suckers of all time for saying this, but…” The air in his lungs went a little sore. “…I have some slight problems. Maybe not so slight.” It was only then that he cinched up his sinews and looked her in the eye. “I need some time to sort things out. It’s going to be one hell of a journey. One I can’t possibly ask you to take with me, feeling about you the way I do.” All of it was coming out so pitiful, he was sure Isabella was going to bolt out the door. Then he said the eight most devastating words in the history of the human existence. “I think we need to just be friends.” He watched Isabella’s face shift under them. “For a while, anyway,” he added quickly. “Until I can get this all worked out.”

Isabella unfolded her arms, placed her hands on her knees with unhurried accuracy, lifted herself off the couch, and threw the right end of her shawl over her left shoulder. Keenan braced himself for her departure.

What he got instead set his emotions reeling.

“I know you’re getting off on being all noble and everything, but I have a few words of wisdom to impart before I go.” She threw her shoulders back and got her hands moving, generations of Italian heritage rearing up on its indignant haunches.

“First of all, I think I should be the one to decide whether I want to journey down any roads with you, you macho son of a bitch.”

Well, he probably deserved that one; it was a little pretentious to think she would want to go anywhere with him.

The pink flush in her cheeks was adding brilliance to her eyes the angrier she got. It was making Keenan very uncomfortable.

“Second of all; where do you get off thinking you are the only one with problems?” With a grand hand gesture, she swept it past all humanity. “We all have problems, buster… all of us. Normal people get through them with help… not on their own!”

“That’s what I was saying…”

“Shut up! I’m not finished.”

Keenan sank into the couch more dazzled by Isabella every second.

She leaned into him and got one sneakered foot up on the couch to get closer. “I like you, too… always have. But I will beat you bloody before I see you succumb to your own life. You want joy, love, freedom, all those wonderful things we humans fight for but usually fail to reach? Then you have to quit feeling so fucking sorry for yourself and kiss me!”

With that, she straddled his lap, slammed her mouth against his, and sucked away thirty-two years of hesitation, self-loathing, doubt, and fear. Time went away…

…and all at once, so did Isabella.

Something yanked Isabella from his lips. When he opened his eyes, she was almost out the door, pulled by a gray-black tendril of smoke. The cloud entity filled every window outside his house and in an instant, Isabella was gone. When he jumped up to follow, everything went black.

Chapter Eleven
Wild Ghost Hunt

When he opened his eyes, Reggie was crouched next to his head, staring directly into his face. Keenan could see the clock hanging on the wall right through him. It read 12:30. Everything in and out of the house was pitch-black.

“You busy?” Reggie asked.

Keenan shut his eyes tight, trying to figure out where he was. It all shot through him in an instant.

He jumped to his feet.

“Where is she?”

“It took her downtown.”

“What? What’s going on, Reggie?” If he could have shook his old friend he would have. He settled for wringing his hands instead.

Reggie was floating crossed legged above the coffee table. “Don’t know, old bean.”

“Damn it!”

Keenan rushed to the open door, but it slammed in his face. When he tried to open it, it wouldn’t budge. He stepped back. It was the first time any of the ghosts had done that and it scared him.

“What the fuck, Reggie?” he screamed.

Reggie nodded to the couch without moving. “Have a seat, my friend. We need to talk.”

Keenan tilted his head toward the door. “You did that?”

Reggie looked at his fingernails and brushed them against his lapel. “Of course.”

Keenan couldn’t keep his bottom lip from trembling. He backed away from the specter and caught himself on the dining room wall.

“What is this?”

He had known Reggie almost as long as he had Constance. The Englishman had been with him for nearly every adventure, had advised him countless times on life, love, and the pursuit of happiness. Reggie had been his best friend when he couldn’t find a human one, had guided him on his choice of jobs, houses, cars, and even girlfriends. In essence, Reggie had seen him through everything.

That thought now made his arms cold and his guts ache. He gaped at the floating spirit.

“Oh, come on, old boot.” Reggie leaned forward. “Just because I don’t use my…abilities, doesn’t mean I don’t have them. Many of us do, you know.”

Keenan maneuvered himself away from the wall, not knowing exactly what to think. It was scaring the shit out of him.

“You said you would do anything for me, remember?” Reggie continued with arrogant nonchalance. “There in the restaurant. I’m here to collect. You owe me, brother.”

“I don’t owe you jack shit!”

“Au contraire, mon frère.”

The glimmer of intensity lighting up Reggie’s ghostly eyes was making Keenan very nervous. He searched the room for a way out.

“Only you can save her.”

Those words tightened the vise suffocating Keenan’s responses. “Isabella?” was all he could manage.

“Of course not. You have to help us.”

Keenan tried to shake the strange words out of his ears and frowned. “What the hell are you talking about? You’re not making any sense. Where is Isabella?”

“Isabella is meaningless.”

“Not to me, asshole!”

“If you want to save one, you have to save the other. Don’t you understand?”

“Hell, no! This is crazy, Reg.”

“More than you could know. It’s all up to you, old boot.”

“Me?” That got everything inside to stop at once. Keenan was having a hard time breathing. “What the fuck can
I
do?”

Reggie chuckled and the front door banged open. “You’d be surprised. Coming?”

Without waiting for a reply, Reggie floated towards the door. For some reason, Keenan followed.

“Where are we going?” he asked, double-checking for his keys.

Reggie put his hands in his pockets and headed out the door. “To church.” Then disappeared into the night.

Chapter Twelve
A Grave Miscalculation

When Keenan was thirteen, the only girl who would even talk to him was Sally Rae Wikowski, his best friend. Partnered a couple years before for a science project that involved a dead cat, a set of scalpels, and balls of steel, the two of them had bonded over thirty-five feet of intestines and bad dead cat jokes.

Keenan’s thirteenth summer was spent with Sally’s family at Diamond Lake where the two of them chatted for hours about God, the universe, and everything, paddled for countless hours over the silky water, and road bikes around the forested shore. Monday of the third week, on one such ride, they decided to get miles off the trundled path. In retrospect, it was probably not one of Keenan’s better choices. Five things happened on that day that changed his life forever.

The first was when they found an old dilapidated cabin and decided to explore it. Rotting timbers barely held up a sloping roof, the fragile walls crisscrossed in ruins, and what they could see through the gaping door was inky. Sally was reluctant to go in, but Keenan bullied her into it, calling her a girl. That did it. She marched into the cabin with determination.