Page 26 of Cadaver Lab: Mind Over Murder

“So see? We’re good. We got it, Nat. You can go back to work and stop stressing so much. The students have become the master.”

“Or the inmates are running the asylum,” she mumbled as she watched the electric bike brigade speed by at at least a solid ten miles an hour.

But she’d take all the help she could get.

Whatever it took to save Harper.

Chapter Eleven

“He’s back!” Gabe blurted that less than specific information as he skidded to a stop right before he would have run through the customer Natalie had just handed a bag containing two bottles of wine.

Poker face in place, there was no way she was going to chase away any customers by letting them know they’d almost been run through by a spirit, she smiled and said, “Thank you. Enjoy it.”

Only when the customer was through the exit door did she turn to Gabe. “Now, who’s back?”

“Doug!”

That got Natalie’s attention. “His body?” she asked, looking for clarification.

“And his ghost.”

Her eyes widened. So Doug hadn’t moved on to… wherever ghosts went when they didn’t stick around.

That was not a surprise at all. Not that she didn’t think he deserved to go to heaven or wherever, but the man in life had never been one to let anything go.

Of course Doug wasn’t going to leave this earthly plain while he had unfinished business. And unfortunately, Natalie suspected that unfinished business involved Harper.

“His body is at the funeral home, but he’s not. Rick saw him going into the community center.”

The community center. The site of the Rotary meeting and the now infamous argument with Harper.

“Returning to the scene of the crime,” Natalie mumbled, more to herself than to Gabe.

“The crime? Don’t let Harper hear you say that,” Gabe warned. “Besides, there was no crime. At least not there at the community center. Doug died at home. Hours later. His wife found him in the morning dead on the floor in front of the open refrigerator door.”

“He died getting a midnight snack? Then how the fu--” She stopped herself and bit back the cuss. Being around Liam had begun to give her a potty mouth. “…how the heck can his widow blame Harper?”

“I know. The idiocy and injustice of it is all the talk in the cemetery,” he agreed.

It was good to know the spirit community was on Harper’s side. But that wouldn’t help her in court. Perhaps Natalie could though, if she could point the prosecutor in a different direction.

“I need to talk to him.”

“To Doug?” Gabe looked inexplicably down on her idea.

“Yes. Why not? If I’m going to have this…ability then I should at least try to use it to help my friend.”

“I understand why you want to question him. I just don’t think he’ll want to talk to you.”

“Why not?” Natalie hadn’t written a book about Doug. She wasn’t on his personal black list.

In fact, she’d done nothing to the man but listen politely and then thank him for coming into the shop even after he complained her wine prices were too high and walked out without making a purchase.

“For one, you’re friends with Harper. But more than that. It seems he’s not talking to anyone. Rick tried. Doug walked right past him,” Gabe said.

Natalie gasped. “Do you think he can’t communicate? Like those…what are they called…residual hauntings? Where the spirit just keeps repeating their last day. Maybe he’ll just continue going to the Rotary meeting, over and over again, for eternity. Like a spiritual echo.”

Gabe shook his head.