Tempt the Stars

now. The old doll she dragged around by the hair had taken on a pinkish hue, and her dress, part of which disappeared through the floor, was now a pale shade of blue. I let out a breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding.
    The ghost’s name was Laura and we’d played together as kids, back when I called this place home. Only I’d grown up and she . . . well, she never would.
    It’s one of the hard facts about ghosts: when you die, you pretty much stay the same way you were in life. Meaning if you’re a one-armed man, you’re going to be a one-armed ghost; it’s just the way the energy manifests. Mostly, they learn to roll with it
Beetlejuice
style, throwing severed heads at unsuspecting tourists—the ghostly term for cemetery visitors—or trailing disemboweled intestines after them like a gory train.
    Humor tends to take on a macabre bent after death.
    But the downside is that, if you die at five years old, you stay five. You might learn new things, acquire new skills, even gain wisdom of a sort. But it’s a kid’s wisdom. You don’t suddenly start thinking like an adult.
    Even after more than a hundred years you don’t.
    That was a problem, since I needed information, and I needed it badly. Specifically, I needed to talk to my mother, who had once been Tony’s guest, too. But who had died when I was younger than Laura appeared now.
    Of course, visiting a dead woman should be easy enough for a time traveler, right? Only I never get easy. I’d spent the better part of a week looking for her, and come up with zilch. But I
had
to find her; a friend was in trouble and Mom was the only one who might know how to help him. And there was a damned good chance that Laura knew where she was.
    But if I remembered right, getting her cooperation was likely to be tricky.
    “Hey, Laura—” I began casually.
    “What’s he doing?” she asked, dragging her dolly over into the wedge of light coming out of the office.
    “Nothing. It’s fine,” I whispered, trying to keep her out here, where we could talk in private.
    So, of course, she went right on in.
    I closed my eyes.
    I’ve been able to talk to ghosts for as long as I can remember, far longer than I’ve been doing my current crazy job. But it’s like with people—they talk to you only when they want to. Of course, they usually want to, since most ghosts are confined to a single place and don’t get many visitors. Well, many who notice them, anyway. So if Jonas hadn’t been here, I’d probably have been getting my ear chewed off.
    But he was, and of the two of us, he was clearly the more interesting.
    I accepted the inevitable and followed her inside.
    Jonas must have done some dismantling, because nothing shot, stabbed, or grabbed me as I passed through the door. He looked pretty okay, too, if you ignored his habit of picking up random things and sticking them in the billowing mass he called hair. Or, in this case, on.
    “He looks like Honeybun.” Laura giggled. She was talking about my childhood pet rabbit, the one we’d basically shared since animals can sense ghosts a lot better than people can.
    And she wasn’t wrong.
    “Did you find something?” Jonas asked, looking up from sorting through the mess on the desk. And sporting two outrageous tufts of white hair escaping from either side of an old fedora. It didn’t match his outfit, and he hadn’t had it on when we arrived. But I’d already discovered that trying to figure out Jonas only made my head hurt, so I mostly didn’t.
    “He’s just fluffy.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Uh, no. Not yet,” I told him, trying to surreptitiously shoo Laura back out the door.
    She crawled under the desk instead.
    “Done already?” Jonas asked, looking at me over the tops of his glasses as I crawled after her.
    “Uh, yeah.”
    “Are you certain you didn’t overlook anything? It’s quite small, you know.”
    “Pretty sure.”
    What he wanted wasn’t in the outer office. I knew that because I knew where it was, but I needed him to take a few minutes to find it. Minutes that I could use to pry some secrets out of Laura. But Jonas wasn’t looking like he felt like giving them to me. For once, Jonas was looking focused.
    “This is no time for games, Cassie,” he said sternly, as Laura crawled through his legs.
    “Couldn’t agree more,” I muttered, grabbing for her.
    Only to have her go abruptly less substantial, and my hands to pass right on through. And grab Jonas’ calf instead.