A Date With the Other Side Read Free Page A

saw diddly-squat. Sometimes she thought it was all a lot of bunk, and other times she was damn jealous. What was the matter with her that no ghost wanted to show her a spectral face and plead for justice?
    Except for an hour ago. She’d heard that doorknob jiggle. Of course, that had to have been Brady, acting like an ass, as he was known to do.
    Gran speared a melon. “Then how did you see the Old Colonel if you don’t see ghosts?”
    “I don’t know who the Old Colonel is, but the guy I saw was not old, most certainly not dead, and he was sleeping in the blue bedroom.”
    Naked.
    Gran looked surprised. “You mean I never told you about the Old Colonel? He sunbathes in the nude. You’ll have to add that to the tour, it’s so eccentric. And folks just love eccentric.”
    Shelby didn’t give a rat’s hooey about the Old Colonel, though she hoped if a ghost did ever decide to show himself to her, it wouldn’t be to flash her.
    “I’m talking about Boston Macnamara. You know, you might have told me you let the house before I walked in on the man stark naked.” Not that she regretted it, but Gran didn’t need to know that.
    Gran crossed her little white sneakers at the ankle. “Lucky you.”
    Shelby laughed. “Don’t let Mom hear you say stuff like that, she’ll flip out.”
    Gran snorted. “Your mother’s had about twelve boyfriends since your father left. She has no business going prude on me. And I really do think you’re a lucky thing to have seen that man without any clothes on.”
    “Gran!” Shelby laughed. “Behave.”
    Gran just smiled, her hand coming up to pat her straw-colored hair, trimmed short and framing her face in a cute modern cut. Shelby thought about her own hair, all eight hundred pounds of it, parked on top of her head like a brown octopus. Maybe she ought to think about getting a trim, if her own gran looked better than she did.
    “What? I saw the man, and he’s quite a hottie. I’m so old, I’ve earned the right to say whatever I’m thinking.” Then Gran turned sly. “What did you think of him, Shelby?”
    That he was a prime hunk of man and that she’d wished she’d been wrapped around him instead of that bedspread. Shelby crossed her legs. Lord, celibacy was catching up with her. “I didn’t think anything except that he was naked and in your house.”
    “He’s single, you know.” Gran dipped her fork back into the inadequate fruit salad and stabbed a grape. “Works for Samson, of course. Probably rich too. Drives a fancy car and didn’t blink when I told him rent was fifteen hundred dollars a month.”
    Shelby stopped inspecting the dry scaly patch on her left knee and looked at her grandmother in amazement. “You charged him fifteen hundred dollars? That’s almost double what he should be paying. You normally only charge two hundred per bedroom.”
    “And there’s five bedrooms,” Gran said like that explained everything.
    “So that’s only a thousand. Where does the other five hundred come in?”
    “He’s paying extra for privacy. He’s got the whole house to himself.” Gran waved her hand in the air and didn’t look the least bit ashamed of fleecing a city boy. “He gave me three months’ rent up front.”
    Shelby tried to imagine possessing forty-five hundred dollars all at one time and gave it up. “Dang. So what does he do at Samson? Is he here for good?”
    Samson Plastics had been in Cuttersville for nearly ten years, and had saved the town from extinction. About half of Cuttersville’s fifteen hundred adults worked in the plant, which manufactured two-liter bottles and other plastic items. While it had brought employment, it had also brought outsiders, who didn’t always respect that Cuttersville had its own way of doing things.
    Boston Macnamara was an outsider if ever she saw one. You only had to listen to him talk for five seconds to figure that out.
    Gran shrugged. “I don’t know what he does, I just know he must be important. His