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Which, for some reason made me think about the girl from last night.
I hoped she was doing okay and had gotten safely to wherever she’d been going. Hell, I hoped she finally remembered her own name.
“Hey.” Hudson swung out a hand and slapped me in the knee to get my attention. “What’s up? You look as if you’ve got something else on your mind.”
“Oh, do I?” I asked, lifting my eyebrows curiously. “Is there a blinking number above my head that says Foster now has thirty-five different things on his mind?”
“It was thirty-six actually. So come on, spill it.”
I exhaled roughly and shook my head. “Not now,” I told him. “I just had an…interesting night is all. But with everything else going on, it doesn’t seem to signify at the moment.”
“Nonsense!” Hudson claimed, while across the room, Keene threw Alec’s hand off his shoulder and surged to his feet.
“All I had to do was go down on her for thirty secondslonger,” he growled, “and she’d still be alive right now.”
As he stormed from the room and down the steps to the lower portion of the house with Alec hot on his heels, Hudson turned back to me, completely unaffected.
“So lay it on me,” he demanded.
I laughed softly and shook my head. “Alright. So right after Park called me last night, ordering me to stick around Javonte’s house because he was sending something my way, I took a walk along the beach by myself while I waited.”
Fifteen minutes later, I sat back against the couch cushions with a heavy exhale, claiming, “And I have no idea where she is now.”
“Let me get this straight,” Hudson said. “You came across some drunk chick…on a roof—which she magically got down from without a ladder—and she just poofed into thin air this morning before ever giving you her name.” Chuckling, he shook his head. “Are you sureyouweren’t the one who had something slipped in his drink?”
“I…” I frowned at that thought because it actually made sense. But then I shook my head. “No…no. I had beer in my cup, and I specifically remembernotdrinking any of it.”
“That’s right…” With a knowing nod, Hudson glanced at Faith. “He’s so weird. He hates drinking at parties.”
I squinted at him in surprise. “How did you know that?”
“What?” He shrugged. “I cook, and I know things.”
“Maybe the girl was a ghost,” Faith spoke up, making both Hudson and me blink at her in surprise.
“Except I can’t see ghosts,” I said slowly.
Faith and Oaklynn were the only people I knew who could actually perceive the dead.
“Are you sure?” she countered with zealous interest. “Because Iknowyou saw Hudson when he died. You looked right at where his ghost was standing, and you said his name.”
My shoulders collapsed in fatigue because this wasn’t the first time she’d asked me about that day. But I guess when Hudson had been hit by that car, he’d apparently been dead for a couple of minutes, and both Oaklynn and Faith had been able to talk to him and see his ghost.
I’d been too busy trying to give him CPR to worry about that, but therehadbeen a moment right before the first responders had shown up that I might’ve seen him standing a dozen feet away from the body I was pumping on.
Except, to Faith, I shook my head. “I’m telling you; I don’t know what I saw. I was delirious with fear and exhaustion from all the chest compressions. Maybe I saw him standing next to you for a split second; maybe I didn’t.”
I actually hated to think about it because it reminded me too much of the day Hayes had died.
When I was younger, I had sworn that he’d come back to help me build my sandcastle after he’d left with my mom. But when I’d tried to tell anyone that, my mom promised me it wasn’t possible. By that point, she’d already spotted him out in the surf going under the water. They’d convinced me I’d been incoherent with grief and had made the whole thing up in my mind to cope with his death.
The mind was a funny thing and liked to play tricks on people. That’s why I was sure I hadn’t actually seen Hudson’s ghost either.
“But IknowI never once saw Damien’s sister for the ten whole years that she haunted her apartment,” I added.
Faith bit her lip. “Thatisstrange,” she had to admit.
“Did you ever touch this girl last night to make sure she was a true, corporeal being?” Hudson asked.
