The goose bumps fade, and I breathe in the familiar smells of the house. The ghosts allow me to pass.

For now.

Three

Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin

Detective Colin Pearson looked down at his buzzing cell phone and saw the three letters on the screen he’d hoped against.

Mom

By the time he decided to answer, the call was already off to voicemail. He checked the time. Nearly 9:00 p.m.

Probably four or five drinks in by now, Colin thought. Which meant her lips were loose and ready to spew out whatever came to her mind.

“Jackie again?” Colin’s wife, Meg, rested an open book on her five-month-pregnant belly.

“Yup.”

Colin would listen to his mother’s voicemail, but he needed a minute. A minute, and a couple more sips of his beer.

Colin and Meg were snug on their living-room sectional, perpendicular to each other, her head on his lap. Before bedtime, they’d taken to the habit of retreating here, each with a book, reading for at least thirty minutes. It was their time to decompress, air out the day, be together silently. It had become Colin’s favorite time.

Until his mother called. And she always called.

“Okay.” He sighed, then thumbed the phone to the voicemail app. One new message. Fourteen seconds. He pressed Play and held the phone to his ear, not wanting Meg to hear. He wasn’t hiding anything from his wife, but he knew how agitated Meg became when his mom set to drinking. Jackie Pearson was a lovely person until the evening, at which time she turned into someone else entirely. Sometimes Colin wondered if it was the other way around, and his mom’s real acting chops were on display during daylight hours.

“You probably don’t remember Linda Grassey,” the scratchy voice on the phone said. “But she was a real slut. They lived just down the street, and she always flirted with your father. Fawned about him like a goddamn saloon whore, getting him to help her out whenever she could. Oh, you’re such a good neighbor. And so strong! Bitch died twelve years ago.”

Saloon whore?

His mom’s foul-mouthed missives were a beacon, summoning Colin to come rescue her from her own mind.

She’d been on a steady decline since Colin’s father died two years earlier. Her doctor labeled it anxiety, prescribing meds she refused to take, just as she refused so many other things. Refused to move out of the family home and into an assisted-living facility. Refused to stop driving until the state wouldn’t renew her license. Refused to stop drinking, even though it was probably the thing that’d end up killing her. She was only seventy-five but whatever life remained was eating her from the inside out.

Colin and Meg had been happy in Madison, but he knew he needed to return to the town he grew up in and look after his mom, because no one else was going to. He had no siblings, no father, no relatives anywhere near Wisconsin.