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confused.”
    And in this Dad was right. The only ones confused by the name change were the humans: None of us could get used to the new name, so we started to say “Dog” and shifted to “Doug,” resulting in: “Come here, Daw-ugh.”
    The neighbors had begun to make fun of us, asking, “How’s Daw-ugh?”
    Aw, life in the ’hood.
    Standing around in the kitchen were Stan, my teenage ex-stepson Caleb, and my best friend, Luz. Visitors at the table were not uncommon for the Turner household: Dad liked nothing better than to cook for a big crowd, and anyone passing by was likely to be invited to stay for dinner. The air was redolent with the aroma of oregano and tomato sauce; on tonight’s menu was something Dad liked to call “Turner special” lasagna, which included spinach for my sake—because according to him I’m a “health nut”—but also hamburger, because Dad is a big believer in beef.
    I greeted the gang, petted Dog, poured myself a glass of the cheap red wine already open on the counter, and gave them the basic rundown of my day, including what happened when I showed up at Chantelle’s apartment.
    “Again?”
Dad said, slathering butter and minced garlic onto a huge sourdough boule. “Again with the bodies? What goes on at these client meetings of yours?”
    “It didn’t happen at the client meeting,” I said. “It was afterward. And there’s absolutely no connection to Crosswinds. Probably.”
    “Wow, are you talking
Chantelle
Chantelle?” asked Luz. Luz was dark-haired and slender—but she ate like a linebacker, thereby ensuring her status as my dad’s favorite. Though she worked like a fiend and was a well-published professor of social work at San Francisco State, she still managed to maintain a finger on the pulse of popular culture.
    “Um, I guess so,” I said. “She’s a psychic . . . ? Or,
was
a psychic, on Nob Hill?”
    “You’ve never heard of her?” asked Luz. “Chantelle’s pretty well-known.”
    “Yeah,” Caleb chimed in. Caleb had been only five years old when I married his father, and the only thing Iregretted about the divorce was losing my status as his stepmother. Happily, Caleb was as loath to give me up, and we had stayed close. He was now almost a man, working on college applications and getting ready to graduate from high school. I was still stuck on how cute he used to be in his Batman underwear.
    “Chantelle does these huge shows, like seminars?” Caleb continued. “People pay serious money to hear her talk, and hope she’ll pick them out of the crowd and do a reading. There are billboards and commercials. Even
you
must have noticed them.”
    “I don’t know anything,” I said, unconsciously parroting my dad:
nobody tells me anything around here
. San Francisco—and the surrounding Bay Area—was the kind of place that hosted music/arts/food/wine festivals darn near every weekend, and Oakland had started a First Friday art walk that was hugely popular, with local restaurants offering canapés and happy hour drinks. There were museums galore: the DeYoung and the MOMA and the Legion of Honor. Cliffs enticed adventurous folks to hang glide, the waves were full of surfers, redwood glens beckoned hikers.
    I took advantage of none of these things. All I did was my job. And talk to ghosts. One of these days I was really going to have to get a life.
    Speaking of which, at that moment Graham Donovan walked in the door.
    Graham was an attractive man, well muscled from years of working on construction sites. He now made his living as a green building consultant to rich people, and had recently become semifamous in the field due to his innovations at the Wakefield Retreat Center in Marin.
    Over the past several months Graham and I had embarked on a full-fledged romance. It had gotten to the pointwhere even I—who may have been a tad relationship-phobic after my marriage fell apart—had started referring to him as “my boyfriend” in public. Sure, we