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“Second, another ghost-talker, a rare and endangered species according to you, just happens to show up at the same place at the same time as you?” she asked.
    “Well, yeah,” I said. “It’s possible.”
    “Please. Do you have any idea of what the odds would be on that?”
    “No, but it doesn’t matter,” I argued. “She would have had no way of knowing that I would be there tonight.”
    “Uh-huh.” She sounded less than convinced. “Because no one knew about the demolition tomorrow and Mrs. Ruiz’s issues .”
    Apparently, none of us had known the extent of Mrs. Ruiz’s issues, but her haunting the place was fairly common knowledge, and the impending demolition—as well as the Decatur Historical Society’s doomed efforts to prevent it—had been in the local news for weeks.
    I shook my head. “This is crazy. You think this is some kind of elaborate scheme? To accomplish what?”
    She threw up her hands. “How should I know? Ask your new girlfriend.”
    I frowned at her. “She’s not my—”
    “Anyway, it doesn’t matter now whether she meant to find you or not,” Alona continued.
    “It doesn’t,” I repeated.
    “No. The fact is, she did find you. And if there are so few ghost-talkers out there, do you think they’re going to let an opportunity like this pass them by?”
    “Who?” I was beginning to wonder if one of us had experienced brain damage tonight. Honestly, I wasn’t sure which of us was the more likely candidate at this point.
    “The people she’s working for,” Alona said with exasperation. “Weren’t you listening? ‘This was my third chance at a containment.’That’s what she said.”
    I gaped at her. “We don’t even know what that means.”
    “I can tell you it means someone else is judging her based on whatever she did or did not do with Mrs. Ruiz tonight. And I don’t think it’s an international committee of former figure skaters.”
    She folded her arms over her chest and waited for me to respond.
    “Do you think this hard about everything?” I asked, not even sure what else to say. It was distinctly possible Alona had missed her calling in life as a conspiracy theorist. Albeit a better-dressed one than most.
    She leaned closer to me. “Homecoming Queen, three years in a row,” she said. “Do you think that happened by accident?”
    She did have a good sense of people, I would give her that. Most of the time, she just didn’t give a shit unless it affected her. Which, in this case, I suppose it did, indirectly.
    I waved her words away. “Okay, fine. If she shows up again, I’ll make sure to ask her all the dark and mysterious motives behind her appearance.”
    “Good.” She nodded, satisfied.
    Jesus.
    She turned around and began putting all the first-aid stuff back in the box. “Did you like her?”
    I tilted my head, not sure if I was hearing her correctly. “I’m sorry?”
    “I said, did you like her?” She kept her back to me. She seemed to be rearranging the contents of the first-aid kit by alphabetical order or size or something. It should not have taken that long to put back tweezers, bandages, and antibacterial cream.
    “I…” My God, there was no good way to answer this. “Yes” was obviously out. She’d detect “No” as a lie immediately. And “I don’t know her well enough to know if I like her” was just weak. “I was curious,” I said finally.
    “How curious?”
    Damn, another impossible-to-answer question. I was starting to sweat. “I don’t understand what you’re—”
    “She didn’t seem to have a spirit guide. At least not right now.” Alona shrugged. “And if she ever had one, he probably deliberately made himself disappear just to get away from her,” she added, her mouth tight.
    Okay…there was a question in here somewhere. I could feel it coming. I had no idea from which direction, though. Leave it to Alona, the most direct person I knew, to broach whatever this was in the most oblique manner