Rocks & Gravel (Peri Jean Mace Ghost Thrillers Book 3) Read Online Free Page A

mouth turned down. “Too bad he died so young.”
    Yep, too fucking bad. I kept the comment to myself and walked around to the driver’s side door and waited for Amanda to dismiss me.
    “Look…I hate it when people tell me what I ought to do, but right now I’m about to do it. Try to make friends with your mom. My situation growing up was a lot like yours. My mom left me for my grandmother to raise while she went off and got remarried.”
    I would rather bathe in hot garbage than open the door for Barbie to crucify my emotions.
    “Did you make up with her?” I couldn’t help asking. Amanda never, ever discussed her past, and it remained a mystery because she didn’t grow up here.
    “Nope. Last time I spoke to her, when I was about nine, I told her I hated her guts.” Amanda took a breath and let it out. “She died two years later in a house fire. She, her new husband, and my half-brother.”
    Would I regret it if Barbie turned up dead? I didn’t think so. I barely knew her, and what I did know was negative. But I could never be sure until the situation presented itself.
    “Sometimes we forgive people, not to give them a pass for whatever wrong they committed against us or to get them to do a certain thing, but to be kinder to ourselves.” Amanda watched my face and then nodded. She patted my arm. “Think about it. Okay?”
    “I will.” I opened the door climbed into the car. “I gotta get on this if I want to finish. Thanks for the talk.”
    “You bet.” A car pulled into the parking lot, and Amanda walked over and talked to the person, following them inside her business, still chattering.
    I started the car, a little fear tingling at me. I tried to remember why I’d been scared again, hoping it would come with Barbie gone, but I couldn’t access it. It was gone, as though it had never been. Just as well. If it had to do with the Mace Treasure, I was better off forgetting it. I put the car in gear, and my cellphone rang. I checked the caller ID. Eddie Kennedy. Uh oh. “Hi, Eddie.”
    “What do you mean telling Hannah you can’t help her? Don’t you know what this is about?”
    “Something I don’t want any part in.” I cringed as I said the words. Back talking Eddie felt wrong no matter how old I got.
    “I want you to meet me at Hooty’s.”
    “I have a job. I’ll spend the day at the laundromat doing Amanda’s towels from her beauty shop.”
    Eddie slapped his hand over the phone, nearly deafening me, and said a few things. I heard Hooty Bruce’s deep voice answer.
    “Hooty says bring the towels here. And, Peri Jean? Darlin’?”
    “Yes?”
    “Move your skinny ass.”

2
    H ooty’s graceful two-story house on Spence Street usually made me smile. I helped paint the gingerbread trim white and the house its lovely wisteria color when Hooty and his wife Esther restored the 1920s home. Today, the sight of Eddie’s beat up old truck in the house’s driveway settled a heavy weight onto my shoulders. Much as I didn’t want to argue my duty to help find Hooty’s lost family heirlooms, I knew the only way to extract myself from the drama was to listen to what they had to say.
    Gaslight City residents called Hooty’s neighborhood Bed and Breakfast Row. True to its namesake, and despite the hellish late summer weather, tourists determined to get in one last vacation before school started swarmed the street. I had to drive five miles per hour to keep from hitting any of the nitwits wandering around holding up their cameras and cellphones, totally unaware of the world around them. I caught a mini SUV vacating a parking spot right in front of Hooty’s house and slipped into the space, slick as mayonnaise.
    “Hey!” A guy wearing a golf visor leaned out of his huge diesel truck. “We’ve been waiting for that spot for five minutes.”
    “There’s a public lot a block over.” I locked my car and started up Hooty’s stone walkway.
    “Ma’am? Ma’am?”
    Groaning, I turned back to them.