“That’s weird.” On Saturday, Patrea knocked on the door of Merry Eats for the third time, then cupped her eyes with her palms, pressing the sides of her hands against the window to block out enough light for a decent look through the textured glass. “I don’t smell anything cooking, and I don’t hear anyone moving around in there. She wouldn’t flake on me again, right?”

She tried the door, and it opened. We exchanged a look before stepping over the threshold. The familiar sinking sensation in my stomach and the dead silence boded ill.

Patrea beat me to the door, took one look, and backed away. I already had my phone in my hand when I walked past her. “We’re too late,” I said, needlessly. Face gray, eyes wide and staring, her head lying in a pool of vomit—that Summer was gone was painfully obvious. That her death hadn’t been an easy one, even more so. A wave of sympathy overwhelmed me—what a sad waste of a life.

Carol Ann Wilmette answered the emergency call. Why was she always on duty whenever I found a dead body? And yes, I am aware that the larger question should have been, why was I always finding corpses, but at this point, I’d decided to stop asking that one.

“911, what’s your emergency?” Carol Ann asked again.

“Uh, it’s Everly Dupree.”

“Who’s dead now?”

“Why do you assume someone’s dead every time I call?”

I heard the pop of a gum bubble. “So someone’s not dead? What’s your emergency, then?”

I sighed. “No, someone is.”

There was an expectant silence on the other end of the phone, then the bubble sound again. “You gonna tell me, or do I have to guess?”

“It’s Summer Merryfield. You’d better send Ernie over to the café right away.”

“You want me to stay on the line until he gets there?”

Carol must have had some new training because she’d never asked me that before. “No, I know the drill. Don’t touch anything, don’t move the body. Just send him over.” I tapped the end button and put my phone away.

Patrea lurched toward the small table near the door, put her hands down on it to steady herself, then pulled out one of the chairs and sat. She looked at me much the same as I suspected Carol would have if I’d walked into the station. I don’t mind saying it hurt a little.

“I didn’t do anything,” I defended myself. “Don’t look at me like I’m the harbinger of death. It’s not my fault if I keep ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“How awful is it that my first thought was there goes the food for my wedding?” Patrea pressed two fingers in the spot between her eyebrows. “I’m a selfish, horrible person.”

Taking care to stay back from the body, I reassured Patrea while trying to take in as many details as possible just in case Summer’s death hadn’t been accidental.

“Of course, you’re not. We all have those weird reflex thoughts when confronted with death. It’s only natural.” I skirted the steel-topped table where Summer had been working, made my way to the stove, grabbed a set of tongs from a nearby container, and used them to lift the lid of a pot and look at its cold, congealed contents.

“You’re not supposed to touch anything, remember?” Patrea’s voice sounded tired.

“I didn’t touch the stove.” My voice sounded defensive.

“You touched the tongs.”

So I had, I thought, dismayed. And since it was too late to go back and undo what I had done, I used them to open one of the oven doors letting out a waft of the scent of something sweet. The smell came from a baking sheet containing a single layer of pale, green stalks sliced at an angle that made them look like a bit like pasta and coated in sugar that looked to have gone damp and sticky.

The second oven held a pan of herb-studded chicken that looked about half cooked. I nudged the door shut with my knee. Both ovens had been turned off before the food had time to finish cooking.

“I’ll fess up when Ernie gets here. And you touched the chair and the table.” I didn’t tack on a so there, but my tone did.

I circled the body looking for signs of foul play but saw nothing obvious. Summer lay on her side, her body curved inward. I couldn’t see or smell blood, but that could have been masked by the smell of vomit.

“Looks like Summer ate something that disagreed with her.”

With no telltale chill in the air, no chatty ghost hovering, either, I assumed we hadn’t disturbed an active crime scene and said as much to Patrea.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Ernie hadn’t made any noise as he entered the café, probably because we’d left the door open behind us. “What did you touch, Everly?”

As succinctly as possible, I told Ernie what I’d done. As he knelt to examine Summer’s body, I explained how we’d come to find her lying on her kitchen floor. Patrea pitched in to back me up. The story didn’t take long to tell, and by the time it was done, the ambulance had pulled up out front.

“That’s it,” I said. “I met the woman for the first time yesterday, and now she’s gone. It’s sad, really.” I stepped back to let the medics bring in their equipment, recognizing the first man through the door.

Vinnie De Luca was here in both his current positions. I suspected he’d been elected to be the county’s coroner because he had at least some medical training, and no one else wanted the job. Maybe if we lived in a larger area, the poor man could have given up his paramedic shifts and spent his days just wearing one hat…or would that be one lab coat? I’d heard through the grapevine—in the form of Martha Tipton—that Vinnie had applied to work for the state medical examiner in some capacity. According to Martha, Vinnie had aspirations—she’d wrinkled her nose over the word—that involved moving to Augusta.

“Poison,” he said after a quick examination. “Would be my first guess. Accidental, most likely. We’ll have to send her to Augusta for an autopsy. The lab techs will have to run a tox screen to be certain.” He stood and scanned the items scattered across the tall, steel-topped table where Summer had been slicing and dicing ingredients. “It’ll take time for the results to come back.”

“Any way you can get the ME to put a rush on it?” Ernie said.

“I’ve got some pull, but probably not enough to move us to the front of the line for what’s clearly death by misadventure. I’ll do what I can, though.”

While he talked, Vinnie picked up samples of the chopped vegetables, dropped them in small plastic bags, and set them aside. He did the same with the contents of a lidless, plastic container that looked like the one we’d seen with the sorbet. Next, he went over to the stockpot, sniffed the contents, then took a small sample of that and another from the contents of the tray in the oven.

Part of Vinnie’s job was to look at the evidence and decide the cause of death, but that pronouncement generally came after the autopsy. If Ernie suspected homicide, he could call the state police and a tech team to investigate the crime. Since he was on the spot, and because he leaned toward an accidental poisoning, it looked like Vinnie had decided to take on the job all by himself.

“Shouldn’t you call in someone more official to do that?”

Ernie glared at me when I asked, but Vinnie answered before Ernie had a chance to tell me to mind my business.

“I’m this close,” he held up his thumb and index finger with less than half an inch between them, “to finishing my degree in forensics. I think I’m capable of collecting evidence,” he said in a how-dare-you-question-me tone.

A tall, square trash can lined with a black plastic bag sat at the end of Summer’s worktable. As Vinnie passed by the can, he glanced down, then stopped short, and looked harder. Whatever he saw there sent his eyebrows upward and had him reaching into one of his pockets for a pair of rubber gloves, which he put on with practiced movements.

“Find something?” Ernie’s shoes squeaked on the tile as he walked over to take a look for himself. He reached down, possibly to tilt the can toward better lighting, but Vinnie swatted Ernie’s hand away before it made contact.

“Don’t touch that with your bare hands, you fool.”

Ernie’s face flushed a dull red at being called a fool, but he kept his cool. Another reason why I maintain Ernie is a good cop.

“That’s Cicuta maculata. Commonly known as water hemlock. Every part of the plant is poisonous. We’ll need to send a sample to the lab to be certain, but this is gonna be your cause of death. I’ll stake my reputation and stand you a week’s pay if I’m wrong.”

Too cool to flinch, Ernie slowly and deliberately shoved his hand in his pocket, rocked up on his toes to get a look at the offending plant matter. “You sure? Looks like Queen Anne’s lace from here.”

“I’m sure. The diameter of the stems is a dead giveaway.”

Vinnie’s poor choice of term earned him a sidelong look from Patrea, but by unspoken agreement, we’d stayed quiet during the past few minutes. Call me nosy, but I didn’t want Ernie kicking us out until we’d heard everything there was to hear.

“Something like this happens every year or two in Maine. You get your amateur botanists who insist on foraging for mushrooms and other edibles, and they’re never careful enough. Mistake destroying angel mushrooms for white caps or hemlock for angelica, and instead of a nicely seasoned meal, they’re serving up a plateful of death.”

I heard Patrea suck in a breath at about the same time I realized that, had Summer not taste-tested her own dish, we’d have been tucking into that plateful of death right about now. All the blood drained out of my face leaving it, I was sure, paler than it naturally was, which was saying something. Intense emotions washed over me—fear, relief, sorrow—leaving a chill in their wake. I shivered. Beside me, Patrea did the same and clasped her hands together to stop them from shaking.

It wasn’t my first brush with death, but this time things were different. The danger hadn’t come at me from the front in an all-out assault but sneaked up from behind. This time, I didn’t have any sort of adrenaline rush to carry me along, so the impact hit harder.

“I suppose she’s better off this way.” Ernie watched the paramedics put on extra protection before attending to the body. “If she’d have opened up for lunch, no telling how many people she’d have killed.”

“The hell I would.” Summer’s voice came from behind me and turned my veins to icy streams. I closed my eyes slowly and hoped that when I opened them again, it would be to wake up from a bad dream.

A doomed wish, of course.

“Condescending jackass. Who does he think he is?” Summer ranted. “My grandmother taught me more than he’ll ever know about wild edibles. I’m not some idiot wandering the woods with a guidebook and no clue. I have eyes, don’t I? And a nose. And more than half a brain, too.”

With every syllable she uttered, Summer’s ear-popping energy rose higher. I felt the prickle across the back of my neck, the buzzing in my throat, the tiny hairs standing up along my arms. Surrounded by people who clearly weren’t able to sense the disturbance—though I did see a shudder run through Patrea’s body, and she had once mentioned feeling a presence in my house—I couldn’t turn and tell Summer to shut up. I dearly wanted to, mind you, but not as much as I wanted to avoid giving Ernie one more reason to look at me funny. So, I kept quiet and let her run down.

“I’ve been cooking with angelica for years. I’ve never poisoned anyone before, and I certainly wouldn’t be stupid enough to cut up hemlock with my bare hands. Do you see any gloves laying around here, genius?”

Summer waved her finger under the ME’s nose. “Do you? And look at my hands. Are there contact burns on them? No, there are not, and there would be if I were stupid enough to handle hemlock without protection. How did you get that job anyway?”

Vinnie didn’t even flinch when she put her face close to his. I did, though. Maybe other people can’t feel anything, but being that close to a ghost isn’t a pleasant experience for me. The nearest real-life experience I can compare it to is walking barefooted through ankle-deep muck. Touching a ghost is like that, only over my entire body, and the muck is icy cold besides.

The thing that finally shut Summer up was the sound of the zipper closing on the body bag. Maybe she hadn’t fully realized she was dead until then, but she quit talking right in the middle of a sentence and seemed to become more aware of her surroundings. I watched from the sidelines hoping she wouldn’t notice I could see her.

Would I feel lousy if she didn’t know there was someone in the living world who might help her find justice should there come the need? Probably, but I figured I could live with the guilt if it meant her not following me home and bugging me until I did.

Mooselick River is the kind of small town where people will follow an ambulance or fire truck out of morbid curiosity. Plus, Carol Ann Wilmette has a big mouth. Whether she called Summer’s ex, or some other lookie-loo did, the result was the same because he picked that moment to show up and shove his way past the pair of deputies Ernie had called in to help.

“Summer?” Jack Merryfield stumbled to a halt at the sight of the black body bag being loaded onto a gurney for transport. “It can’t be.” Frantic, he searched the room for someone who might tell him what had happened. When his gaze fell on Patrea and me, he frowned, then latched onto Ernie as the best possible source of information.

“What happened? I heard…tell me that’s not Summer.” He moved closer to the gurney, and I think he would have gone for the zipper if Ernie hadn’t stepped in front of him.

“Don’t!” Given in a gentler tone than I’d have expected, the command still stopped Jack from following through on his quest for assurance that Summer was dead. “Let Vinnie take care of her now.”

“I don’t understand.” Breathing heavy, Jack grabbed the front of Ernie’s shirt. “Tell me what happened.”

For an ex-husband, the man took distraught to a new level. Watching him melt down put my response to the situation into perspective, calmed my anxiety a notch or two. Patrea’s, too, I guessed when I caught her expression.

And then, I made my fatal mistake. I looked over at Summer to see what she might be thinking, and she caught me. Her eyes widened as she hovered nearby.

“You can see me.”

Too late, I tried to let my gaze pass over her as if she weren’t there, but it wasn’t enough.

“You can see me.” She said again with such relief I couldn’t help myself. I looked at her deliberately, nodded my head slowly, then tried to communicate using subtle expressions that we couldn’t talk with everyone around.

I wasn’t looking forward to the moment when she got me alone because, in my experience, her presence could only mean one thing: murder.