Jack and I spent the rest of the day resting, enjoying our time in the hot tub before we went up to eat. Neither of us really had much to do while we were out of our apartment, so I spent my time picking the lock that came with my kit and then pushing it closed again. It became so fast and natural that it was almost like a fidget toy for me.

I decided to go into work again starting Monday, and I told my boss as much. He was relieved to say the least, but he seemed much less thrilled that I would miss a day near the end of the month and one undisclosed day soon for a funeral. I talked to the Dunne's and they still hadn't heard anything about Kaylyn's body being turned over to the funeral home, so they couldn't give dates for anything. They had gotten everything ready for when they can give out a date, but so far the only word of Kaylyn's death had been spread out from me to her parents who had further spread the word to those who needed it.

I realized in my time not working on something that I don't really have any hobbies, except for my newfound love for lockpicking, which was quite recent even if I did have an uncanny talent for it. There were plenty of things I'd done or learned, but very few things brought this kind of joy or excitement to my heart, just the occasional video game and picking locks. I let the thought go, maybe I was just so boring that I even thought the things I enjoyed were boring.

Jack and I spent the time trying to brainstorm ideas on how to save someone, or perhaps what to do the next month for a new victim. I didn't have any answers, but Jack made the decision for me. We would find this ghost every month and stop her from taking any more lives. We were the only ones that could and that made it our duty. I wasn't so sure on that part but Jack was adamant that this was our purpose, so I didn't fight back.

Monday morning I had to go into work, life wasn't so kind as to get me out of everything just because someone was brutally murdered twenty feet away from me while I slept like a baby. Everyone at work at least pretended to be empathetic, but I knew many of them were faking just to seem like better people than they were. I skipped lunch and worked through the day, making only some brief conversation with Steve as he checked my work, which still rode the fine line between over planned and vague.

I was supposed to be on sight last week, but someone else had taken that so I had to change my schedule slightly for the next few weeks. I worked on site for most of the week, finding a sort of solace in the mindless grunt work that was stringing wires throughout residential buildings. Many people thought it was much more complicated than it was, and to be fair it does take a lot of training and work to get the wiring to work right, but once you've done one house, you've kind of done them all. The only interesting moments in the job came from construction, just seeing what they decided was a good idea was always a mental exercise.

I worked hard to finish jobs early or get to a point where I could pick up the work the next day so I could go home at about four every day. It wasn't an exact science, but I did everything to get back to the hotel as early as possible, where Jack had gone back to working on his job as best he could without his nice PC which still sat in our apartment. Jack worked from home and his job tended to be pretty slow, so Jack tended to clean up and make dinner while he was procrastinating some project or another before he went crazy and forced the work into fruition on the last possible day. I couldn't say it was a good strategy, but it was a strategy.

I skipped lunch every day, just having an energy drink and a protein bar that I stole from Jack's stash for breakfast every day. I left dinner up to Jack, he always was better at cooking anyways. I could follow a recipe, but it never quite had the same depth of flavor Jack always managed to coax from the materials, no matter who I tried to emulate in my cooking efforts. He always said "it's an art, not a science," but that was bullshit, cooking is chemistry, chemistry is science, therefore cooking is science. That's the end of it for me no matter what anyone else said.

Every day I would shower and look out the window at the moon, waiting impatiently for the new moon to come so I'd know where to look for our killer. I couldn't lie, there was a heavy knot in my gut that cried for revenge even if I logically knew it wouldn't help anything. I kept pushing my mind back to righteous justice but it always turned to just make her pay. I didn't even know how to make her pay, but I wanted her to with everything in my being.

The recommendations on my phone gained a very sudden and large lockpicking presence, mostly just bagging on master lock and how they did not have secure locks no matter how they marketed it. It made me want to buy a bunch of nice locks to practice on, but I was still drowning in college debt and I'd already spent way too much money on this particular hobby already.

My lock opened and closed so quickly it was hard for even me to tell what was happening, I'd used the same lock so many times that a lock that required so little actual skill to open was practically falling open at my touch. I didn't know what to do to practice on more interesting locks, so all I did was fidget with the locks I did have. Maybe work had some I could use? I'd have to find some in the office that people wouldn't mind me picking. Getting into rooms I wasn't supposed to be in was probably actually illegal in some way. While I didn't mind that so much, it was more the fact that I was risking it for literally nothing more than fun.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Each day passed slowly, working and working until I came home, ate, showered, and tried to find a new way of thinking of the situation, some way to at least punish this ghost who saw fit to play reaper. Every thought I had was shut down by the rules of the ghost world, which were ill defined at best as I had learned during this difficult time.

The fact that everything I knew about the dead was being flipped on it's head gave me a headache, it was something I had finally had lots of time to consider while I was waiting for the moon to change phases. Items could have powers? How? As a matter of fact, how did any item cross over at all? Humans always crossed over, but items were rare. I'd never even heard of an animal that had crossed, but until just then I'd never heard of magical crossed items, so I didn't know what to believe.

I'd always seen the world of the dead as something that was connected to our world but inherently separate, but that couldn't be as true as I'd thought. Before I had assumed that the only thing that our worlds shared was landscape and light, but that raised other questions I didn't have answers for. What determined landscape? Why could ghosts walk through thin walls and doors but couldn't go through mountains and instead had to go over them? How could all ghosts see this world while I was the only one who could see their world?

These worlds were far more connected than I had grown up assuming I was sure.

About two three weeks into the month, just a week before the new moon, we were allowed to move back into our apartment. I wasn't sure what I was expecting when we were allowed to move back in, but for whatever reason I didn't expect a phone call during work that lasted all of twenty seconds.

"Hello?"

"Is this Conrad Keller?"

"Yes."

"You are cleared to move back into your apartment, thank you for your cooperation." That was the end of it. I wasn't sure if that was normal, but for the victim being one of my best friends and how I was in the other room while it happened the police seemed incredibly disinterested in Jack and I. On one hand I was glad they had left us alone so we could complete our investigation as best we needed, but I was a little bit peeved that they thought we were so blameless in this that they didn't do more than a few questions for the paperwork.

That Saturday I took the time to pack up my bag and wash the place up as best I could, although the sand would never leave, I was sure. At least it was a hotel, those were for vacations and sand was, as Jack put it, vacation herpes. I hauled my bag down through the elevator for the last time, I would never be able to afford an actual stay here, and we left the key cards on the counter under the mat where we had found them. I crammed my bag into the trunk of my dented car and shut it with a resounding bang of finality as Jack made his way out of the front doors.

I got in my car and made my way to the apartment, reminding me of the times I would walk the streets searching for a clue to a mystery I had now solved. That seemed so recent but it hadn't even been a month. I felt like I was missing something important, but these hunches had been all over the place lately and they'd been wrong more more often than not.

I pulled into the parking lot and parked, taking much more care with my parking here than I did at the hotel considering that the apartment was completely full in contrast with the unopened hotel that I had shamelessly taken advantage of. I popped the trunk and as I walked around, locking the car as I did so. I dragged the luggage over to the front doors.

The front doors opened at a soft push and I dragged the bag over to the wall where our mail was contained. There was mostly junk mail and a couple of bills. Plus a number of letters for Kaylyn. I took a deep breath and held all of it in my hand and moved up to the elevator, I wasn't about to haul everything up the stairs.

After a moment of waiting the elevator doors slid slowly and haltingly compared to the brand new elevators at the hotel. The ride up was silent, suffocating as I waited for the doors to finally open back up and spit me back out onto the floor where my apartment sat. It brought back painful memories, but I pushed them down, at least until I could get inside.

My key slid into the lock and I turned it, the door lock sliding open and letting me turn the knob to walk in. I was met with the small space, more spotless than it was before Kaylyn died, but also so empty. Nothing was gone, of course, just her spirit. And, unfortunately, all of her belongings. They must have sent them to her parents to find out what to do with them.

I took another deep breath and moved deeper in, stopping at my room and dumping my bag out on the floor, which was also well cleaned. I sat on my bed, the door sitting open. I didn't want to deal with this. It'll be better once we've caught the ghost, I thought to myself as I pushed the feeling deeper down inside myself.

I walked out to see Jack just walking in, taking the same deep breath I did to prepare himself for the emotions. I let him deal with his feelings, most likely in a much more healthy way than I did.

So we carried on until that Thursday, which I told my boss I wouldn't be working on.

"Let's go to the Smoothie Shack," I said after waking up and seeing Jack in the kitchen.

He just nodded solemnly.