5. BRECIA

Boulder, Colorado

2 Years Before

These were the things I had learned after three days of living in his house:

The naked Barbies in the front yard belonged to his two daughters, Emma and Kimmie. I had never been good at pinpointing exactly how old kids were. If I had to pick a number, I'd say that the two little girls with duck-down, white-blond hair were six and four. Still babies. For the most part, I kept my distance from them, wary of anything he'd touched.

The scraggly azaleas beneath the kitchen window had been planted by his wife, April, who was the opposite of everything I'd been while I was alive. She was quiet. Blond. Rail-thin. Endlessly patient and doting. When I wasn't following her husband from room to room, brimming with hatred, I watched her. She washed the dishes, folded laundry, picked up toys, fed the cat, read a book, and made breakfast. She snuggled up next to him at night and kissed him in the morning. At first, I was sure that if I looked hard enough I'd see that she was his match: rotten at the core. But the more I looked, the more confused I felt. To be honest, I hated her at first—maybe even more than I would have if she'd been awful. Because she seemed so blissfully, doggedly unaware. Just like I had been when I'd dated her husband a year ago. Except this woman had been married to him for years.

The cat in the garage was named Oscar. Out of everyone who lived in the little brick rambler in Boulder, he was the only one who seemed to have the sense to hate the man of the house as much as I did. When the garage door opened, he sat up in his kitty bed in the corner by the bikes, craning his neck to see who it was. If it was April or one of the girls, he made a chatty little noise in his throat and hurried over in hopes of being scooped up and taken inside the house. If it was him, Oscar stayed put. Or slunk out of the garage.

To be fair, Oscar didn't like me much, either. Whenever I approached, the cat stopped what he was doing and stared for a few seconds. If I tried to touch him, he shrank back and moved the other way. I found this strangely reassuring. It seemed to mean that somebody knew I still existed. Even if it was just an orange tabby.

The boxes in the garage, stacked in neat rows and meticulously labeled with black sharpie, were destined for Herriman, Utah. The U-Haul had already been paid for.

I followed him like an invisible shadow that first day. While he ate breakfast at his mid-century-style kitchen table. While he shaved off the Joaquin Phoenix beard that I wondered if he'd grown for the sole purpose of making himself less recognizable. And while he tickled Kimmie and Emma on his way downstairs.

I tried everything I could think of to do the things ghosts were supposed to be able to do. And I'm here to tell you that either Ghost Whisperer was a bunch of BS, or there was a different brand of ghost involved. Because I couldn't slam any doors. I couldn't (as far as I could tell by his reaction, anyway) make the temperature in the room suddenly drop. I couldn't be heard.

I really couldn't do anything.

For a hot second, I thought about trying to find my way home. I quickly discarded the idea. I didn"t know my way around Boulder. I couldn't have found my way, even if I'd wanted to.

Part of me felt homesick for Frank and my apartment. But I knew that the only thing waiting there for me was my dead body. Probably not even that. Robin, my manager, would have been the one to report me missing when I didn't show up for work. Knowing Robin, she had taken it upon herself to check on me before calling the police.

I hoped she took Frank.

* * *

He did normal stuff for most of the day. He had a home office in the basement, where he disappeared right after breakfast.

To my surprise, he hadn't lied about his job. He actually was a programmer—for a tech startup called TreeHaus. I couldn't tell exactly what he was working on. Code, and more code.

He was still on MatchStrike, with a new profile broadcasting the same alluring, blurry photo—and the same lies that had reeled me in:

That he was single.

That his name was Jamie Carver.

That he was looking for his soulmate.

By this point, I had pieced together that his real name was James Carson.

He compulsively opened up the MatchStrike app on an incognito browser to check on the messages he'd gotten since he'd last logged in.

He was chatting with four different girls.

Nicole. Allie. Tena. Danae.

Nicole was his clear favorite. She responded the quickest and the most often. He spent the most time crafting his messages to her—which he then copied and pasted into the other chats, when he came up with little tidbits he liked.

I thought about all of the messages he'd sent me on MatchStrike last year and wondered how many of them had been copied and pasted into other chats—or from other chats. How many other lines he'd had in the water when he decided to meet up with me for the first time.

I wondered what he'd told his wife, April, during the week we'd dated. He'd never stayed the night at my apartment or anything. But we'd spent hours across from each other in the dinette on the corner near my house. I'd been planning to invite him to my place.

Finally, he used the incognito browser to look for me. First, he typed "Brecia Collier." Then "Brecia Collier murder."

The first headline read, "Woman found murdered in backyard of her Denver home."

I read fast, not wanting to miss a word if he suddenly clicked out of the article.

When police arrived at the home of Brecia Collier, the Colorado woman who was reported missing on Friday afternoon, they found Collier strangled to death in her side yard.

According to court documents published online Saturday, Collier had been reported missing by coworkers when she failed to appear at work.

Chilling details reveal that forensics has confirmed that the murder weapon was an extension cord likely taken from Collier's trash. According to the court documents, the cause of death has been confirmed as asphyxiation by strangulation and blunt force trauma to the back of the head.

Police are asking for potential witnesses or anyone with information about Brecia Collier's murder to come forward immediately.

"There was no evidence of sexual assault. We believe that Brecia was surprised while taking her recycling bins out to the side yard at approximately 8:30 p.m. on Thursday evening," read the probable cause statement.

No one answered the door when police arrived at Collier's home Friday afternoon when a coworker notified police that Collier had not appeared at work. However, Collier's car was parked outside, and she didn't answer her cell phone.

Collier's sister, in a statement to the press made Saturday morning said, "Our family is devastated by this horrific and senseless tragedy. Brecia was so loved by her friends and family. We are desperate for any information. Please, if you know anything, come forward."

I had time to read my sister's statement twice before he closed the tab and went back to MatchStrike. They were desperate for any information, which meant they had no information.

They didn't know who had done this. Red-and-blue flashing lights would not be appearing at the window.

I tried to remember who I had even told about Jamie's/James's erratic texts after I broke things off with him. My sister. Lanelle. Robin. A couple other friends, maybe. Life went on. And by the time he showed up in my side yard, he was old news.

The disturbing truth was, James's texts were par for the course. I'd heard worse stories from plenty of friends. Online dating was a roulette of men who didn't like to hear the word "no." I never could have imagined any of them showing up in my side yard with an extension cord.

"What the fuck is wrong with you," I hissed in his ear. He didn't react. Instead, he crafted a new message to Nicole: Saturday night? Meet at O'Michaels?

Nicole responded almost instantly in the affirmative.

The piece of paper on the top of his neat office mail filer was a receipt for U-Haul. The truck was rented out for Sunday.

I studied the thumbnail photo of Nicole in the chat window. She had gorgeous auburn hair with perfectly blended highlights. Subtle makeup. Stunning smile. If I knew anything, I knew that right now she was hanging on every word "Jamie Carver" said.

Because he was beautiful, too. He was the kind of beautiful that drew you in before you even considered the fact that beautiful things can be poisonous.

As he read her response, his lips turned up in the barest smile—which disappeared as the sound of little footsteps clattered across the office ceiling, accompanied by shrieks of laughter.

The anger that had been simmering inside me for the past three days bubbled into something white-hot as I watched him close the incognito browser and put in headphones. If I still had a body, it would have been shaking. Since I didn't, the whole world sort of turned fuzzy and charged.

That's when I heard a quiet pop, and his computer screen went dark.

He pulled the headphones out of the computer jack and flung them onto the desk in annoyance, as if they were the source of the problem.

I stared at the dark computer screen as the fizzy feeling disappeared. It was replaced by something like hope.

Had I done that? Computers fritzed out all the time. So did light bulbs. It might have been a coincidence.

But I didn't think so.