“Why aren’t there any good-looking teachers?” Jason asked his grandfather and took a sip of his egg drop soup.

His grandfather looked around them to see who might be listening in. “You realize if word ever got out that you said that, you’re dead in the water.”

The two of them were at the Chinese restaurant in Garnet, the small town where Jason taught. Because of tonight’s parent-teacher conferences, it made no sense to drive all the way back home after school, and then turn around and drive back for conferences a short while later. Gramps had been kind enough to drive out and treat Jason to dinner.

“Well, I can think of one attractive teacher,” and Jason was thinking of Lynn, “but there just aren’t many good-looking women in education, and I don’t understand why. Take culottes, for example. There isn’t one woman in a hundred who looks good in culottes, but they’re like a uniform for female teachers, they’re so common.”

“The really attractive women don’t work. No woman wants to work.” His grandfather poured himself a cup of hot tea. “If you married a wealthy, sexy woman, would you still teach?”

“Hell no,” Jason said forcefully.

“Any really good-looking woman is going to marry a man with money. The better looking she is, the wealthier the husband. So the lookers are not going to teach and make chump change; they’re going to marry lawyers, ophthalmologists, successful entrepreneurs, and have nothing but leisure time.”

Jason ate another spoonful of soup as he thought about what his grandfather just said. “In the game, the monkey told me that the two women working at the rescue mission, Sister Belinda and Sister Jamie, were willing to be with me because they didn’t have any options, but I think they’re good-looking enough to find husbands.”

Gramps finished the last of an eggroll before washing it down with a bit of tea. “You got me there. I think you’re as far in the game as the Father Milligan scenario, right?”

Jason nodded.

“The nun there at the shelter, Sister Mildred, is pretty much what you can expect to find. A sexy nun is a fantasy, because the most beautiful women get married to wealthy men, and the least attractive women wind up either as spinsters or nuns. In real life, Sister Belinda and Sister Jamie wouldn’t be working at the rescue mission, or they might be married and volunteer to serve there part-time. But if we put you in a rescue mission with plain, unattractive women, it would be realistic, but no fun as a video game, and you wouldn’t play it.”

When they finished dinner, Jason thanked his grandfather and went to his classroom. There were few parents at tonight’s conferences, which were intended to help any students who were struggling and in danger of failing their classes as the end of the semester approached. Jason was in his room surfing the internet when a chubby woman entered his classroom midway through conferences.

“Hi, I’m Jason Whitlock,” he said while rising to meet the parent and gesturing to a seat in front of his desk. “And who is your student?”

“I’m Mrs. Saunders—you can call me Debbie. Mark is my son. He’s in your English class.” She smiled and shook his hand, then sat down.

“Oh, Mark, great kid.” That was the challenge, that parents came in, and although Jason knew their children, he didn’t know the parents. Another challenge was that the parents of the best students showed up, while the parents of the worst students, the parents who really needed to be at conferences, were almost always no-shows.

Mrs. Saunders leaned forward and smiled. “Mark says you called him up to your desk and told him, ‘This story kicks butt!’”

Jason remembered the story, a sign that it was outstanding. Any teacher who actually read student work read a lot of boring, cliché, perfunctory writing, usually riddled with errors, so the really exceptional papers were memorable as a rare treat. Jason’s English class read the story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and the assignment was to write a story like Walter Mitty, in which there is a huge discrepancy between the character’s real life and fantasy life, like the contrast between Jason’s miserable job teaching and the thrilling world of the Midas Game. In Mark’s story, a kid imagines he’s a Navy SEAL in gritty combat, when in reality he’s a nerdy kid who panics when he gets a nosebleed in the swimming pool.

“Yeah, I laughed out loud when I read that story,” Jason recounted with a smile. “I told Mark, ‘Anytime you can make me laugh with your story, you’ve got an A.’”

“And he tells me you put up his poem,” Mrs. Saunders added.

“Oh, yeah, it’s right up there.” Jason pointed to a spot on the bulletin board, which he called his “Wall of Fame.” “He was describing his grandmother’s dementia. ‘Like a zeppelin drifting over strange lands.’ I told him that was just incredible.”

“You know, Mr. Whitlock, Ms. Thorpe never really appreciated Mark’s work.”

Jason realized Mrs. Saunders was referring to Lynn, the attractive English teacher. Jason had heard from a number of sources—parents, fellow teachers, and students—that Lynn had a harsh side to her, and while she loved students who wrote the kind of poetry and stories she liked, she could care less about the students who weren’t writers, or whose writing didn’t match her tastes. Maybe that explained why Mark transferred from Lynn’s English class to Jason’s.

“Mr. Whitlock, every student ought to have a teacher like you.” Mrs. Saunders looked at Jason intensely, smiling as she spoke. “I think you’re doing a wonderful job with students, and any student who has you in class is lucky. You know, the way I’m praising you, some people might think I was making a pass at you…”

Holy crap. Jason realized she was making a pass at him. Mark told him that his dad’s favorite TV show was the weather channel, which he watched constantly: that could explain why Mrs. Saunders might be looking for some excitement in her life. Jason got through the conference with Mrs. Saunders and the few parents who followed. As he made his way out to the car after parent-teacher conferences, he reflected that at least Mrs. Saunders wasn’t one of the nasty, critical, overprotective parents who made teaching miserable. Whether it was Mrs. Saunders in real life, or Sister Mildred in the Midas Game, it seemed that they were the only type of woman who might be interested in him.

* * *

Floating outside the rectory window, Jason spotted a tuft of short black hair, and went to pluck it from the spot where it had caught in the drainpipe brace, but found that his fingers drifted through it.

“You can’t pick anything up; you’re in ghost mode.”

“Holy crap, you scared the stuffing out of me,” Jason exclaimed and shot the capuchin an irritated look. “You see that? It’s monkey hair, I bet.”

“Ape hair,” the monkey replied indignantly. “I suppose all of us look alike to you.”

Jason climbed hand over hand, then floated up through the window and the wall, just as the detectives were wrapping up the crime scene and leaving the priest’s room.

“If you remember the priest’s body,” Jason told the capuchin, “He had no injuries on the top of his head, and no defensive injuries on his hands or arms. A person in a murderous rage will instinctively pick up an object and smash it down onto the head of the person he intends to kill. That’s probably how Cain killed Abel. Just as instinctively, any victim is going to raise his hands to ward off the club or the knife, resulting in what are called ‘defensive injuries’ to the hands and arms.”

“So why doesn’t the priest have any defensive injuries on his arms?” the monkey asked.

“Say someone held a club in his foot, and repeatedly hit low, to the father’s shins, knees, and groin, low enough that he couldn’t really block the blows.” Jason demonstrated by reaching down with his hands to his knees. “Just as he’s crouched over, trying to block the blows to his legs, the bat comes up to his head, and he’s wide open. Father Milligan didn’t have any wounds on the top of his head because the fatal blow came up from the floor, not overhead.”

“Who could hold a baseball bat in his foot?” the monkey asked, but already knew the answer.

“The mayor’s chimp advisor.” Looking out the window, Jason saw the ambulance roll down the street, followed by squad cars, leaving just one police car at the rectory to help maintain order. “Can we leave ghost mode? I’m going to talk to Sister Mildred.”

The monkey nodded and disappeared. Jason went down the stairs until he found Sister Mildred, who looked at him through her thick black glasses. “Who are you?”

“I’d like to stay here at the shelter,” Jason told her.

The nun looked him up and down, and even raised her glasses up to her forehead to scrutinize Jason. “You’re not the type of man who stays at the shelter.”

“True,” Jason admitted. “I’ve been working at the Healing Hands Rescue Mission. I have an idea who murdered Father Milligan, and I want to catch him when he comes back. I’ll just lie low and stay out of the priest’s way.”

“Priest?” Sister Mildred asked, looking at him through her thick lenses.

“Father Milligan’s replacement.”

Sister Mildred shook her head and folded her hands over her belly. “There is none. Father Milligan broke with the church ta start the shelter, funding it with his winnings from boxing. Who’s goin’ ta want ta lead a shelter after the last leader got brutally murdered?”

There was a lull in the conversation as Jason wondered what would happen to the shelter and the men if no one arrived to replace Father Milligan.

Sister Mildred gestured for him to sit on the couch, while she sat in the high-backed upholstered chair. “So tell me about your work at the rescue mission.”

Jason told her everything: how he’d arrived at the Healing Hands Rescue Mission as a homeless man who spent the night in a cardboard box, then started helping out around the rescue mission, until he arranged to get the men physicals, followed by helping men from other shelters, and was working on getting every homeless man in the city the meds that he needed. He even confessed how he’d given the men booze in order to get them to get a checkup or take their medicine.

“I remember you now, coming in the bus ta take the men ta the doctor.” The nun closed her eyes as though praying silently, and when she opened them she looked straight at Jason. “I think yer just the man ta lead St. Michael’s Shelter.”

Stunned by the idea, Jason sank back onto the couch. “Whoa. But I’m not a priest.”

“There’s no law that says ya have ta be a priest. I don’t know if ya realize it, but when ya talked about yer work at the rescue mission, and described the men there, ya were passionate. I think that’s yer calling.”

Jason sat and thought carefully. Okay, so it was shallow, but Sisters Belinda and Jamie were done with him, so there was no sense going back to the rescue mission, which would only be awkward for everyone. Also, Jason was really needed here at the shelter. And if heading the shelter was a big challenge, what was the point of playing the video game if he couldn’t be adventurous, and live large?

“Okay,” Jason relented. “I’ll agree to lead the shelter. But I’m not a priest, and don’t want to make a mess of things.”

“Ya’ll do fine,” Sister Mildred assured him and patted him on the arm. “It’s better ta care about the men, and not be a priest, than ta be a priest who doesn’t care about the men.”

“Oh, and have you seen Father Milligan’s shillelagh?”

“Why no.” The nun wrinkled her brow and frowned. “I haven’t. Why do ya ask?”

“You said that the father beat the mayor’s men with his shillelagh. I think Father Milligan was murdered with his own shillelagh to make a point, and I’m going to get it back.” Jason’s hands clenched into fists.

Sister Mildred looked at Jason curiously. “Yes, I told the detective about that, but how did you know that?”

Good question. How did he know that? Jason couldn’t tell her he was in ghost mode with a capuchin monkey. “Let’s just say I have my sources.”

The nun seemed content with that answer, and Jason thought that with the unattractive nun here at the shelter, he could concentrate on his mission and develop his superhero skills without any kind of sexual or romantic entanglements that would only screw everything up.

Sister Mildred lit up, and a wide smile spread across her beaming face. “Oh good, I’d like for ya ta meet my niece, who just got out of school.”

Jason turned to the door and his heart began beating erratically. Holy shit.