by E M Kaplan
The girl paused in thought, then said, “You’ll see everyone eating at Smiley’s. Not just the bubbas, but the bubba techs—computer nerds, but Texas style—old timers, kids, and regular people. It’s a real cross-section of Austin and it’s not even technically in Austin. It’s north, in Leandro. But kind of Austin.”
Barbecue as a common denominator? Well, other than for vegetarians and vegans, who would be a distinct absence in that slice of the population. Not to discount them in the slightest. In fact, her good friend Benjy had been vegan for a long period of time, which, incidentally, had coincided with his Pastafarian foray. That story was a long involved tale about parental defiance for another day.
“What happened to Smiley’s first building?” Josie said as she took the shopping bag that the girl slid across the counter to her.
“It burned down.” The girl shrugged her rounded shoulders. “One of the built-in dangers of running a smokehouse, I guess. If you cook with flames, I guess it’s a given risk that you’re going to have some big flare ups now and then. But Billy Blake—that’s the owner—he rebuilt it in about 2007 just the same as it was before. Like an exact replica of the original building. He even picked the same wallpaper. I was just a kid, but I remember going to the grand opening with my parents. Or rather, the grand re-opening. And he still makes the best barbecue around in my opinion—not just mine, actually, according to a lot of people’s opinions.”
“What about the place being haunted?” Josie half-expected the girl to laugh her out of the store.
She gave a half-smile, her dark lips lifting just at the corners of her mouth. “Kind of local lore. Urban legend, you know.”
Her flippant answer seemed to dismiss the possibility, but Josie sensed something more going on. Something in that funny half-smile made her delve a little more.
“You don’t believe in ghosts?”
“I never said that.” That same crooked smirk crossed the girl’s face again. Nothing malevolent, just an impish thought behind the curtain that was trying to poke out. Something was making the girl want to laugh. An inside joke, maybe.
“What am I missing?” Josie frowned. “You believe in spirits and the undead presence who live among us?”
“Of course I do,” the girl said. “I’m a ghost hunter.”
Chapter 5
Josie blinked, calling to mind images of Ouija boards and Victorian séances, crystal balls and so-called mediums scamming little old ladies out of their life’s savings in trying to talk to their dearly departed calico cats named Bernard and Muffin.
“You hunt ghosts? Seriously? Like Ghostbusters with ectoplasm, beeping machines, and the lights flashing? Crossing the streams, Egon, and everything?”
She didn’t want to laugh at the girl, but she was pretty sure her disbelief-tinged-with-ridicule was coming across loud and clear. Josie had one of those faces. People said the eyes were the mirrors to the soul, but in her case, her face was a looking glass right into whatever ludicrous or skeptical thoughts she was entertaining at the moment. Super embarrassing. And, man, was she lousy at poker.
“Not exactly like that. But kind of.” The girl crossed her arms, a defensive pose if Josie ever saw one. Looked like she had some ground to recover if she wanted Professor Venkman here to open up… “We have sensors, yeah. But we’re not full-time hunters, obviously. We all have jobs and just hunt on the weekends when we can coordinate our schedules.”
“And you have all the stuff?” Josie realized belatedly that her question could be taken in a number of ways.
The young woman’s precision-crafted eyebrows crept up again. “You want to know more about the equipment?”
“Well, yeah.” Josie’s nosiness had gotten the better of her. Again. Not a big surprise there. Curiosity had almost killed the…snarky food critic…more than once in the past. Just because she was a non-believer in spirits walking the everyday world, for the most part, didn’t mean she wasn’t open to hearing more about it. Plus, she liked to hear what revved other people’s engines, what made them tick. It helped with finding the key to the universe, so to speak, if she could just figure out the people around her to the smallest degree better.
“Okay, so like, there are about twenty people in the group. Well, nineteen because someone just left.” She paused, dark fingernail scratching the corner of her matching lipsticked mouth. Puce—that was a color, right? Dark purple-brown, like dried blood. “He’s born again, actually, and decided it was against his new religious beliefs as a Christian. But anyway, we usually go out in groups of three to four because of our schedules. It’s honestly hard to get more people than that together at any given time, so we have a couple sets of equipment in a storage locker we can all access if something comes up.”
“And the red phone rings and Janine the secretary rings the firehouse alarm?”
The girl brushed off Josie’s sarcasm with an eye-roll and slow blink combo move. “Basically, you need an EMF detector for magnetic fields. Definitely a high def video cam. Some kind of thermometer for cold spots, though you can usually feel those just on your skin. You should have extra batteries, flashlights, first aid stuff—I mean, you’re stumbling around in the dark, right? People are gonna get boo-boos. I think those are the basics.”
“I get hurt just walking around my apartment at night.” She had the bruises to prove it.
“I also like to add some baby powder to my kit to capture any footprints. If you sprinkle it around, the ghosts might step in it and leave their tracks.”
“What kind of shoes do ghost generally wear?”
“Depends what century they’re from.”
“Have you ever gotten actual ghost footprints?”
“Yeah, a couple of times.”
“Really?”
The girl shrugged. “The evidence is there. Sometimes you just have to let yourself believe it.”
“‘I want to believe.’”
The girl stared at her. “That’s an X-Files quote, isn’t it?” Her pursed mouth said she was starting to get somewhat ticked off at Josie’s attitude.
Oops again.
It wasn’t that she wanted to outright disparage the girl’s hobby—her beliefs—but for Josie, seeing was believing. And she had never seen a ghost. Well, not really.
I mean, there was that one time out in the desert when I had that conversation with my father…but that wasn’t a ghost, really. That was a hallucination. One that saved my life. But that was all in my head. Probably.
Josie brought her snark down a notch. “Have you ever seen the ghost at Smiley’s?”
“No, but my cousin has. She was eating there a few weeks ago, and a woman appeared in a mirror right by the front door.”
“A woman? Was it the wife of the owner?”
“Oh, you know about that? Yes, it was Mary Clare. My cousin said you could tell it was her because of her big hair and also the gold necklace around her neck that said her name.”
Josie frowned. “Like one of those gangster girl necklaces?” She’d seen a few of them in Tucson when she was in high school. Chola necklaces, she thought, but didn’t dare say out loud.
“Exactly. Except the script was smaller and classier. I think maybe with some diamond accents. Kind of 80’s bling. My cousin thought the ghost was a picture on the wall, but then the sun hit it when someone opened the door and it turned out to be a mirror.”
“So Mary Clare appeared to your cousin at the restaurant. Was she trying to warn her away? Was something wrong with the food that day? E.coli? Salmonella? Bad cole slaw?”
“No, nothing like that. In fact, the ghost was smiling, like she was welcoming people in.”
A happy ghost? Was there such a thing? It seems contrary to popular belief.
Josie shook her head at herself. She needed to be convinced they existed first.
“Not only that,” the girl said, “but their old house is haunted, too.”
“What house—the one Mary Clare used to live in?”
&
nbsp; “Yes. My cousin is a real estate agent. Cookie Casteñada. Her signs are all over town—bright yellow in the shape of a house. She’s the second biggest selling agent in the whole city. She’s been hired to list their former house in Bee Caves.”
A little light went on in Josie’s brain. Georgia, the woman from the Ruby’s, had mentioned a big mansion-like house on the west side of town.
“How come it’s going on the market after all these years?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Billy Blake is getting ready to retire and he’s finally downsizing. I mean, no one has lived there for years. He stays somewhere else. Maybe because it’s haunted—and not by a settled spirit, but one that likes to break things and leave disgusting messes everywhere.”
Gears were churning in Josie’s head. She could almost hear the rust flaking off her mental cogs as they creaked into motion, groaning with effort.
“Would your cousin be willing to show us the house?”
#
“You want to see Billy Blake’s haunted house? Like a tour? Or as a potential buyer?”
Josie cleared her throat, a little uncomfortable with admitting her…undecided status as to whether ghosts were part of reality. This girl would trust her more if she were a believer, whereas Josie would be more relieved if she’d been able to steadfastly deny their existence.
And here was where it got a little tricky. She didn’t even know this girl’s name yet. She’d known her for approximately thirty minutes, if that, and she was already asking for a favor.
Might as well just come right out with it.
“I was wondering if we—you and I—could go ghost hunting at the house.”
The girl blinked. “Us—like you and me?”
“I’m doing this all backwards,” Josie said, feeling her face get a little warm. Even self-professed antisocial grouches like her weren’t immune to being embarrassed, after all—twice in one day, thanks to the adult toy shop.
She held out her hand. “I’m Josie Tucker. I’m a food blogger from Boston. I’m here doing a story on local barbecue, but as you can tell, I’m totally distracted by this story about Mary Clare and Billy Blake. I just want to find out more about what happened to her, and I think going to the house might help.”
There. That was pretty much the truth. Josie felt self-congratulatory at the great strides she already seemed to be making. Not too much longer now and she’d be a fully self-realized grown up. Legit.
Instead of taking Josie’s hand in greeting, the girl crossed her arms over her chest. After an extremely uncomfortable moment of silence, which could have been anywhere from thirty seconds to…oh, about five hours, she picked up the phone from behind the counter and held it between her cheek and her shoulder as she dialed.
Josie eyed the front door of the shop, thinking she might have to make a hasty retreat. If she took a circuitous route around the side of the shop, and maybe zig-zagged through some back alleys, the cops wouldn’t be able to track her back to the hotel…
“Hey,” the girl said into the phone, which made Josie think she might not be calling 9-1-1 for the police. “Yeah, this is Lizzie. Can you get me and my friend Josie in to see Billy Blake’s house tonight? No? What about tomorrow night? No, it’s not a big group of us. Just two girls. We won’t track any dirt in, I swear. It’ll be in exactly the same condition we find it when we leave. I swear on Grand-mami’s grave.” She nodded. “Thursday night, it is. All right. Thanks.”
The girl hung up and stuck her hand out to Josie and rattled off a bunch of Spanish. “First of all, Lizabeta Del Valle Del Jabalí. That’s my name, but you can call me Lizzie. And second of all, it’s not ghost hunting if you’re looking for a specific ghost. It’s ghost investigation.”
Good thing Josie had a private investigator’s license. Not that it was worth anything in the spirit world.
Chapter 6
Josie returned to the hotel room around eight and found Drew lying face down on the bed. All the lights were on and he was fully dressed, but his one visible eye was closed. She eased off his shoes, and he gave a muffled groan as she kneaded the arches of his feet with her knuckles. He made another unintelligible sound that might’ve been an expression of gratitude. Or maybe he was dreaming about his mother’s spaghetti. Josie could admit to having that dream more than once. The woman’s cooking was the stuff of legends.
“Hey there, sleepyhead. Are you okay?” she asked near his ear as she sprawled next to him.
His dark lashes didn’t even flutter as he muttered, “Vodka,” which explained everything. Neither of them were big drinkers. Alcohol had gotten her into several idiotic predicaments in the past—one word: burlesque—and he was more of a beer fan. If they had been plying him with cocktails at the catered happy hour, he was pretty much done for the night.
She spied a pile of medical vendor brochures on the bedside table. No wonder he’d imbibed. This week’s medical conference was focused on Geriatrics—which she imagined would have an ever-growing list of topics to discuss. Diabetes. Osteoporosis. Heart disease. Yeesh. A laundry list of reasons to die young and leave a beautiful corpse.
Okay, that was a horrible sentiment.
She’d known a young woman—a bride in Arizona—who’d done that very early death thing. And when death wasn’t your choice, it was horrifying and wrong. She pursed her mouth in momentary apology to the woman’s memory. Crap like that stuck with a person and colored her outlook on life, especially since she was lucky enough to be among the living.
She shook her head and thumbed through the stack of pamphlets before admitting her distinct lack of comprehension. New ways to test glucose, memory loss, balance. Or something. This medical conference was the first one Josie had ever gone to with Drew. He tried to attend at least one a year, sometimes in wonderfully warm and palm-tree filled places like San Diego. Texas was also nothing to spit at, considering the chilly weather back home in Boston this week.
Their friends Susan and Benjy were taking turns dog-sitting for Josie, so her phone had been bombed with texts from them, including photos of Bert refusing to walk down the icy front steps of her apartment building. The last photo in the sequence of messages had been of Benjy carrying Josie’s enormous brown dog down the steps. Interesting. It meant Susan had gone with him, because she had taken the photo, which she’d then sent to Josie. Was romance finally afoot for those two?
Not holding my breath on that one.
Josie tried not to rustle too much as she took the ring she’d bought for Drew from its shopping bag and transferred it to the back pocket of her suitcase. Between the paper bag and the 58 layers of tissue paper, she was sure she was going to wake him up, vodka-induced coma or not. Ever the careful planner—not—she hadn’t figured out how to pop The Question yet. A special dinner at a memorable restaurant? A sunset cruise on Lake Austin? She had no idea what to do. However, even she knew waking him from a boozy stupor to ask him if he wanted to get married probably wasn’t the greatest idea.
Her stomach gave an unearthly howl, which might have been hunger, disgust, or anxiety—or a combo of the three. She squatted down in front of the room’s mini-fridge and peered inside at the tower of takeout containers. Barbecue. Ribs. Brisket. Slaw. Ugh. She couldn’t face another bite of meat at the moment. She needed to gird her loins for tomorrow’s round of taste-testing. She wasn’t in much of a people mood—was she ever?—but maybe the bar downstairs would have something green to eat like a little salad. Or a mojito, which had mint, and mint was green. Close enough to a vegetable.
One more glance told her Drew was out like a light, his face mashed against the decorative bolster pillow. He didn’t even move when she pulled a blanket over him, so she grabbed her room key card and headed for the elevators.
#
“What can I get for you?” a twelve year-old boy with ear grommets and full sleeve tattoos asked her. After a double-take, she saw the strawberry blond soul patch and barely-there beard shadow on the bartender. It sucked to lo
ok so young sometimes—she could relate.
When you look underage, your opinions tend to be downgraded in relevance, even if hindsight proves your near infallibility. Not to toot my own horn too loudly.
She put down the parchment-paper menu. “Green beans, nachos, and an ice tea, please.” Her order sounded mundane, but it was short-hand for French fried green beans with a chipotle aioli, black bean carnitas nachos with a lime-cilantro relish, and prickly pear iced tea—at the last minute, she’d decided to avoid the alcohol. Her late-night noshing was going to be pretty frickin’ ritzy. Hopefully, her stomach wouldn’t object. She was started to tiptoe around it as if it were a colicky baby who’d finally fallen asleep.
“You got it.”
With a tattooed finger—she couldn’t see what the tattoo was—he tapped her order into his handheld tablet and pulled a tall glass off the rack behind him for her tea. The bar ran along the back of the hotel’s open atrium area, though her perch on a steel-legged stool still managed to feel secluded. Purple up-lights made the place feel kind of spaceshippy, as if a Ferengi from Star Trek might pull up a chair next to her and order something smoking with tentacles hanging out of it…or whatever. She made a note to start limiting her television consumption. Reruns were starting to color her view of the world. Something supernatural could occur and she might not even bat an eye.
“Have you checked out our world-famous bats and bat bridge?” he asked, setting down her drink. He had scars along the backs of his knuckles, as well as a Band-Aid over one. Maybe he worked in the kitchen as well as tended bar. Kitchen staff were always so macho about their scars.
“No, not yet. I didn’t know if there was much to see this time of year.”
“Yeah, it’s the end of the season, I think, and it gets dark so early. But people have been telling me the little buggers are still around. You should give it a try if you have time. Are you here in town long?”
She noticed he didn’t ask her if she was in town for the medical conference. In fact, no one had asked her, which wasn’t a huge surprise. She didn’t look doctorly in her worn jeans and tee, and she certainly didn’t act it either. Even when Drew had a day off, he still managed to exude a certain authoritarian manner, an aura that said I know what your cholesterol level is and You need to eat more fiber.
