Deader Still

by Jordaina Sydney Robinson

  “What was it?”

  “Verbal reasoning.”

  “It couldn’t have been that bad. That’s when they give you a paragraph and ask you true or false statements about it, right?” Sabrina said as we turned to the fort and started making our way down the grassy hill. It was such a beautiful evening it seemed a shame to waste it inside at our Ghostly Acclimatisation meeting. The mandatory meetings were supposed to turn us into better ghosts, or at least help us learn ghostly skills, like walking through walls and ghost transportation.

  “Yep, but Jenny started off with one about classroom behaviour and if it’s ever acceptable for a student to jump in and take over the class. Yep,” I said with a nod as Sabrina winced. “But there were also personality test questions in there.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, you find a million pounds in your locker. Do you report it, keep it or donate it to charity?”

  Sabrina pulled me to a stop by my elbow just before the doors of the hall. “That was on your test?”

  “I know. That’s weird, right?” I peered through the entrance. I wasn’t supposed to be talking to anyone about the whole assessment thing.

  Sabrina’s voice dropped an octave in fervent agreement. “Er, yeah.”

  “Oh.” I snapped my fingers and pointed to her as we passed through the vestibule and into the main hall. I checked around us and lowered my voice. “I have someone who is willing to help us break into the doctor’s office.”

  Sabrina’s mouth formed an “o” and she had to catch herself before she tripped on the step up into the main hall. “Who?”

  “I can’t tell you because of—” I made a zipping motion across my mouth.

  “Gotcha. I’m incredibly curious as to who you might know that would be willing, or able, to help us.”

  I leaned in as we passed a group at the front of the hall. “He’s meeting us tomorrow at Elderfield Hospital so you can ask him yourself.”

  “Intriguing.” She nodded in greeting at someone on the far side of the room and we headed straight for the refreshment table as usual.

  There was still the regular tea and coffee but, in honour of the extremely hot weather, also three jugs of ice water. Sabrina and I took our coffee and tea respectively and loaded our plates with biscuits. We settled ourselves on the back row of the block of seats and turned our chairs to catch the sea breeze that drifted through the back entrance of the fort.

  “Oh, I checked that code on Gracie’s file,” Sabrina said as she snapped a digestive in half. “It means she informed on another student’s romantic entanglements.”

  “Romantic entanglements?” I arched an eyebrow at her. “You mean someone was sleeping with someone they shouldn’t have been?”

  “Apparently, if you’re sleeping with anyone that’s someone you shouldn’t be sleeping with.”

  I frowned at her. “I thought the rule was no dating in your first ten years. After that you’re free to do whatever as long as you have a license.”

  “A license to date, yes. Anything else—” Sabrina drew a line across her neck with her finger and made a gagging noise.

  “They kill you?” I dropped my custard cream into my tea. I didn’t have any plans to start dating any time soon but a death sentence for enjoying the intimate company of a handsome gentleman seemed somewhat extreme.

  “Well, no. They don’t kill you. They just put you back on probation.”

  I blew out a relived breath and scooped my custard cream out of my tea before it turned to mush and slopped it onto the saucer. “Did it say who she’d informed on?”

  “It did,” Sabrina said with a grin.

  I waited but she didn’t elaborate. “Are you going to tell me?”

  “Matthew.”

  “As in her fellow team leader, Matthew?” I grimaced. “Does he know?”

  Sabrina shook her head. “The informant scheme is confidential to encourage responsible citizens to share any knowledge that may impede the smooth running of our society.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her. “Are you quoting?”

  Sabrina grinned. “I’m paraphrasing.”

  “Surely Matthew would …”

  “Would what?” Sabrina asked.

  “I was about to say surely Matthew would know it was Gracie who’d informed on him, like he’d be able to join the dots, but then I realised Matthew was an idiot, so …”

  Sabrina frowned at me. “He can’t be that dumb.”

  “If you say so,” I said then sipped some of my tea. “Did you manage to find out who he was sleeping with?”

  Sabrina shook her head. “Name wasn’t in there.”

  “The name of the person he was sleeping with, of the person he was breaking the law with, isn’t in his file?”

  Sabrina pointed to me. “Okay, now, see, I’m glad you find that as stupid as I do. Why would they just not add it as a footnote or something?”

  “Because these people are idiots,” I said with a nod.

  “And it makes him a pretty good suspect for Watson’s murder though since the file says Watson was the one that suggested the punishment be an elongated probation term.”

  “That’s not really a reason to murder someone, is it? A few more years on probation.”

  “He can’t graduate from the academy while still on probation and murders have been committed for much less,” Sabrina said then took a sip of her coffee. “I was thinking about Watson …”she said with affected casualness.

  “Right …” I dragged the word out. The way Sabrina made that announcement, I just knew it wasn’t going to be anything good.

  “Lucy’s at the academy, right?”

  I held up my hand in front of her face to stop anything else coming out of her mouth. “I am not involving my housemates any further.”

  Sabrina grabbed my hand and moved it out of the way. “Just hear me out.”

  I moved my hand back in front of her face. “No.”

  Sabrina batted my hand away. “Do you want to be the next dead ghost stuffed in your locker?”

  I placed a hand over my heart. “I love how you always treat the prospect of my untimely second demise so delicately. It warms my possibly missing soul that you care so deeply about my feelings.”

  Sabrina opened her mouth to respond then closed it with a frown. “You don’t think we have souls anymore?”

  “How about we leave the big questions for when I’m not the centre of murder a investigation?” I asked, sipping my tea.

  “If we did that we’d never talk about them.” Sabrina dunked a digestive into her coffee and ate it quickly before the softened part could slosh back into the cup.

  “Ohhh, you’re so funny.”

  Sabrina grinned at me. “Do you think Lucy would help us out?”

  “No. Because I’m not going to ask her.”

  “But she’s in the perfect position to garner intel.”

  “Do you have any idea what Oz would do to me?”

  Sabrina’s eyes were wide and imploring as she gave a small shake of her head. “He’d never find out.”

  “You’re kidding, right? Now with this whole ghost invisibility thing, I’m not entirely convinced Oz just doesn’t follow me around all day and wait for me to do something wrong.”

  Sabrina frowned at me and leaned back. She always did that when she sensed a new and interesting piece of information. As if leaning back could somehow help her see the whole picture. “Ghosts can make themselves invisible? Who told you this?”

  I frowned back at her, custard cream halfway to my mouth. “Have I not told you about this?”

  Sabrina enunciated the word clearly. “No.”

  “Oh. Well, someone heard a conversation that no one was really close enough to hear without me seeing them. So, there’s definitely some sort of ghost invisibility thing.”

  Sabrina shook her head. “I cannot wait to meet this guy.”

  I grunted. I didn’t know Charon all that well but I doubted he’d be forthcoming wit
h that sort of information, especially since Sabrina would be desperate to know.

  “So, you’ll ask Lucy?” she persisted.

  “Didn’t we just cover this?”

  “Oz wouldn’t harm you.”

  “Harm me?” I shook my head. “No, he wouldn’t physically harm me. He would, however, happily make my afterlife an even closer version of my own personal Hell.”

  Sabrina pursed her lips in thought. “What if we just asked her to ask around for suspects?”

  “No.”

  “How about we ask what she’s already heard?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, maybe we could—”

  “No.” I peered over my mug of tea at Sabrina’s frowning face. “And no to the other suggestions you’re trying to think up to lure Lucy into your illegal crime solving web of deceit.”

  Sabrina wagged a finger at me. “You’re just worried I’ll like her better than you,”

  I laughed. “Shut up.”

  “So we can’t ask her anything?” Sabrina made puppy dog eyes at me. “Like, at all?”

  I could see why she’d made such a great private detective. Tenacity had nothing on her. “I’ll ask her in a general way that does not incriminate her, or me, when Oz gets wind of it, but that’s all.”

  “Suppose that’ll do.” Sabrina sipped her coffee, mollified. “We need a better suspect list than ‘everyone’. I managed to sneak a quick look at Watson’s file this afternoon. Nothing stood out, though. Nothing about the things your housemates mentioned. And I couldn’t find anything in there about the ex-boyfriend, Eric, which is weird. Relationships always go in there. So, maybe there wasn’t a relationship. Maybe he stalked her and killed her.”

  “No, there was definitely a relationship.”

  “How do you know?”

  I waved my hand dismissively. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Eric didn’t do it.”

  Sabrina narrowed her eyes as me. “How do you know?”

  “Just do.”

  “You have far too many secrets lately.”

  “It’s the same secret. It just seems to have quite a wide reach.”

  “Your community service assignment is killing me.”

  I snorted. “You want to try doing it.”

  “Sorry I’m late everyone.” Eleanor dashed into the hall, flushed and flustered. Her southern belle accent was always so much thicker when she wasn’t fully in control. “Tonight you’re going to be taking your passenger tunnelling test. It will be the same process as your previous provisional test. I’ll tunnel us both to a location twenty miles away, but this time you’ll be tunnelling me back here with you.” Eleanor glanced around the hall for questions, pausing on Sabrina and me. There weren’t any. “Well, okay then. Volunteers?”

  “Right here.” Sabrina stood and dragged me with her to the front of the hall.

  ∞

  “Did you pass?” Sabrina asked ten minutes later when I met her on the hilltop around the back of the fort.

  “I’m a bit offended that you’re asking. I’m assuming we’re going to use this time productively and practise misting as Eleanor requested?”

  Sabrina shuddered. “I’m still not down with that, y’know?”

  I arched an eyebrow. “You’re not ‘down with it’?”

  “Yeah. I’m not down with the whole passing through solid objects thing. It’s bad enough tunnelling alongside someone who refuses be a passenger or to tunnel you. Why can’t people see the risk in separately tunnelling to the same location?” Sabrina threw her hands up. “It’s dangerous.”

  “Is this just because you had that minor human-fly-monster-merging-mishap with Martin that one time?”

  Sabrina shook her head. “Please, I’m so over that now.”

  “Are you? Oh, okay, so the reason one of us always has to tunnel the other is …?”

  Sabrina scowled at me. “It’s practical.”

  I pressed my lips together to hide my smile. “Okay.”

  “Fine, so I’m not totally okay with it, but I’m dealing with it. Passing through solid mass, I’m not dealing with.”

  “I don’t see how it’s all that different,” I said with a shrug.

  Sabrina’s voice inched up an octave. “It’s not that different? How can you pass through walls but not sink through the floor? What happens if your focus is squiffy and you sink to the earth’s core and burn to death in the molten magma?”

  I stared at her. “Great. Now that’s all I’m going to be thinking about. If I sink to the earth’s core and burn to death in the molten magma, you and I are going to have a falling out.”

  “Let’s postpone this whole walking through walls and do something productive. Like breaking some laws.” Sabrina reached out and I accepted her hand with a sigh. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to help Madame Zorina and her new business venture, more that general good deeds seemed to be against the law and I always got caught. Always.

  We landed in a small back garden, tightly packed with pretty much every type of flower that existed and every one of them was in full bloom. The garden was maybe ten metres long and four wide, with a narrow path of irregular sized paving stones that wound from the open patio doors in a figure of eight shape around the garden. Some sections of the garden were raised, almost like rockeries, to add different levels and make the garden look more appealing, but it was a little difficult to make head or tail of the display when everywhere you looked was a kaleidoscope of colour. I didn’t get hay fever as a rule, but the mass of pollen in the air made my eyes water.

  “Wow.” Sabrina sneezed, then coughed, then sneezed again. She turned to me, eyes watering. “Let’s get inside before I die from pollen overdose.”

  I followed Sabrina up the path around the beautiful blooms. Just as we were about to escape the garden, Rebecca stepped out of the patio in a yellow summer dress and through Sabrina. Rebecca shivered and glanced over her shoulder while Sabrina fell to her knees, half inside the patio doors. I dragged her the rest of the way inside, ignoring her complaints. I was tempted to slam the door shut behind us but, as it slid closed sideways, I figured that might be a bit difficult to explain away as the wind.

  “I think I’m dying.” Sabrina lay curled up on the floor, her back to the door.

  I pulled my emergency chocolate bar from my pocket. “Give it a few more seconds and it’ll pass.”

  “No, Bridge, I really think—” Sabrina squinted one eye open.

  “Feel better?” I offered her the chocolate. That right there was a sign of true friendship.

  “Er, yeah. That was kind of weird.” Sabrina sat up and glanced around her. She unwrapped the chocolate bar and took a bite. It was the only thing I’d never seen her hesitate to eat. “What happened?”

  “When an alive person walks through you, it makes you super ill for about ten to fifteen seconds.”

  “No. Really? I’d never have guessed.” Sabrina took another bite of the chocolate bar and motioned with her hand for me to explain further.

  “Sorry. That’s all I have,” I said with a shrug. “I don’t know why or what exactly happens. And I have no idea why you think I would have any sort of helpful information. Or how, with your vast sources of information, you don't already know that?”

  “Somehow it’s never come up.” Sabrina grunted and pushed to her feet. “Anything else you want to tell me?”

  “Only that when you find your one true happy thought you can fly.”

  Sabrina paused, chocolate bar halfway to her mouth. “What?”

  “Can you guys not do that? Huh, maybe it’s just a facilitator thing.”

  “You guys can fly?” Sabrina’s face screwed up on the last word.

  “Yep, then it's past the second star on the right and straight on until morning.” I gestured in the air as though I was directing her. “And then you'll arrive in Never Never Land.”

  Sabrina frowned at me. “You do realise that Peter Pan was supposed to represent the Angel of Death and Never Never La
nd was Heaven?”

  I stared at her for a long moment. “No, I did not, but thank you for just ruining my childhood.”

  Sabrina laughed at my scowling face and turned to look out over the garden. “Which one of them is the gardener, do you think?”

  I nodded to Rebecca sitting at the patio table with a very large glass of red wine. “I hope for her sake it’s her because, if it’s not, that’s a mammoth amount of work to take on.”

  “Maybe she’ll just get it paved,” Sabrina mumbled.

  “Ooooh, you get grumpy when you’re ill,” I said, nudging her shoulder with my own.

  “I’m sorry, some woman just walked through me.” Sabrina slapped her chest while she spoke as if checking she was still solid. “What if she’d gotten stuck halfway through? Can we occupy the same space as a livie? I could’ve died.” She attacked the chocolate bar and scowled at me.

  “I don’t think you can get stuck.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “Er … because we both saw Edith step inside Porscha, Barry’s fiancée, remember? She walked away from that just fine.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe Edith got lucky that one time and managed to survive. It could work like Russian roulette. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “And you say I’m not adjusting to being dead. At least I don’t freak out over the smallest ghosty thing.”

  “A woman just walked through me.”

  I waved it away. “You get used to it.”

  “I doubt that,” Sabrina grumbled and looked at the last third of the chocolate bar. For a second I thought she was going to throw it away. I’d have seriously re-evaluated our friendship at that point. “Fine, Miss Oh-so-well-adjusted, let’s snoop and get out of here,” she said, then stuffed the last of it in her mouth, unaware of the friendship disaster she’d just averted.

  A four-seater table sat by the patio and a blue and white kitchen opened up behind it. The dining table wasn’t new but appeared well cared for. As did the bookcase filled with cookbooks to the right of the table.

  “What are we looking for?” I asked, crouching to check the bottom few shelves of books. Other than a penchant for Italian recipes, nothing stood out.