Under the Cheaters Table

by Etta Faire

  Under the Cheater’s Table

  Etta Faire

  Copyright © 2018 by Etta Faire

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Website: http://ettafaire.com/

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  32. Inside the Executive’s Pocket

  Chapter 1

  Winehouses

  I was the only one who tried to talk Shelby Winehouse out of marrying her awful first husband twelve years ago when she announced her engagement at one of her makeup parties.

  Okay, so technically, I just sat on the old floral couch in her parents’ living room, quietly scanning the five-page order form, searching for an eyeliner under fifteen bucks (there wasn’t one). But I made sure to shift my gaze downward a lot whenever she’d talk about her boyfriend. And that should’ve been a tipoff.

  I would’ve done more, but at the time, I didn’t really know her. Shelby was just the pregnant girlfriend of the route driver who serviced the Thriftway when I worked there in college. I’d just moved out of the dorms, so when the root beer guy came in one day and shoved an invitation into my hands, I jumped on it.

  “My girlfriend’s having a makeup party,” Peter said, practically grunting.

  I remember staring at the brightly colored card and then back up at the humungous oaf of a man, wondering just what the hell kind of unibrowed girlfriend he was going to have. But I was torn between two men at the time (one being my dead ex-husband, and the other my now-boyfriend), so I wanted to get away from both and meet some new people.

  The route driver wasn’t for Shelby. I tried to tell her that with my strategically timed gazes all evening. I tried to tell her about her second husband, Roy, too. That time, I actually said things out loud.

  “His name’s Roy? C’mon. That’s not a real-person’s name anymore. That’s the name you tell people is your name after you’ve exhausted every other real-person name. He’s obviously been on the run for a while. Either that, or he’s a 90-year-old cowboy.”

  “You’re too funny,” Shelby said, patting her pregnancy. She was on her third kid at the time, which turned into twins. And I had been right about the fake name. Roy left without a forwarding address, probably goes by John Wayne now.

  But, I honestly thought Bobby Franklin had been the one, even though he had always been a ne’er-do-well that I didn’t really like. He was good to Shelby.

  The grandfather clock in the Winehouse’s living room ticked rhythmically in the background, reminding me what an annoying bastard time was. Almost two months had passed since Bobby and his brothers disappeared and there was still no sign of them. But, like the two husbands before him, he was allowed to leave.

  I set the cardboard box I was carrying next to the others, in a pile by the faded floral couch, and pulled my curls up into a bun. It did nothing to cool me off. Mrs. Winehouse liked her house more like the Florida Keys in August instead of Wisconsin in March.

  The smell of bleach took over my senses because, for some odd reason, most people in Potter Grove treated ordinary spills like crime scenes. And Shelby’s kids apparently caused massacres.

  Shelby was right behind me. Her hair was pinker today, her makeup extra thick, and she had a new black rose tattoo circling one of her wrists. She told me once a long time ago that she liked to “play with her looks” when she was nervous. Her fiancé was missing and she was moving back in with her parents. It’s a wonder that girl looked anything like herself.

  Mrs Winehouse moseyed in from the kitchen, a sponge in one hand, Bobby Junior in the other. The baby wouldn’t be a year until July, but he took up most of Mrs. Winehouse’s hip and seemed to be glaring at the old bulldog laying lazily in the corner like he wished Wisconsin had a Stand Your Ground law he could fudge.

  “Take the boxes upstairs before your dad gets back with the boys, okay?” she said to Shelby while scanning the room, probably looking for something else to bleach.

  Shelby shuffled over to the stairs, staring off into space like she wasn’t really there.

  “You okay,” I whispered as we took the boxes up to her room.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Don’t worry. He’ll come back.”

  “I don’t know about that,” she said, pointing me to the room down the hall. It was painted pale pink with black accents. Photos of Shelby in various majorette uniforms from high school sat on her desk. In one, she was twirling a flaming baton in front of a judge’s stand. In another, she had red-white-and-blue streamers attached to the ends of her baton. Somehow, I still couldn’t picture it.

  “I never told anyone this,” she said, closing the door behind us. She rummaged through one of the boxes as she talked. “Bobby and I had both been saving for our wedding, stuffing whatever extra money we could into the mattress of our bed. After he left, I checked for that money.”

  I turned my gaze downward. Oh God, another Roy. “At least you didn’t marry him this time,” I said.

  She pulled something tiny and furry out of the box and held it out. It barely took up any space along her palm. “Instead of money, I found this.”

  It was instantly familiar. One of the signs in the scrapbook I’d found in the basement. Some sort of an animal’s foot with white fur, and long yellowed claws protruding out from its three toes.

  I realized my lip was curled and I hadn’t reached out to take the taxidermied foot from her even though she was still holding it out for me.

  “It’s a grouse pin,” she said. “I looked it up.”

  Somehow I got myself to take the bony, weird thing with a surprisingly cute silver toe ring on its middle digit, the initials BFF engraved into the metal with a heart.

  “Worst Best Friends Forever pin ever,” I said, plopping down on her black comforter. She sat down next to me and smoothed out the wrinkles on her 60’s-looking capris.

  “BFF isn’t for best friends forever, or at least I don’t think it is. It’s Bobby Furgus Franklin. I also read it’s a Scottish thing, these grouse pins. They used to wear them when they went hunting. And people also gave them to their significant others when they’d go on a long trip, as a way to remember each other.”

  “Awww. I knew it had to be romantic,” I said, leaning into her, trying to get her to smile. “I need to take this to Justin. Why didn’t you show the police this earlier?”

  She shrugged. “I guess I didn’t want people to know for sure that Shelby Winehouse had been stupid once again. I mean, everybody already knew it. I knew it. But the missing money and this grouse pin with his initials on it, it was like a ha-ha added onto the way thin
gs ended for us. And I didn’t want people to talk about it and pity me, the stupid woman with five kids and no husband or savings, living out of her parents’ house.” She put her head in her hands. “I honestly thought he loved me.”

  I put an arm around her bony shoulder. I knew how this town operated, and she was right. They would’ve pounced on that part of the story. But, I honestly saw it as a positive sign. “I don’t think this was meant as a ha-ha. I think it’s an IOU. One of those ‘we’re not through yet. Here’s a tiny, severed foot to prove it’ moments.”

  This made her smile. I had no idea what the severed foot actually meant. All I knew was that Bobby and his two brothers were bear shapeshifters that no one had seen for more than a month. Or at least, I hoped not.

  Last month, three bear skins had been strung up behind the barber shop. No one knew why or who’d done it. And to make matters weirder, bear skins were in one of the photos on the page in my scrapbook marked “Signs,” right next to the foot I now knew was a grouse pin.

  Of course, Shelby didn’t know her boyfriend was a shapeshifter or that his brothers (and her baby) probably were too. And she always looked at me like I was crazy when I worried about those bear skins.

  But we had the “dating a bear shifter” thing in common. I recently discovered Justin was one too. And when you’re dating a bear and you see bear skins strung up in your town for no reason, you have to think maybe somebody’s trying to tell your bear shifter something.

  Thing was, even if Justin knew, he wasn’t sharing that with me.

  “How much money did Bobby take?” I asked my friend who was still staring off into space.

  “Probably around three thousand.”

  “You had three thousand dollars stashed in your mattress? Are you crazy?”

  “You know I don’t trust banks. They steal your money.”

  I resisted the urge to point out the irony here. But at least it explained why Bobby’s debit card hadn’t been used, something I only knew because Mrs. Carmichael told me, not my police officer boyfriend.

  I slipped the foot into the pocket of my skinny jeans and headed downstairs when I stopped midway down. Something was walking with me, close enough for the hairs on my arm to stand on end, but not close enough to touch me. It was like a heavy coldness right by my side, hard to ignore, but I tried.

  Ever since I moved back to Potter Grove last summer, strange things had been happening to me. The strangest was my strong mediumship abilities, which I’d never had before. But ghosts were coming out of the woodwork to communicate with me now. So naturally, I’d started taking on their cold cases, helping the dead to solve their murders so they could move on with their after-lives.

  The thing that was following me here seemed different, though.

  The front door opened and the sound of four rowdy kids arriving home with their grandpa took over my senses, indicating my time to go.

  “Staying for dinner,” Mr. Winehouse asked when he followed the kids in and saw me coming down the stairs. He was a tall man in his 60s with a ruddy, weathered complexion and reddish gray hair. He took his firefighter jacket off to reveal a t-shirt with the same logo.

  I shook my head no. “Can’t. I have plans.” I was lying. I just had a rule about eating with kids: I tried not to do it.

  I loved kids, but I didn’t grow up with siblings, and I didn’t have children yet. So, maybe I was being snobbish about the whole thing, but I liked to eat dinner without someone opening their mouth to show their already-chewed food because someone else farted.

  When I went to leave, Mrs. Winehouse pulled me to the side by her husband at the front door and lowered her voice. “I’m real worried about Shelbs. She’s usually our trooper. Even when she was a single mom with the four boys, she’d rather have worked three jobs than move back in with us. Isn’t that right, Ryan?”

  “Yep, but don’t get us wrong, we love it,” Mr. Winehouse quickly added, looking over at Shelby who was holding the baby while staring aimlessly off at the ceiling while three of her kids ran around her in a circle, the oldest filming it on his phone. “But we’re worried.”

  Mrs. Winehouse continued. “Has Justin mentioned anything? Are there any leads on Bobby yet?”

  “Not that I know of,” I said. I didn’t tell her the part where nobody was really looking. Shelby had given Bobby an ultimatum when his brothers’ Christmas visit lasted until almost February, and Bobby was allowed to take the or-else option.

  “They haven’t given up yet,” I said, because, apparently, lies are like potato chips for me.

  She nervously cracked her fingers as she talked. “We need to find Bobby, one way or the other. It’s this not-knowing thing that’s killing Shelby.”

  Shelby did look like she was dying, but I didn’t think it was the not-knowing part that was doing it to her. I maneuvered my way through the circling children and hugged the cadaver good-bye. She barely looked at me.

  The cold feeling that had followed me down the stairs suddenly shot over my entire body, making me gasp for air. I searched the room, but didn’t see anything. Was it Bobby? Had he passed? Was he making contact? I shook the feeling off, refusing to believe it until a painful chill crawled up my spine and across my chest. Someone was riding on me, and unlike every other ghost I’d ever encountered, this one wanted me to know about it.

  I concentrated on each step as I trudged over to the front door, my breathing labored.

  “You okay?’ Mr. Winehouse asked, watching me with a raised eyebrow, his first-responder instincts probably kicking in.

  I nodded that I was fine, even though I wasn’t sure. I’d never experienced anything like it before.

  Chapter 2

  Turning Points

  I stumbled through my kitchen door. It felt like every cell in my body had been forced to carry a tiny five-pound weight, and it was pretty apparent we were all seriously out of shape. But I somehow managed to make it to my living room where I sunk into the soft crimson fabric of the settee.

  The room spun a little when I tried to focus on anything too hard, especially the damask wallpaper. I avoided that, mostly because it made me sick anyway.

  The sound of an excited dog’s nails clattered along the hardwood, but I was afraid I’d throw up if I turned toward the noise.

  My dead ex-husband appeared beside me. He was bright today, full-color almost. I could see every hair on his beard and pockmark in the leather of his jacket’s elbow patches. “And just when I was telling the other ghosts how well you were aging,” he said, “the old person in you had to come out and prove me wrong.”

  I closed my eyes but I could still tell the annoying man was hovering right by my face.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Fine.”

  “I would say you’re cute when you lie, but I’d be lying,” he said. “The upside to that, of course, is that I’m an adorable liar.”

  I scrunched my already-closed eyes up tighter, which made my head hurt. But I was in no mood for my ex. Rex licked my hand and I smiled, instantly regretting it because it made me realize my mouth-muscles hurt too.

  Then, as suddenly as it came on, the chilling, nauseating feeling travelled across my body in a gust that started at my toes and ended through my sinuses like it had taken a flying leap out.

  It was gone. I bolted up, relieved. “I feel better now,” I said, moving my neck around with ease.

  “I bet.” Jackson pointed to the middle of the living room where a tall, darkened ghost hovered in front of us. I looked the apparition over. It really didn’t have much detail or form to it, just a weird dark mist-looking thing that I wasn’t even sure had ever been human.

  Rex barked uncontrollably at it.

  “It’s okay, boy,” I said, stroking his back to calm him down. He was tense, his fur stiff. “What are you, and what do you want,” I asked the thing in the room.

  I threw my ex-husband a look. Ghosts were supposed to follow a certain protocol if they wanted my hel
p, which included Jackson vetting and approving them. And part of Jackson’s job was making sure they followed the rules.

  “Sorry, Carly,” Jackson said, moving between us, glaring at the spirit. “If you’ve heard of Carly’s abilities then you know how this business is run. All clients must meet with my approval first. No exceptions.”

  The thing hovered closer to my ex. I knew from past experiences that if spirits got too close to one another, they repelled each other like the polar opposites of magnets. It didn’t happen this time.

  It made a low, almost humming noise, and I wasn’t sure what to do or expect, so I backed away, thinking about the bundles of sage I always kept in the top drawer of my credenza. Even burning a little of it seemed to get a ghost to leave, if only momentarily. I turned to get it, but heard something in the humming noise. There was a voice in there.

  “I need your help,” it said through mostly low-pitched vibrations.

  Jackson must have heard it too. He answered. “I’m very sorry. But we have a long list of clients already waiting. You’ll have to get in line to be interviewed about your intentions. You must follow the rules.”

  “I’m about to turn,” the voice said, over and over. “Need your help fast.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked my ex.

  “I think it’s trying to tell you it wants to skip the line because it doesn’t have time to wait. Its energy is transforming from a ghost to something else,” Jackson said.

  “What the hell else is there?”

  “Darker energy. People sometimes mistakenly call them demons or poltergeists.”