Lark went red. Clearly she hadn’t thought Audrey would notice her taking a sandwich from the fridge.
“I might like another,” said Lark, her blush deepening.
“Sure thing, you can make your own,” Audrey said, pointing to the fridge.
At Haunted Bluff, everyone had a job to do. My mom kept everything running smoothly while Meg oversaw all the new ghostly additions, did a lot of the decorating, and made sure that our current residents were well cared for and not running around scaring the townsfolk willy-nilly.
Meg’s daughters, my cousins, were in charge of helping Meg, but also of making sure the grounds kept their ambiance for the paying customers. It wasn’t enough that this place actually was a haunted house. No one would believe a haunted house that didn’t also look haunted. Luckily, Grandmother Cookie helped a lot with that effort just by being herself.
“How long are you going to stay this time?” my aunt asked.
I shrugged. I wasn’t ready to say I’d moved back home for good, because in my heart of hearts I told myself I might get to leave again. In my even deeper heart I didn’t believe I would, but I wasn’t going to say that out loud.
At least not yet.
“A while,” I said evasively.
“Good, you can help with what’s going on here . . .” Lark didn’t get a complete sentence out of her mouth before Pep delivered a sharp kick to her shins.
“Ouch,” cried Lark. She glared, but she also stopped talking.
“What was that about?” I asked, looking amongst the three of them.
“Oh, nothing,” said Audrey casually. “We’re just really glad you’re home. The SpookyBooSpectacular is coming up. It’s going to be a grand time.”
The three of them exchanged a significant look. Lark had most definitely not been talking about the big Spooky Event we had every year, but I knew I wasn’t going to get anything out of them right now. If I wanted to know what was really going on I’d have to get Lark alone, and given the determined expression on her older sister’s face and the fact that the Garbos didn’t believe in alone time, that was going to be a challenge.
“Is there anything we can help you with right now? Chocolate chip cookie-making, perhaps?” Pep asked Audrey.
My plump aunt laughed. “Don’t take me for a fool. I know you’re supposed to be cleaning the bowls. I’ll make cookies for you all later.” The bowls were the large pots we used to collect money every weekend, and cleaning them was a chore.
Pep brightened. “I can get through anything with your cookies!”
“I’ll make them faster with flattery,” my aunt confirmed.
“Aren’t you glad to be home?” Pep asked me, referring to the cookies. I nodded.
“Since you’re glad, do you want the good news first or the bad news?” said Lark, turning to me.
“Give her the good news first,” said Pep.
“Okay,” said Lark. “The good news is that the haunted house is more popular than ever. We get great reviews all the time.”
“Most of them reference how authentic the place is,” said Pep. “Go figure.”
“Shocking,” I said, picking up another cookie and munching on it.
“We’re doing really well,” said Lark.
Just then there came a banging on the window. Without missing a beat, Audrey grabbed a cloth, turned around, and like a fabulous baseball player chucked the cloth at the window.
Annoyed, the skeleton turned away.
“What’s the bad news?” I asked.
“You came home just in time for season opener,” said Pep with a big grin.
I groaned.
Chapter Five
We were closed during August, but otherwise the haunted house ran year-round. It was open four days a week leading up to Halloween, and I had come home just in time for the season to get into full swing. In other words, we were up and running with a vengeance. This was no time of year to mess around.
From the time I was little I had hated going into the haunted house by myself, and I never did so if I could help it. This might sound silly coming from a real witch, especially because over the years the ghosts and skeletons had often taken pity on the silly little witch I’d been, but I couldn’t help it. Haunted houses are scary!
“You’d think knowing that skeletons were real would make them less terrifying,” mused Lark as she nibbled another sandwich. Like everyone else in the house, Lark knew I was never thrilled with the haunted house.
“I’m not scared of them. It’s the darkness, the hay sticking out of the cracked walls, the echoes, and the spider webs that get me,” I shivered.
“It’s a good thing Kip and Corey like all that stuff so much,” said Pep, “because I want nothing to do with it.”
For the most part, the ghosts, vampires, le-haunts, and skeletons themselves kept the haunted house in tiptop shape. Whenever a customer was so afraid that he or she broke, smashed, or ruined something, usually someone fixed it before it became a big deal. Lark, Pep, and I found other ways to be useful around the Bluff, but at least we didn’t have to do much in the haunted house.
Only thing was, we weren’t allowed to go supernatural hunting. Yes, that’s right. My family gathered the ghosts from houses they were haunting, cemeteries they were ruining, and anywhere else they might have gotten to, and told them we’d give them loads of people to haunt without their having to search them out at all. The Garbos went to cemeteries and told all the skeletons milling about that they had something better for them to do. There was the occasional trouble with a skeleton who was having a little too much fun preying on the living, but for the most part even the stubborn ones were fetched back to Haunted Bluff Mansion without much difficulty.
“Oh, did you hear about the flying ghost bats? That was funny.” Pep keeled backwards giggling.
“They were attacking the back wing of the mansion, but they couldn’t do any damage, because they’re ghosts,” Lark explained.
“They’d need someone to pour water on them,” I mused.
Lark and Pep, who had busied themselves getting tableware out for dinner, went white. It was a little known fact that water solidified ghosts for a short period of time. For that reason, ghosts became all the more dangerous in the rain.
Most ghosts didn’t know this about themselves (because it wasn’t as if they’d been offered ghosts histories and life lessons while they were still living humans), and we tried to cycle ghosts in and out of the mansion relatively quickly so they couldn’t chat with each other long enough to find out. A ghost uprising was my mother’s biggest fear.
“The full moon makes it worse too,” Pep pointed out. “That’s another layer.”
“Right, I forgot,” I said. The haunted house was at its most dangerous during the full moon. Whenever the full moon was due, my mom would get into a dither about whether to close the house if rain was forecast. She was afraid the ghosts would become unmanageably rambunctious if given that golden opportunity.
“Anyway, live bats saw the ghost bats and got very upset,” laughed Lark. “They were flying through the air one minute and flying into ghosts the next.”
I shook my head. “The poor bats.”
“How about you three help me make dinner?” Audrey broke in suddenly. “You can save your chores and work on them tomorrow.”
We were all happy enough to drop the chores for today and help Audrey make a delicious meal.
It took a lot to keep the family business up and running, and we all had a lot to do at the best of times. Kip, Corey, Cam, and Lizzie were around to help my mom and Meg run the place, and yes, I intentionally didn’t include Cookie on that list, though she did help in her own fashion by pretending to brew her potion on the front lawn. A little known fact was that customers thought she was muttering potion ingredients as she stood out there stirring, but she was really muttering curses on the guests.
Luckily, the curses weren’t real. At least as far as we knew.
“I have
to work in the gift shop tonight, but I’ll be at dinner for sure, at least for a little while,” said Pep, who had taken over the Haunted Bluff gift shop from Cookie to the great relief of the family, the paying customers, and all future paying customers, because we actually needed to sell gift items and customers actually wanted to buy them. All Cookie had done for her past few years in the gift shop was to yell at happy couples and groups of excited friends who had arrived looking forward to an entertaining haunted house.
“She’s much better as a front lawn decoration,” I said of our grandmother.
“Yes, now when she does something offensive they think she’s in character,” sighed Pep. “It’s a good disguise that way.”
“They think she’s just acting like a witch, when in reality . . .” I let that hang there until we all burst out laughing.
“How’s Taft?” I asked.
My great-uncle had gone crazy a few years ago, announcing one day that he believed there was a conspiracy among the vampires for world domination. He kept warning us of that fact, saying it was only a matter of time. He would run around the house changing all the clocks and having sword fights with the air, apparently preparing for the great final battle.
“He’s the same,” said Pep carefully. “He’s around here somewhere, though he doesn’t show himself as often as he used to. Mom was worried about him for a while, but she’s gotten over it. He’s made great friends with all the new ghosts and they watch out for him when they can. Even the skeletons seem to like him. Cookie tried to help him get lost and never return, but he found his way back. Now Cookie’s banned from ‘helping’ any of us.”
I shook my head. There were no words. “I wish the skeletons would warm to Cookie like they’ve warmed to Uncle Taft.”
“Cookie is lacking a witchy warmth, a . . . basic humanity, shall we say . . . that Uncle Taft is not,” Pep observed.
“I suppose Cookie wouldn’t be Cookie if she weren’t causing trouble,” I said.
“You could say that for anyone in the family,” said Lark with a grin. “It’s a wonder we hold this place together.”
“Anything else been going on?” I wondered.
Lark and Pep both fell silent again. In fact, their guilty faces had returned, while Audrey scrubbed ever harder at the sweet potatoes. I knew very well that they were holding something back, but I couldn’t figure out what could be so bad that they wouldn’t just tell me.
“Everything is good! We’re glad you’re back,” said Pep brightly.
“Yeah, well, I tried not to come back. I got fired from a lot of jobs. I would have preferred to keep working at the law office to coming back here, so you can see how desperate I was to stay away. But even those crooks fired me in the end.”
“We understand that you didn’t necessarily want to embrace the whole haunted house thing again, but you’re here now, and I’m sure you’re going to make the best of it,” said Lark. “And anyhow, I’m so glad to have you back!”
“You could get a nose ring. I bet that would make you feel better,” said Pep.
“You’re only saying that because your mom and mine would be mortified,” I said.
“Yes, their mortification is why you should feel better,” grinned Pep. “It certainly helped me.”
All this talk of welcoming me home reminded me that something was missing, and suddenly I realized what it was.
“Where’s Rose, anyway?” I asked.
Rose was the best cat in the history of best cats. She was snow white with bright blue eyes and a bushy and judgmental tail.
“Probably out killing something,” said Lark. “Hopefully mice. We’ve had to talk to her about the mice, actually. We need some left alive for the sake of haunted house authenticity, but she seems determined to kill every single one single-paw-edly. I think she’s laughing at your mom’s declaration that if we only have one cat, some of the mice will survive.”
“She’s not eating all of them, either. No, sometimes she’s just bored,” said Pep, shaking her head. “It’s not really sanitary.”
“Cats are plenty sanitary and Rose is the best.” I decided there and then to go find her before dinner and say hi.
Ghosts are a more supernatural white than the cat, but ever since we’d gotten Rose, some of them had mistaken her for one of them and tried to get her to do things she couldn’t, like fly or go through walls. In the end she just yelled at them, explaining that her white fur was real, whereas nothing about a ghost was real, and if they didn’t stop it she’d get really mad.
No one wanted to see Rose mad, though the mice no doubt minded more than the ghosts.
“Remember when you first got Rose?” Lark said.
I rolled my eyes. “It took so much to convince Mom to get a cat.” Rose had showed up as a stray, and Mom didn’t want to keep her. “She was worried about the fact that Rose was white, but black would have been worse. Black cats spell doom, at least people think so.”
“But a white cat does look spooky darting across the fields at night. It really is like she’s a ghost,” Lark shivered. “I wish I could be a ghost and scare people.”
“Rose would probably say she doesn’t need to be a ghost to scare people,” Pep said.
“That’s one of the good things about coming back,” I said. “There was no room for me to have a cat in New York. Now I have Rose again.”
At that point the conversation was diverted by the fact that dinner was ready.
It was time to face the music: the whole family together.
Chapter Six
Dinner with all the family present could only be described as stress-inducing. Historically I had tried to avoid it by eating early, eating late, or not eating at all. Anything, really, to skip out on Cookie’s orders and my mother spinning on about work.
My sneaky mother had taken the opportunity of my return to the Bluff to insist that we all have a celebratory meal. Lark, Pep, and I thought it was unnecessary punishment on top of the simple fact of my return, but it really wasn’t avoidable.
At least Audrey’s delicious food was some compensation.
At dinner that night were my grandmother Cookie, my great-uncle Taft, Kip and Corey, and my younger brother, not to mention my mom and my two aunts. Lizzie, Lark, Pep and I rounded out the gathering.
When I greeted Uncle Taft, he peered at me and asked if I was from the 1920s or the 1930s. I told him I was from a totally different century, and that really blew his mind. He was in an old white and red dress uniform, complete with an eyeglass and a sword hanging at his side.
“How are the ghosts settling in, Meg?” Lizzie asked immediately.
Lark and Pep could barely contain their annoyance.
Meg loved to talk about work and Lizzie loved to ingratiate herself.
After a long day, Meg had changed into a red, flowing dress. Real fire danced along the hem. My mother hated that Meg used enchantments on her clothing. Meg did it more once she found that out.
“They’re settling in nicely in one of the back fields,” said Meg. “They really like the upper floor of the haunted house, so hopefully they can work up there until they’re feeling more at home.”
“And how is your work going?” Lizzie turned to Pep.
Pep enjoyed running the gift shop, and business had been great since she took over. She was born to work with customers and she was great at selling. Still, we’d had an issue recently with a skeleton getting loose and smashing up some of the glass trinkets in the store, and Pep had had to spend a week cleaning up and doing inventory, with all her other work delayed in the meantime. I could see all these thoughts and one more, pure annoyance, flash across her face and disappear in the span of a second.
“It’s going well. I think sales will be brisk this weekend,” she said in a stubborn monotone.
This weekend was known as the soft opening, while next weekend was the extravaganza known as the SpookyBooSpectacular. We had a long tradition of offering a quiet opening weekend to get all the k
inks worked out. Then we really kicked things up a notch the following weekend. Now that the haunted house was so well known, there was a lot of pressure to make the big weekend spectacular.
“Of course they will be,” Lizzie smirked.
“What will you be doing this weekend?” I asked her.
Pep gave me a grateful look. I thought it was a perfectly innocent question, but apparently it wasn’t. The entire table fell silent, including Lizzie, who loved any opportunity to make me feel inferior.
After a beat of silence, Lizzie brushed off my question entirely, intent on making a show of leaving me in suspense. “Oh, you know. The usual.”
“No, I don’t know the usual, because I haven’t been living here,” I replied. “Which is why you took my room.”
I saw my mother’s eyes close in rising consternation, but I didn’t care.
Lizzie’s expression now changed to one of delight. She had been looking to me for a sign that I was upset about the room, and now I had given it to her. Silently cursing myself, I waited for her response. “It’s just such a nice room,” she said yet again.
“Have you heard any strange sounds?” Lark asked.
“In my room?” Lizzie asked, her face paling.
“Maybe, I can’t really remember where I heard them.” Lark tapped her mouth, pretending to think. “But it was most definitely when I was passing Jane’s old door.”
“I’ve heard funny sounds too, but this is a haunted house,” her mother chided her. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”
We all ate in silence for a few minutes, then Cookie said sarcastically, “I’m so glad we could all get together as a family.”
“Would you rather be eating alone?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“You’re welcome to leave,” Lark offered.
“My daughters-in-law made me come,” she grumbled. “Besides, I’m old. If anyone’s going to leave it’s going to be the rest of you.”
“Where should we have dinner, if not right here?” I asked.
“Maybe one of the barns,” said Cookie after a moment of thought. “That’s far away.”
Spooky Business (Jane Garbo Mysteries Book 1) Page 4
