by Alex A King
“Did you argue?”
“About what? There was nowt to argue about. She’d come over, we’d shag, she’d go home again.”
“So she had no reason to want you dead?”
“She wasn’t going to inherit nowt, was she? Now you leave her alone. She’s got nowt to do with any of this.”
Was it just me or was he putting too much effort into his protest? All that did was amp up my curiosity.
I grabbed my things. “If you say so.”
“Where are you going then? You leave Eleni alone.”
I wiggled my fingers. “Ta-ta, old chap.”
On that cheerful note I slipped into the hallway and locked the door. What I needed was a shower, clean clothes, and a nap. But this couldn’t wait. The sooner I booted Roger Wilson toward the light, the better off my life would be. Then I could deal with the poltergeist.
“Psst!”
I leaped out my skin. When my central nervous system quit freaking out—no dinosaurs, no lions, no imminent quicksand—my gaze cut sideways. Sitting next to Lydia’s door was a big cardboard box, with a pair of air holes punched into the side. A groan popped out of my mouth. “What do you want?”
Jimmy Kontos’s voice filtered out. “Is she home?”
“Lydia?”
“Don’t say her name!”
“Why are you in a box?”
“Why do you think I’m in a box?”
“Because you’re weird and creepy?”
“I didn’t think about that,” he said morosely. “Is it too much?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t even know what I’m trying to do!”
There wasn’t enough alcohol in my life for this. “Yia sou,” I said, throwing the dismissive goodbye over one shoulder.
“Wait!”
I took several steps back until I was level with the box. “What?”
“Knock on her door. I can’t reach.”
“Be honest: can you reach anything?”
The box jumped. “You can’t feel it but I’m kicking you.”
“Violence really inspires me to do nothing.”
“Fine.” His arm snaked out from between the flaps. The limb was encased in plushy brown fabric that brought to mind puppies and cute farm animals.
I grabbed his furry forearm. “What are you wearing? Are you dressed like an animal? Please tell me you’re not dressed up as an animal.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Let me go!”
Apartment 202’s door opened a crack. Lydia was there wearing yesterday’s makeup and last night’s fuzzy pajamas. Her eyebrow arched. Just the one.
“Could be a bomb,” I said, indicating the box which was suddenly still. Jimmy’s plushie arm had vanished.
“You should call the police,” Lydia said.
“I was thinking pest control.”
There were no van-driving folks spraying chemicals on crowds of ants. Pest control on the island was anyone with a fly swatter.
“Stink bomb.”
She made a face identical to the face I was making. “I was hoping it was the souvlaki delivery man I ordered.”
“You ordered souvlaki? Not from Crusty Dimitri’s, I hope.”
“No—just the man.”
A small noise squeaked out of the box. I covered it up with a hacking cough.
“I should go before this starts to stink,” I said.
The door closed. Lydia vanished. Now it was just me and the shrimp in the fur suit. Not to judge real furries. At least those guys had conviction. Jimmy was just a weirdo in a costume.
I crouched down and pushed the box over to my apartment, unlocked the door, shoved it inside.
“Out of the box,” I said.
The cardboard shimmied and shook. “Gamo ton kerato sou,” Jimmy said.
Screw your horn. Greeks love sticking horns in holes where horns don’t belong.
“Do you kiss your reflection with that mouth?”
“I think I’m stuck.”
“How can you be stuck? You’re the size of a breadbox.”
Roger Wilson seized the opportunity to stick his beak in. “What is that?”
“None of your business,” I muttered.
Jimmy squirmed. His tiny arm popped out, middle finger waving the unofficial Greek flag.
“Help me,” he said. “Help me and I’ll never insult you again. At least not until the next time.”
It wasn’t easy, but I managed to locate his armpits under all the fur. With an almighty yank, he popped out.
“You’re a pair of bloody clowns, that’s what you two are. Balls. Two hairy balls.” Roger Wilson had lots of opinions and they were all stupid.
Jimmy scrambled to his feet. He was encased in brown fur from head to toe. The mask covered his whole head. It had a pointed nose, whiskers, and a lolling pink tongue.
“What are you?” I asked him.
“Puppy. Women love puppies.”
“So you were hoping Lydia would open the box and completely fail to notice that you’re a nanos in a puppy costume?”
The ghost in the salt circle cackled. “It’s worse than I thought. He’s a sodding loser. And look at him, he’s barely a man.”
“At least he’s alive,” I muttered.
Jimmy shook his head at me. “You need a head doctor because there’s something wrong with you.”
“I’m not the one dressing up like a dog to get a woman’s attention.”
His face fell—what I could see of it anyway. There was an overabundance of beard going on and it hid everything from the nostrils down. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Just ask her out. It’s that simple. Either she’ll say no or she won’t.”
“Maybe she has a weird midget fetish,” Roger Wilson said. “She’d have to, wouldn’t she, to shag that one.”
I moved so I couldn’t see him over the back of Jimmy’s head. La-la-la … Roger Wilson did not exist.
“She’d never say yes,” Jimmy said. “I’m too successful. It’s intimidating to women.”
“Wrong. It’s because he’s a sodding midget,” the dead man crowed.
My eye twitched. “Lydia doesn’t strike me as someone who is easily intimidated. I don’t think she has inhibitions.” Or standards.
Jimmy tucked his mask under one arm. “Can I climb out your window? I don’t want her to see me like this.”
“You know I don’t have a basket to lower you down, right?”
“No problem. The bushes will catch me.”
On that pathetic note, he raised the living room window and boosted himself out. He dangled for a moment, gripping the ledge, then he unhooked his fingers and fell.
I peered out.
“I’m fine,” he called out.
“He’s as daft as a brush,” Roger Wilson said. ”Go on then and make this circle bigger. I’d be as happy as a dog with two dicks if I could get a gander at that tiny bellend in the bushes.”
Chapter Eleven
“Still fine,” Jimmy said when I emerged from the lobby, wheeling my bicycle. “Although there are leaves stuck to my kolos.”
“Ewok problems.”
I didn’t need a rearview mirror on my bicycle to know he was flipping me off.
I arrived at the hospital minutes later, hoping I wouldn’t need to lie my way into Kyria Fasoula’s room. Constable Pappas was still stationed outside. Today he was slouched down in the chair, playing a game on his phone.
“Can I see her?”
He didn’t look up. “Uh-huh.”
“Will Leo be okay with that?”
“Uh-huh. He’s done questioning her. I’m just here in case the attacker comes back for another round.”
I slipped into the room. Kyria Fasoula had her crochet, and the television was blaring Greek soap operas from high on the wall. Greek soaps make Latin America’s telenovelas look like a laidback snooze fest.
“What are you doing?” I asked. Her black and blue face hadn’t yet begun to change colors like au
tumn leaves.
“Watching my stories. What do you want?”
“Nothing really.” I helped myself to one of the faux leather chairs. It farted once and then yielded until my backside was this close to touching metal. “Did you kill Roger Wilson?”
The hooking stopped. The yarn fell into her lap. “Why would you ask that?”
“Because he’s dead and you were his married lover?”
She retrieved the yarn. It took her several moments to pick up where she’d left off. “Maybe it was my husband.”
“Maybe. But I don’t think so.”
“It was not me.”
“Your husband said you were in the outhouse crocheting at the time of Kyrios Wilson’s death.”
“I spend a lot of time in the outhouse, that way I do not have to see my husband’s face. It is old and ugly and he does this when he looks at me.” She made a face like she was sniffing poop. “Also he has this terrible habit of picking his nose with his pinkie nail and flicking it in to the yard.”
Yikes. That alone would be a divorce-able offense.
“How was your relationship?”
“Terrible. That is why I want to divorce him.”
“I meant with Kyrios Wilson.”
“Then you should have said so. How is any relationship? It had ups. It had downs. It had a lot of up and downs, sometimes twice a day.”
My brain recoiled. My stomach lurched. Bumping uglies is perfectly natural but no one—least of all me—wanted to imagine someone as obnoxious as Roger Wilson waving his floppy man-wand around.
“I’m more interested in the downs,” I said.
She eyed me with a pinch of suspicion. “Why do you care? You are not the police. You only want to know my business so you can sell the information.”
Ouch. “That’s not what I do.”
As I watched, she tried to raise an eyebrow. The swelling made it impossible and painful, so she quit trying. “Oh really? Then why are you here with your mouthful of questions?”
“Detective Samaras thinks Kyrios Wilson’s death was nothing more ominous than a heart attack. I don’t think it was. So he told me to sally forth and investigate.”
Time moved on. Oceans rose and fell. Deserts evolved into lush forests filled with cute critters that became lunch for bigger, also cute predators. Those forests devolved into deserts again. Keith Richards alone prevailed through the eons.
Eventually, Kyria Fasoula spoke again.
“You will not find his murderer. There is no one to find.”
“Where there’s a murder there’s a murderer. That’s how murder goes.”
She looked left. She looked right. She looked at me.
“I do not know who attacked me for one very good reason: because it was nobody.”
“Nobody?”
“Nobody.”
“Was it an accident? On your way back from pilfering a souvenir from Kyrios Wilson’s house you tripped and punched an olive tree with your face?”
“It was not a tree. It was not anything. One minute I was walking, the next something that was not there came out of the darkness and punched me in the face until I was almost kaput. If Roger was murdered, it was the nothing that did it, I swear on the Virgin Mary’s life. Everybody loved him. Well, not everybody. Or anybody.” There was a long thoughtful silence. “Maybe his mama did, once.”
The Virgin Mary was long dead so Kyria Fasoula’s promise had the heft of wind. But I believed that she believed a big nothing leaped out of the bushes and accosted her. What I didn’t understand was why.
“Why would this nothing attack you and kill Kyrios Wilson?”
“Maybe it was a Turkish nothing,” she said. “Or French.”
There was only one nothing stalking Merope—more specifically, stalking me. And that nothing was something. In my experience the poltergeist was irritating, bordering on annoying, but mostly benign.
Although there was the whole flying pot thing at the Cake Emporium. What if there was more than one?
Betty called. “Just the one, luv,” she said.
One of these days I’d get used to her mind-reading, but not today.
“How do you know?” I winced. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. You’d have to get up early to offend me. I can’t normally read a spirit, but this poltergeist of yours has worked themselves up into a real lather,. I can’t help catching glimpses of all that anger.”
“Could it have killed Roger Wilson?”
“I suppose anything is possible, but I don’t see how in this instance. If his head was smashed in, maybe, but a heart attack?”
With my mind on spin, processing and sorting the new information, I zipped back home.
“You’re back,” Roger Wilson said like an exhausted stay-at-home mother whose husband was arriving home late after drinks with his coworkers for the umpteenth time.
Unlike those husbands, I had zero responsibilities toward the ghost in the salt circle.
“It was inevitable,” I said, “because I live here. Unlike you, who doesn’t live anywhere.”
He ignored my snark. “So? Did you get anything useful for a change?”
“Annoyed.”
“You don’t have to be a sodding bitch about it, do you then?”
“Keep it up and I’ll make the circle smaller.
He went quiet again. I used the silence to go on a manhunt for Angela, hunting for past transgressions that hadn’t been reported to the authorities. I combed through his social media. Mostly pictures of his castles and a strong preference for cats and coffee.
Nothing. Nothing. A lot more nothing. Apart from his penchant for tiny castles, Sir Teddy Duckworth’s past seemed to be cleaner than a Greek widow’s front yard after the twice-daily sweeping and hosing ritual. (Part of the reason I lived in an apartment was so I wouldn’t have to sweep and hose—although I had noticed I enjoyed swirling water around my kitchen sink for longer than necessary.)
I looked at Sir Duckworth’s photo. His face was nice. Pleasant. He had a face like chicken soup. Appealing not because his features were attractive but because he lacked non-attractive features. If anyone else had made the request, I would have stopped there. No red flags. Not even debt. Except I knew Angela and her terrible taste in men. If she liked this guy he had to be hiding something. Maybe overdue library books from his childhood.
“You know what’s weird?” I said to Roger Wilson.
“No, but from the look on your face I bet you’re about to tell me.”
“Leave the smart-assery to those of us who are still alive. What’s weird is that you haven’t asked how your girlfriend is.”
“She’s fine. You told me yourself that she’s in the local hospital.”
“That’s not normal,” I said. “You should still ask. That’s what decent people do.”
“Did you ask your sister about her husband’s thumb?”
Yikes. He had me there. I snatched up my phone and called Toula.
“It’s just a broken thumb,” she said, “but the way he’s acting you’d think he’d lost an arm. What about you?”
“My thumb is fine.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it. I’m talking about what happened in your apartment. Did they catch the vandal?”
“I don’t think the vandal is exactly someone who can be cuffed and stuffed into a cell.”
Overhead, the floor creaked. Leo was home and working out. Either that or Jimmy had swapped his knee-high UGGs for lead boots.
“What does that mean?” Toula asked.
“Are you sure you want me to answer that?”
She thought about it for a moment. “No.”
“Even though Milos and Patra are like me?”
“They’re not like you,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with them that can’t be fixed.”
Ouch. That stung. “There’s nothing wrong with them—period. So do them a favor and don’t even hint that their ability to see ghosts is wrong or weird or
in any negative way.”
“Are you calling me a bad mother?”
“What? No!”
“First you fling your ankles behind your ears and steal my boyfriend, and now you’re trying to take control of my children?”
“Wait, what?”
Silence.
She’d ended the call.
Chapter Twelve
I fled across the street searching for coffee and sugar. What I found was Merope’s Best. Their coffee was barely coffee, and I suspected the sugar was sugar’s sad cousin, one of those artificial sweeteners hotly debated as cancer’s favorite snack.
That didn’t slow me down. One coffee-ish and cake-ish later I felt worse. My self esteem was usually rock solid, and yet Toula had swung a pickaxe at the foundation. Because we’d known each other my whole life, she knew exactly where to strike, the big meanie. I got it, though. She didn’t want her kids to be different. There’s safety in being what society considers normal. Toula and I were already slightly abnormal by Merope’s standards because we’d grown up in another country. Until the day we died we’d be our grandmother’s granddaughters from America. My sister was doing her best to raise two round pegs destined to fit perfectly into their round holes. Even her husband was one of the island’s roundest pegs. Kostas was born on Merope, raised on Merope, and he’d die here, possibly when Toula tired of fetching his beer and decided to smack him upside the head with the bottle. But Milos and Patra weren’t pegs. You can’t be a peg when you see ghosts and fake farts on your arm.
I eyed the paper cup in my hand. Maybe my self esteem wasn’t that stable—not if I was drinking Merope’s Best after 9.00 AM.
“Mad at yourself?”
I looked up to see Lydia sauntering across the road. Fully dressed, which was nice for a change. As she reached me, I caught sight of Jimmy skulking out of the courtyard. He vanished behind a bush. Every so often it shook. Virgin Mary, I hopped he wasn’t playing pocket pool.
“I keep hoping it’ll get better,” I told her. “It never does.”
“Have you tried tipping it in the garbage as soon as you buy it? It’s delicious if you do that.”
Lydia definitely had some of her grandmother in her. “You here for coffee?”
