The Dead Girls Detective Agency

by Suzy Cox

  “It’s okay, D, it’s going to take time before you’re over this,” said a female voice, muffled by the aisles and aisles of shelves.

  Someone was coming? Oh, crap. I pushed myself against the bookshelves, right between the Iliad and the Odyssey. Then remembered that whoever was coming back here couldn’t see me anyway, so I straightened up.

  David rounded the aisle. Ohmigod. Maybe he was trying to get over his trauma by spending time somewhere he felt close to me?

  “Thank you so much for being here for me,” he said, walking right by me and sitting down in his usual seat. Even if he couldn’t see me, did he not feel me here? Who was he talking to anyway?

  A blonde in a cheerleading uniform rounded the corner and sat beside him. Like, so beside him she was almost on his lap. For a second I thought it was Kristen. Then I looked more closely. It wasn’t her at all—but Jamie.

  What was with these girls? Why were they all so desperate to comfort my boyfriend? They were supposed to be off in their locker room nursing their eating disorders or learning to hold a pom-pom. Not this.

  “Maybe we should talk about her?” Jamie said in a voice so sugary it would have given an Olympic athlete diabetes. “I didn’t know Charlotte all that well …” You mean at all. “But she was someone I always wished I’d had time to get close to.”

  Oh, AS IF.

  “Why don’t you tell me a little more about her? About why you loved her? It really might help.” Jamie’s face was now a whole three centimeters from David’s. If she got any closer he’d be able to feel her eyelashes fluttering on his cheek.

  “Charlotte was just …”

  Amazing, brilliant, generally the best girlfriend in the world ever?

  “Charlotte.” David shrugged. Erm, thanks for the glowing obituary. I knew David was not a boy of many words, but they were usually better ones than that. He’d gone to sleep holding our movie ticket—wasn’t he missing me as much as I was missing him?

  “That’s lovely,” Jamie simpered. Oh, puhlease, it was not. Any fool could see through her act. It was as transparent as me.

  Any fool, but my fool, it seemed.

  “Why don’t you tell me some more? It might help.” Jamie was in serious danger of convincing me that she wasn’t as stupid as she looked. Her greatest academic achievement might be being able to read her schedule, but her Boy-Q was off the chart.

  “We were both going to study in the city after graduation—her at Columbia and me at NYU—so we could, you know, still see each other most days. She was going to do art history and I was … Well, it doesn’t matter. I just … I’m going to miss her so much.” David sniffled, looking down at the wooden table where he’d once drawn our initials in a little heart with the compass from his math set. Jamie stroked his hair. Seriously, she actually TOUCHED and STROKED my boyfriend’s HAIR.

  The nerve of this girl. And I’d thought Kristen was trouble.

  Jamie rubbed David’s arm reassuringly, as he put his head in his hands. She leaned in to give him a hug.

  I had to stop this. Stop this now before David was taken advantage of by this … this … Tornaho.

  Suddenly I knew what to do. I could apparite! Just a little bit. Just my hand or something. I’d wave it at her, in a really menacing way—in a fist!—distract her a bit, then get out of here before I scared David or anyone else who could possibly want to be in here on such a sunny day. Okay, so technically it wasn’t an apparition that would help to solve my murder, but it would only be a teensy one. That couldn’t be breaking the Rules, right?

  Okay, apparition. I’d done this before. Twice. All I had to do was close my eyes and think about David and how much I missed him, and how unfair this entire ridiculous scenario was—and then I’d get the glow.

  So I concentrated and I thought and I pushed all my pent-up bitter feelings as hard as I could right down through me to the thick green carpet on the library floor.

  But nothing happened. Nothing at all.

  I guess it’s very difficult to get all overemotional about someone who’s sitting right in front of you, allowing another girl to stroke his thigh (seriously, she’d moved on to that) and not looking totally upset that she was doing it.

  Come on, glow. Glow.

  But the more I wanted it to happen, the more invisible I felt.

  Brrrrrrrrinnnnnnnngggggggg!

  I jumped so hard I sprung back and clear through the bookcase. David fell off his chair. Honestly, it was only the bell for next period. I guess after everything we’d been through, we were both feeling jumpy.

  “Uh, Jamie …,” David said.

  “Oh, just call me J. All my friends do,” she said.

  Urgh, I thought, as I scrambled out of about thirty thousand years of literature.

  “J, I think I better get to class,” David said, pulling himself up too. “It’s homeroom next and we’re having a memorial for Charlotte before we take the rest of the day off, so I better be there on time. Seeing as I’m the, um, widower and all.”

  He awkwardly bobbed in front of her and with a “see ya” ran out of the room.

  “Yes, you most certainly will see me,” Jamie said to herself. “You’ll be seeing a whole lot more of me.”

  That was it. Enough. Full-on-scare-the-life-out-of-the-beyatch apparition coming up.

  Again, I closed my eyes and concentrated. Hard. But no matter how much I strained and pushed and centered and tried to thrust the power out of me, nothing was moving. I was like a cell without a battery. Totally and frustratingly useless.

  Jamie got out her compact and started fixing her face. Not that there was anything to fix. She looked just as perfectly groomed as she did before she started molesting my man. She smiled at herself smugly, snapped it shut, smoothed down her hair, and shimmied out between the stacks.

  This was war. I might be dead, but I was not out of the battle. Yet.

  I shut my eyes and ported back to the Attesa. Seconds (and a couple of dry heaves) later I was back in the hotel. Back in my new life.

  I crept through the lobby and up the stairs. Edison’s door was half open. I could see through the gap that he was lying on his bed, reading a beat-up book while he listened to the Doors.

  “Edison?” I said, as confidently as I could. “Hey, what are you reading?”

  “Slaughterhouse Nine-Oh-Two-One-Oh,” he said.

  Either he thought I was stupid or he wasn’t in a conversational mood. Better get straight to the point.

  “You know that lesson you promised me? To show me what I’m really capable of?” I asked, drawing myself up. “Well, I’m ready.”

  There was rustling. The sound of him turning a page. Here I was freaking out about doing something totally spur of the moment and most definitely not Nancy-approved, and Edison was so not bothered by what I’d just said that he’d not even stopped reading his book.

  “Meet me downstairs in an hour then, and we’ll get this freak show on the road.” He didn’t even look up.

  I stood there in the doorway, waiting for who-knows-what, and feeling like more and more of a dork with every second that passed.

  “That’s sixty minutes,” Edison said, still refusing to get off the bed and properly acknowledge me.

  Which I guessed was my cue to leave. So I did.

  Chapter 10

  PRECISELY ONE HOUR LATER, I FOUND MYSELF sitting on the Attesa’s black couch, bouncing my heels on the floor. Okay, it was more like fifty-one minutes later, but I was always the first one to arrive everywhere. My grandmother said it was one of my “better qualities” (for real). And, even though I knew it was a lame-ass habit, I couldn’t make myself act any other way. Even when I was dead, it seemed.

  To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure I’d thought the whole call-on-Ed-and-get-down-with-your-dark-side thing through, no matter how upset I’d been in the library. I mean, here I was, only three days off my mortal coil or whatever, and I’d managed to get myself stuck in limbo—if that’s what this was—the e
scaping of which relied heavily on me, Nancy, Lorna, and Tess solving my murder so I could get the hell out of here and move on to wherever came next. Which, with every day that passed, I was reeeally hoping involved unlimited PB and J sandwiches with the crusts off like Mom used to make (but I’d been too cool to take to school for at least, like, five years).

  That considered, what was I doing? Not hanging around with the good ghosts, oh no. Instead I was asking the broody-potentially-evil guy to show me how to work against the system—just in case that meant I could maybe talk to my boyfriend again. David. The alive one. Who I was literally dead to now. And who seemed to have become a magnet for perky uniformed blondes. Hmmm …

  “It doesn’t matter how hard you bite your lip, it won’t bleed.” I jumped. Ed was standing above me. How did the guy move so quietly? He was sneaky. Even for a ghost. “Sure you’re up for this?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, trying to sound as sure as I totally didn’t feel.

  “Then let’s get out of here. May I?” He held out his hand to pull me up. Like I was the kinda girl to fall for the chivalry act. I made a point of getting off the sofa without Edison’s help. Which would have made more of a point had I not nearly toppled off Mom’s heels in the process.

  Ed smirked. “New, are they? Oh well, at least you have all of eternity to learn to walk in them.”

  Asshole.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here before Nancy Drew comes back and persuades you to do some map work or fingerprinting or whatever she has you guys doing in that ‘investigation’ room of hers.”

  While anyone who wore as much black as Ed was far too cool to put finger quote marks around the word investigation, I could still hear them in his voice. Surprise, surprise, he wasn’t about to join the agency.

  “Charlotte Feldman, get ready for a lesson you will never forget,” he said, making sure I’d had time to get steady and upright, before taking a step toward me.

  Oh, hell … What was I doing? Edison was taller—and broader—than David, so he must have been over six feet. Even in these heels, my eyes only came up to his chin, which I noticed was covered in dark stubble. Either he hadn’t shaved for two days before he died, or he just liked it that way. I’d put money on him being a razor-dodger. It went better with the air of not giving une merde. Damn that I’d never get to spend that summer in Europe, wowing David—and any hot Parisians—with my four years of mediocre French. I focused hard on the dimple in the middle of Ed’s chin, so I wouldn’t have to look up and meet his eyes. If I did, I knew I’d back out.

  “Ready?” he asked. Even though we both knew it wasn’t a question. He was as close as a person could get without actually touching. I tried hard not to visibly shiver and let him know I wasn’t 100 percent cool with any of this.

  Edison stretched his arms—for one terrible second I thought he was going to hug me—and made a wide semicircle about an inch from my body. He was taking no Nancy-style risks here: He was going to drive us wherever we were going or not at all. I was just debating whether I kind of liked the fact he’d taken control or hated him for it, when I felt the lobby begin to spin. Uh-oh.

  The room blurred from white to black to red to gray. Oh, help, what if this wasn’t my best idea?

  I looked up to find that the Attesa had melted away. We were standing by a pier on the riverbank. I tried to take a breath.

  Dusk was falling, and the lights of New Jersey twinkled on the other side of the Hudson. A sight slightly ruined when an empty plastic cola bottle floated past. White gulls bobbed up and down on the water. Except the lucky ones who’d got prime positions on the wooden poles that poked above the gray ripples. They must be the queen gulls, I thought. That’s where Kristen and Just-Call-Me J would be sitting if we’d been reincarnated as birds. I’d be down in the river, bobbing around with all the unwanted crap, and they’d be up there, lauding it over all of us.

  Well, enough of that already. It was time to stop being such a wuss. It was time to make some changes. Starting right now. I dropped my shoulders and tried to stand up tall.

  Edison was looking at me strangely. He cleared his throat. “So, Charlotte, what are you hoping to get out of our little field trip today?”

  Very good question. “I want to find out more about what I, we, can do”—no point telling him about David just yet and my whole scare-off-the-cheermonsters plan—“so I can, you know, use all of my powers.”

  “Your powers? Who do you think you are? Ghostgirl?”

  I reddened.

  “No, I just …”

  Why? Why was I unable to form a sentence around Edison? I had a boyfriend (kinda), so why did I care what he thought? No matter how green his eyes were and how intently he was looking at me now.

  I tried again. “You must remember what it was like when you first died. How you felt like you’d lost so many things. Didn’t you want to find out what you were capable of too?”

  An emotion flickered across Edison’s face. In that instant, I realized I didn’t understand him well enough to know if it was hurt or regret. He shrugged and kicked the grass with his sneaker, bringing up lumps of dirt onto the green. (Note to self: Get Ed to teach me how to kick things sometime soon.)

  Maybe I needed to try to understand him.

  “Just how long have you been dead, Edison?”

  “Long enough.” He lifted his head, but this time there was a smile behind his eyes.

  “That’s not an answer,” I said.

  “It is if you don’t want interfering young newbies knowing your private business.” His eyes really were the deepest green. I laughed, despite myself.

  “Seriously though, does it get any easier?” I asked.

  “Which part?”

  “Any of it, I guess.” A couple around my parents’ age walked by, enjoying an early evening walk. They looked so content. A wave of loss passed through me so powerfully I shuddered. “Do you ever stop worrying about them?” I asked. “You know, the Living. My parents, I … I can’t even go there in my mind yet. Think about what all of this has put them through. Does there ever come a time when you don’t wonder if the people you left behind are doing okay? Do you ever let them go?”

  Ed pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his jeans pocket and tapped the bottom on his palm until one fell out. He rolled it in his hand for a few seconds before shuffling around for a light. He sparked up, inhaling deeply, then sat back on the grass.

  “Don’t ask easy questions, do you, Ghostgirl?”

  “Maybe that’s my secret power.” Gah, why oh why did I come out with that? “Sorry, it’s just that I’m not sure even if I asked Nancy and Lorna this, they’d tell me the truth—amazing as they both are. And Tess certainly won’t.”

  He squinted up at me, one eye half shut. “Why do you think that? Don’t tell me you’ve got on the wrong side of Tess already?”

  I unsuccessfully tried to stop the answer from showing in my expression.

  “Look, I can’t really tell you what it’s like for ‘us,’” Edison said, looking out at the river. “I think it’s probably different for every ghost.”

  “Then how was it for you?” I asked.

  He picked some grass off the lawn and threw it in the air, watching as the blades caught on the wind, briefly spiraling in the air before they fell back to earth. “You don’t give up, do you?” He brushed his hands on his jeans. I shook my head. “Okay, I’ll tell you how it was for me, but I don’t know that you’ll relate.”

  I didn’t dare say anything or even move, in case he stopped speaking.

  “For me, well, the worst happened way before this. My dad, he died suddenly when I was fifteen, and my mom kinda fell apart. Me and my brother, we had to look after her. We both promised we’d always be there for her. And I’m … now I’m not. What kills me about this”—he waved his hands at the world around him—“is that people talk about life and death, but they never talk about the moments in between. The ones where you’re stuck, just watching and una
ble to help because you’re not really meant to be here.”

  I thought about my parents. At least they had each other. At least I didn’t have to worry about either of them being alone. Or having their heart broken twice.

  “But, you know, my brother’s done a good job looking after her. He had to. After everything that went down. Aft—” He stopped short, not willing to tell me any more. Emptied of the smug and the wisecracks and cool, Edison’s face looked younger now. How old was he? Maybe only a year or so more than me—in Living years at least. In ghost time, I was sure it was a hell of a lot more.

  He was on his feet now, clapping his hands on his jeans, putting back up the barricade, looking annoyed again. “I’ve got better things to do than sit around riverbanks with newbies, you know?”

  “Oh, I’m well aware of that,” I said. “But I thought you were going to teach me about the dark arts of ghosting, instead of standing around talking like a sorority girl all night.”

  He stared at me. For far longer than I can honestly say I was comfortable with.

  “Drop dead, Ghostgirl.”

  “Edison, as you know only too well, I already did.” I held his gaze. This time he was the first to look away.

  “Right, let’s start small,” he said, the smirk back at the edges of his mouth. “I don’t know yet if you’re a fast learner or special ed.”

  “Can we just get on with the lesson?” I asked.

  Over the next hour, Edison calmly and patiently taught me what he considered to be the basics. And, whoa, were they different from Nancy’s. First up, I learned the Kick—all you needed to do was focus your energy and pretend you hated that grass—then the Jab (most effective if you wanted to poke an unsuspecting member of the Living on the shoulder as they walked by and freak them the hell out). Oh, and not forgetting the Throw (shout some words into your hand, then slam-dunk them into the mouth of a passing human and—hey, presto—they come out as their own). I tried it on a solo jogger first—watching him wonder if he’d gone cuckoo while simultaneously shouting my words, “Faster! Faster!” Ed dared me to Throw “you’re not my father!” into a baby’s mouth to mess with his parents, but the mom looked kinda sweet and—down with my bad side or not—I didn’t want to upset her.