The Dead Girls Detective Agency

by Suzy Cox

  “Charlotte, I think you should …” Edison was pointing down the track. Actually looking nervous now. Whatever.

  “I said, SHUT UP!” I shouted. “I am doing fine without your lessons, thank you very much. So fine, that if I never saw your dead ass again, it would be too soon. So fine, that—”

  My words didn’t seem to be having any effect. Instead Edison stood up and slowly crossed his arms across his chest in a don’t-say-I-didn’t-warn-you way.

  Idiot.

  I turned back to the tunnel. Crap—there they were. The lights. The two lights. Speeding at me. Ohforgodsake. I was not being run down three times. Once is careless, twice is stupid, but three times, well … Concentrate, Charlotte, I told myself. You can do this. Just close your eyes and port and …

  Bang! I landed on the platform in record time—right on top of Edison, just as the train sped past.

  “See, I said this would help your porting skills,” Edison said, the grin firmly back in place. “Though if you’d wanted to get me horizontal, all you had to do was ask.”

  Right at that moment, I wasn’t sure if I was in more danger up here, sprawled all over Mr. Tough Love, than I was down there, in the path of a careering train.

  “Well, looky what we have here …,” a voice said.

  I unsuccessfully tried to pull myself off Edison’s lap, and saw Tess standing on the platform in front of us, with her hands on her hips and a quizzical expression on her face. She looked like a girl who’d just walked into her closet to find her little sister stealing her new clothes. Which was weird. Seeing as there could not be less going on between me and Edison—not now anyway—and, as far as I knew, Tess didn’t like anyone but herself (and sometimes Lorna/Nancy when they behaved).

  “Um, Tess, what are you doing down here?” I asked, doing my best to sound casual, like getting caught lying on top of Edison on an empty platform after dark was no biggie.

  “Nancy was worried when you didn’t port straight back to the hotel after her and Shop-a-lot,” Tess said. “She seems to think your porting skills aren’t up to snuff yet.” I tried to ignore Edison as he smugly poked me in the ribs. “Seems like you’re not that green in other areas though, doesn’t it? Is this your new tactic for holding on to guys now, Charlotte? Don’t worry, honey, we’ve had cheerghosts in the Attesa before—they weren’t Edison’s type then, so I doubt they would be now.”

  Ouch. Could she just give me a minute while I pulled that knife out of my back?

  Edison lifted me off his lap and onto the concrete beside us. For someone who looked like a dead poet, he was strong. He gracefully stood up, then reached a hand down, pulling me up too. This time I didn’t end up with my face in his chest, thank God.

  “Thank you,” I said, before I could help it. Gah! Why was I thanking the strong mad boy? It was his fault I was in this mess in the first place.

  Ed smirked. I half wanted to punch him and half wanted to kiss his self-satisfied grin away. Except, no, I didn’t want to do the last one. I so didn’t want to do any of that. I wanted to …? Ohmigod.

  “Look, Tess,” I said, carefully taking a step away from Edison to show our total not-an-item-ness. “This is not how it looks.”

  “That’s a shame, because it looks kinda interesting,” she said, pretending to look down at her nails. I couldn’t help but notice that her face looked—as my grandmother would have said—like thunder.

  “No, sorry, it’s not interesting at all,” I said, trying to keep my voice even as Edison took a massive step toward me, and casually slung his arm around my shoulders, making my whole right side buzz. He smiled encouragingly, as if to say, Go on, please finish your story.

  I straightened up, trying to take control.

  “So it turned out that Edison was also at the Arctics’ show but when I bumped into him Lorna and Nancy had already ported back to the hotel so I couldn’t tell them he was there and then he suggested that we come here because he knew I was afraid of the subway after everything that happened and I’d not had the best day with my funeral and the dying and so you can see there is less going on here than you think.”

  Tess looked from me to Edison, then back again. He gave my shoulder a deliberately obvious squeeze. Tess’s jaw tightened.

  “What’s up, Tess, you look stressed out? Want to bum a smoke?” Edison offered her a cigarette and blinked at her innocently.

  “No thanks, you know what those things do for your health,” she said evenly. “Now, Edison, if I can just have one second of your time on our own, that would be very helpful.”

  “Oh, come on, Tess, it’s kinda late, I’m beat, and …”

  Pop!

  Talk about avoiding the issue. Edison was gone. Leaving nothing but a burning cigarette behind him. He’d ported off the platform to who knows where, leaving me with an angry Tess and a whole load of questions about what the bejesus had just happened. Could I actually be crushing on a guy who was dead, hot, and the object of Tess’s … what? Irritation? Affection? Jeez, the way my luck was going, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn she and Edison had dated at some point and, thanks to tonight, she now had even more reason for giving me the scowl.

  Tess slowly and very deliberately walked down the platform toward me, stopping right in front of my face. For one horrible second, I thought she was going to push me on the tracks for a third time, but instead she pursed her lips into a small hard line, then focused on the burning butt on the concrete beside her.

  “Look, Charlotte, I don’t know what went on tonight, and to be perfectly honest with you, I have no desire to hear the details. But I do know this,” she said, stamping out the cigarette, “the more time you spend getting distracted by Edison, the longer it’s going to take to solve your murder”—she put her arms around me, ready to port us home together, and looked me hard in the eyes—“and the longer I have to put up with you in my afterlife.”

  I tried to hold her gaze as the platform melted and the Attesa lobby appeared.

  As soon as she could, Tess dropped her arms.

  “I think we’ll both agree that neither of us want that to be too long,” she said. Her eyes were harsh again now, there was no mistaking the flecks of hatred being fired at me. Just what had I done to annoy her this much? Was it really that I was another newbie who had the chance of a way out of here that it seemed she’d lost? “If I were you,” she said, “I’d stay away from Edison, get investigating hard, and then, let’s hope, everything around here will go back to normal.”

  Tess turned on her heel and started up the stairs. “And I can forget you ever existed.”

  Chapter 14

  THE TITLE NANCY HAD SCRAWLED ON THE blackboard wasn’t her most subtle effort, but it did the trick: Murder Suspects. Then underneath in smaller letters—as if to clarify anything Lorna, Tess, or I may not have fully understood: People who might have killed Charlotte.

  Nancy stood by the board, chalk in hand, like some expectant teacher who’d just asked her class a tricky algebra problem. Lorna and I sat on small swivel chairs opposite her. Tess—typically—was slouching on the table to her right with her feet dangerously close to a pile of ancient case files. There was no way she could see Nancy’s board from that position. But I doubted she cared. Even her legs were pointing away from us, as if to say, Yeah, whatever, I may be here, but don’t expect me to be into it. Edison, who I’d not seen since what-the-hell-happened-last-night, was, as usual, sitting this one out.

  “Let’s start then, shall we?” Nancy tapped her chalk on the board. White dust swirled and whirled in a shaft of morning light. “We’ll go through what we know and make some lists.”

  Lists. Woo.

  “First off, from observing your friends at the funeral and the high school, no one seems to suspect you were killed in suspicious circumstances, Charlotte,” Nancy said, walking back and forth in front of the board. “And the police don’t think that either.”

  “Which means they either think you were a total clumsy-head who
tripped onto the tracks or a jumper,” Lorna clarified.

  “Thanks,” I said. Man, this was shaping up to be about as fun as a root canal.

  “But”—Nancy raised an eyebrow—“we know that both of those conclusions are not true. If you’d killed yourself or just stumbled, you wouldn’t be here with us. Someone pushed you and meant to do it. That’s why you’re in the Attesa.”

  Yes, the push, the heat, yada yada, I remembered all that. Way too clearly after Edison’s actions last night. Could we move it along?

  “What about security cameras?” I asked. “There must have been cameras down on the subway platform. They must have seen something? Someone standing close to me, the moment I”—nope, still no easier talking about this out loud—“went under the F train?”

  “Yes, we checked out the security footage while we were waiting for you to arrive,” Nancy said. “Well, Lorna ported to the nearest NYPD station and she watched over the officers’ shoulders while they looked at the tapes. Unfortunately there was a problem with the way the cameras had been set up, so they weren’t much help.”

  “The cameras were pointing in the opposite direction to the tracks—to focus on the turnstiles,” Lorna said. “So there’s no footage of the platform or you being pushed under the train.”

  Figures.

  “So seeing as we don’t really have any evidence from the crime scene—because the police didn’t think a ‘crime’ had been committed—and there’s no Living investigation in progress, we’ll have to solve this case on our own,” Nancy said. Awesome. “I guess the first big question we have to ask is, who wanted you dead?”

  Who wanted me dead? I looked blankly at the others. Sorry, no lightbulbs were about to ping anytime here.

  “No obvious suspects, then?” I got the impression this was really not going the way Nancy wanted, but I’d been thinking this over since I’d arrived and I hadn’t come up with anyone.

  “Okay, let’s think about things differently,” Nancy said, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Did you go home via that route every day?”

  “Yes,” I said. Every day after school let out, at three thirty p.m., I caught the F train at Rockefeller Center, before getting out at Lexington and Sixty-Third. It might not have been the most direct route, but it meant I could walk home through the park, which gave me alone-time to think.

  “So if someone wanted to push you under a train, for anyone who knew you, it would have been a pretty safe bet that you would have been on the F train platform at about three forty p.m. on a school day.”

  Yessss. Where was Nancy going with this?

  “My point is that ninety-five percent of murders are committed by someone the victim knew.” Nancy was way too knowledgeable on this stuff. “So, seeing as you were killed somewhere you went every day at pretty much the same time, I think we can surmise that whoever did this was someone you were at least on first name terms with.”

  Lorna’s eyes were wide. “Or”—she was so about to come up with something classic—“it was an evil stranger who stalked you for weeks and weeks until he knew your routine.”

  Eww, not a thought to dwell on.

  Nancy wrote random madman/woman on the blackboard in round, neat letters.

  I visibly shuddered. Nancy shot Lorna one of her pipe-down looks. Tess over-yawned.

  “But that is really unlikely,” Nancy reassured me. “There’s much more chance that your murderer was one of your friends or family.” She smiled as if that were a comfort.

  Scratch that. A crazed random stalker sounded way better than someone I knew hating me enough to take my life.

  “I get your logic, Nancy, really I do,” I said. “It’s just that, well, I can’t think of anyone who’d want me dead.”

  Tess snorted loudly behind me. Who did she think she was? I got it: She had something against me for whatever reason, and catching me sitting on Edison didn’t seem to have helped our relationship, but I was getting so bored of the Cruella act.

  “Think again, think hard,” Nancy said. “There must have been someone who stands out as not liking you.”

  So I thought. But I couldn’t come up with a name. Not one. It wasn’t like I stood out in my high school. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t one of those weird kids who is so quiet and shy she practically merges into her locker and you only notice her when, one day, your lab partner is ill (or at least pretending to be) and the teacher pairs you up and you think, “Oh, were you here all along?”

  I wasn’t invisible. I just wasn’t very … well, anything really. I was into music and photography. I loved art. I wanted to see the world and go to college—who didn’t? High school sucked. Everyone knew that. But if the Tornadoes and the lacrosse team wanted to pretend like it was all some big preparation for the rest of their lives, I knew better. David knew better. Which was why we kept our heads down and waited until graduation called, when we could get the hell out and socialize with people who didn’t think Joan Jett was a kind of airplane.

  I was just your average sixteen-year-old. Who would have the time, energy, or inclination to bother killing me?

  “Let’s just do the motives test.” Lorna was getting as bored of this as I was.

  “Yes, the motives test.” Nancy drew a line down the middle of her blackboard and wrote Possible Motives as a header on the right-hand side. Tess pretended to stifle another yawn.

  “Okay, motive number one,” she said, writing a large number one. “Revenge—was anyone mad at you?”

  Nope, it appeared only mean girls like Tess were mad at me now that I was dead.

  “Number two: jealousy. Did you have anything someone else at your school would have wanted?”

  “That’s always a good motive,” Lorna said.

  Noooo. My grade-point average was so not enough to threaten Massie Jones or any of the nerds. I could paint and take pictures a little, but I hadn’t won one scholastic prize since I was the only member of my class who colored Santa Claus within the lines in first grade. Mom always said I was good at “making stuff,” but no one gets murdered for being able to customize an old shirt. And it wasn’t as if I was up for prom queen.

  I shook my head again.

  “Motives three, four, and five aren’t really that helpful to us,” Nancy said. “Number three being that there is no motive, just that your murderer was a loony. Number four being that they didn’t mean to do it, they just killed you in the heat of the moment.”

  “And five is that it was mistaken identity.” Lorna had obviously sat through this little brainstorm so many times even she knew what was coming. “And while you do look like a lot of other teenage girls, I don’t buy that for one second. If you’re going to commit teenicide, you’re going to get the right girl.”

  Duh.

  This was going nowhere. At this rate, I was going to be stuck in this stupid hotel, in these stupid boots I could not for the death of me walk in forever. I’d spend my days watching Edison try to smoke himself back to life. While my friends grew up. My parents got old. Ali went to college. David and Kristen fell in love, got married in the church where I’d just been buried, and had a soccer team of perfect little blond-haired babies.

  “So we don’t have a suspect or a motive?” I asked.

  “What about lover boy?” Tess asked.

  We all turned to stare at her in shock.

  “What, David?” I eventually managed. “Are you insane?”

  “Not clinically. But let’s look at the evidence, shall we?” She swung her legs off the desk, narrowly missing pushing the case files onto the floor. Not that she cared. “Ever since you checked in here, who has been having the time of his life? Blondie.” I cringed. Tess stood up, looking down at me. “Maybe that little speech he made to the cheerleader wasn’t so far off the mark, Charlotte. Maybe he felt suffocated, so he found a way to get himself some breathing space—forever?”

  Right. After everything that had happened on the subway platform, I was already at my enough limit, and now she
’d tipped me clear over.

  “Tess, I don’t know what you have against me—maybe you’re like this with every newbie who comes through the door—but you’ve been a grade-A bitch ever since I checked in here,” I said. “As far as I know, I’ve been nothing but nice to you. But for some reason that doesn’t seem to be enough. Whatever. I’m tired of trying to work it out. Because believe it or not, I don’t want to be here spending time with you, any more than you want to be spending time with me. But guess what? There’s not much I can do about it.”

  Lorna tried to hide behind Nancy’s back.

  “You might have these two convinced that the Big Red Door is the worst idea since exorcism, but I am not as easily fooled,” I continued. “If you hadn’t been scaring them with all this mumbo jumbo about the ‘bad things’ on the Other Side, maybe they’d have tried to find their Keys and gone through it by now. Instead of staying here with you just because you don’t want to be lonely. Because that’s the real problem, isn’t it? You know you’re stuck here forever so you don’t want to be left alone. And you don’t like anyone new coming around who might convince your friends that they need to leave you behind—for their own sakes.”

  I stopped. From the look on Nancy’s face I could tell I was about one sentence away from saying something I’d really regret.

  “There. I’m done,” I said. “Sorry for the outburst, but at least I feel like now I’ve given you a concrete reason to have a beef with me.”

  Instead of fighting back, Tess stared at the floor.

  Lorna was the first to speak. She came out from behind Nancy and patted my arm. “Charlotte, no one is making anyone stay here. It’s really nice that you’re looking out for us, but really, you don’t have to.”

  She turned to Tess. “And Tess, you’re not funny. Charlotte might be new, but anyone can see that she really loved David. I may not be the sharpest ghost in the box, but I know people, and I can see Charlotte was not the kind of girlfriend a boy would want to murder.”