The Dead Girls Detective Agency

by Suzy Cox

  “Ohmigod! I, like, totally did too,” said Blonde Five. “Kristen must have worked us way hard. I feel like I’m coming out of a Bikram coma or something.”

  Out of the cheerleaders’ bodies, Lorna and Nancy expectantly ran over to where I was standing.

  “Well, what happened? She didn’t look like she freaked out,” Nancy said. “What did Kristen say?”

  “Enough for us to draw one of your red lines through her name on the suspects’ list.”

  Nancy sighed.

  “So I’ve just spent the last thirty minutes taking part in physical education for no good reason?” Lorna asked.

  Behind her, I saw Kaitlynnn talking to Brian. His eyes were glowing and she’d somehow persuaded him to give her four candy bars out of his backpack. Now she was stuffing them into her mouth—two at a time.

  “Tess, will you get out of that cheerleader already?” Nancy shouted at her.

  “Oh, cawm ohn. Ah jusht whanna hahve ohne mohre.” She swallowed. “Just let me eat two more. It’ll mess her up for weeks when she comes around and realizes she’s consumed an empty calorie. Well”—Tess turned over the label of one of the bars—“five hundred of them! In one go. I can put the wrappers in her pocket, so when Kaitlynnn wonders why she’s feeling so full she’ll find them. She’ll think she was sleep-eating or something. It will be excellent.”

  “Tess …” Nancy shot her a look.

  “Fun sponge,” Tess said, as she stepped backward and left Kaitlynnn’s body.

  Kaitlynnn shrugged, blinked, and then looked down in shock at the two candy wrappers in her hand. “What the …?” She spun around to check that no one had seen her eating, then dropped them on the ground and ran into the locker room—no doubt already calculating how many squat thrusts she needed to do to work off the calories.

  Tess appraised the situation. “Cheerbaiting aside, that,” she said, slow clapping, “was what I’d call an epic fail. You apparite in front of someone and she doesn’t even believe you’re a ghost?”

  “Well, I guess you’re right, Charlotte. It proves that Kristen’s not feeling guilty about your death.” Man, was Nancy perceptive. “I don’t think she pushed you.”

  “Or any of the rest of them,” Lorna added. “They just don’t seem that bothered about you. Not even Jamie—unless she is an Emmy-worthy actress and I don’t think she’s that smart. Sorry, Charlotte.” She looked away at the girls walking back across the field.

  “So I told Emily, if she buys a party dress from Acne again without checking with me first, we are so no longer lab partners.” As if on cue, Jamie pushed through me and shivered.

  “Oh, totally.” Blonde Four nodded. “Like, you said you were getting an outfit from there for the Halloween dance weeks ago. It’s off the girl-rules chart if she violates your store.”

  “But, guys, it’s a costume party,” Five said, trailing after them. “We have to get costumes that make us look like, like, ghosts or busters or something.”

  “Oh,” Jamie said. “Well, that still doesn’t mean I’m letting the Acne go.”

  We watched as they walked through the locker room door.

  “Halloween dance?” Lorna asked. “When’s the Halloween dance?”

  “Repeat what you just said out loud in your head, think about it, then have the decency to blush,” Tess said.

  “Oh.” Lorna did.

  “Saturday then,” Nancy said, trying to make Lorna feel less like an idiot.

  “And David is going with Kristen,” I said. “Which is weird because he hates dances. And the whole popularity BS. But then, he seems to have done a one-eighty on most of these things in the last week. He used to tell me he hated cheerleaders too.”

  “Charlotte, whatever lies he told you when you were dating, it seems David will now make out with anything with a pulse and, sadly, that removes you from the equation.” Trust Tess to drag me down one notch further.

  Maybe it was time to stop being so nicey-nicey. Maybe—risk or not—it was time to take another lesson from Ed.

  Chapter 19

  AS SOON AS PRACTICE FINISHED, TESS SULKILY ported back to the Attesa muttering something about “time wasters” at a volume she knew I could hear. Charm personified.

  “Let’s port back to HHQ,” Nancy said. “I guess the next step is to cross off Kristen and Jamie and reassess the suspects’ list. Maybe we could go through some more old case files for inspiration.” She smiled hopefully.

  Lorna scowled. “I spent most of yesterday in that dungeon,” she said. “I’m not really ready to go back yet. Charlotte, how about you and me port part of the way, then walk back to the hotel through the West Village?” She looked at Nancy intently. “It’ll give Charlotte a chance to think about everything that’s happened today—you know, if there are any major clues we’re just not seeing because we’re too close to the case.” She winked at me. “And it’ll give me a chance to look at a couple of new window displays in the shops on Bleecker Street,” she whispered.

  Typical. Though seeing as my only other option was another episode of Who Killed Charlotte Feldman? I might as well just go with it.

  “Sure.” I smiled.

  Outside, it was unseasonably warm, and people had left their coats at home. Bleecker Street was one of my favorite places in the city. I loved the way trees lined parts of the wiggly street, the cute secondhand bookshops and quirky boutiques, and the brownstones where I had hoped I would live one day. The whole neighborhood felt relaxed. None of the buildings down here were more than a few stories high, so you could look up and always see the sky. It was a world away from the madness of midtown. When I graduated college, I’d wanted to run an art gallery here. Or open a really cool coffee shop where photographers could exhibit their work. Maybe I’d even have taken some pictures myself and sold them.

  Thanks to the F train, I could kick that stupid dream to the curb.

  “So”—Lorna gave me a sideways glance—“what was Edison doing by the bleachers while we were possessing the squad?”

  Crap. I thought they’d all been too busy with their cheertricks to notice him. How could I explain it? And why was I even trying to? Tess had seen us together before. It wasn’t like I’d asked Edison to be there. Or that he wasn’t allowed to be. After all, he lived in the Attesa too. It wasn’t like him turning up was some big secret I needed to keep from Lorna and Nancy.

  So why did it feel that way?

  “We were just talking,” I said carefully. “I don’t know how he knew we were there. Maybe Tess told him. She seems to be his spy. He was just being his usual Ed self.” I shrugged, unsuccessfully trying to disguise the fact that I was babbling now. “Shooting me down and saying our plan to interrogate Kristen wasn’t going to work. Being all I’m so cool and you girls have a lot to learn. Generally making me mad. You know.”

  “His ‘usual Ed self’?” Lorna repeated back at me. She stopped at the junction of Perry Street. To our left, a gang of girl tourists were excitedly having their photo taken in front of Magnolia Bakery. You know, the one that’s famous from that episode of Sex and the City? Imagine coming hundreds of miles to New York, then just going to see that?

  “How do you know so much about what ‘Ed’ is ‘usually’ like?” Lorna asked. “Have you guys been hanging out?”

  Caught. For someone who seemed so hooked on shopping and shoes and not much else, Lorna could be scary perceptive.

  “Not exactly,” I started. “We’ve been, well, I, we … we talked a little. About how I might get out of here. He had some suggestions about haunting.”

  When he’s not being smug or charming or scaring even more of the life out of me.

  “Oh, does he now?” Lorna’s expression was—for once—impossible to read. We carried on walking down the street in silence. Maybe she was going to let the subject drop?

  The weird thing was that I suddenly realized I didn’t want it to.

  “Um, Lorna,” I asked, “what do you know about Ed … Edison? Like, when
did he arrive at the Attesa? How did he get here?”

  Lorna stopped walking and looked straight at me. “You seem pretty tight. Why haven’t you asked him yourself? During one of your ‘talks’ …”

  I felt myself blush, and concentrated very hard on the sidewalk. “Because when I’m around Edison, he makes me feel uncomfortable and I kind of turn into a complete dork.” Why was I admitting this? “I guess he’s kinda intimidating. Sure, I asked him about his past, but I didn’t get very far. I didn’t want to push it.”

  Nope, saying all of that out loud had not helped at all. Instead, I officially felt like the afterlife’s biggest loser. My soul mate had turned into a school-dance-attending rat—one who, by the way, I was majorly over—and now it looked like I was asking Lorna for the skinny on the dead bad-boy-next-door. She probably thought I was getting myself into some complicated love triangle of me, David, and Ed. Not that you can have a love triangle if two-thirds of it aren’t breathing.

  Lorna eyed me carefully. “As far as I know, Edison was here before the rest of us,” she said. “Then Tess came next. Then me. Then Nancy. Of course there have been others in between, but—apart from a few exceptions, like Jimmy—they’ve all found their Keys and gone through the Big Red Door. We’re the only stuckists.”

  Nothing I hadn’t already figured.

  “Well, I guess Nancy and I aren’t technically stuck,” Lorna said. “I still think we could both get our Keys if we wanted them. But Tess, well, she’ll never talk about it of course, but I always get the impression she would have been out of here years ago if she could.”

  Tess couldn’t solve her murder and was stranded? That would be the worst thing ever—and could explain a lot.

  “And Edison, has he ever talked about what happened to him? What his deal is?” I absentmindedly kicked an empty cigarette packet that someone had dropped on the sidewalk. It bounced off my foot and hit the curb on the opposite side of the street. Lorna’s eyes widened and she looked at me questioningly. Uh-oh. She so knew Nancy had not taught me that trick. I carried on walking, like I hadn’t done a thing.

  “No, I don’t know what his deal is,” she said eventually. “He’s pretty guarded about his past, so I never pushed it either.”

  We walked across Avenue of the Americas. Lorna waited for the lights before she crossed. I don’t know if she did it to be kind—while the speeding traffic could no longer kill me, getting mown down by two fast-moving vehicles was enough already—or out of habit. I thought it was sweet.

  “Whatever happened to Edison, it’s his story to tell,” Lorna said as we started up the avenue to Waverly Place, the street that led to the Attesa. “Look, I’m not Nancy,” she said. “I’m not going to tell you what to do—unless you start telling me it’s okay for women over twenty-five to wear cropped tops—but I do think that, when it comes to Edison, you need to be careful.” Lorna kept walking. “I don’t know much about him, but I do think that he and Tess … they …”

  My stomach flipped. “They what? They dated?” I asked, searching her face for the answer and suspecting it wasn’t one I wanted to hear.

  Miss Snarky and Ed together? Sure, the thought had entered my head. I mean, he’d told me they talked, and she hadn’t looked super-pleased when she found us on the platform that night. But them actually having a proper relationship? That was about as likely as David cheating on me with one of the cheerleading squad. And, oh … while I found Tess to be one of the least pleasant people on the planet, I supposed she was actually not bad looking. She could even be borderline attractive when she stopped scowling. And Edison was … well, he wasn’t my usual type, but he wasn’t someone you’d be embarrassed to say you were seeing either. He was kinda attractive. If you liked the whole dark-mysterious-green-eyed-brooding thing. Which of course I didn’t. Tess and Edison being together at some point—the thought was about as appealing as mixing milk and orange juice.

  Lorna shook her head so hard, her straight blond hair fanned out around her face. “No! No, I don’t think they’ve ever dated. Well, actually I don’t know. Neither of them are exactly the spill-your-guts types. What I think is different. What I think is that—” She caught herself and stopped talking. Lorna’s perfectly smooth forehead wrinkled and she looked serious for the first time ever.

  “What you think is what?” I asked.

  Lorna looked around, as if she were expecting Edison to jump out from behind the nearest tree or Tess to stomp over and tell her to keep the hell out of her business.

  She lowered her voice. “Okay, don’t say this to anyone, not even Nancy, but I have this theory.” She stopped. Jeez, was she building this up. It better be good.

  “Which is?”

  “Which is”—Lorna sighed, like I’d got it out of her through hours of harsh emotional torture—“that Edison and Tess, they knew each other. Like, before. Before they died.”

  “They what?”

  Color me shocked, that was not what I was expecting.

  “I think they might have known each other before they died,” Lorna repeated, just in case I hadn’t taken it in.

  “How? And how has Nancy, the chief detective, not detected this most major of all the major facts and you have?” Ouch, that sounded a lot meaner than I meant it to.

  “I’m not totally useless,” Lorna huffed. “I’ve been dead longer than you and Nancy put together. I do have some experience at it.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. That came out wrong.” I sat on a wall and motioned for Lorna to sit beside me. “Where did this theory come from?”

  Lorna checked for dirt, then sat.

  “It was before Nancy got here. Right about the time when I’d decided I wasn’t that into finding my Key and more into making sure my family was okay,” she said. “Edison and Tess hadn’t exactly been the most welcoming new hotel mates”—understatement of the eon—“don’t get me wrong, Tess wasn’t as mean to me as she’s being to you. She really, really hasn’t taken to you for some reason.” Great to have that confirmed. “I guess she’s just seen so many newbies come through the hotel that she can’t be bothered to be polite anymore. But with me, well, she wasn’t exactly asking me for sleepovers in her room on a nightly basis either. I was lonely. So I decided I should try to make her like me. I’m not sure we would have been friends when we were alive, but I was feeling kinda sad with no one to talk to but Tiger, my kitten—”

  “Your what?”

  “Oh!” Lorna brightened. “So this is a really cool fact! Cats can see us. Like, without us appariting or anything. Nancy thinks it’s one of their ‘special senses’ or something. Have you ever had a cat?” I nodded. Arthur, fifth grade. “You know when they sort of bristle or jump for no reason? Tiger used to do that all the time and I thought he was just being weird, but now I know it was because he was probably seeing something from this world. Look, I’ll show you.”

  Lorna jumped off the wall and walked across the street, where a tiny tabby cat was lying stretched out in the afternoon sun.

  “Watch this. Hey, kitty, kitty,” she said as she stroked her hand over the cat’s belly. It wiggled, like a contented snake. OMG, it could feel her!

  “Cool, huh?” Lorna said. “Sometimes they do freak out if they don’t know you, but …”

  Suddenly the kitten opened its eyes, saw Lorna, and sprung up with a terrified mew! It ran off down the street.

  “Yeah, that one didn’t look too ghost friendly to me,” I said.

  She shook her head and came back to the wall. “It’s different if they’re used to you,” she said. “Now, where were we? Oh yes, the important stuff: how I know about Edison and Tess.”

  She shuffled. “I was trying to get Tess to talk to me more, so one morning I came down to try to be friendly. But when I got to the lobby, I could hear them talking.”

  “Them? Tess and Edison?”

  Lorna raised her eyebrows at me, telling me to keep up.

  “Of course, Tess and Edison. I couldn’t really hear wh
at they were saying, but they were talking about one of the Living, and from the way Ed was speaking, it sounded like they both knew this person. And not just from haunting him after they’d died.”

  Lorna looked down the street. The tabby she’d terrified had found a new spook-free patch of sun and was lying in that.

  “And?” I asked.

  “And I don’t know because they saw me then and stopped.” Lorna stood up off the wall again. “Maybe they had friends in common—it wouldn’t be that weird, would it? This island’s not that big. They’re around the same age. I didn’t pry. I’ve got enough of my own stuff to deal with without getting into theirs.”

  She held out a hand to help me up.

  “I may be wrong, I sometimes am, but just be careful with Edison,” she said. “If Tess doesn’t heart you and they’re actually close, she may feel, I don’t know, threatened or something. You don’t know the real story there.”

  She was right, I had no clue. But I was sure as hell gonna find out.

  Chapter 20

  “SO THE SPORTS FIELD TODAY,” I SAID. “I AM willing to admit that was slightly embarrassing.”

  “What, the part where the esteemed members of the Dead Girls Detective Agency caused a pretty-girl pileup? Or the part where you tried to haunt that Kristen chick and she just walked straight through you?”

  “Er, all of the above,” I admitted.

  It was a mere three hours since Lorna had warned me off Edison so, clearly, here I was, standing by the river with him alone. I figured he may have a Tess-involved past, but—when he wanted to—Edison also talked a lot of sense. Exhibit A: He was right about the whole cheerbacle today. For a group of supposed detectives, we completely sucked. So as soon as I’d gotten back to the Attesa, I’d gone to find him and asked for the scare-the-bejesus lesson special.

  “You would have done things differently, then?” I asked.

  “I would not have been down there wasting my time in the first place,” he said.