The Dead Girls Detective Agency

by Suzy Cox

  See? Sense.

  “Look, if finding your Key is what you really want to do, let me offer some advice from my many years hanging out in the afterlife. Because”—he leaned in like he was going to tell me a secret—“when it comes to dead years, I’m practically at retirement age compared to a freshman like you.”

  Good point. One that conjured up some unpleasant mental images but still …

  Edison reached an arm across my body, his eyes firmly trained on mine. Up this close I could see the tiny gray flecks in them. Even though his skin was pale, his lips were still a deep pink.

  “Ah, here it is.” Fast as a cat, he whipped my copy of the Rules out of my blazer pocket.

  “Hey! Paws off,” I said, trying to grab it back. “I need that.”

  Edison held the book high above his head. I tried to jump to snatch it, but he was two heads taller than me, so I didn’t stand a chance.

  “Fine,” I said. I crossed my arms and stood back. “Tell me, oh wise one, why you need the book so badly to get this lesson on the road.”

  Ed waved the Rules in the air one more time, then—when he was sure I wasn’t faking the whole surrender thing—held it in front of his face, and turned to page ten with a flourish.

  “The Dos and Don’ts of Apparition: A ghost should apparite when it is only in the interests of solving his/her murder case,” he read in a measured, high-pitched voice. For someone who didn’t seem to give a lot of airtime to Nancy and what she thought, Edison could mimic her almost perfectly.

  “When appearing as an apparition, ghosts will manifest themselves in the form they took in everyday life before they died,” he continued. “In this way, they may scare humans with a little light haunting, but will not upset them irrevocably. This should help them to uncover any extra information they might need, but cannot be discovered by traditional detection methods.”

  Ed slammed the book shut and threw it on the grass behind him. He was lucky Nancy was a good ten blocks away. Even she would have flipped out at that.

  “You know what page ten is?” he asked. I shook my head. “It’s only half the story. Manifesting in the form you took when you were alive? Christ. Where is that gonna get you?”

  “Really? Apparition seems like one of the cooler things we can do, is it really so wrong?”

  “Not wrong, just a little useless,” Edison said. “I’ll prove my point. Can you apparite, right now, for me, please?”

  Ever since I lost my glow-jo in the library when faced with the heinous sight of David and Just-Call-Me J, I’d been practicing apparition on my own in my room at night. And, even if my little display earlier hadn’t affected Kristen in the way I wanted it to, I’d still been able to apparite on demand.

  I looked around to check that none of the Living were near, then pushed all the power in my body down to my feet and let it swell up. The warm feeling rose until, limb by limb, I slowly appeared in a pink glow.

  I smiled—okay, I’ll admit it—a bit smugly and turned to Edison. “There you go.”

  Edison looked me up and down critically. He walked around me in a circle, inspecting my work.

  “I’m sorry, Charlotte, but when I see you now, you are in a slightly paler, more iridescent version of your former Living self.” Yeeesss, wasn’t that the idea? “And being a typical, attractive high school girl in eleventh grade—”

  Attractive? Did Edison just say I was attractive?

  “You, Miss Feldman, ain’t scary to look at, not at all. Even when the Living can see you. Sorry to break it to you, but that’s the truth. Sure, if you popped up and clanked a few chains in your parents’ living room right now, I imagine they would need to get themselves to the nearest shrink.” Edison stopped circling and stood in front of me. “But if I was your murderer, and you materialized one night looking like that…”

  He raised his arm and traced a line in the air next to my body, from my head to my knees. The space between us seemed to hum.

  “Well, being the unbalanced murderer that I am, I would probably just put your appearance down to a little post-kill guilt.”

  Oh.

  “Or if I did believe that you were a ghost and haunting me, being such an unbalanced murderer, I would be so badass that I wouldn’t be scared of you at all.”

  That put me in my place. I blew my energy out and became invisible again.

  “But …” Ed took another pace toward me. He was so close now that my hand would brush against his if I just lifted it up. “… if you materialized looking like this …”

  There was a loud flash of yellow light, then smoke. I jumped at the noise, putting my hands over my ears. What was with the pyrotechnics? And where had Edison gone?

  I looked up to see Ed was floating above me. His feet on a level with my shoulders.

  Only it wasn’t Ed. Not normal-possibly-attractive-when-he-wasn’t-near-a-subway Ed, anyway. It was a big, scary, straight-out-of-Thriller (if they seriously updated the special FX) zombie Ed. He’d somehow managed to turn himself into a hideously scary ghost: His pupils were red and unfocused, his skin was green and glowing—and parts of it looked like they’d fall off if you touched them too hard. He’d expanded, so he was Ed-and-then-some-size. Some gross green slime was dripping off his black Adidas and forming a smoldering puddle on the ground.

  So how was he still totally hot?

  “Then I’d be scaaaaaaaaredddddddddddddd.” He roared. His voice had all the echo of a bad dance track.

  I was so shocked, I tripped over nothing and fell on my butt.

  “See, Charlotte,” Zombie Ed boomed, “you’re used to the afterlife and its many freak-out moments, but even you’re scared of me when I look like thisss.”

  “I am SO not scared.” I tried to get up off the ground, but my legs weren’t working the way I wanted them too. I stayed put.

  Suddenly I had a bad thought: What if Lorna was right? What if he was Tess’s secret BFF and this was part of their plan to get me out of their lives—for good. What if, now that he’d turned into a zombie and trapped me down by the river, they were about to send me off to some alternate as yet-uncharted-hell dimension where I’d live forever until time finally stopped?

  Help.

  Just as I was wondering how fast I could port out of there, there was another flash of green light and a thunderclap bang. Normal Ed stood in front of me again.

  “Neat, huh?” he said, giving me his hand and pulling me up. I carefully moved my feet to the left, trying to avoid the ectoplasm pool, but that—like Edison’s flaking skin—had gone too. His eyes were twinkling with excitement.

  “Um, you could call it that,” I managed.

  I looked around expecting to see police cars or fire engines or at least a couple of the Living lying on the sidewalk, having zombie-sighting-induced heart attacks. But there was no one around. Apart from a couple of oblivious, drunk Wall Street guys in suits trying to hail cabs.

  “Seriously, don’t worry about them,” Ed said. “They’re too wasted to have seen a thing. That’s what three dirty martinis and a round of flaming sambucas will do to your levels of perception. You have been warned.”

  Wow. I definitely preferred Dark-Arts Ed to Tough-Love Ed. “So you can teach me to do … that?” I asked. “It’s not against the Rules?” Much as I wasn’t sure quite when I was going to use my zombieness, it was a “neat” trick. Plus, as Mom always said, it was better to be over- than underprepared.

  “Course I can and, no, it’s not. Look, like I said the Rules are only half the story,” Ed explained. “If you promise to only use this when you really, honestly need to and won’t go getting any Zombie Charlottes on CNN, I’ll show you how it’s done.”

  I looked at Ed. So far his loopholes had proved a lot more useful than Nancy’s book-approved tricks. Right now, Ed didn’t look like the incarnation of evil (well, not anymore). Down here, away from the others, he seemed genuine.

  Maybe Lorna hadn’t heard what she thought she had in the lobby that day. Lik
e she said herself, she had been wrong before. And, if Edison wasn’t on my side, why was he taking time out from his exhaustive schedule of brooding and being a smart ass to fit me in?

  “How do you know all of this stuff?” I asked.

  Edison sat on the grass and took a cigarette out of his pocket. He inspected it, then bounced it up and down on the Lucky Strike box, his forehead crinkling. He took a minute, then stood up to face me.

  “Come on, Charlotte, think about it,” he said, staring hard into my eyes. “Everyone in our world—well, they haven’t got here through the most pleasant means. You were pushed, Nancy was blown up, Lorna died of head injuries, and—”

  He stopped short. “What I’m trying to say is that none of us reached ninety-five years old and died in our sleep after a long life of love and fulfillment and grandkids. We all had our futures stolen. We were all murdered. When we were teenagers, forgodsake.”

  He broke my gaze and looked out to the water. More than anything I wanted to touch his arm and tell him I got it. I got how life could be so, so, so unbelievably unfair. But I was too scared. Too scared to touch his arm in case he pulled away.

  “It’s a big, bad world out there. We’re proof of that.” He looked down at the cigarette in his hand, as if remembering it was there, and slowly lit it. “So I figured that one day I might need some extra tricks, ones that aren’t in there”—he pointed at the Rules book lying in the grass—“to protect myself. And my family.”

  His eyes were unfocused. His mind going someplace else. “What happened to you, Edison?” I asked, in a small voice.

  He turned and walked away from me, toward the river. “Like I said, after my dad died, things were tough,” he said in a tight tone. “Mom wasn’t making enough money, so my brother, Matt, and I … we got jobs as soon as we were old enough to help out.” Edison was still facing the water. Like telling his story to the gulls was easier than telling it to me.

  “I worked in the local record store, waited tables, walked the neighbors’ dogs—anything I could to make Mom’s life easier. But after a while, Matt started bringing home more cash than me, despite being a year younger. Just occasionally at first. Then his ‘wage envelopes’ became more and more frequent. He told me he was washing dishes at some restaurant downtown, but no busboy ever got paid that much.” He shook his head. This was the longest I’d heard Edison talk without making a joke or a jibe.

  “I got suspicious. One day I followed him to work. Sure, ‘work’ was a restaurant—this dirty-looking place out at the wrong end of Soho—but there was no way he was making that kinda cash from cleaning the place up every night. I confronted him about it and he admitted he’d been helping the owner out—delivering packages around town.”

  “He was a drug dealer?” I shuddered.

  “Yeah.” Edison took a last drag on his cigarette and ground the butt into the ground. “I didn’t want to tell Mom. I couldn’t. It would have killed her. So instead I told Matt he had to leave the job—that if he didn’t I’d make sure she found out. It was an empty threat but it was enough. The only thing was he had to do one last job before his boss would let him off …”

  Edison turned back to me, his eyes finding mine.

  “And because he was your little brother, you went in his place,” I finished.

  Edison shakily put his hands behind his head. “Let’s just say things didn’t go according to plan.” He looked away now. “The next thing I knew I woke up here.”

  Wow. “Do you have any—”

  “Regrets?” he said, finishing my sentence now. “About going in Matt’s place? Never. Man, Charlotte, it didn’t matter what he’d got himself into. He’d done it for the right reasons. There’s no way I’d want him here instead of me. But do I have regrets about that time? Of course I do. I always will have. I should have found a better way to support Mom. One that meant Matt never went near something like that.”

  “That’s why you’re still here? To look out for him and your mom?”

  “It’s the least I can do after I left them like that.”

  “But, Edison, it wasn’t your choice,” I said.

  “No, but I have a choice now,” he semi-shouted.

  Ed caught hold of himself, gave me an I’m-sorry look, and went on.

  “And I choose to stay here to make sure they’re okay. And if that involves working out how to use my … what did you call them?” A glimmer of the twinkle was back in his eyes. “Powers to put on a scary light show if I ever need to, then those are the breaks.”

  “Now, enough of this serious talk. Come over here, Feldman,” he said, beckoning me with his finger, “and I’ll show you how to create Ghostgirl’s evil nemesis: Zombiewoman!”

  The tension punctured, I allowed myself to giggle. It felt good. I felt good. No, whatever Lorna said, Ed wasn’t bad. Not bad at all.

  Chapter 21

  “GUYS, WHEN I SAID I WAS REALLY INTO MY boyfriend, I did not mean literally.”

  It was eight thirty a.m. and the Dead Girls Detective Agency had gathered in the hallway of Saint Bartholomew’s, right in front of the eleventh grade lockers. No students would be here for at least half an hour. (Nancy said even she hadn’t got to class this early when she was alive.) Which was a good thing, because Nancy, Lorna, and Tess were looking at me oddly.

  Like really, really oddly. Like they didn’t recognize me anymore.

  Which, to be fair, they didn’t. I was in David’s body at that point, after all.

  “I totally get it,” I said. “After the Plan: Stage One, Possession of the Cheerleaders tanked, we need to step it up.” I looked at Nancy. “And the Plan: Stage Two makes mucho sense. It just feels a bit strange, that’s all I’m saying. Possessing my own boyfriend.”

  “Ex-boyfriend,” Tess corrected me, smiling a smile that stopped short of her eyes.

  “Ex-boyfriend,” I repeated. Was David making a screw-you face? Because that was what I was thinking.

  “You need to take the mind-over-matter approach,” Nancy said, patting my—well, David’s—head. “Don’t overthink it. Just see him as your vessel.”

  Hot guy, boyfriend, soul mate, asshole, vessel. Quite the résumé.

  “And try not to think about the fact that you’ve made out with your own face,” Lorna said.

  I raised my boyf—sorry, ex’s hand to his face and touched his lips that were now sort of my lips. Ew. I grimaced at Lorna. “Thanks for that,” I said.

  “Stop thinking about the fact it’s David’s body you’re inside and focus on the Plan.” Nancy walked a few steps down the hall, then came back. Pacing helped her think. “He was the person closest to you in life, so if we spend a day in his sneakers, we might spot something new.” She smiled optimistically.

  “Because, quite frankly, we need a break,” Tess said, peering inside David’s trash can of a locker. “You’ve been dead for a whole five days now.” She spotted an old tube sock, pretended to hold her nose, and threw it through Nancy. “So I would really like you to find your Key and get the hell out of here.”

  “At least that’s one thing we agree on,” I snapped. It was hard to sound angry with David’s voice. Tortured, maybe. Angry, not so much.

  Harsh as Tess could be, she was right. We weren’t getting anywhere. Apart from more and more annoyed by each other. After Ed’s lesson last night, I was pretty sure I could pull the zombie trick if I had to, but who should I be zombiing at? We had more kids with alibis than suspects. My vessel session better give us some leads or I was looking at spending infinity here.

  “I think Tess has the right idea,” Nancy said, ignoring the insult volley between us. “Let’s investigate David’s locker. There could be a clue in here.”

  Or more proof we didn’t have one.

  Nancy poked around inside, moving textbooks about. Hmm … so she could touch the Living’s stuff too? That was a trick she’d not seen fit to show me. Maybe she only wasted the complicated stuff on lifers like Tess and Lorna.

  �
��Whoa, Nance, sure you want to do that without protective gloves? You might mess up the evidence or put your fingerprint someplace it shouldn’t be,” Tess said leaning against the wall, crossing her arms and yawning.

  “Don’t be silly, dummy, ghosts don’t have fingerprints,” Lorna said. “We lost them when we lost our fingers.”

  “I think she was being facetious, Lorna, but well done for remembering,” Nancy said, riffling around in the stacks of papers and other crap for a few seconds more, before picking up a stack of unopened letters in sky-blue envelopes.

  “What are these?” Nancy asked, holding one up to the light, like she was on a cop show or something. She looked at them more carefully. “Oh, wait, there’s a stamp on each: ‘Saint Bartholomew’s Library’?”

  “Those are late slips they send to warn you you’ve got books overdue,” I explained.

  “But there are, like, eleven of them!” Nancy said in disgust. “I can’t believe he’s this irresponsible.”

  “Really?” Tess said, stifling another yawn. “Because the rest of the evidence was pointing toward Mr. Charlotte being such a together guy.”

  “I bet he’ll do that with bank statements and bills when he gets older too. You’re lucky to be rid of him, Charlotte,” Nancy said, shaking her head.

  “Forget those, look at these!” Lorna pulled a pair of mini hair straighteners out from under the debris. Trust her to discover the one beauty product among all that mess. David’s Spanish textbook clattered to the floor, taking a half-eaten, fuzz-covered apple with it. Good to see something had been decomposing for longer than me.

  “OMG!” Lorna shrieked. “I’ll give him props—he must be very accomplished with these things. I would never in a trillion years have suspected he was fighting the frizz. His hair always looks great.”

  Lorna stuck her head into a pile of folders and class notes.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Just seeing what else he has hidden back here,” she said in a muffled voice. “There’s no smoke without fire. Or heated irons without leave-in conditioner.”

  Great, so now David was vain beauty addict? Did I ever know him at all?