by Tess Lake
“Dinner with Jack,” he replied without hesitation.
He very carefully peeled the dough up off the counter and placed it on a pizza tray. Then he rolled out the other ball of dough and did the same.
I didn’t say much as I watched him work, admiring the way he picked up the tray and sliced off the extra dough with a sharp knife, the movement of his fingers as he stretched the dough, the way the tiny touch of flour on his cheek made him look utterly adorable.
Give me a break! I am utterly head over heels about him. I think he could open a can of beans and I would find it adorable.
Jack pulled out a variety of ingredients – peppers, mushrooms, olives, salami – and started preparing them as he asked me about my day.
“Well, I got to spend a very intriguing hour with Bella Bing this afternoon,” I began. I told him about someone throwing a giant antique globe out of an upper window to smash onto the road in front of the mansion and then how Cyro Nash had come rushing out before driving away in his very expensive car.
“Wasn’t he that guy who locked those actresses in the shipping container with that rotting meat?” Jack asked.
“Yeah, that sounds familiar. Why did he do that?”
“I think it was preparation for a scene he said they were filming. But then the actresses claimed that he’d forced them into it or something like that. I know amongst the set builders, the general opinion is that the guy is a complete nut job,” Jack said.
“That’s not the end of it, though,” I said. I told him about Bella Bing’s assistant, Ru, grabbing my hand and virtually threatening me if I asked any questions about what I’d seen. Jack was cutting up a red pepper at this point, and he frowned and put the knife down when I told him what had happened.
“She grabbed your wrist?” he asked.
“Maybe she was protecting Bella?” I said.
“It’s pretty weird, though. They hire you to do interviews, and then you can’t do a proper interview?”
“It really was the shallowest interview I’ve ever done. The only time I think she said anything that was approaching the truth was when she said how she was so devastated that Matterhorn had passed away. But even then it was exclusively focused on how it happened right in front of her, as though she was the main character in that story,” I said, taking another sip of wine. The ingredients prepared, we got to work making the pizzas. Jack covered both the bases with tomato sauce (homemade) and scattered cheese on them, and then we worked to cover them in ingredients. The pizza I worked on was a salami, pepper and olive. Jack’s was roast pumpkin, pine nuts and a basil pesto.
Once the ingredients were down, he covered everything with more cheese and put both pizzas in the oven.
“So how’s the set building going, anyway?” I asked. Jack was standing at the sink, washing the flour off his hands. He shrugged, a beautiful movement of muscle, and I found myself once again slightly transfixed. I snapped out of it a moment later, when a particularly strong gust howled outside and what sounded like tiny pieces of hail hit the kitchen window.
My plan for tonight was to eat pizza, drink wine, and have dessert, and then for Jack to carry me kicking and screaming over his shoulder away to his very comfortable bed. But if this storm was centered over me and it was going to get a lot worse, I might have to abandon that plan.
“We started work on the pie-exploding set today. We’re building an entire bakery kitchen, and then we have to leave all this space for spring-loaded and air pressure explosions for when the main character’s magic goes crazy and all the pies explode on her,” Jack said.
“Sounds like fun,” I said. My mind strained back to the time I’d accidentally detonated a bowl of soup when I was a teenager. Thankfully it was gazpacho and thus chilled. I wondered if the author of the Ivy Spark novels was a witch…
“Everyone is talking about Mattias dying. Some of the guys think the whole film will get shut down,” Jack said, drying his hands on a large red tea towel.
“That would suck,” I commented.
I was very sorry for Mattias that he had died but, on the other hand, he was quite overweight, and a legendary drunk, so a heart attack wasn’t entirely unexpected. On my selfish side, I was looking at my guaranteed three weeks of work evaporating in an instant.
“We’re still building sets until someone says otherwise, so I guess we’ll see,” Jack said. Now that he was finally cleaned up, he picked up his glass of wine and held it out to me. I tapped mine against his.
“What are we saying cheers to?” I asked.
At that moment, there was a crack of lightning above the house and thunder boomed. I felt the magic around me wash back and forth like an ocean wave.
“Cheers to you and me together in this storm,” Jack said, smiling at me. I leaned forward over the counter and kissed him, feeling his slight stubble brush against my skin. There was something about him that excited and calmed me in equal measure. Being near him was intoxicating, but at the same time there was a deep peace there. I don’t know whether it was the kiss that did it (and it was a very good kiss), but I felt the storm centered above Jack’s house give one last grumble and then begin to dissipate. The rest of the night followed in a blissful haze of delicious pizza, white wine, and then an apple crumble that was divine. I discovered the pink towel in the bathroom with the tiger stitched on it was a gift from one of Jack’s second cousins, a little girl named Elsie. She’d stitched the tiger onto the towel herself, and whenever they talked, she would often request to see that he had the towel up somewhere and was using it. The night soon closed in, dark and somewhat cold outside from the lingering traces of the storm, but he and I were ensconced in a warm bubble of warmth, food and laughter. And then, yes, he did grab me and carry me kicking and screaming over his shoulder.
Chapter 5
In the morning, I was eating a piece of toast with apricot jam in Jack’s kitchen when Mattias Matterhorn appeared in front of me, nearly causing me to inhale my toast.
“Aha! I knew you saw me,” he said.
I managed not to choke on my piece of toast and finally cleared my throat. Yesterday the living Mattias had been dressed as a kindly old grandfather. Today the ghost Mattias was still the same age, but dressed in some kind of elaborate brocade coat and wearing a captain’s hat like he’d been sailing.
I glanced down the corridor. Jack was showering at the other end of the house, so I could talk to Mattias without being overheard.
“I can’t talk to you here,” I whispered to him.
“I have been murdered, young lady!” Mattias boomed.
I flinched, irrationally afraid that Jack could hear him, which of course was impossible.
“Do you know who murdered you?” I asked, hoping he’d give me a name that I could pass on to Sheriff Hardy.
“If I knew that, I’d be haunting them right now. You’re going to find out for me,” Mattias said. He was waving his hands around, giving what would undoubtedly be a wonderful performance if it was captured on film. As he gesticulated, his ornate coat transformed into a battered leather motorcycle jacket and the sailor hat on his head faded away. His stomach shrank and he looked like he was in his early fifties.
I’d never seen a ghost do that before, but I didn’t have time to get into that or anything else right now. I heard the squeak of a faucet as Jack turned off the shower.
“Follow me to my office and I can talk to you. But I can’t talk right now,” I said to him, desperately hoping he’d listen.
“I was murdered,” Mattias said, his face dark with anger.
I couldn’t keep talking with him, so I turned my back on him and focused on eating my toast.
“I was murdered!” Mattias yelled from behind me. I heard an enormous thud and then the smash of a coffee cup hitting the floor. I turned around to find Mattias glaring at me. Then he looked down at the broken cup and commented, “I didn’t know I could do that,” before vanishing. Jack came walking into the kitchen to find me standing ther
e in the midst of a smashed coffee cup, pieces of ceramic scattered across the kitchen floor.
“Sorry, I slipped,” I said. He kissed me on the cheek and grabbed the dustpan to clean up the shards.
“Don’t worry about it, it’s a cup,” he said. Once the mess was cleaned up, we left together, Jack rushing off to get to the set to continue building the exploding pie scene. I glanced around, but I didn’t see Mattias Matterhorn waiting for me anywhere, so I got into my car and drove to my office. When I got there, I found a very young blonde twenty-something girl with a short skirt and a lot of cleavage waiting out in front of my building.
“Excuse me, do you work for Bishop Developments?” she asked.
“Harlot Bay Reader. Bishop Developments is downstairs from me,” I replied.
“Do you know when they open? Have you met Jonas?” she asked.
“I have met Jonas, he’s great. But I don’t know when they open,” I said, unlocking the building and going inside. I left the girl out front, looking around. I glanced back at her. She was adjusting her top, pushing some more cleavage into view.
Obviously word that Jonas was looking for his future wife had finally spread out into Harlot Bay. I wondered if the poor guy knew what he was getting himself into. I was expecting my office to be locked up, empty and covered with a layer of dust, so I was quite surprised to find Aunt Cass sitting in my chair with her feet up on my desk, tapping away on a very shiny and new-looking laptop. She was wearing an earpiece and talking to someone.
“It’s perfectly legal if they sign a waiver, Anderson. I’m going to need at least another three boxes and you’re the guy who’s going to supply me,” she said. I quietly made my way into my office and over to the sofa, where I sat down. I noticed there were two twenty-dollar bills sitting on the desk, probably left by John Smith. I was still working hard on getting him to remember his past, but because he had a severe memory problem, he often forgot we had already had counseling sessions and turned up anyway. Normally I was in the office most of the week, so I could tell him there was no session, but when I wasn’t, he would often drop off the money and then immediately forget why he was there before drifting away. He was somewhat still obsessed with moving on and would take himself to any high point he could find in Harlot Bay and then throw himself off. Currently he was favoring the radio tower of the local Harlot Bay radio station.
I sat on the sofa and saw Aunt Cass glance across at me, her eyes narrowed. Anderson, whoever he was, clearly wasn’t saying what she wanted to hear.
“Yes, you will do it and you’ll do it today. Torrent out,” she said before pressing a button on the earpiece to end the call. “So what are you doing here?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest.
“Mattias Matterhorn, the famous actor who died yesterday on set, has turned into a ghost. He believes he was murdered, and then he smashed a cup because he got upset. I told him to meet me here,” I said.
“Smashed a cup? That’s not good news,” Aunt Cass said. Her laptop chimed something at her. She glanced at the screen and then sighed. “Why are people such chickens?” she muttered to herself.
“So this isn’t something that’s illegal, is it?” I said, waving my hand at the laptop and whatever else it was that she was doing.
“Certainly not.”
“What’s the business with the waiver?” I asked.
“That’s a trade secret. Don’t worry about that right now – you need to make sure this dead actor doesn’t start breaking things.”
“It’s not that unusual, though, is it? I mean, John Smith can turn on the television by himself. I even saw him hold a large piece of paper once.”
“John Smith is peaceful. Mattias is angry, and once ghosts head down that path, they can become something else entirely. Most of them burn themselves out, but sometimes that little burst of fury will gain power and become a raging storm.”
She seemed to remember something then.
“That reminds me, that storm was you last night, right?”
The warm bubble of pizza and Jack and white wine that I’d wrapped myself in last night couldn’t keep me away from the harsh reality.
“Yup, it was me. It started when I was taking a shower and seems like it went away when I kissed Jack. It hasn’t returned so far.”
“Are you making sure you’re using your magic?” Aunt Cass asked.
“Of course I am. I think I’ve boiled that well about a hundred times and levitated every rock out behind the mansion.”
“Well, if that’s not working, maybe you should focus on kissing that ex-cop a few more times.”
I wasn’t quite sure how Aunt Cass felt about Jack. She had a general disdain towards law enforcement, but as Jack was no longer a police officer and was now a builder or general handyman, she seemed to grudgingly accept that he was an acceptable boyfriend for me. I was about to ask her more about Mattias Matterhorn and tell her how I’d seen him changing from an older man dressed in a sailor costume to a younger man when none other than the ghost of the famous actor appeared in front of me. He’d changed again and now looked to be somewhere in his forties. He was wearing a turban, a leather satchel, a belt with a pistol on it, thick knee-high boots, and an outfit that you would generally describe as that of a daring adventurer. I was fairly sure it was the costume of his most well-known character, Blake Buckley. He’d starred in a series of films with titles such as Blake Buckley and the Forbidden Palace, and Blake Buckley and the Lion’s Heart.
I guessed now he was in Blake Buckley and the Ghost’s Demand.
“Are you going to solve my murder now?” Mattias asked. He’d lost all the weight that he had been carrying in his later years and was a figure of dynamic power. I wondered if this meant he would become more powerful as a ghost too.
“Who killed you?” Aunt Cass barked at him.
Mattias whirled around, a glare on his face, ready to unload on whoever it was that had spoken to him like that, but the moment he saw Aunt Cass, his entire demeanor changed. He looked her up and down and then I swear winked at her.
“My, my, my, who do we have here?” he asked.
Aunt Cass rolled her eyes at him and repeated her question.
“I don’t know who murdered me, but I’m so glad I got to meet you…” Mattias said.
“Cassandra. You want Harlow to help you, then keep it in your pants,” Aunt Cass said coldly. She definitely had her scowl on, but at the same time I could see she was enjoying the attention.
“What do you remember from before you died?” I asked.
Mattias glanced back at me and was about to say something before he was pulled across the room. He vanished out the front wall. I rushed over to the window to see him receding into the distance in the direction of the film set.
“He must be tied to something,” Aunt Cass said and turned back to her laptop.
I rubbed my hands on my face, trying to push away the sudden burst of stress that had crept up on me. I felt the magic high above me start to move around and knew that if I didn’t find a way to calm down, there’d soon be a raging storm following me.
“Do I have to solve his problem?” I asked, sounding far more whiny than I intended.
Aunt Cass looked up towards the roof, no doubt feeling the magic swirl and the storm start to form.
“If you don’t want to get rained on, I’d suggest you get rid of him as soon as possible. He looks like trouble to me,” she said. I sighed and focused on calming down, even as a small part of me realized that Aunt Cass enjoyed trouble, and Mattias Matterhorn was precisely the kind of trouble she liked.
Could a ghost even kiss a human? I wondered as I took deep breaths in my office.
Chapter 6
“Mattias Matterhorn was murdered. Care to comment?” Carter said, thrusting his handheld recorder into my face.
I swiped him away, but he merely ducked and brought it up again like a prizefighter.
“Stop it! Turn that stupid thing off!” I snapped at him
.
I glared at him until he reluctantly complied.
“Okay, we’re off the record. So was he murdered?” Carter asked.
I crossed my arms and seriously considered smacking him across the face and refusing to talk to him for the rest of my, or his, life. The descent of the Harlot Bay Times into gossip and lies had been a truly sad sight to behold. I knew why Carter had done it – the fact was that there wasn’t very much news in our sleepy seaside town, certainly not enough to fill a newspaper every week. So he’d started printing rumors and asking all kinds of absurd questions. In the world that Carter Wilkins presented, Harlot Bay was a hotbed of criminal activity, with a corrupt police force and dark secrets hidden under the surface.
Actually, considering some of the things that I’d been through, he wasn’t entirely off sometimes. This didn’t stop me from letting him have it with both barrels.
“What happened to you? You used to be a real journalist who cared about the facts and the truth!”
“This is what real journalism looks like, Harlow,” Carter said. He brought his recorder up again and I could see he was thinking about switching it on, but he must’ve reconsidered when he saw the look on my face.
“Do you have any evidence that Mattias Matterhorn was murdered?” I asked.
“He had a gambling problem,” Carter said.
“And?”
“Maybe he got in too deep with the wrong people. Refused to pay. They took their revenge.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose between my fingers and squeezed my eyes shut. I’d worked extra hard this morning to remain calm so as not to bring about another magical storm, but merely being around Carter was causing my anxiety to ratchet up again. High above me, I could feel the air currents starting to swirl more vigorously.
“I’m pretty sure the guy was worth about a hundred and fifty million dollars. Even if he was a heavy gambler, I think he would’ve been able to pay any debts.”
I didn’t really have any idea why I was defending Mattias Matterhorn. For all I knew, he was a gambler, and he could have gotten in deep with the wrong people. Considering Mattias himself had told me this morning that he’d been murdered, there was definitely at least one person out there who had motive and opportunity to do it. Why not gamblers chasing a debt?
