The Dead Detective Agency (The Dead Detective Mysteries)

by Peg Herring

  “You think Gabe looks like Errol Flynn?”

  “Who does he look like to you?”

  “Sean Connery.”

  “Oh.” Seamus wasn’t sure who that was, she could tell. “They look like a person you know and trust. It helps to overcome the trauma.”

  “That’s explains a lot.” She remembered their purpose. “Do we go now?”

  “Soon,” he answered. “Let’s find a place where we can talk.” He steered her toward two deck chairs that sat removed from others, pushing one toward her in wordless invitation. Tori sat reluctantly, balanced on the edge of the seat, not about to relax.

  Seamus hung his hat on the back of his chair and sat down, taking time to adjust the footrest to his liking. He rotated his shoulders until they were in a comfortable position against the backrest. Finally, he surveyed the horizon, or what appeared to be the horizon, before speaking.

  “I keep trying to figure out how to tell you what it’s like,” he said, almost to himself. “It’s not something I can describe, and it’s nothing you can imagine. You’re not alive, but you exist. You can’t function, but you act. It’s weird. You miss life more than you ever knew you could, because it’s all around but you’re not in it.”

  Tori watched Seamus as he spoke, intent on absorbing what he tried diligently to convey. She sensed he had never put words to feelings before, and it was difficult for him now.

  “No one’s ever gone with you before.”

  “No.”

  “But you go back, time after time.”

  “Yes.” His eyes went to her briefly, and then back to the objective void in the distance. “It’s something.”

  Tori wanted to ask what the attraction was for Seamus if the cross-back was so unpleasant. Was it the thrill of the unusual, or nostalgia for a life that was gone? Nothing in his demeanor invited such questions or promised shared confidences.

  “You only get one shot,” he cautioned. “Once we’ve visited a case, we’re barred from returning. Keeps the traffic down, I guess.”

  “So we have to get it right the first time.”

  He sniffed. “Yeah.” Seamus turned businesslike, sitting straighter in the chair and ticking items off on his fingers. “Here’s the way it will go. You and I travel together, at least at first. I initiate all conversations. You are an observer and only that. If there’s something you gotta tell me, wait until our host is asleep.”

  “Host?”

  “We got no physical form. We can’t just wander around.” He grinned. “Didn’t think of that, did you?”

  “Well, no.”

  “In order to exist for more than a few seconds on earth, we become parasites of a sort. We enter a host and observe through him or her.”

  “Because we have no bodies anymore.”

  Seamus nodded approvingly. “Right. They give us the illusion of what we’re used to here for convenience and comfort. We’re used to having substance, but everything is—”

  “Fake, like the holodeck on Star Trek.” Her voice sounded more resentful than she intended.

  “Creatively manufactured, let’s say.” He made a vague gesture with his hands. “Anyway, we’re visible on Earth for a few seconds as we come and go. Your essence, or whatever you call it, creates an image that resembles the person you were.”

  “Like a hologram. So when people say they saw a ghost—”

  “That’s what they saw. It doesn’t last for long. It’s like seeing the light of a television screen in a dark room after you’ve turned it off, a fluke of physical existence.”

  “Then we take over the body of someone who is alive?”

  Seamus chuckled. “It depends what you mean by ‘take over.’ We can’t make them do what we want, by any means. Remember the free will Gabe mentioned? It applies to the living and the dead. A host won’t do things that are out of character, and we can’t communicate with them, at least, not really. We’re inside their heads, and sometimes we can plant an idea if it’s very simple and non-threatening. But you have to pick things the host might actually do, because they have the will to resist.”

  “Are we going to share a host?”

  Seamus nodded. “In the beginning. Once you’re used to it, you’ll jump to someone you know. It will be less disorienting for you. You’ll see what I mean when you get there.”

  Tori nodded. “What will you do?”

  Seamus uncrossed his legs and re-crossed them the opposite way. “I like to move around, pick up information until I have a working theory. But we start together. I don’t want you getting lost, so when I jump, follow along.”

  “How is it done?”

  “Like it sounds. We jump, which means the host has to be fairly close, within a few feet.”

  “Where do we start?”

  “We have to begin where you left. That’s how it works.”

  “My apartment.”

  “Right.” He rubbed his nose absently. “I know the basics of your case, but I want to hear you tell it. You have no idea why this character drilled you?”

  Tori tried not to wince at his choice of verb. “I’d never seen him before.”

  “Most people know why they got killed. I’m not saying they deserve it or anything, but they know where it came from. This guy wanted you dead, but you don’t know him from Adam. My guess is you know something you don’t know you know.”

  Tori agreed despite the contradiction. “It has to be work-related. I hardly knew anyone in Grand Rapids outside the office.”

  “Nothing unusual on the streets or in your building?”

  “No.”

  “Then we’ll concentrate on work, at least in the beginning. What did you do?”

  “Clerical stuff for the brokers at PLK Investments.”

  “Did any of your bosses ever try to get close to you?”

  Tori made an unladylike snicker. “Mr. Pardike couldn’t tell you what I look like. He only wants work done. And Mr. Falk is this puny guy who just had a heart attack.”

  It was Seamus’ turn to wince, and Tori wondered if one or both of those things hit home with him. “None of that stops a man from wanting a pretty girl on his arm.”

  “Trust me, they only care about money.”

  Seamus brightened and slapped his thigh emphatically. “There, you see? Money. One of the main causes of murder, and you were up to your ears in the stuff.”

  Tori shook her head. “I wasn’t! I did minor work for the men who do major work so some rich person makes more money on the money he’s already got. PLK seldom takes on clients with less than a million to invest.”

  He raised unruly eyebrows at the figure. From her observance of him and from his awe of millionaires, Tori guessed Seamus’ life probably ended in the 1950s. She hoped he kept his skills up to date. But then, what skills did a person need for soul-hopping?

  “So we have to work our way to the PLK office?”

  “Yeah. It’s not difficult, actually. You move from person to person as they pass each other.”

  “Is the jumping part difficult?”

  “Not really, but jump targets have to be close or you get chaos for a few seconds.” Noting Tori’s look of distress he assured, “After you’ve done it once, you’ll be fine. Jumping between adults isn’t hard, because they stand pretty still. Kids are tricky, and I hear teenage girls are the worst. It’s like they send out negative impulses, and when you try to jump to them, furniture gets broken.”

  “Poltergeists.” Tori shivered, remembering something she had read about adolescent girls being associated with such occurrences.

  “If you miss, you can usually get back to your original host, but it’s messy.”

  “How do the living react to that?”

  “They either ignore it or explain it away. In my day we called it having the creeps.”

  She had felt that way too, like something was out of kilter in the universe for a second or two. “Now we understand in part,” Paul’s letter to the Corinthians says, “but then we shal
l understand fully.” She agreed it wasn’t good for humans to know all of it. “Through a mirror dimly” was probably best.

  “I mentioned pain earlier,” Seamus reminded her. “You need to hear it again. There’s a lot of pain in the passage, not discomfort, not an ache or a twinge, but searing, awful pain. It lasts about three seconds longer than you think you can stand.” He waited, having played his trump card, no doubt expecting Tori would falter.

  Watching a couple walk by, their conversation a murmur of earnest debate, she asked, “How do you stand it, time and again?”

  Seamus looked away, and she wondered if he was impressed or disappointed that she hadn’t wavered. “There are some tricks. First, you focus on the goal.”

  “My mother said that about childbirth. If you focused on the reward, the pain was bearable.”

  Seamus chose not to comment on that. “The other thing is more practical: you groan.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He looked embarrassed but continued doggedly, “You know how weightlifters and martial artists yell at a certain point to maximize their force? Well, it works for this, too. If you groan with the pain, in and out as waves hit you, it functions like a pressure release.”

  Little light bulbs came on all over Tori’s brain. “So the groaning that the living say accompanies a haunting…?”

  Seamus grinned modestly. “It’s just guys like me, coming and going.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Let Not Your Heart Be

  Troubled

  Tori was a few minutes late for her appointment with Nancy. She apologized for tardiness, catching her caseworker up on recent events. Nancy seemed intrigued. “Please see me when you return,” she said. “I’m always interested, since so few go back.”

  Tori frowned, and the stillness in the pale office seemed to wait for her response. “What I’m doing is rare?”

  “Very rare. Of course the Portal Detectives cross-back, but they’re an odd lot, and they only speak of it among themselves. Others may consider returning, but I understand it is frightening when you hear the details. They hang around a while and then decide against it.” She met Tori’s eyes directly. “The pain of your death will fade. It really won’t matter anymore.”

  “All the more reason to solve it now, before I forget,” Tori replied doggedly.

  Leaving Nancy’s office a few minutes later, she met Phillip, the young man who had been so fearful on their first day aboard. Today Phillip’s smile was genuine, his manner relaxed.

  “Hello! Tori, isn’t it?”

  “And you’re Phillip. Are you feeling better today?”

  “Much, thanks. I’m learning bocce. Do you play? We could have a game later.”

  “Uh, I can’t, but thanks.” In her excitement, she had to tell someone. “I’m going back.”

  “Back?”

  “To life.”

  Phillip’s reaction was dismay. “But why?”

  “I have things to resolve, things I can’t leave unfinished.”

  His earnest face was disbelieving. “How could there be anything back there you could care about?”

  “You’ll be going on, then?”

  “I’m looking forward to it. Nancy and Mike have been very supportive, and I’m not afraid of it now.”

  Curious, Tori asked, “What made you so apprehensive, anyway?”

  The slightest frown crossed Phillip’s face but quickly disappeared. “I don’t remember,” he replied, but that didn’t seem to worry him at all.

  Tori hurried to find Seamus, upset at seeing how quickly memory could fade. A person’s will had to have something to do with it. Phillip wanted to forget the life that had traumatized him, but she refused to let go of one detail of her own life. Mentally she practiced bringing the killer’s face before her so she’d be sure to recognize him again.

  Along the deck, she passed people engaged in various activities, from organized games to relaxed discussion. Engaged in forgetting, she concluded as laughter rose from one group of players. Well, she was otherwise engaged.

  Seamus was where she had left him, reading, of all things, Green Mansions. “Somebody left it,” he said by way of explanation. “It’s pretty good. I wonder how it ends.”

  “In the way of all flesh,” Tori told him.

  He set the book down, obviously disappointed. “I like happy endings.”

  “How do we get this project started?”

  “If you’re ready, we go now,” he answered.

  Tori felt a stab of doubt. Fear of the pain and fear of the unknown merged with a petty concern: Should I have gone to Mr. Li and gotten something different to wear?

  “You mean we go whenever we feel like it? Like Dorothy, I had the power all along if I only knew how to use it? Do I click my heels three times?” She pressed her lips together to quell her nervous babbling.

  “We don’t have the power, but it will be provided,” Seamus replied. “Gabe gives us the means to get there and finds an opportune moment to start our investigation. After that, we borrow energy from our hosts.” He touched her arm briefly in a final question. “Are you ready for this?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  Pain shot through her then such as she had felt neither in living nor in dying. She felt Seamus take her hand in his, and a different Seamus manifested, supportive, encouraging, even warm. He talked nonstop in a calm voice, giving assurances, like a parent soothing a sick child. “You’re doing fine. It’s going to be all right. This won’t last much longer. You’ll be where you want to be very soon.”

  Tori felt as if her whole body was stretched with agonizing force until she must be thin as spider-web and taut as piano wire. Seamus’ words maintained contact between them and allowed her to focus on the sound and not the pain, at least somewhat. When she thought it couldn’t get worse, it suddenly did, much worse, and she heard, as if from far away, “Make some noise, Sister!”

  In a moment, she heard it, the sound of gut-wrenching, tormenting pain manifested in two tones, one low and one higher, almost keening. Dimly she realized the latter sound was her own as she gave voice to the terrible anguish that shook her. When she thought she could stand no more, Seamus growled through clenched teeth, “Once more, and count to three!”

  She obeyed with no conscious will, the pain so intense that nothing else existed. She moaned in three waves: “Ah, Ahhh, AHHHHH!”—and it was over.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  And Are We Yet Alive?

  Tori stood inside the doorway of her apartment, just as she had at the last moment of her life, feeling “limp as used tea leaves,” as Grandma Mueller would have said. Seamus supported her with one arm, although he too looked drained, his breath coming in short, raspy pants. He smiled weakly. “We made it, kiddo.”

  The weakness passed quickly, and she stood on her own, looking around. Her place! A rush of melancholy struck which, on the heels of the passage experience, threatened to crush her. On the end table was the scarf she had begun to crochet for her sister’s Christmas gift, knowing it would take months. Reaching out, she found her hand could neither feel nor grasp it.

  In one corner was a stack of books bought at the Red Shield store. It was embarrassing to see them left in a jumbled pile, not neatly shelved as they should have been. There were a dozen things that would forever remain unfinished, each adding up to a failure on her part to do as intended. How many more things would she encounter that could never be completed? In the press of daily living, had she neglected her own family, good works, simple kindness? Tori saw immediately why coming back was not advised. Her entire life seemed reduced to a stack of half-finished undertakings.

  “Cross-back is funny,” Seamus said from behind her. “Things aren’t all tidy, and stuff didn’t get done. Some people feel bad about that.” He stopped, and Tori wondered if he referred to her, to himself, or to both of them. That was all he was willing to say on the subject, however. “We got things to do.”

  Forcing herself to dismiss
the miasma of her thoughts, Tori asked, “Where are we? I guess I mean, when?”

  “It’s three days since you died. The investigation is under way, and we can access the information we need right…about…now!”

  As he spoke, a key turned in the lock and the door opened. In stepped a man with broad shoulders that tapered to a taut waist and strong, thick legs a bit too short for the torso. He was dressed in a well-worn suit that looked like he had neglected to try it on before buying. As he frowned into the living room suspiciously, he seemed at first to have seen them. He squinted momentarily, and then his face cleared, and he walked past them into the room.