She lifted her right hand for emphasis, and a half dozen little gold bracelets clanked together. Vera Mae winced as the mike amplified the sound and the arrow on the volume meter flipped into the red. I pointed to the bracelets, and Chantel—ever the media pro—slapped her left hand over her wrist to stop the jangling sound.
“If you’ve read my book I Talk to Dead People, you should have a good understanding of my views on mortality, Sylvia. There is no room in your heart for doubt. You must choose love and optimism over doubt and despair.”
I glanced into the control room and saw Vera Mae give me a little eye roll. We’d been forced to listen to Chantel’s spiel over and over, and it was getting old. Plus, Chantel never missed a chance to mention the title of her book. Once or twice was okay, but her shameless self-promotion was beginning to grate on my nerves.
Yesterday Vera Mae threatened to hang a Chinese gong in the control room and give it a good whack every time Chantel plugged I Talk to Dead People. I caught myself drumming my fingertips on the console and made a conscious effort to stop. I glanced over at Chantel as she mouthed her all too familiar clichés. They were so cloying, they made my teeth ache.
I stared hard, narrowed my eyes, and tried to send her a psychic message. Chantel, please don’t say our time here is like a drop of water in the ocean. Please, I’m begging you.
“Our time on earth is like a drop of water in the ocean,” she said.
So much for thought transference. Or maybe she’d heard me and had decided to tune me out. I watched as she leaned forward, her bloodred lips aiming for the mike like a heat-seeking missile.
Not the grain of sand analogy again . . .
“We’re like a grain of sand on the beach.”
Ouch. I knew what was coming next. Think eye. Blink. Millisecond. Here it comes.
“Believe me, Sylvia. Our life on earth is over in the blink of an eye.”
Hmm. I glanced at the clock. Life might be over in the blink of an eye, but this show felt like it was stretching into tomorrow. We were two minutes into the first hour, so that meant it was time for Chantel to plug one of her books. Again.
“In chapter three of my sequel, Dead People Talk to Me, I’ll be covering this topic in some detail.”
Aha, right on schedule. And now she was hawking the sequel to I Talk to Dead People, a book that wasn’t even in print yet! Genius, right? Chantel glanced up just in time to catch Vera Mae making a throat-slitting gesture. She glared at Vera Mae for a long moment, while I ducked my head and pretended to be studying my notes.
“Yes, but to answer Sylvia’s question,” I prodded. I looked up and plastered an innocent-looking smile on my face.
“I was getting to that,” Chantel said testily. “I want you to know I’m feeling very strong vibes from Barney right this minute, Sylvia. In fact, he’s here in the studio.” She looked past me and gave a faint smile. “I can practically reach out and touch him. Do you see him, Maggie? He’s right behind you.”
Wh-a-a-a-t? He’s here in the studio? Standing behind me? Yowsers!
Vera Mae gave a startled yelp and dropped all her show notes on the floor. As she scrambled to pick them up, my heart thumped in my chest and my pulse zoomed into overdrive. A little rash of goose bumps sprang up on my arm, and I willed them away. I thought I felt a cool breeze fluttering somewhere behind my left shoulder, or was I imagining it? I refused to turn around; I wasn’t going to play into her silly game.
I forced myself to maintain eye contact with Chantel. She was obviously a master manipulator and was playing tricks with my head, making me doubt my own perceptions. I hated to admit it, but she was good, very good.
I don’t believe in ghosts. Again, there was another little puff of cool air behind me, and the papers ruffled slightly on the console. It was my imagination. It had to be. Or maybe the always-temperamental air-conditioning unit was pumping out erratic blasts of icy air. That was why the papers were moving ever so slightly on the counter top.
No way was it a sign from the dearly departed Barney!
Was it?
I don’t believe in ghosts.
Do I?
“Yes, he’s here,” Chantel continued, her voice low and silky. “I feel his presence. Don’t you feel it, Maggie?”
“Well, um, actually—”
“You would feel it if you were more open to it.”
You mean I’d feel it if I were open to mass hysteria like your crazy followers. Call me Galileo, but I believe in science, not superstition. There is no way I’m going to fall for this. As a psychologist, I know all about the power of suggestion, and—
“Barney is standing right next to you, practically screaming to be heard.”
He is?
I was sure pure shock registered on my face, because she added, “I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. His spirit, his aura, is in the room, not his corporeal form. I’ll send you an advance copy of my next book, Maggie, and you’ll learn how to tune in to the spirit world.”
See what I mean? Chantel has an uncanny ability to steal the show, put me down with a snide remark, and draw the conversation back to herself. Who could compete with her “I see a dead guy in the studio” shtick? Ghosts trump psychological insights with the audience every time. Trust me.
“Ohmigod, Barney’s in the studio? Is he all right?” Sylvia shrieked through the headphones. I jumped in surprise, my right elbow slipping off the console. I’d been so caught up in the saga of Barney the Friendly Ghost, I’d completely forgotten about poor grieving Sylvia, waiting patiently on the other end of the line.
“Ask him if he needs anything! Does he look good? Is he happy?” Sylvia was so excited, she was almost hyperventilating.
“He’s very happy, Sylvia,” Chantel said warmly. “He has everything he needs. And he looks fine to me.” Chantel gave me a sly smile. “How does he look to you, Maggie?”
Ah, a trick question. How would a dead person look? I thought for a minute and drew a blank.
“Well, I guess he looks . . .” Dead? I wanted to say. I started to sweat a little, even though the AC was cranked up to the max. I thought I heard a faint cough sound behind me. Do ghosts cough?
This time I really had to force myself not to look around. I was developing a nervous tic in my left shoulder, and I was stammering a little, which is also something I do when I get nervous. “I mean, I think he looks—”
“Maggie thinks he looks fine, too, Sylvia,” Chantel interjected. Then she waited a beat, lowering her voice to a funereal tone. “But he’s worried about you, dear. He doesn’t want you to be sad or unhappy at his passing.”
“But I miss him!” Sylvia wailed. “Of course I’m sad and unhappy.”
“Barney wants you to know that you didn’t do anything wrong,” Chantel said firmly, her forehead wrinkling in thought. “There’s nothing you could have done differently. He knows you feel troubled about something. It seems like he left this earth very quickly. That is correct, is it not?”
Chantel always tries to get “those left behind” to agree with her as part of her shtick. Then she builds on what they say, or changes tack if she thinks she’s veering off course.
Dead air for a beat. “No, not really.” Sylvia sounded confused.
Chantel frowned. “He passed unexpectedly, did he not?” Her tone was wheedling, argumentative, like Sam Waterston’s when he’s grilling a witness on Law & Order.
“Well, no—”
“One minute he was here, and the next he was not. That is correct, is it not?” Chantel was in rare form. She could give James Van Praagh a run for his money any day.
“I suppose so—”
“Then that’s unexpected, right?” She gave a derisive little snort, very unladylike. “Here one moment and gone the next. You can’t get much more unexpected than that, sweetie.” She snapped her fingers for emphasis, and all the bracelets jangled together again.
“Yes, if you put it that way.”
Chantel closed her eyes
for a moment and put her fingertips to the bridge of her nose, as if lost in thought. “I’m sensing there was a problem with his heart, or it might have been cancer.”
Heart disease or cancer. A safe choice. Don’t most people die of those things?
I mean, she could have gone out on a limb and said “leprosy” or “malaria,” but why should she? Nothing like hedging your bets. I found myself hoping that Barney had died in a bizarre way.
Maybe an avalanche? Admittedly, an avalanche would be a rarity in southern Florida, but I would have loved to see Chantel try to talk her way out of that one.
Or maybe a hang-gliding accident. That would certainly throw Chantel for a loop. Or maybe he was eaten by a shark or—
“But he didn’t have heart trouble, and his cardiac function was fine.” Uh-oh. A doubtful note was creeping into Sylvia’s voice. Grief stricken or not, she wasn’t falling for what Vera Mae calls Chantel’s phony-baloney.
So now what? It looked like Chantel was way off target, and that meant it was time for a quick backpedal.
“Of course he had heart trouble! When he died, his heart stopped, didn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s true, but—”
“There are no buts about it. He died because his heart stopped. That means he had heart trouble. Period.” Chantel sat back in her chair and folded her arms over her chest, looking smug and vindicated. Chantel Carrington, the psychic cardiologist.
Dr. Oz, eat your heart out.
Vera Mae and I locked eyes as she gave a little shrug. But doesn’t everyone die because their heart stops? Isn’t that the definition of dying? I bet our thoughts were chugging along the same track, because she gave me a tiny eye roll.
Chantel took a quick peek at her notes. Better get off the details of Barney’s passing and jump into something else fast.
“Is he still there in the studio?” Sylvia asked.
“Yes, he is. In fact, Barney is telling me right this minute that you were his soul mate, the love of his life,” she said slowly into the mike. “But you already know that, right?” Her tone was as treacly as molasses.
Sylvia gave a tremulous laugh. Chantel was winning her back. “Oh, yes, I do know that.” A pause. “I hope he realizes it was his time. At least that’s what Dr. Harper said.”
Dr. Harper? Chantel hesitated, looking blank for a moment. She opened her mouth like a guppy, snapped it shut, and then took a deep breath through her nose. “Barney knows that Dr. Harper made the right decision.” She spoke slowly, the way people do when they’re not quite sure of what they’re saying.
Had Barney been on life support? I wondered. Maybe Sylvia felt guilty about pulling the plug. I couldn’t think of any tactful way to ask, so I remained silent.
Luckily Chantel talks enough for both of us.
“Barney tells me his loved ones were all with him when he passed,” Chantel continued. “That must be a comfort to you.”
“But that’s impossible. Barney didn’t have any relatives. They all died years ago.”
Chantel blinked. She was off her game today. “Well, when I said they were with him, I meant they were waiting for him on the other side. You know, after he went into the white light and crossed the Rainbow Bridge.”
Nice save, Chantel.
“Oh, I see what you mean.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Vera Mae making a quack-quack motion with her hands, a sign that a commercial was coming up. Time to wrap this up till the next segment.
“I’m afraid we have to take a break now—,” I ventured.
“Wait!” Sylvia pleaded. “I have to ask one more question. Does Barney know about Harold?”
Harold? It’s awful when a caller says something out of left field, and I saw a flash of panic in Chantel’s eyes. She bit her lip uncertainly, and some of her flame red lipstick smeared onto her front teeth.
Who was Harold? An illegitimate son? A business partner? A new romantic interest?
“I think he does,” Chantel told her. “Yes, he’s nodding his head.” I resisted a ridiculous impulse to look around and see whether the ghostly Barney really was nodding in approval.
“And he’s okay with that?” Sylvia asked breathlessly. “Because Harold’s sleeping with me now. I know it seems a little soon, but it was just one of those things.”
Harold is sleeping with her, and Barney just passed last week? I felt like I was caught up in an episode of The Young and the Restless. Or maybe One Tree Hill.
“I . . . Yes, I believe Barney is okay with that,” Chantel said. She swallowed, clearly flustered. “Barney seems to be drifting away now, so I’m afraid I can’t be more specific. . . .”
“I never thought I’d get another Pomeranian, but I bought Harold from the same breeder that Barney came from.” Sylvia was talking in a rush. Pressured speech, the shrinks call it. “He’s got papers and everything. I may show him at Westminster next year.”
Same breeder? Westminster? Suddenly it all made sense.
“Barney’s a dog?” I blurted out.
“Of course he’s a dog,” Sylvia huffed. “A prizewinning Pomeranian. What did you think he was? I had to have him euthanized last week. His kidneys went. Dr. Harper said it was time. I just wanted to see if he was doing okay and to tell him about Harold.”
I was speechless, but Vera Mae took up the slack. “And so the circle of life continues,” she muttered into her mike. “We’re coming up on a break, and we just have time for a quick word from our sponsor, Wanda’s House of Beauty.”
The moment we went to break, Chantel and I whipped our headphones off and stared at each other in stunned silence.
Chapter 2
“And we’re out. For two minutes!” Vera Mae yelled from the control room.
Her cone of lacquered hair tottered a little as she leaned down to jam a cassette into the deck. An annoying jingle from Wanda’s House of Beauty flooded the studio, and Vera Mae motioned for me to read the live copy that was sitting in front of me.
The thirty-second spot is called a “doughnut” because it opens and closes with music; there’s a “hole” in the middle for me to say my lines. This means there are ten seconds of music and ten seconds for me to read the ad copy, and then the music returns before fading out in the last ten seconds. It’s a good deal for the sponsor. It saves on production costs, and it’s very flexible; we can change the ad copy without recording a whole new commercial.
“Don’t miss our midweek special,” I said into my mike. The music was jacked up too high, and I practically had to shout to make myself heard. I felt myself wincing as I read the lines. Vera Mae is supposed to lower the volume for the voice-over part of the commercial, but I figured she was still rattled from Sylvia’s call. I know I was.
“Thirty percent off on highlights, this week only.” I was racing through the lines. It looked like too much copy for ten seconds, and the words were tumbling over each other. “Single-process color is only forty dollars, and that includes being blown out of this world.”
Blown out of this world? Where had that come from? I felt like my brain had slammed into a wall. Chantel snickered, sitting back in her chair.
“I mean, that includes a blow-dry,” I said hastily.
Music up and out. I saw Vera Mae bent over the control board, flipping dials, booting up the music for the end of the spot.
“Nice commercial,” Chantel said in her Queen of Snark voice. “Did you write it?”
“No, we have a copywriter.” I paused. “Well, she’s sort of a copywriter. It’s Irina, the girl at the front desk.”
Chantel laughed. “Sort of?” she mocked. “I’ll say.”
Irina strikes again! I bit back a sigh. Irina is our beautiful blond receptionist from Sweden. She manages pretty well in English, but jokes and double entendres go whizzing right by her. Cyrus, in one of his typical cost-cutting moves, decided that Irina could double as a copywriter, churning out radio copy in addition to handling the reception desk.
I kne
w it was time to talk to Cyrus again about hiring a real copywriter. Someone who understands the English language. This was getting ridiculous. A few more bloopers like this, and the FCC would pull me off the air.
Vera Mae ran a promo for a Cypress Grove celebration for the next sixty seconds and muted the sound. She opened her mike, and her voice floated into the studio.
“I can’t believe it. Barney was a dog! A show dog!” She grabbed her midsection and chortled. “I have to tell you, Maggie, I never saw that one coming.”
“Barney was a dog,” I mused. “I was sure he was her boyfriend. I was really blindsided by that one.” I turned to my guest. “How about you, Chantel? I guess Sylvia caught all of us off guard.”
“She didn’t catch me off guard, not for a second.” My guest was playing it cool, inspecting her bloodred nails. They looked phony, like acrylics. Her fake-violet eyes glittered with amusement, and she ran her hand through her gypsy curls. I wondered whether they were fakes, too, maybe extensions?
“You mean you knew? How did you figure it out?”
“I didn’t have to figure it out. I knew it from the first word out of Sylvia’s mouth.” She gave me a nasty smirk. “And don’t forget—I saw Barney in the studio. Apparently you didn’t.” She threw a meaningful glance over my left shoulder, but I refused to take the bait.
I smiled at her, but I didn’t turn around. No more head trips, Chantel!
She wrinkled her nose like Samantha does on those Bewitched reruns. “Poor Barney, I think he needs a bath because he’s got a major case of doggie odor.” She waited a beat to see whether I would react. I didn’t. “You know he’s still with us in the studio, right? He’s standing right behind your right shoulder, Maggie. He’s moved a little closer.”
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
I swear I caught a puff of hot doggie breath on my shoulder just then. And a faint whiff of liver treats.
“Well, that was a doozie of a show,” Vera Mae said later. “Holy moley, that call about Barney was the worst.”
Stay Tuned for Murder Page 2
