Muses

by Elizabeth Andre

  Muses

  Paranormal Grievance Committee Chronicles, Book 2

  By

  Elizabeth Andre

  Published by Tulabella Ruby Press

  Copyright 2019 Elizabeth Andre/All Rights Reserved

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

  Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is strictly coincidental.

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  Other titles by Elizabeth Andre:

  The Curse of the Old Woods (Paranormal Grievance Committee Chronicles, Book 1)

  Tested: Sex, Love, and Friendship in the Shadow of HIV

  The Time Slip Girl

  Learning to Kiss Girls

  Taijiku

  Love’s Perfect Vintage

  Lesbian With Dog Seeks Same

  Bodies in Motion

  Right Time For Love

  Landing Love

  Lesbian Light Reads Volumes 1-6 Boxed Set

  The Beauty Queen Called Twice

  Skating on Air

  Someone Like Her

  Roll With Me

  Stop and Go

  Nice Jewish Girls

  Lesbian Light Reads Volumes 7-12

  Love Most Likely

  Editor: Cassandra Pierce

  Cover design: May Dawney

  Thanks to our beta readers: Carlos and Julie

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  About Elizabeth Andre

  Connect with Elizabeth Andre

  Other Titles by Elizabeth Andre

  Chapter One

  A writer’s end

  By the time Richard and Kate Vinette had barricaded themselves and their remaining guests in the study, Richard started to think that maybe Kate was right about getting someone in to do something about the ghosts. Richard had always referred to them as his muses, his assistants as he wrote his novels, but Kate was at the point where they were nuisances at best. Richard had hoped his muses—Nelly, Rosie, and Maddie—would behave around their guests, but they were becoming increasingly uncontrollable. He wondered with a sinking feeling if he’d ever had control of them at all.

  “Jesus, Richard. I know it’s Halloween and all, but this has been just a bit too real.” Tom Florian, a CPA who wrote eco-thrillers featuring rugged secret ops men and beautiful female marine biologists or botanists, pulled the Harlequin mask from his face and wiped sweat from his forehead.

  Richard, still panting a little, tried to smile. “You know me, Tom. Verisimilitude. Always verisimilitude.”

  “Verisimilitude my ass, Richard.” Nancy Daddario, a political strategist who wrote sweet romances, snorted with derision. She shook the broken fake shield that was part of her Viking maiden costume at him. “Someone slapped me out there! Who was it? What the hell is going on?”

  Richard had hoped the Halloween party would help break the tension that had been developing between him and Kate lately. It was a small party, made up mostly of people from his writing group and book club along with a few of Kate’s friends from work and church. For the first hour or so, it seemed to be working. Their cats, Abner and Athena, had checked out early on, opting to stay upstairs in the guest bedroom. The guests were mingling. The hosts were charming. The ghosts kept a low profile. Richard and Kate smiled and socialized as if they didn’t have a care in the world and everything was just fine.

  Then Fran Perlman ran screaming from the downstairs bathroom, her hair soaking wet. When Kate finally calmed her down with soothing words and a shot of whiskey, Fran said that someone had dunked her head into the toilet bowl.

  “A few times. I don’t know how many times. And then they flushed the toilet!” More dramatic sobbing and another whiskey. “When it stopped, I looked around. There was no one there. I was in there alone the whole time.” Fran sobbed while another guest rubbed her head vigorously with a towel.

  Richard chuckled. “Someone gave you a swirly?!”

  Kate and another guest, Veronica Gish, shushed him. Kate gave him a particularly nasty look.

  That was only the beginning of the troubles about to beset the party. Larry Shadley’s clown pants got pulled down—twice. Guests inexplicably became clumsy, spilling their drinks on themselves and each other, tripping over the carpet, and walking into doors that suddenly closed.

  “Guess we’ve had too much to drink,” said Richard with a chortle, triggering another angry look from Kate.

  Lights flickered on and off. Richard thought about making a flippant remark about the electrical grid and the wiring in their old house. Another dirty look from Kate made him hold his tongue.

  One of the Vinettes’ neighbors, a skittish man named Paul who, as it turned out, was claustrophobic and scared of the dark, ended up trapped in a closet for several minutes before Richard, Tom, and Larry could bash their way in. Paul ran screaming from the Vinettes’ house. Fran left right after he did.

  “Wait. Did Paul say something about a ghost as he left?” Nancy asked.

  “He said ghostly voices, I think.” Veronica turned to Kate. “Do you guys have a ghost?”

  Richard didn’t want anyone to know about his ghosts. He wanted to keep them to himself. He swore Kate to secrecy. They were the secret of his success, he said. They were his muses. Before they came into his life, he’d worked full time as payroll manager at a tool and die company while writing in whatever spare moments he could grab. He and Kate had bought the old house with good bones on Grant Street in Springfield Heights fifteen years ago when the neighborhood was still a bit iffy. They’d put a lot of work into renovating it, and it needed it. The lowest point for the house, built in the 1890s, was when it became a shooting gallery for heroin addicts in the 1990s. The Vinettes got the house for a song, thinking that they would flip it once they’d finished the work on it. But he and Kate, who was a claims investigator for an insurance company, had fallen in love with the house during the renovations and couldn’t bear the thought of selling it.

  The ghosts first appeared to Richard like a whisper. They were so hard to hear and see that he initially thought their voices were just the sounds of an old house. He told himself the brief sights of their faces in a mirror or a shiny object were a trick of the light, but their voices got louder. They assured him that he was a good writer. With each appearance, they became easier to see. Eleanor or Nelly, as he later came to know her, had a long mane of jet black hair tumbling from her head and had been the first one to make herself fully visible. Rosamund and then Madeleine, her younger sisters a
lso known as Rosie and Maddie, quickly followed.

  At first, Richard had kept his work with the ghosts to himself. He thought he might jinx the sisters’ guidance if he told anyone, even Kate. With the sisters’ counsel, he was finally able to finish a young adult novel about a wizard detective and his dragon sidekick that had long been percolating in the back of his brain.

  To his delight, he was able to secure an agent who sent The Whitebinder Staff around to publishers. A medium-sized press expressed interest, which thrilled him. Rosie was particularly pleased since one of the main characters had been named after her. The editor praised Richard’s sparse prose.

  “Thank my hero, Ernest Hemingway, for that,” he would always say with a chuckle. The sisters didn’t like that. They wanted more credit, but he kept saying it anyway.

  That first book debuted eight years ago and, while it had never been a blockbuster, it sold steadily. He told Kate about the sisters a few months after that book was released. For months she’d questioned him when he left his study after an evening of writing. She claimed she’d heard him talking loudly, sometimes to himself, sometimes to female voices that seemed to come from nowhere. Richard told her that he was talking to himself in order to get the dialogue in his stories right. She had nodded and said what a good idea that was. Then he said he had been listening to recordings of women in order to get his female characters right. That triggered slightly more skepticism.

  “Okay, if that’s your process, that’s your process,” she had said.

  One Saturday, she had left to do some shopping. Richard settled in his study for another writing session with his muses, as he’d started calling the three ghostly sisters. Kate had burst into his study far too soon. She couldn’t get the car started, and she was in a hurry. The sight of him hunched over his laptop surrounded by ghosts stopped her in her tracks.

  “We need to talk,” she had said before she left once more, this time in Richard’s car.

  After the modest success of his first book, his editor had said Richard could definitely get a few more books out of the concept and create a series called Allorahan and Syrreth, after the two main characters. The ghostly sisters were with him the whole way as he wrote one book and then another featuring the wizard and the dragon. With the publication of the fifth book in the series, Richard had begun thinking of quitting his day job and writing full time. Kate made a good salary, and he had come up with an idea for another series that he was sure would be as successful, if not more successful than the one he already had. The decision was made for him, however, when his company laid off him and everyone else, closed up, and moved overseas two years ago. The sisters’ guidance became even more critical to him after that. He needed their ideas, and their encouragement that, not only was he a good writer, he could make a living at his craft.

  For about a year, everything worked well. He wrote the final two books, although they didn’t do as well as the others. He and his publisher chalked it up to series fatigue. He felt like a real writer and worked hard every day. He was deep into planning his new series, this one focused exclusively on dragons, when things began to fall apart.

  He’d had brief bouts of writer’s block before. What writer hadn’t? But it wasn’t just that he had become stuck. He was becoming aware that he had become dependent on the sisters’ ideas and encouragement, and now they were subtly and slowly undermining him. After a long writing session focused on the dragon series, Eleanor had suggested switching to wizards or making them children’s books. Then they all faded away. The next day Rosamund questioned why anyone would read a novel about dragons before they got to work. After a couple of hours Madeleine stopped talking and floated around his study in an aimless manner. What followed were weeks of subtle and not-so-subtle comments that undermined his confidence. Then they became stingy with their ideas.

  He’d assumed all along that they were there for him, that he had at least some control over them, but he was beginning to realize that his assumption was wrong. He didn’t know what to do.

  Kate shot Richard an angry look as they pushed another piece of furniture against the bulging door to his study. “Do you want to tell them or should I?” she said as the sound of something heavy hitting the study door was followed by the sound of shattering glass.

  “Tell us what?” Nancy demanded.

  Richard felt embarrassed and uncomfortable, but he tried to sound jovial. “Yep. We’ve got a ghost.”

  “Richard…” Kate said in a warning tone.

  “Three ghosts. We’ve got three ghosts, actually.”

  “So Fran got a swirly from a ghost?” Tom said, incredulous. He laughed and laughed as the bells on his costume jingled and jangled. “Poor Fran.”

  Jennifer Karaszewski, a manager of a health care non-profit who wrote paranormal romances, paced on the faux Axminster carpet. “It’s no good staying in here then. Ghosts can go wherever they want.” Something else came crashing down just outside the study door. A faint smell of old perfume started to permeate the room.

  “Did you guys get a deal on this place because of the ghosts?” Judy Northrop, a friend of Kate’s from church, asked, holding out the towel she’d used to dry Fran’s hair.

  Larry, who had sat down on the love seat, asked, “What did you do, Rich, to piss the ghosts off? Isn’t that how it usually works? You piss them off and then they get pissy?”

  “Maybe they don’t want you here anymore.” Jennifer had stopped pacing and was now running her index finger along the spines of the books on the built-in bookshelves.

  “Maybe it was Kate who pissed them off. Maybe Kate is the reincarnation of the long lost love of one of the ghosts, and she spurned his advances…” Tom said.

  “Or her advances. Let’s open this up to as many possibilities as possible, Tom,” Nancy said. The writing group had gone into full idea generation mode as they were wont to do at the most inopportune times.

  Tom shrugged. “I never thought of that. Do you swing that way, Kate? Because if you don’t, and the ghost who made the advances is female, then that could explain the wrath of the ghosts.”

  “No, I don’t swing that way, Tom, and you’ve got it all wrong.” Kate joined Larry on the love seat, folding her arms across her chest. Her annoyance continued to rise.

  Richard was nervous. The guests, his and Kate’s friends and colleagues, seemed to view the ghosts and this situation more like a parlor game. They didn’t seem to be convinced that the ghosts were even real. He knew Nelly, Rosie, and Maddie wouldn’t like that.

  At that moment, the study was plunged into darkness, without any glimmer of light. With the darkness came an unsettling silence, as if all sound that could reach the room had been blocked and the room sealed.

  “Good thing your neighbor left when he did,” Veronica said. “He’d have shat himself.” The silence made her voice sound so loud.

  “I think he did on his way out,” Larry said sardonically.

  Something whooshed through the air. Then another thing whizzed past. Books flew off the shelves. The little knick-knacks Richard kept on his shelves crashed to the floor.

  “Stop it! Ladies, please,” Richard said. He felt desperate.

  “Who’s he talking to?” Judy asked.

  Kate, sounding exasperated, said, “He’s talking to the ghosts. Richard, get them to stop. This isn’t funny.”

  Richard took a deep breath. He tried to sound calm. “Ladies, my friends aren’t the ones you have a problem with. It’s me. I know I shouldn’t have done what I did. I’m sorry. Please stop so my friends can leave. Please. Oh...”

  “Richard?” yelled Kate.

  In an instant, the lights flickered on. Books, papers, and knick-knacks were briefly suspended in mid-air and then came crashing down. Richard was sprawled on the floor. His eyes were open, though unseeing. His left temple was cut. A little bit of blood had leaked out. Next to his body lay his hardcover collected edition of four of Hemingway’s novels. The spine was cracked, and it, to
o, was red from the force of the book’s impact to Richard’s head.

  Kate fell to her knees and screamed.

  Chapter Two

  Meanwhile across town…a Halloween date

  Julie went out with Maya a couple of times after Maya’s romance with that forestry service woman, Charlie, had fizzled out. The dates—they were both aware that they were dates—had gone well, but Julie was realizing how guarded she was. She still had feelings for her ex-girlfriend Gabi. Ugh. Julie had been attracted to Maya from the start. There was no doubt Maya was attracted to her, too, but Julie still felt a pull toward Gabi that held her back. There was also the unanswered question of what it would be like to work together if their relationship took off. They were running the Paranormal Grievance Committee, a supernatural detective agency, together in accordance with Mrs. Forcier’s last wishes. Mrs. Forcier had left them significant money and resources in her will and asked that they continue working together because they had done such a good job solving the curse of the old woods. She had even left them her house, and they would soon both be living in it.

  Their third date was to a Halloween parade and then out to dinner. The parade featured amazing costumes. There were women dressed up as the guys from the original version of Ghostbusters. There were guys dressed up as the gals from the all-female remake. One woman somehow looked as if she was being carried in the backpack of a troll, and a couple of guys were dressed up as chefs. Their newborn baby was decked out as a lobster in a pot one of them was carrying. A friend of Julie won third place in one of the contests for her costume of the night sky—a black body suit covered in twinkling lights. Neither Julie nor Maya had dressed up although Julie had dyed the ends of her hair orange. With her otherwise dark hair, she thought it set the right Halloween night mood. She and a bunch of friends had dyed their hair different colors occasionally when they were in college, something she continued after graduation. She stopped dying her hair when she started dating Gabi, who liked Julie’s hair natural. Julie had been feeling like she needed that sort of whimsy in her life again.