Royal Ghouls

by Alex A King

“I can’t help myself.”

  What had Betty told me? Ghosts have to want to go. Whether they’re popping back to the Afterlife or poofing around town, they have to want it. The woman brightened up when I passed on the happy news.

  “Really?”

  She closed her eyes, crossed herself, forehead to chest, shoulder to shoulder, then she tumbled over the edge, same as always.

  One … two … three …

  Poof! She didn’t look happy or impressed. “It didn’t work.”

  “I guess you didn’t want it hard enough.”

  Big sigh. “I hate falling more than ever now. It’s a mess down there. All kinds of garbage floating in the water. I could get a disease. Very unhygienic.”

  “Relax. Death brings all your vaccinations up to date.” Her other words sank in. “Garbage? What kind of garbage?” Without my binoculars, the yacht was a lump of fiberglass and other materials. If there was garbage it was hidden by the foamy churn.

  “Why do you care about garbage?”

  “Clues. Evidence.”

  The yacht’s remains were unreachable without a boat. I didn’t have a boat. So I called my parents’ other daughter.

  “Do you own a boat?” I asked Toula.

  “Why would we own a boat?”

  “For maritime activities?”

  “We don’t have a boat.”

  “How about a jetpack?”

  Toula sighed like I was her third child; which, for the record, I wasn’t. “What are you doing, Allie?”

  My boot-covered toe nudged the stone, pushed it along the curb. “Talking to you on the phone, what else? Have you heard from our parents?”

  “When I hear from them, I’ll let you know.”

  Wow, what was her problem? Her tone was tighter than a bouzouki string.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Milos and Patra are home today.” The words rode out on a sigh.

  “But it’s a weekday. Why aren’t they in school?” Dumb question. Toula and I spoke at the same time. “Strike.”

  Greek teachers strike a lot. They always want something, and that something is always money. Greece’s coffers are filled with IOUs, empty promises, and the scent of money; and apparently teachers (and other government employees) can’t buy life’s necessities using any of those things.

  “Want me to take them for a while?”

  “No, it’s fine. I’m fine.” She lowered the phone and let out the long, primal howl of a wounded beast. When she recovered she said, “LEGO. I just stood on LEGO.”

  Wince. “I’ll let you go so you can get that foot amputated now.”

  “It’s the only way,” she said.

  So what did I have now besides a list of absent suspects? No boat, obviously. A jetpack was out of the question. Renting a boat was a possibility, although difficult outside of tourist season. Rappelling was a less viable option, but I liked the idea of hovering midair over the wreck. It had a Mission Impossible flavor to it.

  A boat it would have to be.

  Thirty minutes later, I was the proud temporary owner of a floating tin can the size of a bathtub. Its motor was a pair of immersion blenders, strapped together with duct tape. Good thing it came with a couple of oars, too. Did I say oars? My mistake. I meant koutalas—wooden spoons. Five minutes after the rental place took custody of my money and I took custody of the approximation of a real boat (the better boats—the actual boats—were moored for the winter), I was puttering around the island’s outer curve, bound for the crash site. On this chilly morning I was alone on the water, which was more gray than summer’s blue-green. It was the color of skulking krakens and Poseidon’s imminent Seasonal Affective Disorder. I tried not to think about what was lurking below as the immersion blenders coughed and gagged. I helped them along by rowing. In the distance, far away from Merope’s rocks, fishermen were hoisting nets out of the sea, dumping them on deck, dipping them into the water again. Without an onslaught of tourists to hoover up their daily catches, they were moving slowly.

  There she was, the Royal Pain. The vessel looked bigger from down here, even though it was crushed like a soda can. Merope had packed one heck of a punch. The yacht never stood a chance, not at the speed it was moving.

  Who had set that speed, and where did they go? Harry Vasilikos and his guests couldn’t have poisoned themselves and then set the speed to annihilate. But Harry Vasilikos was his own captain, so that’s probably exactly what he did, inadvertently. Set the autopilot, destination: Merope. Then he went off to eat his bowl of poison.

  The tin can drifted around the wreckage, which was no longer burning. The sea air had whisked away most of the smoke and its acrid smell. Garbage bobbed around the yacht’s white, bloated corpse. Some was floating out to sea, bound for (eventually) Greece’s other islands. Most of the refuse was bumping against the rock, pushed and pulled by the tide. Clothing, gadgets, bits of the boat itself. A soggy pillow was beached on one of the island’s vicious crags. A rubbery dildo had fastened its suction cap to a smooth expanse of rock and was flopping up and down in the breeze.

  If Leo and I were a thing, I’d snap a picture and send it to him. Then we would laugh and make jokes before one us suggested it would be a fun purchase, you know, just for kicks. Then either an uncomfortable silence would set in or the whole thing would be foreplay. But we weren’t, so I didn’t.

  I nudged the boat-ish thing closer, hoping to find anything that might still have traces of the poison Harry Vasilikos mentioned. A couple of water bottles were drifting near the hull, so I scooped them into a plastic bag, along with some pieces of fruit. Other food—bread, cheese—had disintegrated or drowned in Merope’s waters.

  As far as evidence went, that was the only thing that stood out. For more, I would have to board what was left of the yacht. Trying it alone didn’t seem smart, but trying it with others might earn me a slap on the wrist and one of Leo’s frowny faces. The way things were between us, I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of his frowny face. I didn’t want to see his face at all.

  Lying to myself was working out really well. Definitely one of my hidden talents.

  Then my phone rang. Whoever was calling, they weren’t in my contacts.

  “What are you doing?” a male voice wanted to know.

  “Who is this?”

  “Look up.”

  Constable Gus Pappas was peering over the cliff’s edge. He had coffee in one hand and he was using the other as a visor, despite the fact that he was wearing dark aviators.

  “Nothing to see here,” I said into the phone. “I’m not the woman you’re looking for.”

  “Ha-ha. A Star Wars joke. I like it. Seriously, what are you doing?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  He took a short pull from his cup and made a face. Someone had stopped at Merope’s Best.

  “I’m not an expert, but I would say you are looking for loot.”

  “Wrong. I’m looking for clues.”

  “Clues? What kind of clues?”

  “Blue’s Clues.”

  “I don’t know what that is, but you should probably finish what you’re doing and leave. Everyone else will be back soon.”

  “Why? They’re not finished the rescue operation?”

  He opened his mouth but Call Waiting chose that moment to cut in. This time the number was one I knew.

  “You were right,” Leo said, his voice grim. “They were dead before the yacht crashed.”

  Chapter Six

  I was on dry land again, my sardine can returned to its owner. Getting my security deposit back had been a battle, right up until I threatened to park my bicycle in front of the boat rental place all summer, while I scared potential customers away with true customer service horror stories. The owner knew me, and I knew that one time—at least—he’d tried to engage in oral sex with a donkey. He wound up in the hospital with a hoof print on his cheek and some convenient memory loss. But there was a witness (wasn’t there always?),
and that witness had parted with the juicy story while we were reaching for the same watermelon five summers ago. I could barely look at the man without hearing Wayne Newton singing Donkey Shame.

  As I was escaping with my deposit in hand, Leo was pulling up at the dock. If he'd slept at all it didn’t show. He was wearing the same combination of jeans, boots, black sweater, and leather jacket he’d been wearing yesterday. The circles under his eyes were dinner plates.

  “Say it again,” I said.

  “Which part?”

  “The part where I’m right.”

  He chuckled. “You were right. Now I need to know how you knew.”

  I jumped in with a question of my own before answering. “Did Panos start the autopsies?”

  Panos Grekos is Merope’s coroner. He's abrupt, moody, and he gets all his pornography the old school way: from a periptero—a newsstand. His dead mother haunts his favorite periptero, shrieking like a banshee when Panos shows up for the latest Playboy. She doesn’t know I can see and hear her, or I have no doubt she would destroy my sanity until I agreed to convert her son into a Good Greek Boy.

  “He started when the first body showed up. According to him, every body we recovered had been dead for at least three hours before the crash.”

  “Any idea how they died?”

  “None. We know what it wasn’t, and that’s all we know.” He fixed those long-lashed eyes of his on me. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  Focus on the bags, Allie. “You didn’t ask one.”

  “How did you know they were dead prior to the crash?”

  I shrugged. "A ghost told me.”

  A smile crept into his eyes. “A ghost? Let me guess. Harry Vasilikos’s ghost?”

  “Of course.”

  He laughed, full and deep. “Ghosts. The way you say it I almost believe you.”

  “Almost?”

  The laugh went away. “You’re a smart woman. You don’t strike me as …” he wiggled his fingers.

  “Woo-woo?”

  “Like one of those old Greek women who sees signs and spirits everywhere. You don’t spit when you say something nice about someone. I’m a policeman and I believe in hard evidence. Supernatural, paranormal, whatever you want to call it, I don’t believe in it because it’s not there, it doesn’t exist.”

  “And people who do believe in those things?”

  “Crazy.”

  My heart crashed down through my lungs and diaphragm, leaving me winded. Leo and I had no future—or a past—but it stung that his opinion of people like me was so low. I’d made the right call, exiting the restaurant stage left. Well, not stage left. I’d wriggled out the bathroom window like I was leaving the scene of a horrendous toilet crime.

  “I have to go,” I said, and it wasn’t a lie. The junk I’d fished out of the water needed analyzing, so I had somewhere else to be as soon as possible.

  Leo nodded, his brain somewhere else. “I have to get moving, too. I hope we recovered all the passengers yesterday.”

  “How many did you get?”

  “Six. Why?”

  Mentally, I counted my apartment’s occupants, then I counted them again. Both times I came up with one extra. Seven. A small bell rang in my head. Betty had also mentioned the number six. At the time, I figured all the bodies hadn’t been recovered yet.

  “You’re missing one,” I said. “There should be seven.”

  “Your ghost again?”

  I held up both hands, wiggled my fingers. “I have powers you can’t imagine, and I used to them to get a headcount.”

  Sam Washington lives outside the village, halfway up the hill. Which is a real pain in his black ass, as he puts it. If he’d had access to a physic, he swears he would have bought a place on one of Merope’s flatter surfaces because dragging that wheelchair up the hill is living out its welcome. If Sam sounds like an American, that’s because he is. Sam came to Merope hunting for a missing person. He quickly discovered two things when he arrived: his missing person wasn’t missing. The guy had followed his poutsa across several Greek islands, narrowly avoiding fathers with shovels, pitchforks, and other assorted garden tools. The second thing Sam discovered was that he and Merope were soulmates. Business was good, there was money to be made, and he could do it here in a low-stress environment, where a traffic jam was two bicycles and one old man on a donkey. From Merope he could go anywhere in Europe, if the work paid.

  On my last day of high school I begged Sam for a job. He liked that we spoke the same language—literally—so he hired me to be his overworked, underpaid sidekick. When I established Finders Keepers, Sam was my first client. Hit and run. Turned out a seven-year-old had struck him with a car and kept on going. End result: cool, shiny wheelchair for Sam, and a lifetime supply of figs from the boy’s family.

  “The dudes always dig a man with his own wheels,” Sam always says. “If that doesn’t seal the deal, the figs win them over.”

  “What do you think?” I said to Sam today. I was holding up two bags. One held garbage. The second was packed full of treats from the Cake Emporium. The white cakebox was waiting when I walked into what had become my favorite store on Merope.

  (“I know what Sam likes,” Betty had said. “Call it a very well-educated guess. The bodies on these bats are filled with tiramisu.”)

  “Only one of those bags is full of good eats, and it’s not the one with …” Sam squinted “… is that trash? Did you bring this fine looking black man a bag of garbage?”

  “It’s your lucky day. The cakes are for you. The trash is for some other poor person who can check it for traces of poison.”

  “Who?”

  “I was hoping you could give me a name.”

  When it comes to knowing stuff, Sam Washington knows more than me. He has been collecting names and people since Aretha Franklin was skinny—his words, not mine. These days he is more of a tech guy, although he dabbles in private investigating, when the lucre is less filthy and more lucrative. After the hit-and-run, he took every online computer class available and discovered he had a knack of hacking the unhackable.

  “Nobody on Merope. Plenty of people you can buy poison from, but no one who analyzes the stuff. Even the cops outsource to a lab on the mainland. How quick do you need an answer?”

  “There’s no ticking clock, but soon would be great.”

  He held out his hand. “Give me your trash, woman, then give me that cake.”

  I grabbed a fork and unpacked the cakebox.

  Sam raised an eyebrow. He was good at it. “One fork? You sick or something? Let me guess: you didn’t make up with that cute cop yet.”

  “There’s no making up to do.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It was one date. It didn’t work out.”

  “Half a date.”

  I lifted out a tiramisu bat, placed it on the plate, passed it to Sam, whose eyes widened to saucers.

  “What’s this? Greeks eat some funny things but I didn’t know they ate bats.”

  “Just shut up and eat it, Ozzie,” I said, laughing.

  He shrugged and stuck the fork in. One bite later he was swooning. “I don’t know where you got this, Callas, but I’m telling you whoever baked this is a magician.” When I told him about the Cake Emporium, he shook his head and swallowed another bite. “Never heard of it, but this might be worth rolling down the hill for. So you gonna tell me what makes a woman cut out of a date and shimmy out the bathroom window?”

  "I realized he was a bad idea.”

  “Yeah, I’ve had a few of those myself.” He didn’t seem too broken up about it, but that was Sam for you.

  “Anyone new on the horizon?”

  “Please, you keep me too busy with your trash.” His voice was gruff but his eyes were all sparkle.

  “Keep it up, Washington, and I’ll put the rest of those cakes on the high shelf.”

  “You are one cruel woman.”

  He ate. Not hungry, for once, I watched him enjoy the cake
s Betty’s brother had whipped up. We took turns mocking each other and faking outrage, until my phone heralded the arrival of a new text message. I ignored it. Reality was trying to cut into my fun time.

  “You want to tell me what happened on that date?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  Sam knew my little secret. He didn’t judge, didn’t think I was weird. He did see how dead people could potentially be a real pain in the behind. Now that Olga was gone, Sam was the closest thing I had to a best friend. Maybe my only real friend. Lots of people talk to me but it tends to be a one-way transaction. My life is acquaintance-rich.

  So I told Sam about how Leo and I decided on Taverna! Taverna! Taverna! for our date night. Nice place. Dumb name. No prizes for guessing the owner’s favorite WWII movie. Though the night was cool, Taverna! Taverna! Taverna! had exterior gas heating, for those rare tourists and less rare locals who wanted to dine alfresco during the colder months. We both wore jeans but I went all out with a fancy top and a good jacket. My lipstick was red and my eye makeup was smoky. Somewhere along the way I’d managed to figure out how to draw the perfect winged eye without jabbing my eyeball with the liquid liner. Leo told me I looked pretty, and the way he checked me out—hard and all over—told me he meant it.

  The first ghost showed up while we were picking at mezedes and I was forking a chunk of spanakopita into my mouth. She was young, beautiful, and as dead as dead gets. She held up her wrists and bled invisible-to-regular-people blood prettily onto the food. I nudged the plate away and tried to ignore the dramatic visual retelling of her death.

  “This will be you,” she said. “You will see.”

  My teeth sank into my tongue. What was Leo saying? Something about my sister, Toula. Perfect. Everyone wants to hear about their date’s exes over dinner, especially when that ex is their sister.

  I shook my head, tried to focus. “What about Toula?”

  “She came to see me at work.”

  “Why?”

  His forehead had scrunched up. He’d genuinely looked worried. “Are you okay?”

  Nod. “Why did Toula come to see you at work?”