Royal Ghouls

by Alex A King

  “Time to run,” I said.

  “Wait,” Leo said. “We need to talk.”

  “You know where I live.” I pointed two finger guns at him and fired.

  I knew where I lived, too, which is why I rode straight home. Lunchtime had snuck up on me, and now my stomach was voicing its displeasure. It really wanted a sandwich, and so did the rest of me.

  Kyrios Yiannis, the dead gardener, was busy pruning the courtyard’s bushes. He raised his hand and waved to me as I approached.

  “Someone is here to see you,” he said.

  “What kind of someone?” I held my phone to my ear so no one would inspect me for missing screws if they witnessed my conversation with thin air.

  “A man.”

  “What does he look like?”

  He stopped clipping for a moment to shrug. “A man.”

  “Thanks for nothing.”

  “Parakalo,” he answered without a shred of sarcasm, and went back to his fruitless work.

  Parakalo is one of those words that pulls double duty. It’s “please” and “you’re welcome”.

  Curiosity piqued, I jogged upstairs. My visitor was standing outside my apartment, staring out the hallway’s picture window. His back was to me but I recognized the long black coat and the blacker than night boots. At the nape, his dark hair curled, touching the coat’s collar. During our first encounter I established that he exuded cool and that his voice evoked memories of ancient and unsolved mysteries, foreign, unexplored places, and candlelight. The mysterious man would have been right at home in a Jane Austen novel. At first I’d mistaken him for a ghost, but he was solid and could interact with me and the world around us. No falling through walls and chairs for this guy, whatever he was. His body was hard and well-built. I didn’t know who he was—all I knew is that he came and went and sometimes our paths crossed. This was the first time he’d sought me out at home.

  My voice crackled on its way out. “Are you looking for me?”

  He turned slowly, a frown unfurling across his face. His eyes were shrouded with shadows that didn’t seem native to the hallway. “Yes.”

  I raised both my arms. “Here I am.”

  “Not all apparitions belong to the dead,” he said in that hypnotic voice. That melodic sound, I could listen to him for hours. A fireplace would be involved, and a comfortable chair, and rugs and paintings from another century. There would be crusty rustic loaves in a wooden bowl, and for some reason, grapes.

  He moved closer and the shadow dissipated. His dark eyes held mine. I was paralyzed … until he walked past me and kept on going. Shocked, I turned around.

  “Wait, you’re leaving?”

  He stopped. “I’ll find you again, if you need me.”

  “Are you some kind of guardian angel?”

  He smiled. “I am no angel.”

  Then he continued down the hall until the stairs carried him away. I exhaled long and deep and stood in the hallway, thinking.

  What he’d said resonated with me. I had more ghosts in my apartment than the morgue had dead people from the Royal Pain’s wreck. If everyone in my apartment was dead, then either a body was still missing, or someone was tagging along for the ride.

  But who?

  There was no way to ask Detective Samaras to take a picture of the lone survivor without arousing more of his curiosity and suspicion. After our date, he already thought I was a whacko, which is rich coming from a potential serial killer. Maybe I could convince Constable Pappas to sneak in and snap a photo. Or someone else. Merope was small enough that I knew everyone’s faces and most of their names. Things didn’t get anonymous until summer struck and the island’s population exploded.

  I made a quick call to one of the nurses I knew. We’d gone to school together, and she was a reliable source of information.

  “They’re not letting anyone in except doctors and two nurses at the moment,” she told me apologetically. “The police have her room locked down tight. Nobody goes in without their permission. They’re saying she murdered all those people on that yacht.”

  “The police are saying that?”

  “No. But everyone else is. Why else would they keep us out unless she committed a crime?”

  It was a good point … for something that was based on nothing. I thanked her, ended the call, and prepared to bust some ghosts.

  In I went.

  The ghosts were home—all seven of them. The womenfolk were crowded around the TV—still. Harry was at the window—still.

  “Okay,” I said. “One of you spooks is not a ghost. Who is it?”

  The older woman I’d taken for Kyria Vasilikos, Harry’s wife, slowly stood and turned to face me.

  “That would be me.”

  Two minutes later, we were both pacing.

  “I don’t know,” the not-a-ghost said. “I promise. We were eating lunch, then we were here. When we first came to your apartment I thought I was dead like the others. Then I realized there was no light for me, no waiting room in the Afterlife. I was on the boat, then I was in your apartment. There was nothing in between.”

  “The rest of you went to the Afterlife first, yes?” I asked the others.

  One at the time, the yeses came back to me.

  “The waiting room, yes,” Kyrios Harry said.

  “You can all see her?” I pointed to the woman, whose name I didn’t know. “What’s your name? In my head you’re still Kyria Vasiliko, even though you’re not his wife.”

  “Eva. My name is Eva Vasiliko.”

  “Not his wife though?” I gestured at Kyrios Harry, who looked horrified at the idea.

  “Sister,” he said.

  I tried to imagine sailing the seas with Toula. No way. Couldn’t do it. Eventually I’d be driven to toss one of us overboard. Would that be murder or self-preservation?

  Or murder as self-preservation?

  “Everyone else onboard died, but not you,” I said to Eva Vasiliko. “Why not? Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you’re alive, but why you and not the others?”

  We paced some more, the transparent woman and me.

  I stopped. Faced her. “What did you eat? More importantly, what didn’t you eat?”

  She shrugged. “I ate what everyone else was eating. That morning it was fruits and cheeses.”

  More pacing happened. A lot of it. Kyria Eva was bird thin. Blow on her wrists and they’d snap like crackers. Difficult to imagine her eating anything. There is naturally thin, then there’s a thinness that comes from years of deprivation dieting. Kyria Eva’s face was gaunt. Her bones were missing a layer of padding. She looked like something the dog dragged out and shook until the stuffing was history. Fruits. Cheeses. Fruits. Cheeses. Something was missing—something Greek.

  “What about bread? Did you eat bread?”

  A Greek who didn’t eat bread. That didn’t compute. Bread is the cornerstone of the Greek diet. It’s their food, it’s their knife. Bread was at that table, guaranteed.

  Kyria Eva shuddered. “There was bread.”

  “But did you eat it?”

  “I never eat bread.”

  “Low carb diet?”

  “Bread makes you fat. Look at them.”

  She was talking about the dead women, every one of them on the high end of underweight. If bread did that, every woman in the western world would be mainlining toast.

  “So they’re dead and you’re not, and you’re the only one who shunned the bread.” Not a question; I was clarifying things for myself.

  Kyrios Harry chose that moment to interrupt. “You think somebody poisoned my bread?”

  “Your bread?”

  “Royal Pain bread.”

  I stopped again. “You were serving Royal Pain bread on the yacht?”

  Two palms up. “What else? My bread is the best bread in Greece.”

  Somehow I doubted that. I remembered Penny Papadopoulo’s words, particularly how many times she used “skata” in reference to Kyrios Harry and his bread.


  “To answer your question, yes, if you were poisoned, it’s possible that the bread—your bread—was the vehicle for that poison. Which means it could have been poisoned any time.” I flopped down in my office chair and opened my laptop’s lid. Interesting that the murderer had chosen to poison the bread. They were really sticking it to Harry Vasilikos, killing him with his own product. Maybe everyone else was probably collateral damage—everyone except Kyrios Harry’s sister. Her diet had saved her life.

  But if she was alive, why was she here, and how? Ghosts were basically souls that had permanently left the building. Maybe they could take vacations if the body and brain were banged up enough. Leo mentioned that the survivor was in critical condition. Probably she was unconscious.

  One survivor. Six dead. Luck or design? Was Eva Vasiliko the murderer? I ran the scenario in my head but the ending didn’t fit. Why kill Kyrios Harry and the others, then sit back as the yacht plowed into an island?

  “If you didn’t eat the bread, why didn’t you call for help or manually override the yacht?”

  “I don’t know.” She wrapped her arms around her body, hugged her thin bones tight. “Maybe I tried. I don’t remember.”

  Could be the crash was affecting her memory.

  For the moment, I added Kyria Eva to the suspect list, right at the tippy top.

  Kyrios Harry peered over my shoulder. “Why is my sister on the list?” he said in the snotty tone of someone who thinks they poop rainbows and candy.

  “Because she’s alive and you’re not.”

  He did some quick math in his transparent head. “You think she poisoned the bread?”

  Kyria Eva crossed herself, then clutched the xylophone that passed for her chest with a red-tipped claw. “I would never murder my own brother. Them,” she nodded to the bikini-clad entourage “maybe, but only because they are strangers and not very clever ones. But I did not murder them.”

  The gaggle of nearly identical women ignored her. My television was more captivating. Good thing they couldn’t touch anything or they’d boost my phone to check their social media.

  “Last time a murder fell in my lap, I made a wrong call. She’s on the list because if there’s one thing I know about people, it’s that you never really know people.”

  “So cynical,” Kyria Eva said.

  “Not always,” I said. “I’m a happy drunk.”

  On that note, I saved the revised document, went to my kitchen, cobbled together a simple sandwich—kaseri cheese, salami, and bread. No mustard. No mayo. I eyed the bread with suspicion, then bit into it anyway because it wasn’t a Royal Pain loaf.

  What if the Vasilikos murders were unlucky accidents and not a murders at all?

  I dropped the sandwich back onto the plate.

  Leo. I wanted to call him. Needed to call him. Virgin Mary, why did he have to be a potential serial killer? Why couldn’t he just be some normal guy who’d boned my sister back in high school? That I could deal with. Being maybe murdered in my sleep was a no-go.

  No. My parents didn’t raise a pair of fools.

  Instead of calling Leo, I hit the internet and ran a search for recent deaths in Greece. I was looking for unsolved cases, mysterious deaths, poisonings, that sort of thing.

  “What are you doing now?” Kyrios Harry asked me. He was peering over my shoulder. Again. The way he did personal space, he’d be comfortable in Tokyo.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “Browsing obituaries. Why?”

  “It’s what I do for fun,” I lied.

  He moved away. “You are a strange woman.”

  Pretty rich, coming from a ghost. “I want to know if you’re the only ones who were poisoned by Royal Pain bread. Maybe you weren’t an isolated case.”

  Here came his nose, poking over my shoulder again, reading my screen. “Are you saying someone sabotaged my factories?”

  “No. I’m saying I want to know if someone sabotaged your factories.”

  “Wundebar Bread,” he muttered.

  “I haven’t ruled that out. Thanassi Dalaras died but—”

  “His widow lives here on Merope, but I do not know if she still owns the company.”

  “She wasn’t on your list.” Angela was on mine though, written in invisible, imaginary ink.

  “Angela does not have a mean bone in her body, just a lot of stupid ones.”

  Was that a glowing endorsement or not? I couldn’t tell.

  I didn’t tell him Angela still owned the company. For now, let him think of Johnny Margas as the company’s frontman and suspect—at least until I had a chance to confront Angela. “Wait,” I said. “Do you know Yiannis Margas personally?”

  “We were friends.”

  “Before you died?”

  “Before he hezo’d on our friendship. We were in the navy together when we were young.”

  “So he’s old like you?”

  “I am not old!”

  “That’s right, you’re dead. You’re not anything anymore.”

  Mean, yes. But Harry Vasilikos’s ghost was breathing down my neck and reading over my shoulder. I couldn’t elbow him in the face so I had to rely on sarcasm and cutting remarks.

  “Death is not the worst thing that has ever happened to me,” he said.

  Yikes. I almost felt bad for the man. “What happened between you and Margas?”

  “He went to work for Thanassi Dalaras at Wundebar Bread, after I offered him a job.”

  “If you were friends, why didn’t he take the job.”

  Kyrios Harry’s sister jumped in. “Because the job my brother offered him was menial and beneath him. Thanassi Dalaras offered him work that let him be a man.”

  Charming woman, that Eva Vasiliko. The type who looked down on the people who waited on her hand and foot.

  I pulled up the picture Angela had given me of her new beau. He was attractive if you had a thing for reptiles and oil spills. Angela had two types, and those types were Filthy Rich and Bad to the Boner. I didn’t mention that Angela and Johnny Margas were embroiled in a long-distance fling.

  “Is this Yiannis Margas?”

  Harry looked and laughed “Sure. Maybe twenty, thirty years ago.”

  A-ha! So the guy running Angela’s bread business, weaseling his way into her life and possibly her treasure chest (not a euphemism; Angela actually owned a treasure chest) had shaved at least two decades off his age. Angela wouldn’t be happy. She liked her Bad to the Boner types to come without a pillbox.

  Now I had two reasons to pedal over to Angela’s villa. But I couldn’t go without proof. Angela would laugh me out of the house if I told her a ghost had tattled on her sweetheart. The internet wasn’t any help, either. Some weirdoes aren’t on social media. I was one of them. My business was, but not my face. Johnny Margas wasn’t anywhere else on the internet either, not as a face. His name was sprinkled here and there in connection with the bread business, but otherwise, he was a ghost. Figuratively.

  Angela had asked me to verify his good looks. No mention of wanting to know his age or other statistics. Time to go digging a little deeper on Johnny Margas.

  I shot Sam an email with Johnny’s details—what few I had—and asked him to run a quick, detailed search.

  Sam called me. “What do you think I am, a wizard?”

  “Yes.”

  He laughed. “You’ve got that right. Hold tight.”

  While Sam was working his wizard magic, I grabbed my sandwich and wrapped it in a napkin. Into my bag it went.

  “Where are you going now?” Kyrios Harry wanted to know.

  “I’ve never had a mother-in-law,” I said, “but if I had a really nosy, bossy one, she’d be just like you.” I slung my bag across my body, took a step toward the front door, then stopped. A thought had just popped into my head. With the whole Leo thing messing with my head, I was slacking. The question should have been my first.

  “Kyrios Harry, who inherits everything now that you’re dead?”<
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  “The business goes to my sister. My art collection goes to various galleries.”

  “You collect art?”

  “Paintings of bread,” Kyria Eva said dryly.

  “Paintings with bread in them,” her brother clarified. “The bread does not have to be the main feature. There is very little art where bread is the subject.”

  Everyone collected something, I supposed. Rich people could afford to indulge their quirks more often and more easily than the rest of us. “What about your money?”

  “Donated to a good cause,” Harry said.

  “Medical research? Hungry children? Homeless veterans? Sad puppies?”

  “Politics.”

  So, not a good cause then. I made mental note and headed for the door. While I was waiting on Sam, I figured I had time to make a house call. But before I could yank the door open, there was a scuffling on the other side, then a knock.

  I peered through the spy hole.

  Toula had come calling.

  Normally my sister dressed like she was three-quarters Amish. She didn’t believe in cleavage or things like skinny jeans. She liked scarves and buttons that went all the way up to where her chest became chin. From the neck up she was me. From the neck down, she was one belief system away from magic underwear. So I recoiled when today’s fashion choice registered. Pajamas, with a cardigan thrown hastily over the top. Yikes. Was the world ending?

  “Are you home?” she called out. “You must be. Your bicycle is downstairs.”

  I opened the door. “I’m on my way out. What’s wrong?”

  “I changed my mind. Take them. Please, take them. Otherwise I am going to bang their heads together like a pair of soft coconuts. What kind of mother would I be if I banged their heads together then spent the rest of my life in jail?”

  I looked past her hip. The hallway was empty. “Where are they?”

  “In the van. Will you take them?”

  “I’m going to church.”

  “Perfect. Tell them to beg God for forgiveness while they’re there.”

  “What did they do?”

  “What didn’t they do?” A noise at the end of the hall jerked her attention sideways. “I told you two to stay in the car.”