Royal Ghouls

by Alex A King

  I slipped into Kyria Eva’s hospital room. The bone-thin woman was unrecognizable. Lots of bandages. Her bare skin was scorched and crispy. She looked like a half-baked turkey. Her eyes were open.

  “Allie,” she rasped.

  Eva Vasiliko was awake.

  One audible gasp later—mine—Leo was ejecting me from the ICU.

  “You can’t be here,” he said. “She is either a victim or a suspect, and it is up to the Thessaly Police to decide which. They will go crazy if they know you’ve been in to see her.”

  “What about Johnny Margas?”

  Pappas was already marching Johnny Margas down the hallway, hands cuffed. The older man had lost his swagger and the color in his skin. Maybe he liked handcuffs but not like this.

  “If he tried to kill his wife, this is our jurisdiction, not Thessaly’s” His eyes softened. “Go home. We’ll talk later. I’ll make sure Kyria Vasilikos is okay.” He put his keys in my hand and closed my fingers around them. They were warm and strong—his fingers, not his keys. “Take my car.”

  “What about you?”

  “I will call you if I need a ride home.”

  Leo’s car wouldn’t fit in the street outside the Cake Emporium. It was a space designed for donkeys, bicycles, and a maximum of two gossiping widows walking abreast. So I parked in the main street and hoofed it to what had become my favorite confectionary store. I couldn’t go another night without more sugar. Not if was anything like last night.

  Betty hugged me. She was warm and tiny, and she felt like home and smelled like marshmallows and cream.

  “Perfect timing, as always, luv. I just whipped up a couple of treats for us.”

  The treats turned out to be a pair of caramel hot chocolates, served with tiny marshmallows and chocolate freckles on the side. Stress slid out of my body. Boneless, I flopped down on one of the small sofas and reached for the closest mug of heaven.

  “My life is weird,” I said, breathing in a curl of chocolate and caramel steam. “Too weird. I need more sugar in my life. Diabetes schmiabetes.”

  Her eyes twinkled. “Lucky for you then that I know a place you can get some. You can tell me what you’d like or you can leave it to me to pack a box filled with things I know you’ll love. I’m good at figuring out what my customers like.”

  “That sounds perfect,” I said. “I’ll leave my gastronomical delights in your capable hands.”

  Betty beamed, hugged me around the shoulders. “Then while I’m doing that, you drink that hot chocolate and tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “Murder and mayhem, mostly. One more murder and this will become the new normal. I don’t want it to be the new normal. I like my quiet life where I find things for people.”

  Betty placed a large white cake box on the counter. Her head disappeared as she got busy picking and choosing from the big cabinets. Her voice wafted over the top. “To be alive is to change, I’m afraid. You can turn your back on change, but like a puppy, that change will keep sitting its bottom down in front of you, demanding you pay it attention.”

  “What if I ignore it?”

  “The puppy?”

  “Change.”

  “Eventually it will switch tactics, won’t it? What was a cute puppy will become a giant hammer, and that hammer will boop you over the head until you yield and evolve.”

  “I was afraid of that.” The hot drink was making me drowsy. “I’ve got a ghost in my apartment that isn’t a ghost.”

  “Not all apparitions are ghosts,” she said.

  I looked up from the caramel hot chocolate. “What did you say?”

  “You’re projecting those words in neon. Whoever told you that had a good point. Not every woo-woo thing used to be alive. And some, like your Kyria Eva, are alive enough, but their bodies are damaged or sleeping.”

  “Are you saying vampires are real?”

  “Every story, every myth, every rumor or legend starts somewhere with a seed of truth. Maybe vampires aren’t bloodsucking fiends who hunt virgins at night, but maybe there was someone once who fancied a tipple of blood now and then.”

  “What about zombies?”

  “Men and women enslaved by powerful medicines that hold them in a thrall.”

  “Werewolves?”

  “Perhaps you should ask Kyria Sofia about werewolves. I hear she knows a thing or two about exotic animals.”

  I choked on the hot chocolate. Spluttered. “Kyria Sofia, Father Spiros’s sister? You know about that?”

  Her head popped up above the glass cabinet. A mischievous grin reached up from her lips to dance in her eyes. She winked.

  “You are terrible,” I said, laughing.

  “Everybody has secrets, and thanks to my gift I see far too many of them. Now, Greece is interesting because it has all the usual woo-woo things, plus its own.”

  “Don’t tell me the Olympians were real.”

  “Remember, there is truth in fiction. Every fantastical thing starts with that seed of truth, even those crackpots from Mount Olympus. Can you imagine what a philandering nightmare the real Zeus must have been?”

  “You know a lot about this stuff.”

  “We all have our talents. You have a knack for finding things and convening with the dead, and I am a fount of knowledge when it comes to things that go, ‘Knock, knock, can I borrow a cup of sugar?’ in the middle of the night.” She reappeared on my side of the cabinets with the cakebox. “Something sweet for every occasion,” she said, presenting me with the box. “Too bad that big teddy bear of a cat can’t share.”

  I shooed the dead women off my couch, flicked the television to something I liked, opened my box of cakes. The women peered into the box. They made happy sounds.

  “I would kill someone to be able taste cake one more time,” one of the women said. I don’t know which one. They were interchangeable. Which was offensive now that I thought about it. They were individuals—or had been—and it was wrong of me to think of them as a monolith, just because they all wore the same hairstyle and visited the same plastic surgeon. Virgin Mary, I was no better than Jimmy Kontos or Johnny Margas.

  “What are your names?” I asked them.

  Maria, Maria, Maria, Maria, and Maria.

  “You have issues,” I told Harry. “Was your mother’s name Maria?”

  He shrugged it off. “Can I help it if they are all Maria? They were all Maria when they asked to come on my boat.”

  Kyria Eva was, predictably, gone. Six to go.

  “Your sister is fine, by the way. Nice of you to ask.” I went to the kitchen for a fork and spoon. It pays to be prepared.

  Harry did not turn away from the window. “She is alive and I am dead.”

  On the television screen, Keanu Reeves spotted the white rabbit and prepared to go Alice by heading to the club to meet Trinity. I did the same thing, cracking open a white chocolate mummy with edge of a spoon. Raspberry cream oozed out, streaked with real raspberries.

  Keanu was cute. He wasn’t Leo Samaras but he made leather look good.

  Leo. Was he killer or not?

  Not all apparitions are ghosts.

  What if the dead women from our date weren’t dead or women? Like Fox Mulder, I wanted to believe.

  Another confection later—a dark chocolate witch’s hat filled with nuts and caramel—Keanu was taking another leap of faith. Maybe I needed to do the same thing. I had a head full of loose facts, flopping around like mismatched socks out of the dryer. Now that the Thessaly Police had seized the Royal Pain case, I had time to think about other things until the status quo stopped status quo-ing.

  I carried my laptop to the couch, propped my feet up on the coffee table. Good thing my mother and sister were not here to witness that travesty.

  The hunt was on. Objective: Find the two dead women who had muscled in on my date with Detective Leo Samaras.

  What did I already know?

  Leo hadn’t been back on Merope for long. He was raised on the island, then he’d le
ft for a long stretch before returning as the local police detective. His last known location on the mainland was Thessaloniki, the country’s second largest city. Thessaloniki is a major hub for people and cargo traveling to and from southeastern Europe. A murder or ten could happen there and be swept under a rug or into the sea.

  Or maybe there was no murder at all.

  I started with homicides of women between the ages of eighteen and thirty five. In 2017 the country saw eighty-one murders, about a third of which were women. Within ten minutes I was looking at their faces—their unfamiliar faces. Leo was a couple of years older than me, so I went back twelve years, hunting for a face I recognized, hoping I wouldn’t find one.

  And I didn’t.

  Next: Missing persons, specifically women. There were hundreds of faces to sift through, women who were lost or worse. The second Matrix movie came and went and I had abandoned the cakes for the scores of women who had vanished.

  Nothing.

  Deaths were next. More interested in suicides, I narrowed my search and came up dry again. Same with deaths from natural causes and other assorted accidents.

  Dry haul. I squished a piece of cake with the fork while I thought.

  What if the women weren’t Greek?

  I picked up the phone and called Sam. Asked him to find out if Leo had left the country in the past twelve years. From the two apparitions’ hairstyles and fashions I would guess they had been killed—if they were killed at all—within the past five years, but I was playing it safe by extending the search to twelve.

  While I waited, I extended the searches by another decade.

  No faces stood out.

  Until one did.

  Chapter Eleven

  The falling woman from Merope’s cliff smiled back at me. Maria Petsini was her name. Twenty-eight-years-old. Part of the fabric of the island for so long—at least as long as I’d been here—I had never paid her much attention before. She’d gone missing twenty years ago, somewhere between Athens and Thessaloniki.

  At the time, her parents, Yiorgos and Maria Petsinis had offered a reward for information, the substantial sum of five thousand euros. (Given that Greece switched from the drachma to the euro fifteen years ago, the original sum would have been in drachmas.) The reward had never been claimed.

  The poor Petsinis. Their daughter wasn’t missing. She was long dead, her bones swept away to God only knew where.

  Sam called back. “Your boy has never been anywhere. Doesn’t even have a passport.”

  “Thanks, Sam.”

  He wasn’t done. “Say, that cake shop of yours. Where did you tell me it was? I went rolling down the hill today to take a look. But maybe I’m getting old or something because I couldn’t find the place.”

  I gave him directions again and ended the call. Sam was wrong about one thing. Just because Leo didn’t have a passport, didn’t mean he’d never left the country. All it meant was that he’d never visited a region outside the Schengen Area. That gave him twenty-six potential killing grounds.

  I went back to Maria Petsini’s face. Something about her was bothering me, but I couldn’t put my finger on what that something was. Maybe it was me. Guilty feelings and all that. Next time I saw her I would try to be kinder. Maybe she would have information I could pass to her parents, so they could find some measure of peace—if there is such a thing for the parent of a dead child.

  Frustrated, I flopped back onto the couch cushions. Ghost milled around me.

  “Are you stressed? You look stressed,” one of the Marias said. “What you need is a massage.”

  “I don’t do massages.”

  “Massages are amazing,” she said. “You should do massages.”

  “Too ticklish,” I told her.

  Another Maria had other ideas. “You should drink.”

  Now there was an idea I could get next to. In the kitchen cupboard there was an ouzo bottle with a solider on the label. The same bottle Toula had brought over after Kyria Olga’s murder. Toula didn’t always have a stick up her kolos; sometimes she could be downright human. I poured two fingers of ouzo and was this close to knocking it back when my phone rang.

  “Come get me?”

  Well, well, well, Detective Samaras.

  “You just saved me from drinking and driving,” I told him. “I was this close to ouzo oblivion.”

  “Bad night?”

  “Let’s just say my life took a weird turn recently and it isn’t getting any less weird.”

  “The ghosts,” he said dubiously.

  “The ghosts have been around since forever. They’re nothing new.”

  “What are you drinking?”

  I told him and he chuckled. “Sounds like you need some food to soak up that ouzo.”

  He was right, drinking with food was the Greek way. It prevented a lot of blackouts and saved myriads from being outed as alcoholics. “What did you have in mind?”

  “Pick me up and you’ll find out.”

  I thought about the dead women from our date and the skeletons that didn’t appear to be hiding in his closet—not yet, anyway. The possibility that he didn’t kill those women raised questions. Questions with potentially complicated and terrible answers.

  “No hints?”

  “Food. That’s the only hint you’re getting.”

  Whatever it was, I hoped it didn’t come with a side of murder.

  “Are you joking?”

  Leo slapped a white minty pill into my hand. “Take this.”

  “Why?”

  “Preventative measure.”

  I handed it back. “Antacids won’t save us from salmonella and E. coli.”

  “But it will stop us burping up Crusty Dimitri’s gyros. Besides, we have ouzo, remember? Alcohol should kill the bacteria and parasites.”

  “I don’t think there’s any science in your science.”

  There was a knock on the door. It was the same kid who had delivered Lydia’s flowers earlier today. He was really killing it as a delivery boy.

  “I’m sorry,” he said as he accepted Leo’s money.

  “Don’t be,” Leo told him. “Caveat emptor. What kind of meat is Dimitri serving tonight?”

  “I don’t know, but my neighbor’s donkey went missing earlier this week.”

  I winced. There were only so many places a donkey could go on a small island. Crusty Dimitri’s kitchen was one of them.

  Leo took the bag and headed to my kitchen. The ghosts followed. Great. So we had an audience. Although, given that Leo might still be a serial killer, having ghosts around wasn’t the worst idea ever. Maybe they could find some other poor sap to contact if this meal went wrong. At least one other person could see ghosts on the island. There was a chance I could yell Kyrios Stavros’s name before I took my last breath.

  Leo divvied up thick tiganites—fries—sprinkled with green flecks I hoped were oregano, and a couple of gyros that looked okay from a distance. Up close, the meat was oily and the tzatziki was more pungent than it should be, with something other than garlic.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” I said. “If I eat it you’ll have to transport me to Toula’s house on my shield.”

  Leo carried the plates to my kitchen table. He poured water for two, and a glass of ouzo for himself. Mine was already on the table. For someone who didn’t live here he was comfortable moving around in my space.

  “That’s what the ouzo is for,” he said. “Courage. Where do you sit?”

  I pointed to my seat. He took the other one.

  He raised his glass. “Drink.”

  We drank. First one, then another. Two glasses later we were brave enough to tackle the food.

  “I like this,” he said.

  My eyebrows rose. My mouth tried to open but I was busy holding back the vomit. I swallowed and instantly had regrets. “The food? How can you like the food?”

  “I was talking about the company and the atmosphere. This is what we should have started with.”

 
“It’s too late for that now.” Ouzo haze filled my head. My limbs were soft and floppy. For someone whose life was turning down dark corners, I felt good.

  “Why did you run away?”

  “Technically, I walked, then I climbed and shimmied, then I risked social suicide by slipping off my heels and hobbling home barefoot.”

  “Whatever you did, why did you do it?” He moved to pour more ouzo in my glass but I covered it with my hand.

  I thought about all the dead and missing women I’d looked at today and now none were familiar except Maria Petsini, the perpetual cliff-jumper.

  “I saw something.”

  “What?”

  I pushed the plate away. I couldn’t do this, not even with three glasses of ouzo in my stomach. “Women.”

  “Women?” He ditched the gyro and forked fried potato into his mouth. “At the taverna? I didn’t see any women. All I saw was you running away.”

  “Walking.”

  “Walking away then.” He ate another oregano-sprinkled potato. “Is this another ghost thing?”

  “I don’t know what it is.”

  And I didn’t, because like last time, the woman stepped out of nowhere and into my kitchen. No shimmering air that normally occurred in the split second before a ghost appeared. She wasn’t here, then she was. The same woman from Taverna! Taverna! Taverna! Beautiful. Sophisticated. Wrists dripping blood from a vicious pair of slashes.

  She looked at me and spoke. “Run for your life. I had no choice but to stay and die. Run before he cuts you, too.” Her voice crackled like a bad radio signal. Not the apparition’s body though; that signal was clear. By kitchen light, she was straddling the border between transparent and opaque. Unusual. Even Dead Cat, a more solid ghost than most, was see-through.

  Not all apparitions are ghosts.

  Two mouths had delivered a similar message. One of them—Betty’s—was even reliable.

  If she wasn’t a ghost, what was she? Eva Vasiliko had some kind of out-of-body experience while she was unconscious. Kyrios Harry’s sister had looked like a ghost in every respect. I could see the wall through her. She’d had issues with furniture. This was different.