Royal Ghouls

by Alex A King

  If she was, then what?

  Did Harry Vasilikos push Maria off the cliff two decades ago? Did Maria discover her mother died at the hand—or foot—of Kyrios Harry? And if so, did she poison the bread, intending to kill him?

  The math didn’t work. Why would she kill herself and her cousins in the process? The women were close; Kyria Dora had said so.

  Maybe the Thessaly Police were running this investigation now, but they’d packed up their toys and scampered back to the mainland. Which left me alone in the sandpit, digging for twenty-year-old fossils. The missing link was here somewhere on Merope. Now I had to find it.

  “Boring,” I told Leo. “It was a work thing.”

  “Hunting down an elusive doily again?”

  “Never underestimate the allure of the perfect doily.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “Still elusive. The hunt goes on for another day.”

  Leo squeezed my hand and took me home. He didn’t come in and he didn’t mention making out. What I got was a kiss on the forehead and a promise that he’d see me tomorrow because he hadn’t slept in two days. And I was okay with that because I had lied to him about my trip to the mainland.

  In my own defense, the lie was white and necessary. He’d told me to stay out of the Thessaly Police’s sandbox.

  Me being me, I couldn’t. The compulsion to find things was stitched into my soul.

  Chapter Fifteen

  My stomach growled. Leo’s appearance on the dock had addled my brains and temporarily squelched my hunger—for food, anyway. Now I was home and my appetite was raging. It would have to wait. Arms folded, I paced the living room floor and told my ghosts a bedtime story.

  “Once upon a time, there was a pretty brunette in mid-1990s fashions and a Jennifer Aniston hairdo. She met a rich man who considered himself to be good at making money, although his wardrobe really needed work. That whole nautical thing is so late 1970s, by the way,” I told Kyrios Vasilikos. “She got a job as a stewardess on his yacht so she could afford to raise her small daughter. Then, one day, while the yacht was moored at Merope, the brunette vanished. From that day on, the man traveled the country, looking for his lost love.”

  Okay, not a good bedtime story. Less Dr. Seuss, more Brothers Grimm—the dark, horrifying original tales, not the newer, brighter retellings.

  “What was her name?” I asked Kyrios Harry.

  He shot his cuffs and stood tall. “Who?”

  “The woman you loved, the one who vanished.”

  The Marias lined up against the couch, every one of them a variation on the same Petsini theme. Maria’s daughter was a younger, less angular copy of her mother, but now that I knew what I was looking at, the resemblance was unmistakable.

  “What about her?”

  “Maria Petsini,” I said. “That was her name, wasn’t it?”

  Kyrios Harry’s chin jerked up. “How did you know?”

  I pointed to the Marias. “Maria Petsini, Maria Petsini, Maria Petsini, Maria Petsini, and Maria Petsini.”

  One of the Marias raised her hand. “Maria Andreou.”

  “Same thing,” I said. “You are all cousins.”

  “Maria’s nieces?” Kyrios Harry sounded bewildered. His gaze travelled from face to face.

  This time I pointed to Maria’s Maria. “Your Maria’s daughter.”

  The ghost of Harry Vasilikos staggered backwards. He fell through the wall, walked out of my bedroom’s open door a moment later. “Maria’s daughter? I did not know.”

  “Because we didn’t want you to know,” the dead woman’s equally dead daughter said.

  “What was the plan?” I asked her.

  She shrugged. “I discovered Mama was last seen on Kyrios Harry’s boat, so we found a way for him to bring us aboard when he was in Skiathos.”

  “You all looked like her, so that part wasn’t difficult, I bet,” I said. “And you were all named Maria.

  Maria nodded. “He said we reminded him of someone he cared about,” she said.

  “Did you poison the bread?”

  The Marias exchanged glances. Maria’s Maria spoke up. “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t any of us. We didn’t want Kyrios Harry or anyone to die. I just wanted to find Mama.”

  “What was your plan, once you boarded his yacht?”

  She looked at Kyrios Harry, who was still processing the shock. “To earn his trust and ask him about my mama. Then follow the trail from there.”

  “But you didn’t have time,” I said. Not a question but a simple fact. Time had run out for everyone. As soon as they’d boarded the Royal Pain with that bread in the galley, their clock had stopped ticking.

  “I did not hurt your mother,” Kyrios Harry told Maria. “I loved her even though she never knew. I never stopped looking for her.”

  “She didn’t know?” I asked him.

  “No.” His smile was a tiny, humorless smear. “Even twenty years ago I was too old for her. What did I have to offer an attractive young woman besides money? Nothing. She was better than that.”

  Maybe, I thought, so was he. “What happened before she disappeared?”

  He shrugged. “I have asked myself the same question a million times or more. When I sail, I replay that day over and over in my head. Nothing changes. No answers come. The day was a normal one on Merope. I played tavli at the kafeneio, I argued about politics with old friends and acquaintances.”

  Playing backgammon and drinking coffee was a favorite pastime for Greek men of a certain age.

  “And Maria Petsini?”

  “That day she went off exploring on her own. She did not like those two malakes, Yiorgos and Dimitri.”

  “Triantafillou?”

  “Who else?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they are cheap and she did not like that they refused to pay their employees what they were worth. They thought I was a fool for paying fair wages when I could have saved money paying less. She got angry with them and would not breathe the same air as they did, after that.”

  Nothing had changed. The brothers were still shortchanging their employees according to Stephanie Dola.

  “So you last saw her the morning she disappeared, then you spent the day with the Triantafillou brothers?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do when you realized Maria was missing?”

  “I talked to the police, I talked to people on the island. Everybody had a different story. Some said they saw her boarding the ferry to Skiathos. Others said she went to Mykonos. The police would not do anything because to them she was not missing—she left. I traveled to both islands, again and again, but nobody had seen her.”

  I believed him. Maria’s face said she did, too. But I still had questions.

  “Why bring the Marias aboard your yacht?”

  His eyes reddened. “When a woman’s heart breaks she tells the world. When a man’s heart breaks, it breaks quietly, along with the rest of him. After Maria disappeared, I turned to my business. I never stopped turning to my business, even to touch other women. Then, when I saw the Marias, I could not believe how much they looked like the woman I had lost. I could not resist asking them to travel with me for a while, to keep an old man company. But they were never her. All I could do was look and imagine what might have been.”

  I sat on my office chair, tried to think. I looked up at their grim, transparent faces.

  “Help me,” I said. “I have all these dead people and no killers.”

  We exchanged helpless glances, Kyrios Harry, the Marias, and me.

  “If I knew I would tell you,” Kyrios Harry said, “and they would, too.”

  The chorus line of Marias agreed.

  My stomach growled. There wasn’t going to be any serious thinking happening on an empty stomach. Kyria Dora’s cherries were ancient history, and I hadn’t eaten since.

  I got up and went to the kitchen. “I need a sandwich. My brain requires fuel.”

  No sandwich for
me. Like Old Mother Hubbard, my cupboards were bare. Condiments I had, but unless I wanted ketchup soup with a lightly toasted napkin, I would have to go shopping.

  “Give me ten minutes.” I grabbed my keys, phone, purse. “While I’m gone, I need you all to think. Who could have poisoned the bread? Who would want you dead? Names and reasons.”

  My phone rang.

  “Can you babysit?” Toula sounded desperate. “We’re in the middle of dinner and the babysitter just called, threatening to run away.”

  “Why?”

  “Can you look after Milos and Patra or not?”

  Me, Dog Fart, Pinkie Pie, and a pile of sandwiches? As far as ideas went it didn’t suck.

  “Sure.”

  “Great.”

  Without another word, she hung up. There was scuffling outside my door, then a knock. I opened the door to find a scrawny teenage girl with two nose rings and a T-shirt that read Fack This, Fack That, Fack Everything. Her makeup was black and smeared in circles around her eyes. I suspected it was deliberate. Milos and Patra was hovering either side of the teenage ray of sunshine, chins on their chests, miserable. I remembered the babysitter when she was a cute kid in pastels and ponytails, before she got hit with the teenage hormones and went all Marilyn Manson.

  “You need a proofreader,” I said.

  “Fack you,” she said in what I decided was supposed to be English. It was hard to tell with the typo in her words. “Take them. Kyria Toula said you would.”

  “Kyria Toula says a lot of things,” I called out as she stalked off, presumably to punch herself in the eyes again. I stuffed my things into my bag. “I hope you two can handle a walk, because that’s what we’re doing. Are you hungry?

  “Again?” Milos whined.

  “You sure like to walk a lot,” Patra said. “Are you worried about getting fat?”

  I stepped in between them and held their hands. Better to divide and conquer ahead of time. “Tonight, I’m worried about starvation. I need food. It’s this or Crusty Dimitri’s, and I like you both too much to feed you Crusty Dimitri’s food.”

  Milos looked up at me. “What does ‘fack’ mean?”

  “It’s something your mother has done at least twice, so you should ask her.”

  My stomach protested all the way to the More Super Market. The tiny market’s lights were off. The door was locked. No sandwiches for us.

  I was about to walk away when I spotted the Triantafillos brothers’ three-wheeled Motoemil truck parked in the narrow alley between their shop and its neighbor. Motoemil quit making the three-wheeler in the early seventies. Motoemil also quit being Motoemil in the 1980s. Nowadays the company made boat trailers and called itself Emilios Trailers.

  “They are up to no good,” a voice said in my ear. “Trust me, they are making trouble.”

  I jumped. Vasilis Moustakas and his walker had materialized alongside me. As always, the dead man was wearing pajamas with a strategic opening.

  “Stay right there. Don’t move,” I told my niece and nephew.

  “Do you need to fart?” Patra asked, wide-eyed. “That’s what Mama does when she needs to fart.”

  Virgin Mary, these children. “No, I just need to make a phone call.”

  I moved far enough that they couldn’t overhear me easily but stayed close enough that I could tackle them if they tried to make a run for it.

  I spoke into my phone. “What kind of trouble?”

  “I fucked your yiayia,” Kyrios Moustakas said.

  Eye roll. “You and everyone else.”

  “They took something that does not belong to them.”

  “Who? The Triantafillou brothers?”

  Kyrios Moustakas and his walker shuffled away.

  The Triantafillou brothers were tight but they weren’t criminals. Not unless frugality, underpaying their employees, and leaving goods on their shelves decades past the Use By Date were crimes. So what was the old man talking about?

  I cupped my hands against the glass door and peered inside. Not easy. Stephanie Dola wasn’t paid enough to wipe a cloth over the glass.

  Squint.

  Sure enough, the decrepit brothers were inside, loading something onto their shelves from a pallet.

  Bread. Royal Pain bread. The Royal Pain bread someone had poisoned.

  I hammered on the door. “Stop!”

  The brothers looked up. Leaning heavily on his walking stick, Dimitri ambled over to the door.

  “The bread,” I said through the glass. “It’s poisoned. You can’t sell it, remember?”

  With his hand, he pushed his fleshy earlobe forward.

  I jabbed my finger at the door handle. “Open the door.”

  He nodded. His liver-spotted hand shook as he went hunting through a hundred or so keys on a massive keyring. Hours later—or minutes—he found the right key, pushed the door open.

  I almost fell into the shop, pulling my sister’s kids behind me. “I thought the police confiscated the Royal Pain bread. There’s a chance it’s poisoned.”

  “It is not poisoned,” Kyrios Yiorgos said. He was stacking bread on the shelf.

  “Did they test it already? That was fast.” Leo hadn’t said a word about the bread when he’d picked me up at the dock.

  “This is from the mainland. It came earlier today, direct from the factory. No poison.”

  Relief washed over me. Good. Great. No one else was dying anytime soon, unless it was from natural causes or the result of bickering with their neighbor over wandering farm animals.

  “I meant to come earlier but I was on the mainland. I haven’t eaten anything except cherries all day. Can I still buy something?”

  “Of course!” He stopped stacking. “Whatever you want, Dimitri will ring it up for you.”

  Kyrios Dimitri took Stephanie’s place behind the counter. Groans leaked out of his mouth as he eased himself onto the stool. “My feet,” he said. “All winter they hurt. This year is going to be the coldest in history.”

  I selected a jar of Merenda. Not my first sandwich of choice tonight, but the deli was closed up and all the meats and cheeses had been banished to the refrigerator. Neither Triantafillou brother looked like they’d survive cutting cheese, so I made do with the hazelnut spread.

  “You like Merenda, yes?” I asked Milos and Patra.

  “Mama only lets us have it on weekends,” Milos told me solemnly.

  “Mama isn’t here.” I looked around to make sure I wasn’t lying to my own flesh and blood. “If you don’t tell her, I won’t tell her unless she tortures me. If that happens, you’re on your own.”

  Milos looked at his sister. “Will you tell Mama?”

  “Only if she asks me.”

  Good enough. I carried the jar to the checkout.

  Kyrios Dimitri picked up the hazelnut spread. “You have bread to go with that?”

  My face fell. “No.” Kyria Eva had taken everything except condiments.

  “Lucky for you we have bread now,” he said.

  Kyrios Yiorgos quit stacking long enough to throw me a loaf of Royal Pain bread. “For you it is free.”

  “Really? You’re sure this isn’t poisoned?”

  He shook his head, laughing. “No poison. For that we would charge you extra.”

  Triantafillou brothers giving away free bread? Obviously my lucky night. They never gave away anything.

  I paid for the Merenda and wrangled my niece and nephew, not caring that the brothers’ generosity didn’t extend to giving me a plastic bag. Free was free, and the Triantafillou brother never gave away something they could sell.

  “Who was that man in the pajamas and why were you pretending to talk into your phone?” Patra asked me.

  Full stop. Jaw drop. “Man?”

  “The naughty man,” she said.

  I crouched down in front of her. “Why was he naughty?”

  “Because he was peeing all over the road.”

  “You saw him peeing?”

  Milos poked his s
ister. “He wasn’t peeing, he just had his thing out like he was going to pee.”

  Thoughts were whizzing around my head. It was a spin cycle in there. “Wait—you both saw a man?”

  “You saw him, too, Thea Allie,” Patra said. “You were talking to him.”

  Slowly, I unfurled my body until I was standing. I blew out a long sigh.

  “You’re right, I did see him and I did talk to him.”

  Patra giggled. “He was like a window. That was funny.”

  “Like an old man window,” her brother said.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “You’re not angry?”

  “Angry? Why would I be angry?”

  “Mama gets angry when we see people she can’t see.”

  “How many have you seen?”

  “They’re everywhere,” they said together.

  Kyrios Harry eyed the loaf in my hand. “Is that my bread?”

  “No. It’s my bread. My free bread.” I quickly slapped together three sandwiches, spreading the chocolate-hazelnut goop thick. Then I made a fourth one because my stomach told me one wouldn’t be enough, and even two wasn’t likely to make a dent in my hunger. I carried the sandwiches to the living room. Milos and Patra were hanging out with four of the Marias. The dead women laughed as Toula’s kids took turns throwing things through them. Then Dead Cat showed up and Patra fell in love. Now that the Merenda sandwiches were a reality instead of a fantasy, their interest in eating had waned.

  No problem. More for me. I carried them to the couch.

  “Did you figure out who murdered you yet?” I asked Kyrios Harry and Maria’s Maria.

  “We don’t know,” Maria said.

  I bit into the sandwich. The woman from Agria, Kyria Dora, was right. Royal Pain bread did taste like a sanitary napkin. Not that I’d eaten a sanitary napkin since I was a toddler, and even then it was a small bite. The paper taste didn’t slow me down. I took another bite, followed by another.

  “Today is my lucky day,” I said. “Some might even say it’s historic. Do you know why?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “Because for the first time ever, the Triantafillou brothers gave something away. For free. No money at all.”