by Etta Faire
Agnes went back to the food as the janitor approached and asked her if she was working hard or hardly working.
I noticed more this time. Gerald’s coveralls were overly baggy, probably to hide his magic props. I wondered how many extra pockets and things he’d had sewn into the lining. And where on earth was that puppy anyway? I didn’t see anything that looked like it could’ve been it.
The man set the pail and his drink down on the floor and grabbed a plate. “Did I show you my new trick?”
Agnes rubbed her hands together. “What have you got this time?”
I watched Gerald’s fingers as they lit up but never noticed anything but flames.
“That wasn’t it,” he said when Agnes applauded. He motioned us away from the table. “We need space for this one.”
Everyone but Nancy took a few steps forward. I tried to focus in on the conversations around me, but they were pretty much talking about magic and how good Gerald was getting at it.
Picking up his bucket, Gerald showed us the inside while tapping on it. It sounded like a hollow metal bucket.
He handed it to Agnes and she looked it over. I still didn’t notice anything weird even though I knew it had a false bottom. Magic buckets were very authentic looking.
This time I was going to notice the things behind me, noises, movements, people. And I did see something weird, Nancy fiddling with the cups and plates in the potluck area.
Gerald raised the bucket over his head. “Alacazazz,” he said while waving a hand over the opening. I was guessing this was when the fancy hand stuff was supposed to meet the pyrotechnics. One of Gerald’s hands reached into his pocket while a white puppy peeked out from an opening in the bottom of his coveralls, and he laughed. “Obviously, not what’s supposed to happen,” he said, pulling the maltese the rest of the way out.
“Amazing. He’s an even worse magician than he is a janitor,” Nancy yelled from the food table to the man with the antler headband as she motioned like a magician’s assistant to the mess of cups and plates along the table.
“He’s usually better,” the man replied. He checked the beeper attached to his Dockers then hustled into the cubicle maze.
Agnes took the puppy from Gerald’s hands and held it up to her face. “My goodness. Aren’t you the cutest? What’s your name?”
While the puppy was up there, I smelled him. Nothing weird, except maybe a little residual lit-match smell from the pyrotechnics. Poor thing. It must’ve sucked being inside coveralls all day with a bunch of magic stuff. Where did he go to the bathroom, anyway?
Instead of concentrating on the conversation I’d already heard, I tried to hone in on the voices around me, look for things I hadn’t noticed the first time around. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hank stumbling around this time, bumping into people and pulling food off of their plates. He carried a bottle of champagne, but he wasn’t drinking from it, and he didn’t seem to be offering it to anyone else.
“People, it is,” Gerald said, taking his puppy back. “You’re right. Carbon is a weird name. I will name him People.”
“Don’t do that to a dog. Next thing you know you’ll be changing his name to a symbol, like Prince,” she said. Gerald put the puppy into the bucket and left, without even cleaning up his own plate. He was pretty much the only janitor I knew who left a mess when he should have been cleaning them. That was suspicious. Plus, the sleight of hand. Anyone with that ability was suspicious.
Agnes turned back around, realizing Hank was right behind her, standing so close she accidentally brushed herself against him.
“You were supposed to meet me in my office,” he said.
“I got hungry and thirsty,” she replied, pointing toward her drink at the potluck table where Nancy was still standing. It was at the end, away from the other cups and plates, right where she’d placed it before.
“Me too,” Hank said, smoothing down his bushy Tom Selleck-wannabe mustache.
Nancy shook her head disapprovingly at Agnes and Hank, then turned and left.
Hank sauntered over to the potluck table, grabbed the cup Agnes had previously indicated was hers, and added more champagne to it. He handed it to Agnes, leaning into us. But he didn’t take a swig from the champagne bottle himself. The three other people standing by the food smiled politely and left when Hank stumble-bumped into them on his way by.
He pulled Agnes over to the doorway again. “You know what they say about mistletoe? It makes you tell Michael you can’t live with him because you are in love with a much more attractive man.” Agnes strained to understand his slurred words.
Out of the corner of my eye, while Agnes watched Hank yank the mistletoe down from the doorway, I saw Gerald had come back. This time, he picked up the cups at the potluck table, looking behind the casserole dishes and pans, but left without actually cleaning anything again.
Hank was still slur-talking about his wife. “Helen and I really did talk about things this time. We’re waiting until after the holidays because of family and parties and families and, you know, the stuff you have to pretend to care about.” He plopped the mistletoe into her drink, burped, then sauntered off.
Agnes pulled it out and giggled, not really noticing that her fingertips were tingling and burning. She took a large gulp, grimacing like usual. This time, I was prepared. I smelled the drink and tasted it more. It had an odd chemical smell mixed with the champagne. It also fizzed more than what was expected, not just in the cup, but also in our ears, like it was continuously fizzing down our throat even though we had finished swallowing.
Agnes set the cup down and moved back to the potluck. Things didn’t feel right. Her throat was numb yet it felt like something was choking her. Trying desperately to feel her throat right, she took a bite of the pot roast, but spit it out again. Her stomach rumbled and churned. She knocked over the plates and drinks at the table as she tried to steady herself enough to run to the bathroom. She bumped into Santa on her way down the hall.
My eyesight suddenly dimmed. And the fireplace and freak tree in my own living room flickered in, making for a jumbled mess between realms. I could tell Agnes’s spirit was struggling to finish.
“I don’t need to see the rest anyway,” I said to Agnes in my head. “You can rest now. I have an idea about things.”
Chapter 11
Making Spirits Bright
Like usual, as soon as the channeling was over, I jotted down everything I remembered into my notebook. My eyes stung from exhaustion. Not only did channeling take a lot out of ghosts, but it was really hard on living people too.
I shuffled into the kitchen where I fed Rex and grabbed some water. My head throbbed with the sympathy pains of living through a poisoning. Glancing at the time on the microwave clock, I sucked in a gasp. I had to hurry. I needed to be to work soon.
I grabbed my laptop from off the coffee table while rubbing my temple. I had a few things to rule out and look up before I could confront anyone.
By comparing the amount of fizzing in Agnes’s cup when we first received it to the amount at the end, I could tell that the cup only had champagne at the beginning, ruling out Michael, for now.
I quickly looked up jewelry cleaners and the effect they would have if someone accidentally consumed them. Many stronger ones still contained cyanide at the time. And if Hank’s grandma’s vintage earrings also included special vintage cleaner to take care of them, that was even more likely. Hank was still in the running.
But, Agnes’s symptoms were inconsistent with cyanide, and the toxicology report hadn’t mentioned it.
My mind kept coming back to the table. There were too many cups left near the potluck, that no one was cleaning up.
But one cup stood out more than the others in my mind, mostly because it hadn’t been on the table at first. It had been on the floor, and then it was wasn’t there anymore. Gerald’s cup.
I pulled up Facebook and messaged him again.
I know you think this is all nonsense,
but I met with Agnes again, and I have a few more questions for you about that night in 1993.
I refrained from accusing him of anything, even though I really wanted to, and instead gave him my cell phone number, my landline number, and the one for the Purple Pony.
Still, I didn’t really think he was going to call “that crazy lady” back so he could hear all about the conversation she’d just had with a dead person.
A few hours later at work, it was all I could think about.
Rosalie was practically dancing around her hippie tree that was adorned in various Bohemian-style pink, green, and turquoise bulbs and ornaments. She was still going on and on about the complimentary ticket.
“A traditional Victorian Christmas party. That sounds weird, right,” she said. Her smile took over her thick cheeks as she pulled a sea forest green, yarn-covered bulb from off the top of the tree and put it more toward the middle. “What are you wearing to something like that?”
It barely registered that she was talking to me, even though we were the only two in the shop at the time.
“Carly?” she said, glancing at me from behind the branches. “What are you wearing tomorrow? You going Victorian?”
“Oh God. Is that what we’re supposed to do? I was going to wear my cute black dress,” I replied, checking my cell phone again.
“You expecting someone to call?”
I put my phone back in my pocket.
“That’s the seventh time you’ve checked in half an hour,” Rosalie said, motioning for me to help her with the tree. “What’s going on? Everything okay with you and Justin?”
I nodded. “It’s just ghost problems.”
“Ghosts calling you on your cell phone now?” She joked, making me smile. “Now, help me fix this thing.”
“The tree looks beautiful,” I said.
“Not yet, it doesn’t. There’s too much going on. We need to make it look less…”
“Commercialized?”
“Yes. Exactly. Lord knows you can’t sell anything at Christmas if you look too commercialized.” She took a couple blue and red egg-looking ornaments off the tree and hung them along her finger. “And we need to sell, sell, sell.”
After taking a couple steps back, she examined her work for a full thirty seconds, turning her head this way and that. “It needs more glitter,” she finally said as the wind chimes rang, indicating we had a customer.
I recognized him immediately. Chubby man with a balding mullet, around 50. It was Gerald.
“Welcome to the Purple Pony,” Rosalie said in her customer-friendly voice.
He looked from Rosalie to me then back again. “Is one of you Carly Taylor?”
Rosalie’s smile faded into a scowl as she limped into the backroom on her bad hip. “Let me know if a Christmas miracle happens and we actually get some customers around here.”
We both knew that wasn’t going to happen.
“Thanks for coming by,” I said, like I’d asked him to.
“I hope you don’t mind,” he replied, taking a step closer to me. I took a step away just in case. “High-school teachers are pretty flexible in the afternoon. And, I just wanted to see what a medium looked like. You don’t look nearly as crazy as I thought you would.”
I looked at his black pants and white sneakers. “And you don’t look like a killer,” I said, under my breath.
He stared at me sideways, and I motioned for him to sit down in one of the stools Rosalie always kept around the store so she could sit if her hip acted up on her.
“As a medium, I don’t always just talk to ghosts. Sometimes I channel with them, which is when their energy and my energy merge and I can relive their memories in real time.”
He looked at me like I was crazy.
I was too familiar with the look to be rattled by it. I went on. “I saw you that day doing your magic trick.”
“What’s this about?”
“I have a theory and I was hoping you could walk me through your last memories of Agnes. I also want to hear all about the magic trick, things like how you prepared for it and what went wrong with it during the party.”
He looked down at the light wood grain of the floorboards. “I don’t remember much. I’d done it a bunch of times already that day, but of course, whenever I was around Agnes, I got a little flustered. I had a crush on her.”
I nodded.
“I still do magic tricks, mostly for my students now. It’s how I keep them interested in chemistry. You may not know this but a lot of the pyrotechnic tricks, you know, the ones with the pops and flames, they’re just a quick mixture of chemicals…”
“Janitorial chemicals?”
His eyes widened. “As a matter of fact, yes. There was this drain cleaner that I loved, almost pure sulfuric acid. I could mix up a whole batch of exploding cotton for the same price as a small bag of it at Landover Magic Shop. Biggest rip off in town. I danced on their grave when the internet came along and I could find quality magic stuff online…”
I leaned against the register. “Did you keep that cotton in your pocket? How did the trick go?”
“Only a couple were in my pocket, just enough to do one or two tricks. But I stuffed a whole bunch into a cup that I carried around with me so my puppy wouldn’t accidentally find it and eat it…” He paused. “I… You… I lost track of that cup. It was why I couldn’t do the trick with Agnes. I didn’t have enough cotton in my pocket…”
“I saw you that night, in my channeling. When you first got to the potluck table, you set a cup on the floor with the bucket but I never saw you pick it up again. Nancy was cleaning up plates and cups and setting them on the potluck table when she was complaining about you not being a very good custodian, which you weren’t. Agnes must have motioned toward it, thinking it was her cup. And Hank must’ve added champagne to it, being too drunk to see it was full of cotton.”
“Not just cotton. Cotton that had been soaked in pure sulfuric acid and other chemicals before drying. A whole concentrated cup of pretty much pure acid…”
After about thirty seconds of stunned silence, I finally said, “You couldn’t have known, and we’re still not sure.”
He looked at the ceiling. “It doesn’t matter. I have to go to the sheriff with this information,” he said. “I think I’ll see Caleb tomorrow, actually.” He stared out the front window at the gray sky that would be Wisconsin’s weather for a while. “Yeah, I’m sure he’ll be at that Victorian party.”
“Oh really,” I asked, my eyebrows raised. “And what Victorian party is that?”
My ex appeared by my side in time to roll his eyes and shake his head. “And just when I thought you’d given up on this made-for-TV sappiness.”
Gerald was still talking. “My kids got me a ticket to this silly party tomorrow night. Their mother has already moved on and remarried, and they think it’s time I met someone too. I’m not sure who they think I’m going to meet at something called a Traditional Victorian Christmas…”
I squealed and my ex-husband ran a hand over his ghostly white face.
“You never know who you’re going to meet,” I said. “Or reconnect with.”
He went on. “I definitely need to let Caleb know about the cotton cup theory. Ask him to look into it. I never thought…” He paused to look around. “Is Agnes here, floating around somewhere?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
He went for the door. “Shame. I was hoping to tell her I was sorry.”
“I have a feeling you’ll have plenty of time for that apology,” my ex chimed in from across the room.
I smiled at the chemistry teacher. “I thought you didn’t believe in any of this nonscientific, illogical stuff.”
“I said I believed in things that were proven to be true,” he said. “That still stands.”
As soon as he left, Agnes appeared by the door.
“Sorry,” I said. “I guess you must’ve heard.”
She nodded. I barely saw her.
Her coloring was so light. She was merely a faint reddish glow against the white walls of the Purple Pony. “It’s funny,” she said. “I remembered being in love with both Michael and Hank, but when I looked back on things, I guess I wasn’t in love with either of them. Thank you for helping me figure out what true love isn’t.”
I looked over at my ex-husband. “You can actually thank my ex for that one. He was the one who taught me what true love could never possibly be in a million years.”
I pulled my curls into a ponytail, casually pointing toward the door. “But Gerald said he used to have a crush on you. Did you hear that? He’s going to be at the party tomorrow.”
My ex-husband groaned from across the room. But Agnes got a little brighter. I could see beige skin tone in her plunging neckline again.
“Maybe my soulmate wasn’t the boss or the coworker. Maybe it was the murderer,” she said. “He looks a lot better without the full mullet, huh?”
I had to admire her mullet-half-full approach to life. I nodded politely, thinking about the chubby, middle-aged man in the pleated work pants with the bright white tennis shoes who’d just walked out the door. “He’s still the same nice guy on the inside, which is most important.”
Her red dress darkened in color. I could see the white fur trim and even the lines in her stockings.
I pulled out my phone from my back pocket and quickly brought up his Facebook profile.
“Two teenagers?” she said when she saw a photo of them fishing together. “I’m going to be a ghost mom. Well, a ghost stepmom, kind of.”
“I’m not sure how that works,” I said, trying to make my voice sound encouraging. “But maybe. How would you like to go to a party tomorrow to see what happens?”
Chapter 12
Happy Holidays