Death by Chocolate Cake--A Short Read

by K. J. Emrick

  Jack tapped a finger on the table. “I agree.”

  For a moment, he just stared at Thomas. Thomas stared back at him.

  Was Kyle right, Miranda wondered? Was Thomas a suspect? Then she answered her own question. Yes. Of course he was. “So, who else was there?” she asked, knowing they couldn’t just blame Thomas because he was the current boyfriend. Or, because Jack didn’t like him.

  “Well,” Thomas said, “there was Millie Poole, our caterer. And then there was Barbara Graham. She’s just a friend of ours. A little bit older than us. Retired, you know? Oh, and Marvin. Marvin Locke.”

  “He was there celebrating Anya’s birthday?” Jack was just as surprised by that as Miranda felt.

  “No. Well, yes he was there but it wasn’t for the party. He said he came around to talk to Anya. I didn’t want to spoil the mood by tossing him out on his ear so I let him in and he stayed when he knew the party was on. He was there when I found Anya, out talking to the others. I can’t help thinking maybe he did this.”

  “You’re not a fan of Marvin Locke?” Jack asked.

  “No, I’m not. Of any of Anya’s ex-boyfriends, mind you,” he added, looking directly into Jack’s eyes. “Well. He had no place in our house but for Anya’s sake I let him in. I think it was a mistake on my part.”

  “I see,” Jack said, and nodded slowly. “Thomas, I don’t think you and I are ever going to be friends, but we have a common goal here. We both want to know what happened to Anya, and if anyone hurt her we want them to pay for it. For you, because you were dating her and let’s face it, you need to make sure no one thinks you did this to her. For me, because I’m such a crackerjack cop, as you put it, that I want to see the right thing done. So. How about you let me help you?”

  Thomas shook his head. “There’s already police investigating this. They can handle it.”

  “Maybe,” Jack agreed, “but maybe not. Why not let me try?”

  Throwing his hands up in the air, Thomas relented. “Fine. You’re here, might as well make yourself useful. The thing is you won’t be able to get into my house so I can show you where Anya’s body was until at least this afternoon. The police are still taking photographs or whatever it is they do.”

  “We do a little bit more than take photos,” Jack said flatly. “Fine. We’ll meet you back at your house at four o’clock. That all right with you?”

  “Dandy. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I want to be anywhere but right here.”

  He stood up, and put a few bills down on the table. “Coffee’s on me.”

  “Pleasant man,” Miranda said with a smirk as Thomas was leaving. “I can’t imagine what Anya saw in him.”

  “Money, I’m guessing.” Jack shrugged. “I really don’t care. I just want to make sure justice is done here.”

  Miranda laid a hand across his on the table. “That’s my guy.”

  “Yes,” he said to her. “Yes, I am. How about we see if this little town has a motel we can get a room at for the day? We’ll want to call Sapphire and have her take care of Butter, too. We might not be back until late at this rate. Or tomorrow, even.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Miranda told him, “only Sapphire prefers to call him Gypsy.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Because,” Kyle offered, “Sapphire is insane.”

  “Shh,” Miranda told him. Then she looked at Jack, and realized she’d slipped. He’d just heard her talking to thin air.

  “Psychic thing?” he asked her, in that accepting way that made her like him even more.

  “Yeah…” She looked at Kyle, and he shrugged. This was the part of her life that she hadn’t told Jack yet. Now that she knew his deepest, darkest secret it didn’t seem fair that she was keeping one of her own. He’d been so good with her about everything else. He wouldn’t freak about this.

  Right?

  “It’s your call,” Kyle told her, “but from where I’m standing I’d rather not be a third wheel.”

  “Miranda?” Jack said.

  “Uh, yeah,” she said, realizing she’d been quiet for a very long time. “Listen. Here’s the thing. We’re not… alone.”

  Jack looked all around the coffee house, at the few other customers and the waitresses. “Yes, I can see that.”

  “No, I mean… oh, man, this is hard. Listen, you know I can see ghosts, right?”

  He lowered his voice to match hers, so that no one could hear anything they were saying. “Sure. It’s okay, Miranda. I like you for who you are. There’s nothing you can say that would—”

  “My best friend is a ghost and he’s standing right here,” she said in a rush, before she could lose her nerve.

  He blinked at her. Then he looked around them again, and this time he wasn’t looking at the living people. “Well. That’s certainly not what I expected you to say.”

  She sat for a moment, watching him, until a little smile crept over her face.

  “What?” he asked, when he noticed her expression.

  “You haven’t run away.”

  “Nope. You aren’t getting rid of me that easily.”

  “Oh, Miranda,” Kyle said. “This guy’s a keeper.”

  “Yes, he is,” she said, glad that she had found a man that wouldn’t make her hide any part of her true self. “Jack, allow me to introduce you to my friend. This is Kyle Hunter.”

  “Er, hi…” Jack said, waving over Miranda’s left shoulder.

  “I’m over here,” Kyle complained, pointing to himself on the opposite side of the table.

  Miranda reached over to move Jack’s gaze in the right direction.

  Jack’s face contorted into a frown as he turned back toward her. “Kyle? I thought you said Kyle was just a friend of yours who was back in Melbourne. He supposedly helped us out when we were investigating Lea Maroney’s murder.”

  “Well… technically he did help out. It’s just that he was there that day and not in Melbourne like I said.” Miranda chewed on her bottom lip, worried how he would take that news.

  Jack shook his head. “You know I wondered… why didn’t you tell me about him before this?” He put a hand up to stop Miranda’s response. “No, it doesn’t matter.” He smiled at her then and his face lit up. “It doesn’t change a thing for me.”

  They got back to Thomas Crowe’s house just before four o’clock. The one and only motel in Raven’s Falls had given them a room, and they’d spent a couple of hours flipping through television channels and talking about what it was like to have a ghost for a friend.

  Kyle had loved being the topic of conversation. He’d had lots of helpful things to add, insisting that Miranda tell Jack all about this or that, and what he could do, and how he could float through walls and move small objects.

  For the fun of it, he’d stood the pen on the motel room’s desk on end, spinning it like a top.

  Jack had watched in awe, and the asked Kyle to do it again.

  “Still can’t believe there’s a ghost with us,” he said now, shaking his head as they went up the walk to Thomas’s front door. “Is he there all the time?”

  “Not all the time,” Miranda explained. “He comes and goes as he pleases.”

  “Too right, I do,” Kyle smiled. “I’m a free spirit. Ha! Woohoo…”

  “Okay,” Jack said in response to what Miranda had said. “I get that. He comes. He goes. But is he around us… all the time?”

  Finally, Miranda got it. He was worried Kyle had a looky-loo whenever they were, um, getting comfortable on the couch.

  “Oh, for the love of God,” Kyle said. “Tell him to stop worrying so much. I’ve got no reason to watch you two making out. I’ll go wait on the roof the next time you two want to canoodle, or I’ll take a walk, or something.”

  Miranda smiled at Jack. “He says not to worry. He’ll respect our privacy.”

  Kyle grimaced. “Not exactly what I said, but sure.”

  “Guess I’ll have to trust you,” Jack said. “Not like I’ll ever know if he’s
watching, right?”

  “I’ll be sure to spin a pencil,” Kyle snarked.

  Just as Jack was about to knock on the front door, it opened. Thomas was standing there, with a beer bottle in one hand. “Well. I guess the wondercop is here to save the day.”

  He turned and walked back into the house, leaving the door open for them.

  Jack shrugged, and they followed Thomas inside. They already knew they weren’t going to become best friends.

  A long hallway had doors leading off to both sides. Miranda saw a huge living room and then a smaller sitting room with shelves holding books and knick-knacks. The house was all tastefully done. It didn’t seem like a man’s touch. It felt like a woman had put her vision on every part of the home. That would be Anya, no doubt. Had she finally found a man that she could stay with forever, instead of just for the here and now like she had with Jack, and then Marvin?

  Miranda suddenly heard an ear-splitting scream. Seeing that neither Thomas nor Jack reacted to the noise, Miranda knew what she was hearing. This was a scream from beyond the grave. A dead woman’s scream.

  Anya Westfield.

  Kyle floated off down the hall. “I’ll go take a look.”

  Miranda thought about letting Kyle handle this, but she wanted to get to the bottom of things quickly and playing telephone with Kyle was never quick. Or easy.

  “Thomas, is there a restroom I can use?” Miranda asked, trying to give herself a reason to follow her friend.

  “Yes,” Thomas said idly, pointing off in the direction Kyle had gone, using the hand that was holding his bottle. “There’s a guest bathroom just down the hall, that way. You can’t miss it.”

  “Thank you,” she turned to Jack quickly, hoping that she was able to convey in a single glance what her plan was. “Do you think you could start without me?”

  “Sure thing,” he said quickly. “You can catch up… after. Thomas, why don’t you show me the kitchen where you found Anya?”

  “Yeah, okay. This way,” Thomas grumbled.

  They started walking off in one direction, while Miranda hurried in the other.

  As Miranda made her way along the hallway toward the restroom, she could hear Kyle talking with someone, both voices having that fuzzy and slightly distorted quality the voices of the dead always seemed to have.

  She found the door to the room that the voices were coming from. When she gently pushed it open, she found herself in a cramped space decorated in dark shades of red and brown, with chairs set here and there in no apparent pattern. The room didn’t seem to fit any particular function as far as Miranda could tell. The house was so big, it had more rooms than anyone knew what to do with.

  Kyle was indeed there, as was a rather pretty redheaded woman maybe just a few years younger than Miranda. Well, a pretty redheaded ghost to be precise, emitting the blue hazy aura that always surrounded the dead in Miranda’s eyes.

  No doubt this was Anya Westfield.

  “Marvin and Thomas. Marvin and Thomas,” the woman repeated over and over again, pacing back and forth, her fists pounding the air in front of her with each step. “Marvin and Thomas…!”

  Finally, she stood stock still.

  “Why couldn’t either of you have been more like him?” she said.

  It was obvious that Anya’s ghost was completely disconnected from reality. She was talking to Marvin, and Thomas, who weren’t even here. And, more like him? That could only mean Jack.

  Miranda had dealt with dispossessed, crazy, even malicious spirits before. Sometimes they were so dangerous the only recourse was to force them out of the space they were inhabiting. It was hard, and both physically and mentally exhausting, and there was always a few echoes of the ghost left when she was done.

  Miranda seriously hoped she didn’t have to do this here. The last time it had taken her three months to recover.

  “It’s all right, Anya.” Kyle was clearly trying very hard to soothe her, and Miranda remembered why it was that she loved her old friend so very much. “Everything is going to be all right.”

  Now Anya’s gaze focused on Kyle, with a blur of motion as she twisted her head. “I’m a ghost. I’m a ghost and you’re a ghost. I’m dead and I’m a ghost and you’re a ghost and I’m a ghost.”

  “Right, exactly,” Kyle said. “Now, just take it easy. You need to calm down.”

  “Calm down! Are you insane! I’m a ghost and you’re a ghost and no one can see us because we’re ghosts. You’re a ghost and I’m a ghost and you’re a ghost and I’m a ghost…!”

  Miranda took a step closer, starting to call on her inner reserves, that place where she would call energy from if she needed to do an exorcism. But then Kyle reached out, and his hand touched Anya’s, and that connection seemed to ground Anya in reality again.

  She was a ghost.

  She was dead.

  “I’m going to help you move on,” Kyle said to her, “but I need you to calm down so that I can explain it all to you. We’re not going to get anywhere like this, Anya.”

  “I don’t… understand what happened to me.” There were tears in her eyes now, shimmering in a halo of blue light.

  “We’ll help you,” he repeated, getting her to finally stop moving back and forth.

  “He’s right, Anya,” Miranda said, and both ghosts turned sharply to look at her. “We’re both here to help you.”

  “You’re not a ghost,” Anya said, floating closer to Miranda, her feet barely skimming the floor. “You’re still alive, I can feel it.”

  “That’s right, Anya. I’m still alive.”

  “But you can see me.”

  “Yes, I can see you. But I’m the only one here who can. I’m a psychic/medium, you see.”

  “Oh,” she said, as if that made all the sense in the world. “You really can see me? I’m not alone? We’re not alone?”

  That last question was directed at Kyle. It seemed to comfort her somehow to know she wasn’t going to be invisible, and alone, for all eternity.

  “Yes, Anya,” Miranda said, letting her inner energies ebb away again, “you’re not alone. We’re going to help you but to do that we’re going to need you to try and remember a little bit about what happened to you. Do you have anything at all to tell us?”

  Anya settled over to one side of the room, folding—more or less—into a chair. “I don’t. I mean I do, but I don’t. The weird thing is, everything feels a bit fuzzy. I know there was something going on, like a party or something.”

  “Yes, that’s right. It was a birthday party,” Miranda said encouragingly.

  Anya ignored her, lost in what was left of her memories. “I was out in the kitchen, yes, at a party… and I was sneaking a few sips of wine… and then someone came in. Now, that’s weird.” She blinked at Kyle, and then at Miranda. “I don’t know who it was. How odd is that? I remember being there, and I remember that person coming in, but I don’t remember who it was. They gave me a piece of cake. Chocolate cake.”

  “Did you eat it?” Miranda asked, trying to keep Anya on the right track.

  “I did. It was my birthday after all. Oh,” she said suddenly, her eyes going wide. “I remember it was my birthday. How odd. It was my birthday, and they gave me chocolate cake and I ate it. No, I ate about half of it, and I felt really strange. Like my throat was tightening up, I think. It felt like somebody was choking me. Then I was on the floor and I was really struggling to breathe. Then somebody was there, somebody knelt down, and touched my face.”

  “Do you know who it was?”

  “No, I don’t.” Her fuzzy appearance distorted like she was made of static, before coming back into focus. “I ate the cake, and I fell to the floor, and then everything went black. I love chocolate cake. It’s my favorite. The next thing I knew, I woke up alone and I screamed. Thomas couldn’t see me. Marvin couldn’t see me. There were police here and they couldn’t see me either. Then you were here, and you can see me.”

  People always responded differently to wak
ing up dead. Some screamed, some cried, some were too angry to do anything but rampage through the world of the living. Others were able to make sense of their afterlife. Still, every ghost Miranda had ever encountered forgot part of their past. Usually, the very moment of their death.

  Anya’s experience wasn’t unique. She didn’t remember much of what happened to her, and there weren’t many clues there for them to go on.

  “Do you remember everybody who was in the house?” Miranda asked next. She had Thomas’s version. She wanted Anya’s.

  “Yes,” she answered. “The same old people. Me, Thomas, Barbara. Oh yes, Millie was here, obviously.”

  “And Marvin Locke?” Miranda coaxed.

  “Oh yes, Marvin came. Quite out of the blue, really. He shouldn’t have come here on my birthday. He and I had broken up so long ago. He shouldn’t be here, but I thought I ought to invite him in anyway.”

  “Okay. Let’s go over your guests, one at a time,” Miranda said, hoping this might lead them somewhere. “Tell me a little about Barbara.”

  “Did I hear my name called?” Suddenly a woman with curly gray hair and a knitted shawl over her blue dress, wearing a very angry expression on her face, appeared in the open door of the room.

  Chapter 5

  Realizing that she was simply standing there on her own—to normal eyes at least—Miranda felt like she’d been caught stealing. Why would she be standing in this house, talking about a woman she’d never met before? She racked her brain for an excuse while she wondered exactly how much of the conversation Barbara had heard.

  “I’m so sorry,” Miranda said, when no good excuse came to mind. “I think I just had your name stuck in my head. Thomas mentioned you when I first came in. He invited us. My boyfriend and I, that is. Jack Travis. Detective Jack Travis, that is.”

  “Is that so?” Barbara looked suddenly very concerned. “Thomas brought you here?”

  “Yes. He did. Anyway, I think I got turned around. I certainly lost my way to the restroom and now I should be getting back.”

  “Smooth,” Kyle joked with her. “You should give lessons in how not to have someone believe you.”