by Lotta Smith
“Of course!” Clara flashed a thumbs-up.
“Consider it done.” Jackie winked.
As I told Rick about Clara’s reaction, he chuckled. Then he entwined his arm with mine, whispering, “Be extra careful about your footings.”
“Thanks, I will.” I smiled. The heat of him and his caring tone made me feel so warm and fuzzy in the bottom of my heart. I was fortunate that I married this guy.
“Swoon!” Jackie made a kissy face, which I pretended not to see.
“Mandy, Rick, will you try to walk as quietly as possible, please?” Clara warned. “We’re nearing Mr. Kirkland’s gravesite, and he’s so fussy about the noise during the night. Despite being a ghost, he claims he desperately needs to have a quiet night’s sleep every day. For some aspects, life as a live being offers more comfort and convenience, I think. When you’re alive, you can buy earplugs from your local drugstore, but when you’re dead, they’re useless.”
“I know!” Jackie agreed enthusiastically. “During the earlier phase of my dead life, I got sick of being unheard, so during the first Pride dance following my death, I went near the microphone and called everyone’s attention. Of course, the majority of the people didn’t seem to hear me, but a few of the partygoers noticeably jumped. So I went to them, hoping to communicate with them, but all of them pretended not to notice me.”
“That’s horrible! What has the world come to?” Clara shook her head.
While the two ghosts discussed the cruel indifference festering among the living, Rick muttered, “Hmm, who would’ve thought I’d be roaming the graveyard as an adult?”
“Watch your step, Rick,” I warned. “Clara says we can’t make much noise around Mr. Kirkland, who happens to be…”
While I relayed our ghost company’s conversation about the finicky resident, we came across what looked like a pond.
“Rick.” I stopped walking and grasped his hand. “Can you please switch off the flashlight?”
“Okay.” He killed the light. “See anything?”
“I think so. I thought I just saw a pale blueish shadow that sort of sparkled in the middle of the water…” I squinted at the pond.
“Mandy, you have truly keen eyes.” Clara clapped her hands and called, “Fynn? Hello? As promised, I brought my daughter-in-law, Mandy, and my beautiful son, Rick.”
“Oh, Mrs. Rowling,” muttered the pale shadow. It didn’t take long for the shadow to morph into what looked like a human.
I was 99 percent positive that I just encountered another ghost, so I asked Rick, “Do you see him?” The male in front of me looked so real—almost like a living person—and I wasn’t sure if he was dead.
“See who?” He shrugged—not that I could see him shrug, but I sensed his motion.
“Never mind,” I said. “You can now turn on the light.” At that point, I was convinced the guy in front of me was a ghost.
“Hi, I’m Fynnley. Fynn Cochran,” the ghost said timidly. “I’m so sorry for bothering you in this grave hour, but when Mrs. Rowling told me that you and your husband used to work for the FBI, I wanted to seek your help.”
“Hi, I’m Mandy.” I waved at Fynn, who looked too young to be dead. I assumed his age to be early to mid-twenties.
Unlike many dead people I’d encountered in the past, he wasn’t covered in blood. Indeed, he wasn’t sporting visible wounds to indicate the cause of his death—except he was wet as a duck, which prompted me to guess he’d drowned. “This is Rick, my husband. He’s currently in the private sector, but he used to be an FBI agent.” I felt my cheeks getting hot as I introduced Rick. It had been over two months since we’d tied the knot, but whenever I uttered the big H-word, I couldn’t help feeling the reality of being married.
“Hi, Fynn. I’m Rick Rowling. Nice meeting you.” Rick raised his hand at the direction I was facing. “Since I can’t see or hear you, my wife will help us while we chat, okay?”
“Okay.” Fynn nodded. “Thank you.”
“Hi there! I’m Jackie. I’m Mandy’s guardian angel,” Jackie chimed in.
“Her guardian angel?” Fynn glanced at Jackie and then at me. He looked taken aback, and I didn’t blame him. Having a guardian angel wasn’t too out of the norm; however, when you had a drag queen as your guardian angel, that was considered incredible.
“Riiiight.” Jackie flashed a wide grin. “You know what? Rick and Mandy have solved a ton of cases that otherwise turned cold, so you’re in really, really good hands.”
Clara smiled patiently during our introductions, and then she opened her crimson lips. “Fynn here is quite new to our society, as he died just a week ago. When he was alive, he used to be a car mechanic and worked for a Mercedes dealership relatively close to this location. In human age, he was just twenty-five when he joined us.”
I relayed her words to Rick. Fynn was a slim guy, but he had muscular arms and large, strong-looking hands—perhaps something he acquired from being a car mechanic—and he was wearing cargo pants and a wrinkled T-shirt with heavy dirt on it.
Fynn looked down at his own attire and furrowed his eyebrows apologetically. “Sorry for meeting you in such a messy getup. I’d like to be better dressed to meet someone, but I can’t get out of the clothes I had on when I died. To make it worse, now I’m stuck with all the dirt and filth in this pond. Crap, Nikki would be so mad if she saw me looking like a hobo. To make matters worse, I can’t move out of the water.”
“Nikki?” I tilted my head.
“That’s my wife. Nikki is my high school sweetheart, and we’ve been married for two and a half years, with a beautiful daughter, Jennie,” the ghost said proudly.
“Oh I see,” I said. “So, how can we help you?”
“Well the police seem to believe I killed myself, but I didn’t. Actually, I think I was killed, as in murdered.”
“Oh…”
As Jackie and I gasped in unison, Rick asked, “What?”
“Okay, so Fynn was murdered.” Rick frowned as I relayed Fynn’s words to him. “Hmm… this neighborhood should be part of the 81st Precinct of the NYPD.”
“But, Rick, you have to at least listen to Fynn, as police officers and detectives can’t hear him,” Clara pointed out. “Now, darling, you’ll want to take notes while Mandy relays the victim’s words, you know.”
As I passed on his mom’s words, Rick crossed his arms. “Are you sure she said that? I have a hunch you made up the part about taking notes. You used to take notes for me when you were my assistant.”
“Yes, she did. And no, I’m not making that part up,” I said. “For your information, as soon as you left the feds, I morphed from your assistant into your wife, remember?”
“Well said, Mandy!” Clara gave me a thumbs-up. “You want to make your role clear at the earliest stage of your marriage.”
I winked at her. “Thanks!”
“For what?” Rick raised an eyebrow.
“Clara says that I have to make my role clear at the earliest stage of our marriage, you know.” I patted his arm.
“If I recall it right, you’ve been making your role clear since the moment we met,” he reminded me, the corners of his lips curling into a smile.
“Who, me?” I pretended to be shocked. “At that time, I had to make my point like a total desperado, mostly because I was being interrogated for a false accusation of murdering three people.”
“Oh yeah.” He chuckled. “You didn’t kill them on purpose. It’s just the three victims dropped dead just seconds after touching you.”
“I so didn’t kill them,” I insisted. Then I warned him, “By the way, don’t even imagine the G-word, okay?”
“You mean the Grim Reaper?” he said innocently, prompting my cheeks to puff up. When I was in medical school, two murderers and a serial rapist who slipped out of punishment due to a loophole in the justice system dropped dead immediately after touching me. People, like the attending physicians and nurses at the university hospital where I was rotating,
looked at me apprehensively. And, of course, the police were very suspicious of me. Anyway, Rick sort of pulled me out of hot water. I was grateful for him, except for one thing—he told the detectives I was some kind of Grim Reaper. That moniker had a tremendous impact on my life. The school I was in basically kicked me out, saying they couldn’t keep someone like me around for fear of having more casualties.
In retrospect, my failed medical education could’ve been the best thing that happened to me, considering I ended up marrying him following some adventurous times as his assistant.
“Come on, Mandy. Don’t get mad.” Smiling, he playfully poked my cheeks, pushing the air out.
“Are they always like this?” Clara asked Jackie, rolling her eyes.
“As far as I know, they’ve always been like this,” she said knowingly. “Actually, when I met them, they argued like 98 percent of the time. I was aware of the chemistry between them, but you know, it took them forever and ever to realize their feelings.”
“I see.” Clara nodded. “The Rowling men are known for their stubbornness and impulses. Anyway, I’m glad my little boy found his love.”
Silently, Fynn observed our interaction with wide eyes. I thought I caught a worried look in them, so I said, “Rick, let’s get started.”
“Fine.” Rick snorted and took his phone out of his pants pocket. “Mandy, I’ll take notes, but you’ll have to take turns when I question him, okay?”
“Of course,” I said. Then I turned to Fynn. “So, can you walk us through how you ended up here in your situation?”
CHAPTER 3
“It was the Friday of last week,” Fynn started with a serious face. “My birthday was coming on Sunday, and the guys at work held a birthday party for me. I got a little drunker than I should have, and Johnny Steinway, my buddy at work and friend from grade school, was driving me home.”
“Actually, Mrs. Arbuckle says he was a lot more drunk than a little.” Clara rolled her eyes as she informed Jackie and me in sotto voce.
“When we drove by this cemetery, Johnny said he wasn’t feeling so hot, and we decided to chill a little by taking a stroll on the cemetery grounds.”
“In the middle of the night?” Jackie and I said in unison, prompting Clara to shush us.
“Yes. At that moment, it seemed like a good idea.” Fynn shrugged. “So we went into the cemetery’s perimeter. Johnny was familiar with this place as he has family here. Anyway, he said there was a beautiful pond not so far away from us, and I followed him.”
“Okay.” Rick nodded as I relayed Fynn’s words to him.
“I could see the full moon in the clear sky. Johnny was carrying a flashlight, but we barely needed it in the moonlight. So we came by this pond, and he said he’d seen rainbow-colored goldfish with polka dots in the water. I thought he was kidding, but he said he wasn’t making that up.”
“Did you see such colorful goldfish?” Jackie asked, looking into the pond.
“No, I didn’t. Unfortunately.” Fynn shook his head. “So I was like, ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire!’ but Johnny said, ‘No way. You should look at it more carefully.’ So I crouched and looked into the pond, but all I saw was the dark water with a ton of water lilies and watergrass.”
“You were so right. John was lying,” Jackie said, looking into the murky water. “I don’t see any colorful goldfish. I don’t even see fish.”
“Maybe Johnny mistook the pond for some other pond. He didn’t sound like he was lying back then.” Fynn wrinkled his forehead.
“But you said he was familiar with this cemetery,” Jackie pointed out.
“Jackie, sweetie.” Clara patted Jackie’s arm. Unlike ghost-human interactions in which each of us went through each other when we tried to touch, when both parties were ghosts, they were able to make physical contact. “Why don’t we let Fynn talk as he wishes to?”
“Oh… where are my manners?” Jackie smiled apologetically. “Sorry, Fynn, for my interruption. Please go on with your story. I’m dying to know what happened next.”
I wanted to say, “You can’t get any deader,” but I didn’t want to further interrupt Fynn, so I kept my mouth shut.
“Okay, no problem.” Fynn nodded. “Johnny was telling me to look more carefully, and I got closer to the water. All of a sudden, I got shoved in the back, plummeting into the cold water headfirst.”
“Oh!” Jackie gasped as I relayed Fynn’s words to Rick.
Fynn went on. “I struggled in the muddy water, trying to get out of here immediately, but my garments grew heavy as they absorbed water, and the lotus stems and watergrass caught my arms and legs. If only I wasn’t drunk, or it happened in the daytime, I guess I would’ve managed to get out of here and laughed off my foolishness, and maybe been scolded by Nikki. To make the matter worse, it rained heavily the day before, so the water level was higher. Anyway, I was suffocating beneath the water, and I couldn’t do anything as it seeped into my mouth and then into my stomach, and perhaps my lungs as well.”
“That’s it?” Rick tilted his head to the side as he listened to the ghost’s story through my interpretation. “So, we have the killer’s name. That makes it easier to catch him.”
“Um… but…” Fynn stumbled over his words. “Perhaps Johnny had no intention of killing me. Maybe that was just a playful push on his side and everything was an unlucky accident… I mean, he loved to pull pranks on me.”
“Except you ended up dying because of his prank,” Rick pointed out after I relayed Fynn’s words, frowning. “Was he as drunk as you on the night of your death?”
“Oh no. Not at all.” Fynn shook his head. “He had been sticking to soft drinks, like Coke, OJ, and such. He’s not an irresponsible person who would drive while intoxicated.”
Rick turned to me for an explanation, then crossed his arms when I finished. “Uh-huh. Okay.”
Apparently, he didn’t buy Fynn’s theory about his cause of death being a failed prank by his friend Johnny, and I didn’t blame my—gulp!—husband being too skeptical. Drunken people resorted to a smorgasbord of idiotic behaviors, ranging from drunk driving, swearing in public—which was often peppered with a ton of racial slurs as demonstrated by so-called Hollywood A-listers—and undressing in public and confessing they were back from an alien abduction where they were raped by alien goats with three horns. So Johnny could’ve found pushing Fynn into the pond as fun and entertaining. Except he happened to be sober. I couldn’t imagine a sober adult pushing his friend into the pond just for fun.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” Fynn furrowed his eyebrows, looking anxious.
“Well… um…” I produced some sympathetic noises without answering his question, but Rick was different.
“No, I don’t,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Still, Johnny is a good guy, even though he tends to be a little rough around the edges,” Fynn said, somewhat defiantly.
According to him, Johnny was not just a colleague of his but also his best friend—or, at least, Fynn believed so. They went to junior high and high school together, playing basketball as teammates. They went to the same local auto mechanic school, landing their jobs with the same company at the same dealership. They even joined the same amateur basketball team and visited each other’s house from time to time.
“Except Johnny ended up killing you,” Rick interjected after I relayed the dead mechanic’s words to him. “Oh, don’t forget that he didn’t even bother to help you out of there, much less call 911.”
“I see your point.” Fynn nodded sadly, letting out a deep sigh. “If he wasn’t joking, and if he’d intentionally killed me… I think he had his own reason to do that to me.”
The way he uttered those words reminded me of a little kid being chided. I touched Rick’s arm and eyed him with an intention to warn him not to sneer as he rolled his eyes while listening to my interpretation.
“Mandy, I’m hoping to ask you a favor,” Fynn said sheepishly.
“Okay. What’s y
our favor about?” I asked, prompting Rick to clasp my hand and whisper, “Don’t make a rash promise,” into my ear.
But I wasn’t going to make promises I couldn’t keep. I’d wait until I learned about the ghost’s desire.
“It’s about Nikki, my wife. She’s been terribly saddened since she heard from the police that I’d killed myself. She seems to be tormenting herself for being an awful wife, as she didn’t realize I’d been suffering from something that drove me to drown myself. And I… I can’t stand seeing her cry whenever she visits me,” he said with a hiccup, and then he started to weep. “Mandy, will you please, please tell Nikki I didn’t kill myself?”
As he begged me between hiccups, his weeping escalated into an open sobbing sprinkled with occasional bawling and howling.
“Um, well,” I mumbled, taken aback. Having worked with the FBI, I was expecting the ghost to ask us to catch the killer.
“Mandy, I really need your help. In the past few days, he’s been going on and on and on like this,” Clara interjected, and then she came closer to me and lowered her voice. “I mean, he cries his heart and lungs out just like this every night, and to be honest, he tends to be a little bit too… noisy. Though I don’t mean to be mean, he has become a noise issue, you know. And to be honest, he’s getting worse and worse.”
“I see.” I looked around the place where dozens of tombstones were aligned. Of course, I was a bit curious about the getting worse part considering he was already dead, but perhaps some things were better kept unsaid.
Clara shrugged. “Also, I happen to be the president of the homeowner’s association in this district this year, and I’ve been receiving many noise complaints, especially from Mr. Kirkland. As I mentioned previously, we ghosts often leave our tombs and go wherever we wish to go. However, it’s customary for most ghosts to come back to our hometowns, maybe pop in around our loved ones once in a while.”
“Hey, Mandy, don’t forget to interpret the ghosts’ words to me.” Rick nudged me, prompting me to relay Fynn’s and Clara’s words to him.