She wasn't asleep, but it wasn't her usual state, either. Gone was the chattering of thoughts, the words spoken by worries. She was in a deep, peaceful place, noticing her breathing and her body but being disconnected as well. There were no restrictions here, and her mind could go anywhere.
She heard her own voice, answering Dr. Walsh's questions. Yes, she was ready to keep walking down the stairs, to go all the way down to the basement.
And there she was, in the Morrison house again. Teddy was there, right beside her, and Winnie was behind her, complaining about wanting to go.
Dr. Walsh told her to take it slowly, to slow time down if she wanted to.
She slowed time down when she reached the bottom step. There was the bare patch of concrete where the carpet had been lifted. She felt the grit of the cement underneath the sole of her shoe. She breathed deeply, taking in the rotten, decaying smell of the house. Now that she knew it was week-old shrimp stuffed into the curtain rods, it was unmistakable.
The stink was distracting, so she decided to push it aside. She was still safely inside Dr. Walsh's bright office, breathing the clean air there. With the next deep inhale, she smelled only fresh air.
But she was still in the basement, still down there, with the spirit who had summoned her.
And it was all so clear to Piper. Why hadn't she figured it out before?
The spirit before her wasn't George. It was a female who bore a striking resemblance to the other Morrisons.
You must be Mrs. Morrison, she said. I'm Piper Chen. I'm a friend of George's.
Only she hadn't said it out loud. She was thinking it now, on the therapist's sofa.
That night, she'd said nothing. Behind her, Winnie gasped and grabbed Piper's arm. “We should go. Stop scaring me. It's not funny.”
She can't see you, Piper thought. But I can see you, Mrs. Morrison.
Teddy broke his silence with a low, steady growl.
“We shouldn't have come here,” Winnie said behind her. She swallowed audibly. “I think I'm going to be sick.”
Piper ignored her friend and continued staring at the ghost. What did she want?
The ghostly woman said nothing. Her expression remained the same. Serious. She turned on blurry, swirling legs, and moved toward an adjacent wall. They were in what appeared to be a recreation room. She reached a low piece of furniture, which was either a telephone stand or a low bookshelf, and grabbed the phone. Her hand passed right through. She reached for the phone again with no success. Her serious expression turned to anger. She swiped through the phone angrily.
You want to call someone, Piper thought. I can help. She picked up the handset portion of the phone. It was a corded model, the type that had been popular in the 1980s, before everything went wireless. The square lever on the base popped up, and a tinny dial tone came from the phone's speaker. The number pad was on the headset, but it was still surprisingly lightweight for such old technology. She noted these facts calmly, not at all disturbed by the angry-looking ghost.
Behind Piper, Winnie said, “Sixty seconds, Piper. I'm leaving in sixty seconds, with or without you. Fifty-nine, fifty-eight…”
Piper tuned out her best friend and focused on the ghostly woman. Is this what you want me to do? She held the headset with the numbers facing the ghost. Who should I call? She waited, feeling absolutely no fear at all. In fact, somewhere in the back of her mind, she was singing the theme song to the Ghostbusters movies.
The apparition's face was as crisp and clear as a television screen now, seemingly lit from within. Her thin lips twitched with agitation as her gaze locked on the telephone held before her. Around them, the room became both freezing cold and boiling hot at the same time. Piper's mind was calm, but her body was confused. She felt like she might faint or explode or levitate.
Winnie said, “Twenty-nine, twenty-eight…”
You heard my friend, Piper thought. We're leaving as soon as she gets to zero. If you have something to say, you might want to say it now.
The woman's twitching lips clenched into a thin line. Something to say? If she was like George, she couldn't say anything.
This was going nowhere, just like the majority of Piper's conversations with George.
Winnie said, “Ten, nine, eight, seven…”
Piper shrugged. Maybe another night. She still had the phone in her hand. She meant to lean over and hang up the phone, but her arm wouldn't obey. She was stuck.
“Zero,” Winnie said. “And I'm not even touching you.”
Piper looked into the ghost's eyes and silently commanded, Let me go.
The woman shook her head. Was she smiling? Was she enjoying this?
A trickle of panic sweat tickled its way down Piper's frozen back. Now she couldn't move at all. Even her throat was locked. Winnie was talking, threatening to leave her there, and she couldn't speak, couldn't ask her friend for help.
Where was she? Was she in her therapist's office? She couldn't hear the metronome, couldn't feel the couch underneath her.
The foul stench of the house filled her nostrils and sickened her. She was trapped here, trapped in time, like a ghost. She would never leave.
Then the ghostly woman opened her mouth and began to scream.
Her mouth got larger and larger, until it was only darkness, and the darkness was coming from Piper. It would suck all the light from the world, all the life from her veins.
Someone was screaming, and it was a scream that filled her until she was bursting, an overfilled tank of pain. The agony. The fury. How it howled through Piper, through every drop of blood. Her bones were as dry as the desert, and she was empty, the dry husk of a dead plant, nothing more than a vessel for a sonic windstorm with no beginning and no end. She was an empty hallway in an empty house, a house of hallows.
* * *
Piper sat upright, awake again. Dr. Walsh was no longer sitting in the chair beside the sofa. She was typing away on her computer, at her desk.
The light in the room had changed. Time had passed, maybe hours.
Piper asked, “How long was I hypnotized?”
“I'm sorry,” Dr. Walsh said, smiling. “Sometimes it doesn't work, and people go right to sleep. I didn't have any other appointments for the morning, so I decided to let you nap while I ate my lunch at my desk.”
“What do you mean it didn't work? But I went down there, into the basement. I saw the lady. It's his mother. I guess since she's dead, she's haunting the place, too!”
Dr. Walsh crunched on a stick of celery. “Sounds like you had quite the dream!”
Piper opened her mouth to argue, but changed her mind. What did it matter that the therapist didn't believe her?
She hadn't gotten what she'd come for, yet she'd gotten exactly what she needed.
She paid for the day's session, promised she'd get back to Dr. Walsh about a follow-up session, and left.
* * *
Piper hadn't felt this calm and relaxed in weeks.
She enjoyed the feeling of strength in her legs and the softness between her shoulder blades as she rode her bicycle away from the therapist's office in the strip mall. She pedaled while she steered with one hand and held the phone with the other.
Winnie answered, “How'd it go with Dr. Walsh?”
“Come to my house for lunch and I'll tell you.”
“My lunch hour is almost over.”
“So?” Piper couldn't keep her irritation from her voice. It was petty of her, and she knew it, but she couldn't help her feelings. The nonprofit organization barely paid Winnie anything—certainly nothing to match the allowance that Winnie's parents provided to subsidize her Lexus and other luxury habits—but Winnie's career often took top priority in her life. Piper was envious of the passion Winnie had for her career, and jealous that she had to compete for attention with the job. She'd never admitted her feelings to her best friend, but everything was bubbling up today.
“I guess I could pop over for a bit,” Winnie said.
“No, don't worry about it. I'm just being difficult, and needy, and I'm sorry.”
Winnie sighed into the phone. “Now you're making me feel bad. I'm a bad friend.”
“No, you're not. The truth is, I'm the bad one because I'm jealous of your job. Always have been.”
There was a pause. “Piper? Are you okay?”
“I'm in a deeply relaxed state.”
Another long pause. “I'm coming over. I'll be at your house in five minutes.”
Piper argued with her friend, trying to convince her that it could wait until after work, but Winnie had made up her mind. Piper felt like she'd won and lost at the same time.
But more importantly, she was hungry.
She stopped at a produce store to buy some fresh fruit and vegetables plus soft goat cheese. The next stop was the French bakery for some long baguettes. It always made her day cheerful to have a fresh baguette or two sticking out jauntily from her bicycle's front basket—just like a girl from a Parisian postcard.
Her spirits buoyed by the good food, Piper was smiling by the time she pedaled onto her street. Was she still hypnotized? How did it work if you fell asleep during a session?
She didn't care.
The smile fell away a minute later, when she spotted a police cruiser in her driveway. Now what? Not another apology from Carl Plummer! This was getting ridiculous.
As she approached the front door of her house, Piper could hear Winnie yelling inside. Teddy was barking. Piper hit the brakes, let her bike drop in the driveway, and ran up the front steps.
Inside, Winnie was red faced and swearing in three languages at Officer Jerkface, who was handcuffing her.
Winnie caught Piper's eye and yelled, “Run! Take Teddy and run! Get your dad's lawyer!”
Teddy was barking and skittering toward her, his toenails loud on the tiles. Piper scooped the dog, turned, and ran out the front door.
She could barely process what was happening, and there was more. Another vehicle was pulling into the driveway. The driver wasn't watching carefully and didn't see Piper's dropped bicycle. The front wheel of the bike popped and bent under the car's tire.
Pop goes my getaway vehicle, Piper thought.
The car's driver's-side door opened and a woman stepped out.
She wasn't a police officer.
It was the celebrity crime reporter, Nancy Dowd, dressed in a flamboyant purple suit and orange blouse. She held one hand over her mouth, the very picture of shocked dismay. She surveyed the damage to Piper's bicycle, from the popped tire to the bent frame. The long, French baguettes lay in crumbs on the gravel. One plump, red tomato rolled away as though fleeing the scene.
Nancy Dowd glanced at the open house door, where Winnie could be heard cursing at Officer Jerkface, then over at the police car next to hers in the driveway. She scrunched up her face at Piper and said, “This seems like a bad time for me to drop in unannounced.”
Teddy barked once, as if to say, ya think?
Chapter 19
6:55 p.m.
Pool House, Chen Residence
“The candlestick holder was in here?” Nancy Dowd pointed to the cabinet under the television and let out a low, single chuckle. “Deja vu. This conversation feels so familiar.” The investigative journalist looked grimly amused as she examined the inside of the cabinet, her asymmetrical bright-red hair swinging like breezy curtains. “There was the candlestick, the knife, the revolver, the rope, and what else?”
Piper gave her a confused look. What revolver? Was Nancy getting her celebrity murder cases confused?
Nancy thrust her finger into the air. “Poison,” she declared.
“Who's getting poisoned?”
“I'm talking about Clue, the board game,” Nancy explained. “My brothers always wanted to play Monopoly, but I couldn't get enough of Clue.”
“I'm an only child,” Piper said. She forced a smile, the way she always did whenever she had to say that phrase. If she didn't smile, people would feel sorry for her and make up some story about how siblings weren't all they were cracked up to be, and how their brother or sister had been a nightmare.
“You never played Clue?” Nancy looked horrified. “You might know it as Cluedo.”
“That's the one with the old mansion?” Piper did have a dim recollection of playing it at a friend's house.
“Yes,” Nancy said wistfully, her eyes unfocused. “I used to love that game. It never got boring because, with all the combinations, there were infinite murders to be solved.”
“Good thing you got a lot of practice,” Piper said flatly. “Now solve this one.”
The two of them were in the pool house behind the Chen residence. They had driven over to Nancy's motel room and laid low for a few hours before returning to Piper's home. The police were gone, and Teddy had thoroughly searched the premises to be sure. The dog was now slurping down his dinner, Nancy was working on her laptop at the table, and Piper was sitting on the hardwood floor of the main room.
Piper felt as limp as one of Teddy's deflated rubber dog toys, like someone had let all the air out of her. For the second time that Monday, she'd told her entire story to another person, this time the celebrity crime reporter. For Piper, seeing her best friend get arrested had made her desperate. She no longer cared about people thinking she was crazy for seeing ghosts. It was worth the risk to get more allies. Unlike skeptical Dr. Walsh, Nancy had accepted the entire story without a whiff of judgment. If anything, the weirder it got, the more the reporter seemed invigorated.
Piper's stomach growled. She'd been too nervous to eat before her therapy appointment ten hours earlier, and hadn't eaten since. She wondered if the baguette abandoned in the driveway was salvageable or covered in tire treads. The scent of Teddy's dog food wafted over to her nostrils. Her mouth watered. This is bad, she thought. When dog food starts smelling tasty, life has really taken a turn.
She heard another voice in her head, her father's voice, saying, “The roof always leaks on a rainy day.” The saying meant that trouble always follows trouble. She'd been poking her nose into places it didn't belong. There'd been a funeral, the Morrison residence (twice), Otis's pantry closet, and even the Copeland Police Station. After looking for trouble so systematically, was it any wonder she'd found it?
Well, technically Winnie was the one who'd gotten swept up in the trouble this time. Details were still sketchy, but in the hours since Winnie's questioning and subsequent arrest, facts had been emerging. Some news came through the lawyer, who was currently at the Copeland Police Department, working on getting Winnie released. This was the same lawyer who hadn't been available for a meeting that week with Piper, but he'd magically found room in his schedule for Winnie, whose family was apparently in better standing with the firm.
The lawyer had been in contact with Piper a few times, but was more concerned with getting information than giving it.
The person who'd been most helpful since the arrest was, perhaps not so surprisingly, Nancy Dowd. She had a keen investigative mind, plenty of contacts within law enforcement, and a special way with people.
According to Nancy Dowd's contacts, this batch of trouble had started early that Monday morning, when a tipster called the police with information. This anonymous person lived near the Morrison house, and had seen something on the day of George's death. It hadn't seemed relevant at the time, but over the last eleven days, there'd been more and more media speculation about the mysterious death, and this neighbor had started to feel they might hold a clue to the case. The neighbor reported seeing an “Asian schoolgirl,” dressed in a short plaid kilt and knee-high socks, visiting the Morrison home just hours before the estimated time of George Morrison's death.
When the Copeland Police Department received the tip, they wasted little time in getting a car over to the home of Piper Chen, one of a handful of Asian-Americans living in the town. It was Winnie who'd answered the door, expecting to see Piper with lunch. One misunderstanding led to another, and soon
the two officers were searching the home. They didn't even have a warrant, but Winnie gave them verbal permission, or so they claimed.
They hit the jackpot once they reached the pool house. Officer Jerkface was the one who looked inside the TV cabinet and discovered a candlestick holder suspiciously bundled inside three layers of plastic bags. He recognized it as the missing twin of the one at the Morrison residence. He quickly transferred it into an evidence bag and questioned Winnie. She claimed to have never seen the candlestick holder before—which wasn't entirely true—and things got a little feisty. Winnie pushed back when Officer Jerkface encroached on her personal space, and that was when the proverbial dog doo hit the fan.
The only charges issued so far against Winnie were related to her scuffle with Officer Jerkface. The lawyer assured Piper over the phone that there was nothing to worry about, but Nancy Dowd wasn't so calm. In her career, she'd seen innocent people get blamed for crimes and even go down for them. It was the reason she kept doing her job, despite having more than enough money to retire. She used the cash from the high-profile celebrity cases to fund pro bono work for desperate people. Winnie was not a celebrity (yet), nor did she qualify as being desperate, since she drove a Lexus, but Nancy Dowd still wanted to help.
Nancy Dowd wanted the inside scoop on the celebrity murder scandal of the decade.
But at least she was there, and she was helping.
“We can solve this,” Nancy Dowd said as she closed the doors of the now-empty TV cabinet with a solid, sure-sounding thud. The police had taken the candlestick holder along with everything else in the cabinet, from old movie DVDs to jigsaw puzzles. The Chen family's entire collection of wholesome entertainment was now evidence in a murder investigation.
“Hmm,” Piper said, which was all the enthusiasm she could muster.
“My research assistant is currently digging up information about Pandora Lee and her precocious daughter, Coco.”
Piper's body had been limp from a distinct lack of go-go juice, but the idea of Coco, a teenaged girl, visiting George's house made Piper shudder. Coco was only fifteen. Winnie had called George a pervert. What if she was right? What if he'd done something awful to young Coco, and Coco had acted in self-defense, pushing him down the stairs, killing him by accident? Or what if she'd called in her mother, and Pandora had gone all Tiger Mom and struck the killing blow? Now Pandora was dating Officer Jerkface. But why? He didn't have much going for him, other than being an inside source on the investigation.
Interview with a Ghost in Arizona (Humorous Cozy Mystery) (Ghost Mysteries of the Southwest Book 2) Page 15