The Haunted Breadbox

by Carter, Scott William

  "Oh," she said, her face softening, more sympathy there now than shock. "I just thought, you know, opening the door would make you more comfortable. Since you're, well, you know . . . .You mean you can't tell by looking?"

  I shook my head.

  "Oh. That must be—um, hard. In your line of work."

  "And what line of work would that be?"

  "You know. For a ghost detective."

  "Again, I'd rather you not call me that. I'm just a detective. A licensed private investigator, actually."

  "But you do work for ghosts?"

  "I work for all kinds of unsavory types." When she stared blankly, I sighed. It was no use. "Yes, I sometimes work for ghosts. It pays the bills. And yeah, not being able to tell the difference makes it challenging. Now what can I do for you Mrs. Thorne?"

  She still hadn't quite recovered from my otherworldly feel-up, biting down on her lower lip, kneading the beads on her handbag, whatever was left of her confidence having evaporated when I'd confirmed her non-corporeal status. I felt bad that I'd done it, but it wasn't like I had a choice. When Billie wasn't around, I had to take matters into my own hands. Literally. It was either that or lose everything.

  "Do you want to sit down?" I asked.

  "Um, all right."

  I directed her to one of the two padded office chairs across from my desk. Rather than return to my desk chair, a more imposing position, I took the seat next to her. She perched with her legs pressed close together, handbag in her lap, our knees nearly touching. I was still just humoring her. I had no intention of taking up the case, but she probably deserved more than a casual brush-off.

  "You said you wanted me to find someone?" I prodded.

  She cleared her throat. "Yes. As I said, Mr. Vale—can I call you Myron?"

  "It's either that or Vincent, I guess."

  "Vincent."

  "It's my middle name."

  "Oh, well, if you would prefer I call you Vincent—"

  "I wouldn't. Not unless you're my mother back from a pretty incredible facelift, because I have to say, you don't look anything like her."

  "Oh."

  "And I only let her do that because she used to call me Vinnie," I said. "Drove me bonkers, but I never said anything about it until she passed. Always figured she wouldn't live forever, so why make waves, right? She'd always wanted my first name to be Vincent just so she could call me Vinnie, who knows why, but Dad had insisted on Myron after some friend of his who died in 'Nam. Of course, then things changed for me—and when I realized that she was going to go on calling me Vinnie for eternity, well, I put my foot down. Told her to call me Myron like everyone else." I knew I was rambling, but it seemed to be putting her at ease.

  "But you said she still calls you Vincent?"

  "Right. That was a compromise. There's only so much my mother will listen to reason, especially now that she's dead."

  She laughed, and it was a good one. Genuine. She wasn't putting on airs, which was the sense I got from her the rest of the time. She laughed with her whole body, head thrown back, a bone-rattling kind of laugh that would have woken up the dead if there was anybody left to wake.

  "You're a funny man, Myron," she said.

  "Tell that to my mother. All right, out with it, who's this guy you're looking for?"

  That sobered her in a hurry. The little banker's lamp on my desk cast a warm yellow glow in my otherwise sterile office, but it was a weak light, weak enough that I could still detect hints of neon red on her cheeks from the bar sign. Another truck rumbled past in search of more pot holes, and when it passed, shifting the light and the shadows in the room for just a moment, no more than a split second surely, the color of her hair changed. It was still blond, a vibrant yellow, no more transparent than it was before, really, but there was a different tint to it, a certain quality that set it apart, that gave it a more ghostly shade of gold.

  Every now and then, if the light was just so, if the mood was right, if the stars aligned, whatever it was, I could tell. I could see, just for a second, the difference between the living and the dead. It gave me hope that one day all this madness would end.

  "His name is Anthony Neuman," she said. "Or Tony. I always called him Tony." She looked like she was going to tear up.

  "Husband?" I said.

  She nodded.

  "Living or dead?" I asked.

  "Living," she said. "At least I think so."

  "You think? When was the last time you saw him?"

  "Three months ago," she said, and then she did tear up. The blurring line of her mascara strained to hold back the waterworks, and I thought oh no, it's all over but the crying, but then she battened down the hatches and shot me an angry look as if I'd insulted her somehow. "Actually it was three months, six days, and four hours ago, to be exact. I saw him ten minutes before I was murdered."

  That got me sit up a little straighter. While it wasn't the first time a client had uttered the word murder in my office, it was still rare. Of course, Vale Investigations had only be open for three years, but still. Finding a murderer was a hell of a lot more interesting than finding someone's estranged son or a dead army buddy who had fallen out of contact.

  Still, I wasn't planning on taking the case. Blue skies and warm sand still beckoned.

  "Murder, you say?"

  "That's right," she said.

  "Do you know who killed you?"

  She hesitated. "I think it was Tony, but I don't know for sure. That's why I want you to find him."

  "Really? And you want to find him for, what, revenge?"

  "I said I don't know if it was him. I'm hoping it wasn't. That's why I want you to find him."

  "Why would he want to kill you?"

  She swallowed. "For money, I guess. He didn't get any." When I raised an eyebrow to this, she went on: "I started to suspect, you know, that he might try something. I had this funny feeling. We'd only been married a few months and he was acting strange."

  "Strange? How?"

  "Moodier. Edgy. I don't know, it was just a feeling. It was so vague that I didn't even tell anyone, but I—well, I changed my will. Made sure all the money went to my sisters instead of him. My plan was to tell him I'd done this, really for my own peace of mind. I figured if he knew, and if he stayed, well, then he really loved me." She choked on the words, swallowed and pressed on. "I really thought he loved me, Myron. In fact, I still do. I think he must have been in trouble. I don't know. Maybe somebody else killed me as revenge for something he did and he's in hiding."

  "How was it done?" I asked.

  "Done?"

  "Yeah. The method. Bullets, poison, what?"

  She reacted as if she'd swallowed something sour. "You know, this is my life we're talking about here."

  "Sorry. Just used to cutting to the chase. Comes from the old days when I was a cop."

  She nodded. Down the hall, the singers were starting into another hymn. I felt my anxiety swelling. Billie was right. If I didn't take a vacation soon, I was going to become a murderer myself one of these days.

  "Car crash," she said. "Somebody messed with my brakes."

  "You sure it wasn't an accident—you know, car trouble?"

  She glared at me. "Do you think I'd be here if I thought it was an accident?"

  "Sorry."

  "I was there. Everybody may think the reason I ran into that brick wall was because I'd had too much to drink, but I know what happened. I know how the car just started going faster. For no reason. And it was a Bentley! Brand new!"

  "A Bentley? What kind of money did you come from anyway?"

  "Come from? What, a girl like me can't just earn it on her own?"

  I didn't say anything.

  "I could have earned it, you know," she said. "I did graduate from Yale. Daddy may have helped me get in, but he certainly didn't earn those grades. I earned them all on my own."

  "All right, easy. So you earned the money on your own, then. Fine."

  "I said could, Myron. I di
dn't say did. I didn't ask to be born into this family. It's just my life."

  "What family are we talking about here?"

  She simmered silently, as if she was debating about whether to take offense to my comment, then shrugged and said, "You ever heard of Thorne Pharmaceuticals?"

  "Oh. You're that Thorne family."

  She nodded, kneading her handbag. Thorne Pharmaceuticals—I didn't know how big they were exactly, but judging by how often their commercials about male erectile dysfunction played just during the few hours when I watched late night TV trying to kill my insomnia, I assumed they had to be big.

  "My father is one of Morgan Thorne's seven grandsons," she explained. "The way my great grandfather set it up, all the descendants have a certain percentage of company shares. Mine's a pretty small slice of the pie, but still, it adds up."

  "I'll bet," I said.

  "So there's no problem with me paying you whatever you want."

  "Uh huh. And now that you're no longer, um, able to sign checks, how do you propose to do that?"

  "I figured you'd ask that. My father will pay you."

  "He's a Sensitive?"

  "What?"

  "I mean, he can see you?" It was the second thing she'd said that made my spine straighten. I was a pretty rare breed. Extremely rare, in fact. As far as I knew, there was nobody else like me on the planet, somebody who could see all the ghosts all the time. Still, there were occasional flesh and blood humans who had could see specific ghosts, sometimes briefly, sometimes for quite a long time. Mediums, psychics, clairvoyants, people with the second sight—there are lots of words for these folks, though in my experience the vast majority were phonies, charlatans, and con artists. In the ghost world, the real ones were known as Sensitives, though it wasn't surprising that Karen, as a new arrival, hadn't yet heard the term.

  Her eyes took on a distant cast as she contemplated my question. "I don't know," she said. "He's very distraught about my death. Sometimes, when he's very sad, and not too drunk, I'll whisper to him how much I love him, and I think, maybe . . . " She shook her head. "I don't know. Probably just wishful thinking on my part. But he will pay you. There's some things that only he and I know. If I tell you them, he'll believe your story."

  "Mmm," I said, trying not to show my skepticism. Billie always claimed I was too soft on the payment side of things. I'd been stiffed too many times, to use a very apt word.

  "I really, really need your help," she said.

  "Yes, you've said that."

  "I have to know if he killed me, Myron—and if he did, then why. I can't rest in peace until I know."

  "Well, who rests in peace anyway? That's one of the first things I learned about you folks—there isn't a whole lot of resting going on."

  "It's just a figure of speech. I—I even brought his picture. So are you going to help met?"

  Her voice had grown tense. I couldn't blame her. I was being pretty obtuse, even by my standards. The thing was, I knew full well the real reason she wanted to hire me, and it wasn't to find out why he'd killed her. The real reason was to find out if he'd really loved her. That was the burning question on her mind, and why she needed me rather than a detective from her own kind. She needed somebody to talk to him, somebody he could talk to, and that wasn't going to happen with my transparent counterparts.

  Love is a messy business. If I've learned anything, before and after I became the freak show I am, it's that questions of the heart can never be fully answered to someone's satisfaction. I knew that better than anyone.

  "I already bought the tickets," I said.

  "I told you, I'll reimburse you for any—"

  "I really wish I could help."

  I said it with enough finality that it cut short the argument. She nodded sadly. Outside, the rain had mercifully stopped, as had my off-key singers down the hall. Thank God for small miracles. Well, thank somebody for small miracles. Nobody knew if the Big Guy really existed—on either side of the great divide.

  That was the bitch about dying. You still didn't get all the answers.

  "Well, thank you for your time," she said, rising abruptly.

  I rose along with her. "I really do wish you all the best of luck."

  She turned away without comment. I thought that was it, I'd never see her again, but then I did something stupid. Before she made it to the door, my curiosity got the best of me.

  "You have his picture, huh?" I said.

  She looked at me. "Yes," she said, a hint of her hope in her voice. "Do you want to see it?"

  A thousand voices inside me screamed to say no. I'd already made my decision, so it would have been the prudent thing to do. Of course, being too prudent was one of the chief reasons my life had ended up the way it had. Sometimes, I'd learned, it was better to be impulsive and follow your instincts.

  I shrugged, and she snapped open her purse. I still thought it odd that ghosts carried on as if their world was as physical and real as ours was, when I figured they could imagine just about any kind of world they wanted, but old habits probably died hard—or didn't die at all, to be more literal. She pulled out a 3 by 5, one of those glossy head shots that were more the province of actors than business people, and held it out as if she wanted me to take it. But of course I couldn't take it. It may have been real to her, but it was no more substantial to me than she was. Ghosts were always forgetting this.

  Instead, I merely leaned in, smiling, arms behind my back, with the kind of polite display of attentiveness that a person engages in when inspecting some new piece of jewelry a friend is particularly proud of—which may have been why the man's picture, when I finally saw it, hit me so hard.

  There may have been some small part of me that knew there was at least a tiny chance I'd recognize the person in the picture, but I never in a million years expected this.

  It was the man who'd shot me.

  ~continued~

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