by Mona Marple
The Ghosts of Mystic Springs
Mystic Springs Paranormal Cozy Mystery Series: Book One
Mona Marple
Copyright © 2018 by Mona Marple
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book was mainly written in cracks of early morning writing, only made possible by the infinite support and encouragement of my husband to go, do, write… and leave everything else to him.
I am truly blessed to have a man beside me who believes in me and backs up that belief with actions that give me the time to create.
Contents
Prologue: Connie
1. Connie
2. Sage
3. Connie
4. Sage
5. Connie
6. Connie
7. Sage
8. Sage
9. Connie
10. Connie
11. Sage
12. Connie
13. Connie
14. Sage
15. Sage
16. Connie
17. Connie
18. Connie
19. Sage
20. Connie
21. Sage
22. Connie
23. Connie
24. Sage
25. Connie
26. Connie
27. Sage
Bonus Short Story
About the Author
Also by Mona Marple
Prologue: Connie
I finally try to give in to the migraine that’s been haunting me for hours at around midnight, hours after when lights out should have been.
Jane’s music isn’t helping and I consider stomping across the landing to demand she turn it down, but I’ve been avoiding her bedroom ever since I walked in unannounced and caught her shaving her legs with my razor. It’s not that I don’t care, I’m just wise enough to know there are some things that girl will keep doing, and I’m better off not knowing what they are.
Mum should be home soon. She’ll check on each of us, come and give me a graveyard-shift-grease kiss and whisper for me to be good, as if her warning will seep in my unconscious while I sleep. I’m not the one she needs to worry about, I want to tell her every night, but I don’t, I carry on pretending to be asleep.
I’ve always had problems sleeping. It’s not like I became a teenager and decided it’d be cool to stay up all night, like Jane. I was the baby who never slept and the child who never grew out of it. My mum’s tried all the sleep training on me. I can’t be cured.
The music’s gone off now. She must have heard mum’s key in the lock.
I squeeze my eyes closed and wait for the door to creak open, for mum’s shoes to tip-tap across my carpet, but the noise doesn’t come.
Instead, the house fills with silence.
Something isn’t right.
I push the comforter away and turn on my bedside lamp.
I can see a light poking under my door, and Jane can’t sleep with the light on. She’s like a fairy tale princess with all her sleep requirements. Two and a half pillows (the other half hangs over her bed), darkness and a cup of warm milk which she would die if I told Jake Robertson about.
I knock on her door and hear a movement inside the room, but she doesn’t answer me, so I push it open (little sister privilege, I’m allowed to be annoying).
My sister is cross-legged on the floor, watching herself in the mirror she bought from the neighbor's garage sale last year and has had propped against her wall ever since. And she’s crying. Like, her whole face is damp.
“What’s going on?” I ask, and I hear the panic in my voice and suddenly the migraine has gone, as if all I needed was more stress in my life.
Jane looks at my reflection in the mirror and it’s strange how we can make eye contact like that, when we’re not looking at each other, not really. Do I understand how that works, I wonder, but I can’t remember.
“Oh Connie.” She says as a big, fat tear falls off her face and lands on her clavicle. See, I know bones.
“What’s happened?” I repeat.
“It’s awful.” Connie says, her attention still on the us in the mirror.
“Are you acting?” I ask. She’s been talking about trying out for the summer play for weeks, but I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest she’s serious. She’s still been spending her out-of-school time flicking through the magazines that Enid gives her second-hand, the best fashion choices already circled (or cut out!) and the quizzes already completed.
Jane watches herself as another tear escapes and drops onto the carpet.
“Fine, I’m not even interested.” I announce, which is clearly a lie because I’m the one who got out of bed to come and ask her what had happened. To my surprise, Jane turns away from the mirror and looks at the real me.
“It’s so awful.” She sniffs.
“Okay…” I say, and my mind goes there. Mom. She should be home already, I think, even though I know there’s no telling what time she’ll convince the last drunk to leave so she can lock up and come home. She’s always home before dark, officer, I remind myself of my lines. I guess we’re actors already, me and Jane. “Well, you need to spill.”
“Mr Raddison.” She says, and I see that she’s been experimenting with make-up. She has one blue eyelid and another smoky brown. The brown’s better, but she’ll prefer the blue. That’s always the way.
“What about him?” I ask. I plop down next to her on the carpet and suddenly feel tired, like all the years of restless nights have found me, have worn me down. I don’t see what our headmaster could have done to upset her so much. He doesn’t even give out detentions.
“He’s dead!” She exclaims, and she returns her attention to the mirror so she can witness herself experiencing grief for the first time.
“Dead?” I ask. “Is this a joke?”
“Of course not! Who’d joke about something like that?”
“I just…” I begin. “I… why are you so upset?”
“Connie, how could you say that? He’s the man in charge of our educations! Our whole teenage lives depend on him and his dimpled cheeks…”
“How did you even find this out?”
“Jake told me.”
“Jake’s been here?”
She nods. “He wanted to tell me himself, isn’t that sweet?”
“You’d better not have let him in.” I say and my eyes flit to the window, as if I might see fingerprints from where he’s climbed his way inside. Sometimes I think he’s only interested in my sister because we live in a ground floor flat. Easy access.
Jane shrugs. “Can you just focus? I’m not kidding, I swear, he’s dead.”
“Jake’s probably kidding you. He hates Radish.” I say with a shrug.
“Yeah, I didn’t believe him either, until he started crying. It’s real, I know it is. This is our whole lives ruined!”
“I don’t get it…”
“You’re too young to understand.” Jane says. She stops crying for a moment and looks straight at the mirror-me. “What kind of education are we going to get without a headmaster?”
I can’t answer that without upsetting Jane more, because I’m fairly sure Mr Raddison doesn’t - didn’t? - do much at all apart from lead assemblies and smile at the Year 11 girls just enough to make most of them believe he fancied them. It didn’t seem like his death, if it were real, would make much of a difference at all.
“I’m sure everything will be okay.” I say. A yawn slips out of my mouth. A real, live
, yawn. I could punch the air but that seems a bit insensitive. “I’m going to bed, don’t stay up too late. And don’t worry about this, nothing’s going to change.”
Little did I know, everything was about to change.
**
The door bangs so hard I don’t so much hear it as feel it.
It snatches me away from a sweet dream about Toby (“Tubby”) Nelson finally getting revenge on the sixth form kids who have been making his life hell for years.
People always say when noises like this happen that they jump upright. I stay down, all of my body and most of my face buried under my blankets. Seems safer. I’m a lover, not a fighter.
When I hear a footstep approach, I know it’s mum, because nobody else ever comes in my room in the middle of the night. Even Jane, as annoying as she is, doesn’t creep around the house while people are asleep. Her strict demands around sleep have no room to fit in moonlight wanderings.
“Mum?” I whisper. Tonight, I won’t pretend to be asleep, I’ll let her kiss me even though she’ll smell of oil and fried meats and beer. Tonight, I’ll be glad to see her.
She drops herself onto my bed, and the weight of her pulls the blanket down off my face. I glance across.
And freeze.
Every part of me wants to scream, but my vocal chords refuse to work. I try to move away, to scramble out of bed, but I’m frozen in fear.
“Mr Raddison?” I ask, my voice barely a whisper.
He smiles, that dimpled smile I’ve seen a thousand times. He is, clearly, dead. His body is transparent, I can see my mustard-yellow curtains through him.
“Can you talk?” I ask.
He nods. “Sorry for bursting in like that. I’m getting used to how this all works.”
“How all what works?”
“Well…” He says and gestures towards his ghostly self, “…this. Being a spirit.”
“A spirit?”
“Ghost sounds a bit too haunted house, I think. So, how long have you been able to see us?”
“Us?”
“Spirits.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You can see me.”
“Erm… yes.” I say, wondering if whatever happened to Mr Raddison included a bump to the head.
“Nobody else has been able to.”
“Who else have you been to?”
“Pretty much everyone.” He says with a grin. “I’ve been busy. I decided to follow the register, alphabetical order.”
“You have been busy.” I say. Winters was clearly towards the end of the register.
“I’d have been busier if everyone could see me, but nobody else has. Didn’t you know you could see spirits?”
I shake my head. “I must be dreaming.”
“You’re not.”
“I must be. Jane told me you’d died, and then I got really tired and went to sleep. I always dream about the last thing I think about.”
“Lots of people do.” Mr Raddison agrees. “But this isn’t a dream. I can prove it.”
“How?”
“I’ll tell you something you couldn’t have guessed, then you’ll know I was here.”
“Okay.” I say. “Tell me how you died. I definitely didn’t know that when I went to sleep.”
Mr Raddison grimaces. “Ugh. Okay, it was a car accident. I drove my car into that big old cherry tree outside school. I’d been working late and I was too tired, I should have called a taxi.”
“Wow.” I say. I know the tree. There have been petitions to have it removed for years, it’s right on a bend, hidden out of view. Lots of people have crashed into it, but they all got out of their cars and walked away. “That’s too bad. Are you sad?”
“Not really.” Mr Raddison says. “It was my time, I guess. I’m not in any pain, by the way.”
“Oh, good.” I say, feeling bad that I didn’t think to check. “So, you’re going to Heaven, or?”
“I don’t really know what happens next.” Mr Raddison said with a grin. “I’ll keep popping in on the last few people on my list. Anyway, enough about me. What are you going to do next?”
I laugh at the question. “Try and go back to sleep probably.”
“I mean, in life. After school.”
“Oh.” I say. “I’ll probably get a job at the diner with my mum.”
Mr Raddison shakes his head. “You could do so much more, Connie.”
I shrug my shoulders. “The diner’s fine.”
“I have nothing against the diner.” He says and points towards his stomach, which is virtually a six-pack so doesn’t prove his point at all. “Or your mum. I know she works hard for you and Jane. But you’re smart, very smart. I think you’re University material.”
I laugh, which is the only appropriate response to the idea that a Winters girl could be University material.
“I’m serious. Your grades are good enough.”
“It’s not about the grades.”
“What is it about?” He asks.
I gesture to the room and suddenly feel embarrassed that Mr Raddison, even if he is dead, is in our little flat. The carpet has worn away in places, flashing the floorboards below, and the walls are still covered in pen marks from the people who were here before us. Mum’s always saving, but there’s too much month at the end of the money. Jane and I could repeat that sentence in our sleep, we hear it so often. Mum opening the cupboards in the kitchen frantically, bang, bang, bang, then appearing in the living room with a smile. I’m not even that hungry tonight, how about you guys?
“That’s not my world.” I say.
“Well, I think it could be.” Mr Raddison says, and gets up, giving me chance to notice that he has no feet. His body ends in a wisp where his legs should be. “Give it some thought.”
He evaporates away and I pinch my arm until I draw blood.
1
Connie
“Absolutely not.” I say for the third time. My hands are at that stage where they resemble wrinkled sultanas, but I’m staying in the bath to avoid being mobbed. I slide down underneath the water and close my eyes, enjoying a moment’s peace, and then as always I feel guilty and reemerge from my watery hiding place.
“You’re so mean.” Sage says with a pout.
“I’m the one who has to think sensibly.” I say. “It would be a disaster.”
“It could help bring the community together.”
“The community is together enough already.” I say, but she’s smart, she’s found my weak spot.
“I just think it would be fun.” Sage says.
I sigh in her general direction. She’s sat on the toilet, the lid down thankfully, the way she has done since we were in our late teens and moved out together into a shared flat. My sister may have changed her name, but she’s remained the same in virtually every other way.
“I’ll think about it.” I say.
“Yay!” She exclaims, and I’ve always been a soft touch when it comes to making her happy, so her delight pretty much seals the deal. There will be a party.
“You’ll have to help, you know.” I say, then add: “If I agree.”
“Of course.” Sage says. A flower tiara sits atop her head.
“I mean, really help. Not just flit around looking busy.”
“Your problem, sis, is you’re a control freak. You want help but nobody does it as good as you, so you don’t let people help.” Sage says with an infuriating grin. She’s right, of course.
“Can I just have this bath in peace?” I ask. “It’s been a long week.”
Sage makes a mock salute and pretends to zip her mouth closed, but makes no effort to move. I feel like a mother of small children, every bath time or toilet visit interrupted.
I do love her, though. I can’t deny that.
I watch her as she sits there, staring straight ahead, lips pursed inwards so I know she’s still making a point of being quiet.
I slide back down under the water and visualise the stresses and tension
leaving my body. I saw the technique in a magazine, help for busy people, but haven’t had the time to try it.
I close my eyes and think back to the client meetings of the last week; eight when I’ve said for years my limit is five. One a day is tiring, any more becomes exhausting. And I’m not a fun person to be around when I’m exhausted. I get snappy. And my eye starts to twitch in a creepy way.
I must be more strict. No matter how desperate people are to see me, my limit has to be five meetings a week.
It’s all urgent, of course, that’s the problem. Nobody wants to join a waiting list. They want to come now, today, and if I can’t do that, they’ll find someone unscrupulous who can.
Five meetings a week. I force myself to focus on those words, repeat them silently until I imagine they’ve sunk into my unconscious. Sage is all about the unconscious. Always banging on about your inner mind and the guidance system it can offer.
I feel my shoulders begin to relax and slide up so my nose, and only my nose, is above the surface of the water. Okay, okay, my stomach is too. Nothing I can do about that one, thank you very much.
I begin to picture the party that Sage wants me to throw. It seems like such an obviously bad idea, and yet I know it will happen. I can’t hold up against Sage’s ongoing begging campaign.
An April Fools’ party! It will be so much fun.
And who am I to say no to fun? Only the person who’ll have to do all of the non-fun parts so that other people can turn up to enjoy the fun itself.
My shoulders are tensing again.
I return to the visualisation technique before giving up. If my life means I can last two minutes without the tension returning, I might be better off to just accept it. Live with it. Isn’t there a quote about how being wise is knowing which things you can change and which you can’t? If not, there should be. Because I’m definitely realising that accepting the chaos that is my life may be my best option.