Pecan Pies and Dead Guys

by Angie Fox

I scrambled to the other side of the bed, very much aware that I’d need to exit the way I’d come.

  “You’re out of time.” The gangster rose out of the floor. “This,” he said, pointing to the ooze on the floor, the ooze that had begun trailing from the corner of the ceiling to the right of the windows, “this is a badass angry ghost.”

  “I have one shot.” He knew it, and I knew it. I shoved the mattress off the bed, letting it splat into the goo on the other side. “Now. This is my chance.”

  “You don’t get it, Verity,” he said, stalking toward me as the floor around us began to fill. “I pulled my last trick. I put all the high-octane hooch into one of them shells out front and lit it on fire. Good booze! Gone.” He nodded fast. “They thought it was a real great show, but they’re going to figure out soon that they’re out of liquor.” He ran a hand through his disheveled hair as if he couldn’t quite believe he’d done that. “The worst thing is, it only distracted that crazy dominant ghost for a minute.” He looked at me, eyes pleading. “What kind of sicko can ignore a river of burning booze?”

  But it had worked long enough. Almost. “You’re doing great,” I said, grabbing the freezing cold ghostly briefcase. “Look.”

  “Drop it!” he ordered. “It’s part of the dominant ghost’s memory of the room.” He stared openly at the advancing tar. “The memory he’s trying to erase.”

  I flicked it open and dumped it. Photographs and documents tumbled to the floor. I recognized the Adairs, Shane, Marjorie.

  His jaw dropped. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “I can’t actually touch the contents, or they’ll disappear. If I scatter them, at least I can get a closer look.” This part of the floor was clear.

  “That’s not what I meant,” he pleaded. “What are we still doing here?”

  “You can keep distracting the ghost,” I assured him. “You can top the river of booze. If I know you, you’re just getting warmed up.”

  He had to be. Otherwise, I’d end up engulfed in goo, and Ellis would come in here to find me dead for reasons unknown. I needed Frankie to focus.

  “This is the last time,” I said. “I promise.”

  “Eyah!” He danced sideways as the ooze neared his feet. It was coming in faster now. It seeped over the edge of the windows and slunk down the wall. It started bubbling through the wallpaper right next to me, obscuring the classy vertical stripes with dark, spreading stains.

  “Unless you want to look at the contents of the secret briefcase and I’ll distract them.” At least he could touch the papers without them disappearing.

  Frankie looked at me, as serious as I’d ever seen him. “I wouldn’t take odds on you getting out of this room.”

  “Don’t say that.” We were too close to let this one go. “Think of what it will be like to solve this case,” I told him. “De Clercq off your back forever. No more kowtowing to him. No more forced investigations.”

  He threw his head back. “You’re killing me.”

  “We can do this, Frank,” I said. “But we have to do it now.”

  He dropped straight through the floor with a tortured groan.

  I felt for him. I did. But we all had issues here.

  I dropped to my knees to check out the contents of the hidden case.

  Right away, I knew it had been worth it to stay.

  Chapter 13

  I crouched down and saw the photograph of a familiar face right on top.

  It was Marjorie Phillips, my friend from downstairs, the one who had told me about this place. Had she known I’d find this?

  She appeared several years younger in the photo. Her hair was shorter, and she wasn’t wearing makeup or jewelry. Gone was the saucy girl from downstairs. She held a white placard with black lettering that read Marjorie Gershowitz. The young Marjorie stared straight into the camera, terrified. It took a moment to hit me, and when it did, I gasped. It was a mug shot from when she had been arrested and booked in Chicago in—I checked the date—1921.

  Interesting that a judge in Sugarland would have Marjorie’s Chicago arrest record. I’d have to ask my sister, Melody, to do a library search on her.

  I studied the youthful roundness of her cheeks, the fear in her eyes. I hoped she hadn’t done anything too terrible. I could imagine her being a wild child. The first time I’d seen her, she’d been dancing on a table. She had a husband and a lover and seemed to handle both them and the party crowd with ease.

  Below Marjorie’s picture, I could make out a faded scrawl.

  Bootlegging, resisting arrest, public indecency.

  Okay. She liked to flirt with danger. That didn’t seem too bad. Or perhaps I was hanging around Frankie too much.

  A handwritten letter was clipped underneath the photo and appeared to tell the same story.

  Just last Friday night, Marjorie was seen drinking bootleg gin with not one, but two unsavory gentlemen, one of whom she accompanied home that night.

  I sat back on my heels. If this was the situation that Marcus had gotten her out of, it hardly seemed worth marrying him after, even if he was an old friend. Unless he lent her some respectability in the eyes of…who? Family? Society? She didn’t seem to care what people thought.

  I coughed a little. The air in the room felt heavy and I had trouble drawing a deep breath.

  It still didn’t make sense why Larry would care about any of this, or about Marjorie.

  I spotted a photo of a glowering Shane Jordan near my foot. A slight sneer curled his lip. It wasn’t a mug shot, but he certainly hadn’t been happy to have his picture taken. The jaded diamond dealer appeared even sharper when captured on film, like a man made of knives with a skin mask thrown over the top. I shivered and turned my attention to the paper clipped to the photo.

  The ink lettering had faded more than the scrawl on Marjorie’s page, but the crowded, stiff handwriting was the same.

  Machine Gun Riley…30,000…Square Deal Laundry

  O’Flannery Gang…20,000…Happy Housewife Laundry

  The South Town Boys…20,000…Sugarland Laundry

  That was Frankie’s old gang.

  It seemed Shane didn’t just deal in diamonds. According to the judge’s notes, it appeared as if old Shaney had an extensive money-laundering operation going. I mean, that was what they did in the past. Laundromats dealt in cash, and it was the perfect way to turn dirty money clean.

  Heaven knew how Larry figured into this. Was he taking bribes to look the other way? But that didn’t make sense. Shane would have to be charged before he was even brought up in front of the crooked judge. A man like that didn’t pay blackmail for no reason.

  From the notes, it was unclear if Shane was laundering money for the mob or hiring the mob to do the work for him. I huffed under my breath. Frankie would know.

  No wonder Shane never relaxed. It had to be nerve-racking to deal with the mob on a daily basis. I wondered if he handled Greasy Larry’s dirty finances too.

  A ledger page protruded from underneath, one with columns and columns of numbers. Perhaps my answer lay there.

  I hoped so. The acrid air stung and thickened my throat. I didn’t know how much longer I was going to be able to breathe.

  A sudden crackle made me jump. The ooze had drawn closer while I was reading. It was eating up the edges of the room, burning down into the carpet with ghostly smoke tendrils rising as it made its advance.

  I turned back to the jumble of evidence.

  The tar would engulf it soon. I wondered if that would be the end of it. The dominant ghost obviously wanted it hidden. Although maybe he didn’t have enough power to block it out completely, not if he wanted to also hide the murder. Perhaps that was why he had to keep people out. Why I might not make it out.

  The black ooze sliced its way across the floor, forming and reforming like frozen waves pushed by an invisible wind.

  A glob dripped down from the ceiling. I dodged. It landed with a hiss on the photo of Marjorie, sizzling a hole in her
forehead.

  Sweet mother.

  I stared up at the ceiling now black with goo.

  This evidence was toast. Might as well touch it.

  An enormous boom shook the house. The lights flickered, dimming to nothing for a long moment before reluctantly flaring to life again.

  Goose bumps shot up my arms as I grabbed a chilly handful and started sorting and tossing car thieves, cheating husbands, small-time bookies. My fingers stung. I lost feeling in them, but I kept going until a new face greeted me, a smiling one. Graham Adair.

  I nearly dropped it.

  Was every one of our murder suspects in this briefcase of sins?

  “Oh, Larry, what were you doing?”

  Under it, I found an icy ledger page, similar to the one I’d seen earlier, with the columns and columns of numbers. Only this one was more personal.

  Marjorie

  Shane

  Graham

  Marcus

  They’d all had money dealings with Greasy Larry. They were the only ones on this ledger.

  Marjorie had paid or received a thousand dollars a year. That was a lot of money back in the twenties.

  Shane was in it for five thousand a year in addition to the sums I’d seen on his page. Why not keep all the money on one page? I didn’t see the Laundromats on this sheet.

  And Graham? Ten thousand a year.

  That one surprised me most of all. He seemed so carefree, so full of life. What was he doing dealing with Greasy Larry?

  Yet a rich, powerful man like him was bound to have a few secrets.

  Like Marjorie’s, Graham’s page had a folded piece of paper clipped to the backside. I pulled it off and opened it.

  It was a birth certificate from the state of New York. For Eliza Jean Adair, born June 12, 1916.

  Only the Adairs didn’t have any children, did they?

  Father: Graham Adair.

  Mother: Marjorie Adair. Maiden name: Gershowitz.

  I clapped my chilly hand over my mouth.

  Marjorie was not only Graham’s old friend, but she was also his ex-wife and the mother of his baby. EJ wasn’t Graham Adair’s niece, she was his daughter. I was willing to bet she’d been born well before Graham married Jeannie, and obviously Graham and Marjorie had parted ways before that as well.

  Unless their relationship was still going on?

  No.

  Graham Adair was very much in love with his wife. I didn’t see him having an affair. Jeannie didn’t even forgive a stolen tiara. There would be no way she’d forgive a straying man. The whole thing had to be in the past, before they met.

  Did EJ know the truth? If she did, she didn’t let on. She’d had fond memories of her relatives here, but maybe the truth had driven her from this place.

  And what was Greasy Larry doing with the birth certificate?

  I set it aside and, underneath, I found my answer: adoption papers signed by Rose and Henry Adair in New York, and by Graham and Marjorie Adair in Sugarland, witnessed by Judge Larry Knowles. EJ Adair had stayed in New York and become Graham’s “niece.” No one would ever know. A crooked judge like Larry could make paperwork disappear. In this case, right into his briefcase.

  “Run!” Frankie’s voice sounded in my ear.

  “Just a minute,” I shot back.

  I had to see if there was more before the contents of the briefcase disappeared, but as I looked up, I realized the clock had run out.

  The ooze had built, swelling like a tsunami ready to break over the shore, and I was the only island around. Only it seemed the ghost had a limited amount of goo. While it closed in on me, it had left the door clear. I pushed to my feet, leapt over a three-foot-wide arm of ooze and made a run for it.

  That was when the dam broke.

  Cracking, snapping maliciousness poured toward me from all sides. My lungs seized. My bones iced over from the inside.

  “You stayed too long!” Frankie’s voice hollered.

  I knew that.

  I did the only thing I still could do. I ran like the wind.

  Chapter 14

  I charged down the darkened hall at full speed, not stopping for anything. A heavy, freezing presence lashed at my back.

  “Shut off your power!” I yelled to Frankie. I didn’t want to see the ghosts or the haunted house or any of it anymore.

  I can’t! His voice sounded in my ear. The dominant ghost is in control!

  The sphinx leaned forward out of its alcove, eyes glowing red. It raised a paw and took a swipe at me. I dodged and kept running.

  I made it to where the landing should be and saw only a wall of filmy gray, like a twisted spiderweb. I flung myself into it, crashing through the wet, sticky haze, tripping over the broken board on the landing. Thank goodness. The landing!

  The brightness on the other side threw me for a second, and I stumbled, my heart lurching as I lost my balance at the top of the staircase. I grabbed hold of the banister and stumbled down. I had to keep going.

  The partygoers toasted and laughed as if nothing had changed, but I felt the ice at my back. A brutal, clawing force surged like an angry freight train bent on running me down.

  Halfway down the staircase, I dodged a pair of overweight men dressed like two freaky, full-grown cherubs.

  “You feel that?” The first guy turned to his buddy. “It feels like an earthquake!”

  The other gaped up at the landing behind me. “Holy mother!”

  “Run!” I shouted as I kept going. A woman below screamed.

  But it only wanted me. It only chased me.

  I reached the bottom of the stairs and chanced a look over my shoulder, immediately wishing I hadn’t.

  The dominant ghost burst out from the upstairs hall as a dark, thundery cloud churning with malevolence and rage. It reached toward me, forming large grasping hands.

  “Help me, Jesus,” I whispered.

  I’d thought the dominant ghost might stop at the landing. That was where it was strongest, where it had concentrated its energy. Instead, the entity shot out over me into the chandelier. The crystals rattled with dark energy as the spirit churned, ready to unleash holy terror.

  “Wow! Would you look at that?” a woman carrying a sheaf of wheat in one hand exclaimed, pointing at the dark cloud above. “That’s better than the flaming booze!”

  “Live girl coming through!” I hollered, catching a stalk of wheat to the ear. It stung like a mother and I spun, narrowly missing a Hephaestus who swung his hammer for a pair of admiring muses. And I literally jumped right over a prostrate Hermes who’d passed out in front of the door.

  “Frankie!” I called, landing hard on the stone patio.

  “Way ahead of you!” He rocketed past my left shoulder, nothing but a ball of light. The gangster knocked over two papier-mâché trees out in the yard and buzzed past a waiter so fast the startled ghost dropped his canapés and fell straight into the champagne fountain.

  It seemed our gangster hadn’t blown up all the booze.

  Frankie kept straight on going, and I was right with him, lungs heaving as we raced for Ellis’s car.

  Up ahead, past the lawn party, I could see Ellis in the light cast by the open driver’s side door, still on his phone.

  “Ellis!” I shouted. He looked up in surprise. I waved my arms. “Start the car!”

  I saw his lips shape my name, the question in his face. There was no time to answer questions right now. “Just do it!”

  He didn’t hesitate after that. He stuffed his phone in his pocket, revved up the engine, and had the car turned around by the time I flung myself into the passenger side. “Go, go, go!”

  He hit the gas and my back smacked against the seat.

  When it came to narrow escapes, Ellis didn’t kid around.

  I slammed the door closed, Frankie’s urn rattling at my feet. If the gangster weren’t already with us, he would be as soon as we hit the property line.

  “What’s the emergency?” Ellis demanded, launching us over
a bump in the road. My gut dropped as the car went airborne, and my teeth rattled when we hit the dirt on the other side.

  “Angry ghost,” I said, bracing my hand on the dashboard, daring a glance behind us. No Frankie. Just a churning black shadow blocking out everything we’d left behind. I watched in horror as it reached through the back window of the car.

  The police cruiser shook wildly.

  Ellis cursed.

  I heard a scratch like fingernails on a chalkboard. Inside the car.

  Ellis heard it too. He went a little white.

  “Hold on.” He steered a hard left, over an embankment. I tumbled sideways and nearly into his lap.

  “Where are you going?” I demanded. The exit was straight ahead. A long, long way ahead.

  “Shortcut,” he gritted out, both hands on the wheel.

  A metallic scratch rattled the top of the car.

  “I got it!” Frankie hollered from the backseat.

  I peeled myself off Ellis. “You made it.” I turned to see the gangster draw a revolver out of his shoulder holster and fire three shots straight up.

  Bang.

  Bang.

  Bang.

  I clapped my hands over my ears. The noise was deafening in such a small space.

  Click.

  Frankie cursed and tossed the gun onto the seat next to him. “How many times has Suds said, ‘Always check your bullets. Never leave home without six bullets!’”

  The car lurched wildly as Ellis shot across the side yard, aiming straight for a small arched gate that should have been locked, but stood wide open and ready.

  “How did you—?” I began.

  “Keys,” he said, shooting through the gate, barreling down a narrow road and away from the house in less time than I would have imagined possible. He clenched his jaw, both hands clutching the wheel. “It always pays to have an escape plan.”

  “We’re not out of it yet,” I warned.

  “It’s trying to take control of the car,” Frankie warned.

  The darkness pressed in closer, making my ears feel like they needed to pop. Clawlike tendrils of smoke sank through the roof.

  “How much energy does it have?” I hollered, cringing. It used up a lot on me.