by E. C. Bell
Drowning in Amber
Published by Tyche Books Ltd.
www.TycheBooks.com
Copyright © 2015 E.C. Bell
First Tyche Books Ltd Edition 2015
Print ISBN: 978-1-928025-37-5
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-928025-38-2
Cover Art by Guillem Marí
Cover Layout by Lucia Starkey
Interior Layout by Ryah Deines
Editorial by Allison Campbell
Author photograph: Shelby Deep Photography
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage & retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright holder, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third party websites or their content.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this story are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead would be really cool, but is purely coincidental.
This book was funded in part by a grant from the Alberta Media Fund.
Dedication
To Bear, the best dog ever...but don’t tell Buddy and Millie. I don’t want to hurt their feelings.
Prologue:
“Brown Eddie” Hansen:
The Kicking and What Came After
UNDERSTAND NOW, I’VE taken a kicking or two in my life. I have. That’s part of living on the streets. But these three guys in Donald Duck masks—which made me half laugh and think, “What the hell?” just before they caught me—put the boots to me good.
I curled into a ball, felt my kidneys turn to mush, and knew I’d be pissing blood for days as I waited for them to stop. Ribs broke—snap snap snap—the pain a distant burr, thank God. They’d caught me just after I’d smoked, and I wasn’t feeling much. But I was going to. Like I said, I’ve taken a kicking or two in my life. I knew what was coming. Another visit to the Royal Alex Emerg.
“Please stop.” My voice sounded funny, whiny and high. “Please. I won’t do it again.”
Had no idea what I’d done, but I was ready to admit to just about anything to get them to stop. Really, just about anything. My pathetic-sounding voice must’ve touched a chord in one of them, because the boots laid off and the voices started, and so I did what I always do when I get a small break in a beating. I tried to run.
Didn’t go so good, I must admit. I crawled about a foot and a half. They grabbed me again, and as they hauled me to my feet, I heard screaming. Took me a second to realize it was me.
Stop the noise. Just stop the noise and maybe they’ll leave you alone, I thought. But it didn’t stop. Just gouted out of me like it was my lifeblood. Like if I stopped that, I’d stop everything.
Through my high, I started to feel afraid. No. That word’s not big enough for what I was starting to feel. Not by a long shot.
They dragged me across the Holy Trinity Church front yard where I’d been sitting, peddling my wares. Scruffy grass, mostly dirt. I watched my feet kick up dust as I tried to run, but the hold on my arms didn’t loosen, and then they had me under the only tree left.
They pushed me up against it, face first. The bark bit into my bloody cheek and the screaming went up in pitch. I sounded like a girl—why wasn’t anybody helping? There had to be someone around. They flipped me so I was looking out at them. Their masks didn’t look so fucking funny anymore, and I tried to stop screaming so I could talk them into letting me go but my voice just wound up and up to soprano registers as they held my arms out, touching the branches of that fucking tree, and I felt the broken bones grinding in one of them. I was broken everywhere.
“Please!” I screeched, blood spewing from my mouth like a fucking fountain, and then even my screams got small and thread, and I couldn’t catch my breath.
One of the ducks looked at the leader. “Isn’t this enough?” he asked. At least I think it was a he.
“No,” the leader said. “We have to make an example of him. These pieces of shit have to understand—”
And then he pulled a hammer out of somewhere, and with it long spikes, and I found the strength to fight against the hands holding me, and almost made it, almost fell out of their grasp, but not quite. Oh god. Not quite.
“We have to make them all understand that nobody can do what this shit bird did and expect to live.”
He held one spike to my mostly open left palm and smacked it a good one with the hammer. And again I found my voice.
The last thing I remember seeing, after he nailed me to that fucking tree, was the hammer swinging up in the full moon light. I watched the blood—my blood, my god that was my blood, there was so much of it—arc away, black against the grey of the rest of the world. Then the hammer came down and hit me on the forehead.
My last thought as the world went black was, “I’m in real trouble here.”
Truer fucking words were never spoken.
STAGE ONE
GETTING TO WHY
Marie:
Looking for Another Ghost,
Like I Have Nothing Better to Do
I WENT LOOKING for Brown Eddie one day after he died. I wasn’t happy about this particular meeting, because to that point, dealing with ghosts hadn’t helped me further my life goals one iota.
I thought I’d have a career by now, know what I mean? That I’d never wear mismatched socks, my hair would always look good, and I wouldn’t have to worry about paying my rent again.
Not a very long list, but the only thing I could definitely check off was not having to worry about paying my rent, because technically, I was homeless. (That’s what happens when your ex-boyfriend burns down your apartment building in a city with a zero vacancy rate.) My best friend, Jasmine, was letting me couch-surf at her place, but still. Not good.
On the plus side, I did have a job—sort of. I was working as a secretary for James Lavall, who’d inherited a ramshackle private investigation business from his recently deceased uncle.
The big problem was, James wasn’t even a real private eye, yet. He’d inherited his dead uncle’s licence with the business, so he had a month to either wind up the old man’s affairs and close the office, or get his own licence and carry on.
The fact that he was suffering from a concussion—due to our last, and only, case—was making him think very hard about whether he wanted to do this private eye thing. Which meant, well, I had a job, but only sort of.
In short, I felt like a fly trapped in amber or something. My life wouldn’t get better no matter how hard I tried. But there I was, trudging toward the Holy Trinity Church near downtown Edmonton, preparing to talk to another ghost like I thought it was actually going to help my situation at all.
My cell phone chirped. James Lavall’s name showed on the display, and I sighed, deeply. He might be my boss, sort of, and gorgeous, definitely. But I didn’t want to talk to him, because I hadn’t yet told him about the new case I’d taken in his name. I stared down at the phone and decided that since this job was one of the only things I did have going for me, I didn’t want to screw it up. So I slapped a big, fake smile on my face and answered his call.
“Hi, James. How’s your head?”
“Not great.” He sounded terrible, like he was recovering from a concussion, which he was. “Somebody named Honoria Lowe called. She told me to tell you the dead guy’s name is Brown Eddie and that she wants her appointment moved to
two o’clock.”
Oops.
“Who is she,” he asked. “And why does she think she has an appointment?”
“Because she does,” I said. “She wants to hire us.”
“Why?”
“The cops think she had something to do with a murder. She didn’t, of course, so—”
“A what?” His voice went from impatient to angry. “A murder?”
“I’ll explain everything when I get back to the office,” I said and crossed my fingers.
He was silent for a long time, and when he spoke, he sounded even more tired than he had moments before.
“I thought we were going to make some decisions before we took another case,” he finally said.
“Decisions?” I asked, weakly.
“About this place,” he replied. “This business. Us. You know, decisions.”
Us. There it was. The thing I didn’t want to deal with. The possibility of us. Chicken that I am, I decided to ignore that and concentrate on the business.
“I know we haven’t had a chance to talk, James, but here’s the thing. You still have a month to use your uncle’s private investigator’s licence. That’s the reason I told Honoria to come in for a meeting. I think we should take her case. Why not have some money coming in while you’re deciding. You know?”
“Twenty days,” he replied. “I have twenty days.”
“All right, twenty days,” I repeated, trying to keep the crankiness, which was really bubbling to the surface by that time, at bay. “I don’t know about you, but I could use some cash.”
He was silent for so long I wondered if we’d lost our connection.
“Do you honestly have a lead?” he finally asked.
“Yes.” And I held my breath.
“Then go,” he said. “I gotta lie down.”
I put the phone away and picked up my pace. I had to get to the Holy Trinity Church, find the dead guy—who I now knew was called Brown Eddie—and convince him to tell me, clearly and without a doubt, who had killed him, so I’d have good news to take back to James.
Technically, things like “who killed you” didn’t matter when it came to moving a ghost to the next plane of existence, but it would help Honoria, and that would help the Jimmy Lavall Detective Agency, which would in turn help me.
All right, so I wasn’t going to see the ghost for any altruistic reason. I was doing it for a paycheque. My mom would have never done anything like that. She saw our gift as a calling, not a career. But I wanted a career.
Forget career—I wanted a life. And not the same as my mother’s, that’s for sure. All that gift gave her was a broken marriage, screwed-up kids, and cancer.
Okay, so maybe it didn’t give her cancer, but it sure gave her the rest. Why would I want that? Why would I ever willingly accept that as a viable life choice? It never paid. It’s not like I could invoice ghosts. Could I?
No. Trust me. I couldn’t.
Now, I didn’t feel particularly good about trying to get information from this Brown Eddie guy without offering to help move him on to the next plane of existence, but I’d decided I wasn’t going to volunteer. I was still exhausted—and dehydrated—from the last ghost I’d moved on. If Eddie didn’t ask for help, he’d just have to find his own way.
Usually, they move on without help, I told myself as I trudged down the street toward the church where the dead guy had been killed. Usually.
But not always. Sometimes they needed help from people like my mother. Like me. So if Eddie asked, I’d probably feel compelled to help, which was just about the last thing I wanted to do.
It wasn’t just because I didn’t want to interact with ghosts anymore, though that was a big part of it. It was because I’d have to lie to James Lavall about any and all information Eddie gave me. You see, he didn’t know a thing about my ghost-seeing abilities, and that’s the way it had to stay.
For about a second, I wished I could just come clean to James about being able to interact with ghosts. It would have made it all so much easier. But I knew I wasn’t going to do that. Normal people like James don’t want to know about this kind of stuff. They live on the surface of the world. And they always—always—think that people who live any deeper are crazy.
Just ask my dad.
Thinking about the way he’d treated my mother girded my loins, so to speak. Nope. James didn’t need to know about the ghost. James just had to be massively impressed when I walked in with all the answers, solved the case, and brought in a quick—and real—paycheque for both of us.
I hoped.
I HAD TO push through a large crowd to get to the big tree in the dusty front yard of the Holy Trinity Church. Nothing draws the crowds like death, I guess. I couldn’t really see anything until I got to the yellow police tape draped around the tree. Then I saw the blood.
The front of the tree looked as though it had been drenched in it. Two branches, reaching out from the trunk about four feet up, looked as though they had been attacked with an axe. I felt sick and turned away, nearly stepping on a frighteningly skinny woman about my age, squatting in the grass by the yellow tape. She was trying to light a candle that she’d set by a grocery store bouquet of white daisies.
“Watch it,” she said, without looking up. She sounded exhausted, as the lighter in her hand spewed hugely ineffectual sparks all around the candle and the daisies. She rubbed her eyes distractedly, smearing her mascara. “I can’t make the stupid thing light.”
“Want me to try?”
She stared at me for a second, then handed me the lighter. It took a couple of tries, then the candle was lit, and I handed it back to her. “Thanks,” she said.
“You knew Brown Eddie?” I asked. “The guy who died?”
“He didn’t like being called that.” Her eyes narrowed, and she clutched her purse. “You a reporter or something?”
“No. I work for a detective agency,” I said. “And I want to help. What was his name?”
I will never know why she told me, but she did. Her bottom lip quivered, and she turned back to the tree. “His name is—was—Hansen. Eddie Hansen.”
“Thank you.” I turned, but her voice brought me up short.
“I wish I could be the one to tell his mother what happened to him,” she whispered. “She needs to know.”
“The police will do that,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, and shook her head. “But I’d like to be the one to look her in the eye and say, ‘You did this to Eddie, you bitch.’”
Her mouth pulled into a thin, tight line in her pocked face. I didn’t know what to say, but for once did the smart thing and kept my mouth shut.
“If she’d only let him back home, maybe none of this would have happened.” Her lips quivered. “I mean, she lived in the city and everything. And he was only a kid.”
She turned toward me as though she was going to say more, then her eyes iced, and she shook her head. “I shouldn’t be talking to you. I don’t even know who you are.”
Before I could speak, she turned on her heel and walked away, letting me know without a shadow of a doubt that our interview was over.
So I looked around the rest of the church yard for a dead guy named Eddie Hansen. What I found was nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I kept looking at the tree as I searched in vain for the ghost. He should have been here. The violence to that tree told me he’d have questions—a boatload of them was my guess—before he made his decision and moved on. So, where was he?
Nowhere I could see.
I left the churchyard and headed back to the office, not completely depressed, but close. I had Eddie’s last name and knew that his mother lived in the city. Somewhere.
I hoped I could turn those bits of information into something concrete before James and I had our meeting with Honoria Lowe, our almost client, since I had no idea where Dead Eddie Hansen was, and my hour was up.
Darn it anyhow.
Marie:
Honoria Lowe’s
Not Crazy.
She’s Special
I WASN’T FEELING fantastic as I walked back to Dead Uncle Jimmy’s office, where James Lavall was waiting for me. I was supposed to be bringing back all sorts of information that would help us quickly wind up the case I’d taken.
However, Dead Eddie hadn’t been where he should have been, which was close to his place of death.
Typical. Never a ghost around when you really need one.
I briefly wondered if he’d moved on to the next plane of existence all on his own. It was unusual, but not out of the question. The big problem was, if he’d moved on, I’d have to actually do some detective work if I wanted to figure out who killed him. Since I had no idea how to do that, Honoria Lowe would probably have to find someone else to save her from the police. Which meant no paycheque for us.
James was sitting at his dead uncle’s desk, reading a book, with a pizza box and two cans of soda sitting in front of him. He looked up and smiled as I walked in, gesturing at the pizza box, which I could see had been opened.
“Want some?”
“Thanks,” I said. I was starving, and the cooling cheese and pepperoni smelled divine.
He handed me the unopened can of soda, then leaned back, watching me as I mashed the slice into my mouth. I realized I was not being very ladylike and tried to slow down, but my starving stomach said no-go to that idea, and I swallowed and rammed more in, grinning at him.
“Just a teeny bit hungry,” I said. I was going to get embarrassed, which would have made me say something mean, I’m sure, but he shrugged.
“I was starving, too. When was the last time we had a decent meal?”
“I don’t remember,” I mumbled.
“Neither do I,” he said. “Things got a little exciting. Couldn’t seem to work it in.”
“Yeah.” I sipped the soda and took another big bite of the pizza, sighing deeply. It felt like a little bit of heaven, and James was good enough to let me finish eating before he grilled me.