by Alex A King
My blood boiled. “Sorry, I only find things for people who are living. They’re much more likely to pay their bill when the job is done.”
“I can pay you.”
Yeah, right. “My bank doesn’t accept ghost bucks. But if you go on up to the Afterlife, I understand they have a whole organization devoted to helping the newly deceased acclimate. Whatever help it is you need, I’m at least sixty percent sure they can assist you.”
A shadow wafted across his face. “I can’t do that.”
“Sure you can. Click your heels and fly straight until morning. Or something like that.”
He clicked his heels together. Nothing happened. “Got any other ideas for me, you muppet?”
“Leave here and pop in to the Afterlife?”
He spat invisible specks onto the floor. “Bloody useless, that’s what your advice is.”
Two palms up. “I can’t help you. Sorry.” Not sorry.
Solving problems and finding things for ghosts isn’t my thing. I’d told him the truth, that Finders Keepers deals exclusively with the living. Okay, yes, I’d recently solved two other murders for the victims, but there were special circumstances. The first murder victim was my combination best friend, neighbor, and landlady’s murder. Olga Marouli zinged right back to see me while her body was still warm on the floor and demanded I get straight to work, figuring out whodunit. Because I loved her I complied with only a minimal amount of grumbling. The second was a Greek bread baron whose exit out of this realm happened on his yacht, with several passengers onboard. The freshly dead group had holed up in my apartment and refused to leave until I found their killer.
“Then you leave me no choice,” Roger Wilson said in a voice that was as tepid as the rest of him. “I wish there was another way.”
Huh?
Roger Wilson crouched until his head was level with mine, and then sprang forward with the grace of an intoxicated three-legged cat. He sailed into my body and kept on going, emerging from the middle of my back. The whole thing felt like being temporarily encased in a Jell-O shot.
Son of a gun, had the dead jerk tried to jump into my body?
Total failure, thank every deity ever. Instead of successfully hijacking my bag of meat and bones, he bounced off the ring of salt’s invisible protective barrier and fell panting on the ground. This from a guy who no longer had lungs.
“That was supposed to fooking work,” he said.
“Says who?”
“The movies.”
My eyebrows climbed as high as eyebrows could climb. Thank goodness I’d never succumbed to Botox or I’d be ninety percent less expressive. “By movies I presume you mean things like Ghost?”
He nodded.
“How did you get to your age without learning that what you see on TV isn’t always real?” How deep did the delusion go? “You do know there aren’t tiny people in the television, right? Please tell me you know that much.”
He pelted me with serious case of stink-eye. “Help me or else I’ll find another way to use your body as a puppet.”
Lovely guy. Appearances were so deceiving. He looked like a man who cultivated roses and drank milky white tea, but really he was a transparent sack filled with dicks.
“I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself. Check out the Afterlife, swing by some Council of the Formerly Living meetings, and get educated about what comes next. While you’re doing that, the police will be busy working your case. Detective Samaras is a good cop, so it won’t be long before we know the whole story—if there is a story.”
“I can’t leave this circle,” he said.
“You’re already dead,” I said as gently and firmly as I could. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
“Could be anything out there, for all any of us know. Supreme evil might poo in my soul.”
I blinked. “Again, like the buggering, I don’t think that’s possible.”
“You don’t know that it’s not, do you though? Thinking isn’t knowing. And who knows what that tosspot who killed me has up his or her sleeve. They had to have been shirty when they snuffed me.”
“Shirty?”
“Americans,” he muttered. “Angry! Shirt is angry! Angry is shirty! I’m starting to feel shirty myself!”
“Then you should have said that.” I glanced around at the kitchen and all the nobody in it. If there was a murderer lurking around, or anything else waiting to poo in Roger Wilson’s soul, they were invisible. “Okay, well, I can’t stick around all day, so I’m just going to step over this salt and mosey on home.”
“Don’t! Supreme evil might poo in your soul, too.”
“There’s nothing and nobody out there.”
“Ha! That’s what you think. But murderers get themselves a taste for murdering. Could be you’ll be next.”
Well. That was cheerful. “I doubt that. I’m not nearly as annoying as you.” But I did stick my nose in where it didn’t belong sometimes. Hazard of the trade. As recently as this week I’d been in an eBay fight to the death for a rare batch of wool. Knitting aficionados were brutal. I’d won the auction, but username: KnitOrDieScreaming had knitting needles and knew how to whip up souvlaki using a human face.
“Why would someone want to kill you?” I went on.
“There’s a homicidal bloody killer loose on the island and you’re asking what I did to deserve it? That’s victim-blaming, that’s what that is. Isn’t that what you women are always crying about?”
My teeth sank into my lip. I counted to ten. Then I counted to ten again. “That’s not what I was asking. Most homicides aren’t stranger-on-stranger.”
The grooves in his forehead dug deeper. “I don’t bloody well know, do I?”
“Well, what do you know?”
“Ghosts are stupid, and now I’m one of them.”
Bigotry against his own kind. Charming. “I’m leaving now.”
“Don’t come crying to me when the killer offs you, too.”
Like ripping off a Band-Aid, I stepped over the salt line. I held up both hands in supplication. “See? Perfectly fine. Now why don’t I smudge this line so you can toodle off, pip pip old chap to the Afterlife and get the help you need?”
Behind me, there was a light hollow clang, the sound of a lid lifting off a pot.
“You daft cow,” Roger Wilson said. “I told you. I distinctly remember telling you.”
I turned around in time to see a large stockpot colliding with my face.
Chapter Three
When I woke up, I discovered I’d been making salt angels on the bakery floor. The circle wasn’t so much broken as it was scattered to the low-lying breezes that naturally occur in buildings that aren’t as air-tight as they should be.
Emitting a suitably pained sound, comparable to a wronged donkey, I rolled onto my stomach and scanned everything at eye level. There was no sign of Roger Wilson’s transparent feet. Could be he was hovering in the air higher up, but I didn’t think so. The absence of gloating was a giveaway.
The stockpot lurked in the corner, its heavy copper bottom dent-free. Lucky, I supposed, because that kind of cookware didn’t come cheap. Jack Honeychurch spared no expense when it came to equipping his kitchen. Alone on the Cake Emporium’s floor, I mangled a few lines of Eric Carmen’s All by Myself.
“You are not alone,” said a deep male voice that definitely wasn’t supposed to be present, especially while I was scraping the bottom of my talent barrel.
I jerked upright. He was there. I didn’t know his name, although I supposed he had one, on account of how most people wind up with a name sooner or later. In Greece, for instance, you don’t get a name until you’re three months old. Up until your baptism you’re simply named Baby. The man in black--he was always in black--probably had some kind of high faluntin’ name like Lord Fancy Pants the Third or Sir Muckety Muck Darcy Heathcliff. His hair was the color of midnight on a moonless night, and it curled where it touched his collar. He wore a long coat, the kind a man wears to march
through the fog, across the moors, to claim a woman, whom he recently decided was worth traipsing through the fog for. His cheekbones were high, his lips full, and he always seemed swathed in shadows, even on a sunny day. What he was I didn’t know. Not a ghost; the man was solid. But he wasn’t fully human either, I suspected. He had a way of showing up unexpectedly, usually when I was in some kind of physical trouble, or when he assumed I was in dire need of a cryptic message. Although why he thought I enjoyed cryptic messages was beyond me.
I grimaced up at him. “Please don’t tell me it puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the stockpot upside the head again.”
He bent down to pick up the pot, hooked his finger through one of the D-shaped handles. “Someone threw this at you?”
“Unless it flew by itself, and even in my experience things don’t whizz across the room unless someone is whizzing them.” I glanced around. “Did you see anyone else here?”
“The spirit is gone … for now.”
“You saw him?”
He took his sweet time answering, placing the pot back on its shelf before shifting his attention to my banged up cranium. “A person can see a great many things if they pay attention.” He crouched beside me, touched my head, where the pot had made contact. His fingers were cool. “Are you damaged?”
“Not permanently.”
He nodded once, then he stood, bringing me up with him, all business and stoicism and foggy moors. Probably he was on his way to stride across one right now. Not that Merope had moors. What we had was cliffs and donkeys.
“I am glad.” A smile left before it had even fully arrived. He turned away.
“You’re leaving?”
“Do you need further assistance?”
“No … But I do have a question.”
He waited.
“Where are we right now? I mean, what is this place? What do you see?”
“The Cake Emporium. That is what it has always been called, and I expect that is what it will always be called.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because that is its name.”
He walked out the kitchen door. A moment later I heard the front door open and close. Another sign the man in black wasn’t a ghost.
Head quietly throbbing, I took the time to sweep up the scattered salt. Roger Wilson didn’t reappear. Neither did the mysterious pot slinger, which was nice. I didn’t think my head could take a second beating today. When I was done, I sent out a silent message for Betty to call me. That window needed fixing, and I knew someone who could get the job done on regular time, not Greek time, provided I convinced him using tools like blackmail and bribery.
Greek time fully embraces words like “whenever” and “whatever”. Contractors show up when they feel like it, and they might not feel like it until after five cups of coffee, a game of tavli--backgammon--and several long, loud conversation about politics. An hour, a day, a week, all meaningless measures of time.
Betty didn’t call.
That didn’t mean I couldn’t help her out.
My next move was to drag some old boxes out of the alley and use them to patch the broken glass so that the weather wouldn’t sneak in while I was waiting for Betty’s instructions. Not too shabby. Okay, a little bit shabby. But not out of place among some of the island’s other storefronts. Greece’s financial problems meant shopkeepers couldn’t always afford things like glass, paint, or dusters to dislodge the thick crust of dust forming on their wares.
Something tickled my memory banks.
I stopped.
The broken window. It hadn’t broken all by itself. The large jagged hole was the result of a flying brick. Leo had gone hunting for the brick tosser but he’d returned empty handed, no vandal in custody. Who had thrown the brick? Roger Wilson’s killer? If so, was he or she alerting us to the lowest-key ever murder scene inside? Maybe it was a coincidence, but I’m not a fan of coincidences. Too often they’re the result of careful planning.
With the window as secure as I could get it with cardboard and tape, I jogged over to my bicycle. Nobody would rob the Cake Emporium, I was sure of that. Tourist season was over, and even the most nefarious of Merope’s denizens wouldn’t steal from another one of Merope’s own shops. Besides, I wasn’t sure the island’s worst could see the shop as anything other than an unoccupied shell. Betty’s comments about the Cake Emporium’s visibility had raised more questions than it had answered, and I was trying not to perish from all this curiosity. I have long suspected that Greek DNA contains at least one cat hair.
I grabbed my bicycle, slung my leg over, and pushed off. Something caught my eye. Something silvery and shiny in my bicycle’s basket. A small salt shaker, the neck circled with a pink ribbon tied in a bow. I read the accompanying note, penned in an old fashioned hand on cream colored parchment paper.
For your protection.
The shaker was full.
As recently as a couple of months ago I was not a homeowner. Now, thanks to a death I’d undo in a heartbeat if I could, I was the reluctant deed holder of the apartment I’d called home for years. When my best friend and neighbor was murdered, I discovered she’d been harboring a secret: the building where we were neighbors was hers. In Olga Marouli’s Last Will and Testament she left me the apartment I’d unknowingly rented from her since I was barely out of high school. Apartment 201, its four walls, and all its contents were mine now. The rest of the building went to her granddaughter Lydia, who was technically the family’s black sheep. After meeting Olga Marouli’s children and other grandchildren, I’d say Lydia was better off being a black sheep than one of those white-fleeced crazies.
My apartment is located in the village, a couple of roughly hewn blocks away from the waterfront and the main road. The building is basically a three-layer cake, smothered with white icing and the requisite blue shutters. It features a pretty garden in the courtyard, tended to by a couple of gardeners, one of whom is dead. Kyrios Yiorgos, the dead one, is the more reliable of the two. He works day and night to keep the garden in show worthy condition. The other guy just takes credit for the dead man’s efforts, even though he has no clue his dead counterpart exists.
Kyrios Yiorgos saluted me on the way past. I kept my wave down low where no one but the gardener could spot it. Merope’s favorite pastime is gossip. The eyes here are big and the mouths are bigger. I didn’t fancy being the main story of the day. Plus I didn’t want to advertise my ability to see the dead. If the dead knew, they’d do annoying things like engage me in pointless conversation.
I parked my bicycle in the small lobby and jogged up to the second floor. The building houses two apartments per floor. My closest neighbor now that Olga Marouli was gone was Lydia, and when Lydia was home music seeped under her door, flooding the hallway with German pop. Today the hallway was filled with shadows and silence. Winter was headed right for Merope, and the light filtering through the picture window at the end of the hallway was thinner and more anemic than a Victorian orphan.
I locked my door behind me and let out a long relieved breath. It was good to be home. My place was small but it was comfortable and it was mine. After dumping my bag on the end of my desk, I lifted the lid on my laptop and waited for the machine to spring to life. I checked my email, voicemail, text messages, my primary points of contact for the Finders Keepers business.
The first voicemail was from Angela Zouboulaki, one of my repeat clients, and someone I considered a friend-ish. A week rarely passed without Angela sending me off on a mission. Angela is a collector of men. It’s my job to vet her coveted acquisitions, checking them for wives and other defects. Her most recent conquest had shaved twenty years off his age and murdered a boatload of people, but it was really only the age thing that bothered Angela. Today she declared she was headed to England to meet a man who claimed he owned a castle, and she wanted to me check on the status of this castle before she boarded her yacht, which would carry her to the mainland and her private plane. I called her
back because the curiosity was killing me.
“A castle?” I asked, incredulous.
“That is what he said, but you know how men are: they say a lot of things.”
Her men said a lot of things. Apart from her first two husbands, both of whom had left her a very rich woman, Angela’s taste in men is suspect at the best of times. I don’t know why she doesn’t just cut out the middleman--me--and do her hunting in dark alleys and prisons.
“What’s his name? I can find out right now if he really owns a castle.”
If the internet failed me there were other ways to uncover dirt. I had a network of databases I could sift through. For the tough, uncrackable nuts I turned to Sam Washington, my old boss and good friend.
“Teddy Duckworth. Sir Teddy Duckworth.”
My eyeballs performed a slow roll. Only a rich person could afford to have a name that ridiculous. “Sounds bogus.”
“Hurry,” she said. “If his castle is real he could be my true love, I feel it right here in my chest, just above the fifty carat diamond a man gave to me once.”
“Which man?”
“I do not remember him, only the diamond.”
I quickly sorted out the genuine historical figures from the Duckworths living today. Sure enough, there was a Teddy that matched the information Angela had given me.
“Huh. That’s his real name,” I said.
“Teddy Duckworth?”
I winced. “Technically his first name is Sir.”
There was a long, confused pause. “How can his name be Sir? That is a title, not a name.”
“I can only assume his parents hated him.”
“So he is not a a baronet or a knight?”
“No.”
“What about his castle?”
I pulled up his picture. Lo and behold, Sir Teddy Duckworth was approximately Angela’s age--Angela’s real age, not the fairy tale she told people--and he was single and without heirs. Attractive in a boyish, sandy-haired way. A pot belly that said he liked beer or meat pies. Or maybe beer with his meat pies.