The Dead Girls Detective Agency

by Suzy Cox

  Lorna kept staring out, as if she could see her home. “The idea of giving that up—of moving on to somewhere where there are no guarantees that I’ll be able to watch them as much as I can now? Well, that just makes me sad. So for now, I’m staying put. It’s not like I’m in a rush or anything, is it? In theory, I have forever, so I figure I’d rather spend a little more of it in New York with the people I love. Even if they don’t know I’m here.”

  I was not the touchy-feely link-arms-on-the-sidewalk type, but right then I wanted to give Lorna the biggest hug. But I wasn’t really sure if ghosts could even hug each other. I might fall right through her. So instead I hung back, said nothing, and thought that, yep, there was definitely more to Lorna than first met the eye.

  “Besides, like Tess is always saying, finding your Key might not be such a good idea—after all, we don’t know what’s through the Door, do we?” Lorna said. “We only know that no one has ever come back through it. And that might not be because they don’t want to.” She shuddered.

  Tess. There she was again. It seemed like Nancy and Lorna were almost scared of her. Or at least weren’t about to get on the wrong side of someone with such a stellar mean-girl act.

  “I mean, what if when you go through, that’s it? You’re trapped?” Lorna said. Tess had shook her up about this, hadn’t she? “What if what’s behind the door is … hell?”

  I must have been looking at her strangely because Lorna stopped, got a hold of herself, took a second, then smiled. “I’m sure it’s not though. I’m sure you’ll be fine,” she said.

  “This may be a totally rude question so please just tell me to get lost—I’m not up on the dead-etiquette thing yet—but, um, how did you die?”

  Way to lighten the mood, Charlotte.

  “No, it’s fine. I don’t mind telling you,” Lorna said. “I made out with the prom queen’s date during the slow dance section. Some bitch hit me over the head with her crown as soon as I left the floor.”

  I unsuccessfully suppressed a giggle. I was being sarcastic about the whole cyanide-in-the-lip-gloss theory, but turned out I wasn’t that wide of the mark.

  “Well, that’s a much better conversation starter than ‘some psycho pushed me under the F train,’” I said.

  Despite ourselves, we both giggled. Hmmm … maybe I liked Lorna. Which was weird because I hadn’t had a whole lot of girl friends when I was alive, apart from Ali, who I’d known forever. And especially not ones who looked like they’d stepped off the pages of Teen Vogue.

  “Come on, let’s go find Nancy,” Lorna said. “I’m sure she’s going loco somewhere because we’re wasting ‘valuable lesson time’ gossiping. Though, in my humble opinion, gossip is never a waste.”

  We found Nancy on the north-facing side of the observation deck, looking out in the direction of the New York Times building. For a second, I felt a pang for my dad, and had to tell myself to stop with the pity party and just get on with the matter at hand. Haunting for beginners.

  “So how did you find your debut port?” Nancy asked.

  “About as much fun as my last trip to the dentist, but I’ll get over it.” I was trying not to think about the dizziness or if it would be as hard on the way off this thing as it had been on the way up. “I just need to train my brain to realize that, now I’m dead and can’t breathe anymore, it’s pointless making me feel like I am going to blow chunks. Because I can’t, right?”

  Nancy nodded. “Now that you don’t have a body, it’s all in the mind. Which brings us to Rule Five …” Of course. I patted my blazer pocket and felt its outline. Red book—passed down from teen ghost to teen ghost—at the ready. “Which is that ghosts can appear to humans if we need to—to solve a case.”

  What? Ghosts could appear to humans! So there was a way to make my parents and David see me again?

  “We can?” Rein in the overenthusiasm, Charlotte, or they’ll get suspicious.

  “Oh yes!” Nancy said. “I mean, we don’t make a habit of it. No one wants to be freaking out the Living for no good reason or doing anything that’s going to end up on YouTube or Most Haunted or whatever reality TV show Bravo’s commissioned this week.” No, God forbid. “But sometimes we do need to let the Living know we’re here in the course of an investigation. A little light haunting can be extremely effective when we’re trying to get information out of people—information they don’t necessarily want to tell us.”

  “Nancy Radley, are you suggesting that sometimes you scare the Living in order to make them confess?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” she said, using a voice that should have had subtitles reading yesss. “It’s for the sake of justice. And your Key.”

  “So essentially what you’re saying is that if we think one or more of the Living know something about my death or they seem to be acting all suspicious and hiding something, we are entirely within our rights to scare them until they ’fess up?”

  “Um, no. Well, yes?”

  Uh-huh. Maybe there was more to Her Geekiness than met the eye too.

  “Now, the key to making yourself visible to the Living is to focus on your fingertips, then push until the energy spreads out over your whole body,” Nancy said. “You’ll materialize to the Living as an apparition—and look just as you did before you died. Well, before you were killed horribly. So that means normal, but with a bit more of a glow.”

  Oh, good, I’ll appear as a glowing ghost to my loved ones. That won’t mess them up even more than my murder.

  “So, in order to apparite, you need to push,” she continued. “Push all your energy down to the ends of your fingers, everything inside of you—and there’s a lot of kinetic energy there—and that power will make you visible whenever you need it to. Sure, it takes time and practice, but you can do it. And you will get the hang of it.”

  “Um, Nance,” I said. “Is it wise doing this here? There’s so many peo—I mean, so many of the Living hanging about. Won’t they freak out if they start seeing free-floating hands while they’re trying to make the telescopes work?”

  “Actually this is a perfect place to practice,” she said, all trust-me and breezy. “I always bring new recruits to public places. Everyone here is so busy gaping at the city, no one looks at what’s happening next to them. Look, I’ll prove it.”

  She walked over to a young couple who were snuggling up like newlyweds. Miss Snuggler was pointing in the direction of Brooklyn, while her guy spooned her from behind and whispered the kind of sweet nothings in her ear that made me want to barf. Wait until one of you dies before your time, I wanted to say to them, you won’t be so smug and huggy then. Because one of you will be down there in the city probably crying your eyes out and looking at pictures from last semester’s trip to the Smithsonian while the other one of you will be floating around somewhere inappropriate, like the top of the Empire State, learning how to make her pinky finger reappear just to scare humans.

  Nancy stood next to Spoon-a-lot and a look of extreme concentration filled her face. She stared hard at her hand and slowly, like a glass filling with cherry soda, her fingers changed color. They began to look, well, more alive again. Until that moment I hadn’t even noticed that she—we—could have auditioned to play one of the Cullen family, but now Nancy’s hand was back to full rosiness, it was beyond obvious. So that was what happened when a part of you became visible to the Living again. Her hand glowed with a pinky hue.

  Nancy looked back at me, then back to Hug-boy and smiled. If he stopped paying attention to his date and did a 180, he’d see that there was now a neat little hand floating right by his ear. A hand without a body. No body that he could see, anyway.

  Nancy waved her visible hand about for a few seconds, before putting it behind his head and making a bunny ears sign. Neither he nor his girlfriend noticed a single thing. They were far too busy planning what sights they were going to see the next day. Or which street corner they were going to make out on next. Yuck.

  As usual, Nancy was right.
Busy places were actually perfect to practice my new skills without upsetting the Living. I hoped I didn’t suck at apparition as badly as I did at chem.

  “Your turn,” she said, relaxing as she put her hand back down by her side. It paled until it matched the chalky color of the rest of her body. “Try it out. Make your hand appear.”

  I held out my fingers in front of my face and stared at them hard. In fourth grade, my piano teacher told me I was lucky to have such long, thin fingers. Apparently I could have been a natural. Like Alicia Keys or something. That was if I’d ever bothered to practice and Dad hadn’t canceled the lessons after two months on account of me missing three to watch cartoons with Ali instead.

  Right, apparition. How hard could this be? My fingers were ready. All I needed to do was find my energy. I could do that. I’d watched enough yoga shows on the Fitness Channel. (Admittedly while eating cookie dough ice cream on the couch, but still …) I patted my stomach. Maybe my power was hiding in there. I strained and clenched and stared at my hand. Boy, was this unattractive. I strained again. Nope, nothing. My hand still wasn’t going to be seen by any breath-takers tonight.

  “Relax, don’t try so hard,” Nancy said. Which, actually, was so not helpful. I smiled through my clenched teeth at Lorna, silently thanking her for hanging back and letting me take my time.

  I lifted my hand again and stared at my fingers. This time, instead of thinking about my stomach, I thought about them and how much I wanted them to appear. To look the way they used to when I was alive. How they did when David held my hand. If I could just make this work, then he could see me. I could appear to him one last time and let him know that I might be dead, but I was okay. And that he would be okay someday too.

  My toes felt warm. Then my calves. Then my knees. Then that balmy perfect-bath feeling traveled all the way up my body—like the sensation you get when you drink a mug of hot chocolate on a winter’s day—until, eventually, all of me was nice and toasty.

  I examined my fingers, wiggled them again. They felt buzzy like the top of a stereo speaker. And they were pink! Pink! Had I made them apparite? I turned back to Nancy and Lorna expecting to see them smiling all encouragingly because I’d done it. I’d made my hand appear!

  But both of their mouths were on the floor. Not literally. But they were looking at me like I had three heads.

  “Charlotte, whatever you do, don’t move,” Nancy said, edging toward me. “You’ve somehow managed to … You, well, you … It seems you have a gift for apparition.”

  What was she talking about? I’d done what she asked, right? My hand was pink, just like hers had been. “Nancy, what’s wrong with you?” I asked. “Since I got to the Attesa, I’ve done everything you’ve asked of me,” I waved my hand around and up in the air. “And it seems all you can do is …”

  Um, hang on a minute. What was that? I waved my arm again. It was glowing. All of it. My fingers, my forearm, my elbow. Like a neon party sign. I looked down at my other arm, my legs. Same story.

  Uh-oh. Somehow I hadn’t just made my hand visible to the Living—I’d done my whole body. Which meant that people—human, not dead people—could see me and …

  “Miss, can I see your ticket?” A security guard in a uniform was standing in front of me. I swiveled around, desperately hoping there was some alive girl behind me who he was talking to.

  “Miss?” Darn, there was no one but two preppy guys in dorky pastel polo shirts and khakis. Which meant he had to be talking to me. Which meant—oh, help—he could totally see me. And he was looking at me very strangely indeed.

  “Er, I think I lost it when I came up here,” I said. My voice sounded strange. Like it was lower than normal and had a bit of an echo. Now he could see me, could he hear me too?

  “Lost it?” He parroted back. So we’d established that, yep, apparition made my voice audible to the Living too. “And where do you think you did that exactly? You do need a valid ticket to be up here, I’m afraid. Plenty of signs told you that before you got in the elevator. Where do you think you lost it, miss? Your ticket?”

  Oh, crap. Should I just make myself disappear? Or would that make him madder? Actually, I didn’t even know how to do that. Nancy had stuck me at the wheel of a speeding car and forgotten to point out the brakes. Come to think of it, where was Nancy?

  Then I saw her. Behind the security man, she and Lorna were waving madly. They kept pretending to hold something in the air, then miming that it had fallen out of their hands and … where were they pointing?

  What was with them? This was not the time to start playing charades. I was knee-deep in smelly stuff here and I needed their help. Nancy pointed over the edge again.

  “What? What are you trying to say, Nancy?” I asked, feeling myself getting annoyed.

  Security man looked behind him to the spot where Nancy stood. Where I could see her. But he could just see air.

  “Have you been drinking, young lady?” he asked, starting to get stern with me now. He obviously thought I was wasted—why else would I be asking the air behind him questions? “Because one thing we at the Empire State Building do not allow is any person under the influence of any alcohol …”

  Lorna giggled. Nancy was too busy madly pointing to find it funny.

  “Now, you’ll have to show me your ticket or I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “Sir, I told you: I lost it,” I pleaded. He was so not buying this. “It went …” I looked back to Nancy, who was waving at me—she did her little mime again, something in her hand, it flew out and over the edge. Oh. I got her now. I turned back to the security guard and gave him the same polite smile that I usually reserved for David’s mom.

  “I did have a ticket, but when I got up here there was a big gust of wind and it went over the rails.” I pointed to the street below, like that was going to make him believe me any more than he already didn’t.

  “That may be,” he said, his cheeks getting redder by the second. I shouldn’t have added the polite smile. It never worked on David’s mom either. “But if you don’t have your ticket now, you’ll have to leave. If you’ll just follow me to the elevator …”

  He turned his back to me and started to lead the way off the observation deck and back into the building. Ohmigod, what was I going to do? What if he tried to touch my arm? He’d go right through it—just like Nancy’s arm had gone through the wall in the Attesa. Or worse, he was going to take me in the elevator, where there weren’t as many lights, then he’d see I was glowing. Glowing. He’d get all freaked out. And call the police. Or maybe Ghostbusters. I bet they had a number for that here. I can’t have been the first spook to show up. What if they caught me with some ghost ray and locked me up in a special, secret prison and I was stuck in there forever and ever and …

  “Quick! Charlotte! This is your chance. Blow!” Nancy said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t think about it, just as hard as you can blow—blow all the energy out through your mouth and you’ll disappear.”

  Blow? Blow. I didn’t think, I just did what Nancy said.

  Cold crept down my body. Quicker than the warmth had come. It made me wince, like a milkshake headache did.

  “Miss, if you’ll just walk this way …”

  The security guard turned around. And around again. I hadn’t moved an inch, but—please—it seemed as if he could no longer see me.

  “Miss? Miss?”

  I looked down at my body. It was washed out and pale again. No glow. Result!

  “Well, I …” He stomped off into the building. No doubt to find a colleague to come and hunt for me. Or—worse—so he could look at the security camera footage. Now that was going to make for interesting viewing. Now you see me, now you don’t. Was that how it went? Did apparitions even appear on camera? Maybe he’d think he’d fantasized me. That I was just a figment of his imagination. He’d probably had a long day after all.

  I turned back to Nancy and Lorna. “That was a close one,
hey?”

  “That’s one way to put it,” Nancy said, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear.

  “How did you do that?” Lorna asked, her blue eyes wide. “It took me weeks to even make my little finger glow and you—you made your entire body go on your first try. You’re even better at apparition than Nancy!”

  Her Geekiness scowled.

  “I have no idea. I just thought of how much I wanted it and bam! there I was. Weird.”

  “Wait a minute,” Nancy said, looking uneasy. “He’s coming back.”

  She gestured behind us. We turned to see the security guy striding over—with another guard. Even though I knew I was invisible again, what if I hadn’t blown hard enough? What if they could still see my foot or my ear?

  “She was here. Just here,” the guard told his friend. “Then poof! She was gone. Like she disappeared into thin air. Where can she have gone to? There’s only one way out.”

  “Guys, we should get out of here,” Lorna whispered. She seemed to have forgotten that the security men couldn’t hear her either. “We don’t know when Miss Apparite here”—she pointed to me—“will get her glow on again.” Lorna walked in between the two men, who were busy arguing about my whereabouts. “And these guys look, like, ancient. I don’t think either of their hearts could take seeing a ghost again this evening.”

  “You’re right, Lorna,” Nancy said. Possibly for the first time ever. She turned to me. “Seeing as you seem to be something of a star student, we’ll let you take the wheel. You can transport us out of here. Just think of somewhere you really want to be, or someone you have a strong emotional connection to. Think hard, then close your eyes and—if that demo was anything to go by—you should be able to port the three of us off the Empire State on your own. Lorna and I will travel with you.”