The Dead Girls Detective Agency

by Suzy Cox

  They stood on either side of me to be sure we all ported together, making a circle with their arms, one wide enough to encompass but not touch me.

  “What if she’s hiding in the restroom? Have you checked in there?” security man 2 was asking. “They’re fast, teenagers. My grandson managed to sneak out to a bar when he came to stay with me last month. You can imagine how mad his mother was at me about that. Honestly, blink and they’re gone.”

  They had no idea. I looked at Nancy, then at Lorna. Nancy nodded, silently willing me to give it a go. Just as quickly as I could, please. I shut my eyes. Think of somewhere I really want to be. Or someone I have a strong connection with …

  I couldn’t help it. Much as I tried not to, of course I thought of him. The dizziness started, and I tried not to imagine the world around me whirling, spinning out of my control.

  Then it stopped. I opened my eyes. And there we were. Me and my new dead friends.

  In David’s bedroom.

  Chapter 6

  “WHERE ARE WE?” LORNA WHISPERED, HER BLUE eyes wide. “This isn’t the Attesa. Where in Manhattan have you brought us to, Charlotte?”

  The one place I’d always wanted to see, but had never been allowed to go: my boyfriend’s bedroom. So just knowing where something was did give you enough information to port there. But while we were here, he—from what I could tell—was not.

  Phew?

  I sneaked a preliminary peek around. Blue walls. Matching dark blue comforter. Sun-bleached My Chemical Romance poster (of course). Bashed-up iPod charging in its dock. Acoustic guitar proudly displayed on a stand in the corner. Grime gathering on said guitar due to his move into band “management.” (Translation: He might have looked cute carrying a Strat, but playing-wise, he sucked.) Half a toy airplane suspended from the ceiling. Dirty sports socks on the floor.

  Typical teen-boy room.

  I’d imagined this particular one in my head a thousand times—when I’d finally be let in, what I’d say, how cool I’d be, all I’m not freaking out about this. I go into boys’ bedrooms all the time. It was beyond weird to finally be here. Especially considering all the other places I’d been in the last few hours.

  It felt familiar but super-strange too. As if I were standing onstage in the set of a play—and this was how some big-deal Broadway producer had imagined David’s room to be. Why was that? It had only been half a day since we’d seen each other—was I that removed from him already? Would I feel this way if I ported into my own home too?

  “Wherever it is, they need to fire their maid,” Nancy said.

  Slightly harsh, I thought. Until I caught sight of not one but three used cereal bowls on the windowsill—each growing various stages of mold. It was messy. But then it wasn’t like David had been expecting three ghost guests, was it? I’m sure he’d have gotten out the vacuum and thrown away that pizza box under his bed if he’d known.

  Oh, who was I kidding? David had never been a poster boy for neat. He always had ink stains on his hand, his shoelaces spent more time trailing on the sidewalk than keeping his sneakers on, and his locker? He’d be lucky to find a book among the wrappers, empty soda cans, and loose paper.

  Some days I’d stand down the hallway from his locker, just before class, watching as he threw book after book out of it—along with bits of paper, soccer shirts, his two-day-old lunch. Out it all went onto the floor, as he manically searched for whatever it was he couldn’t find—that day. Nine times out of ten, I’d get to class before him. And he’d bounce through the door just as the bell stopped ringing, mouthing apologies at the teacher and asking if he could share my textbook because—even after all of that—he still couldn’t find his.

  I was a neat freak and David’s locker annoyed me so much that I’d even cleaned it up a couple of times—he was the only person who knew my combination and vice versa—but two days later it was back to looking like a dump.

  Lorna stepped over a pair of sneakers (which, doing a double take, I was sure were the ones he promised me he’d thrown out a year ago). Ewww all over her face.

  “This,” I said quietly, trying not to sound embarrassed, “is my boyfriend David’s bedroom.”

  Lorna and Nancy looked at me nervously.

  “Well, you did tell me to think of someone I had a strong connection to,” I mumbled. “I’m connected to him.”

  Nancy looked out of the window. Probably cursing herself for not having thought the whole Empire exit strategy through a bit more carefully. I could see her mind working overtime—and it worked a lot already. I bet she was thinking, Why did I let her have the wheel? Look at the close call we’ve already had this evening. If Charlotte can turn into an apparition up there, where no one knows her, just imagine what damage she can do here.

  “I really think we should go,” she said.

  “Oh, is this him?” Lorna asked, waving around a picture on David’s desk. How she picked it up, I did not know. But if lifting objects was in the lesson plan for Rule 6, looking at Nancy, I didn’t get the impression she was all that hot on teaching it to me anytime soon. I was rapidly becoming a liability.

  “He’s too cute,” Lorna said. “Tell all: How did you meet him? How long have you been together?”

  I ignored her and walked over to the desk to get a better look at the picture. Ouch. It was one David had taken of us on our first almost-date—that May day in Washington Square. I was carrying a red Amoeba Records tote bag my dad had bought as a present from a work trip to LA. David kept telling me how cool it was that I was “into music” too. I remembered him pulling out his camera phone to get a shot of us. He must have printed it off and put it in a frame. Who knew he was such a secret romantic? He must be so devastated now. Maybe that’s why he wasn’t here. Maybe he’d gone somewhere that reminded him of me—like our rock.

  “Guys, seriously, we have to get out of here. It’s not helping the investigation progress at all and—”

  Slam!

  The bedroom door banged shut, cutting Nancy off mid-flow.

  Someone was in the room. Someone Living enough to have slammed that door. Which could only mean it was … I don’t think I ever got what people meant when they said they were frozen to the spot before. But right then, frozen didn’t even start to cover it. Behind me, I heard the mattress springs creak. Whoever was in the room had flopped on the bed.

  Come on, Charlotte, I told myself. If you’re going to investigate your murder—if you’re going to have to haunt the people in your life to find out who did this to you—you’re going to have to see him at some point. It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid. Just turn around. And don’t think about the fact that you can never be together now. Unless he goes all Romeo to your Juliet and throws himself under the next F train he sees.

  I turned around. And—just as I’d suspected—there, lying facedown on the bed, was the teenage boy whose room we’d invaded. David. Super help.

  Lorna wandered over, all casual and hey-I-sneak-up-on-people’s-Living-boyfriends-all-the-time. She pointed at David in a totally obvious way.

  “Is this him?” she whispered. Honestly, here I was dying inside (again), and she was this excited? Time, place, anyone?

  I nodded weakly. As always, he’d changed out of his uniform before he even left school. David was wearing the same sky-blue Penguin sweater (with holes in, obv), baggy Levis and white (or they had been when he’d bought them) Pro-Keds that he’d been wearing when I’d kissed him good-bye that afternoon. Before I went down to the subway and … I could still feel the texture of the wool on my cheek … how it felt when he hugged me and I buried my head in his chest.

  I had to get a grip on myself. And fast.

  “Cute!” Lorna mouthed, giving me a double thumbs-up. She was loving this. Like, reveling in the opportunity to gossip about boys and relationships and all that stuff. It must have been the closest she’d gotten to girl talk in months. Any second now she’d be asking me if I thought some Z-list celeb couple were over for good.
>
  By the window, Nancy put her head in her hands. She was about as into losing control of the situation as I was into giving Lorna the skinny on my love life.

  There was a sniffle from the bed. David, was he … crying? I had to really bite down the urge to run over there and try to stroke his arm and tell him it would all be okay. Because I couldn’t. And it wouldn’t be.

  Or would it? Had anyone ever had a cross-dimensional relationship before? You know, a ghost being with one of the Living? Could that work out? There was more than enough (admittedly fictional) evidence to prove that vampires and humans could date (if you ignored the whole potential blood sucking and death angle)—maybe we could be the first ghost-mortal couple? Sure, dating wouldn’t be easy, but is it ever? Being invisible to humans, well, it meant David would look weird if he talked to me/air in the street. But then it did have its advantages. For a start I could sneak into his room anytime I liked and his mom would never know. Though would he still find me attractive now that I was an apparition? After all, I’d never asked him if “ethereal pink glow” was on his list of must-haves in a girlfriend, along with curly black hair and blue-gray eyes.

  David sniffled some more.

  Oh no, he was crying. He must have just found out about me. Awww! I was totally going to talk to Nancy about this. If I could just find a way to touch him—like Lorna had that photo frame—maybe we had a shot. Maybe there was even some way we could kiss. Feeling brighter than I had since I died, I started to walk over to the bed.

  Nancy jumped up from the windowsill and, quick as a cat, blocked my way. Eye to eye, I noticed that hers were a really pretty green color under those black glasses.

  “We can’t stand here talking. We need to go.” Nancy was officially up to her enough level now. “Until you’ve learned all the Rules, this place is no safer than the Empire State turned out to be. Any second now, he could feel your presence, or you could accidentally apparite your left foot or something, then he’ll be all freaked out, you’ll be all upset, and—unless he’s your murderer—none of us will be any closer to getting the Key.”

  Wow. That was the most wound up I’d seen her. Nancy must be stressed. “We have to go. Lorna, make the circle and—”

  “David! Visitor!” a female voice boomed from downstairs. His mom. I recognized it well. Though I wasn’t sure she should be shouting at her recently bereaved son when he was in mourning.

  David didn’t move. Except to sniff a bit.

  “Will someone give the boy a tissue or ten?” Lorna rolled her eyes.

  “David! I said you have a visitooor!”

  David shuffled on the bed and slowly sat up. His eyes were red and puffy. His floppy blond hair stuck to his face. There were little pink wrinkles on his cheek where the pillow had made an impression. His sweater had ridden up, revealing a crumpled Nirvana T-shirt underneath. He was a mess. A cute mess. It killed me to see him this way. It was all my fault. Well, the fault of the psycho who decided to go public-transport-Bundy on my ass.

  There was a light knock at the door. It must be the visitooor. Maybe it was one of his friends from band practice. He’d been sort of managing this group of seniors, Camels on the Freeway, and Tom, the drummer, and he were really good friends. He said he was doing it because “managing was where the creative control was at.” Though looking over at the unused guitar in the corner, I suspected there may be another reason.

  Another knock, more urgent this time.

  Nancy and I stared at each other. I hoped she had a plan. I didn’t even have an obituary yet, I certainly didn’t have a plan.

  “David, can I come in?”

  That was not Tom. Or Pete (the Camels’ bassist). Or even Plectrum (lead singer—go figure). It was a girl’s voice. A girl. You know, as in not a boy.

  And, by the way, David’s mom did not let him have girls in his bedroom. She didn’t even let me upstairs in his town house—and we had been dating for around a year and a half (okay, exactly seventeen months). In high school years we were pretty much married with two children, a house in Connecticut (yuck), and a dog. But if we were watching TV in the den (“with the door open, kids, or not at all”) and I needed to pee, I was allowed to go only in the small downstairs bathroom. Just in case I—I don’t know—ran upstairs, got into David’s room, and in some way infected it with girl germs that made him like me more than his mother.

  So what was his mom doing letting some other girl upstairs? David didn’t hang out with any other girls.

  The door creaked open. Just a crack. And a professionally blow-dried blond head popped around the wood.

  “Hey, I am so sorry to hear your news.” Somehow she shimmied her way from the door to his duvet in under a second—simultaneously looking concerned and pulling off a killer look-how-Angelina-my-lips-are pout.

  Kristen.

  Kristen, the Tornadoes’ head cheerleader.

  Kristen, the prettiest and most popular girl in school.

  Kristen, the bitchiest girl I’d ever met.

  Who didn’t like me.

  Who never talked to us.

  What was she doing here?

  “Jamie, my deputy head cheerleader, she was on her way to Barneys when she saw Jenni, who’d just been to Bloomingdale’s, and she told her that a girl from our school had died underground.” She sniffed, like that was the worst place you could possibly go. “Well, we just had to find out who it was right away—”

  I bet they did.

  “And when we heard it was poor, poor, poor”—okay, enough already—“poor Charlotte, I just had to race over here and see if you were okay.”

  Get the gossip more like. Apart from earlier today when we’d had the whole me-bumping-into-her/books-falling incident, I didn’t think Kristen even knew I was alive. But she certainly knew I was dead. Oh, the irony.

  “That’s kinda sweet of you,” David said. He sat up properly. He still hadn’t noticed his sweater was hiked up somewhere around his middle. Kristen kindly pulled it down for him. I started to seethe. And get hot. What the freaking hell did she think she was doing here? Why was she trying to comfort him? He was my boyfriend. Mine. She was not having him. Oh no. Over. My. Dead. Body.

  Oh.

  Hotter. I was so mad, I was feeling even hotter. It was that warm bath feeling. The same one I’d had up the Empire State. Just before I … Uh-oh.

  “Lorna, Lorna, quick, she’s going to apparite, she can’t control it.” Somewhere behind me Nancy was talking, but all I could see was that … ho (and I hated that mean-girl word) now stroking my boyfriend’s hair. And David? He was clearly so traumatized and upset by my death that he was letting her do it.

  Arms. In front of my face were Lorna’s and Nancy’s arms. They were circling me now. Trying to get me out. And just as I felt the warm buzzing in my toes and looked down to see them begin to glow, the room spun. And spun. And spun some more.

  Until I felt sick. Until we were back in the Hotel Attesa’s lobby. And until all I was left with was porting sickness …

  And the image of the hottest girl in school pushing David’s dirty blond hair out of his eyes.

  Chapter 7

  “I CAN’T DO IT—NOT TO HER. SHE WAS THE LOVE of my life. We were together for too long to disrespect her in this way. It’s … it’s not fair. It’s not me.”

  “Oh, but you can. She left you alone. And she’ll never be back. You can’t be lonely for the rest of your life. You deserve a chance at happiness. She’d want that for you. She loved you—she wouldn’t want you to sit here alone, unhappy forever, would she?”

  “But this feels so wrong. I can’t. I won’t. I—I—I—… Oh, okay then …”

  It was the morning after the day I died, and I was standing outside HHQ, the door slightly ajar. And I could hear a weird, muffled conversation going on inside. Between a man and a woman. Who sounded like they had a lot to discuss.

  I slowly pushed the door open a few inches more.

  I never—if I was stuck in the Attesa f
or a million years—expected to see the sight waiting for me on the other side.

  “I shouldn’t have kissed you,” a male voice was saying. “I was upset. It was wrong. You caught me by surprise.”

  Nancy was sitting with her legs tucked underneath her, as close to the TV screen as she could get, drinking in the conversation taking place between the actors on it like it was the first pumpkin latte of Halloween.

  So that’s who was talking—some actors in a shitty TV drama. It seemed that, as well as being an ace detectress, Nancy was a soap-opera addict. Surely there was a Rule that forbade that kind of pointless vegging out, when you could be crime fighting?

  “Uh-hum!” I coughed loudly. And totally not realistically. Nancy jumped so hard she hit her glasses on the screen. “What are you doing?” I asked sweetly. I was going to enjoy this.

  “Um, I’m, I …,” she mumbled guiltily.

  “It’s the, um, new episode of General Hospital,” she said quietly. “It’s sort of my favorite show. I used to watch it every day after I’d finished my homework. I missed it when I came here. I inadvertently discovered this TV and if you, um, twiddle this knob”—she pointed at the largest of the rusty ones below the front of the screen—“it can pick up the Living’s daytime TV!”

  “When you’re not crime solving, of course,” I said.

  “Oh, of course,” Nancy echoed solemnly.

  “General Hospital, hey? I’ve got some questionable TV habits myself, Nancy.” Don’t mention Gilmore Girls, don’t mention Gilmore Girls, or the fact it got so bad that in fifth grade you named your teddy Lorelai. “What does someone as smart as you see in a show like this?”

  “I think Jason is kind of dreamy—” Nancy admitted.

  “Jason? Is he still in it?” I asked, before I could stop myself. “Not that I’ve ever seen it either.” Damn, upper hand destroyed. I needed a subject change. Fast.

  “Nancy,” I said as assertively as I could. “I’m going out. Alone.”