Spookygirl - Paranormal Investigator

by Jill Baguchinsky

  SPOOKYGIRL :

  paranormal investigator

  SPOOKYGIRL :

  paranormal investigator

  JILL BAGUCHINSKY

  DUTTON BOOKS

  A Member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  DUTTON BOOKS

  A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Jill Baguchinsky

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author

  or third-party websites or their content.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Baguchinsky, Jill.

  Spookygirl : paranormal investigator / by Jill Baguchinsky.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: “Fifteen-year-old Violet can see ghosts and communicate with

  the dead, so it’s up to her to uncover the truth behind the school’s

  paranormal activity and to finish the investigation that led to her

  mother’s untimely death.”—Provided by publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-59145-1

  [1. Psychic ability—Fiction. 2. Mothers—Fiction. 3. Dead—Fiction.

  4. High schools—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B14215Spo 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2011052673

  Published in the United States by Dutton Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  www.penguin.com/teen

  Designed by Jeanine Henderson

  Set in Adobe Caslon

  Printed in USA First Edition

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  For Rhonda,

  my favorite Time Lady,

  who knows a thing or two about being spooky

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One: Death, High School, and Other Necessary Evils

  Chapter Two: Wipe Your Feet

  Chapter Three: Ghost Jock and Gabriel Saint Rochester Rochester Saint Gabriel

  Chapter Four: No Respect for Half Vampires

  Chapter Five: High School Hell Gate

  Chapter Six: Guinea Pig Poltergeist

  Chapter Seven: Who Ya Gonna Call?

  Chapter Eight: Séances and Shiny Things

  Chapter Nine: Night of the Gothlings

  Chapter Ten: The Black Rose

  Chapter Eleven: Aura Treatments and Psychic Echoes

  Chapter Twelve: Through Your Incorporeal Skull

  Chapter Thirteen: Like a Dead Body You Can’t Bear to Bury

  Chapter Fourteen: The Skeptical Emerson Bean

  Chapter Fifteen: Ghost-in-the-Box

  Chapter Sixteen: Resurrecting Riley Island

  Chapter Seventeen: The Foot of the Stairs

  Chapter Eighteen: The Other Way Around

  Chapter Nineteen: A Tap on the Nose

  Chapter Twenty: Riley Island Paranormal

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER ONE

  death, high school, and other necessary evils

  I was sitting in the Tranquility Room with my sketchbook and Mrs. Morris—nice, quiet, unobtrusive Mrs. Morris—when I heard the clang. Although it was muffled, it was still loud enough to startle me into dropping my charcoal, which rolled to a stop near the casket stand. Before I could pick it up, Dad’s voice called out from the embalming room at the rear of the building.

  “Violet? Can you help me?” He sounded more than a little frazzled.

  Crap. So much for an uninterrupted art session.

  Leaving the sketchbook on a chair, I hurried down the hall through Dad’s office and the prep room. Dad stood in the embalming room’s doorway, holding a tube and a container of who-knows-what liquid.

  “Someone’s in there with me,” he said, and his remark was punctuated by an instrument tray zipping through the air and smacking against the door frame, inches from his head. The collision produced a second loud clang, and the now-dented tray toppled to the floor, where another tray already rested.

  Not again.

  “Yeah, that’s kind of obvious. I’ll handle it.” I ducked past him into the room. I’m not even supposed to be in the embalming room—I’m fifteen years old, so obviously I’m unlicensed—but sometimes dealing with the dead means having to break a few rules.

  The room was utilitarian—neat and cold and stark, with hospital lighting and supply shelves lining the walls. One wall had a big door that led to the freezer. The naked body of an old man with thinning curly hair lay on a table in the center of the room, his lower regions covered with a sheet. Aside from some scattered implements, everything looked orderly and clean—but apparently the old man thought it wasn’t clean enough. Yeah, he was dead on the table, waiting to be embalmed, but he also stood in the middle of the room, translucent and blue and kind of shimmery, dressed in dark coveralls. He was muttering to himself and scrubbing the bare cement floor with a ghostly mop; his stooped posture caused a few limp gray curls to fall over his forehead, partly veiling his intense, slightly crazy gaze. He looked like a character in a horror movie, probably one with a really low budget.

  Ugh. Confused newbies are such a pain.

  “Excuse me? Sir?” I tried to sound polite instead of bored; this kind of thing really gets old after a while.

  He didn’t even look up. “Scat, missy. Can’t you see I’m working? This floor won’t clean itself.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “It’s my job, ain’t it?” He finally glanced at me, his jaw jutting forward in defiance. “You tell that man in the white coat to stop getting in my way and making a mess with those chemicals, or I’ll throw something else at him. And this time I won’t miss.”

  I glanced back at Dad, who was watching me with a puzzled look. He couldn’t see or hear the old man’s ghost. “Mister?” I said, trying again with the old grump. “You do know you’re dead, right?”

  The man scrubbed,
then paused, then scrubbed a little more, then stopped again and looked at his body on the table. “Dead?”

  “Yeah. You remember?”

  He held up his hand in front of his eyes, flexing his fingers experimentally. “Dead.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, that’d explain why I can see right through my dadgum hand, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yep. It would.”

  “But I feel pretty good.” He leaned the mop against the embalming table—it disappeared as soon as he let it go, but he didn’t seem to notice—and did an awkward little jig. “My knees don’t even hurt anymore. And the chest pains are gone.”

  “That’s how it works.” I stepped a little closer; now I could read the name patch on his coveralls. HENRY.

  “So what now?” he asked.

  “Now you move on.” It seemed pretty obvious to me. Most newbies figure these things out for themselves, and they go off on their own. Some of them haunt their favorite hangouts or their least favorite relatives; others just go on to…well, wherever ghosts go. Into the light or whatever. I don’t know. I don’t really care. I just get tired of having to explain these things every time a recently deceased person throws a fit. The only interesting ghosts are those with unfinished business; Henry was just a boring, run-of-the-mill dead guy.

  “Where do I go?” he asked.

  “The afterlife?” I shoved my black bangs out of my eyes. “Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t know the details, okay? You’re going to have to follow your instinct on this. Do you have a wife who died? Or a relative? Maybe they’ll find you and help.”

  “Yeah, I had a wife. Died ten years ago.” His tone was less than enthusiastic.

  “Then you can go join her now.”

  “And go back to her nagging? For all eternity? No thanks.”

  “Well, you don’t have to cross over, but you can’t stay here.”

  He frowned as he considered his options, his bushy brows lowering to shadow his pale blue eyes. “Say, can I go back to work?”

  “Um, I guess. As long as you don’t think you work here.”

  “Of course I don’t work here.” He gave me a glare. “You think I’m slow or something? I’m a janitor for the Palmetto County school system. Forty-five years of dependable service.”

  “And going back to that is better than moving on?”

  Henry wagged a finger at me. “You never met my Delores. I’d rather scrub toilets for another thousand years than hear her complaining again. So I can just…go?”

  A ghost with issues might have been tied to a particular location, forced to haunt the place he died, but Henry didn’t seem to have any such complications.

  I nodded.

  “Huh. Thanks, missy. You’re okay.” Whistling an off-key tune, he marched through the doorway—right through Dad—and down the hall toward the front entrance.

  I followed just long enough to make sure he passed through the front door as well; then I went back to Dad. “He’s gone.”

  “It was this guy?” Dad took a few steps toward the body. “Henry Boyd?”

  “Yeah, it was good ol’ Henry. He thought he was supposed to be cleaning, and you were getting in his way. Good thing I’ll be around all the time now to handle stuff like this, huh?”

  I’d been shuttled back and forth between Dad (on weekends) and Aunt Thelma (on weekdays) since I was eight. Dad had always said I’d live with him again once he took over the funeral home. When he finally bought the place a few months ago, the first thing he did was clear out his apartment’s tiny second bedroom for me.

  “This stuff doesn’t really happen when you’re not around,” he said. I knew what he meant, unfortunately. Some ghosts tend to get more agitated when there’s someone nearby who might actually be able to hear them. It gets them all excited, and it can be really inconvenient.

  “Well, you’d better get used to it, because I’m not going anywhere.” I grinned at him. More time with Aunt Thelma just wasn’t an option. I wouldn’t put up with her anymore, and I knew Dad wouldn’t, either. He was glad to have me around, even if it meant dealing with a weird mix of single-parent angst and unsettled spooks.

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way, kiddo. Okay, I shouldn’t be too much longer in here, and then I’ll have to get ready for Mrs. Morris’s service.”

  “I’ll keep her company until then.”

  Dad’s eyes widened a little. “She’s not haunting the place, too, is she?”

  “Nah.” Most ghosts move on before their bodies even make it to the funeral home. Only the confused ones stay close to their corpses. “But if I see her, I’ll tell her you said hi.”

  “Great.” Dad didn’t look like he thought the idea was so great at all as he closed the door to the embalming room.

  I went back to sketching Mrs. Morris in the Tranquility Room, which is where our in-house viewings and services are held. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” I said as I sat back down next to her casket with my sketchbook. I was drawing her portrait to practice facial proportions.

  Hey, dead bodies make good models, okay? Living models want to talk and move and stuff; dead ones are peaceful and still. I know it’s called life drawing, but whatever.

  After a while I heard Dad go upstairs to our apartment to shower and change; I kept right on working.

  Yeah, Dad owns Addison Funeral Services, and we live in the apartment upstairs. Whenever I’m coming or going, I pass through the mortuary’s formal front parlor, which is always full of flower arrangements and smells like wilting carnations. The Tranquility Room opens off the parlor, and the showcase room with all the sample coffins is just down the hall. Dad’s office, a storage room, the prep room, and the embalming facility and freezer are at the back of the building, so it’s not like you’re parading past a pile of corpses whenever you’re coming or going. Still, I can see how it might seem a little freaky.

  It doesn’t bother me, though. I’m used to dead people. They won’t leave me alone. But even being confronted by the grumpiest dead person beats being around Aunt Thelma. She stepped in and helped raise me after my mom died, but she’s strict and judgmental and I don’t like her. Staying with her half the time while Dad went back to school and got his business going…Well, I understood why he needed help for a while, even if I didn’t like it.

  So now I eat and sleep and do my homework upstairs, while downstairs there are bodies in the freezer. It’s as weird as it sounds, I guess, but I like helping Dad with his business, and he could really use the assistance. He lets me do stuff like hair and makeup—or as he sometimes calls it “death spackle,” since it looks so fake and slathered on when it’s not done right.

  I do it right. I’d kept Mrs. Morris’s makeup light, using just enough base to camouflage the chalky pallor of her skin. With her cheeks a little pink and wisps of white hair resting on her forehead, she looked like she’d just stretched out for a nap in her coffin.

  It wasn’t such a crazy idea. Her family had sprung for an Eternal Rest 3500. You can’t find a better coffin without getting something custom made. Upholstered silk interior, padded with goose down…It’s comfy. I know. I’ve tried it out.

  I was finishing my sketch when Dad came back down. “Is she being an agreeable model?” he asked, walking up to do his final prefuneral check. Dad didn’t really get my artistic new hobby, but he humored me about it. “You did a great job with her death spackle. Keep that up and you’ll have a career waiting for you.”

  It’s true. People are always dying, so there would always be a market—not that I wanted to spend my life decorating the dead. I had other plans—plans Dad didn’t even know about. Still, I preened a little at the compliment. “She looks peaceful, doesn’t she?”

  “Peaceful, sure. But I had to sew her mouth shut and use eye caps to get her that way.” Eye caps are like huge contact lenses with little spikes; Dad puts them under corpses’ eyelids to keep them closed.

  I added a few delicate charcoal curls along the portrait
’s hairline. “I’m sure she didn’t mind.”

  “If she did, she didn’t complain.” He grinned a little under his neat salt-and-pepper beard. “Almost done? I’m not sure how Mrs. Morris’s relatives would feel about her being an art project.”

  I closed the sketchbook. “All done.”

  “Great. Oh, I was looking at the list your school sent earlier—”

  Ugh. And just like that, my mood crashed down a little. “Don’t remind me about school.”

  He ignored my complaining. “I’m not sure we got you enough shirts. And are you sure you don’t want a backpack? You’ll have lots of books to carry.”

  “I already told you. Mom’s messenger bag will be fine.” Purple with a lavender flower appliqué, it was the same beat-up old bag I’d used for years. It was one of only a handful of my mother’s things that I had. Dad thought it wasn’t big or sturdy enough to be a proper book bag, and he swore the shoulder strap was about to snap, but I knew he was wrong. Mom made it herself, and because of that, I knew it was strong enough to last.

  “You might want something bigger, though.”

  “I used it last year at Lakewood. It was big enough.” I’d stayed with Aunt Thelma so often last year that I’d been registered in her school district. Living full-time with Dad put me in a different district, so I would be transferring to Palmetto High for my sophomore year.

  “Okay. But let me know if you change your mind. Anyway, Mrs. Morris is the only service scheduled for today, so I’ll be free this evening. How about we go out, grab some dinner, and pick up those shirts?”

  Palmetto High maintained a pretty strict dress code; as a result of Dad’s overzealous single-parent nerves, I already owned enough plain white collared shirts and khaki pants to last me for three weeks without doing laundry. Then again, if buying another week’s worth of shirts would make him stop worrying a little, I was okay with that. “Sounds good.”