Spookygirl - Paranormal Investigator

by Jill Baguchinsky

  “Great.” Dad smiled again. “I should finish getting things ready in here. I think it’s time for you to go upstairs and—”

  “Keep Buster out of trouble. I know.” Babysitting Buster was the other part of my job at Addison Funeral Services.

  “Thanks for your help, kiddo,” Dad called as I went upstairs.

  The apartment over the funeral home was teeny. The size made sense for a man living on his own, but it was pretty ridiculous for a father and daughter. The two bedrooms were practically microscopic; Dad had been using the second as an office, but he carted his computer and filing cabinets downstairs when I moved in. I didn’t really mind the cramped space—I would’ve gladly slept on a couch in the living room, or even downstairs in one of the display coffins, if it meant more time with Dad.

  I put my sketchbook and charcoal in the dresser drawer where I kept my art supplies, then went back to the living room and looked around. “Buster!”

  A squeaky howl echoed from my dad’s bedroom. I followed the sound and called Buster’s name again when I reached the bedroom doorway.

  The air in the room was at least twenty degrees colder than in the rest of the apartment. The sliding door to Dad’s tiny closet was open; his neckties were floating and writhing in a circle near the bed, like a collection of airborne snakes in muted, mortician-appropriate colors. A nervous, giddy squeal emanated from nowhere apparent, causing the ties to shudder in midair.

  Oh, Buster was definitely here.

  “What are you doing, Buster?” Trying to sound as authoritative as possible, I grabbed for the nearest tie. It whipped away, the imitation silk brushing my fingertips.

  Buster’s taunting, wordless cries seemed to pulse from the walls themselves; it was impossible to tell exactly where he was. To tell the truth, it was impossible even to tell what he was. I’ve never been able to figure it out, so I’ve always thought of him as a poltergeist. An abnormal one. He does poltergeisty things, like making noises or knocking stuff around, but real poltergeists are more like pockets of built-up negative energy. They’re not usually actual ghosts like Buster. He followed Mom home from an investigation like a stray dog when I was two and has just stuck around ever since. After Mom died, I let him follow me to Aunt Thelma’s, but after he smashed her favorite casserole dish—an accident I got blamed for, since Aunt Thelma insists I make up all my ghost stuff for attention—I told him to stay with Dad instead. Buster’s pretty good about obeying orders when he knows I mean business.

  Well, most of the time.

  He made a trembling shriek that sounded almost like a giggle, and the ties began to knot themselves together.

  “You know how mad Dad’s going to get if he sees this,” I warned, stepping into the middle of the drifting circle of knotted ties. I reached for one again; this time I managed to get a grip before Buster could yank it away. Trying to pull it down was like being in a vertical tug-of-war with a linebacker. When the tie jerked upward and threatened to take me with it, I let go.

  I didn’t mind letting Buster have a little fun, but Mrs. Morris’s guests would be arriving downstairs within minutes, and it wouldn’t do to have an abnormal poltergeist banging around overhead during a funeral service. In the same tone I would’ve used on a misbehaving dog, I yelled, “BUSTER! BAD BOY!”

  Buster’s mischievous chortles turned into an anguished scream; he hated being scolded. The ties wadded themselves into a polyester ball and flopped down on my head. Wrinkled, knotted neckties hung off my shoulders and arms like ropes of seaweed off a swamp monster.

  “CRATE, BUSTER. NOW!” I pointed toward the small, open trunk that sat in the apartment’s tiny living room. The cold air left the room in a whoosh that knocked several of the ties off of me, and the trunk slammed shut. A hurt, angry whimper chastised me from inside.

  “Sorry,” I said, “but you know the rules. I’ll let you out as soon as the service is over.” I took a U-shaped piece of polished stone—obsidian—from a nearby shelf and slid it through the hole on the trunk’s latch where a lock would normally go. Obsidian was supposed to be good for controlling misbehaving spirits. I wasn’t sure why it worked, but it would keep him locked up until I set him free. With that taken care of, I gathered Dad’s ties, unknotted them, and hung them back in the closet. Except for the occasional light thump as the trunk rocked back against the wall, Buster was quiet and calm.

  Buster’s not really such a bad ghost. Like a puppy, he just gets a little crazy sometimes if we’re not strict enough with him. In his own ghostly way, I think he loves us. Mom was his favorite—she was the one who crate trained him—but he seems pretty attached to me, too. “He knows you’re like your mom,” Dad would say when Buster happily squawked at the sight of me or levitated one of his favorite toys in my direction. “He’s much more active when you’re around.”

  Muted noises carried up from downstairs. Car doors slammed outside; the front door opened and closed; voices droned too quietly for me to hear what was being said. For the next two hours or so—or longer, if Mrs. Morris had lots of friends who wanted to pay their respects during the viewing before the service—I had to tread lightly. Sound traveled too well through the old building; improving the soundproofing between the apartment and the funeral home was high on Dad’s list of things to do, a list he often threatened to rename “Things That’ll Never Get Done.”

  The sound restriction always made me a little stir-crazy. I couldn’t watch TV, and I couldn’t listen to music unless I used headphones. Hoping for a distraction, I browsed the bookshelves in the living room. My paperbacks were mixed in with Dad’s textbooks and reference books from when he’d gone back to school for his mortuary science degree. That was a few months after Mom died, once the police investigation into her death ended and no charges were filed against Dad.

  Aunt Thelma, of course, disapproved of her kid brother’s career change. (In fact, she disapproved of everything.) They never discussed it in front of me, but I had eavesdropped on plenty of their conversations over the years. Aunt Thelma nagged him a lot.

  “And what happened to being a doctor?”

  “You know I gave that up years ago.”

  “When you met Robin and decided to be a ghost hunter.” No one could drizzle their words with disdain quite like Aunt Thelma.

  “I was struggling with my internship before I met Robin.” Dad’s voice always sounded soft and weary when Aunt Thelma brought up my mom.

  “You can still go back to medical school,” Aunt Thelma urged. “Take more classes. Try again.”

  “It wasn’t right for me.”

  “Oh, and ghost hunting was?”

  “Paranormal investigation, Thelma.”

  “At least you outgrew that. But funerals? Is this what you want to do with your life? Spend all day looking at dead bodies?”

  “Maybe it is.” I knew what he was saying—at least these dead people would stay dead. For the most part. Even though he couldn’t sense ghosts the way Mom had, he’d had enough of them.

  “A little girl shouldn’t grow up surrounded by the dead.”

  “That’s why I need you to help me with Violet for a little while. It’ll be a tough couple of years—I’ll have to go to school, get an apprenticeship, establish myself in the field. I can’t do all that and take good care of her, too.” Dad’s voice had sounded rough and choked when he’d said that.

  “She’s like her mother,” Aunt Thelma replied. The way she said it made it sound like there was something wrong with me. Ever since then, I’d always hated her a little.

  I had already flipped through most of Dad’s mortuary reference books over the summer, and it was hard to find my own books among all the clutter on the shelves. Originally Dad and I had attempted to keep our books separate, but after Buster threw everything around a few times, we stopped trying to sort through the volumes and just piled them back on the shelves instead.

  It took me a good five minutes to locate what I was looking for—Mom’s battered copy
of Wuthering Heights, her favorite novel. I grabbed it not for the story, but for the treasure hidden inside—a faded business card for Palmetto Paranormal, the investigation business Mom and Dad had run together before her death. I’d just found the card tucked in the book a few months ago, soon after I’d moved in. It was plain, just black type on white card stock that had yellowed over time, with a generic logo, Mom’s name, and the business’s phone number and e-mail address.

  That was what I wanted someday—a business like Palmetto Paranormal. Maybe it’d be easier to deal with this ghost stuff if I could turn it into something more interesting. A little excitement would be a good trade-off for having to review the whole ghost how-to manual with every newbie that came my way.

  I hadn’t told Dad yet about my plan, but I doubted he’d be too enthusiastic about it. He didn’t even know I’d found Mom’s card; he never talked about Palmetto Paranormal.

  Nothing else on the shelves caught my interest, so I gave up and curled up on Dad’s secondhand brown corduroy couch.

  At this time tomorrow, the first day of school would be over. I couldn’t ignore the ball of lead lurching in my stomach any longer.

  For most of the summer, I’d been able to ignore my impending doom at Palmetto High. Spending so much time with Dad had been a welcome distraction, and I’d tricked myself into believing that the start of the school year was further away than it really was. There was no more denying it, though—my personal doomsday countdown had begun; school was less than eighteen hours away.

  Last year at Lakewood had been bad enough. Lakewood High was small and exclusive; I hadn’t had any friends, but I managed to blend in and be ignored. At least it was far enough away from Palmetto Crossing that no one knew my reputation. Back here people still remembered. They knew me. I was that weird girl whose dad killed her mom and got away with it. I was that girl who lived in a funeral home. I’d already heard a few comments at the mall food court the week before. And that was without them knowing my other little secret. You know, the whole ghost thing.

  Then again, was it so bad to be weird? What happened to my mom was no one else’s business. And living above a funeral home is a lot more interesting than living in the same kind of boring, Florida-style, pastel-colored single family home as everyone else in town. Plus, I was tired of downplaying the whole talking-to-ghosts thing. Ever since I’d moved back in with Dad full-time and found Mom’s business card, I’d felt compelled to step up and own that part of my life, just like she had.

  After all, if you’re going to be a freak, you might as well really be a FREAK, right? I’d spent too many years pretending to be normal, and all it had given me was the realization that normal was totally boring.

  So why was my stomach still knotting up like a couple of Dad’s ties at the mercy of Buster?

  After Mrs. Morris’s service ended and Dad got home from transporting the body to the cemetery, he changed from his tailored, somber, funeral-director-appropriate suit into a “Han shot first” Star Wars T-shirt over jeans, and we went out to dinner. When my dad wasn’t busy with dead people, he was busy being a very big geek.

  We went to Mama Chen’s, a small, slightly dingy Chinese restaurant where I’d found a dead beetle in my tea the month before. I’d shrugged it off—bugs are everywhere in Florida—and requested a fresh pot of tea. Ever since then, we’d been treated like special guests by the owner, probably because we didn’t make a fuss or report him to the county health inspector.

  Beetle tea aside, it was a nice little restaurant. The owner’s mother, who had apparently been dead for years, always stood near the kitchen door and kept an eye on the dining room. I was the only one in the restaurant who knew she was there; I never spoke to her, but she always smiled and nodded when she saw me. She threw a fit on Beetle Night, screeching at her son in heated Mandarin while he simultaneously apologized to us. Mama Chen didn’t appreciate customers being served buggy tea in her restaurant.

  After an insect-free meal at Mama Chen’s, Dad insisted on buying me five more white polos. Only then was he satisfied that I wouldn’t have to go to school shirtless.

  On the way home, I stared out the window. Palmetto Crossing was small and pretty, in a boring manicured-lawns-and-backyard-swimming-pools kind of way, and it was full of palm trees and old people, just like the rest of Florida. You couldn’t throw a rock anywhere in the state without hitting a retiree or a coconut palm. Lakewood had been a lot like that, too, but I had a reluctant preference for Palmetto Crossing because Aunt Thelma didn’t live there.

  Dad unlocked the door to the front parlor and reset the security alarm. We were halfway up the stairs to the apartment when we heard the thumping. Dad froze and motioned for me to stay back, but I already knew where the noise was coming from.

  “Crap. Buster!” I pushed past Dad into the apartment, where the trunk was rocking irately in the little living room.

  Dad followed me in and looked down at the trunk in dismay. “You didn’t let him out before we left?”

  “I forgot. He’s going to be mad.”

  “For once, I can’t blame him.”

  “Stand back; this won’t be pretty.” I pulled the curved obsidian free and opened the trunk. An icy blast hit me in the face with enough force to send me stumbling backward against Dad. Buster scolded me with an insulted moan, and books began hurtling through the living room and banging against the walls.

  Ugh. Not again.

  It took about fifteen minutes and three cookies (oatmeal chocolate chip—Buster’s favorite—I tossed them into the air and they disappeared) to get him to settle down, and another half hour to clean up his mess. While Dad and I gathered books by the armful, I kept an eye out for Wuthering Heights. When I found it, I flipped it open while Dad wasn’t looking and made sure the Palmetto Paranormal business card was still inside. It was. I kept meaning to put it somewhere safer, but at the same time, I kind of felt like I was honoring Mom’s memory by leaving it exactly where she had.

  When we were done, Dad pointed to his watch. “It’s getting late. You have to be at the bus stop at six forty-five, so maybe you should think about going to bed.”

  “Bleh.” I ignored his suggestion and flopped down on the couch. I was still thinking about the business card. “Tell me something about Mom. What was it like doing those investigations with her?”

  He looked over from where he was straightening a pile of books. “Where’d that come from?”

  “I don’t know.” I almost felt brave enough to mention my plan to follow in her footsteps. Almost. “I’ve just been thinking about her lately. Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “You remember your mother just fine.”

  “Yeah, but there’s plenty I don’t know, right? Tell me about one of the investigations you guys did.”

  I knew he wouldn’t. And he definitely wouldn’t tell me what I most needed to hear: what really happened during the investigation of the Logan Street house on Riley Island the night Mom died.

  Occasionally I thought about finding a way to figure it out by myself.

  Okay, I thought about it every single day.

  “Well…” He looked relieved when his cell phone rang. He unclipped it from his belt and answered, then listened and said, “I’m so sorry. I’ll be right there,” and hung up. “Sorry, kiddo. Ralph Wilson’s mother just passed away at home. I need to get over there and help take care of things. Should take a few hours. You’ll be okay by yourself, right?”

  I nodded. Nighttime calls like that were common; some people were pretty inconsiderate about what time of day they decided to die, so independent funeral directors and morticians like my dad didn’t have the luxury of regular business hours. Dad kept throwing around the idea of hiring an assistant, but he didn’t have the budget for it yet, so he carried the full responsibility of the business on his shoulders. (Well, except for that unpaid, underage, massively talented intern he had handling the death spackle and babysitting the poltergeist.)

 
He kissed my forehead on his way out. “I might not see you before you leave tomorrow morning, so have a great first day at school.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be amazing and fantastic and splendiferous,” I said drily as he left.

  That phone call might have saved him, but Dad’s reluctance to talk about Mom was nothing new. He still missed her, and he dealt with his grief by not dwelling on her memory. But I missed her, too, and I didn’t have as many memories of her as he did, and that wasn’t fair.

  There was another reason talking about Mom made Dad uncomfortable. He never came right out and said it, but I could tell it was always there, this dread right below the surface. He was afraid I might have seen her and maybe talked to her at some point after she died, and he couldn’t handle the thought of his wife as a ghost. A ghost he couldn’t see the way I could.

  Not that there was any reason for him to worry. No matter how many times I wished, and how hard I tried to sense her presence, Mom never appeared to me. She wasn’t around. I knew I shouldn’t take it personally, but I did. I’d hoped that moving back in with Dad would alleviate that feeling somehow, as though being close to him again would also let me feel closer to her. It didn’t, though, and I was starting to realize that if I really wanted to get past the doubts I still had about the night Mom died, I’d have to find the truth myself.

  But first I had a far more pressing horror to deal with: Palmetto High.

  CHAPTER two

  wipe your feet

  Monday morning arrived much too quickly. The idea of breakfast or even coffee made my stomach flip in all kinds of unpleasant ways, so I forced down a glass of milk, then got dressed. White collared shirt, khaki pants—ugh. I know being miserable is basically part of my job as a high school student, but Palmetto was making it way too easy. I missed the dark-wash jeans and purple or black shirts I’d been allowed to wear at Lakewood, which didn’t have a dress code.