by Eve Paludan
J.R. Rain Presents:
HOLLYWOOD
HILLS
Medium Mysteries #3
by
EVE
PALUDAN
BOOKS BY EVE PALUDAN
SERIES
THE MEDIUM MYSTERIES
Hollywood Hills
VAMPIRE FOR HIRE (Kindle Worlds)
Wolf Moon
ABNORM CHRONICLES (Kindle Worlds)
Glimmer by J.R. Rain and Eve Paludan
WAYWARD PINES (Kindle Worlds)
Salem’s Lottery
ANGEL DETECTIVES
The Man Who Fell from the Sky
The Man Who Rose from the Sea
BROTHERHOOD OF THE BLADE
Burning
Afterglow
Radiance
Brotherhood of the Blade: The First Three Books
DEARLY DEPARTED
Let Sleeping Dogs Lie
While the Cat’s Away
GHOST FILES
Ghost Fire
JACK LEE MURDER MYSTERY
Bigfoot Island
RANCH LOVERS ROMANCE
Taking Back Tara
Tara Takes Christmas
WEREWOLF DETECTIVES
Werewolf Interrupted
Werewolf Rising
Werewolf Unleashed
WITCH DETECTIVES
Witchy Business
Witch and Famous
Witch Way Out
Witch Bones
WITCH DIARIES
Witch Potion
STANDALONE NOVELS
Chasing Broadway
Finding Jessie
Hearts of Hanukkah
Rekindling Claire
Santa’s Little Heist
Three Christmas Wishes
Vein Glorious
Hollywood Hills
Published by Rain Press
Copyright © 2016 by Eve Paludan
All rights reserved.
Ebook Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
HOLLYWOOD HILLS
Chapter One
As I awoke, my pulse pounded intense spikes of agony in my temples and behind my crusted-shut eyelids—it was either the mother of all hangovers or I’d been beaten with a baseball bat.
Moaning, I tried to move my head without opening my eyes, but something was holding my head down. I also realized that my neck was killing me.
“Mack!” I blurted, rubbing my eyes with slow, heavy hands, as if I were underwater. “Help me!”
I heard Mack’s deep voice as if from far away, because, well, he was a ghost. “Wake up, Pauline!”
I opened my eyes to blinding light and tried to move my head again, but without success.
“My neck hurts. I think it’s broken,” I said. “And everything is too bright. Is it the light coming for me? Am I dying?”
“I’m sure you feel like it. You spent the night on the bathroom floor.”
“I did what last night?” I attempted to roll over and noticed my head was indeed stuck to the floor. As I sat up, some of my hair ripped out.
“Eww!” I gagged as I realized just how strands of my hair were stuck to the floor. I lay in a pool of my own…oh no.
The room spun around me, and my stomach lurched. I pulled myself up on a towel rack for support as I swallowed, hard. The towel rack ripped out of the wall and left a big hole in the drywall. I almost fell.
“Damn it!” I said, regarding the mess I had made of my bathroom. “What the hell happened to me?” I moved my head from side to side, looking around for Mack.
And then, I remembered…a poker party. With Mack’s ghost friends. I hope I hadn’t embarrassed myself. Or him. “What did I freaking do last night?”
Mack’s disembodied voice said, “Never mind rehashing that debacle. I’ve been trying to wake you for hours. I turned your head to the side last night after you passed out, so you wouldn’t choke.”
“I did all that?” I interrupted.
“Yes, Pauline! I stayed by your side all night.”
I grimaced. “Thank you. I think. Ow, my head hurts and my eyes hurt and even my fingernails hurt.”
“Do you even realize the seriousness of—can you even see me?” Mack asked.
I squinted in the bright light streaming in through the bathroom window and looked all over for Mack’s shimmery ghost form. “I can’t see you, Mack! I can’t see you! Where are you? What’s wrong with me?”
“You’re gonna lose everything good about your life, including being a medium, if you don’t clean yourself up.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I can’t lose my medium powers from having a few drinks at a poker party!”
“Denial is a long river.” His voice sounded hollow now and farther away. “And it wasn’t a few drinks. It was beer on top of wine. Mojitos. And then there was the absinthe. Absinthe. Are you crazy?”
“Stop calling me crazy,” I demanded, my voice coming out like a bullfrog’s croak. “Just shut up!”
“Be careful what you wish for.” The bathroom door slammed shut.
I guessed Mack had taken off because I couldn’t even sense him anymore. I couldn’t sense much of anything except for the pain I was wallowing in.
I used the bathroom counter to help get my balance, but I shrieked when I saw myself in the mirror.
Red lines from the tile grout were embedded in my cheek, and everything I’d consumed last night had been regurgitated and pressed into those lines. My hair was matted and filthy. And, at some point during the night, I’d chipped a front tooth!
I looked like I was ready to star in a horror movie. Worst of all, I could no longer see or hear Mack—my best friend.
I was terrified. Had I really lost my medium mojo?
Chapter Two
I’d been scared sober for two whole days.
Those two days had been a whirlwind of unexpected reparations. I’d made a trip to a cosmetic dentist in Beverly Hills for a tooth bonding and had put it on a credit card. I’d installed a new towel rack in the bathroom and had patched and painted the drywall.
I’d cleaned up the disgusting mess I’d made. I also removed my underwear from the ceiling fan where I’d apparently thrown it, hopefully not in front of Mack’s ghost friends. Vaguely recalling a memory of our last hand of Texas Hold’em poker game degrading into one hand of strip poker, I felt embarrassed.
I’d tried to apologize to Mack for whatever I’d done that night—not that I could remember—but he avoided me. I could only catch occasional glimpses of his amorphous form out of the corner of my eye. As if I were barely psychic.
At a new low in my life, I’d given my credit card further exercise and was now sitting naked in a sauna with a perfect stranger. Okay, so I actually had a too-small towel wrapped around me. She didn’t.
With differing comfort levels of our nakedness, we lounged on wooden benches in a redwood-paneled cubicle of an upscale specialty spa—aka a weekend detox clinic—in the Hollywood Hills. The two-day commitment was really a mini-rehab for wusses. I didn’t have twenty grand to shell out for the full monty of a real rehab. So, I was in rehab lite.
My sauna companion was an enviably lanky woman who fixed her gaze on me in that way creative types stare curiously at others, as if they are fodder for some novel or script or artwork.
“Hi,” she said in a voice that sounded like it didn’t belong to her. Even though I didn’t know her, using my remaining half-assed medium abilities, I was suddenly hit with a strong intuition that she was possessed.
Of course, I was immediate
ly intrigued by the spirits I sensed that were attached to her, so I stared right back at her. If I wasn’t so wrung out from the tail end of my recent drinking binge, I would have better control of my medium abilities.
From what I could tell about my possessed sauna companion, her life must have been incredibly hard with all of those spirits she was dragging around with her. She was like a possession magnet—the spirits were holding onto her for dear life, or I supposed, holding on for dear undeath. One of them seemed especially malicious, but my vision of them faded in and out. My medium abilities were indeed compromised, as Mack had warned me.
Outwardly, I would have taken my naked anonymous companion for a supermodel, except for her intense perusal of someone outside of her own universe. She was genuinely interested in other people. Okay, she was genuinely interested in me.
She was sitting on her towel without any shame, but as ladylike as one could get while naked with another strange chick—her knees together and angled just so, and her feet politely pointed away from me. I guess if I had a perfect body like hers, and I’d had a Brazilian wax like hers, maybe I wouldn’t hide myself under a towel either. I politely glanced away from her mesmerizing beauty and pondered the volcanic rocks, which were surrounded by a grate and a warning sign in six languages: Hot.
Noticing where I was looking, she got up to use a ladle to dip water from a wooden bucket and pour the liquid on the now-hissing pumice rocks. Then she sat again on her perfect butt cheeks.
“Be careful not to burn yourself,” I warned. I felt silly that those were my first words to her, but there they were.
“I’m very careful with my body. I can’t afford to scar up the goods.”
“You’re in show business?” I asked, feeling that from her.
She laughed. “I’m in the ‘everything’ business. What are you in here for?” Her tone came off almost mock-conspiratorial, which forced me to look at her again.
I riveted my gaze to her face and tried not to notice how stunning she was, even dripping with perspiration and without a hint of makeup. I looked at her crystalline-blue eyes, which were so light that I could see through the color of them. She had eyes the actual color of sky. I was a bit envious.
“Booze and cigarettes are my downfall,” I admitted. “I bet my credit card a thousand bucks that I could quit both when I bought this fake spa weekend. The truth is, I’m drying out.”
She nodded. “I thought so.” She paused, narrowing her eyes at me. “I can smell the booze oozing from your pores. And the cigs, too.”
I tightened my towel around myself and pressed my arms closer to my armpits. “Sorry, I can’t help it that I stink.”
“Don’t apologize. That’s what we’re here for, to get ourselves cleansed, detoxed and rebooted for the real world.”
“For sure. It was time for me to do something.”
“Me, too. I guess you’re my weekend buddy that they matched me up with.” She let out a soft breath. “Number ten?”
“Yeah, and you’re number nine?”
“You got it.”
I flashed a half-smile. “I think it’s sort of sweet that they assign you a buddy so you don’t feel alone in this place. It’s like the first day of elementary school. Except that we have numbers instead of names.”
She nodded. “I guess they know what they’re doing in the quickie detox business. But names do seem more polite.”
I agreed. “They offered me a Groupon when I called to make my reservation. You?”
“I bought a Groupon, too. I’m addicted to Groupon. Among other things.” She paused as if contemplating something deep. “Did you have a moment of truth that brought you here?”
“Yeah. A few days ago, I woke up on the bathroom floor with the imprint of the floor tiles embedded in the side of my face and my hair stuck to the floor.”
She curled a lip. “I prefer substances that don’t make me throw up. I only like stuff that will make me thinner, minus the puking, which ruins the enamel of one’s teeth. Otherwise, I would totally be addicted to that, too.”
I shuddered. “If only I loved stuff that would make me thinner.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” she said. “Remember that Stephen King book?”
I laughed. “Thinner. Who could ever forget that book? I guess we all have our demons.”
“That we do.” She gave me a compassionate look. “Do you want to talk about it, what’s eating you?” This time, her voice was a whispery tenor.
“Sure. I guess that’s what we do here. Amateur exorcisms. Of bad habits. Or entities,” I ventured.
She laughed uncertainly.
I said, “That morning, a couple of days ago, when I woke up on the floor, I had chipped a front tooth, either on the toilet or on the tile floor. That was the first shock. The second shock was the realization of my impending birthday, which is next week. I won’t say the number out loud because to do so would give my age even more power over my self-esteem.”
“I could see how either of those things would be fairly scary,” she said as sweat poured down her naked body.
“They are scary. That, and my friend, Mack”—I didn’t want to say my resident house ghost—“sometimes calls me a bazo.”
“A bazo? What the hell’s that?” She raised curious eyebrows.
“A boozer. He’s from the Northeast. He has that Massachusetts accent and talks like a Kennedy.”
She grinned. “He sounds cute.”
“Oh, he’s very cute, as well as smart and a smart-ass, and he’s occasionally infuriating. Sometimes, he saves my life, though.”
“Literally?”
“Yep. And he’s got this gorgeous head of salt-and-pepper hair and a lifetime of hard knocks under his belt.”
“Oh, nice. A protective older guy. They can be the best sometimes.”
“Agreed.” I smiled, thinking of Mack at his best. I missed him.
“Are you doing him?” she asked, but it was a different voice coming out of her mouth—the husky vocal sound of a seductress.
“Am I doing him?” I almost choked on my saliva. “No, nothing like that. We have our boundaries and roles within our friendship dynamic. He’s my partner in crime, so to speak. My bestie, I’d call him.”
“That’s cool that you have a guy BFF. I don’t have one of those.” Her voice returned to normal again. The middle C of her emotional piano, so to speak. The voice of normality. “I don’t have one guy. I have guys. The lovers come and then, sadly, they go. Right now, I have a special on-again, off-again lover and there are so many things about him I love. And things I definitely don’t love.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” I said kindly.
“I know. Least of all, me. Just for once, though, I’d like to hang onto one of the good ones while they’re being good. I’m too old for all this, and I want my lady bits to stop being a revolving door.”
“At least they aren’t a clown car,” I quipped.
She laughed. “No, I don’t have any kids. You’re too much.”
You’re too much, too. I could now see one of the people possessing her, like a male twin of herself. “So, what are you in here for, or must I ask the warden?” I was joking in the same vein that she had ribbed me.
“I adore cocaine,” she said proudly…and in yet another voice. Another personality. No, not another personality. It was another spirit. This was serious, her problem with possession. This spirit’s voice was rasping and low—desperate—a male voice.
“Oh!” I said, because she’d used the word cocaine so casually. And because she had someone like that in her head who had enough power to speak aloud for her. It was seriously the voice of a male street junkie. His spirit peeked out from behind her to look directly at me. I tried not to judge and held back a physical shudder.
Her voice now returned to the smooth, feminine voice from before. “I’m only a little worried about the coke. It’s not quite a habit yet. At least, I hope not, because I can’t afford it all the time and t
hat’s the only reason I want to quit it. Because I love it too much!”
“Oh,” I said, trying to relate.
She continued, “I opted for this so-called de-tox spa weekend instead of full-blown rehab, just to see if I can go two days without it and because I absolutely have to work next week. If I make it through the weekend, I can stay in denial that I’m really a cokehead.” She paused and held out her hand. “I’m Amanda Jordan, by the way.”
Ah, we’d graduated to names instead of “inmate” numbers. I was semi-happy about that. “Pauline Ocean. I’m impressed by your candidness.”
“I’m impressed by you not running away screaming from me right now.”
“People are just people,” I said. “Imperfect but beautiful, each in their own way.” I paused, not wanting her to know I knew she had a few people living in her head and body. I joked, “And I can’t run in this towel. It might fall off and then there would be the horror of my cellulite to imprint itself on your retinae.”
She couldn’t help but chuckle. “You’re refreshing. And witty.”
“I’m just me.” We shook our sweaty hands and let go. “What do you do, Amanda?” I asked with a smile.
“I’m an indie movie producer. I have a YouTube channel and instead of box office receipts, I have ad revenue. And sometimes, sponsors.”
“I can see your enthusiasm for your lifework.”
“That’s because I’m loving the creative freedom and yes, it is my lifework. We’re developing quite a cult following, too, with fans clamoring for more. YouTube moviemaking is the most fun I’ve ever had, including my rather hedonistic early years of willful wanderings and civil disobedience.”
“That’s great that you have found your calling in life.”
“I have. I used to only want to act, but I found out that I really wanted to direct.”
I smiled. “I hear that YouTube moviemakers are trending.”