A Prickly Predicament (Mad River Mystery Series Book 1)

by Constance Barker

  “Don’t be silly,” Eliana began.

  I cut her off quickly with my best argument. “Besides,” I insisted, “won’t it take a toll on all our old buildings, our old streets and yards, to have more people tromping through all the time?” Gaining courage, I continued. “You know how hard we all have to work when the tourists go home, to repair everything and put things to rights again.”

  This time Matt rolled his eyes. “That’s just trivial and you know it. Besides, it’s done. They’ll be here on the eighteenth, with their cameras ready to roll.”

  I did my best, but Matt’s mind was made up. Unfortunately for him, he’d rue the day he listened to my sister.

  Chapter Two: Restless Souls

  I walked home that evening perplexed about what I should do. I was troubled about the pain I knew Harriet was going through, and I was worried about the ghost hunters. What if their fancy equipment really could detect and record the activity of my spirit friends? That could mean unwelcome publicity for them, disrupting their peaceful existence. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do to stop the ghost hunters from coming at this point. And as for Harriet, I had been at my wit’s end about what I could do to help her for months. I felt helpless and alone, but as it turned out, I wasn’t so all alone after all.

  “Hold on there, missy,” a comforting voice rang in my ear. “We’re still here. Don’t forget you can count on us.”

  This time it was Phineas, Jessamine’s husband. The young couple had died within hours of each other during a local Civil War battle, Jessamine hit in the heart by a stray bullet as she tended the wounded on the field and Phineas as a combatant on the Confederate side. Reunited in death as they had longed to be in life, the two had decided to stick around their old hometown for a few generations, just for the fun of it. They remained the ages they had been at the time of their deaths, he twenty, she nineteen. I know and love them both, and they often show up to counsel me, either separately or together, when I most need it.

  “Don’t you understand what’s happening, Phineas?” I didn’t look up to see him, but I did slow my stride. I looked around quickly to make sure Phineas and I were alone. The people in Mad River know me well, as so often happens in small towns when people know each other their whole lives through, but I still try to maintain the illusion of normality and avoid having people see or hear me communicating with my ghostly friends. Everybody in town already thinks I’m too weird for words, but that’s no reason to confirm their suspicions.

  “Of course I understand, but it’s not so bad as all that. Don’t you see?” Phineas countered.

  “But they’re ghost hunters, Phineas!”

  “Ghost hunters!” he cackled. “And what’s wrong with that?”

  “Everything is wrong with that, don’t you see?”

  “They won’t find us.”

  “They won’t?”

  “Not unless we want to be found.”

  “Well, I guess that’s true,” I admitted, slightly mollified. I know how difficult it can be to find a particular spirit at a particular time and place. Ghosts aren’t all that great with clocks and calendars and other aspects of physicality, as I have painfully learned from time to time, but when a ghost doesn’t want to be found, he or she can’t be found.

  “We’ll just go hide in the forest by Mad River for a while until it all blows over,” Phineas chuckled.

  “That would be a relief.” I felt somewhat relieved by his assurances. “Just keep a low profile then.”

  Phineas looked puzzled. “What’s a low profile?”

  I sometimes forgot my ghost friends from a century and a half ago aren’t quite up to speed on the modern lingo.

  “Just do what you said. I think everything will be fine.”

  The week passed all too quickly, and despite Phineas and Jessamine’s reassurances, I was still worried.

  ~.~

  I didn’t like Adam Gaunt on sight. It’s not that he wasn’t charming. If anything, he was too charming, and incredibly good-looking to boot. Athletic and photogenic, he was the primary host of the local television show Bright and Gaunt Ghost Hunting. Everyone around here knew he came from money, and that it was his funding that provided all the equipment plus got the show on the air in the first place. The crew of two plus an occasional assistant made themselves available for rousting out ghosts in various locales all over the tri-state area.

  Eliana focused her feminine charms on Adam right away, and he ate it right up, but I for one knew her efforts were insincere. Grasping and greedy, Eliana just wanted what she thought Adam could give her—a boost to her acting career. A “romance” between the two of them would be fun to watch, I thought. They were made for each other.

  Nathan Bright, on the other hand, was down-to-earth and struck me as honest to the core. The other half of the ghost-hunting duo, I was sure he was the brains behind the operation. He was also the man behind the camera, having only so-so looks and being of average build. “Adam and I have been friends since grade school,” he told me once during a lull in the activity, “and our show is a natural progression of our interests since then.” He grinned, and I felt immediately drawn to him, picturing him and Adam as two sticky-faced little kids with their heads bent over gruesome comic books.

  All the same, something was a little off between the two men. I couldn’t quite put my finger on the source of the tension, but I assumed it had something to do with a passing disagreement, much like the one I was having at the time with my sister. Nathan and Adam were probably as close as brothers, after all.

  An odd thought quickly flashed across my mind that Nathan might be a good match for Harriet. Sure, he was a good decade older than she was, but the word was that a degree in mechanical engineering had led him into stage production, which surely made him invaluable as half of the team of Gaunt and Bright. Someone as ambitious as he obviously was would be able to take care of Harriet for the rest of her life. Besides, just thinking selfishly, I figured a boyfriend might be just the thing for pulling Harriet out of her funk.

  “Not a good idea, missy,” a spirit voice whispered in my ear.

  “What?” I retorted silently in my mind. It can be still quite disconcerting when my spirit friends make it clear they can read my thoughts. It gives me very little privacy.

  I glanced over my shoulder to see who was speaking that time and saw that it was none other than Josiah Ratchett, who had been killed in the Battle of Mad River at the ripe old age of sixty-two, and who was as crotchety in death as he reputedly had been in life.

  “You’d better keep your eye on that one,” Josiah continued as I watched Nathan retreat into Matt’s office with Adam. I cocked my head to one side to observe the ghost hunters’ respective derrieres. Not bad, I decided, focusing on Nathan’s. Harriet could do worse. As for me, I intended to marry a cop. That is, if I married anyone at all.

  “Never mind. Looks like all your interested in is your hormones.” He sounded disgusted.

  “You wouldn’t know a hormone if it bit you on your hind-end,” I retorted. Josiah was a stick in my crawl. He was cantankerous and loved to irritate me to no end. But sometimes I saw a twinkle in his eye. He wanted the attention and this was the only way he knew how to get it. But today he was all business. It seemed he was just as worried as I was.

  “If you won’t watch out for him, we will,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” I whispered, but just as quickly as he came, he whisked away, leaving me disquieted and confused. Was the troublesome old ghost trying to tell me not to trust my own instincts? Even ghosts are wrong sometimes. Even they can’t know everything. I tried to shrug off his warning. It wasn’t the first time Josiah had shown up to discomfit and distract me.

  ~.~

  While the ghost hunters sorted out the details of their contract with Matt behind closed doors, a small gaggle of Mad River townspeople clustered outside the office. They politely remained outside—West Virginia residents are nothing if not
polite—but the volume of their excited chatter rose in volume until I could barely think. Opening the door to ask them to keep it down, I found myself inches away from the diminutive senior Wendy Carpenter.

  With her gray hair smartly coiffed and her button earrings flashing brightly in the morning sunlight, Wendy appeared composed and confident. The timbre of her voice told another story, however. She was clearly anxious and upset. “We need to talk with those two young men!” she demanded. When she smoothed the front of her skirt and stared up into my nostrils, it was all I could do to stifle a laugh/snort. Standing at least twelve inches shorter than me, she nonetheless attempted to project authority. “Right now!” she insisted.

  “I’m sorry, but they’re in the middle of talking things over with Matt at the moment. They’ll be out in a little while,” I said. Wendy was almost a half-century older than I was, and I was brought up to respect my elders, but the old girl was testing the limits of my patience today. My mood was already gloomy without a gaggle of people making demands of me.

  “If there are ghosts in this town, we need to know,” Wendy went on. “We have a right to know.”

  I endeavored to maintain a neutral facial expression. Oh, Mom, where are you when I need you most? Mom would have laughed, too, at Wendy’s silly posturing. Aloud, I said, “Yes, Ms. Carpenter, you do have a right to know.”

  Irritably, I thought but didn’t say, you would never believe me if I told you about our town’s ghosts, so why would you choose to believe these two men whose only claim to credibility is a television show and a truckload of expensive equipment? As if ghosts could be made visible to live humans by means of electronic gear. Absurd! I maintained steady eye contact and what I hoped was an unreadable facial expression as I attempted to stare Wendy down.

  Wendy wasn’t backing down very easily. “How much longer will they be?” she demanded.

  “It shouldn’t be too much longer now,” I answered. I smiled politely and firmly closed the door.

  “It’s really important that we talk to them,” Wendy said as the door clicked shut. She sounded distraught. I knew she was just scared and I felt sorry for her, but she would just have to wait her turn.

  “Good grief!” I muttered, trying in vain to focus on my work. The noise from the cluster of townsfolk on the sidewalk outside the office continued to rise in volume throughout the day.

  ~.~

  I thought the day would never end, what with a steady stream of anxious townspeople noisily clomping in and out of the office or hanging around outside it, and similarly anxious ghosts drifting in and out and whispering in my ear at odd moments, startling me and preventing me from getting any real work done. When five o’clock rolled around, I was forced to tell Matt that I hadn’t completed the spreadsheet he had asked for the previous day. “I’m sorry, Matt, but the day was just too distracting. I’ll finish it tomorrow.”

  “That’s okay, Shelby. It has been a rip-roaring day,” he reassured me, laughing. He seemed excited and happy, the exact opposite of the way I felt. “It should be calmer around here tomorrow.”

  “Have a good evening,” I said as we parted ways on the plank sidewalk outside the old barbershop.

  “See you in the morning,” he called cheerfully.

  ~.~

  I hugged my little sister when she walked through the door after work that evening, intending to provide some wordless comfort. It worked. We tacitly agreed on a truce that evening, at least for the time being, and we prepared and shared a quiet dinner together. I was grateful for the tenuous peace that lay between us, even if it should prove to be only temporary. Determined to protect that fragile peace, I tried to limit my dinnertime banter to small talk only. “These chicken breasts are delicious, Harriet,” I offered. “What did you to them?”

  “Oh, just a little of this and a pinch of that,” my sister replied.

  “I do think you’re a better cook than Mom was.”

  “Nonsense, Shelby,” Harriet answered, but she smiled proudly when she said it, and I took that as a good sign.

  “How was work today?” I asked. “Did George behave himself?” George Foster was the owner of the historic general store, which was also the town’s only hardware store. The building and its business had been in the Foster family for generations, and even though I didn’t think much of George Foster as a person, I had to admit that the family had done a good job of maintaining the structure’s historical personality.

  “Pretty much,” Harriet answered. “I think he was a little tipsy all day long, but that at least keeps him mellow.” Harriet was George’s only employee in the store, and she managed him well.

  “Is that right?” I asked. “What is he like when he’s stone cold sober, then?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Harriet answered truthfully. “But when he runs out of sauce, he can get mean pretty fast.” She gave me a rueful look. “I try to make sure that never happens.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said. “Sounds like the guy could use a twelve-step program or something.”

  “I don’t know what it would take. He doesn’t seem to want to change,” answered Harriet.

  “Isn’t it hard for you when he’s drunk so much of the time?”

  “Not really,” Harriet answered. “I’m learning a lot about running the business, and I really don’t mind the added responsibility.” She reached for the salt. “It takes my mind off things,” she said, and by that I knew that she meant she had some relief from grieving over Mom. Good for her, I thought. “By the way,” she continued, “everyone who came into the hardware store today was all atwitter about what was going on at your office.”

  “You don’t say.” I quickly tried to think of ways to get the conversation back onto safer ground. My mind went blank, so I forked the last bite of broccoli from my plate and stuffed it into my mouth.

  “Everyone was either fearful or optimistic, but everyone was taking it all pretty seriously.”

  “Hmmm,” I said. The townsfolks’ reactions were pretty similar to those of the town’s ghosts then. With the exception of the calm reassurances from Jessamine and Phineas, every other ghost that had had anything to say to me during the day had been either anxious or full of bravado. I didn’t want to say anything to Harriet about the ghosts, though. That had been a pretty touchy subject between us in recent weeks. Instead I said, “That was a great dinner, Harriet. I’ll clean up since you did most of the cooking.” I wanted to stay busy so as not to pay attention to my heart pumping in my chest, but it didn’t help. For some reason, I felt even more anxious.

  Chapter Three: Newborn Ghost

  I woke the next morning with a sense of foreboding and had to force myself to get out of bed and get on with the day. A mild headache threatened behind my eyes. Too much stress lately, I decided. I could hardly wait until the ghost hunters went away and things calmed down around Mad River Old Town again.

  I checked my phone while I chewed on a piece of toast and found to my surprise a text message from Nick Simmons, an old childhood friend and one of the youngest members of Mad River’s police force. My heart skipped a little when I saw his name at the top of the message. Oh, stop it, I told myself. I had known Nick all my life, but recently butterflies invaded my stomach every time I thought about him.

  “Could you meet me for lunch today?” his text message read.

  “Okay,” I texted back. “Where?” Despite myself, I felt excited at the prospect and hurried upstairs to change quickly into something more flattering than the outfit I had first chosen that morning. Thank goodness I got his text before I left the house! I didn’t want to meet him in the dowdy blouse I originally put on.

  I had to hurry to make it to the office on time, but I burst through the door at eight o’clock sharp and settled in right away. If I could get my work squared away early, maybe I could hang out at the general store, where the ghost hunters would be setting up their equipment. “Hey, Matt,” I greeted my boss. “Why aren’t you with the ghost hunters?�
�� Everyone else in Mad River would surely be there already.

  “I had a little business to take care of first,” he said. “I was just on my way over there. Come on over as soon as you sort through my emails and finish that spreadsheet.”

  My heart sank. “Won’t the spreadsheet wait, Matt? It’s not every day our town has this much excitement.”

  “No,” he answered. “I really need you to take care of things for me this morning. Especially that spreadsheet. I really need it.” He stuffed some papers into his top desk drawer and closed down his computer. “Besides,” he continued, “I thought you were opposed to having these guys in town.”

  “I am, but that doesn’t mean I want to miss any of the action.”

  “Sorry Shelby, I really need that spreadsheet as soon as possible,” he said walking out the door.

  I scanned through his emails right after he left and saw nothing important, then went to work on his stupid spreadsheet. I was hoping I could finish before lunchtime, but no such luck. I was pretty good with the software I was working with, thanks to an online course Matt had paid for and encouraged me to complete a few months earlier, but all the same I was having trouble figuring out some of the formulae.

  I kept thinking that a ghost or two would appear to lift me out of my tedium and let me know what was going on over at the general store, but I didn’t hear a peep from either living humans or earthbound spirits all morning long. I was surprised, especially, that the ghosts hadn’t headed my way, what with all that hustle and bustle that must have been taking place over at the general store, as ghosts prefer peace and quiet most of the time.