Deader Still: A Bridget Sway Novel (A Paranormal Ghost Cozy Mystery Series)

by Jordaina Sydney Robinson

  Warren caught my eye and raised an eyebrow in question. I nodded. Warren was annoying but I didn’t really see him as a killer. Not really. And he didn’t have to tell me about my reoccurring shadow. If it really was there. But then he hadn’t told me about it the last time the bodies were being stuffed in my locker, so maybe he really was the killer and was trying to look innocent. I realised I was sounding like Petal and gave myself a mental slap.

  I tried to see anything over my shoulder but all I could see was empty space. I was getting that shadow thing checked out by Madame Zorina in the next free moment I had. I blew out a breath and adjusted my fringe. Permanent clouds? Temporary cloaks? This afterlife stuff had to start getting easier at some point. Didn’t it?

  Once we had rearranged into a circle, Matthew placed two chairs in the centre facing each other.

  Jenny clapped to get everyone’s attention. “Today’s assessment is role play.” The group groaned as a whole, except for three people who looked ridiculously pleased at this prospect. I hated them. “First, we’re going to pick costumes to wear and then I’ll explain what we’re doing. So everyone up and follow me.”

  Jenny led us up onto the stage and through a small back door in the left corner. The room beyond opened up into a dressing room. It reminded me of summer holidays spent inside at drama club because my mum had to work all the time due to my absentee father. And then I got another flashback of them … diddling.

  The room was the size of an average classroom. A makeup counter and mirrors lined the right wall which bordered the back of the stage, and six rows of free-standing rails took up the left half of the room.

  “It doesn’t matter what costume you chose.” Jenny moved to the centre of the room and gestured to the rails with a sweeping motion. “You just need to choose something.”

  “Why?” someone at the back of the group called.

  “Because you do.” Jenny moved back towards the door to give everyone space to peruse the rails.

  “But why?” the same voice asked. I couldn’t see who was asking but the voice sounded young and male.

  “Because.”

  “Because why?”

  “Because ‘y’ is a crooked letter,” Jenny snapped. “Now everybody pick a costume and get back outside.” She turned on her heels and stormed out of the small room, her footsteps echoing across the stage.

  “Why is ‘y’ a crooked letter?” the same voice asked. I got the impression he wasn’t asking anyone specifically, more just in general. No one answered. I picked the first thing I could find, one of the three wise men’s robes from the nativity, and put it on. It was basically a long length of gold brocade material with a slit that reached from one end to the middle to make a long waistcoat. I figured since my fashion cred was long past saving in the mauve jumpsuit it was best to grab something that was easy to take on and off should I need to run for my afterlife at some point.

  “You look like a court jester,” Warren said, walking past me on our way back to our seats. “It suits you.”

  I took the high road and didn’t respond but that was because he’d chosen a knight’s tabard that was another length of material with a red and gold lion pattern and a slit for the neck. It looked like a tea cosy but calling him a teapot seemed kind of lame. I really was struggling for comebacks.

  Once everyone had found their own pieces of material with slits and returned to their seats Jenny called our attention back to her.

  “There are ten situations. You’ll get a turn at each one. You and a partner will be given a card each, and you have to play out what’s on those cards. First up—”

  “Jenny, I’m sorry to interrupt but how are we being assessed on this? And how is this relative to our acclimatisation?” I held part of my costume up for her to see while Matthew grumbled something under his breath.

  Gracie sighed at me and shook her head. “Bridget, you keep asking the same questions.”

  I nodded pointedly. “I do, don’t I?”

  She frowned at me, obviously missing the pointed end of my comment. “Yes, Bridget, you do.”

  Jenny shuffled the white note cards in her hands. “You don’t need to concern yourself with the hows and whys, Bridget. You only need to focus on passing the assessment.”

  Why did everyone keep saying my name like that? It was as if they’d been taught to personalise their comments in assessment leadership school and didn’t know when to stop.

  “Well, Jenny, that would be a lot easier to do if I knew how and what we were being assessed on.” I looked around the circle. “Is this just me?”

  “I have to agree with Bridget,” Tommy said from a few seats to my right. “It does seem strange to be asked to take a test without knowing how you’re being graded. The costumes do seem an odd touch as well.”

  “You don’t need to know,” snapped a forty-something woman in a green jumpsuit wearing a long waistcoat costume similar to mine. She was short and slender with delicately made up features that made me wonder how she had managed to get that many different products from her guardian. I waited for a follow up comment from her but nothing came.

  “Thank you, Jessica. It’s good to know that someone understands how the system works,” Jenny said and walked towards me with her hand of cards outstretched. “Bridget. You’re up first.”

  “What a shocker,” I mumbled.

  Jenny offered me the top card and the next card to the lady to my left. “Don’t look at them yet. Now, to the centre and take your chairs.” Jenny waited while we moved. “And … start.”

  I read the description on the card. The woman opposite me slumped in her chair, limp and faux dead.

  I waved my card at Jenny. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Bridget, I’m getting tired of your disruptive nature. Complete the role play or this is an automatic fail.”

  I weighed my options. For a reeeeeally long moment. So long that Warren snorted a laugh. But, realistically, what choice did I have? I turned back to the slumped, faux dead woman, folded my arms and waited.

  “I’m not kidding here, Bridget.” Jenny pointed at the faux dead woman opposite me. “Complete this or it’s an automatic fail for non-compliance.”

  “I am completing the role play.”

  Jenny’s voiced inched up an octave. “Bridget, you’re not doing anything.”

  “I am. I’m waiting for the police and GBs to turn up.” And if she addressed me by name again in that tone there was going to be a real dead person in the room.

  Jenny nodded. “Okay, yes, good. But what do you do before that? Before waiting for the police to turn up?”

  Was that a trick question? “You find the body.”

  Jenny grasped her notecards tightly in both hands as though it were her rapidly dwindling patience. “Okay, but what do you do in between finding the body and the police showing up?”

  I gestured to what I was doing. “You wait.” I had no clue what she meant. This was what I did when I kept finding dead bodies and no one had told me I was doing it wrong.

  “Bridget, pretend you’re not you,” Gracie interrupted. “Pretend you’re a well-adjusted person who’s just found a dead body for the first time.” Jenny threw Gracie a glare and Gracie returned to staring at her feet.

  I gestured to myself. “This is what I did when I found a body for the first time and, as it happens, I do consider myself well-adjusted.”

  Jenny gripped her cards so tightly they curled in her hands. “Next pair. Jessica and Warren.”

  Warren took the victim’s card and Jessica strutted over to me and plucked the card from my hand. She’d been one of the three people who hadn’t groaned when Jenny had said “role play”. My partner and I returned to our seats and Jenny nodded for Warren and Jessica to begin. Warren, unsurprisingly, choked and spluttered and clutched his way through, according to clock on the wall, three and a half minutes of a painful death. Jessica screamed for the duration. At one point I was sure Warren was trying to outlast her scream
ing but after the three minute mark, I think he realised that simply wasn’t going to happen and finally “died”. Even that didn’t stop the screaming.

  Jenny finally called an end to it and Warren and Jessica bowed to the round of applause. I didn’t clap. Tommy didn’t clap. He saw me watching him and smiled with a small shake of his head. At least I wasn’t the only sane person in this asylum. I so very much hoped he wasn’t the killer.

  That performance seemed to be the bench mark for everyone else and the next twenty minutes was filled with solid screaming. By the time it was my turn again, my head was throbbing. My partner and I took the centre seats again. Jenny offered me the top card and my partner the next. Jenny motioned for us to begin. I read the card and groaned.

  My partner got to her feet and started to run around the circle. “Help! Help! Help! She’s trying to kill me. Help!”

  I adjusted my fringe with a sigh. “This is just so very far from what I expected my afterlife to look like.”

  Chapter Eleven

  I landed in the centre of Madame Zorina’s office as soon as the assessment centre released me. She had her back to me as she poured herself some coffee, humming under her breath.

  “Is my death shroud back?” I asked.

  Madame Zorina let out a small yelp and dropped her mug. It bounced on the wooden floor and she jumped back, only just in time to avoid getting splashed. She whirled around, the hot liquid sloshing in the glass coffee pot in her hand. I very much had the impression she would have liked to have thrown it at me.

  “Don’t sneak up on me.”

  “I didn’t. It’s not my fault your spirit announcement system is on the fritz.”

  Madame Zorina opened her mouth, no doubt to hurl some insult at me, but closed it again without speaking and exhaled slowly instead. She replaced the coffee pot on its stand and retrieved a wad of tissues from the cabinet below to start wiping up the spilt coffee from the floor.

  “Have you made any headway with the Walsh case?” she asked, her back still to me.

  “We haven’t found the money yet but that’s not why I’m here.”

  “Oh?” She scooted around to glance at me while she wiped up the last of the spillage. Her attention focused over my shoulder.

  I gestured to myself. “Anything you’d care to mention?”

  “Well, your death shroud’s back.” She walked across the room to the bin to dispose of the used tissue.

  “You didn’t think to tell me about it sooner?”

  “I’ve only just seen it.”

  “Are you sure, because someone told me I’ve had it pretty much since I died.”

  “What other medium do you know?” The tone in Madame Zorina’s voice made it sound like she was accusing me of cheating on her.

  “Does it matter? What I’m—”

  Madame Zorina thrust her hands on her hips. “It matters to me.”

  “Well, the fact I’ve apparently had a cloud over me since I died that occasionally becomes a cloak of death matters to me. So how about you tell me about my cloudy cloak of death and I’ll tell you about my medium friend?”

  “I don’t know what your friend is talking about. I’ve never seen a cloud around you. Only the death shroud.” Her heels clicked on the wooden floor while she circled me with her hands out as if she was trying to feel it. “So how did you get it this time?”

  “Same way as last time, I suspect. By doing nothing to warrant it.” I glanced down at her shoes. They made such a lovely sound and I didn’t think I’d ever seen her in heels. Tan leather strappy sandals with a four-inch heel. I turned to face her, pointing at her feet. “Why are you wearing my shoes?” I glanced around the room. “And where’s the rest of my stuff?”

  “These aren’t your shoes. These are my shoes. Someone was kind enough to leave a suitcase full of clothes and one full of shoes in my office for me.”

  I threw my hands skyward and spoke to the universe. “Why does everyone think it’s okay to steal my stuff?”

  “Probably because you died so it’s not your stuff anymore.”

  “I bought it. It’s my stuff. Why can’t you people understand that?”

  She stepped back, hands on her hips and looked me over. “Now I understand why you’re being assessed.”

  “Y’know what? If I wasn’t relatively sure that the next stage of the afterlife is probably going to be worse than this, and that Johnson would try and arrest me for self-murder, I’d kill myself.”

  “I’m glad you brought up this afterlife business,” said Madame Zorina as she sashayed back to her desk in my four hundred pound shoes and flipped open her notepad. “I have some questions.”

  I rubbed my temples. “That’s nice for you. Do you have any aspirin?”

  “Why do you need aspirin?”

  “Because I have a headache,” I said, following her across the office and moving behind her desk to root through her drawers. Everybody kept aspirin in their desk, didn’t they? It was a necessity when you worked with other people. And we might be ghosts but we were technically “other people”. Sort of.

  Madame Zorina stepped back to give me room to search, clutching her notepad to her chest. “Why do you have a headache?”

  “Aha.” I pulled a bottle of aspirin out of the bottom right hand drawer and flipped the lid off but Madame Zorina snatched it out of my hands before I could count any out.

  “What do you think you’re doing? You can’t do that. You don’t know what the effects could be.” She recapped the bottle and hid it in one of the many folds of her skirt. I assumed there was a pocket in there somewhere.

  “Well, I’m thinking it might get rid of my headache.” I examined the way her skirt fell. Was it worth trying to tackle her for them?

  “It could kill you.”

  “Yeah, wouldn’t that be terrible?”

  “I don’t care. You’re not having any.” Madame Zorina held her pad away from her chest so she could see her list. “Now, who is your boss?”

  “Did you miss the part where I have a headache?”

  “Your boss?” she persisted.

  “My line manager boss or the head of the afterlife boss?” I asked, moving to the moor-facing windows that over looked the car park. Maybe she’d hidden my suitcases in her car. I didn’t even know if she had a car.

  “Both.”

  “I don’t know.”

  She frowned at me. “You don’t know who your boss is?”

  “Well, right now it feels like everybody is my boss, but no. I don’t actually know who my boss is.” I turned my back to the window and perched on the windowsill. I couldn’t really see anyway.

  “That’s really weird.”

  “Trust me, that is the least weird thing about this place.”

  “Okay. We can revisit that later.” She marked something on the notepad. “What else do you do all day?”

  “I work. What do you do all day?”

  “What’s your job?”

  “I’m a facilitator of pre- and post-life affairs.”

  Madame Zorina made another note on her pad. “What does that mean exactly?”

  “I haunt people.”

  Madame Zorina’s eyes jumped up from her pad to me. “You haunt people?”

  “Yes. I haunt people. Did Edith not go through all this with you?”

  “She answered my questions at the time but now I have more.”

  “How many more?”

  Madame Zorina flipped through several pages. “A few.”

  “Okay, well. Bring my stuff back. All of it. And I might consider answering.”

  Madame Zorina arched an eyebrow at me. “I don’t think you understand how this works.”

  I was tired of people telling me that too.

  “Oh, I understand just fine,” I said and tunnelled to the Italian Gardens, leaving a cursing Madame Zorina behind. For whatever reason she didn’t try to summon me straight back.

  Edith and Sabrina were engaged in an energetic conversation about s
omething to do with jodhpurs when I arrived. I flopped down on the soft grass in front of their bench and opened the chicken salad sandwich Sabrina handed to me.

  “You didn’t find another body, did you?” Sabrina asked, watching me silently eat.

  “Only in the role play. Don’t suppose you have any aspirin, do you?” I winced as I chewed. “Madame Zorina wouldn’t give me any.”

  Sabrina stared at me. “I don’t really know which part of that to tackle first.”

  Edith disappeared then reappeared ten seconds later and handed me a small packet of dried apricots. “There you go, dear. Now start from the beginning.”

  I stared at the small packet. Did I ask for apricots? I was fairly sure I’d said aspirin. But then there wasn’t much I could hear over the pounding in my head.

  “They’re the afterlife version of aspirin, dear,” Edith said when she saw me staring at the packet.

  “Oh. Thanks.” I opened the packet gingerly and sniffed the fruit. Why were all the afterlife remedies things I didn’t like?

  “Just eat one, dear. It’ll help.”

  “Can we still get ill?” Sabrina asked, scribbling in a small black notebook.

  “No, not really,” Edith said, while watching me nibble on the corner of the fruit. “Really, Bridget? Were you one of those children? Just put it in your mouth, chew, swallow and your headache will be gone.”

  I grumbled but popped the fruit in my mouth, chewed, swallowed and waited for my headache to go. Less than half a minute later the throbbing was completely gone.

  “So we can’t get ill, like the flu ill, but we can still get headaches?” Sabrina asked.

  Edith hesitated. “Sometimes, when you’re newly transitioned, you can be still susceptible to alive illnesses.”

  I sighed. “Great. So, basically, you’re saying that my headache announces I’ve not adjusted very well.”