by Etta Faire
She paused like she was trying to remember, or trying to forget. “Ruth and I told the police it was just us girls. Us and the girl we didn’t know. Three friends, watching a baby when a fire broke out. I was surprised how easily people believed it. But it ate at every one of us, and our friendships, especially since Ruth was praised for saving a baby she didn’t save, allowed it to propel her career into child psychology. Barry worked his way straight up that company after his girlfriend saved his boss’s kid…”
“So how did it get to be a onetime favor?” I asked.
“My husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, wasn’t about to lie without getting compensated for it. Not when he saw his opportunity to cash in. He always had a get-rich-quick kind of mentality. He’d also run out of the house with the movie camera, so he had the film that incriminated people. He made them each swear to give us one, no-questions-asked favor to keep everything a secret, one that we could cash in at any time, and they couldn’t say no.”
Mandy thought through the blue notes from the movie.
“The notes had been Graham’s idea,” Mandy told me. “I didn’t think anything about them at the time. I just thought he wanted a fun psychological element in the story. But maybe there was another reason why he chose those notes. They do seem telling, just like Ruth said.”
“Do you remember Ned’s girlfriend’s name?” I asked because I wanted to look the story up later to see how it had been reported, even though I was pretty sure I could find it without a name.
“No, I knew it at the time, but I don’t remember it now,” Mandy replied. Something in the way her voice caught at the end told me she was lying. She probably didn’t want me to look the woman up and tell the family the truth, not that it made much difference sixty years later.
I un-paused the memory. The doorbell chimed again.
“I’d forgotten I told you to come by today,” we heard Ruth say from the foyer to the person at the door. Her voice was sweet and even-keeled, like she hadn’t just been arguing with an old friend.
“I’m sorry. Is this a bad time?” A man’s voice asked.
“No, of course not.”
“I sure do appreciate this, Mrs. Locke. I’m just a huge fan of Mandy Smalls. Huge, huge fan. I just love her, I kid you not.”
“Well, she’s right in here.”
Mandy instinctively picked a chunk of Pringles out of her teeth, smoothed out her dry, crispy hair, and sucked in her gut.
Someone was a huge fan. She had more than a few of those in the 70s, back when the sorority girls series was popular, but not many nowadays.
Ruth walked into the room with her arm around a short, thin man in his 30s with sunken cheeks and a baseball cap. He was carrying a poster tube. Ruth smiled at us like we were the best of friends. “Mandy, this is the custodian at Brownstone, the building where my practice is located at in town. He was really hoping to meet you.” Her eyes begged us not to be mad anymore, or at least to pretend we weren’t.
Mandy recognized the man right away. “You’re the extra we had to kick out of here last week. The one taking pictures.”
“I’m just a fan,” he said. “I wanted pictures for my collection. It’s not every day a movie gets made in my town. Sorry I got in the way.”
“And you were in some of the scenes downtown, right?”
He coughed into his fist. It was rattly and deep. “No, ma’am. But I’ve been hanging out at Slappy’s every night, hoping to see y’all in there. I got Mr. Reinhart’s signature already, and your husband’s…”
The man pulled a pair of blue disposable gloves from his back pocket and snapped them on, smiling at Mandy the entire time. His teeth were tiny and already yellowed. “They’re so I don’t get fingerprints all over the poster,” he said when he caught Ruth staring at his gloves.
He popped the lid off the tube he was carrying and poured out a rolled-up poster into his gloved hand. He unraveled it, and we could see it was the promotional poster for Death Party Sorority House from 1972. In the picture, Mandy was standing in front of the smoldering ruins of a large house with columns and Greek letters. She had cut-off jean shorts and a bloody demon head in her hands. Her blonde hair had been teased on the top, but was long and draped over her shoulders. Her eyeliner was cat-eyed and her face looked flawless.
She touched her shorter, hair-sprayed, helmet-like hairdo now.
“I am a huge Toppletree fan,” he said, handing her a sharpie. “And I know you are really the brains behind the operation. I read the articles. I got a whole horror collection going on. It’s getting real nice.”
“I’d like to see it sometime,” Mandy said politely, then regretted it. Graham always warned her about inviting fans into their lives.
She placed the poster on the table and glanced around, finally finding the cuckoo clock above the china cabinet.
She was late.
They were probably already filming her scene. Why hadn’t someone come up and reminded her? “I have to make this quick. I have a scene to shoot.”
“Can I watch and take some pictures? I’ll be quiet this time.”
She looked at her friend who was shrugging at her, but in a way that was also begging her to say yes.
“Okay. If you’re quiet and you don’t interrupt, you can take pictures, but only if you share them with me. My kids are coming today, and it’d be nice to have photos of it.” She winked, then regretted that, too. Graham’s voice echoed in her mind. “Don’t invite crazies to the lawn, Mandy.”
The man laughed. He was closer than he probably should have been, and we could smell the cigarettes and orange soda on his breath. “Dream come true,” he said.
Mandy could feel her friend beaming with pride from the other side of the table. Ruth loved to come across as the “nice person” in life. The woman who saved babies, solved parents’ problems, made janitors’ dreams come true. She probably couldn’t wait for this man to brag about her at the office.
Mandy found the appropriate place to sign at the bottom of the poster. “Who should I make this out to?” she asked.
“Hank, please. Crazy Hank. That’s what everyone calls me. And put the date on there too.”
He laughed again, loud and in a rhythmic annoying way that resembled doorbell chimes. Chimes, ringing in the background.
My alarm. How long had it been going off?
I’d completely forgotten I needed to wake up for work.
Chapter 12
Real Life
I bolted awake, gasping for air like I still had Pringles in my lungs. My phone’s alarm clanged and bonged out annoying chimes by my side. Each one seemed to sucker punch my already aching head. I fumbled to find my phone, realizing I was slumped over my couch in a weird way. My head was down by my arm and both were somehow wrapped in the throw blanket. No wonder my head hurt.
I grabbed my cell phone and turned off the alarm. I’d set it for 11:30. It was 12:15.
12:15. I had to leave in fifteen minutes.
I thought about rushing over to the credenza to get my notebook. I had so many things I wanted to write in there before I forgot them.
The fire. Ned’s girlfriend. The favor. What Crazy Hank looked like.
But I didn’t have time, so I grabbed the next best thing. My cellphone so I could put my thoughts into my notes app via voice-to-text.
I ran up the stairs to get dressed into something I hadn’t borrowed from my boyfriend when dinner turned into staying over.
For a moment, I felt like Mandy. I was in my 30s, rushing off to a minimum-wage job. Would I still be doing this in ten, fifteen, twenty years, watching as my friends climbed up corporate ladders?
At least she had kids and a family, I thought.
I stumbled on the last stair up to my room. Pain shot over my foot. But it served me right for feeling sorry for myself.
I had a wonderful life full of people who cared about me. It didn’t matter that most of them were dead or shapeshifters, or both.
; I hit the little microphone button at the bottom of the screen so I could speak into my phone.
Jackson appeared by my side as I hopped over to my room to get dressed, my neck still hurting from how I was channeling and now my foot too.
Strands of Rosalie’s ghost repellant still hung from my door to prevent him from following me.
“I don’t have time to fill you in,” I said as I moved past the long hanging strands and into my room. “I have a real-life job I have to get to,” I yelled. I closed the door behind me.
My phone’s voice-to-text app wrote a jumbled sentence that included the words “I have a real size gecko.”
I held the receiver up to my mouth and talked as clearly as I could while I searched my closet for the summer romper I bought last week.
“Crazy Hank was there taking pictures. May still have pictures. Can’t see why the guy would get rid of those. Small man around 30, longish brown hair, probably still a local…” I said into my phone, enunciating the words so speech-to-text would work better.
“You saw Crazy Hank?” Jackson asked from the other side of the door.
I jumped. He seemed very close.
“How did he look?” Jackson asked. “I’m picturing Homer Simpson meets Charles Manson.”
I took off my sweatpants, eyes on the door the whole time, reminding myself ghosts couldn’t come into my room. “He’s not nearly as crazy as they say. He’s crazy-ish. I don’t have a last name yet. But I’m going to find him. He hung out at a place called Slappy’s, which I’m sure he meant Slap Pappy’s, the bar everyone went to the night of Mandy’s murder. The one called Hunters now.”
“Did the police already talk to Hank?”
Jackson’s voice sounded pretty close that time, and I fumbled as I pulled my shirt off.
“If they did, it’s not in Mandy’s folder,” I said. “There is nothing in there about Crazy Hank.”
I finished buttoning my romper, checked my hair in the mirror, twisting my curls into a bun. I went to open the door, but stopped myself.
I turned back around and grabbed a few of the ghost repellant sachets I kept in a silver box on my dresser.
My ex was right on my tail when I got back out to the hall. “Did you just put ghost repellant in your pockets? I thought we could discuss the case on the way to your real-life job.”
I didn’t even stop to talk to him. “I told Rosalie I wouldn’t bring paranormal distractions to work with me unless I had to,” I said, hurrying down the last few stairs, searching the living room for my purse. “And no offense, but you can be the biggest distraction without even knowing it.”
“I can also be very quiet when I want to be. You won’t even know I’m there,” he said. His face was faded today, like a constant ghostly reminder that I had no retirement portfolio and never would.
“We’ll talk about it later,” I said as I shut the door and ran out to my Civic. The summer air was already starting to feel more like fall. A crisp breeze brought the smell of leaves with it, yet the bushes surrounding my property looked exactly the same as always.
Exactly the same, year after year.
In every photo of Gate House when it was first built, the trees and bushes looked the same then too, manicured to a specific height. No colored leaves. No out-of-place branches.
Life was meant to change, from season to season and year to year. It needed to grow and stretch and push itself to new heights or even shrivel and dry up if it wanted to. It felt too much like death otherwise.
I looked up. Jackson was on the veranda, doing his best guilt-trip face that was not at all working. He wanted to come with me. But I had a right to ask for my own space.
I had a right to live.
I somehow managed to write some coherent notes into my phone while putting on a little mascara and concealer on my way into work. Thank goodness Potter Grove had a lot of unnecessary stoplights.
“You are late,” Rosalie said when I came through the door. “And not just a little this time. Almost five minutes.”
I could tell something was wrong. Almost five minutes wasn’t that late.
“I’m so sorry. I got talked into doing a channeling, and I didn’t hear my alarm clock to get out of it…” I said, expecting her to tell me how dangerous my channelings were getting, tell me all about the guy fifty years ago who channeled for half an hour and needed to have his food mushed up and spoon fed to him for the rest of his drooling life.
I, at least, expected her to lecture me on how I couldn’t let my paranormal life get in the way of my real-life one. But none of the lectures happened.
She just leaned over the cash register with a distant look on her face, staring off at the back wall, a stack of recipe books off to the side of the counter.
“You okay?” I asked as I gave her a quick “hello” hug.
“Lila called and canceled her order,” she said. “I guess Bette just up and left the guest house in a hurry this morning. What on earth could Lila have used? Do you think she went to another paranormal store?”
She scooted her rolling stool back over to the stack of recipe books and opened one up.
“Maybe Lila just politely asked her aunt to leave like I suggested,” I said.
“Does Bette seem like someone who would leave after being politely asked?” Rosalie asked, barely looking up from her book.
I shook my head no. She had a point.
Bette was Delilah’s daughter, but where Delilah seemed prim and proper, Bette seemed anything but. She barked out orders like a drill sergeant and she did everything with an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips.
Rosalie motioned around the store. “Can you straighten up? The damn gem section is all out of whack over there.” Her voice sounded a little too much like a drill sergeant’s. Plus, the “damn gem section” was always out of whack. That was just the way the damn gem section worked.
But now that Lila had canceled her order, I knew today was going to be rough, probably full of a lot of “damns.” Rosalie liked to cuss whenever she was mad, but especially when she was mad about losing money.
She pointed to the plastic bins in the jewelry section that held all the little crystals and gems. They were supposed to be separated by their healing and soothing qualities. But, much like my life, everything was mixed up and jumbled.
I bent down over the many plastic tubs and began picking pink quartz from the obsidian.
“You’re probably wondering who I was channeling with,” I said, but stopped myself.
Mrs. Nebitt was the only one who knew about the investigation so far. There was still a chance I could see the scrapbook.
I reminded myself how I was no longer going to work with my hands behind my back. The police had botched Mandy’s case, and now, they were giving it to me so I would botch it too, and be taken down a notch in the process.
I straightened out the onyx bin next because it was supposed to help you with decisiveness. “I told you about my new client, right? Mandy Smalls. The woman who was murdered in 1987 when they made the horror movie here.”
Rosalie didn’t look up from her recipe book. She angrily shoved over another large chunk of pages and pretended to look for something. “Lila couldn’t have found her own recipe on the internet. The internet is full of lies…”
“Do you remember when they were filming that movie?” I asked.
Rosalie lifted her head a little, like she was processing our conversation now. “Yeah, a little,” she said. “I was too busy with the Purple Pony to get caught up in any of that. It took a lot of effort to get this place off the damn ground, believe it or not.”
I pulled a clear quartz piece from the onyx tub, not sure I felt like we were too far off the ground yet.
“Do you remember anyone named Crazy Hank? A local here?”
Rosalie shook her head, still staring at the book, not really scanning, not really doing anything but sulking.
I heard mumbled yelling just before the wind chimes rang and the door
opened. Rosalie’s frown turned to a customer-friendly smile at 0-100 speed. Her shoulders rose and her eyes sparkled.
Four kids entered in varying ages from four to twelve, and Rosalie’s smile dropped. Mine did too, because children loved the gem section.
They were Shelby’s kids. I craned my neck to see my friend so I could finally talk to her about the bird attack and nursing school.
Mrs. Winehouse rushed in behind the children with Bobby junior on her hip. He was almost one now, but he kind of looked like an eighty-year-old with wisps of curls poking out through his balding, large head. His grin got wider as he eyed the gem section, a little drool forming on his old-man lips.
Mrs. Winehouse was a woman around 60 with sensible, shoulder-length, brown hair and large glasses. She handed me the baby as soon as she saw me, like I’d asked to hold him. She let out a huge sigh of relief as soon as I took him, then pulled down her blouse that had ridden up along her midriff.
“He gets cuter every day,” I said about the baby as he yanked my ear. Pain shot across my face, and I wondered if he’d done that on purpose. His laugh was low and maniacal for a baby.
“Don’t let him down or he’ll tear through this store like that Tasmanian Devil cartoon,” she said. “He’s not quite walking, but that does not slow this little devil down.”
The little devil tugged on my ear again, and I didn’t even flinch. I could tell now that he was doing it so I’d let him down. But there was no way that was happening. I’d rather have my ear ripped clear from my skull than clean up after a bear-shifting toddler in the gem section.
“How’s Shelby?” I blurted out, ducking my head to the right to avoid the ear tug again. “How’s she doing in school? Tell her to call me. She hasn’t called me in ages.”
“I know. I’ve been apologizing for Shelby ever since she started the nursing program. She’s just been too busy to call anyone. Not too busy to get another tattoo, though. Got a black rose along her wrist.”
She motioned to her own wrist to show me how it circled around. “She told me she was going to get a black rose for every month Bobby was gone, until he returned. They’re going to be all over her body when she figures out he’s not coming back. I can’t tell her that, though. I let her live in hope.”