Royal Ghouls

by Alex A King

  Which left me free to go on a ghost hunt.

  I wandered to the end of the dock and back again, wondering which of the salty ghost sailors and dock workers I should pick. The ghost sailors were gathered in loose packs, smoking ghost pipes, ghost smoke curling in the real night sky. The workers were hauling ghost cargo on and off ships and boats that weren’t there. None of them paid attention to me. Being ignored by the living was their status quo.

  I thought about opening with a seamen joke, but those don’t translate well in Greek.

  I approached the first cluster of dead fishermen. Heavy coats on a couple. Shirtsleeves on the men who’d drowned during summer. An overabundance of beards and other facial hair. A few familiar faces. Some of these men were lost at sea during my time on Merope. Their ghosts did what their bodies never could and returned home. When I greeted them, they gawked at me.

  “Are you talking to us?” one of the older men asked. His eyebrows were high, partially tucked under his fisherman’s hat.

  I told them my name, told them I needed help.

  “Callas … Callas …” another of the men said. They all made agreeable sounds that indicated they knew the name. Not surprising; my family had been here since this chunk of rock cut itself off the continent and shifted way offshore. He took a long puff of his pipe. “Now I remember. I knew your grandmother.”

  “Everybody knew my grandmother.”

  He chuckled. They all did. “We used to call her Olive Oil because she spread herself all over the place.”

  Using all my restraint, I prevented a sarcastic eye rolling. Nobody wants to hear about their grandmother’s sexual shenanigans.

  “Yes, yes, Yiayia slept with most of Merope. Wasn’t that nice of her? She was a real philanthropist. All that sex was her version of philotimo.” Philotimo is the most virtuous of Greek virtues. To simplify, it means doing nice stuff for others. “Maybe you could pay her back for all that generous sex. For instance, right now her granddaughter—me—needs help.”

  “What can old, dead sailors do for a pretty girl who is still alive?”

  “Why can’t you Google?” a handlebar mustache with bloodshot eyes asked. “Google knows everything. That is what I have heard people saying.”

  “I figured I would ask the experts,” I said.

  “Experts in what?”

  “Being dead. I need to know how you get around.”

  Pipes in mouths, they stared wistfully at the dark water. “How does any sailor travel? Always by sea.”

  “Even now that you’re dead?”

  “Now? We go nowhere.” Their laughter was a gruff, gravelly chorus. Someone—several someones—had been yo-ho-hoing with a bottle of ghost rum. “This” he waved his pipe at the water “is paradise.”

  “So you don’t go anywhere, you just stay here on the dock?”

  He shrugged. They all did. “There is no reason to leave.”

  “What about when you want to go somewhere else?”

  “Go somewhere else?” They exchanged puzzled glances. None of these guys had a clue what I was talking about. I thanked them for their time and wheeled my bicycle up to the main road again, wondering who to see next. If only Olga Marouli’s ghost was still haunting me; she did poofing like a pro. My heart hurt thinking about my friend, and there was something in my eye. Probably it was allergies. I needed sugar and I needed it now before my blood sugar level dropped any lower.

  And that’s how I wound up outside the Cake Emporium, drooling. Betty Honeychurch’s bakery had moved in to the long-vacant space around the time of Kyria Olga’s murder. The regular window display had undergone a metamorphosis. The midnight-colored curtain was still in place, but now it was the backdrop for a Halloween celebration. Candy pumpkins. Jack O Lantern cakes. Sugar spirits. Marzipan witches riding marzipan brooms with their marzipan cats.

  Something wet dribbled down my chin.

  Oh. That was me.

  The door opened. A curl-besieged head poked out.

  “You’re right on time, luv,” Betty Honeychurch said in her crisp English accent, eyes twinkling.

  “Are you sure? It’s late.”

  “It’s never too late to eat cake or chat with friends.”

  Betty Honeychurch is ageless. Skin infant-smooth. Eyes that say she’s been seeing everything there is to see since before the dinosaurs glimpsed the meteor headed right for them and said, “Is it a bird? Is it a plane? We don’t know. Oh shit!” She dresses for comfort, and tonight she’d chosen the cozy pairing of flannel flamingo-patterned pajamas and a fuzzy robe. I wanted to be at home in flannel pajamas and a fuzzy robe. Alone. With no ghosts. Okay, Dead Cat could stay because I kind of liked the fur ball, and he didn’t cost me a single euro in vet fees or food, but the others had to go.

  “I meant to come earlier, but I got caught up in a thing …” My brain and mouth trailed off. How do you adequately describe the scene of a nautical disaster, especially one that ends in a massive fireball?

  Betty’s curls bobbed as she nodded. “The yacht, I know. What a tragedy. I understand they’ve found six bodies so far. Those poor people. Are you all right?”

  “They were already dead when the boat crashed.”

  “I know. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t awful to witness.” Betty steered me to a comfortable sofa.

  A sofa?

  I looked around. The Cake Emporium’s interior had undergone a transformation, much like the window display. It was all decked out for Halloween. Orange sofas and matching chairs, huddled around low tables shrouded in black tablecloths. Cabinets filled with sugar bats and spiders. Webs of spun sugar. Vampires of … actually, the vampires looked real. They hovered in the dark corners, eyes glowing silver. Movie props, I told myself. Did Betty always go all out, decorating? As usual, the confectionary store had a split personality. One half sold sweets. The other displayed all kinds of woo-woo things. Ouija boards. Mysterious herbs and other unidentifiable doodads. Crystal balls.

  “I’m always redecorating,” Betty said, answering my unasked question. “I can’t help myself. Everything feels stale after a while, so next thing I know, I’m tossing out the old and hauling in the new. I just adore the holidays, don’t you? Of course I know Greeks don’t really celebrate Halloween, but that doesn’t mean my customers and I can’t.”

  She was right: Halloween isn’t a Greek thing. We dress up like slutty nurses and half-naked superheroes in February before Lent, and we call it Apokries. Also, it goes for three weeks.

  “I love it,” I said truthfully.

  “It reminds you of home? Sorry. The thoughts were just there for the plucking.” Betty patted my hand and urged me to sit. Satisfied that I was comfortable, she quickly whipped up two steaming cups of hot chocolate and ferried them to the table, along with a candy pumpkin the size of two fists. She settled in the cozy chair opposite, tucking her feet up underneath her. “Tap the pumpkin with your spoon. Go on.”

  I picked up the spoon and gave the pumpkin a gentle tap. The shell cracked. A chunk of orange candy fell away, revealing a chocolate cake center.

  “Wait until you get to the middle,” she said. “Molten chocolate.”

  My spoon plunged into the cake. I took a bite. It was still warm.

  “How?”

  She leaned forward, eyes sparkling with delight. “Magic.”

  No doubt. Betty is anything but ordinary. For one, she’s woo-woo herself. The tiny woman can read minds. She doesn’t dip into my thoughts often, but picking up the bits I broadcast loud and clear is unavoidable. She’s one of a handful of people who knows about my ability. And she was right, the Halloween regalia reminded me of, as she called it, home. Merope had been my residence for more than half my life, but a large piece of me couldn’t forget my American upbringing.

  “I’m being haunted,” I said.

  “By the people from the yacht?”

  I nodded and spooned another glob of cake into my mouth. The confection was an explosion of sugar and bliss.
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  “And you want them to leave?”

  Swallow. “They’re annoying. Really annoying. There’s a bunch of them and they’re rude.”

  “Ghosts,” she said, “I understand they can be bigger pests than rats if you let them. I was afraid this would happen sooner or later. Word is getting around the Afterlife that you’re a person with certain skills.”

  She meant seeing the dead and my ability to find things. The first was congenital; the second was mostly persistence, with a dash of talent.

  “But I’ve been able to see them forever, so why now?”

  “It was probably your friend, Olga Marouli. Maybe she thought you could do some good, helping those who can no longer help themselves in the mortal world. Of course she should have asked your permission first, but I’m sure her intentions were the very best.”

  “How do I get rid of them? I asked nicely, then I asked rudely, then I made threats.”

  “And they refused?”

  “They told me some ridiculous story about how they couldn’t. According to them, they don’t know how to poof! Allegedly.”

  “I imagine it’s like any kind of leaving. You have to want to go.”

  “So I need to make the ghosts want to go?”

  “Exactly. Entice them away or make your home inhospitable.”

  I chewed on the edge of my lip, rifling through my thin encyclopedia of ghost knowledge. What I knew was that I could see them. There was no entry shedding light on things ghosts hate. Exorcisms and sage were unknowns. They were movie tricks and the bailiwick of woo-woo people.

  Weren’t they?

  Betty left her chair to go poking through the myriad ornate jars on the shop’s shelves. She came back with a smudge stick.

  “Sage works?”

  “Sage works, although not always,” she said. “Take it. Burn it. Open your front door and sweep toward that door. Shoo those spooks away. You have done everything you can for them. You tried to be helpful, and gave them good information, too. Not just any person would tell them about the Council for the Formerly Living. That’s downright generous.”

  “Am I telegraphing my thoughts again?”

  Her smile was warm and kind. It was a grandmotherly smile. “When you come in here you always relax, then it’s like you’re scribbling all your thoughts on billboards.”

  “What am I thinking right now?”

  “You’re wondering if I know all about that date you had with your handsome policeman.”

  Oof. Not good.

  “Begone!” I waved the smoking sage around. “Scram! Vamoose! Fyge! Bugger off!” Being multilingual about ejecting these ghosts couldn’t hurt.

  Harry Vasiliakos and his posse watched me as I marched from room to room, smudging the whole apartment. When I was done, I grabbed my broom.

  “Last chance to just get up and leave of your own accord,” I warned them.

  No takers. Great. Then it was time for them to feel my wrath—or what little wrath I had left late at night when I really wanted to be in bed. I yanked the front door open and began dragging the broom across the marble tile floor, out into the hallway.

  Did the ghosts get up and fyge?

  No, they did not.

  What was it going to take?”

  “Wow, you’re really committed to housework,” Lydia said. I whipped around to see my neighbor sashaying my way. Lydia is all hips, boobs, and hair that may or may not be naturally blonde. She’s in her early twenties, and she makes most bad girls look like angels. Whether I liked her or not was undecided. I didn’t not like her, but it’s hard to get to know someone when neither of you is in a getting-to-know-anyone frame of mind. She’d lost her grandmother, almost lost her birth mother, and I’d lost my best friend. We were both dealing with that by keeping to ourselves. Lydia was just keeping to herself wearing fragments of black clothing (like me, she was in mourning) and rubbing against men in clubs because sometimes words don’t always mean the same things to other people. I knew this because nothing travels faster than gossip. Light looks lazy and slow in comparison to the speed at which talk zips around Greece.

  “Procrastination,” I said. “It’s sweep or work.”

  “Jimmy said to tell you that he told Leo you left a list for him.”

  “You were up at Leo’s place?”

  “No.” She made a face. “Jimmy was outside. I think he has been hiding in the bushes.”

  “Like a dog.”

  “Like a dog,” she agreed. “Is he normally like that?”

  I held up a finger to my lips, then pointed to the stairs.

  “I don’t think anything about Jimmy is normal,” I said in a louder than normal voice, “and I’m not talking about him being a nanos.” Nanos is the Greek word for midget. It’s impolite, but then so was Jimmy.

  There was scuffling on the stairs, then Jimmy appeared, all one hundred and twenty centimeters of him. The Ugg boots were still on his feet but he’d lost the guy-liner.

  “I heard that,” he said.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t eavesdrop then.”

  “Can’t a man walk up his own stairs without ridicule?”

  I squinted at him. “Do you even live here?” I looked at Lydia, who would know, seeing as how she was technically Leo and Jimmy’s landlord now. “Does he live here?”

  She held up both hands. “Keep me out of this.” And on that note she vanished into her apartment, leaving me with Jimmy and my broom. A moment later the German pop music started up again.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” Jimmy said, shaking his hands at the ceiling.

  Why that little … “Me? You’re the eavesdropper. How is this my fault?”

  He looked left, looked right, then dropped his voice to a whisper. “You know I like her.”

  “So do something about it.”

  What I could see of his face fell. “I can’t.”

  “Sure you can. You’re Jimmy Kontos. You’re famous ... in some sticky circles.”

  “You’re right.” Gaining confidence, he nodded. “I’m kind of a big deal.”

  “I wouldn’t say big.”

  I grabbed my broom, darted into my apartment, slammed the door. Jimmy’s Ugg boots shuffled up to the narrow gap underneath. There was a small scuffling, then his voice wafted into the room.”

  “I can see your feet.”

  “Are you lying on the floor or are you really that short?”

  “You stink,” he whispered under the door. I guess he didn’t want Lydia to hear what a little sawn-off malakas he could be.

  When I turned around, the whole Vasilikos team was standing there. The women were all various shades of bored. Kyrios Harry was wearing a frown. He struck me as a man who wore one often and well.

  “Why are you still here?”

  “And miss the show?” Kyrios Harry said. “Your life is a disaster.”

  “It’s not a disaster. The worst part of my life right now is standing in my apartment with his whole family.”

  One of his daughters giggled. She looked around at the rest of her bikini gang and the woman I assumed was her mother. “She thinks we’re his family.”

  “You’re not?”

  “We’re his companions,” she said.

  “You mean mistresses?”

  A storm cloud wafted past her face. “Companions. We keep him company.”

  “And you’re okay with this?” I asked the older woman with the stretched and tucked face.

  “Why not? I am not his mother or his wife.”

  “I like young people,” Harry said in his own defense, which, if you ask me, was no defense at all. Not one that would stand up in a court of human decency. “Not like that,” he said, reading my mind.

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  “For that sort of thing I like older women,” he said.

  “I still don’t care.”

  My phone rang. It was Betty.

  “The sage and sweeping didn’t work, did they?”

  “How did you kn
ow?”

  “Oh, your thoughts are like fireworks in the sky on the darkest night of the year, luv. Would you like me to send my brother over? He’s familiar with a blessing or two that might fix your wee ghostie problem.”

  I looked at the ghosts infesting my apartment. “You guys are in for it now.”

  Harry’s frown turned upside down in an approximation of what I thought was supposed to be a smile. It was toothy and sharklike and I didn’t trust it one bit. “I am a businessman, Allie—can I call you Allie?—so let us make a deal.”

  “No deal. Just go.”

  “Solve my murder and I will tell you something you want to know,” he said.

  “People on Merope already tell me everything I want to know. For everything else, there’s the internet. It can even tell me if the internet is supposed to have a capital letter. True story: it used to have a capital letter, but now it’s perfectly acceptable to use a lowercase letter.”

  “There are some things the internet and gossiping peasants cannot tell you.”

  My one hand that wasn’t holding the phone to my ear sat on my hip in the indignant position. “Like what?”

  “I can tell you what happened to Andreas. I know where he is.”

  Shock rippled through me.

  “Thank you,” I told Betty, “but my life’s plot just twisted.”

  “You know where to find me if you change your mind.”

  I ended the call and carefully set my phone on the table next to the front door. Then I looked at the King of Greek Bread, my heart breaking all over again in my chest.

  “Tell me what you know about Andreas.”

  Chapter Four

  Harry Vasilikos wagged his finger at me. “Quid pro quo. You help me, I help you.”

  “I already told you: I’m not a cop.”

  “But you are a detective of sorts, which means you can do things the police cannot, yes?

  “Right but also wrong.”

  He didn’t look like he gave a damn. “Think about it this way: the sooner you do what I want, the sooner you will get your information and your peace. And while you do that, I will be here waiting.”

  One of his—cough, cough—companions raised her hand. A dozen bangles slid down her arm, jangling like a bagful of empty soda cans. “Tell her to turn on the television. We are missing our shows.”