The ensuing laughter brings additional tears to her eyes. “Enough of this emotional nonsense. Try on the shoes and the fascinator. I need to see the whole look.”
I’m pleased that the beautiful red-satin T-strap shoes sport a reasonable two-and-a-half-inch heel. She frequently forces me into teetering stilt shoes that do nothing to diminish my natural clumsiness.
“You’re not—”
I stare daggers.
She claps both of her ring-ensconced hands over her mouth and winks.
Shaking my head, I admonish her. “Nothing like a ghost with an addiction to lying.”
“Addiction is nothing to joke about, dear. You know my struggle with alcoholism ruined more than one of my marriages.”
“Yes, Grams. I wasn’t making fun. One day at a time and all that. My apologies.”
She swirls around the closet in a bit of a huff, while I fiddle with my diamond-encrusted headband and the large feathery apparatus hanging off the side.
“Here, let me.”
Her ability to pick up and influence objects in the corporeal world is really coming along. When she grabs the headband to make adjustments, it feels almost as if she were alive.
Now we’re both crying.
“Thank you, Grams.”
“Absolutely any time, my darling granddaughter. But you have to stop making a mess of me. We’ve got to get your unruly hair into finger waves. They take forever to set.”
I step back and kick out one hip. “Do I even want to know what finger waves are?”
She shrugs her designer-gown-clad shoulders and whispers, “It’s probably best if you don’t.”
Chapter 2
Dreading the unknown, I peel off my dress and hang it up to avoid any phantom retribution, toss my slip on the padded mahogany bench in the center of the closet, and carefully slip off my beautiful ruby slippers.
“Follow me, Mizithra.” My ghostly hairstylist blasts through the wall into the bathroom, while I walk around through the doorway like a civilized human.
After what seems like hours of having my head smacked with a hairbrush, while endless amounts of goop are combed through my snow-white locks, I look like a character from Star Trek: The Next Generation. I have large metal clips all over my head and I feel like I might be able to pick up extra radio signals even if I didn’t have psychic powers.
Slouching in defeat, I ask, “How long?”
Grams sinks down to eye level and arches one perfectly drawn brow. “As long as it takes.”
Exhaling dramatically, I pick up my phone. “Fine. I’ll be out on the fire escape.”
I recently discovered that there’s a fire escape out of the back of my second-floor apartment. I’ve got massive 6 x 6 windows with a gorgeous view of the harbor, immaculate tin-plated ceilings, secret bookcase doors, dream closets, an old-fashioned telephone privacy booth, and now a fire escape.
I climb out the window and text Erick. “Didn’t see you at the viewing. Coming to the memorial?”
No reply.
All right. He is a local county sheriff who is, I’m sure, very busy with other people’s problems. But I’m kind of his girlfriend now, and I would think my texts would rank very high on his list of daily priorities.
No reply.
I’m not going to be one of those girls . . . I’ll watch some videos while I calmly wait.
No reply.
No big deal. I have to sit out here anyway. My hair is certainly not dry. Maybe I’ll scroll through some social media and ignore the beads of sweat forming along my hairline.
No reply.
All right. You got me. My breathing is rapid and my heart is having a little infarction. I’m not this calm or this patient. I’m calling. “Yes, hello. May I speak to Sheriff Harper?”
My call is not put through.
“Oh. Yes, it’s Mitzy. No, it’s not urgent. No, I haven’t been kidnapped.”
I hang up the phone and I’m half tempted to throw it off the balcony like every scene in every rom-com I’ve ever watched. The film-school dropout in me is desperate to make that happen, but the recently living below the poverty line me can’t see the wisdom in destroying a perfectly good phone.
There’s really no reason for me to be upset. According to Furious Monkeys, the nickname I’ve given the front desk deputy due to her addiction to said game, Erick is on a call. And because she’s fairly familiar with my amateur sleuthing, she happened to mention that the call was to the Barnes estate. So, not only am I interested in talking to my sort of boyfriend, Erick Harper, but now I also want to know what the heck is going on out at the manse.
Using the dorky abbreviation for mansion that my father and I used to jokingly bandy about gives me a moment of nostalgia for the old Duncan holdings. I only visited a couple of times, but what a spread!
My practical father sold the estate after my grandpa Cal passed away. He said he didn’t need such a big place and that the profits would go a long way to supporting the Duncan Restorative Justice Foundation, an organization my ex-con father generously founded to help defend wrongfully accused prisoners and find good-paying jobs for former criminals. He’s trying to do his part to reduce the rate of recidivism.
He’s such a great guy. Sure, I wish he had been around when my mother died. Maybe he could’ve prevented my mostly horrible experiences in foster care, but everything happens for a reason. All of the decisions in my life brought me to this point. Do I have regrets? Yes. Does it make me appreciate what I have now even more? Abso-freaking-lutely!
Hooray, my stupid hair feels crispy. I suppose that’s the same as dry?
Climbing back through the window, I call Grams. “Hey! Come and check this weird hairdo. Can we take these cyborg pins off my head?”
Grams blasts through the walls, causing my heart to skip a beat, but, as usual, she has no concern for my earthly fears.
“I seem to remember we agreed on the slow, sparkly re-entry. What happened to that idea?” She completely ignores me.
“Let me see.” She carefully fiddles with the clips and touches my crunchy hair.
“What’s the verdict?”
“It feels dry, but we’re going to leave those clips in for another hour just to be safe.”
“You can’t be serious.”
She places a bejeweled fist on her hip. “Serious as an angry spirit.”
I know the ominous words are supposed to scare me, but when they’re coming from the loving face of a woman who died in her sixties but selected the youthful ghost age of thirty-five, it feels more like a comedy scene from Gene Wilder’s Young Frankenstein.
I bow like a marionette on strings. “I am yours to command, Great Ghost-ma.”
“Oh Mitzy, you’re a hoot.”
Shortly after taking possession of the bookstore, I discovered that Ghost-ma’s lawyer, Silas Willoughby, a dangerously skilled alchemist, had devised a way to tether her spirit to the bookshop rather than let her cross over.
It definitely took some getting used to, living with a ghost, and there were a few unfortunate pants accidents. But now that Ghost-ma and I have some ground rules, we’re getting along fine—when she bothers to follow the rules. Apart from a few missteps, I’m learning to co-exist with her and her fiendish feline.