Ghouls Just Want to Have Fun (18 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I found myself staring at Manny, thinking I'd somehow missed a huge chunk of pertinent material somewhere.

"Marry you?"

Manny nodded. "Aunt Mo wants more than anything for Manny to settle down with a good girl. You just said you were a good girl. You'll do."

As proposals went, "You'll do" left something to be desired.

"You can't be serious, Manny," I said. "I can't marry you. We hardly know each other."

"Doesn't matter," Manny said.

"How can you say it doesn't matter?" I asked. "You're talking about spending a lifetime together! Isn't it kind of useful to know the person who is going to be sharing your bathroom--and probably your toothbrush without you knowing it--for, like, ever?"

"What about an engagement, then? Be Manny's fiancee. Will that work?"

I shook my head. "What?"

"Aunt Mo is in the hospital. She may not have much time. She wants to see Manny with a good girl. Manny wants to give her what she wants."

"Yeah. So?"

"So Manny needs you to pretend to be his girlfriend."

I put my ear near Manny's mouth. "What was that? I don't think I heard you quite right."

"Manny needs a girlfriend for a couple hours to visit Manny's great-aunt Mo. Barbie'll do. She'll do just fine."

For the first time in my life, I wished I was Ken.

"You want Barbie--uh, me--to pretend to be your girlfriend at your aunt's deathbed?" I asked Manny. "To stand there and lie to a dying woman? To perpetrate a fraud on an unsuspecting old lady?"

"Good. Barbie's a quick study," Manny said. "So, what time should Manny pick you up tomorrow?"

I looked at him. "Huh?"

"What say two o'clock?" Manny suggested. "Or would you rather meet Manny at the hospital?"

I'd rather be having a pelvic exam.

"I'm not sure--"

Manny began to ring, and he pulled out his cell phone. He put a finger out to me. "Yo, Manny here. Yeah. Yeah. Hell no. Yeah. Right. Okay. See ya."

I shook my head. Monosyllabic didn't begin to touch it. Manny put a huge paw on my head, mussing my hair.

"Manny's gotta split," he said. "Manny'll see Barbie at the hospital gift shop at two."

I blinked. "Gift shop? Why the gift shop?" I found myself saying, instead of something along the lines of, "Hell no, Tressa won't go!"

"Can't visit Aunt Mo without flowers and a gift," Manny explained.

I looked at him. "What would a dying woman want with flowers and gifts?" I thought to ask.

"Aunt Mo don't know how bad she is. Walk in there empty-handed, and she'll know she's a goner for sure," Manny said. I winced. Manny patted my head again. "I'm outta here, Barbie."

I watched Manny's long strides take him to his crotch-rocket. Uh, before those who aren't Harley-literate think I'm being perverted here, that's slang for "motorcycle."

From a stint as the Wicked Witch of the West to a newshound on the scent of a high-powered story to a hospital room performance as Manny's Dream-Date Barbie. I really had to wonder what was next.
Hollywood Squares?

I heard voices near the front of the community center and recognized one of them as belonging to Rick Townsend, and I yanked open the passenger's side of my Plymouth and slid across the seat, diving behind the wheel. The last thing I needed after Manny dropped his little betrothal bombshell on me was to face Ranger Rick Townsend.

The Plymouth sputtered to life, and I planted a kiss on the steering wheel. I could only imagine Townsend's expression in my rearview mirror as I peeled out. Remember? My rearview mirror is among the collection of items that move about the floor of my car, so I really did have to imagine his expression.

I headed out of town, looking forward to crawling into bed with a cup of hot cocoa (with marshmallow cream) and spending the evening with Elizabeth Courtney Howard.

I'd finally decided on a plan of action, which felt an awful lot like inaction to me. I'd decided to take the semidirect approach, and place a call to Courtney Howard the next morning to see if I could persuade Vanessa McCormick to give me one last shot at convincing her boss to give me at least a short interview over the phone. It wasn't what I'd hoped for, but time was running out, and I couldn't think of a single new idea to pull out of Tressa's bag of tricks.

I pulled into my driveway, and an itty-bitty, insignificant, hardly-bad-at-all swear word escaped my lips when I spied Shelby Lynne's brother's Jeep in the driveway, accompanied by Joe Townsend's Buick. Oh, terrific. Just what I needed. Joltin' Joe Townsend and Hellion Hannah and a houseful of erotic artwork.

Banished temporarily to the out-of-doors, Butch and Sundance almost barreled me over welcoming me home. With the affection these guys showed me, who needed a boyfriend?

Which got me to thinking again about Manny and poor dying Aunt Mo. I sat on the porch for a few minutes, playing with the hounds and just enjoying the peace and quiet of the night, knowing that when I opened the door to my home, it would be like stepping into a scene from
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
.

I gave my critters a final hug and stood for a moment, collecting my courage, then finally decided maybe I'd left it out back, so I headed around to the back door. If luck was with me, I could sneak ???d make my way to my room without anyone's being the wiser. It sounded like a plan to me.

I moved around to the back, pulled my key out from underneath the rock that isn't really a rock and everyone knows it, and unlocked the door as quietly as I could. I opened the door just wide enough for me to slip through, closed it quietly behind me and prepared to tiptoe down the hall to take blessed refuge in my room. I'd gone about three steps when I noticed that the lights were out. Strange, since Gram obviously had company. I took another step down the hall, picking up a weird scent--a combination of cloying incense and other, as yet unidentifiable fragrances. I was about to take another step when an unfamiliar voice stopped me in my tippy-toed tracks.

"We wish to make contact with the spirit of Loralie Holloway. Loralie, please make your presence known."

I stood there for a moment. What in the world?

"Loralie, we come to help you find rest."

I considered making a right turn into my bedroom and crawling under the bed, thinking that if I was in bed, I could discount everything around me as merely part of a bad dream. But Tressa, Warrior Princess, that I am, I ventured forth into fray.

I came to the end of the hallway and had to lean on the wall for support. My living room was lit by more candles than we could safely put on my gramma's birthday cake. A card table had been set up in the middle of my living room, and four people sat hunched over it. Somehow I didn't think there was a high-stakes poker game going on, or a jigsaw puzzle marathon. The now-familiar smell of incense, mingled with the combined perfumes of what had to be twenty-five candles of different scents, made me a wee bit high.

"We wish to make contact with the spirit of Loralie Holloway. Loralie, please make your presence known to us."

I could only stand and stare, feeling like I'd taken a wrong turn in the way-wrong wardrobe and ended up in a twilight-years
Twilight Zone
. I took a couple more steps--close enough to finally see the Ouija board in the middle of the table and sixteen fingertips on the plastic indicator dial that receives messages from the beyond. Eight fingertips were from two seniors with a penchant for trouble, four were from a homecoming queen candidate with all the charm of Frankenstein in taffeta, and the remaining four? I had no clue who those fingertips belonged to, but he appeared to be the one attempting to establish the long-distance contact with someone way out of my calling area. I cringed to think of the roaming charges.

"Loralie, we come to help you find rest."

I looked at the table occupant who was commanding the spirit of Loralie to come on down. I'd never seen this Kreskin before in my life.

I decided I'd better to put an end to the fun before something bad happened and the call for Loralie really did go through. I crept to Gram's room, grabbed her mini-air horn and moved back to the end of the hallway, then gave a short toot.

Screams erupted from around the table, and the guy who'd been calling for Loralie fell out of his chair and crumpled to the floor.

"Uh, excuse me, but, like, what's going on?" I asked the discombobulated group.

"Tressa Jayne! You scared the wits out of us," my grandma scolded. Like between the four of them they had any wits to begin with. "Don't ever sneak up on someone like that again! And the idea of using that horn! Why, you scared poor Tom out of his chair!"

I blinked. "Tom? Tom who?"

"Tom Murphy, dear. He's a friend of Shelby Lynne."

"Oh. Tom Thumb."

"Nice." Tom Murphy got to his feet. At least I think he was standing. It was kind of hard to tell.

I put out a hand and gestured at the table. "Would someone like to explain all this?" I asked.

"Not me," Joe said. "I'm a guest."

"Shelby Lynne?"

"I plead the Fifth."

I looked at my grandma. "Joe brought a chocolate cake," was all she offered.

"With chocolate frosting?" I said, then shook my head. Focus, Tressa, focus.

"What about you?" I spoke to the conjurer. "What were you trying to do?"

Tom Murphy stuck his hands in his pockets and weaved back and forth on his wee little feet.

"We were just having some harmless fun," he stammered. "Getting in the holiday mood. You know. Just joking around. Right, Shelby?"

Shelby Lynne was suddenly the poster child for See No Evil. First time for everything.

"Harmless? You've got enough candles lit here to turn the ceiling black, and you're trying to raise the dead. Have I missed anything else?" I asked.

"Besides the cat hurling on the carpet, I can't think of a thing," Joe said. "How about you, Hannah?"

Gram gave him a dark look. "You were the one who fed her the cheese puffs."

"What's the deal with you people? Why on earth are you trying to contact Loralie Holloway?" I asked the four paranormalists--or, probably, that should be abnormalists.

"Joe here told us about the crying and the rose petals at Holloway Hall the other night," Gram said. "And I told you about the time your Paw-Paw Will and I--"

I put out a hand. I didn't think I needed to relive that little trek down memory lane.

"And so? You thought you'd set up a psychic hotline in the living room and reach out and touch some dead people?"

"Not people," Joe pointed out. "Just Loralie."

I looked at Joe and saw for the first time how he was dressed. No neon sweat suit this evening: Rick's grandpa had on a brown turtleneck, khaki pants and the same tweed jacket he'd worn the night he'd gone bearing gifts for Elizabeth Courtney Howard.

"What else did Joe tell you about that night?" I asked, wondering if he'd spilled the beans about our author-in-residence to my grandma.

"Said he was helping you on that story you told me about the other day," Gram said. "Sounds to me as if Loralie is still up to her old tricks," she added. "That's why we were trying to contact her."

I nodded. "I see. So, just for curiosity's sake, what were the four of you planning to do if you did make contact with Loralie--or with something else out there in the great beyond?" I asked. "For curiosity's sake."

All four of the seance participants looked at one another.

My grandma finally spoke up.

"As for me, I'd be having a Dr. Phil moment with Loralie, that's for sure," she said.

Gram and I are both devoted fans of Dr. Phil. I love the way he talks. Like, "That dog ain't gonna hunt no more." You know, he's a good ol' boy who shoots straight and deals from the top of the deck.

"I'd be telling her that she needed to get a life and stop with the boo-hooing and rose-petal-tossin' and move on down the road," Gram said. "That's what I'd tell her."

"Isn't that like telling a ghost to drop dead? And aren't they already dead?" Joe asked.

I rubbed my temple, thinking it was extremely fortunate for all concerned that no contact had been made that night, or I might have come home and found four cadavers sitting around the card table.

"Uh, I think I've heard enough," I said. "This first and only seance is now concluded."

I was going to switch on the lights and start blowing out candles when the doorbell rang. Everyone in the room froze, and we all looked at one another.

"Who could that be?" Torn Thumb--Murphy--asked, his eyes as big as Pringles potato chips.

"Loralie!" Gram said.

I have to admit to feeling a little apprehensive, until I remembered that ghosts generally didn't ring the front doorbell. They liked to walk through walls and float around the ceiling and leave behind snotty ectoplasm or wet footprints.

I hurried for the front door, hoping word hadn't gotten out that Hellion Hannah's Haven for Those Halted in the Hereafter was open for business. Instead I opened the door to find Ranger Rick standing on my front porch. This wasn't happening.

"Oh, uh, hello, Townsend. We meet again," I said, trying to close the door before he could look beyond me into the living room and see that it had been turned into something from
Fright Night
. Townsend's big, brown hand on the door prevented me from accomplishing that, so I tried to block his view with my body. (But, let's not get nasty here. I'm not
that
broad in the beam.)

"What can I do you for?" I asked, moving back and forth whenever Townsend made a move to look around me.

Townsend frowned. "Are you all right? You're dancing like you've got ants in your pants."

I shook my head. "I just need to use the restroom, that's all," I told him. "Was there something in particular you needed?"

Townsend nodded. "A couple of somethings," he said. "First, a word with my grandfather, who if I'm not mistaken is probably trying to sneak down your hallway and out the back door as we speak. And second, a word with you about your friend Manny."

I gave up and opened the door with a flourish. "Enter if you dare," I told him in a scary-movie voice, motioned him into the living room and closed the door behind him.