Melody Bittersweet and The Girls' Ghostbusting Agency: A laugh out loud romantic comedy of Love, Life and ... Ghosts? (26 page)

‘Put your hand over mine, Isaac,’ I whisper, and I watch in fascination as his arm moves out and covers mine. It’s a good job none of the others can see this, because we must look like something from
The Exorcist
.

And then I slide my hand into Richard’s and shake it, my eyes locked on his.

‘It’s the greatest privilege of my life to meet you, son,’ Isaac says, and I can feel him trembling. Tears fall unchecked down my cheeks, because it’s the greatest privilege of my life too, to be able to do this for them.

‘The honour is all mine,’ Richard replies, his voice grave and rich, and he holds my hand as carefully as if I were a ninety-year-old war veteran in full military uniform rather than a sugar-loving, robust girl in a Captain America T-shirt.

‘Jojo,’ I say, and nod for her to come across too. Richard lets go of my hand, and Jojo steps forward.

‘I’m not much of a hand-shaker.’ Her eyes shimmer with tears as she speaks. ‘Would it be alright if I hugged you instead?’

Isaac holds his arms out to her before she’s even finished speaking, and I lift mine to join his.

‘Of course.’

We’re both shaking when she hugs me hard, and I watch in wonder as Isaac’s arms fold around Jojo’s shoulders alongside mine.

‘This is the best thing that’s happened to me in a hundred years,’ he says. I whisper his words to Jojo, and I don’t know if it’s because his heart is directly over mine, but my voice . . . the words come out as his, not mine. I jolt in utter shock, and Jojo and Richard stare at me, incredulous.

I let go of Jojo and step to the side, and for a moment I feel like I might be sick. It’s almost as if the air around me is rushing to push all of the particles back into the right place at break-neck speed, and I gasp in a few lungs full of air to steady myself. Isaac is beside me again now, wide-eyed and as real to me as he’s always been.

‘Did you hear that?’ I croak, and he nods. ‘It was me. I felt it, I’m sure I did.’

Jojo looks me over as if she’s checking I’m alright. ‘You . . . that wasn’t you, was it?’

‘I’ve never done that before,’ I say, laying my hand over my chest. ‘I didn’t know that would happen.’

‘Thank you,’ Richard says, and then he bear-hugs me. It’s unexpected and very, very reassuring, because he’s real and warm and solid and it feels how I expect a hug from your father might feel, if you’re lucky enough to have one. I’m tearful again, and he tells me that what I just did was incredibly brave and he’ll remember it forever.

Wow. This is so far beyond the expected remits of my job. I’m an emotional wreck, we all are, but I look up sharply when Marina calls my name from over the other side of the cellar.

‘Sorry,’ I say, dashing the backs of my hands quickly over my eyes. ‘I need to go.’ I glance up and call Artie, and his face appears instantly at the coal chute.

‘Boss?’

I reel a bit at the title, and then think actually maybe I’ll have earned it if we all get out of here unscathed today.

‘Can you help Jojo and Richard outside and then wait for us there please?’

I shoot across the room without waiting for his reply, because I don’t need to hear it to know I can rely on him to do as I’ve asked.

‘They’re back,’ Marina whispers as I join her at the top of the stairs. She’s on her own, so Douglas must have gone off to see what’s happening elsewhere in the house.

‘Artie and the Hensons have gone outside, so at least we know we’re not going to get trapped in the cellar this time,’ I say, straining to hear what’s going on outside.

‘No need to worry about that,’ she grins. ‘I knocked the key out of the keyhole with my stiletto heel and Douglas managed to push it back under the door to me.’

‘All of those hours re-watching
Ghost
weren’t wasted after all,’ I quip, and she shoots me a sarcastic smile.

‘You have no romance in your soul, Melody Bittersweet.’

‘I’ll fire you if you take up pottery,’ I warn her, and we both start laughing. It’s entirely inappropriate given the situation that we’re in, I think we’re probably both a tiny bit hysterical.

‘Ssh,’ I put my finger against my lips to quieten her, because the voices outside are getting louder and approaching the cellar door.

‘Let her out this minute,’ Leo demands sharply. I guess he must be talking to the twins.

‘Yes, let her out so I can break her goddamn legs!’ Scarborough booms, and I jump back from the door because he hammers his fists on it. ‘I hired you to do a simple fucking job, Bittersweet, and you’ve lost me my buyers and dragged distant fucking relatives half-way down the country to break into my property and try and take my house from me.’

‘I really think you need to calm down,’ Leo wades in again, and then I hear him yowl with pain and the twins tweeting like baby birds in their nest when an eagle just swooped in and took their papa.

‘Oh God, we have to get out there and see what’s happening,’ I say, desperately fumbling to get the key into the lock with shaky hands. ‘It’ll be all my fault if he kills Leo.’

It slides into place eventually, and I look at Marina before I turn it because, to be perfectly honest, I’m suddenly terrified.

‘Ready?’

She nods. ‘We’ve got this.’

I draw on her determination and make it my own. I turn the key.

I
plan
to push the door slowly open, but Donovan Scarborough is faster and rips it back on its hinges the minute I unlock it. He reminds me of Daddy Bear from Goldilocks when he looms up towards us in the doorway, his arms aloft and his eyes wild. Marina and I are so shocked that we duck underneath his arms and make a run for it, ending up behind him in the hall so he swings around in a blind rage.

Leo is sprawled out on the floor with the fembots on their knees beside him, but thankfully from the way he’s batting them off and gingerly feeling his nose to see if it’s broken it’s fairly obvious that he’s going to be fine.

All three Scarborough brothers are here too. Isaac looks mortified, and Lloyd is observing proceedings with an expression of morbid satisfaction. I don’t care if he’s an old man; if he were flesh and blood right this moment, I think I’d actually swing for him to wipe that smug little smile from his face. Only Douglas has the gumption to make a useful suggestion.

‘Hit him with that!’ he shouts, gesturing towards a tall china vase on a side table close to me.

‘Not the Wedgwood!’ Lloyd yells, finally roused out of his smugness as I reach for it. ‘I paid a fortune for it!’

‘Shame,’ I say, as my fingers clasp around the vase’s slender neck. ‘It’s pretty.’

Donovan Scarborough makes a sudden lunge for me and I instinctively swing my arm back and bring it down with a satisfying crack over his head.

He goes down onto his knees like a comedy character in a cartoon, clutching his skull in shock. The vase was pretty dainty really, nowhere near heavy enough to kill him but more than enough to give him a banging headache and me and Marina time to scarper towards the staircase. Even as we’re doing it I’m thinking how only too-stupid-to-live heroines in bad B movies make for the stairs instead of heading for the front door, but it was the nearest option at short notice and Scarborough was between us and the exit.

Besides, we need to get up there to execute the second prong of my hastily cobbled-together plan.

‘Come on,’ I say, half-dragging Marina by the hand. ‘We’ve got a teddy bear to find.’

We make it to the top of the staircase in five seconds flat, running and scrabbling, and when we see Scarborough start crawling up behind us Marina takes one of her shoes off and flings it at him.

‘Just so you know, I’m putting new shoes on expenses,’ she says as she takes aim. I don’t argue. So far today she’s used her skyscraper heels to kick Fletch’s hand when he grabbed me under the bed, knock the key from the cellar door and now to hamper Donovan Scarborough’s progress. The way she’s going she’ll deserve Jimmy Choo’s rather than Topshop.

Lloyd must have heard what I said about the bear, because he’s waiting at the top of the stairs and is no longer the sneering, supercilious ghost of a few minutes previously. He’s reminds me more of his great-grandson than ever; filled with rabid, ugly fury.

If he could push me down the stairs and be done with me, I have no doubt whatsoever that he would.

Isaac and Douglas are here too now, and Donovan is almost at the top of the stairs. His head is a bleeding mess of little cuts and scrapes from the vase and Marina’s heel, he looks like a boxer at the end of a very long fight. An onlooker would be forgiven for thinking that he’d been brawling with Leo, given that he’s in a similar state on the floor in the hallway.

‘I know you killed Douglas,’ I say, staring defiantly at Lloyd. ‘You killed him, and then you stitched the knife inside your favourite teddy bear.’

Douglas is standing completely still, staring at his brother. ‘It’s true, isn’t it? I’ve always known it had to be you.’

‘You can’t prove a thing,’ Lloyd snarls, curling his lips back like a rabid beast.

‘Get out of my house!’ Donovan Scarborough shouts, belligerent and overwrought. He’s lying face-down on the stairs now, clearly exhausted. He looks like a man who has spent too much of his time enjoying the high life and not enough time at the gym. He’s knackered and bleeding, and I’m not sure if he’s shouting at me or the whole lot of us, ghosts included.

‘Oh, I’m going to prove it,’ I counter, jabbing my chin out in defiance at Lloyd. ‘You just watch me.’

I turn to dash down the corridor towards the master bedroom, but I’m stopped in my tracks by the sight of Fletch walking out of that same room.

He’s covered in dust, dirt and disintegrated rubber carpet underlay, and he’s carrying a saggy, dusty teddy bear.

‘Thought I may as well save you a job, Bittersweet,’ he says, casually handing me the bear. I hold it in my hands and, when I press its abdomen, I can feel something sickeningly solid inside it.

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’ I’m thanking Fletch, but I’m also thanking Agnes Scarborough for leading me here. ‘How did you find it so quickly?’

He shrugs. ‘Studied the floorboards. One of them looked a bit off, as if a woman had nailed it down.’

Oh, he’ll suffer for that comment. Not right now, but later at some point. We head back to the top landing, back to the Scarborough brothers.

‘Fletch, do you think you could take Donovan Scarborough downstairs? There’s one last thing I need to do.’

‘It’s that gobbledegook bullshit again, isn’t it?’ he asks, and when I don’t answer, he goes half-way down the stairs and stands beside Scarborough.

‘You can get up and walk or I can drag you. I don’t care which.’

When Scarborough ignores him, he sighs. ‘Have it your own way then, fella,’ he says, then yanks Donovan down the stairs by one foot.

‘I think you might owe Fletcher Gunn a sexual favour now too,’ Marina says, as we stand on the wide landing and watch him drag a protesting Scarborough across the tiles and park him against the wall by the front door.

‘Go and find Artie and the others?’ I squeeze her hand. ‘I’ll be out soon.’

She knows what this means, and she casts an uncertain glance in the direction of the Scarborough brothers and raises her hand in a brief, sad, gesture of goodbye. She looks to me, nods just once, and then heads off down the stairs.

As I turn to face the three brothers, I think I can hear sirens in the distance.

‘Oh-oh.’ Douglas rolls his eyes. ‘Someone called the po-po.’

Lloyd and Isaac look confused.

‘
Hawaii Five-0
?’ I ask, and Douglas laughs sadly.

‘I quite like it. I’ll never know what happens at the end of the series now.’

It seems such an insignificant thing to lament in the big scheme of things.

‘I think it’s time to go, at last,’ Isaac says. It has to be Isaac who releases them; it’s only right and fair after he’s carried the weight of injustice and loss through life and death for so many long, lonely years.

‘Looks like the games up, old boy,’ Douglas says, gesturing towards the bear hanging from my fingertips. ‘Only you could think to hide a murder weapon in such a goddamn childish place.’

Lloyd is shaking with fury. ‘You can’t have her,’ he spits. ‘Not after all these years. Not now, like this.’

Douglas frowns, obviously as confused as I am by Lloyd’s words, and I can’t stop myself from asking the question that’s had me baffled throughout.

‘Why didn’t you just confess after you died, Lloyd? I mean, you got away with murder. You didn’t need to hang around here all of these years, yet still you stayed.’

His eyes widen, and his cold laugh chills me. ‘Because if I stayed here, he had to stay too,’ his eyes flicker towards Douglas for a second. ‘She can’t choose him if he’s not there, can she?’

‘Your mother?’ I say, trying hard to understand.

‘Of course not my mother, you stupid, naive little girl,’ he whisper-growls, as if he’s fast losing patience with me. ‘My wife.’

‘Maud?’ Douglas sounds genuinely shocked, and Lloyd rounds on him, enraged.

‘Don’t you speak her name!’ he yells. ‘You never fucking got it, did you? She was my friend, but it was always you she wanted. She barely noticed me, because just like all the rest of them, she was always so goddamn starry-eyed over you.’

‘You killed me to stop me from going near Maud, a woman I barely knew and had never shown so much as a flicker of interest in?’ Douglas looks utterly bereft at having lost his life over something so insignificant to him.

‘Everything is always about you, isn’t it, Douglas?’ Lloyd rants, exasperated and almost revelling in his big reveal. ‘Except this wasn’t. It was about me, and about Maud. Without you in the picture she finally saw
me
. Without you in the picture she finally loved
me
, and if you think I’m going to let you waltz back into her life looking just how you always did and steal her from me now, you’re . . .’

Lloyd shakes his head, his fists balled tight at his sides. He looks every inch the old, unhinged man that he is; it must tear his still heart out to look at Douglas now, forever young, strong and handsome and to know that he made him that way. Lloyd killed Douglas to keep him away from the girl he loved, and now, in death, he’d created a rival he didn’t stand a chance of beating. I could almost feel sorry for him, except for the fact that it’s Machiavellian and cunning and monstrous.

‘You didn’t confess because you wanted to keep me trapped in this house?’ Douglas almost laughs at the utter depraved absurdness. ‘Do you know how crazy that makes you sound?’

Lloyd seethes, and boils, and writhes, because there is nothing he can do anymore. He’s had a good run, but Douglas was right a couple of minutes ago. After more than a hundred years, the game is finally up.

I can hear a deathly rattle coming from Lloyd as realisation dawns, and I brace myself because I sense what’s about to happen just a couple of seconds before it does.

He stares at me and gapes as if he has something more to say and then, suddenly, violently, he shatters into a million razor-sharp shards. It’s like that sometimes. Urgent and angry, as if he’d boiled in his own temper and vitriol and detonated from the inside. It’s not a nice thing to see, and I look away and close my eyes until it’s over.

When I open my eyes again, Douglas has moved closer to me.

‘Are you okay?’ His eyes search my face, concerned for me rather than himself. It’s easy to see why everyone found him so easy to love.

I nod, and a lone tear rolls down my cheek, because he’s going now too, only this time it isn’t ugly or violent. A shimmer of colour glows warm and welcoming around him, as if he’s walking away into sunshine to take his place on the cricket pitch. Just before I lose sight of him altogether, he presses his fingers against the back of his hand and smiles that dashing smile that must have melted the heart of every girl in town, Maud included.

I press my fingers to the back of my hand too, and I know it’s fanciful, but I can feel his kiss there as he disappears.

I close my eyes for a second and swallow down the scald of tears in my throat, and then I open them again and turn to Isaac.

‘That just leaves me,’ he says with a small, sad smile, and I gaze at him with a heavy, full heart.

‘It does,’ I say. I wish I could take his hands in mine and say farewell properly. ‘Safe travels, Isaac.’

‘Thank you, Melody. Thank you for everything,’ he murmurs indistinctly. Or perhaps he said it clearly, but he’s fading so fast I can barely hear him. I just manage to catch his last word before he fades away completely.

‘Priscilla.’

As I gaze at the empty space he’s left behind, I wish hard that he finds peace now with Priscilla and their boy, Charles Frederick.

* * *

I
t’s
a good couple of hours before the police leave. They walked into the scene to find Donovan Scarborough asleep and covered in blood, Leo still being tended to by the fluttering hands of the fembots, and Fletch scribbling furiously in his notebook and snapping pictures on his phone. His favourite shot was of Donovan Scarborough throwing a punch at the police officer who tried to rouse him and subsequently being thrown in the back of a police car and driven off with the sirens blaring.

Jojo and Richard left not long after, for the local hotel they’ve booked into with a promise to catch up again in a day or two when we’ve all slept and caught our breath. Who knows what will happen with the knife now it’s in police hands for analysis, or even what will happen to Scarborough House, but in the end that wasn’t ever the point. What mattered was piecing together the history of a family fractured by jealousy and lies. At the end of the day, as is most often the case in life, what really mattered was love.

M
arina and Artie
head off and climb wearily into Babs, and before I follow them I turn back to Fletch.

‘Thanks for coming to my rescue,’ I say. We’re both grimy and blood-splattered, as if we’re actors at the end of a blockbuster disaster movie. He’s Bruce Willis without the grubby vest, and do you know what I want to do? Marina would be impressed, because,
Yippee-Ki-Yay
, I want to swoon.

‘You know me, Ghostbuster,’ he says. ‘Anything for a good story.’

I laugh softly. I don’t really know him at all, but maybe one day I will. ‘I should go.’