The Dead Girls Detective Agency (10 page)

It was all bull. Ridiculous, stupid BS that, if I hadn’t been having the kind of crappy week I was, I might have actually found funny. But death seemed to have dulled my sense of humor.

The one thing no one was saying was that I’d been murdered. Which, for a load of city kids, was surprisingly PG.

Why did no one suspect the truth? How had my murderer covered any tracks so cleverly that no one had any idea I’d been pushed. I guess it was crowded on the platform. And no one ever looks anyone else in the eye down there in case somebody’s a psycho. It’s the law of the subway. It’s actually kinda the perfect place for a genuine psycho to commit a murder unseen.

Whatever. Feeling confused and needing some space, I ported over to the library, which—next to the photography room—happened to be my favorite place in the whole sorry school. It wasn’t like I was a Nancy bookworm. More that, it was always quiet. Which meant I could come here to think. Or to gossip with Ali and Parker. Or, occasionally, do some work.

I walked through the door, resisting the urge to giggle as the wood tickled my body, and made my way over to the classics section—the most private place in the library because kids seldom read them, so they never went back there. I slumped at the table in front of Homer and Virgil. In school at least, David and I hung out here a lot. We’d sit here and talk about our day—not too loudly of course, or Library Girl, this geeky little sophomore who seemed to be the student body’s self-appointed
shhhh!
policewoman, would come over and tell us to be quiet. One time, she caught us kissing—I know, but it was a
whole
lot classier than eating each other’s faces off on the school lawn in full view of every other student and the occasional passing tourist bus—and she actually threatened to report me to the principal. Would David ever be able to study here again without thinking of me? I doubted it. It was probably too painful.

“It’s okay, D, it’s going to take time before you’re over this,” said a female voice, muffled by the aisles and aisles of shelves.

Someone was coming? Oh, crap. I pushed myself against the bookshelves, right between the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
. Then remembered that whoever was coming back here couldn’t see me anyway, so I straightened up.

David rounded the aisle. Ohmigod. Maybe he was trying to get over his trauma by spending time somewhere he felt close to me?

“Thank you so much for being here for me,” he said, walking right by me and sitting down in his usual seat. Even if he couldn’t see me, did he not feel me here? Who was he talking to anyway?

A blonde in a cheerleading uniform rounded the corner and sat beside him. Like, so beside him she was almost on his lap. For a second I thought it was Kristen. Then I looked more closely. It wasn’t her at all—but Jamie.

What was with these girls? Why were they all so desperate to comfort my boyfriend? They were supposed to be off in their locker room nursing their eating disorders or learning to hold a pom-pom. Not this.

“Maybe we should talk about her?” Jamie said in a voice so sugary it would have given an Olympic athlete diabetes. “I didn’t know Charlotte all that well …” You mean
at all
. “But she was someone I always wished I’d had time to get close to.”

Oh,
AS IF
.

“Why don’t you tell me a little more about her? About why you loved her? It really might help.” Jamie’s face was now a whole three centimeters from David’s. If she got any closer he’d be able to feel her eyelashes fluttering on his cheek.

“Charlotte was just …”

Amazing, brilliant, generally the best girlfriend in the world ever?

“Charlotte.” David shrugged. Erm, thanks for the glowing obituary. I knew David was not a boy of many words, but they were usually better ones than that. He’d gone to sleep holding our movie ticket—wasn’t he missing me as much as I was missing him?

“That’s lovely,” Jamie simpered. Oh,
puhlease
, it was not. Any fool could see through her act. It was as transparent as me.

Any fool, but my fool, it seemed.

“Why don’t you tell me some more? It might help.” Jamie was in serious danger of convincing me that she wasn’t as stupid as she looked. Her greatest academic achievement might be being able to read her schedule, but her Boy-Q was off the chart.

“We were both going to study in the city after graduation—her at Columbia and me at NYU—so we could, you know, still see each other most days. She was going to do art history and I was … Well, it doesn’t matter. I just … I’m going to miss her so much.” David sniffled, looking down at the wooden table where he’d once drawn our initials in a little heart with the compass from his math set. Jamie stroked his hair. Seriously, she actually
TOUCHED
and
STROKED
my boyfriend’s
HAIR
.

The nerve of this girl. And I’d thought Kristen was trouble.

Jamie rubbed David’s arm reassuringly, as he put his head in his hands. She leaned in to give him a hug.

I had to stop this. Stop this now before David was taken advantage of by this … this … Torna
ho
.

Suddenly I knew what to do. I could apparite! Just a little bit. Just my hand or something. I’d wave it at her, in a really menacing way—in a fist!—distract her a bit, then get out of here before I scared David or anyone else who could possibly want to be in here on such a sunny day. Okay, so
technically
it wasn’t an apparition that would help to solve my murder, but it would only be a teensy one. That couldn’t be breaking the Rules, right?

Okay, apparition. I’d done this before. Twice. All I had to do was close my eyes and think about David and how much I missed him, and how unfair this entire ridiculous scenario was—and then I’d get the glow.

So I concentrated and I thought and I pushed all my pent-up bitter feelings as hard as I could right down through me to the thick green carpet on the library floor.

But nothing happened. Nothing at all.

I guess it’s very difficult to get all overemotional about someone who’s sitting right in front of you, allowing another girl to stroke his thigh (seriously, she’d moved on to that) and not looking totally upset that she was doing it.

Come on, glow.
Glow
.

But the more I wanted it to happen, the more invisible I felt.

Brrrrrrrrinnnnnnnngggggggg!

I jumped so hard I sprung back and clear through the bookcase. David fell off his chair. Honestly, it was only the bell for next period. I guess after everything we’d been through, we were both feeling jumpy.

“Uh, Jamie …,” David said.

“Oh, just call me J. All my friends do,” she said.

Urgh, I thought, as I scrambled out of about thirty thousand years of literature.

“
J
, I think I better get to class,” David said, pulling himself up too. “It’s homeroom next and we’re having a memorial for Charlotte before we take the rest of the day off, so I better be there on time. Seeing as I’m the, um, widower and all.”

He awkwardly bobbed in front of her and with a “see ya” ran out of the room.

“Yes, you most certainly will see me,” Jamie said to herself. “You’ll be seeing a
whole
lot more of me.”

That was it. Enough. Full-on-scare-the-life-out-of-the-beyatch apparition coming up.

Again, I closed my eyes and concentrated. Hard. But no matter how much I strained and pushed and centered and tried to thrust the power out of me, nothing was moving. I was like a cell without a battery. Totally and frustratingly useless.

Jamie got out her compact and started fixing her face. Not that there was anything to fix. She looked just as perfectly groomed as she did before she started molesting my man. She smiled at herself smugly, snapped it shut, smoothed down her hair, and shimmied out between the stacks.

This was war. I might be dead, but I was not out of the battle. Yet.

I shut my eyes and ported back to the Attesa. Seconds (and a couple of dry heaves) later I was back in the hotel. Back in my new life.

I crept through the lobby and up the stairs. Edison’s door was half open. I could see through the gap that he was lying on his bed, reading a beat-up book while he listened to the Doors.

“Edison?” I said, as confidently as I could. “Hey, what are you reading?”

“
Slaughterhouse Nine-Oh-Two-One-Oh
,” he said.

Either he thought I was stupid or he wasn’t in a conversational mood. Better get straight to the point.

“You know that lesson you promised me? To show me what I’m really capable of?” I asked, drawing myself up. “Well, I’m ready.”

There was rustling. The sound of him turning a page. Here I was freaking out about doing something totally spur of the moment and most definitely not Nancy-approved, and Edison was so not bothered by what I’d just said that he’d not even stopped reading his book.

“Meet me downstairs in an hour then, and we’ll get this freak show on the road.” He didn’t even look up.

I stood there in the doorway, waiting for who-knows-what, and feeling like more and more of a dork with every second that passed.

“That’s sixty minutes,” Edison said, still refusing to get off the bed and properly acknowledge me.

Which I guessed was my cue to leave. So I did.

Chapter 10

PRECISELY ONE HOUR LATER, I FOUND MYSELF
sitting on the Attesa’s black couch, bouncing my heels on the floor. Okay, it was more like fifty-one minutes later, but I was always the first one to arrive everywhere. My grandmother said it was one of my “better qualities” (for real). And, even though I knew it was a lame-ass habit, I couldn’t make myself act any other way. Even when I was dead, it seemed.

To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure I’d thought the whole call-on-Ed-and-get-down-with-your-dark-side thing through, no matter how upset I’d been in the library. I mean, here I was, only three days off my mortal coil or whatever, and I’d managed to get myself stuck in limbo—if that’s what this was—the escaping of which relied heavily on me, Nancy, Lorna, and Tess solving my murder so I could get the hell out of here and move on to wherever came next. Which, with every day that passed, I was reeeally hoping involved unlimited PB and J sandwiches with the crusts off like Mom used to make (but I’d been too cool to take to school for at least, like, five years).

That considered, what was I doing? Not hanging around with the good ghosts, oh no. Instead I was asking the broody-potentially-evil guy to show me how to work against the system—just in case that meant I could maybe talk to my boyfriend again. David. The alive one. Who I was literally dead to now. And who seemed to have become a magnet for perky uniformed blondes. Hmmm …

“It doesn’t matter how hard you bite your lip, it won’t bleed.” I jumped. Ed was standing above me. How did the guy move so quietly? He was sneaky. Even for a ghost. “Sure you’re up for this?”

“Absolutely,” I said, trying to sound as sure as I totally didn’t feel.

“Then let’s get out of here. May I?” He held out his hand to pull me up. Like I was the kinda girl to fall for the chivalry act. I made a point of getting off the sofa without Edison’s help. Which would have made more of a point had I not nearly toppled off Mom’s heels in the process.

Ed smirked. “New, are they? Oh well, at least you have all of eternity to learn to walk in them.”

Asshole.

“Come on, let’s get out of here before Nancy Drew comes back and persuades you to do some map work or fingerprinting or whatever she has you guys doing in that ‘investigation’ room of hers.”

While anyone who wore as much black as Ed was far too cool to put finger quote marks around the word
investigation
, I could still hear them in his voice. Surprise, surprise, he wasn’t about to join the agency.

“Charlotte Feldman, get ready for a lesson you will never forget,” he said, making sure I’d had time to get steady and upright, before taking a step toward me.

Oh, hell … What was I doing? Edison was taller—and broader—than David, so he must have been over six feet. Even in these heels, my eyes only came up to his chin, which I noticed was covered in dark stubble. Either he hadn’t shaved for two days before he died, or he just liked it that way. I’d put money on him being a razor-dodger. It went better with the air of not giving
une merde
. Damn that I’d never get to spend that summer in Europe, wowing David—and any hot Parisians—with my four years of mediocre French. I focused hard on the dimple in the middle of Ed’s chin, so I wouldn’t have to look up and meet his eyes. If I did, I knew I’d back out.

“Ready?” he asked. Even though we both knew it wasn’t a question. He was as close as a person could get without actually touching. I tried hard not to visibly shiver and let him know I wasn’t 100 percent cool with any of this.

Edison stretched his arms—for one terrible second I thought he was going to hug me—and made a wide semicircle about an inch from my body. He was taking no Nancy-style risks here:
He
was going to drive us wherever we were going or not at all. I was just debating whether I kind of liked the fact he’d taken control or hated him for it, when I felt the lobby begin to spin. Uh-oh.

The room blurred from white to black to red to gray. Oh, help, what if this wasn’t my best idea?

I looked up to find that the Attesa had melted away. We were standing by a pier on the riverbank. I tried to take a breath.

Dusk was falling, and the lights of New Jersey twinkled on the other side of the Hudson. A sight slightly ruined when an empty plastic cola bottle floated past. White gulls bobbed up and down on the water. Except the lucky ones who’d got prime positions on the wooden poles that poked above the gray ripples. They must be the queen gulls, I thought. That’s where Kristen and Just-Call-Me J would be sitting if we’d been reincarnated as birds. I’d be down in the river, bobbing around with all the unwanted crap, and they’d be up there, lauding it over all of us.

Well, enough of that already. It was time to stop being such a wuss. It was time to make some changes. Starting right now. I dropped my shoulders and tried to stand up tall.