The Dead Girls Detective Agency (25 page)

“Look! She’s spirit sensitive!” Nancy said in delight. “She felt us. I love it when that happens.”

“That happens much?” I asked, thinking back to Ali and the girls’ bathroom.

“Only with
really
tuned-in people.” Nancy smoothed down her curls.

Ms. Jackson tilted her head and refocused on David with a confused look. She took a second, then seemed to remember what she was doing. Which was giving him hell.

“David, I’m waiting. Shouldn’t you be learning something right now?”

“I have a free period,” I made David say. “I’m just off to …” Quick, look around, find an alibi. Ah, there one was. “I’m heading to the
library
. I need to get ahead with some extra reading for that assignment you gave us last week.”

“Really?” Ms. Jackson looked like she believed him as much as my dad did when Mom said she’d “only be five more minutes” getting ready to go out for dinner.

“Course,” I said. “You said we should find a Shakespeare character and think who their modern-day pop-culture counterpart would be.”

How was I remembering this? I obviously paid way more attention in lit than I thought. I cocked David’s head to one side in the hope it made him look less like he was lying. “I have this theory that you can draw some very direct comparisons between the way Shylock is treated in
The Merchant of Venice
and how Spencer Pratt was in
The Hills
.”

She couldn’t be buying this. Unless she hadn’t watched
The Hills
. Which seeing as she was over thirty, may be the case. I hoped.

Ms. Jackson stared at me intently, like, if she made David uncomfortable enough he might break and say,
Yep, you’ve got me. I’m a ditcher, hands up. Do your worst
.

I held firm.

“Then I’ll wait with great interest for our next class.” She hoisted her green bag back up on her shoulder. “Now get in there before I remember who Spencer is, think through properly what you’ve just said, and have to send you to the principal’s office. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said … and tried to walk through the shut library doors.

I banged David’s head, bounced right off them, and fell on the floor at Ms. Jackson’s feet.

“You’re acting very, very strangely. Even for a teenage boy,” she said.

If only she knew.

Behind me I could hear the others giggling.

I pulled David’s body up and brushed the dust off his jeans. His head was throbbing. Man, that was going to hurt tomorrow. With any luck he’d have a black eye for the Halloween dance.

“I’m fine. On my way. Really want to study. See ya!” I
pulled
the library door open and walked in. Lorna, Nancy, and Tess glided through the wall. No bruises or bounces for them.

Inside, the place was deserted. Seriously, who came in here for a free period at this time of the day anyway? Any sensible person would be at home if they didn’t have to be in class until ten a.m. Which was exactly why hardly anyone had a free now. The faculty knew they might as well write
another hour in bed
on your schedule.

Lorna looked around. “This place is a ghost town.”

I forgot I was in David’s body—again—and laughed out loud. So loud it echoed around the room. Weird. I’d done that—made that sound. I’d been invisible for so long, it felt bizarre to be able to disturb the Living without appariting or Jabbing or—

“Shhh!” said a muffled voice somewhere in the stacks.

“Oh, great, we’re going to get lectured again,” Tess said. “Nancy, let’s ditch this body and continue detecting without it. The boy’s holding us back.”

“You’re David, aren’t you? David Maher?” the voice asked.

Depends on your definition of “are.”

A small sandy-haired girl poked her head around the end of the C aisle. She walked over to the library’s main desk and looked up at me with a shy smile.

“Yes. Do I know you?” I asked. Better play dumb.

“I’ve seen you around,” she said. She straightened some papers on her desk so that they were at right angles to a neat pile of books and on an exact level with her stamp. “It’s very early to be in here. Can I help you with something in particular?” she asked encouragingly.

Man, this was not helping us at all. It was time to make a move.

“Nah, that’s nice of you, but I’ll get out of your hair.” I turned David to walk him out. Remembering to
open
the library door this time.

“So what else did you do around here, Feldman?” Tess bounced through the wall. “You know, for
fun
. Or were you such an ardent member of the Little Blond Boy Appreciation Society that you couldn’t fit anything else into your packed schedule? Though I guess all that gazing and hand-holding and hugging must have been pretty intense.”

“Wow, every wannabe stand-up within fifty blocks must be delighted you didn’t live long enough to graduate high school,” I said, pulling David’s body up tall. “You’re too funny. I’m not sure they could have taken the competition.”

“Guys! Guys!” Nancy said, rubbing her temples.

“Actually I had plenty of interests, if you must know. For a start I was in the photography club,” I said defensively.

“And let me guess who your favorite subject to shoot was,” Tess said.

Nancy shot her the Look. “That sounds very creative, Charlotte,” she said.

“It
was
actually. The photography room’s just around there. Wanna take a look?”

“Oh, I can think of nothing I’d rather do,” Tess said, giving me the fakest smile you can imagine. Lorna poked her in the ribs.

I walked David’s body down the hallway and peeked inside the club room door. Silence. No budding Leibovitzes in here. I stepped inside. And instantly felt like I’d been kicked in the guts.

On the wall—blown up a meter square and in pride of place—was the last photograph I’d ever taken. A portrait of David I’d snapped as we were walking home through the park. Usually I spent ages setting pictures up, worrying about the light, or what our teacher Miss Peters said made “good composition.” But this time, I’d just clicked my camera without even trying. We’d been walking past the boathouse, and the background was a blur of lake and grass and early evening sun reflecting off the lens. David wasn’t even looking at the camera; he was laughing with his head to the side. When I came to develop it, I kinda thought I’d have caught half his head or maybe just an ear. But as soon as the picture came into focus, I realized it was probably the best photograph I’d ever take. Just looking at it, you could feel the autumn air and the breeze and the sense of it being Friday and us having two full days before we had to go back to school. Miss Peters made me enlarge it in the lab and put it on the wall as the shot of the month, which totally made me feel more proud than I wanted to admit.

“Charlotte, did you take
that
?” Lorna asked, standing beside me. “It’s way cool. He doesn’t look like an idiot in it at all.”

“No, I guess not, he—”

Thud!

I whirled around to see a pile of pictures cascading out of Mina Anderson’s hands and spreading like a fan as they fell onto the gray tiled floor. She bent down quickly and started to pick them up in a panic.

“David!” she said. “You scared me. What are you doing in here? Oh …” She stopped bobbing and scooping for a beat—long enough for her gaze to move from David’s body to my photograph on the wall. “I guess you came to see that.”

“Sorry, who is this girl again?” Nancy asked.

“One of Charlotte’s friends from the photography club,” Lorna whispered, like Mina could hear her. “She came to the funeral. She sat just behind lovely Ali.”

“Wow, were all your friends this
cool
, Charlotte?” Tess asked, eyeing Mina’s calf-skimming skirt.

Ignoring them, I strode over to where Mina was half crouching and started to help her pick up the pictures.

“Really, you don’t have to do that,” she said in a small voice. “I can clean up my own mess and …”

I stopped short. The pictures. They were all of me. Me in Club. Me waiting for David outside class. Me trying to get into my locker. David and I sitting on the lawn. I recognized them—they were the prints from a portrait shoot we’d done for a school project. Miss Peters had paired us up and told everyone to “try to catch your subject off guard—so it’s natural.” I remember thinking Mina had done a great job when I saw her prints. I’d had no idea she was snapping away. I just hadn’t seen all of them before. I didn’t know she’d taken so many.

“What the …?” Nancy said.

“Looks like someone had a girl crush on you,” Lorna whispered.

“No, no, it wasn’t like that,” I said in David’s voice.

Mina looked at David strangely and quietly picked the remaining photographs up. She gently carried them to the table. “I guess you think I’m strange,” she said quietly. “I was just making copies of these ones. Charlotte told me she really liked the shots, so I wanted to have more.” She stopped suddenly, realizing how that could sound. “No, I mean I … I thought maybe Mr. and Mrs. Feldman would like to see them. To have their own set.” She looked up and shyly made eye contact with David. “If you don’t think that’s out of line, that is. Or it’s not too soon.”

I’d always had Mina pegged as a kid I’d never hang out with outside club—she was so quiet she made Maggie Simpson look vocal—but maybe I’d been wrong? After all this was a super-cute thing for her to do.

“I’m sure they’d love it,” I made David say. Lorna and Nancy nodded while Tess rolled her eyes. “But maybe take Ali with you. You know my, I mean,
Charlotte’s
friend?” Mina nodded. “They’ve never met you before after all and you don’t know where the Feldmans live.”

“Good idea.” She carefully packed the photographs flat in her red tote. “It’s so easy to get lost on the Upper West Side.” She looked down at the final picture of me she was holding in her hands. “She had such a lovely smile. I’ll just never understand why this had to happen, will you?”

“Oh, please can we get out of here before she starts a collection for the Charlotte Memorial Lab?” Tess said.

“No,” I said to Mina, turning my back on Tess. “Right now I don’t know why this had to happen. But if I have anything to do with it, that won’t be the case for very much longer.”

Chapter 23

I’D LOVE TO SAY SAINT BARTHOLOMEW’S
cafeteria wasn’t a high school cliché, but that would be an out-and-out lie. Where you sat said just as much about you as what you wore and who you dated.

The best tables were right by the sliding doors that led out onto a small courtyard where we could eat lunch in the summer. So obviously Kristen and the Tornahoes bagged them. But, come May, that all changed. The cool kids moved outside and those next down the pecking order could move a table closer to the doors, so us mere mortals could watch Just-Call-Me J and Kaitlynnn flirting with whatever boy they were into that week.

The windows were like some TV screen onto the life you could have had. If only your parents earned more, your hair was less blah, or you didn’t still need braces.

David used to say we should study the cafeteria in biology, because it was a great example of the animal pecking order brought to life. I used to think that was clever. Now, I had a sneaking suspicion that—were I not possessing my ex’s body at the very moment—he’d be sitting by the doors. And freaking loving it.

Air, sunlight, and cheerleaders’ saliva being well-known cures for grief and all.

By the time you hit the area past the cash registers called SS (Social Siberia), there were no windows and the only audible noise was the hum of the backup refrigerator. Which was where Lorna was pointing to now.

“Oh! Oh! Oh! There’s that weird kid,” Lorna said, bouncing.

“Which weird kid?” I asked.

“You know”—she put her hands on her hips—“the weird kid who was watching cheerleader practice yesterday.”

I shook my head.

“He was sitting on the benches. To the right of you. You probably didn’t notice because you were talking to Ed—”

Nancy turned around. “Head? Charlotte was talking to
head
?”

“Oh, she’s always talking to herself
in
her head, haven’t you noticed?” Lorna said. “Sometimes, when Charlotte goes quiet and looks all moody, I ask her, ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ And she’ll say, ‘No, Lorna, thanks for asking but I’m just talking to myself in my head.’”

Call the drama teacher over, we have a new winner for Ad-libber of the Year.

Tess looked at us as if we were certifiably insane. “And again, which weird kid, Lorna?”

“That one.” She pointed at the back of the room again and mouthed a “sorry” at me.

Phew. She might not be loving the fact that Edison seemed to want to be my new BFF—or whatever he was—but at least Lorna wasn’t about to issue a press release about it to Nancy.

I scrunched up my eyes and tried to focus on SS. Nope, no one there but a couple of the science club geeks getting off on their homework assignments. No, wait, there was a kid behind them: Brian.

“Yeah, he is strange-looking,” Tess said as Brian took his unidentifiable wheat sandwich apart, filled it with potato chips, and poured sugar on top. “Why would he have been at cheerleader practice? Do you know him?”

Oh good, because Tess needed even more ammo from my relationship résumé to beat me up with.

“Yeeeessss,” I admitted. Nancy looked at me expectantly, like Brian could be the break we’d all been waiting for. I was sooo going to have to level with them. “About ten years ago, we kinda might have dated for a minute.” I closed David’s eyes and waited for the shitstorm.

“You dated him?” Lorna asked, shocked. It was like someone had just told her that
American Idol
was a fix.

“Well, there’s quite a lot of him to love,” Tess said, giggling.

“Charlotte, why don’t you go talk to him and check out why he was watching the cheerleaders,” Nancy suggested. “We should be looking for anything out of the ordinary after all.”

Course. I could do that. Go talk to Brian. Who I hadn’t even locked eyes with in the hall since we were, what, eight? Brian wouldn’t think there was anything weird going on if David—who he never spoke to either—just walked on over to shoot the breeze.