The Dead Girls Detective Agency (6 page)

“I did have a ticket, but when I got up here there was a big gust of wind and it went over the rails.” I pointed to the street below, like that was going to make him believe me any more than he already didn’t.

“That may be,” he said, his cheeks getting redder by the second. I shouldn’t have added the polite smile. It never worked on David’s mom either. “But if you don’t have your ticket now, you’ll have to leave. If you’ll just follow me to the elevator …”

He turned his back to me and started to lead the way off the observation deck and back into the building. Ohmigod, what was I going to do? What if he tried to touch my arm? He’d go right through it—just like Nancy’s arm had gone through the wall in the Attesa. Or worse, he was going to take me in the elevator, where there weren’t as many lights, then he’d see I was glowing.
Glowing
. He’d get all freaked out. And call the police. Or maybe Ghostbusters. I bet they had a number for that here. I can’t have been the first spook to show up. What if they caught me with some ghost ray and locked me up in a special, secret prison and I was stuck in there forever and ever and …

“Quick! Charlotte! This is your chance. Blow!” Nancy said.

“What?”

“Don’t think about it, just as hard as you can blow—blow all the energy out through your mouth and you’ll disappear.”

Blow? Blow. I didn’t think, I just did what Nancy said.

Cold crept down my body. Quicker than the warmth had come. It made me wince, like a milkshake headache did.

“Miss, if you’ll just walk this way …”

The security guard turned around. And around again. I hadn’t moved an inch, but—please—it seemed as if he could no longer see me.

“Miss? Miss?”

I looked down at my body. It was washed out and pale again. No glow. Result!

“Well, I …” He stomped off into the building. No doubt to find a colleague to come and hunt for me. Or—worse—so he could look at the security camera footage. Now
that
was going to make for interesting viewing. Now you see me, now you don’t. Was that how it went? Did apparitions even appear on camera? Maybe he’d think he’d fantasized me. That I was just a figment of his imagination. He’d probably had a long day after all.

I turned back to Nancy and Lorna. “That was a close one, hey?”

“That’s one way to put it,” Nancy said, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear.

“How did you do
that
?” Lorna asked, her blue eyes wide. “It took me weeks to even make my little finger glow and you—you made your entire body go on your first try. You’re even better at apparition than Nancy!”

Her Geekiness scowled.

“I have no idea. I just thought of how much I wanted it and
bam!
there I was. Weird.”

“Wait a minute,” Nancy said, looking uneasy. “He’s coming back.”

She gestured behind us. We turned to see the security guy striding over—with another guard. Even though I knew I was invisible again, what if I hadn’t blown hard enough? What if they could still see my foot or my ear?

“She was here. Just
here
,” the guard told his friend. “Then poof! She was gone. Like she disappeared into thin air. Where can she have gone to? There’s only one way out.”

“Guys, we should get out of here,” Lorna whispered. She seemed to have forgotten that the security men couldn’t hear her either. “We don’t know when Miss Apparite here”—she pointed to me—“will get her glow on again.” Lorna walked in between the two men, who were busy arguing about my whereabouts. “And these guys look, like, ancient. I don’t think either of their hearts could take seeing a ghost again this evening.”

“You’re right, Lorna,” Nancy said. Possibly for the first time ever. She turned to me. “Seeing as you seem to be something of a star student, we’ll let you take the wheel. You can transport us out of here. Just think of somewhere you really want to be, or someone you have a strong emotional connection to. Think hard, then close your eyes and—if that demo was anything to go by—you should be able to port the three of us off the Empire State on your own. Lorna and I will travel with you.”

They stood on either side of me to be sure we all ported together, making a circle with their arms, one wide enough to encompass but not touch me.

“What if she’s hiding in the restroom? Have you checked in there?” security man 2 was asking. “They’re fast, teenagers. My grandson managed to sneak out to a bar when he came to stay with me last month. You can imagine how mad his mother was at me about that. Honestly, blink and they’re gone.”

They had
no
idea. I looked at Nancy, then at Lorna. Nancy nodded, silently willing me to give it a go. Just as quickly as I could, please. I shut my eyes. Think of somewhere I really want to be. Or someone I have a strong connection with …

I couldn’t help it. Much as I tried not to, of course I thought of him. The dizziness started, and I tried not to imagine the world around me whirling, spinning out of my control.

Then it stopped. I opened my eyes. And there we were. Me and my new dead friends.

In David’s bedroom.

Chapter 6

“WHERE
ARE
WE?” LORNA WHISPERED, HER BLUE
eyes wide. “This isn’t the Attesa. Where in Manhattan have you brought us to, Charlotte?”

The one place I’d always wanted to see, but had never been allowed to go: my boyfriend’s bedroom. So just knowing where something was
did
give you enough information to port there. But while we were here, he—from what I could tell—was not.

Phew?

I sneaked a preliminary peek around. Blue walls. Matching dark blue comforter. Sun-bleached My Chemical Romance poster (of course). Bashed-up iPod charging in its dock. Acoustic guitar proudly displayed on a stand in the corner. Grime gathering on said guitar due to his move into band “management.” (Translation: He might have looked cute carrying a Strat, but playing-wise, he sucked.) Half a toy airplane suspended from the ceiling. Dirty sports socks on the floor.

Typical teen-boy room.

I’d imagined this particular one in my head a thousand times—when I’d finally be let in, what I’d say, how cool I’d be, all
I’m not freaking out about this. I go into boys’ bedrooms all the time
. It was beyond weird to finally be here. Especially considering all the other places I’d been in the last few hours.

It felt familiar but super-strange too. As if I were standing onstage in the set of a play—and this was how some big-deal Broadway producer had imagined David’s room to be. Why was that? It had only been half a day since we’d seen each other—was I that removed from him already? Would I feel this way if I ported into my own home too?

“Wherever it is, they need to fire their maid,” Nancy said.

Slightly harsh, I thought. Until I caught sight of not one but three used cereal bowls on the windowsill—each growing various stages of mold. It
was
messy. But then it wasn’t like David had been expecting three ghost guests, was it? I’m sure he’d have gotten out the vacuum and thrown away that pizza box under his bed if he’d known.

Oh, who was I kidding? David had never been a poster boy for neat. He always had ink stains on his hand, his shoelaces spent more time trailing on the sidewalk than keeping his sneakers on, and his locker? He’d be lucky to find a book among the wrappers, empty soda cans, and loose paper.

Some days I’d stand down the hallway from his locker, just before class, watching as he threw book after book out of it—along with bits of paper, soccer shirts, his two-day-old lunch. Out it all went onto the floor, as he manically searched for whatever it was he couldn’t find—
that
day. Nine times out of ten, I’d get to class before him. And he’d bounce through the door just as the bell stopped ringing, mouthing apologies at the teacher and asking if he could share my textbook because—even after all of that—he still couldn’t find his.

I was a neat freak and David’s locker annoyed me so much that I’d even cleaned it up a couple of times—he was the only person who knew my combination and vice versa—but two days later it was back to looking like a dump.

Lorna stepped over a pair of sneakers (which, doing a double take, I was sure were the ones he promised me he’d thrown out a year ago).
Ewww
all over her face.

“This,” I said quietly, trying not to sound embarrassed, “is my boyfriend David’s bedroom.”

Lorna and Nancy looked at me nervously.

“Well, you did tell me to think of someone I had a strong connection to,” I mumbled. “I’m connected to him.”

Nancy looked out of the window. Probably cursing herself for not having thought the whole Empire exit strategy through a bit more carefully. I could see her mind working overtime—and it worked a lot already. I bet she was thinking,
Why did I let her have the wheel? Look at the close call we’ve already had this evening. If Charlotte can turn into an apparition up there, where no one knows her, just imagine what damage she can do here
.

“I really think we should go,” she said.

“Oh, is this him?” Lorna asked, waving around a picture on David’s desk. How she picked it up, I did not know. But if lifting objects was in the lesson plan for Rule 6, looking at Nancy, I didn’t get the impression she was all that hot on teaching it to me anytime soon. I was rapidly becoming a liability.

“He’s
too
cute,” Lorna said. “Tell all: How did you meet him? How long have you been together?”

I ignored her and walked over to the desk to get a better look at the picture. Ouch. It was one David had taken of us on our first almost-date—that May day in Washington Square. I was carrying a red Amoeba Records tote bag my dad had bought as a present from a work trip to LA. David kept telling me how cool it was that I was “into music” too. I remembered him pulling out his camera phone to get a shot of us. He must have printed it off and put it in a frame. Who knew he was such a secret romantic? He must be so devastated now. Maybe that’s why he wasn’t here. Maybe he’d gone somewhere that reminded him of me—like our rock.

“Guys, seriously, we have to get out of here. It’s not helping the investigation progress at all and—”

Slam!

The bedroom door banged shut, cutting Nancy off mid-flow.

Someone was in the room. Someone Living enough to have slammed that door. Which could only mean it was … I don’t think I ever got what people meant when they said they were frozen to the spot before. But right then,
frozen
didn’t even start to cover it. Behind me, I heard the mattress springs creak. Whoever was in the room had flopped on the bed.

Come on, Charlotte, I told myself. If you’re going to investigate your murder—if you’re going to have to haunt the people in your life to find out who did this to you—you’re going to have to see him at some point. It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid. Just turn around. And don’t think about the fact that you can never be together now. Unless he goes all Romeo to your Juliet and throws himself under the next F train he sees.

I turned around. And—just as I’d suspected—there, lying facedown on the bed, was the teenage boy whose room we’d invaded. David. Super help.

Lorna wandered over, all casual and hey-I-sneak-up-on-people’s-Living-boyfriends-all-the-time. She pointed at David in a totally obvious way.

“Is this
him
?” she whispered. Honestly, here I was dying inside (again), and she was this excited? Time, place, anyone?

I nodded weakly. As always, he’d changed out of his uniform before he even left school. David was wearing the same sky-blue Penguin sweater (with holes in, obv), baggy Levis and white (or they had been when he’d bought them) Pro-Keds that he’d been wearing when I’d kissed him good-bye that afternoon. Before I went down to the subway and … I could still feel the texture of the wool on my cheek … how it felt when he hugged me and I buried my head in his chest.

I had to get a grip on myself. And fast.

“Cute!” Lorna mouthed, giving me a double thumbs-up. She was loving this. Like, reveling in the opportunity to gossip about boys and relationships and all that stuff. It must have been the closest she’d gotten to girl talk in months. Any second now she’d be asking me if I thought some Z-list celeb couple were over for good.

By the window, Nancy put her head in her hands. She was about as into losing control of the situation as I was into giving Lorna the skinny on my love life.

There was a sniffle from the bed. David, was he … crying? I had to really bite down the urge to run over there and try to stroke his arm and tell him it would all be okay. Because I couldn’t. And it wouldn’t be.

Or would it? Had anyone ever had a cross-dimensional relationship before? You know, a ghost being with one of the Living? Could that work out? There was more than enough (admittedly fictional) evidence to prove that vampires and humans could date (if you ignored the whole potential blood sucking and death angle)—maybe we could be the first ghost-mortal couple? Sure, dating wouldn’t be easy, but is it ever? Being invisible to humans, well, it meant David would look weird if he talked to me/air in the street. But then it did have its advantages. For a start I could sneak into his room anytime I liked and his mom would
never
know. Though would he still find me attractive now that I was an apparition? After all, I’d never asked him if “ethereal pink glow” was on his list of must-haves in a girlfriend, along with curly black hair and blue-gray eyes.

David sniffled some more.

Oh no, he
was
crying. He must have just found out about me. Awww! I was totally going to talk to Nancy about this. If I could just find a way to touch him—like Lorna had that photo frame—maybe we had a shot. Maybe there was even some way we could kiss. Feeling brighter than I had since I died, I started to walk over to the bed.

Nancy jumped up from the windowsill and, quick as a cat, blocked my way. Eye to eye, I noticed that hers were a really pretty green color under those black glasses.

“We can’t stand here talking. We need to go.” Nancy was officially up to her
enough
level now. “Until you’ve learned all the Rules, this place is no safer than the Empire State turned out to be. Any second now, he could feel your presence, or you could accidentally apparite your left foot or something, then he’ll be all freaked out, you’ll be all upset, and—unless he’s your murderer—none of us will be any closer to getting the Key.”