Melody Bittersweet and The Girls' Ghostbusting Agency: A laugh out loud romantic comedy of Love, Life and ... Ghosts? (9 page)

‘We can’t stay, I’m afraid. Just wanted to give you that.’ He nods towards the pink tissue paper.

‘You know I sincerely wish you well,’ he says as I see them out onto the pavement. ‘It doesn’t have to be a battle between us.’

I watch the twins fold their long limbs into the back seat of his car.

‘Leo, are you here to ask me to share my findings with you?’

He laughs, as if I’ve said something preposterous. ‘Only to avoid old Isaac from having to repeat himself. I don’t think he’d take too kindly.’

I smile and look away. ‘He’s not talking to you, is he?’

‘He will.’

I nod and cross my arms over my chest, chilled by the evening breeze but warm on the inside because Leo and his round-the-clock team are clearly no closer to resolving the case than I am. Further away, if that’s possible.

‘Don’t forget about Friday,’ he says, opening his car door. For a second I’m confused, and I feel as if I’ve slipped back in time and I’m seeing him out after a date. At about this point he’d have kissed me. It’s a happy memory, because to be completely transparent and fair to Leo, the man kisses like a champ.

‘Friday?’

‘Don’t come anywhere near Brimsdale Road,’ he reminds me of the real reason he came here, getting into his car and slamming the door. The window glides down as the engine purrs into life. I lift my hand and wave, and he touches his fingers against his head in salute as he pulls away into the traffic.

I watch his car disappear, and reflect on the fact that today has been distinctly dodgy on my romance chart. I openly admit that I’m going through a dry spell and in need of some action, but have I really caught myself lusting after both Fletcher Gunn and Leo Dark in the same afternoon? Not to mention Douglas Scarborough. The man doesn’t even have a bloody pulse, yet still he made mine race. I really need to get out more. It’s that or buy a shotgun to blow my own brain out, because I’m twenty-seven, single and so damn lonely that I’m going slowly crazy.

G
ran offers
me a glass of champagne as I head back inside the shop and flip the open sign over to ‘closed’. I almost refuse it, but then, why the hell not? I haven’t even raised a glass to celebrate the opening of the agency, and after yet another bizarro meeting with Leo and his Barbie Girls I really could do with a drink.

‘He still carries a torch for you,’ my mother says darkly, arranging the flowers Leo gave her in a glass jug.

‘What, even after he ate my heart and spat it out again?’ I seethe. ‘Not cool, Mother, not cool at all.’

‘He probably regrets it now,’ Gran says, distracted as she holds the champagne bottle at arm’s length to read the label. ‘Supermarket own brand,’ she mutters. ‘And him a big-shot off the telly now, too.’

‘I’d hardly call having a fifteen-minute spot on morning television being a big-shot.’ I wrinkle my nose at the decidedly tart, too-warm fizz.

‘Not like a two-hour Saturday morning phone-in on the radio for the last three years and a People’s Favourite Award,’ my mother sniffs. It’s difficult to tell, but I think she’s feeling a smidgen of professional jealousy. Not that she needs to; she could wipe the floor with Leo Dark if she wanted to, and with me for that matter. Her skills are finely honed and powerful; our gift is something that only increases with age. How else do you think my gran has managed to keep my Grandpa Duke around, despite the fact that he died during a night of over-zealous sex almost twenty years ago? She had to call the emergency services to come and lift his stiff (in every sense) corpse off her, and from that day to this, his ghost has been tethered to their bedroom and is as randy as a sailor on leave. Theirs is a love story that refuses to end, and, by all accounts, a sex life that refuses to end too.

‘Not even close,’ I agree, on my mother’s side just as she is always on mine, even if she does show it by making barbed comments to my ex-boyfriend that make me look like a lovesick fool.

She places the jug of flowers on the shelf behind the polished counter that runs along the back of the shop and looks at me over her shoulder. ‘Will you stay away from the house on Friday as he asked?’

I consider my options. ‘Probably. Antagonising him won’t help me solve the case, and it was never part of my business plan to ruin Leo.’

‘You have a business plan?’

‘Don’t sound so surprised,’ I say haughtily, crossing my fingers behind my back and hoping that she doesn’t ask to see it, because it’s in my head rather than my shiny new filing cabinet.

‘Look at us, three generations of Bittersweet business women.’ Gran refills her own glass and pauses with the bottle midair. ‘More fizzy cat piss, darling?’

I put my hand over my still half-full flute and grimace at her accurate description. ‘I won’t.’

My mother pulls a similarly disgusted face and refuses more too.

‘Fletcher Gunn is poking around the Brimsdale Road case,’ I say, nibbling my deep-grey-polished thumbnail. Why did I even mention him? I know exactly how my mother is going to react, and she doesn’t disappoint me.

‘Gah! What
is
that boy’s problem?’ She changes her mind about the champagne, knocks the contents of her glass back in one go, and reaches for the bottle.

‘Boy’ isn’t a word that comes to my mind when I think of our least favourite reporter. He’s got a few years on me and has satisfyingly broad shoulders that say ‘lean on me, I’m dependable’. Who knew shoulders could lie? His most certainly do. I wouldn’t depend on him to save me if I was clinging by my fingertips to a cliff edge; in fact, I wouldn’t put it past him to stamp on my poor, scrambling hands. Like that big, bad lion in
The Lion King
whose name I can’t think of, but who I do know had startlingly green eyes. Fletcher Gunn has startlingly green eyes, too.

Right, so I think it’s more than time I headed back down to my own end of the building; standing around here drinking lukewarm cat piddle is sending my mind towards paths I’d rather not stray down.

As I head for the door, my mother calls me back.

‘You forgot this.’ She presses Leo’s tissue-wrapped gift into my palm.

Fletcher Gunn and Leo Dark have more in common than they probably realise, despite the fact that they hate each other’s guts. They’re both alpha males, both sexy and they know it, and for different reasons they’re both intent on hampering my ability to make a success of the agency.

I close my fingers over the little bundle and head off down the hallway, too far away to hear my grandmother’s next words.

‘Where exactly is Brimsdale Road, Silvana?’

* * *

‘
N
onna made
cannoli to mark our first successful week in business,’ Marina says as she breezes into the office on Friday morning.

‘Why don’t you put them in the fridge?’ I gesticulate grandly towards the under-counter model in the corner.

‘It’s working then? I thought it might have exploded in a fit of righteousness when you plugged it in.’

‘Like a dream,’ I grin. We snagged the fridge going cheap on eBay yesterday, from a local church having a kitchen refit. We rolled up onto the church car park to collect it, earning ourselves sour looks and pursed lips from the good people at the committee meeting as we shoved it wilfully into the back of the loudly protesting Babs. I imagine it must have been rather like watching a bovine birth in reverse. Throw in the fact that our sign now proudly and loudly announces we’re ghostbusters and I think it’s safe to say they were glad to see us backfire our way off their car park. I can still picture them, all lined up across the tarmac with their arms folded over their chests like a human chain of holy bouncers.

‘I reckon they thought we were Satanists.’ Marina slides the tin of cannoli into the otherwise empty fridge, and then reaches for the milk Artie left out five minutes ago and puts that back inside too.

‘That’d be why the woman in the flowery apron whispered “Save yourself” to me then.’ Artie sips his tea and winces at his burnt lip.

‘Cheeky mare. It’s too late for you, Artie my boy, you’ve joined the dark side,’ Marina laughs, flicking the kettle on. ‘You’re one of our gang now.’

He flushes, a gang member for no doubt the first time in his life.

Marina makes coffee and flops into the swivel chair behind the smaller second desk. ‘So what’s the plan for today, boss?’

I open the green, slowly thickening case file and click the end of my pen. ‘I thought we’d have a meeting to go over everything we know about Scarborough House so far, then take a cannoli break to watch Leo’s TV spot for research purposes. If he’s found anything out he won’t be able to stop himself from crowing about it to the nation.’

‘It’s on in two minutes.’ Marina flicks the volume up on the TV and we all listen to Rylan extol the virtues of cosmetic dentistry. I bare my teeth at my reflection on my black computer screen and try to decide if a new set of gnashers would enhance my hit rate with the opposite sex. I don’t think so, frankly. My teeth are perfectly decent, it’s my ‘other skills and attributes’ box that tends to make for awkward reading on online dating applications. ‘I see dead people’ tends to weird people out, and the fact that I now have to list ‘proprietor of a ghost-hunting agency’ in the occupation box is definitely going to attract the wrong sort of guys.

‘Grab the cannoli, Artie?’

He comes back with the tin and lifts the lid, then stares into it in surprise.

‘I thought cannelloni had meat in it?’

Marina flicks her eyes towards me as if she’s considering murdering him.

‘Forgive him, he’s young and he knows no better,’ I whisper, placing my hand over my heart as I make the case for his survival.

‘He’s lucky he’s got you in his corner, lady.’ Her growl-whisper is full of Clint Eastwood menace.

‘Leo Dark’s segment is on,’ Artie says, carefully carrying hot coffee for us and tea for him in the ‘I love My Python’ mug he’s brought from home. The handle is a snake that winds around the cup and rears up over the edge, nearly poking him in the eye each time he takes a drink. He must really love his python to risk retinal perforation every time he fancies a cuppa.

We all swivel to look at the TV from our respective perches; me behind my desk, Marina from behind the desk that she’ll share with Glenda Jackson from Monday, and Artie from the wing back chair I was snoozing in when his father came to visit me. The day might come when I share the details of that meeting with Artie, but not until such a time as he really needs to hear it.

‘Jesus, will you look at him,’ Marina sneers as Scarborough House comes into shot and Leo practically swashbuckles onto the screen. ‘What sort of man wears knee-high boots?’

‘TV wardrobe?’ I suggest, trying to make sense of his jodhpur-style attire in the context of a man who is clearly not riding his horse.

‘Gok Wan wouldn’t approve,’ Artie says, then stuffs his mouth full of one of Nonna’s cannoli. I want to question him on his knowledge of Gok Wan, but there’s a cannoli with my name on it in front of me and I’m distracted. I don’t know how Nonna makes these things, but they are high up there on my food heaven list. Most of the entries in my food heaven list would be made by Nonna, to be honest, and cannoli are definitely in the top three.

‘She dipped them in chocolate just for you,’ Marina says, watching me as I close my eyes and bite into it.

‘Can I come and live with you?’ I mumble, blissed-out on the crispy, cinnamon infused shell and creamy, sweet filling. There’s a hint of orange in there somewhere, and the chocolate tips it over from delicious to histrionic.

‘You practically do, remember?’

It’s a fact that Marina and I spent most of our formative years in and out of each other’s houses, a fact I’m glad of at this moment because Nonna’s chocolate-dipped cannoli are keeping me from getting up and putting my fist through the TV screen as Leo bangs on about his startling discoveries inside Scarborough House.

‘Just go inside already.’ Marina chucks a pencil sharpener at the screen and it bounces off Leo’s artfully lit nose. ‘Ooh, that’s quite satisfying. Have a go, it’s like playing paper-toss with the added advantage of taking Leo Dark’s eye out.’

‘Behave,’ I chide, and she just shrugs, thoroughly unapologetic as we watch Leo’s ass bounce down the hallway of Scarborough House and into the same room we’d sat in a couple of days previously.

‘As you can see,’ Leo whispers into the mike, as if he’s David Attenborough entering a rare baboon colony. They’ve gone for a
Blair Witch
style of hand-held filming, presumably to add atmosphere, and the lighting isn’t great, which again is clearly for effect because I know for a fact that the living room is flooded with natural light from the windows at the far end.

‘Do you remember there being a suit of armour in there?’ Artie frowns at the screen.

‘I didn’t notice,’ I murmur, listening to Leo give the same potted history of the house that we’d unearthed within five minutes of research.

‘He’s trying to hide the fact that he knows bugger all,’ Marina says, offering me a second cannoli. I’m about to take one when Artie leans towards the TV and squints.

‘That suit of armour just moved. I’m sure of it.’

We all stare hard at it, and sure enough, the arm raises up slowly, more than enough to be clearly noticeable. It’s behind Leo, out of his line of sight, but the camera man has certainly noticed it because his
Blair Witch
-shake has suddenly become decidedly more distinct and I think I can hear him heavy-breathing.

Leo is talking about Isaac Scarborough, but his big brown eyes keep flicking distractedly away from the lens, presumably to the face of the terrified cameraman in front of him.

‘What the . . .’ I say, getting up and walking closer to the screen to get a good look.

‘It’s a set up for TV ratings,’ Marina says. ‘Even I know that much.’

I’m not so sure. ‘You reckon? It makes him look a bit of a joke though, don’t you think?’

Suddenly, there’s an almighty commotion on the screen as the suit of armour keels over and scatters to the floor, and the camera appears to fall dramatically from the operator’s hand before the picture cuts hastily back to an agog Rylan in the
Morning TV
studio.

We all look at each other open-mouthed, and I wish we’d invested in a TV with rewind, because as the camera dropped and swung wildly around, I’m sure I caught a flash of pink spandex and golden Hollywood pin curls. In a panic, I open my desk drawer to check that the backdoor key to Scarborough House is still there. Oh shitballs.