Spookygirl - Paranormal Investigator

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

Chapter One: Death, High School, and Other Necessary Evils

Chapter Two: Wipe Your Feet

Chapter Three: Ghost Jock and Gabriel Saint Rochester Rochester Saint Gabriel

Chapter Four: No Respect for Half Vampires

Chapter Five: High School Hell Gate

Chapter Six: Guinea Pig Poltergeist

Chapter Seven: Who Ya Gonna Call?

Chapter Eight: Séances and Shiny Things

Chapter Nine: Night of the Gothlings

Chapter Ten: The Black Rose

Chapter Eleven: Aura Treatments and Psychic Echoes

Chapter Twelve: Through Your Incorporeal Skull

Chapter Thirteen: Like a Dead Body You Can’t Bear to Bury

Chapter Fourteen: The Skeptical Emerson Bean

Chapter Fifteen: Ghost-in-the-Box

Chapter Sixteen: Resurrecting Riley Island

Chapter Seventeen: The Foot of the Stairs

Chapter Eighteen: The Other Way Around

Chapter Nineteen: A Tap on the Nose

Chapter Twenty: Riley Island Paranormal

Acknowledgments

I was sitting in the Tranquility Room with my sketchbook and Mrs. Morris—nice, quiet, unobtrusive Mrs. Morris—when I heard the clang. Although it was muffled, it was still loud enough to startle me into dropping my charcoal, which rolled to a stop near the casket stand. Before I could pick it up, Dad’s voice called out from the embalming room at the rear of the building.

“Violet? Can you help me?” He sounded more than a little frazzled.

Crap. So much for an uninterrupted art session.

Leaving the sketchbook on a chair, I hurried down the hall through Dad’s office and the prep room. Dad stood in the embalming room’s doorway, holding a tube and a container of who-knows-what liquid.

“Someone’s in there with me,” he said, and his remark was punctuated by an instrument tray zipping through the air and smacking against the door frame, inches from his
head. The collision produced a second loud clang, and the now-dented tray toppled to the floor, where another tray already rested.

Not again.

“Yeah, that’s kind of obvious. I’ll handle it.” I ducked past him into the room. I’m not even supposed to be in the embalming room—I’m fifteen years old, so obviously I’m unlicensed—but sometimes dealing with the dead means having to break a few rules.

The room was utilitarian—neat and cold and stark, with hospital lighting and supply shelves lining the walls. One wall had a big door that led to the freezer. The naked body of an old man with thinning curly hair lay on a table in the center of the room, his lower regions covered with a sheet. Aside from some scattered implements, everything looked orderly and clean—but apparently the old man thought it wasn’t clean enough. Yeah, he was dead on the table, waiting to be embalmed, but he also stood in the middle of the room, translucent and blue and kind of shimmery, dressed in dark coveralls. He was muttering to himself and scrubbing the bare cement floor with a ghostly mop; his stooped posture caused a few limp gray curls to fall over his forehead, partly veiling his intense, slightly crazy gaze. He looked like a character in a horror movie, probably one with a really low budget.

Ugh. Confused newbies are such a pain.

“Excuse me? Sir?” I tried to sound polite instead of bored; this kind of thing really gets old after a while.

He didn’t even look up. “Scat, missy. Can’t you see I’m working? This floor won’t clean itself.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“It’s my job, ain’t it?” He finally glanced at me, his jaw jutting forward in defiance. “You tell that man in the white coat to stop getting in my way and making a mess with those chemicals, or I’ll throw something else at him. And this time I won’t miss.”

I glanced back at Dad, who was watching me with a puzzled look. He couldn’t see or hear the old man’s ghost. “Mister?” I said, trying again with the old grump. “You do know you’re dead, right?”

The man scrubbed, then paused, then scrubbed a little more, then stopped again and looked at his body on the table. “Dead?”

“Yeah. You remember?”

He held up his hand in front of his eyes, flexing his fingers experimentally. “Dead.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, that’d explain why I can see right through my dadgum hand, wouldn’t it?”

“Yep. It would.”

“But I feel pretty good.” He leaned the mop against the embalming table—it disappeared as soon as he let it go, but he didn’t seem to notice—and did an awkward little jig. “My knees don’t even hurt anymore. And the chest pains are gone.”

“That’s how it works.” I stepped a little closer; now I could read the name patch on his coveralls.
HENRY
.

“So what now?” he asked.

“Now you move on.” It seemed pretty obvious to me. Most newbies figure these things out for themselves, and they go off on their own. Some of them haunt their favorite hangouts or their least favorite relatives; others just go on to…well, wherever ghosts go. Into the light or whatever. I don’t know. I don’t really care. I just get tired of having to explain these things every time a recently deceased person throws a fit. The only interesting ghosts are those with unfinished business; Henry was just a boring, run-of-the-mill dead guy.

“Where do I go?” he asked.

“The afterlife?” I shoved my black bangs out of my eyes. “Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t know the details, okay? You’re going to have to follow your instinct on this. Do you have a wife who died? Or a relative? Maybe they’ll find you and help.”

“Yeah, I had a wife. Died ten years ago.” His tone was less than enthusiastic.

“Then you can go join her now.”

“And go back to her nagging? For all eternity? No thanks.”

“Well, you don’t have to cross over, but you can’t stay here.”

He frowned as he considered his options, his bushy brows lowering to shadow his pale blue eyes. “Say, can I go back to work?”

“Um, I guess. As long as you don’t think you work here.”

“Of course I don’t work here.” He gave me a glare. “You think I’m slow or something? I’m a janitor for the Palmetto County school system. Forty-five years of dependable service.”

“And going back to that is better than moving on?”

Henry wagged a finger at me. “You never met my Delores. I’d rather scrub toilets for another thousand years than hear her complaining again. So I can just…go?”

A ghost with issues might have been tied to a particular location, forced to haunt the place he died, but Henry didn’t seem to have any such complications.

I nodded.

“Huh. Thanks, missy. You’re okay.” Whistling an off-key tune, he marched through the doorway—right through Dad—and down the hall toward the front entrance.

I followed just long enough to make sure he passed through the front door as well; then I went back to Dad. “He’s gone.”

“It was this guy?” Dad took a few steps toward the body. “Henry Boyd?”

“Yeah, it was good ol’ Henry. He thought he was supposed to be cleaning, and you were getting in his way. Good thing I’ll be around all the time now to handle stuff like this, huh?”

I’d been shuttled back and forth between Dad (on weekends) and Aunt Thelma (on weekdays) since I was eight. Dad had always said I’d live with him again once he took over the funeral home. When he finally bought the place a few months ago, the first thing he did was clear out his apartment’s tiny second bedroom for me.

“This stuff doesn’t really happen when you’re not around,” he said. I knew what he meant, unfortunately. Some ghosts tend to get more agitated when there’s someone nearby who might actually be able to hear them. It gets them all excited, and it can be really inconvenient.

“Well, you’d better get used to it, because I’m not going anywhere.” I grinned at him. More time with Aunt
Thelma just wasn’t an option. I wouldn’t put up with her anymore, and I knew Dad wouldn’t, either. He was glad to have me around, even if it meant dealing with a weird mix of single-parent angst and unsettled spooks.

“Wouldn’t have it any other way, kiddo. Okay, I shouldn’t be too much longer in here, and then I’ll have to get ready for Mrs. Morris’s service.”

“I’ll keep her company until then.”

Dad’s eyes widened a little. “She’s not haunting the place, too, is she?”

“Nah.” Most ghosts move on before their bodies even make it to the funeral home. Only the confused ones stay close to their corpses. “But if I see her, I’ll tell her you said hi.”