Spookygirl - Paranormal Investigator (3 page)

Nothing else on the shelves caught my interest, so I gave up and curled up on Dad’s secondhand brown corduroy couch.

At this time tomorrow, the first day of school would be over. I couldn’t ignore the ball of lead lurching in my stomach any longer.

For most of the summer, I’d been able to ignore my impending doom at Palmetto High. Spending so much
time with Dad had been a welcome distraction, and I’d tricked myself into believing that the start of the school year was further away than it really was. There was no more denying it, though—my personal doomsday countdown had begun; school was less than eighteen hours away.

Last year at Lakewood had been bad enough. Lakewood High was small and exclusive; I hadn’t had any friends, but I managed to blend in and be ignored. At least it was far enough away from Palmetto Crossing that no one knew my reputation. Back here people still remembered. They knew me. I was that weird girl whose dad killed her mom and got away with it. I was that girl who lived in a funeral home. I’d already heard a few comments at the mall food court the week before. And that was without them knowing my other little secret. You know, the whole ghost thing.

Then again, was it so bad to be weird? What happened to my mom was no one else’s business. And living above a funeral home is a lot more interesting than living in the same kind of boring, Florida-style, pastel-colored single family home as everyone else in town. Plus, I was tired of downplaying the whole talking-to-ghosts thing. Ever since I’d moved back in with Dad full-time and found Mom’s business card, I’d felt compelled to step up and own that part of my life, just like she had.

After all, if you’re going to be a freak, you might as
well really be a
FREAK
, right? I’d spent too many years pretending to be normal, and all it had given me was the realization that normal was totally boring.

So why was my stomach still knotting up like a couple of Dad’s ties at the mercy of Buster?

After Mrs. Morris’s service ended and Dad got home from transporting the body to the cemetery, he changed from his tailored, somber, funeral-director-appropriate suit into a “Han shot first”
Star Wars
T-shirt over jeans, and we went out to dinner. When my dad wasn’t busy with dead people, he was busy being a very big geek.

We went to Mama Chen’s, a small, slightly dingy Chinese restaurant where I’d found a dead beetle in my tea the month before. I’d shrugged it off—bugs are everywhere in Florida—and requested a fresh pot of tea. Ever since then, we’d been treated like special guests by the owner, probably because we didn’t make a fuss or report him to the county health inspector.

Beetle tea aside, it was a nice little restaurant. The owner’s mother, who had apparently been dead for years, always stood near the kitchen door and kept an eye on the dining room. I was the only one in the restaurant who knew she was there; I never spoke to her, but she always smiled and nodded when she saw me. She threw a fit on
Beetle Night, screeching at her son in heated Mandarin while he simultaneously apologized to us. Mama Chen didn’t appreciate customers being served buggy tea in her restaurant.

After an insect-free meal at Mama Chen’s, Dad insisted on buying me five more white polos. Only then was he satisfied that I wouldn’t have to go to school shirtless.

On the way home, I stared out the window. Palmetto Crossing was small and pretty, in a boring manicured-lawns-and-backyard-swimming-pools kind of way, and it was full of palm trees and old people, just like the rest of Florida. You couldn’t throw a rock anywhere in the state without hitting a retiree or a coconut palm. Lakewood had been a lot like that, too, but I had a reluctant preference for Palmetto Crossing because Aunt Thelma didn’t live there.

Dad unlocked the door to the front parlor and reset the security alarm. We were halfway up the stairs to the apartment when we heard the thumping. Dad froze and motioned for me to stay back, but I already knew where the noise was coming from.

“Crap. Buster!” I pushed past Dad into the apartment, where the trunk was rocking irately in the little living room.

Dad followed me in and looked down at the trunk in dismay. “You didn’t let him out before we left?”

“I forgot. He’s going to be mad.”

“For once, I can’t blame him.”

“Stand back; this won’t be pretty.” I pulled the curved obsidian free and opened the trunk. An icy blast hit me in the face with enough force to send me stumbling backward against Dad. Buster scolded me with an insulted moan, and books began hurtling through the living room and banging against the walls.

Ugh. Not again.

It took about fifteen minutes and three cookies (oatmeal chocolate chip—Buster’s favorite—I tossed them into the air and they disappeared) to get him to settle down, and another half hour to clean up his mess. While Dad and I gathered books by the armful, I kept an eye out for
Wuthering Heights
. When I found it, I flipped it open while Dad wasn’t looking and made sure the Palmetto Paranormal business card was still inside. It was. I kept meaning to put it somewhere safer, but at the same time, I kind of felt like I was honoring Mom’s memory by leaving it exactly where she had.

When we were done, Dad pointed to his watch. “It’s getting late. You have to be at the bus stop at six forty-five, so maybe you should think about going to bed.”

“Bleh.” I ignored his suggestion and flopped down on the couch. I was still thinking about the business card. “Tell me something about Mom. What was it like doing those investigations with her?”

He looked over from where he was straightening a pile of books. “Where’d that come from?”

“I don’t know.” I almost felt brave enough to mention my plan to follow in her footsteps. Almost. “I’ve just been thinking about her lately. Tell me something I don’t know.”

“You remember your mother just fine.”

“Yeah, but there’s plenty I don’t know, right? Tell me about one of the investigations you guys did.”

I knew he wouldn’t. And he definitely wouldn’t tell me what I most needed to hear: what really happened during the investigation of the Logan Street house on Riley Island the night Mom died.

Occasionally I thought about finding a way to figure it out by myself.

Okay, I thought about it every single day.

“Well…” He looked relieved when his cell phone rang. He unclipped it from his belt and answered, then listened and said, “I’m so sorry. I’ll be right there,” and hung up. “Sorry, kiddo. Ralph Wilson’s mother just passed away at home. I need to get over there and help take care of things. Should take a few hours. You’ll be okay by yourself, right?”

I nodded. Nighttime calls like that were common; some people were pretty inconsiderate about what time of day they decided to die, so independent funeral directors and morticians like my dad didn’t have the luxury of
regular business hours. Dad kept throwing around the idea of hiring an assistant, but he didn’t have the budget for it yet, so he carried the full responsibility of the business on his shoulders. (Well, except for that unpaid, underage, massively talented intern he had handling the death spackle and babysitting the poltergeist.)

He kissed my forehead on his way out. “I might not see you before you leave tomorrow morning, so have a great first day at school.”

“I’m sure it’ll be amazing and fantastic and splendiferous,” I said drily as he left.

That phone call might have saved him, but Dad’s reluctance to talk about Mom was nothing new. He still missed her, and he dealt with his grief by not dwelling on her memory. But I missed her, too, and I didn’t have as many memories of her as he did, and that wasn’t fair.

There was another reason talking about Mom made Dad uncomfortable. He never came right out and said it, but I could tell it was always there, this dread right below the surface. He was afraid I might have seen her and maybe talked to her at some point after she died, and he couldn’t handle the thought of his wife as a ghost. A ghost he couldn’t see the way I could.

Not that there was any reason for him to worry. No matter how many times I wished, and how hard I tried to
sense her presence, Mom never appeared to me. She wasn’t around. I knew I shouldn’t take it personally, but I did. I’d hoped that moving back in with Dad would alleviate that feeling somehow, as though being close to him again would also let me feel closer to her. It didn’t, though, and I was starting to realize that if I really wanted to get past the doubts I still had about the night Mom died, I’d have to find the truth myself.

But first I had a far more pressing horror to deal with: Palmetto High.

Monday morning arrived much too quickly. The idea of breakfast or even coffee made my stomach flip in all kinds of unpleasant ways, so I forced down a glass of milk, then got dressed. White collared shirt, khaki pants—ugh. I know being miserable is basically part of my job as a high school student, but Palmetto was making it way too easy. I missed the dark-wash jeans and purple or black shirts I’d been allowed to wear at Lakewood, which didn’t have a dress code.

Palmetto High’s “rules of fashion” didn’t say much about jewelry, aside from a prohibition on piercings anywhere except the earlobes, so at least I could still wear my dangly purple spider earrings. I’d bought them last year from Striped Skull at the mall, mostly to annoy Aunt Thelma, who always tried to steer me in the direction of little gold hoops or pearl studs. I didn’t bother with
makeup, except for a little lip gloss. I laced up my purple high-top Chuck Taylors, and glopped a coat of quick-dry purple polish on my fingernails. I always make sure to have on some purple somewhere—it’s my favorite color, and it had been Mom’s favorite as well.

I’d heard Dad get home well after midnight, and he was in the shower when I was getting ready for school. I had already registered at Palmetto, but he’d offered to drive me on the first day and help me get everything sorted out at the front office. I’d said I didn’t need him to do that. If spending time with Aunt Thelma had given me anything, it was an independent streak. She was the kind of person who’d expect a kindergartner to find his own classroom on the first day of school. She certainly hadn’t walked me inside on my first day as a freshman at Lakewood last year, and I didn’t need anyone to hold my hand at Palmetto, either.

Before leaving the apartment, I checked the contents of my messenger bag. I’d thrown in a couple of notebooks and pens and pencils, my cell phone and MP3 player, and the black zippered pouch I use as a wallet. The last thing in the bag was a little leather bag of gemstones and crystals. They’d belonged to Mom. She’d thought they were lucky and protective, especially her favorite: a tumbled pebble of shiny black tourmaline. I wasn’t so sure about the luck thing, but I liked having them with me.

Aunt Thelma had lived a block from Lakewood High, so I’d been able to walk to school last year. Attending Palmetto meant riding the bus instead. After ten minutes of wilting in the stifling morning humidity at the bus stop and another twenty sitting in an unair-conditioned, slightly ripe bus, my bangs were sticking to my face and I could feel sweat trickling down between my shoulder blades. I was dragging, and I regretted skipping my coffee that morning. At that moment I would’ve just about traded five years of my life for an iced latte.

After filing off the bus with the rest of the herd, I stared in dismay at the collection of buildings in front of me. Palmetto looked even bigger now than it had last week. Its district covered Palmetto Crossing plus some of the smaller towns nearby, and its student body was nearly four times larger than Lakewood’s. Surrounded by palm trees and spindly Australian pines that flagged slightly in the hot breeze, the campus consisted of four two-story buildings connected by covered walkways. The buildings were arranged around a big central courtyard with a few scraggly planters and a huge sundial in the middle that looked like the ideal spot for Aztec-style blood sacrifices. A row of portable classrooms sat around back.

The bus loop was off to one side, near the senior parking lot; from there I managed to fight my way to the main office. What a freakin’ zoo. I’d probably gone to
elementary school with at least some of the herd plodding around me, but I hadn’t kept in touch with anyone after I’d left the Palmetto school district.

When I’d registered the week before, the sophomore guidance counselor explained that returning students had signed up for this semester’s electives last spring, so some classes were already full. She wrote down my preferences—Intro to Drawing and Intro to Film I, along with Pottery I and Intro to Poetry as alternates. Intro to Poetry sounded pretty dreadful, but it was still better than the other choices, most of which were gym-related. Gym and I seriously don’t get along.

So, of course, when the secretary at the front desk looked me up in the system and printed my schedule, the first class listed was Beginning Gym.

“No way,” I said. “This is a mistake.”

The secretary glared at me over the rim of her glasses; I guess my complaint wasn’t the first one she’d heard that morning. “Any problems must be handled by your guidance counselor. There’s a sign-up sheet over there on the counter. Write down your name, and she’ll see you as soon as possible.”

“But—”

“There’s nothing I can do. Write down your name and go to class.”

“Fine.” Judging by the eight million names already on
the sign-up sheet, the entire sophomore class was just as delighted with their schedules as I was. It would take the whole semester for the counselor to go through them all.

There was no pen on the counter, so I fished my own out of my messenger bag. I was about to write my name at the bottom of the sheet when I noticed a name in pencil, just a few lines down from the top: Emerson Bean. What kind of name was that? It sounded like it belonged to an uptight, snooty old man who signed his name with “Esq.” and spent the evenings in his study, smoking a pipe, alone.

After glancing at the secretary and making sure she was busy berating another unhappy student, I found a pencil in my bag, erased good ol’ Emerson, and wrote my name in his place—in ink.
Sorry, Emerson, old chap,
I thought.
But, you know…Freakin’ gym! This is an emergency.