Page 23 of Giving Up The Ghost
Mick glanced at me and sniffed again. “Seen you on the show, ain’t I? Julian Weiner.”
“Weems.”
“Hm. You and our Ozzy then. You’re together, right?”
I nodded. “Got a problem with it?”
Mick snorted. “Gawd no. Just make sure you take care of the lad, yeah? Especially right now. Don’t need him being eleven, do we?”
“Eleven?”
“Dead ones. All of our little group?” He dragged his finger across his throat, whistling through his teeth as he gave me a pointed, daring look. “Just me, Heinrich, and technically Oscar left. I suppose you might count May, but she’s been lost in her own noggin for four years now, so I don’t suppose she counts much ‘t all.”
Ezra huffed an aggrieved sort of sound, shaking his head. “Ten. That’s nearly the entire circle.”
“Right? Look, Violet, she was natural, weren’t she? The cancer got her, right?”
“Right,” Ezra drew out, sounding uncertain. “She died in London, at Royal Marsden.”
“Well. Then let’s say nine, since we know hers was natural. Here…” He motioned for us to wait for him and hurried to the door, flipping the sign around so it read Closed and setting the lock for good measure. “Landon fell in his garden, didn’t he? Oh no, the old man lost his balance and cracked his skull like an egg,” Mick said in a falsetto tone. In his normal, lower register, he added, “But I’d just seen him that morning. Fit as a fiddle. He could’ve run laps around me all day without breaking a sweat. And Cora, she had a seizure and fell down the stairs just two months ago. Said it must’ve been something undiagnosed, but you tell me how you can get to seventy-six and never have one messy head a day in your life then suddenly a seizure takes you out?”
Ezra paled. “It can happen,” I interjected. “Sometimes seizures strike with no reason, or a poorly understood reason.”
“Pah. Cora didn’t have none of that. Hessie O’Neill drowned in her tub. Said she fell asleep while bathing and just never woke up. David, he got pinned by his own car when he hopped out to check the mail.”
“Heinrich said he couldn’t stay here and be a sitting duck,” I murmured, recalling something the older man had said not more than a month ago.
Mick shook his head, shaggy black hair sweeping his shoulders even as the top of his head gleamed in the overhead light. “I tried talkin’ to the DI, right? But he blew me off. I’m just the local kook.” His laugh was bitter and dark. “Didn’t want to believe me, not even when I had evidence this was fucked up.”
“What kind of evidence?” I demanded. This time I did reach out and touch Ezra, grabbing his wrist to ground him when it looked like he was sinking in on himself.
“Something tangible, I’m hoping?”
Mick’s sneer was epic. “No, you numpty, I told him three ghosts would visit him before midnight on Christmas Eve and reveal the murderer! Of course, it’stangible.” He mimicked my American accent with a roll of his eyes. “We keep records of every request for our services. Or, rather, we did keep ‘em. Come with me.”
Ezra surprised me by shifting his arm so our hands could join, his grip clammy. “Are you alright?” I whispered as we trailed after Mick, heading for that curtained-off area behind the counter. “Do you feel an episode coming on?”
He shook his head. “No. I’m just suddenly very uneasy about this entire thing. I had no idea so many of Violet’s circle had died so close together. Why didn’t Oscar tell me?”
“Maybe he didn’t know. He wasn’t close to any of them, was he?”
“Other than Heinrich? No. And Heinrich only because he was Violet’s best friend.”
Mick was waiting for us in front of an ancient filing cabinet that had been new when Elizabeth II was in leading strings. “This shop pays the bills, yeah?” he said, rummaging through one of the topmost drawers. “Tourists, curious kiddies, the occasional actual Goth or seeker of the occult. Mostly it’s our mail order business that keeps us afloat.” He shot me a wry grin. “You’d be surprised how much you can mark up cheap silver jewelry by noting it’s from England. For some reason, that’s catnip to the Americans.”
At his expectant look, I shrugged. “I have no idea. I was very much just a giant dork in school.”
“Weren’t we all,” Mick chuckled. “Beneath this Sisters of Mercy shirt beats the heart of a musical theatre nerd who got his arse kicked every day between the ages of ten and seventeen. But the shop, see… What’s that called when an animal hides in plain sight? Camo, yeah? It’s great camo for people like us.” He made a gesture towards Ezra, who stiffened beside me, looking startled at his inclusion in the ephemeralus. “Mediums, seers, all that jazz. Don’t look so shocked, boyo. We clocked you long ago.” He tapped the side of his nose with one finger. “You’ve got a look about ya, yeah?” He pulled a thin purple folder from the drawer with a soft hum of recognition and moved to sit behind his desk. “This is our record book. Not much to look at but the old heads preferred something on paper rather than digital. Partially to cover our asses—you can’t lose paper to a power outage—and also to keep track of any weird requests or issues. Ever since Cora was asked to do a reading for a bloke who turned out to have been the one who made the ghost that were haunting him, we wanted to keep track just in case something happened to one of us.”
I took the folder from him and read down the list of names, noting the highlighted entries before I handed it back. “They’re all for private readings, starting in June two years ago. But they’re for different names and locations.” I handed it back, thinking. “What made you connect them? How are they involved here?”
Mick hesitated, sucking on his teeth for a long moment as he fingered the edge of the folder. “Each one of ‘em was a request from the same person. First few times, they gave a different name. Even tried to disguise their voice over the phone.” He shifted uncomfortably. Plaintively, he added, “This isn’t like me, to just blab client business to a stranger, but you have to understand, there’s nothing anyone will do, okay? We’re being picked off here, and the only thing we have in common was being in this circle. Now most of us are dead, one of us has fled the country, but I’m still sitting here like a right bastard because I don’t know what else to do. I don’t see private clients. I don’t even talk to my wife about it,” he tapped his temple. “All I do is run my little shop and tell anyone who comes lookin’ for a consult that I don’t know what they’re talkin’ about and to bugger off.”
“And no one can back this up,” I pointed out. “The coincidences.”
“It’s not,” he snarled, “a coincidence. It was the same person, every time. And within a day or two of the call out, whoever went would be dead.”
“Did they give any information about how this client looked? Anything at all?”
