Page 26 of Crazy Spooky Love
“Do you actually have one?” I ask, throwing Babs around a corner.
“No.”
I didn’t thinkso.
When we pull up outsidehis mum’s neat semidetached ten minutes later, Artie grabs his lunch box and slides the van door open.
“Well done today,” I say. “You handled your first encounter with ghosts like a pro.”
He smiles goofily. “Not much to see really, was there?”
I laugh and shake my head at his unquestionable logic as he glances behind the seat into the back of the van, frowning.
“What have you lost?” Marina asks, as his mum opens her front door and waves at us wildly from the step. She’s comically tiny when you consider that she gave birth to Artie, smaller than me and I’ve been called “pint-sized” on more than one occasion.
“Nothing,” Artie says. He walks away and then turns back asMarina starts to slide the door shut. “We don’t really have a ghost vacuum in there, do we?”
I honestly find it hard to know if he’s serious or joking.
“Melody, darling. Can I havea word?”
Coming from my mother, it’s the kind of phrase that sends red flags running so high up the pole you’d see them from the moon. A word, in her terms, usually means something that’s a pain in the ass in mine.
“Is there a reason you’re calling to ask me this? We’re in the same building.”
She’s up front at Blithe Spirits, and I’m at the back just closing up after my third day as a bona fide businesswoman. I have a hot date with my bathtub and I don’t want to breakit.
“I would come around, sweetheart, but I’ve got guests.”
She’s using the honeyed voice she usually reserves for her Saturday morning radio phone-in, which can only mean bad things forme.
“Who is it?”
“Thank you, darling. I’ll open that coffee cake you like.”
She hangs up, and I stare at the phone, perplexed. “Open the coffee cake?” Man, she’s good. She’s baiting me with sugar, and I’m about to open my mouth and take a royal-sized bite.
Turning the Magic 8 Ball over on my desk, I ask it whether I should ignore my mother’s invitation/order to attend Blithe Spirits without passing go, or head up the stairs to the sanctuary of my flat.
The bubbles clear, and the answer emerges.
As I see it, yes.
Yes what? Yes go, or yes ignore her? I can’t remember how I phrased the question. Hell, there’s coffee cake involved. Of course I’m going togo.
Two pairs of patent highheels, the back of two Monroe-esque hairdos. I should have guessed. I consider backing away from the shop before anyone sees me, but I’m scuppered when Gran joins me on the pavement.
“She called you too, huh?” she asks.
“She enticed me with coffee cake.”
Gran sucks down air. “She offered me champagne.”
I digest this. “She must really want us in there.”
Gran peers through one of the beveled-glass panes on the old wooden shop door. “Who are they?”
“Darklings.”
