Page 13 of Crazy Spooky Love
“We really don’t need to be so furtive. We’re not doing anything wrong,” I say, picking velvety pink cherry blossoms out of my hair. I look sideways at her, and she has the same floral crown going on. We look like a pair of casual bridesmaids. It’s not eye-catching at all.
I flick some of the flowers from her hair and tussle her back onto the pavement.
“Come on. Try to pretend you’re normal.”
“Says the girl who talks to ghosts.”
“Thatisnormal for me.”
I slow again as we clear the plant cover. Scarborough House is the kind of place that would give TV producers on the home-makeover shows a wet dream. It looks like a supermodel sleeping rough, shabby but with fabulous bone structure, dripping with potential, and ripe for a dream makeover. It’s also the kind of house that gives impatient inheritors like Donovan Scarborough nightmares about missed opportunities for investment, which brings me smartly back to the fact that we can see someone standing in the open doorway of the grand old house.
“That’s him, Scarborough,” Marina whispers.
I knew that, I recognized him from the TV broadcast too.
“Hmm.” I try to see who he’s talking to but they’re standing out of my line of vision. What do we do now? Shredding a gossamer-thin petal in my fingers, I mull over the options. Option A: We walk up the path as bold as brass and offer our ghost-busting services. Option B: We continue to slouch along the footpath in the style of escapees from a pagan flower-child cult. Option C: something in the middle of the two. I like the middle; it’s usually the most inconspicuous place to be. I hope that in time I’ll become a more confident badass businesswoman than I am right now. Give me a few months and I’ll be marching fearlessly up to my prospective customers rather than dithering about in their shrubbery for ten minutes beforehand.
“Let’s just shake the flowers out of our hair and get nearer so we can hear what he’s saying.”
We bend forward and shake our fingers through our hair, and I start laughing when we stand up again and look at each other, because Marina’s hair has grown to twice its original size.
“You look like you’re auditioning for an ’80s rock band.”
“And you look like you’ve been ravaged by the singer from an’80s rock band,” she shoots back, nodding, then finger-combs my dark bob back into place forme.
“Perfect.”
I can hear the conversation more clearly now as we draw nearer; it’s distinctly riotous. “Someone’s not a happy camper,” I whisper, straining to catch their words.
“Is he yelling at Leo?”
We mosey a little closer.
“Mumbo jumbo claptrap…”
Okay, so I heardthatpretty clearly. Scarborough is definitely not in the best of moods, and the cordial, chatty relationship we’d witnessed between them onscreen is nowhere to be seen.
“Just do your psychobabble-shit thing and get this place emptied of everything but the furniture, got that? In fact, you can order a skip for that load of old tat as well. This place is due to be a nursing home as soon as I can off-load it and they won’t want all that junk.”
“Youcansay the wordspirit.” Leo’s disdainful voice carries down the path as we approach the door along the uneven, crazy-paved front path. I have a silent little laugh to myself at the fact that Scarborough just ordered Leo to sort a skip. That will have pissed him off far more than the psychobabble comment. They have their backs turned, giving us the advantage of listening to them unannounced. “Or ghost, if you’re feeling particularly brave. It’s not like saying ‘Candyman, Candyman, Candyman,’ you know.”
We’re within touching distance now, and Marina taps Scarborough smartly on the shoulder and gives him a loud “Boo!” as he turns, making him jump out of his expensive suit and swear like a sailor.
“Christ almighty,” he explodes, shooting us daggers before he swings back to Leo. “What is this? A cheap attempt to turn this into a fairground haunted house to scare me into paying you more?”
Leo doesn’t answer straightaway. He’s too busy rearranging his features through a speedy cycle of “Hello, ex-girlfriend who I dumped acrimoniously; oh shit, you’ve got your vicious sidekick with you,” and “Don’t come a step closer, this job hasLeo Darkstamped all over it.” Or that’s how I read his micro-expressions when his eyes meet mine in the doorway.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he drawls eventually, still looking at me rather than at Scarborough. For a few seconds I’m caught by his eyes; most people are, they’re pretty hypnotic. Cola-brown shot through with shards of burnt-sugar gold and right now narrowed suspiciously in my direction. He hasn’t always looked at me this way though. Those eyes have laughed into mine and lusted into mine in the past; our lives have overlapped for as many years as I can remember. Leo Dark taught me to drive in his first car, back when I was seventeen and he was a charismatic nineteen-year-old, and, as I remember, we spent quite a lot of time in the back seat of that particular car too. He hasn’t always been so in love with himself that he can’t love anyone else; this TV gig has obviously massaged his ego like fine Wagyu beef. Give a man a microphone and a designer cape and he buys into his own hype so much that he can’t remember those admittedly hot tumbles on the back seat of his Nova.Here we go again,I think, and I brace myself against stray unplatonic thoughts, because I’m not a girl given to letting the same man near her heart twice. He broke it quite spectacularly; he pretty much rolled out of bed with me and onto the train to London as soon as the TV job offer pinged into his inbox. If he’d written me a parting letter, which he didn’t, it would have said something like
Thanks for the last few years, Melody, they’ve been fun but basically worthless given that I’m dropping you like a stone to follow my fortune on the golden paved streets of London. Love, Leo. (You should keep this letter safe, my signature will be worth a fortune in a few years.)
I nod and then turn my attention to Scarborough. “Mr. Scarborough, I saw your piece on TV this morning and came to offer you our services.”
“Mypiece on TV,” Leo snarks, then steps closer to standshoulder to shoulder with Scarborough, creating a solid no-entry wall in the wide stone doorway to the house. “Thanks and all that, but I’m afraid we don’t have time for rubberneckers.”
“Rubberneckers?” Marina scoffs, and I hold on to her arm in case she takes a swing at him.
Still looking at Scarborough, I smile politely.
