Chapter Three #2
I watch them consider my words. I’ve deliberately left them without any polite option but to agree and let us leave, and they have the good manners to nod and make positive noises as I lead Marina and Artie down the steps and across the gravel to Babs.
We pile in and all three of us raise a hand of farewell as Barty and Lois wave us off with fixed, cold smiles.
“I’m sorry,” I say as soon as we’re safely back over the moat and on regular roads again. “I totally blew that.”
“You didn’t,” Marina says. “It could have happened to anyone.”
We all know that’s not true. The buck stops with me, and I acted like a startled goat. A goat who’d just spotted a lion and didn’t fancy being its dinner. There is only one thing keeping the flame of hope alive in my head right now.
“You know, Leo’s gran had this really evil cat when he was a kid, some huge thing that would most probably be illegal these days,” I say, flinging a right at the lights back toward Chapelwick.
“It took a chunk out of his leg. Left him with a scar he still bears and a pathological fear of cats. Even kittens make him sweat.”
Marina and Artie digest the implications of this nugget of information and start to nod in slow unison, and a tiny smile curves my lips as I start to hum “In the Jungle” under my breath.
As we come to a halt outside Artie’s mum’s house, he reaches for his lunch box from behind the bench seat and clambers down onto the pavement.
“Does your mum really have a round dining table?” Marina asks as he opens the latch on the garden gate.
He grins and shakes his head and she laughs softly as we belch off back toward the main road in a cloud of exhaust fumes.
It’s closing time when I get home and I’m hot, bothered, and miserable.
Not especially in the mood for my own company, I bypass the stairs up to my front door and head into the apartment my mother shares with my gran at the front of the building.
We’re a pretty fortunate bunch to have had this place in our family for generations.
It’s big enough for me to live separately from them but still stay close, which is a good thing most of the time.
My mother feeds my addiction to sugar; she’s my pancake dealer.
They’re crazy, but they’re my crazies, and they see the dead people too, which makes them comforting for me to be around.
Blithe Spirits is just about the only place I can truly relax and let my guard down, the only place where I’m not set apart from everyone else by my ability.
Or my disability, as it feels like sometimes.
I push their ever-unlocked door open and step inside Mum’s farmhouse-style kitchen, and the familiar scents and sounds are like a soft blanket around my shoulders.
Lestat is snoozing in the pillowy bed my mother insists she found in a charity shop despite the fact that I know full well she bought it for him from an online pampered pooch store.
She looks up from reading the newspaper as I come in, sliding her glasses down her long nose and rolling her shoulders.
“I see Fletcher Gunn is at it again,” she grumbles, tapping the article with the arm of her glasses.
I look over her shoulder at the paper, my mouth suddenly dry. “What’s that?”
She sweeps her bone-straight silver hair to one side of her neck and sniffs with disdain. “Casting aspersions on our industry, as usual. He’s obviously picked up on that Maplemead Castle story you’re involved with.”
Oh crappola.
“They mentioned it on the local radio news this morning too.”
“They did?” My heart sinks even further into my Converse.
I’d foolishly been hoping to keep the story on the down-low, but it seems that Barty and Lois have wasted no time in courting the publicity machine in order to boost the castle’s profile.
I skim-read Fletch’s article; it’s a pretty standard story about the castle having changed hands over the net, accompanied by a smiley photo of the new lord and lady toasting their new home with frothing champagne flutes on the grand front steps of Maplemead.
Fletch goes on to detail their ambitious business plans to rent the place out as a film location and how “their first prospective Hollywood A-lister is refusing to come near the place because she’s read it is notorious for its hauntings.
” I can almost hear his scathing laugh as I read his derision-loaded words.
Word on the street is that the movie is slated to be the blockbuster horror of next summer.
Rumors of the location being haunted will no doubt be welcomed by the production company and the local crackpots, regardless of the fact that they are completely baseless and even more fictitious than the movie itself.
In other words, it’s a load of baloney and bunkum made up to create interest. I’ve no doubt that that is exactly what Fletch thinks.
If he cannot see something with his own eyes, then he doesn’t believe it exists.
It’s a fundamental difference between us and not one we could ever agree to disagree on and try to get along because we fancy the pants off each other.
Needless to say, my mum and gran can’t abide him; he never misses a chance to take potshots at us and our industry in the press.
Take just now: by local crackpots, I know he is referring to us and Leo.
“He’ll never change,” I say tonelessly, because I don’t want to talk to my mother about Fletch.
She’s got a sixth sense for sniffing out stuff I don’t want her to know, and I don’t want her to know that Fletcher Gunn sometimes makes me go weak at the knees.
I definitely don’t want her to know I had wild midnight car sex with him a couple of weeks ago.
I’d only gone out for emergency Haribo gummies, it was a very unexpected turn of events.
It’s difficult; he gets under my skin by calling me names in print and then, when he’s in front of me, he gets under my skin with his clever words and his hot eyes.
Lestat makes a grumble-grunt as he sits up, his eyes trained on the door.
A moment later it opens, and in walks my gran, or Dicey Bittersweet, as she’s known to the world in general.
Lestat has a crush on my gran. It’s probably because she eats like a bird, passing most of her food to him under the table in order to leave room for her never-ending supply of champagne.
“Cup of tea?” I ask, crossing the room to kiss her perfectly rouged cheek. She glances at her Swarovski-encrusted watch and narrows her eyes.
“It’s after five, darling. Let’s have bubbly instead.”
The time is actually irrelevant; it’s all theater. She drinks champagne from a teacup before five in the afternoon and then in a crystal glass afterward. You’d think it might addle her brain or weaken her heart, yet it seems only to increase her joie de vivre and couldn’t-care-less attitude.
To be completely fair to her, she doesn’t actually drink a great deal and she never touches anything other than champagne.
It’s just part of her glamorous persona to sip fizz as sparkly as her personality.
She really ought to have been born French.
She’s a force of nature almost entirely sustained by champagne, American daytime soaps, and the occasional prawn.
I go to decline, but then why would I? I’ve had a crapshoot of a day, and an evening of repeats on TV with a flatulent pug lies ahead of me.
“Have either of you ever come across any unusual animal ghosts?” I ask as I pour us all a glass of bubbly from the refrigerator.
It’s a big double-door American job, with one shelf almost entirely taken up by corked green bottles.
The rest is filled with all sorts of weird and wonderful ingredients, because my mother is what you might call an experimental cook.
Don’t get me wrong, she’s often spectacularly good, but it’s always fraught with that edge of danger, because she doesn’t take criticism very well.
Mum accepts her glass from me and screws her nose up as she considers my question. “Believe it or not, I dealt with a ghost tortoise once. He’d been passed around in the same family for over a century, and when he finally died no one realized for a good two years.”
It’s a sad story, but not what I’m looking for. “Neither of you have ever met, err, a lion, then?”
They both look startled. “A lion?” Mum says.
I nod. “As in fully grown male, angry, and roaming around Maplemead Castle this afternoon.”
“That’s highly unusual, isn’t it, Silvana,” Gran says, frowning toward my mother. “What’s a lion doing getting stuck in a castle?”
“By the looks of the human ghosts I saw today, I’d say there must have been a circus of some kind there. The lion appeared to be with the ringmaster.”
“Fascinating,” Mum says, keen-eyed as she always is when it comes to learning something new. “What did they have to say for themselves?”
I hang my head. “I didn’t get as far as speaking to them.”
Lestat shuffles underneath the legs of the table and plonks his backside down on my foot, a very belated hello.
Gran pats my hand. “What’s the matter, darling?”
My mother leans back on her chair, snags a cupcake from the countertop and pushes it into my fingers.
“Is it a man?” She makes a bad job of keeping the note of hope from her voice. She’s desperate for me to find my Prince Charming.
I shake my head, my heart in my boots. “I made a right bloody fool of myself today.”
“Oh, Melody, we all do that sometimes.” Gran squeezes my fingers. “Look at me crashing around on TV a few weeks ago in that suit of armor.”
On the scale of making a fool of yourself, that was actually quite impressive.
A misguided attempt to help me win our first case that went spectacularly wrong, this is actually the first time Gran has expressed anything other than righteous indignation about the fact that her meddling almost cost Leo his TV job and landed me with so much huge humble pie to eat that I almost threw up on my own shoes. He still holds it over me.
“Not like this,” I say. “Barty Letterman was giving us a guided tour of the castle and the lion appeared out of nowhere and scared the pants off me. He just looked so…” I pause and make shapes with my hands to demonstrate the size of him, finishing off by clawing the air and a silent little roar. “He looked real.”
They both watch me through narrowed eyes. “Did you run?”
I lay my forehead on the table at my mother’s quiet question. “Yes. As if the building was on fire. While yelling ‘lion’ at the top of my lungs and waving my arms as if I was being attacked by a swarm of wasps.”
They lapse into thoughtful silence, so I carry on mumbling into the pine tabletop until my mother speaks with unexpected authority.
“Enough. Lift your head up this instant, Melody Bittersweet.” I’m surprised enough to do as I’m told.
“I don’t need to remind you about my reservations when you decided to open the agency,” she says.
She’s right. She was vehemently set against it.
“But you went right ahead and did it anyway, because you have Bittersweet backbone, Melody. Haven’t I…” She pauses and looks at Gran. “Haven’t we taught you more tenacity than this? Since when did a Bittersweet woman roll over and give up at the first sign of trouble?”
Her words seep slowly into my brain. All three of us around this table have lived our lives outside the normal lines because of our gift, and it’s made us independent and strong.
I might not have my gran’s devil-may-care attitude down pat yet, and I’ll probably never achieve my mother’s Zen-like calmness, but I’m Melody goddamn Bittersweet and I don’t give up this easily on something that matters.
“So you reacted in a way that you aren’t especially pleased with. You can’t change that, but you can put it behind you and come back fighting.”
“They sort of fired me,” I say.
“Pah,” my gran says. “They just don’t know you well enough yet, darling.” She takes a glug of fizz. “To know a Bittersweet woman is to love her. It’s our gift and our curse, Melody.”
I laugh a little bit, despite my mood. Gran has the supreme confidence of a twenty-one-year-old beauty queen and I love her for it.
My mother presses on. “Being defeatist will get you nowhere except defeated.”
I split the last of the champagne between our three glasses and lift mine in a silent, resolute toast. They clink theirs against mine and I nod. Message received. Hauling Lestat out from beneath the table, I kiss my mother and Gran farewell and head on upstairs to my flat.
En route, I text Marina and Artie.
Bring your A games in the morning, people. We’re going back to Maplemead, and tomorrow we play to win.