Chapter Four
Chapter
Four
It’s as well that I have good people in my life, I need them to balance out Lestat.
“Get off me.” I use both hands to lift him bodily, because he doesn’t respond well to polite requests. He doesn’t respond to requests at all, actually; he’s quite like Babs in that a firm, hands-on approach works best.
“Is there any chance I could train you to make coffee?” I ask him as he sits pointedly watching me shuffle my feet into my slippers and pull on the mint-green floor-sweeping silk robe my gran gave me last birthday.
It is fabulously, absolutely not my style, yet somehow Gran got it spot-on.
Whenever I slip my arms into it and knot the belt I expect someone to shout “Action!” or hand me an Oscar, and today I need all of the good old gumption I can muster.
A couple of minutes later I follow Lestat’s furry ass down the stairs barefoot with my mug of coffee in my hands, as I do every morning now that he’s in my life.
I don’t walk him, exactly. We walk together, and although I’d categorically deny it, I’ve come to enjoy it the tiniest bit as a quiet ten minutes to marshal my thoughts for the day ahead.
My entrance door is at the back of Blithe Spirits and it opens onto a broad cobbled cartway that runs between us and our neighbors, so I’m safe to swan up and down there in my robe without someone wondering if I have a Greta Garbo complex.
Lestat is on form this morning, prancing closer to the street end of the alley than usual.
I shout-whisper his name quietly, mindful of my folks and everyone else who lives on Chapelwick High Street.
Too quietly, obviously, because an orange tabby cat sticks its inquisitive nose into the alleyway and hisses at him and he hares off, impressively fast for a dog with such little legs and a fat ass.
Bumholes. I put my coffee down by the wall and dash barefoot across the cool cobblestones. At the end, I poke my head out and glance left along the High Street.
“I believe this belongs to you, Ghostbuster.”
I close my eyes for a second, because I know that voice.
Fletcher Gunn, otherwise known as the last man on earth I should go anywhere near, otherwise known as the man who sometimes presses me against walls in alleyways and kisses me delirious.
I can’t explain it; he’s a cynical hack and my family’s nemesis and I want to hate him.
But every now and then he looks at me with those heartbreaker green eyes of his and makes my brain feel as if there’s a unicorn cantering around inside it farting glitter.
He’s mostly thunder and lightning, but every now and then he dazzles me like sunlight in my eyes on the hottest day of summer.
When I turn the other way to look at Fletch, I find him holding a jiggling, ecstatic-looking Lestat.
“A girl could be forgiven for thinking you were hanging around here just to see her, Fletcher Gunn.” I’m horribly aware that I sound like a bad Mae West impersonator.
He deposits Lestat in the alleyway and I bend down and give my mutt a swift double-handed shove toward the safety of home again.
Fletch laughs as if my words were preposterous, and his eyes drop as he registers what I’m wearing.
“I wouldn’t have imagined you in something so…” He gestures toward my robe. “Girly.”
My hackles shoot up. Just because I’ve carefully cultivated my edgy look, it doesn’t mean I want to be predictable. “I can wear girly stuff if I like. And anyway, I’d rather you didn’t imagine me in clothes at all, thank you very much.” Okay, so that came out all kinds of wrong.
“You want me to think about you naked?” he asks, amused. “Because I do that a lot. And I’m usually naked too and we—”
“Stop!” I hold up a hand and roll my eyes. “I haven’t had breakfast yet. You’ll put me off my muffin.”
His eyes glitter. “I’m losing sleep over your muffins, Ghostbuster. Especially after the other night.” He glances toward my door. “If I buy you Haribos will you take your clothes off again?”
I hate it when he does this, because I love it when he does this. “You sound like a pervert. Scintillating as this is, could you go now? I’ve got work to do, places to go, people to see.”
He nods and shrugs one shoulder. “Maplemead?” I don’t reply, but I don’t need to.
He winks. “Thought so.”
“You’re too cocky, Fletcher Gunn. You’ll trip yourself up one of these days.”
Fletch grins wide. “Would you like me to crack the obvious big-cock joke?”
Fucking hell! Why does this always happen around him? So far I’ve told him I want him to think about me naked and that I think his cock is big enough to trip over.
I go to turn away and then I stop short because Fletch has pulled a key from his pocket and slotted it into a door between the shops.
He’s well aware that I’m watching him and he glances my way casually.
“What?” he asks, shrugging nonchalantly.
Please, lord, tell me Fletcher Gunn isn’t my new neighbor. The shabby little flat over the sandwich shop a couple of doors down has been for rent for a while now. I flick my eyes up and see with a sinking feeling that the To Let sign has gone.
“Nothing,” I mutter, refusing to give him the satisfaction of seeing me riled. “You do know that the previous tenant died in there?” I ask, glancing toward the dirty upstairs flat window. “No one found him for at least three weeks. There’s probably bits of him rotted into the floorboards.”
He just laughs and shakes his head. “That would be the same guy I met in the pub last week to sign the lease. The one who’s alive and well and gone traveling in Asia for a year.”
I shrug. “Similar story.”
He winks as he opens his door. “See you around, neighbor.”
I’m in the office just after nine o’clock and you’d be forgiven for thinking that there was a kids’ birthday party about to kick off.
The coffee table is groaning with Krispy Kreme doughnuts courtesy of Marina, three catering-size bags of fun-size chocolate bars from Glenda, and the tallest chocolate cake I’ve ever laid eyes on, which has been made especially for me by Artie’s mum.
I’m overwhelmed, both by their kindness and by the need to face-plant into the cake and eat my way all the way down to the plate.
I make us all a drink and Glenda picks up the box of doughnuts to make space for me to set the tray down.
When I reach out to take it from her she grips on to it tighter than I’d expected.
For a second it really is like being at a kids’ party; someone stopped the music and we both want to be the one who wins the prize.
In most situations, I’d defer to Glenda Jackson, but this is a sugar-related incident on the back of a very bad twenty-four hours, so I hold on tight.
She narrows her eyes before she concedes and allows me to take the box from her hands before we tear it in two, spill the doughnuts, and everyone loses.
“Okay,” I say with renewed, sugar-induced valor. “Today we’re heading back to Maplemead, and this time we’re going to make them want us so badly they’re going to beg us to stay rather than order us off the property.”
Glenda’s eyebrows rise, her pen poised over the meetings book. “They ordered you off the property?”
“Well, no, of course not,” I say, throwing in a carefree little laugh and rolling my eyes as if I’ve wildly exaggerated, when in fact it is pretty much exactly what happened. I badly want Glenda to think I’m up to this job I’ve created for myself.
“They formed a human barricade across the door,” Artie says, lifting Lestat onto his lap to share his doughnut.
Turncoat! I bristle with hubris. “You say barricade, I say…” Then I pause, because what the hell can I say instead of barricade? “Banana. I say banana.”
They all regard me as if I’ve lost my grip. Even the damn dog. Marina laughs. “Banana?”
Oh, right. So she’s on #teammockmelody this morning too.
Why did I have to go and say banana?
“Yes, banana. As in banana split. Or Bananaman.”
“Even you must struggle to get excited about Bananaman.”
She’s right, of course. Bananaman has never yet featured in any of my superhero fantasies.
“Can we please get back to the point?” I say, as if my errant employees are distracting me rather than the other way around.
Artie raises his hand. “You could have said barracuda. It would have made more sense.”
If his mother hadn’t supplied me with an orgasm-inducing chocolate cake, I’d be thinking about sacking him, mostly because he’s right.
You say barricade, I say barracuda would have made a whole lot more sense than banana.
I swallow a few times as I stare at him, and from the side of my mouth, I inform Glenda that none of this conversation is to be recorded in the book.
“Anyway,” I say, rising above their level. “Today we go back and show them exactly why they need us.”
“And how, exactly, do you plan to do this?” Glenda asks pleasantly, and they all look at me for the answer.
“We stage a triple-pronged attack,” I say, because I planned all of this in the shower this morning. “I’m prong one. I see the ghosts and this time I won’t freak out.” I look at Marina. “You’re prong two. Leo will have the creepy twins with him. You need to go über-Marina.”
Leo’s twin assistants bring a whole new meaning to the word stalker.
They seem to serve little operational purpose besides making him look as if he has a permanent entourage.
They chiefly feed his growing army of socal media fans with shots of him looking moodily into the distance and updates of what he had for lunch.
The one thing they are is eye-catching though; they’re going to have instant curb appeal with Barty Letterman.
“You want me to out-fembot Leo’s fembots?”
I nod. “Marina, you’re foxier, smarter, and funnier than the pair of them put together. You bring the charm and the sizzle, but you also bring brains and actual skills to the party. Wow the Lettermans, help me make them realize that we’re the only team they need on the job.”