Chapter Five
Chapter
Five
Fletch has just strolled out onto the shaded portico with a tall iced glass of water in his hand, and his laughing eyes tell me that he’s having a whale of a time.
If there’s one thing Fletch finds more amusing than taking the piss out of me, it’s taking the piss out of Leo Dark, so he’s found himself in a BOGO situation here and is a proverbial pig in muck.
“Are you stuck on my knicker elastic?” I say snarkily.
“In my dreams.” He shoots me a lazy wink. “Scandal just seems to follow you around, Ghostbuster.”
“Or Leo’s TV company tipped you off about the possibility of a story,” Marina says, rolling her eyes.
“And they weren’t wrong,” he says, unruffled. “It’s turning into quite the party.” He makes a halfhearted attempt at not looking down Marina’s cleavage. “Dark and his crew have only been here for ten minutes and he’s already passed out on the sofa.”
“Leo’s passed out?” I say, mildly concerned despite myself.
Fletch nods. “Stone-cold out.” He flips the page of his notebook and consults it.
“Last seen being spritzed with cold water and muttering for his mummy.” I have a sneaking suspicion that Leo has just encountered Goliath.
I may not have covered myself in glory yesterday, but at least I stayed conscious; maybe Leo’s reaction will help strengthen my case.
Is that mercenary? Probably, but was it mercenary of him to drop me faster than a hand grenade when the bright lights beckoned?
Yes. Yes, it was, and I dropped my loyalty to Leo at the exact same moment.
Put it this way: If there was a fire and I had to choose between saving Leo Dark or my beloved Converse collection, I’d have a tough time deciding.
So I perk up a bit and politely ask Fletch to move aside.
“Haul ass, hack. You’re in my way.”
Did I just come over all Clint Eastwood? Should I draw an imaginary pistol and point it at his smug face?
He takes a long, slow drink, and my eyes are drawn to the movement of his throat.
Half of me wants to slit it, the other half wants to lick it.
If I ever meet Mother Nature in a back alley, I’m going to pin her to the wall and shout, “Why? Why did you do this to me? Why does my body insist that it wants to tangle up the sheets with Fletcher Gunn again when my head knows it’s highly likely to end up with one of us needing to emigrate or do prison time?
” Opposites doesn’t even begin to cover what we are.
He’s the ocean and I can’t swim a length.
Or else I can, but not without feeling like I’m going to drown, which actually is how I feel most of the time around Fletch. Completely and utterly out of my depth.
He looks as if he’s going to laugh but then shrugs and moves away from the doors to sit on the stone balustrade around the porch, leaning back against one of the columns with his leg bent.
I can feel his too-green eyes watching me, and it takes superhuman effort not to turn back around and shove him right off that wall onto the gravel below.
Inside, there’s a commotion. Leo is indeed prone on the sofa with the creepy twins offering him first aid, which seems to consist mostly of fluttery strokes of his cheeks and blowing on him with tiny little puffs.
Lois is also there, spritzing the air around him with a fine mist of water.
It’s like watching Sleeping Beauty in reverse, until he mumbles at Lois to kindly quit with the water because it’s playing havoc with his curls.
My sympathy cup does not runneth over. I’m not saying he’s faking it, but he’s definitely milking it. No one has even noticed we’ve come into the lofty entrance hall yet, so I clear my throat and speak.
“Er, is everything okay in here?”
You’d be surprised how quickly Leo makes a full recovery at the sound of my voice.
He bounds up from the sofa, all damp-shirted, with his hair in disarray.
I’m reminded that I’ve seen him look that way in far more intimate situations than this, and I squash the thought like an ant under the toe of my sneaker.
“Melody, darlin’!” Lois squawks, more pleased to see me than I’d expected.
On that, Barty appears from the hallway. He looks a little put out to see us, until Marina steps forward and leaves a lipstick kiss on his cheek.
“So good to see you again,” she purrs, branding him as her kill for the benefit of the creepy twins, who start to twitch. “Barty, we feel just terrible about not finishing the tour yesterday.”
I nod, even though he hasn’t looked my way once. Marina glances toward Lois, including her, because she’s too smart to alienate Lady Lolo in her mission to cut the twins off at the knees.
Barty beams at Marina’s cleavage. “I guess I could spare the time to show you kids around some more.”
Leo’s face is thunderous, so I turn away and look toward the library. Fleetingly, I catch a glimpse of the woman from beside the fireplace yesterday watching us keenly, but as soon as she appears she disappears again. Has she realized I can see her? Or that Leo can, perhaps?
“Now, where did we get to?” Barty murmurs.
“The bit where Melody saw a lion in the ballroom and ran out of the castle screaming,” Artie says.
Jeez, does he have to be so friggin’ literal?
“And what a beautiful ballroom it is,” I say enthusiastically while sending Artie a slow, simmering look that suggests he might like to button his lip.
“You saw it too then,” Leo breathes, raking his hands through his flattened curls to fluff them up again. “The lion.”
“She didn’t pass out though,” Marina quips. Her lipsticked smile says lighthearted banter, but her kohled eyes say don’t mess with us.
“It was the heat,” one of the twins murmurs, standing to the left of Leo.
“Overwhelmed him.” On his right, the other nods.
Leo shakes them off. “I better come on that tour.”
I bristle with annoyance. How can I stop this from happening? He strides toward me, turning to Nikki and Vikki as they make to follow him. “Stay here and keep Lois company, ladies,” he says, and their heads twitch as if their batteries are short-circuiting.
Fletch picks this moment to saunter back inside and places his empty glass down on the table.
“I’m sure I can keep the ladies company while you guys go and do your spooky-McDooky thing,” he says, crossing the rug to sit down in the center of the sofa.
The twins press their reset buttons and perch either side of him, and by this point I don’t know who’s more wound up, me or Leo.
It’s turning into a stage farce where everyone is pissed with everyone else and smiling inanely to cover their inner rage.
Leo would probably like to kill Fletch in his sleep; they never miss the chance to take potshots at each other, Fletch’s usually in the press for all to read. The fact that I’ve been involved with both of them only makes matters worse.
Fletch would probably choose to kill Leo while he was awake so he could enjoy the fear in his eyes.
Lois is probably disturbed by the fact that Barty is having a midlife crisis over Marina’s cleavage. The creepy twins are firing me daggers because they know Leo and I have history and they’re threatened by it.
And then there’s me, spitting tacks because Leo has attached himself to our tour and spitting feathers because Fletch has stretched his arms out along the back of the sofa with a twin cozied up on either side of him.
He shoots me a mocking grin and I surreptitiously give him the finger as I turn to follow Barty and everyone else into the depths of the castle.
“No TV crew with you today then?” I snap at Leo as we bring up the rear.
“They wanted to be here, but I put them off.”
He’s deliberately offhand, as if he calls all the shots with the production company, which likely means they canceled because they had bigger fish to fry. “Thought I should come and see the place on my own first, get a feel for it.”
“Lucky really, if you passed out from the heat,” I say with faux sympathy.
“Lion,” Marina fake coughs, unsubtle.
Barty is oblivious to the tit for tat going on behind him because Artie is doing a sterling job of asking all the right questions about the castle.
I tune in, listening to him inquire about Maplemead’s spell as a nunnery and then again about its time as a convalescence home for injured soldiers after the Great War.
I get a small inner glow that he’s remembered the information from my initial case research notes.
I’ll give it to them both. Prong two and three are keeping up their ends of the bargain.
It’s up to me now, prong one, to keep up mine and be the best Ghostbuster in town.
I don’t want to tell Leo anything he doesn’t already know, but by the same token I don’t want him to have anything over me.
“It’s fairly obvious that you’ve come across the lion then,” I say, tucking my hair behind my ears. “Bit of a shocker, isn’t he?”
“You could say that,” he mutters.
“And his…companion?” I say, plying him for information.
“You mean the ringmaster,” Leo says. So he’s figured out the circus connection, same as me then.
Barty leads us into a small side chapel. “This was a private chapel for family use only,” he whispers. “Devout, from what I can gather.”
I’m listening, but distracted as a ghostly pair of nuns drift to the front and kneel before the stained glass window. They don’t speak to each other or look our way; they seem caught up in their prayers and contemplation. I slant my eyes toward Leo and find him watching the ghosts too.
“This place is full of them, isn’t it?” I whisper.
He nods. “I dread to think what we might find in the dungeon,” he mutters.
“Shackles?” I say.