Chapter Thirteen
Chapter
Thirteen
“Artie Elliott, your face is as red as my lipstick! What have you been doing down in the kitchen for so long?”
Artie has just appeared in the library with Lestat in tow, and Marina is absolutely right that his head resembles a pickled beet. If anything, he turns even more puce at Marina’s observation, and she picks up a magazine from a side table and fans him as she laughs knowingly.
Artie shoots a nervous glance my way and swallows audibly. “I haven’t been doing anything.” He shrugs, rubbing his hand around the back of his neck. I think there are beads of sweat breaking out on his brow.
“Did Hells Bells make a pass at you?”
Trust Marina to cut straight to the point.
Fletch stifles a half laugh and pulls a book from the nearest shelf to look as if he’s not listening, and I’m glad that the others are still in the main reception hall and out of earshot.
“What?” Artie yelps. “No! Of course she didn’t. She wouldn’t! She’s not like that.”
“There’s nothing wrong with a woman taking control, Artie,” Marina says archly. “Just because we’re in a castle, it doesn’t mean the kitchen maid has to be seen and not heard.”
“Or screwed by the master of the house as she peels the spuds,” Fletch murmurs, flicking idly through his book. He looks up when we all stare at him accusingly. “Sorry,” he says with a shrug. “Too Game of Thrones?”
I send him the death stare. Artie is Fletch’s polar opposite in terms of experience and worldliness, and I feel my protective gene kick in hard.
“Not everyone’s brain operates at your sewage level,” I snarl out of the side of my mouth. “She’s a very nice girl, and that’s an outrageous thing to suggest in this day and age.”
“Said the princess to the knight,” he growls right back, and chucks in one of his infuriating winks that makes me want to find something sharp to poke his eye out with.
“You’re no knight,” I mutter.
“But you’re every inch the princess,” he says softly, and my knees go unaccountably weak.
God, I hate myself! There’s something about the deep, gravelly tone of his voice that makes my ovaries twang.
Please, someone, stop me. If I stay in this castle much longer I’ll be asking him to crawl underneath my crinoline and kiss my Batman knickers.
“She gave me a sausage roll,” Artie says, laying down the linen-napkin-wrapped pastry on a marble side table and gazing at it wistfully. It’s bloody massive. “She said she made it especially for me. What do you think that means?”
We all look at it with him and I really hope no one says anything stupid.
“Maybe she thinks you look like you have a good appetite?” I say.
“She wanted to give you a gift,” Marina remarks.
Fletch grins. “She wants your hot sausage.”
It was always going to be him.
“Game of Thrones again?” I sneer.
He laughs. “Not unless it was the triple-X-rated version.”
Trust him to bring up porn over a sausage roll. I don’t like that gloaty look on his face either; it says “I’m cool because I watch dirty things that you don’t watch.”
“Don’t look down your nose at me, Fletcher Gunn,” I say, thrusting my chin at him. “You’re not the only one who watches porn, you know. Sometimes I flick the adult channel on late at night when I’m alone…with the dog.”
Marina choke-laughs, Artie looks alarmed, and Fletch nods seriously, interest in his mirth-filled, glass-green eyes.
I should never have said that. The closest I get to porn is rewinding old reruns of Poldark to watch him doing manly things with his scythe, but I’ve started now so I brazen it out regardless.
“Go on,” Fletch says, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning on a glass-fronted bookcase. “I’m riveted.”
Oh piss off, you supercilious twat. That’s what I want to say, and on reflection, it would probably have been better than what I actually said next.
“Oh, I pay-per-view with the best of them. Brandy the, er, randy stripper, is practically on my payroll.” I attempt to crick my neck like I’m one of the lads for good measure.
Fletch laughs openly and Marina is trying so hard to keep herself together that a silent tear runs down her cheek.
“So you and your one-eared pug pay to view late-night lesbian porn?”
“Did I say she was a lesbian?” I say hotly. I’m sure I didn’t, and I don’t like the way he’s making assumptions about fictitious Brandy.
“No, but I figured that she must be if you’re paying her to strip for you. Or maybe she isn’t, but you are.”
“God, what is it with you?!” I half shout. “Women can enjoy other women’s company without being lesbians, you know!”
“I don’t mind if you’re a lesbian sometimes. It’s sexy.”
Oh God, this has gone badly off the rails. He thinks I’m a sexy lesbian who forces her dog to watch late-night porn.
Artie frowns, gazing at the sausage roll. “I don’t think I can eat it. It’s too big.”
“I bet Brandy could manage it,” Fletch murmurs, so low that only I hear him.
“She doesn’t get involved with food,” I whisper cattily. I am actually insane. “Not since the tricky incident with, um, a yam. She said it was a special request from one of her customers.”
“Brandy sounds like a game girl. Can I have her number?”
“She’s too busy to fit you in.”
He laughs. “I imagine she must be, what with all those unfortunate vegetable-related sexual incidents and stripping for you and the pug.”
“It was only one yam, not the whole veg aisle!” I’m hazy on what a yam looks like. I’ve probably suggested something anatomically impossible.
“I genuinely cannot fathom what goes on inside your head, Ghostbuster,” he says. “You’re the most unusual person I’ve ever met.”
What the hell even was that? A compliment or an insult?
“I think you made it perfectly clear what you think of me last night,” I say, angry out of nowhere. “And, for the record, you make me feel it more than anyone else I know, so quit with the unusual person crap, will you? I know I’m different. I’m painfully fucking aware of it, thank you very much.”
I stomp straight out of the library, out of the open castle door, and I don’t stop until I’m hidden behind the hulking protection of Babs and can slide down on my ass and hold my head in my hands. “Melody?” Marina is beside me on the gravel in seconds. “What’s happening here?”
I understand her concern. I’m not given to emotional outbursts. She’s the one with the soft, sentimental spot a mile wide. I’m the tough-as-nails one who prefers blood and guts to hearts and flowers.
“I need to ask you a question and I want you to be completely honest with me,” I say.
She frowns. “I’ve never lied to you. Unless it’s about whether it was me who cut Susan Benson’s ponytail off when we were fourteen because she kept taking the piss out of you.”
“I bloody knew that was you!” I say, completely distracted.
I’ve always had my suspicions, but it happened in a crushed corridor and it could have been any one of a number of suspects.
Susan Benson was one of those girls who got on a lot of people’s nerves with her big mouth and bad attitude, all flicky blond ponytail and too much electric-blue eyeliner.
That is until someone hacked her hair off and left her with no choice but to have an unflattering mullet for a good three months while the brutal chop grew out.
“Better that you didn’t know, then you couldn’t be guilty by association,” she says. “I’m still not sorry, the obnoxious cow. I think I still have her ponytail in a drawer somewhere.”
For a moment we sit and reflect on that macabre revelation. She’s one step away from that guy in Silence of the Lambs who makes dresses from his victims’ skin.
“Do I look crazy when I’m speaking to ghosts?”
“What?” She looks at me, surprised. “Why would you ask that? Has Fletcher Gunn been winding you up when I’m not there to black his eye for him?”
“No,” I say, picking at my now-untidy orange nail polish. “Yes. Not exactly, not really. He just…I don’t know, he made me see how it must be for everyone else to see me talk to empty chairs or vacant spaces, and now I feel like a bit of a fool.”
“A fool?” Marina looks mutinously toward the castle.
“Melody Bittersweet, do you have any clue how special what you can do is? Yes, it makes you different, but different good, not different bad! Jeez, are you seriously going to let some cynical hack dull your shine or take away your pride and self-belief? So what if no one else can see what you can see or understand the chair isn’t empty?
That’s our loss, not yours. It’s pretty bloody magnificent to watch you work, and anyone who chooses to make you feel anything less than fucking brilliant needs my foot shoving up their backside, even if the backside in question is fit and attached to the bloke you seem to have decided is the next man you’re going to go to bed with. ”
I wince, wishing I’d already told her about my ill-advised Haribo-related sex tryst with Fletch, but now doesn’t feel like the moment to confess.
She pulls a tissue out of her bra and shoves it into my hands, presumably in case I decide on a good old cry.
She doesn’t use the tissues to boost her cup size; Mother Nature already blessed her with a bosom that stops traffic.
She’s just one of those women who views her bra as additional onboard storage.
Tissues, pens, gum, her phone—she’s got the lot stashed in there.
She used to put her lipstick in there too until the day it melted all over her cleavage and her mother thought she’d been shot in the chest at point-blank range.
“Did Artie’s sausage roll tip you over the edge?”
I laugh softly at the stupidity of her suggestion, just as she knew I would.
“No.”
She squeezes my knee. “Sudden onset of panic over whether we can get the job done in time for the party?”
I sigh hard. “That’s part of it. I don’t feel as if I’m making enough headway.” I feel around in my back pocket and pull out the key. “Although I did find this just before you arrived this morning. It’s for the locked turret, I hope.”