Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter
Twenty-One
“So what were you and Fletch talking about?” I say, glancing at Artie as I pull Babs to a juddering halt at the traffic lights.
“Yeah, actually, spill. You two looked thick as thieves,” Marina says from his other side. He’s sandwiched between us on the front bench and he has to keep batting the Hawaiian garland hanging from the rearview mirror out of his eyes every time I fling us around a corner.
“Man stuff,” Artie mumbles, turning pink and staring straight ahead.
I sigh. “He told you to say that, didn’t he?”
Artie nods. “He knows a lot of things though, doesn’t he?”
Oh yes. Fletcher Gunn knows a lot of things. He knows how to wind me tighter than a windup mouse, and he knows how to kiss me until I feel as if he’s filled me up with moonlight, and he knows how to make me want to shove a stick of giant rhubarb so far up his backside that it tickles his tonsils.
Marina opens a fresh pack of gum. “Like what?”
Artie shrugs. “Like everything.”
She shakes her head. “You’re not going to tell us, are you?”
He pretends to think. “No.”
“Was it about snogging Hells Bells?”
He makes a strangulated sound. “No!”
“It was, wasn’t it?”
Artie covers his purple face with his hands and shakes his head.
I want to tell him that if Fletch gave him snogging advice then he should take it, because he’s a Jedi snog master, but I don’t. I just keep driving, and hope that whatever lust spell Britannia Lovell has cast over me and Fletcher Gunn wears off when we leave Maplemead Castle.
It’s so good to be home. Just pulling Babs into the shady cobbled alley at the side of the building makes me feel calmer.
I hadn’t realized quite how on edge everything back at Maplemead had gotten me.
It seems to have all become very romantically tangled very quickly over there, between both the living and the dead.
Being away for a short while will hopefully help me gain a little clarity, as well as some much needed respite from the pressure of being observed from all angles.
“I’m sorry I made you eat rhubarb,” Marina says once I’ve turned the engine off. She roots in her handbag and withdraws the much-teased packet of biscuits.
“Peace offering?” She hands them solemnly to Artie, who hands them solemnly to me.
“Triple chocolate and candied pecan butter cookies.” I read the swirly silver writing as if I’m Charlie Bucket and I’ve just found the last golden ticket.
Have I mentioned that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is my favorite movie in the world?
Oh to live in a world where chocolate lakes are real and the trees are made from giant lollipops.
“You’re forgiven,” I say. “The cookies outweigh the rhubarb.”
“And it was a very big rhubarb,” Artie says.
I feel better than I have in days. I hand Marina the office key and the biscuits as I slide Babs’s door shut. “Go on in and stick the kettle on. I’ll run and grab Lestat and be right back.”
I love the traditional sound of the old-fashioned bell over the door of Blithe Spirits.
My mother’s insistence on keeping the shop traditional is a warm blanket around my shoulders today, the familiar scents of beeswax, old books, and fresh flowers the welcome scent of home.
My mother is bent over behind the counter and her face breaks into a smile when she straightens up and spots me.
“Melody, darling. You’re home.”
Glenda pops one arm out of the back office and waves, a jingle of gold bangles.
“Hi, Glenda,” I call through.
“Do you need me to come down to the office?” she says, popping her head around the doorframe and looking at me over the top of her horn-rimmed glasses.
I shake my head. “We’re only back for a couple of hours, so there’s no need.”
My mother frowns. “I do worry about you being there around the clock like this, Melody. Is there any sign of an end in sight?”
“That’s kind of why I’ve come back. It’s impossible to think straight over there, so we’re going to go through everything and try to make sense of it. With biscuits.”
Turning her back on me, my mother opens a cupboard behind the counter and then turns around and places a cellophane-wrapped coffee cake on the counter. Absence seems to have made her heart grow fonder; she usually saves this kind of thing to use as bribery when she wants me to do something.
“Have some cake too,” she says, pushing it toward me. “Be careful, won’t you, darling?”
I pull the cake toward me so she can’t change her mind. I’m still not over how easily she upended that pancake into the bin.
“I know. Eat it with a fork, don’t put too much in my mouth at once. I’m a grown woman, Mum. I’m not about to choke on coffee cake.” My childhood was one long round of being warned not to shove sweet things into my mouth whole.
She flips her eyes to the ceiling. “Not with the cake, foolish child.” She taps her heart with her fingertips. “With this.”
I’m not sure if she means because of cholesterol or romance, and I don’t dare ask, because neither are something I want to think or talk about. I’m rescued from needing to answer by the tinkle of the bell as the shop door opens behind me.
“Melody, you’ve come home!” my gran cries, as if I’m a dog that’s been missing for days and turned up bedraggled and dirty.
She’s wearing a lavender spandex all-in-one topped off with a wide-brimmed sunhat; it’s a difficult look to pull off but she works it.
Lestat barrels in behind her and makes a beeline for me, and I find myself begrudgingly glad to see him back to rude health.
I say rude because, as he stretches his stout little body up my leg and paws at my knee, he lets out a volley of dog farts and rolls his eyes back blissfully.
“She’s going over there again in a couple of hours,” my mother says darkly.
The knowing look she shares with Gran tells me they’ve been talking about me.
Gran heads behind the counter to stand beside my mother, and then Glenda pops out of the office too and joins the other end of the row.
They look like the “now” version of Charlie’s Angels in one of those original cast “then and now” picture features the trashy celeb magazines love.
“Are you auditioning for a police lineup?”
They all sigh and then cross their arms over their chests in unison as if they’ve rehearsed it. They have, in a way; these three women have been the stalwarts of my life from the moment I was old enough to hoard my first bag of funsize chocolate bars.
“Why do I suddenly feel as if I’m standing in front of the jury?” I say jokingly.
“We don’t think it’s wise for you to spend another night in that castle,” my mother says. Oh no. She’s wheeled out the royal we. They’ve formed an army and they’re trying to stage an intervention.
“It’s Thursday today. With any luck this will be the last one I need to spend there.”
They glance at each other, trying to decide which of them is best to speak up on behalf of the team.
“We think your judgment is being clouded by the unreasonable time expectations you’re working under,” my mother says, and they all nod sagely.
“And that they’re asking far too much of you, expecting you to stay on-site like this,” Gran adds, smiling at me the way she used to when I was eight years old. Indulgently, as if I am a child in need of guidance.
“And that you’re highly likely to succumb to the carnal temptation of either Leo Dark or Fletcher Gunn and then regret it as soon as the job’s over,” Glenda says, matter-of-fact and direct, and my mother and my gran both look at her sharply.
“There’s not a chance in hell I’d ever let Leo near me again,” I say, sounding scandalized because I am affronted. “I’m offended you’d even suggest it of me.”
Their alliance is in disarray and I take the chance to scoop Lestat up under my arm and stomp my way to the door. My fingers touch the handle and then I remember the coffee cake.
I turn and march back across to the counter, but my mother lays her palm flat on top of the icing and stares me down.
“I note that you didn’t mention Fletcher Gunn, Melody.”
I’m flustered and I give the cake an exasperated little shove toward her. “Keep your cake.”
She pushes it back to my side of the counter and I twist away because Lestat cranes his neck to try to catch hold of the cellophane and claim it as his.
“Take the cake.”
We stare at each other while I decide whether to do as she asked.
“And take care of your heart?” my gran says.
Glenda dips into the office, reappearing a few seconds later with a small box and pushing it across the counter at me. “And take protection.”
It pains me greatly, but I leave the cake on the counter beside the box of condoms and hightail it out of there with my dog under my arm and my nose in the air.
An hour later and I’m almost calm again.
Marina let me have unfettered access to the fancy biscuits out of solidarity after I relayed my encounter with the Witches of sodding Chapelwick, and Artie made me a huge cup of coffee and has started to update the whiteboard.
“What I don’t get is what’s holding the ghosts at the castle,” Marina says, cracking a cookie in half and picking the nuts out as she stares at the board.
I tap the end of my pen against my teeth. “Their unresolved love triangle?”
We all consider that for a little while.
“Or maybe whether or not one of them cut the ropes on purpose?” Artie says.
I study the whiteboard. We have all three names written up there, along with the information we’ve gathered from them and about them so far. It’s frighteningly scant given the ball is in a couple of days, but I know for certain that one of those three ghosts holds the key to all of this.
“The least likely to have cut the ropes, assuming someone did, has to be Dino,” I say, thinking aloud. “I can’t help but think he’s trapped in the castle by circumstance; he’s fiery and besotted and his lover died a hideous death in his arms.”
“That’s true,” Marina says slowly. “Unless Britannia had dumped him, finally chosen her husband over him, something like that?”
Artie writes down our thoughts under Dino’s name. Okay, right, so maybe we shouldn’t write Dino off so readily.
“Well, I think we can safely assume that Britannia didn’t cut the ropes herself,” Marina says, pushing the biscuit plate toward me so I can finish off her unwanted pecans.
“Can we though? Can we be absolutely sure of that?” I’m questioning everything more deeply now. “Maybe she needed to kill Dino off for some reason. Perhaps he was threatening to expose their affair to Bohemia?”
Artie jots down the possibility, then cracks open his Tupperware sandwich box and pulls out one of his egg sandwiches.
Marina tucks the bottom half of her head inside her shirt and murmurs, “Mayday, Mayday,” into an imaginary walkie-talkie, and even Lestat falls down flat on his belly and tries to shove his face up the skinny leg of my jeans.
Usually the smell would get me too, but not today.
Today I’m Iron Woman. Artie helped me get out of swallowing giant rhubarb, the least I owe him is an egg sandwich free pass.
“And then there’s Bohemia, the spurned husband,” I say. “He’s the obvious one, isn’t he? Killed his wife by accident when he intended to murder his love rival?”
They both nod, and Marina and I sway backward on our chair legs when Artie waves his sandwich in our direction because an idea strikes him.
“Unless he actually intended to kill his wife.”
We all lapse into silence as Artie writes down the new scenario. In some way this exercise has helped us, because we’ve crystallized our thoughts in black and white, but the truth is that we’ve still got far more questions than answers.
“We don’t even know how Bohemia or Dino died yet,” I say, thinking.
“And we need to find out what happened to them after they died too. Because if—and it’s a big if—if Britannia and Bohemia are buried by the secret bench at Maplemead, who buried them there and why?
And where is Dino’s body?” I frown. “We need to interview each of the ghosts in turn with all of these questions in mind,” I say, snapping a picture of the whiteboard on my phone.
Marina gathers up the cups and dumps them in the sink, then grabs her denim jacket. “Considering it’s Thursday now and Lois and Barty’s grand welcome ball is in forty-eight hours, we better get our asses back over to the castle.”
As we pile back into Babs, I see a note has been stuck under the windshield wiper.
I open it and find a small sealed white envelope tucked inside.
The handwritten note is from my mother to apologize for earlier, and to wish me luck with getting the case sewn up as quickly as possible.
I huff under my breath, but I’m relieved not to be fighting with her all the same.
“What’s in the envelope?” Marina asks, clicking her seatbelt into place.
“Emergency gift from Glenda, apparently,” I say, scanning the PS at the end of the note. Ripping the envelope open, I tip out a four-finger KitKat onto my palm.
“Trust Glenda to send four fingers instead of two,” Marina says with a grin. “Overprepared, as always.”
I run my fingers over the wrapper because it doesn’t feel quite right, and then I realize something.
“Yeah,” I mutter. “She’s a regular Girl Scout.”
I shove the KitKat back into the envelope before Marina or Artie can catch sight of the silver-sealed condom packet hidden beneath the red wrapper.