13. Til Death Do Us Part #3
I follow him through the wall—not my first rodeo with interbrick transportation—and find myself in a cool, dark space filled with books, blurry bird photos, and an ungodly amount of surveillance equipment.
Lining one wall is a multitude of CCTV screens from various vantage points around the hotel.
Some cameras are static, fixed to one spot, others seem to rove transversely, and some monitors flick between pictures.
They show the lobby, the car park, the auditorium, the dining spaces, and a plethora of identical?looking corridors.
Fran’s desk is positioned in front of the wall of screens, and she’s sitting at her chair, but she’s not watching any of them. Instead, she logs onto her desktop computer, spelling out her password as she types it in.
“L I T T L E O W L. Nineteen.”
I look at the ghosts.
“She always does that,” Trystan says. “Think maybe she’s getting a little forgetful.”
“Wait till she starts arguing with internet strangers,” Stove says, rubbing his palms together with poorly veiled excitement.
As predicted, into the search bar, Franny types the address of a social media website commonly used by people of a certain age.
On the wall to her immediate left are shelves and shelves of telescopic lenses, binoculars, and what appear to be leather?bound journals. I float over to them and inspect the devices more closely.
“Only a killer would have this many spy gadgets. Or a spy. She ain’t a spy, by the way,” Stove says.
“A moment ago you were convinced the murderer was Helga,” I say, though I think I’m getting the measure of Stove and his boom mic.
He simply shrugs, proving my suspicions about him.
Though he brings up a valid point. Why does sixty-eight-year-old Franny Driscoll need such a high volume of spy gadgets—I mean, surveillance equipment—and yet doesn’t even bother to look up at the twenty or so screens displaying almost every angle of the hotel?
“I. Know. What. I. Saw. Deb-bor-ah,” Franny says, as she smashes the keypad with her fingers.
For someone who’s lived in the southwest of England for more than half her life, her Northern accent is still a main character of her persona.
“And you can tell that bloody husband of yours to shove his opinion up his jacksie.”
“Ooh, what did you see?” Stove asks, crouching at eye level to the monitor and obscuring my view of Fran’s feed.
A squashy red sofa and a grease-stained armchair rest in the other corner of the office, and a DAB radio leaks some kind of tropical birdsong in the background. And it all clicks into place—the chirping, the posters, the peeping Tom’s arsenal.
“She’s a twitcher,” I say, mostly for my own benefit, since I’m sure everybody else already knows.
“It’s a ruse,” Stove says. “The birdwatching gig is just a cover story to enable her to carry a scope in broad daylight.”
“Ignore him.” Jeanie slaps Stove on the back of his head.
It’s hard enough that he loses his grip on his microphone, but not hard enough to stop him from bursting out into laughter.
“Franny loves her birds. All these photos are pictures she’s taken.
Some of them are a little blurry. Like this one here, apparently it’s a bearded tit . . .”
But I can’t seem to take my eyes off the radio in the corner to look at presumably a photo of myself.
Jeanie stops talking and follows the line of my gaze with her own. “Ah, yes, that’s how we used to listen to your show each week.”
A heavy sadness, like a weighted sensory blanket, presses in on me from every side.
I had always known that the last episode of Unalive on Air would be my last episode, but somehow it took dying for that to really sink in.
I’d always thought that perhaps there could be more.
Perhaps I could’ve convinced the producers to give me one more go.
“Come on, darling. We don’t have to stay here.” Jeanie puts her arm over my shoulder and tries to lead me through the wall.
“If it’s any consolation,” Pixie says, with that respectful sadness people show mourners. “I’m really going to miss our Monday nights listening to your show.”
“Same,” says Jeanie. “It was always the highlight of my week.”
“Mine too.” This time it’s Trystan, and my heart does a traitorous little triple jump in my chest.
“I can’t believe there won’t be any more.” Camille sighs and waves their hand through the radio. For a second it cuts to static before returning to normal.
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” a small voice says from the corner. It’s Josh. Once again he’s slipped in unnoticed by anyone. “It doesn’t have to be over.”
Trystan laughs. “Yeeeew, Josh, not sure if you’ve noticed this, but . . . we’re dead. We’re not exactly in a position to operate any kind of radio recording equipment.”
“Ha ha ha,” Josh deadpans. “Listen, I’ve been thinking about this for a while now—”
Stove interrupts. “What, all of one day?”
Josh, in all his fifteen-year-old sarcastic genius, doesn’t reply to Stove.
Instead, he sighs and glances at me like a teacher waiting for the class to fall in line before continuing with the lesson.
“Yes, actually. Anyway, I think I’ve figured out a way we could broadcast Unalive on Air live . . . or unalive, as ghosts.”