16. Pushing Up Daisies #3
Josh shrugs apathetically. “Dunno. Not really. I didn’t see no one looking suspicious or nothing.” He shuffles his feet and stretches out his neck in a way only kids and teenagers do when they want to avoid honesty.
“Okaay.” I draw out the word. “What time was this, and what were you doing before going to the breakfast hall?”
He makes a face. It’s half grimace, half surprise. “I just went for a walk around the hotel.”
Internally, I sigh. “Where did you go on your walk? And who were you with?”
“No one. I was with no one.” He glances down at his trainers. Ghost-mud stains the white rubber of the sole. “I may have been in places that I shouldn’t have been.”
“Such as?” I say.
The silence of everyone else beside me is heavy, almost measurable.
“Okay, but don’t get mad at me . . .”
“We won’t.” I look at the others.
“No, of course not,” Jeanie says.
Pixie adds, “Can’t make any promises.”
Josh shakes his head and purses his mouth tight.
“What?” Pixie says. “We don’t know what he’s done. We can’t promise not to be pissed at him.”
“He’s already dead,” Trystan says. “I think whatever he’s done, he’s served his punishment already.”
“We’ll try not to get cross,” I say, attempting to find the middle ground to keep everyone happy.
“I was . . . spinongilsinchanginrum.” He says the last word so quickly, I’m not even sure if it was in English.
“Huh?”
Josh puffs out a sigh. “I said I was in the women’s changing room at the spa.”
“Oh my god!” Pixie shouts. “See, I knew it was going to be something awful.”
“You’re forgiven,” Stove says with a shrug. Pixie punches his arm.
“Dude, I stuck up for you. That’s not cool,” Trystan says.
Josh looks down at his feet again. “Well, you’ll be pleased to know I couldn’t see anything. It was empty. Probably too early, so I left.”
“And then you went straight to the breakfast hall?” I say. Silence descends once more.
“No. I . . . broke into Helga’s office—okay, I didn’t know it was her office at the time,” he says defensively as Peter turns his full glare toward the teenager. “I just saw a door that said ‘staff only,’ so I went inside, and that’s where I found the muffin.”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait.” Bombshell alert. “You found the muffin that exploded you in Helga’s office?”
He nods. “It was in her top drawer. I’d been at the hotel for almost a week, and I never seen chocolate muffins in the breakfast buffet before, so I nabbed it.”
I start pacing. I’m getting very excited now, but out of respect, I’m trying not to let it show too much on my features.
“So you took the cupcake back to the dining hall, and it exploded you there?” I ask.
“Yup.”
“And when you bit into it, did you feel anything inside? Anything at all resembling some kind of teeny explosive device?”
“No, nothing. It was just cake.”
Damn. “Okay.” It annoyingly corroborates Helga’s version of events.
But it’s simply a part of the puzzle I’ll figure out later, hopefully.
“Camille, you were the last one to die. Tell me everything.” Not that I’m keen to stop chatting to a fifteen-year-old peeping Tom wannabe, but I’d rather be talking to anyone else right now. Except maybe Stove.
“Well, as you know, Helga hired me to exorcise the ghosts here,” Camille says, immediately obliging my need to move swiftly on.
“And I’m something of a ghost expert. Using my EMF reader, I pinpointed the location of what I assumed must be a cluster of spirits.
Because the reading was so high. Chatting to them hadn’t worked so far, and if I wanted to get paid, I needed to take action.
So I got my PolterPulse spirit extraction gun, aimed, and . . . was pushed down the stairs.”
“You were pushed from the direction you were aiming in or behind?”
“Behind. So I didn’t see who shoved me. Whether they were living or dead. But they felt solid enough. Two firm hands on my back.”
My thoughts are running away with me again. “If you were aiming the gun at ghosts, presumably towards one of you, surely somebody else would have seen who pushed you?”
“Not me,” Jeanie says.
“I wasn’t there either,” Pixie adds.
“Nor me.” Trystan.
“Just so that you’re aware, the staircase that Camille fell down is on the other side of the hotel. Near the east wing,” Peter says.
“Ah,” is about the only word I can muster. In that case, Camille could very well have been tracking a poltergeist and may or may not have been pushed down the stairs by a level four-plus entity. Why, though?
I stare down at the mass of scribblings on my sheet, and I’m almost glad it’ll wipe itself clean soon. I don’t know how to undo any of this spaghetti soup of information.
“That’s a lot of new shit to ponder,” I say.
Trystan places his hand on my shoulder, and I momentarily forget to be stressed out. “It really is.”
“What you need,” Pixie says, her face lighting up in a smile. “Is something fun to take your mind off death for a few minutes.”
I can’t think of a response, so I keep my mouth shut.
“Ooh, we talking about jamming?” Trystan says.
Josh punches the air, and my gaze flicks between the ghosts.
“Jam? But we can’t eat?”
“Gary,” Jeanie says. “Do you know how to beatbox?”