Page 29 of Crazy Spooky Love

She nods, inhaling deeply and then blowing out again in slow, measured breaths.

I recognize it as a sign that she’s trying to calm herself down so I slowly, experimentally, let go of her arm.

After a couple of uneventful seconds, I nod toward Artie to do the same and I’m relieved to see that Marina has cooled her jets enough to not storm forward and hurl herself on the twins.

I love her passion, but it’s landed her, and me by association, in more than our fair share of trouble over the years.

Let’s just say the local police officers know us by our first names, although less so in recent years, thankfully.

That breathing technique is something she picked up on one of the mandatory anger management classes she attended in lieu of a probation order.

I ask the only question that means anything to me about the whole incident. “Did Leo tell you to do this?”

They both look up, stricken.

“No,” one of them whispers.

“Please don’t tell him,” the other begs, tears leaving crisscross tracks in her immaculate makeup.

Her face is so perfectly smooth that she suddenly reminds me of one of my favorite childhood dolls, one that you could put water in the back of and she’d cry real tears.

She peed her pants too, but let’s gloss over that part.

“He’d left his jacket at Scarborough House and asked us to pick it up on our way into work, and when we got there, well…”

“What?” I say, unmoved by their emotion. “You realized we were there and thought it might be fun to trap us in a damp, dark cellar and leave us there to rot?”

They flinch, and I feel horribly like I’m kicking kittens. “We thought it might put you off,” one of them mumbles. “We just wanted to help him.”

And then I get it. The twins, after all, are fully paid-up Darklings; they saw a chance to do something they thought would aid their hero’s cause and went ever so slightly, temporarily insane. I don’t know whether to be impressed or scared by that level of devotion.

“Well, you couldn’t have got it more wrong,” I say. “Because all you’ve done is strengthened our resolve.”

Next to me, Marina sighs heavily. “You’re not going to tell Leo what they did, are you?”

Hope flares in the twins’ eyes as they both stare at me, and I glance down and notice they’re holding hands. For God’s friggin’ sake! Where did he find these child-women?

“Just go,” I say, resigned. “And don’t ever think about pulling another stunt like that on us again. I’ll tell Leo in a heartbeat if you do, are we clear? No second chances.”

They nod and begin to back away, their stilettos unsteady on the cobbles.

Marina folds her arms across her chest and clears her throat as she stares them down.

“I think you forgot to say ‘thank you.’?”

The twins both nod, hurriedly gabbling their thank-yous at her over the top of each other.

“Not to me.” Marina rolls her eyes and jerks her head in my direction. “To Melody.”

“You did us a bit of a favor, actually,” Artie says, lifting his hand to wave them off. “We found some important things down there, didn’t we? Those—”

Marina and I both lurch forward and slam the door at the same time to cut him off mid-flow and prevent him from spilling the news to the twins about the diaries, but not soon enough for me to miss the looks of complete panic that cross the twins’ faces at the idea that they’ve inadvertently handed us an advantage.

I look at him and grin, and then laughter bubbles up in my chest. “Artie Elliott, you are one of the funniest people I’ve ever met.”

I laugh, and as I catch Marina’s eye the tension finally leaves her shoulders, and she laughs too. This ghost-busting lark is turning out to be more hair-raising than any of us had anticipated. I don’t know what’s in Nonna Malone’s tin today yet, but whatever it is I’m having at least four of them.

Artie watches us, perplexed but pleased. “I’ve never been locked in a cellar before. This is the best job ever!”

“I think these are my favorite yet.” I reach for a third anginetti cookie despite the fact that the lemon icing is rich enough to dissolve my teeth on contact.

“They go lovely with tea,” Artie says, a comment designed purely for the purpose of winding up Marina, who narrows her eyes at him as he dunks one in his snake mug.

“Nonna would weep,” she whispers, slamming the lid down and putting the tin out of his reach. Sadly, it’s out of mine too, so it looks like break time is officially over.

“Right. Shall we take a look at Lloyd’s diaries?” I’m dying to see what lies inside those pages.

Marina nods. “Do you think we should wear white cotton gloves, like on TV?”

I pause. “Because they’re old and precious or because they’re evidence in a murder case?”

She shrugs. “Both?”

We don’t have a shred of police procedural knowledge between us that hasn’t been gained from watching CSI . “There’s a box of those thin surgical rubber gloves under Mum’s sink,” I say. “I’ll go and grab some just in case.”

I find Gran in the kitchen doing yoga whilst watching the Mexican daytime soap opera she’s addictedto.

“I thought you’d given up on this after the character you liked lost the plot and held a bank up dressed in his wife’s underwear,” I say, heading for the sink.

She straightens and sips from the teacup on the table that she uses to disguise her champagne during the day. “It was all just a misunderstanding, darling.”

I frown, wondering how you explain robbing a bank in your wife’s red-lace corset. Gran looks away from the show as it cuts to a commercial break and shrugs. “It’s Mexico. They do things differently over there.”

I want to jump to Mexico’s defense, because they gave us Frida Kahlo and Salma Hayek and enchiladas, but I let the whole debate go in favor of searching under the sink for latex gloves, needed to read a dead man’s diaries. Honestly, I couldn’t make this stuffup.

“Gran, you don’t happen to know where those thin rubber gloves have gone, do you?”

“Shop,” she says, or at least I think that’s what she says. I retract my head from behind the u-bend and straighten up on my knees.

“Did you say they’re in the shop?”

She nods without taking her eyes from the screen. “Silvana took them a few days back.”

I haul myself to my feet, and as I pass the fridge she holds her teacup out without looking atme.

“This tea needs a little more milk. Would you mind, darling?” I flip the fridge door open and extract the champagne bottle, wondering if Nonna Malone knocks back the grappa while she bakes cookies or if it’s just my bonkers gran whose blood is twelve percent proof.

I head around to the front of the building and push open the ancient shop door, enjoying the familiar, mellow jingle of the old-fashioned bell.

It suits my mother’s style to keep Blithe Spirits as traditional as possible, and there is little different about the shop interior now to how it might have looked a hundred years ago.

The wooden paneling has been carefully maintained, and the small beveled panes of glass in the curved bay windows are all original.

Jugs of fresh flowers fill the deep windowsills and the counter that runs along one side has a deep, subtle shine from decades of beeswax.

My mum has added a couple of forest-green velvet armchairs in front of her impressive library of occult books, deeply buttoned and comfortable, and I find her sitting in one of these now, the newspaper open in her hands and her glasses balanced on the end of her slender nose.

Everything about her is long, lithe, and pale; she must look at me and wonder how she wound up with a barely five-foot brunette.

Not that she’s ever said anything of the sort; she’s never made me feel anything but perfect, because I have my dad’s round brown eyes and, according to her, his wide smile and dimples.

We look entirely unrelated, but people who know us well tell us that we are more similar in personality than in looks.

“Melody.” She closes the paper and takes her glasses off as she looks up, blinking a few times to adjust her eyes. “Have you come to tell me that your gran’s watching that wretched show again?”

“Well, no, but she is,” I say, scanning the shelf behind the counter. “Have you got those thin rubber gloves in here? The ones that have been under the sink forever?”

“They’re beneath the counter, left-hand side,” Glenda’s voice drifts into the shop, and a second or two later she pops her head around from the little office out back. I grab the box and pull out one solitary glove, then growl with frustration as I peer down into the now empty box.

“I’ll make a note to bring a fresh supply in the morning,” Glenda says. “I like to keep some in stock. You never know what you might need to do around here.”

She catches my mother’s eye tartly, clearly making a point.

“Your gran asked Glenda if she’d be so kind as to clear up vomit a few days back,” my mother says, looking sheepish. “A customer’s teenage daughter threw up when Gran told her that her dead grandpa saw what she did behind the art block at school.”

Glenda raises her eyebrows. “Dicey said she’d have cleared it up herself if it wasn’t for her knees. The woman has practiced yoga for longer than I’ve been alive, she has better knees than I do.”

I try not to smile as Glenda disappears into the back office again, leaving me holding one useless latex glove. My mother taps her long fingernail on the newspaper.

“There’s an article in here about that house you’re working at.” She slides her glasses back on and flips the pages until she finds the one she wants, then doubles the paper over with a shake and hands it to me. “You can have it. I’m done with it.”

I look down as I take the newspaper and note Fletch’s smug smiling face next to the byline. I might have known. I tuck it under my arm and head out of the shop, already planning to deface Fletch’s photograph when I get back to my desk.

“Planning on trying to get away with murder, Ghostbuster?”

Ah, shizzleshits. Of all the people to run into on the street with the newspaper under my arm, I have to practically walk into the man whose face I’m currently dreaming about defacing with a bright red Sharpie.

He looks pointedly at the latex glove I stupidly still have in my hands and then back up to my eyes.

“Yes, yours,” I retort, shielding my eyes from the sun with my hand.

“Tell me, do you spend your entire life stalking me or were you just passing?”

“Someone’s full of themselves today.” Fletch holds his hand up to show me the brown paper bag from the arty-farty sandwich shop a few doors down. “Lunch.”

“Try not to choke on your rocket,” I grouch and then I pause and wish the ground would swallow me up. Thankfully he swerves the obvious pun, but the amused spark in his green eyes tells me that he’s thinking it all the same.

Instead, he nods toward the newspaper. “Page fifteen. You’ll like it.”

I push it farther under my arm so he can’t see that it’s already open to his article. “I’m planning to use it to clean up dog poo.”

All right, yes, I know it was a crap line. It was the worst use I could think of for a newspaper at short notice. Don’t judgeme.

He laughs under his breath. “You don’t even have a dog.”

“Despite your best efforts to the contrary, you don’t know everything about me,” I huff.

“You don’t have a dog, Melody,” he says again.

“Yes. Yes, I do. I got one.” Shit, can someone please wire my jaw together? I lose all reason around this man and his broad, capable shoulders. “I’m going now.”

“To walk your dog?”

I hate him. “Yes. I’m going now, to walk Parsnip.”

Shoot me. Shoot me now, right between the eyes. I just called my imaginary dog Parsnip. I don’t even like the bloody things.

“You named your dog after a root vegetable?”

Christ, can’t he just let it go? He knows I don’t have a sodding dog called Parsnip, or Turnip, or Butternut frickin’ Squash, for that matter. Although, Butternut Bittersweet would be bloody hilarious. If I do ever get a dog, that’s totally going to be its name.

“I can wait for you, if you like,” Fletch says, smirking. “We can walk Parsnip together.”

There is something about his offer that sounds intimate, despite the fact that we both know there will be no walk, because there is no dog.

He makes no attempt to move, so I dodge around him and half run down the cobbled alley to the back of the building and the sanctuary of my office.

“Go and harass someone else, Fletch,” I toss over my shoulder.

“Just making sure you get home safely,” he calls, still there.

I flip him the V. When I reach the agency door I finally turn back and risk a glance toward the street.

He’s gone, and I don’t like the fact that a teeny bit of me is disappointed.

I’m definitely going to town with that Sharpie.

I might even post it to him at the newspaper office for my own amusement.