Page 5 of Crazy Spooky Love

“I forgot the donuts.”

It’s two minutes before nine, and I stare at Marina aghast then lay my head on the desk. “We’re doomed.”

She laughs and pulls a pretty, vintage Amaretti Virgina biscuit tin from the huge handbag she always carries as she shrugs out of her jacket. “Will these do instead? Nonna made them fresh this morning especially for you.”

I groan happily. “I love your gran so much more than I love my own. The closest mine ever gets to sticky buns is at her exercise class.” I lift the lid from the glitzy lime-green and gold tin and gaze at the shiny wonder of Nonna Malone’s glazed buns.

I sniff the scented air, sugar-drunk. “Lemon?”

“Limoncello babas.”

The heavenly smells that usually permeate the bricks and mortar of Marina’s family home fill the office, sweet and comforting, and I wonder if nine in the morning is too early to start mainlining sugar.

Marina makes the decision for me by putting the lid back on the tin and moving it a safe distance away from me.

She knows me well; I’ve got no stop valve when it comes to sweet things.

I’d happily eat that whole tin of babas and then slump in a heap under the desk by midmorning.

“Any word from Little Art?”

I shake my head. “Not yet. It’s only been two days though, if you don’t count the weekend.”

“That letter probably freaked him right out, to be fair. If he’s got any sense he’ll be hiding in the cupboard under his stairs.

” Marina grins, draping herself sideways over our now thankfully dust-free armchair.

She’s clocked into work wearing black skinny jeans and a black polka-dot blouse, her dark waves loose around her shoulders.

I look down at my own outfit; indigo skinnies and a long-sleeved navy and white Breton T-shirt.

I knotted a red silk scarf around my neck at the last minute, and between us, I think we’re channeling an air of jaunty Parisian chic.

The only marked difference between our look is that Marina is wearing her signature skyscraper heels and I’m in my equally signature flats.

My closet full of ballet pumps and Converse trainers brings me as much joy as other women get from their jewelry boxes.

“It’s not that freaky an offer, is it?” I find it difficult to judge weirdness effectively; my idea of what constitutes odd is skewed by the fact that I’m a Bittersweet.

Marina pulls a face that says “yes, it was possibly the freakiest letter anyone in the whole of Chapelwick has ever received.”

“You’re working here, and you’re normal,” I point out, even though Marina isn’t really all that regular. When she doesn’t answer me, I narrow my eyes and think. “Glenda!” I almost punch the air as I shout her name. “Glenda’s normal.”

Marina’s laugh drips sarcasm. “Glenda’s freakin’ Wonder Woman. She probably wears her knickers over her tights underneath her designer power suits.”

That’s the other thing about Glenda Jackson. She’s businesswoman foxy. We have to keep her away from elderly men with weak hearts in case she dispatches them on the spot and gets Blithe a reputation for drumming up business in the most direct way possible.

We both jump as someone taps, featherlight, on the door.

“God, I hope that’s not Glenda. If she heard me she’ll eat my head without even needing to chew,” Marina whispers.

“Shouldn’t be. She doesn’t start until next week. I asked Gran for a week’s grace so we can at least pretend we know what we’re doing.”

“In a week?”

Whoever’s at the door taps again, just as softly, and Marina hoists herself up and answers it with her hand on her hip.

“The Girls’ Ghost-Busting Agency, can I help you?”

It might have sounded professional if she wasn’t blowing bubbles with her gum.

“Can I speak with Melanie Sweetbitter, please?”

“Melody Bittersweet,” Marina corrects. “You can’t be that interested in speaking to her if you can’t even be bothered to get her name right.”

I clear my throat and cross the room to stand beside Marina.

We watch the toweringly tall, awkward boy on the doorstep turn a painful shade of beetroot as he digs around in the inside pocket of his ill-fitting suit jacket.

He pulls out a letter I recognize and shakes it open.

Arthur Elliott. He looks like a much younger, skinnier version of his ruddy-cheeked father.

“Melody Bittersweet?” he says, his nervous gray eyes flickering betweenus.

Marina cocks her head toward me as I step forward and hold my hand out.

“I’m Melody.” I try to fill my voice with easy confidence as I shake his clammy hand. “You must be Arthur. Come on in.”

I move back to make room for him to step inside, and yank Marina by the arm when she stays put, blocking the doorway.

“Shouldn’t we have a password?” she hisses at me as Arthur edges uncertainly aroundus.

“Like what?” I shoot out of the corner of my mouth.

She shrugs, closing the door. “I don’t know! Donuts? Limoncello babas?”

I hold in a laugh. “Behave yourself. You’re going to scare people off.”

“Says the one who sees dead people.”

Arthur is hovering by the desk, listening to us, his eyes rounder by the second.

“Have I come at a bad time?” The panic in his whispery croak suggests he thinks he has come at a very bad time indeed and would like to leave right away.

“No, no. Come and sit down, Arthur. You’re right on time.”

“I am?” If anything, he looks even more disconcerted to hear he’s on time for an appointment he didn’t actually know he had.

Marina steps forward and swings around the swivel chair in front of the desk. He swallows hard, as if there’s a chance it might be electrified, and then lowers his long frame into it and chews his lip.

“Water?” I ask, taking my seat opposite him. The boy nods. I’m not surprised. He looks as if he’s about to pass out. “Marina, could you grab Arthur a glass of water, please?”

“Whisky in it?” she jokes, looking at him, and he shakes his head slowly.

“I only drink beer. Two cans on a Friday teatime with my dad.” His eyes suddenly fill with tears and Marina looks stricken. I lower my gaze and give him a second to gather himself.

“That water?” I prompt Marina, and she pats Arthur on the shoulder before she disappears in search of a glass.

That’s the thing about Marina. She’s full of wisecracks, everybody’s funny girl, but there’s a soft, sentimental vein that runs through her to the core.

She sat beside my mother and cried when Kate Winslet pulled that old dude around the swimming pool, while I stuck my fingers down my throat and fake gagged into my cuppa.

“You sent me a letter,” Arthur said, looking at his lap.

“I did. I heard that you might be the right person for a job vacancy here.”

He looks up at last, but the expression in his eyes tells me that he doesn’t believeme.

“You heard from who?”

Righto. Sticky wicket. I can hardly tell him that his dead dad came to see me in his hi-vis jacket and talked me into offering his son a job, can I?

“A…friend?” I try, and his eyes grow even more troubled.

Ah, that’s right. He doesn’t have friends. “Umm…an old teacher?”

He shakes his head, and I remember his father’s words about Arthur bunking off.

“You know, I can’t remember,” I say, waving my hand vaguely in the air. “Let’s talk about the job and it’ll probably come back to me.”

He looks at me warily, still unconvinced.

“It’s not much,” I say, because I haven’t actually thought about what the job will be. “Helping out around here, learning the ropes, and coming with us on assignments out in the, er, field.”

He glances at his super-shiny black lace-ups. “Will I need to buy some Wellingtons?”

I frown at him.

“For the fields,” he explains.

“Oh! No…” I smile. “Sorry, Arthur. No, I meant out in the field, as in when I go out to visit clients in their homes, or buildings, or, er, wherever their problem is.”

“But not in fields?”

I shake my head. “No fields.”

He runs a finger around the inside of his shirt collar and gratefully accepts the glass of water that Marina has returned with. He knocks the whole thing back in one gulp and hands her the empty glass.

“Thank you,” he says.

“And you won’t need to wear a suit.” I smile. “We like to keep things casual around here.” I realize I sound like I’m quoting from a ’90s handbook of how to be a hipster boss for buttoned-up people who don’t have a clue.

Marina nods. “Yeah, casual. Dress-down Fridays. Wear-pink Wednesdays. Naked Tuesdays!” She throws in jazz hands for good measure, because she clearly doesn’t feel that she’s terrified Arthur enough. His sudden coughing fit suggests otherwise.

“She’s just kidding,” I say quickly. “She’s like this all the time, you’ll get used to her. I have.”

“The letter…it said ‘trainee ghost hunter,’?” Arthur says, finding his voice at last.

“That’s right,” I say. “The agency is very new, but it’s our aim to help people who feel that their property is, for want of a better phrase, haunted.”

“And we do…what?”

“Well…” My eyes dart a silent warning at Marina to let me do the talking. “We go in, see if there are any ghosts in the place, and if there are, we figure out what they want and hopefully resolve their issue so they can move on.”

Arthur’s gaze never leaves my face as I speak. “How will we know if there are ghosts or not?”

I clear my throat. “Okay. So, don’t freak out, but I can see them.”

He jumps inside his too-big jacket and looks at me as if I’ve grown an extra head.

“With special ghost-hunting goggles?”

I shake my head. “No, Arthur. I see them with my eyes, and I hear them with my ears. I’m a normal person, just like you, except that I can see and talk to dead people.”

I speak in a low, measured voice and he takes it allin.

“And you too?” His gaze slides to Marina, who barks with laughter at the suggestion.

“No way, José. She’s well and truly on her own with that one. Besides her mother. And her gran. You’ll meet them both, brace yourself.”

He looks back at me, and the flare of hope in his eyes is unmissable.

“And you can teach me to see dead people too?”

“I’m afraid that isn’t something you can be taught,” I say tactfully. “You either do or you don’t. I don’t choose to be able to do it. I just can. All of my family can.”

Arthur looks as if a lightbulb has suddenly gone on in his head. “Are you like that Leo Dark off the telly?”

I grip the edge of my chair and resist the urge to swear as I sigh and say, “Sort of. A little bit. Only I’m a lot, lot better.”

“She is,” Marina pipes up from the armchair. “She sees them everywhere, all of the time. You’ll get used to her.” She smiles sweetly and adds, “I have. It’s taken me twenty years, but I have.”

And then, surprisingly, a wide grin splits Arthur’s face, like a splash of pure sunshine.

“You two are funny.”

Marina doffs her imaginary cap. “We’re here every day.”

I look him straight in the eyes and choose my next words carefully. “Well? What do you say, Little Art? Want to be here every day too?”

He goes still, and then slowly picks up his letter from the desk and tucks it inside his jacket pocket while he considers his answer. When he looks up, his eyes tell us his decision before his mouth does.

“I’m in.”

I nod and reach out to shake his hand. This time his hand isn’t clammy and his smile is genuine.

Marina escorts him to the door and shakes his hand too as he leaves.

“See you in the morning,” she says, pumping his hand. “You’re a wizard, Arthur.”

He stalls and his brow furrows. “I’m a trainee ghost hunter, not a wizard.”

Marina rolls her eyes and I look down to hide my smile. Things are never going to be dull around here with these two.

She closes the door and leans her back against it. “Bet you a tenner he doesn’t show up in the morning,” she says.

“He’ll be here.”

I saw the change in him when I called him “Little Art.” He knows exactly who recommended him for the job, and he doesn’t want to let his dad down.

I grab the tin of Nonna’s limoncello babas and lift the lid, inhaling the smell so deeply it’s a wonder the buns don’t levitate.

Marina rummages in her bag and pulls out a pack of fresh Sicilian dark roast. “Coffee break?”

A snort of laughter bubbles up my windpipe. “Naked Tuesdays.”

Fifteen minutes later, we’re all caffeined-up and I’m trying to decide if a third limoncello baba would send me into a sugar coma when Leo sodding Dark swans onto the TV screen with an affected flick of his cape.

“Someone should tell him not to take fashion tips from Sherlock Holmes.” Marina curls her lip and I love her for her loyalty.

I’d reasoned with myself that the TV was a necessary purchase for the business of watching CCTV recordings and such like.

We most definitely won’t be using it to watch Morning TV or reruns of Charmed.

No, sirree. Well, not once Glenda Jackson starts next week anyway.

I reach for the remote and turn the volume up, feeling the beginnings of a tingle down my spine as we watch the outside broadcast from an old, decrepit, Victorian gothic house I vaguely recognize.

“I know that place,” Marina says, brushing crumbs from her jeans. “It’s out on the edge of town. Brimsdale Road, I think?”

I nod, listening to the owner bemoaning that he can’t keep workmen on-site because of the numerous reports of ghostly hauntings at Scarborough House.

Leo is nodding along, frowning in all the right places as he listens to the owner, Donovan Scarborough, grumble about the fact that he’s inherited a house that’s proving nigh on impossible to sell.

The buyers he’s lined up are keen to change the place from a house into a nursing home, but they’ve got a serious case of the jitters and won’t sign on the dotted line unless, in their words, it’s officially declared a poltergeist-free zone.

He couldn’t load his words with more derision if he tried.

You know when you instinctively take a dislike to someone and you can’t put your finger on why?

That’s exactly how I feel about Donovan Scarborough.

He looks like a city banker with middle-aged spread from too many expensive client dinners, all swish suit and red braces with shiny shoes and an even shinier face.

The tails of Leo’s cape flutter in the sharp wind as he turns to the camera and smolders down the lens about the fact that it’s an incredibly sensitive situation and then invites us to tune in next time to find out what happens when he goes live inside the house in a bid to discover the source of the alleged hauntings.

I click the TV off and look excitedly at Marina. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“That I need to take Nonna’s buns away from you for your own good?”

I blow a sad kiss at the tin as she prizes it from my fingers. “No.” I stand up and grab my car keys. “That we need to get our backsides over to Brimsdale Road.”