Little Ghost Lost (Destiny Bay Cozy Mysteries Book 5) (4 page)

And yet…. Here was the paradox. At the same time, she was a ghost, and to leave a ghost unattended anywhere in your house was to lay yourself open to all sorts of mischief. That much I knew.

I would have to risk it. I left the room and she didn’t seem to notice. I felt empowered by that. I went through the house and out the kitchen door into the back yard, hoping to find Aunty Jane. It was getting dark, but there was still enough light to see down the pathways. I wandered up and down until I found her.
 

There, in a corner of the yard, she was putting on a show for Sami, our big black cat. In her usual colorful muu-muu, her straw hat on her head, she wiggled her hips, dancing a traditional hula and singing an old fashioned Hawaiian song, and Sami sat watching her, closing and opening his eyes with lazy affection for the older lady, his thick tail lashing the leaves around where he sat. I didn’t have to tuck my hand under his chin to know he was purring like an engine on high.
 

I watched the two of them, waiting for her to finish, and then I gave a whistle and a round of applause.
 

“Very nice, Aunty,” I said. “Did you ever entertain on the Waikiki Hotel Circuit when you were young?”

“Maybe.” She had a dreamy look on her face. “Could be. I don’t remember.” She shook her head. “It get harder and harder to remember da kine things.”

Well, I didn’t have a doubt about it. She had the fluid grace of a professional. The song she’d been singing sounded as though it came from the twenties or thirties—and Mandy’s clothes made me think she was from that same era. Maybe that could be a bonding element between them?

“Aunty Jane, I have a problem and I need your advice.”

Her head cocked to the side. For one flashing, happy moment, I thought she was actually listening and ready to help, but she quickly tore that pipe dream to shreds.
 

“Listen to that silly bird,” she said, motioning toward the large aviary built against the back of the house where our adopted parrot sat chuckling to himself. “Do you hear those jokes he keeps telling? We should wash his mouth out with soap.”

“His beak, you mean.”

“Whatever.”

“Don’t you dare,” I said, hoping she wasn’t really contemplating taking action. “Detective Roy is going to want to take him back one of these days and when that happens, I don’t want to have to apologize for how he’s been treated here.”

“Detective Roy isn’t coming back,” she said, her voice like a death knell.
 

That sent chills down my spine. “What are you talking about?” I cried, though I knew she wouldn’t give me a straight answer.
 

I shouldn’t listen to her. Not about things like my semi-ill-fated romance with the handsome policeman I’d been dating off and on for months now. When was I going to learn to ignore her red herrings? I bit my tongue, took a deep breath, and got back on track.
 

“Will you come into the house with me? I’d like to show you something.”

The look on her face was suddenly quite benign. “Of course, dear,” she said. “Just as soon as I finish making this little Samurai hat for Sami.”

“Samurai hat?” I looked down to see what she was doing and sure enough, she was folding a piece of heavy paper into an origami hat for the cat.
 

“Oh course,” she said. “Sami…samurai hat. You see, it all works together.”

“Uh huh.” I tried to stay patient, but it was getting harder.
 

“And anyway, I don’t think I can come in the house.”

“Why not?”

“That Captain Stone is there.”

“Nope. They’ve gone to the movies.”

“Oh. Good.”

“You don’t like Captain Stone?”

She shook her head.
 

“You don’t like any of the police, do you?” I said, suddenly realizing that was a fact I’d been missing.
 

“No I do not.”

I had to laugh. “Aunty, don’t tell me that you have an outlaw past!”

“No, I do not have an outlaw past.”

“Good. Then you won’t mind helping me with this.”

She looked at me suspiciously, finally ready to deal with what I was trying to get through to her on.
 

“What is it?”

“I had to go out to the Pennington Mansion today.”

She made a face. “What did you do that for?”

“I’ve been assigned to do an evaluation. Never mind all that. But I did pick up something as I left.”

She was frowning fiercely and shaking her head. “You shouldn’t go there. That place is full of ghosts!”

I stared at her. “You knew that?”

“Sure. I hear things. You think I don’t talk to other spirits of all kinds?”

“Wow. I should have talked to you before I ever went.”

She nodded smugly. “Always talk to me first.” She looked concerned, noticing all my Band-Aids. “What happened to you?”

I sighed. “I think one of those ghosts tried to knock me off a second story balcony.”

She looked outraged, then her attention wandered again. “We didn’t have second story balconies on my house when I was growing up,” she mentioned vaguely.
 

I barely held back a groan. At times her ghostly habits were amusing, but this was rapidly losing its charm. I wanted to shake her. But shaking a ghost is not recommended. In the first place, it doesn’t work.
 

I set my jaw and went back to the subject. “Anyway, when I got into my car and came home, I found out I had a little hitchhiker. A little girl ghost was in the back seat.”

Aunty was shocked. “What?”

“Yes, the sweetest little girl….”

“No! She has to go back. Right now.”

“But…”

“I mean it. You can’t keep her here. Some things just don’t work in the spirit world the way they do in your live situations. Most ghosts are meant to stay attached to their placeholder. You can’t violate that rule.”

I frowned, suspicious. Was she just trying to get my goat, or was this really part of her ghostly world structure?
 

“How about you?” I asked archly. “What is your placeholder?”

She blinked at me. “I can’t tell you that.”

“Right.”
Because you don’t really have one
? Could that be it?
 

But I didn’t want to argue. I just wanted her to come along with me and help me with the kid.
 

Sami meowed. I gave him a skritch behind the ears. His samurai hat had already fallen off, but no one seemed to care.
 

Aunty was frowning. “She has to go back.”

I sighed. “I can’t take her back. She says they are cruel to her. She cried and cried when I said she had to go. And since I’m pretty sure one of the ghosts there tried to kill me, I don’t want to take her in there by myself. So I can’t take her back. Not tonight anyway.”

“Tomorrow?”

I shrugged. “Will you just come take a look at her?”

She glared at me but nodded. “Alright.” And she did follow me, though she kept up a mumbling diatribe about how terrible it was that I had brought her here in the first place.
 

“She gotta go. Bad things will happen to this family. She gotta go.”

I ushered her into the bedroom. “Look at how sweet she is.”

Aunty looked at me as though she thought I was crazy. “Sweet! Didn’t she just twist you all around and make you bring her here? Hah! She foolin’ with you. That not sweet.”

Mandy looked up at Aunty Jane and seemed to see right through her. She smiled at me, and when I sat on the bed beside her, she leaned her head against my shoulder and went back to watching her show. I looked down at her pretty face and felt my heart swell in my chest. I couldn’t help it. Maybe she was just being manipulative. If so, she was pretty good at it.
 

“What should I do with her?” I whispered to Jane. “How do I take care of a young ghost?”

She rolled her eyes. “You take her back,” she muttered, getting monotonous. “Until then, put her out in the yard. She don’t need to be coddled. She’s not… not….”

Not alive?
Even Aunty couldn’t say the word. I felt a small surge of triumph. She was feeling something for this waif too, wasn’t she?

Maybe, but she was definitely restless. She didn’t want to stay in that room. I could feel it. So I gently coaxed Mandy to lean against a pillow and got up to go out with Aunty.
 

“No words of wisdom?” I said as we walked through the kitchen. “No warnings to keep my door locked against her in the night?”

She made a grunting sound as though she’d about had it with me. I still had on the jacket I’d worn all day and as we walked, I felt something hard hit against my hipbone. Slipping my hand into my pocket, I felt the glass box I’d put there at the Pennington House and I pulled it out.
 

“Oh Aunty, look at this. I saw it in the trash at the old house and for some reason, I just had to have it. I just love the way this enamel rose lies in that swoosh curve against the glass.” I held it out for her to see. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

Aunty had stopped dead. If a ghost could turn pale, that was exactly what she did. Reaching out, she barely touched it and then she stared at me. “You found this in da kine trash?” she said hoarsely.
 

I nodded. “In one of the bedrooms. Someone had begun pulling things apart in there and this was in a large trash bin with old notebooks and curtains and that sort of thing.”

Aunty shook her head, a look half way between fear and wonder on her kindly face. “Your mother had a box just like that,” she said softly. “I remember it so well. I never knew what happened to that box. I always thought she took it with her when she left. But how could it get here?”

Suddenly I was short of breath and tingling all over. How indeed? And how strange that I had felt such a strong pull toward it from the very beginning.
 

Aunty Jane still looked fearful. “Put it on the counter,” she said. “Let me see it in the light.”

I did as she asked and she examined it from all sides. I watched her, still excited about the box. But little by little, common sense calmed me down. After all, it was probably one of many such boxes produced in the twenties. There was just no reasonable way it could have anything to do with my mother. I was pretty sure Aunty Jane had made it up anyway.

She looked up at me as though a light bulb had just gone off over her head.
 

“That’s it,” she said. “That box is the little girl’s place holder. That’s why she came here with you. You took her place holder.” She gave a short, barking laugh, as though it was quite a joke on me. “Now you’re stuck with her,” she said. “Too bad.”
 

And she was out the door.
 

I turned and went back to the bedroom and looked at Mandy. Jane was right. Now she was my responsibility. The first thing I should do is get the ground rules settled and probably start limiting her TV time.
 

But then I caught myself and almost laughed. I had to be logical and practical about things. Mandy wasn’t going to grow up and go to college. She wasn’t going to have a career or need study time. If she wanted to watch a little TV, let her.
 

Okay. So much for that. We weren’t going to have to fight over TV time.
 

I went back out to the kitchen and looked at the enameled box, turning it in my hands. It was beautiful, probably an antique. But surely there were hundreds just like it all over the world. Just because it looked like something my mother had owned didn’t mean a thing. I set it down and left it there, drawn back to the bedroom with the little ghost watching television.

But I knew I was going to have to leave her in the morning. I had to go back to that gloomy old house and it gave me the willies just thinking about it. I needed help. I picked up my phone and made a call to Jill. She would come through for me. She always did.

Chapter Four

Jill was willing, but busy.
 

“I’m going jogging with Ginny Genera,” she told me. “I’ve got to lose ten pounds by Christmas. Jagger got an invitation to the Carrington’s big party they always throw during the holidays and he’s asked me to go with him. I’m so excited!”

Jagger was the current love of her life and I had to admit, so far he’d turned out to be a better boyfriend than I would have thought. Of course, there was that unpleasantness when he was accused of murder and ended up spending some time in jail, but that had been cleared up and ever since, he’d been almost as lovey-dovey as Jill was. I kept waiting for him to show his true colors, but I was beginning to think I was the one who was out of step, not him. Maybe he really was a genuinely nice guy.
 

“Anyway, we should be running past your house about nine in the morning,” Jill said helpfully. “I’ll try to give you a signal as to what time I’ll be available to help you out.”

So there I was the next morning, waiting to catch a sign of two energetic females and sipping on my nice hot cup of coffee. I’d put on a pair of fancy jeans and a long sleeved blue jersey shirt to cover my scratches. I’d counted the Band-Aids—eighteen! Thank goodness none of them were on my face.
 

The long sleeves were turning out to be a good choice, though, because a wind off the ocean was blowing through, making dried grape leaves scatter down the street with a high, rustling sound, like a herd of scampering insects. I pulled my elbows in close and savored my warm coffee.

Mandy was in the guest bedroom watching Sesame Street and Bebe was fixing cupcakes for a charity picnic. I’d explained about Mandy and she’d been intrigued. It hardly seemed to matter to her that she couldn’t see the child. She was thrilled to have her with us anyway. She had agreed to look after her all morning while I was gone. It had to be eerie to be babysitting a child you couldn’t see.

I’d felt a bit guilty for laying all this on her. Her husband, Jimmy Miyake, had died two years ago, and I knew she longed to have a child. Time was passing, and though working the flower farm her husband had left her was rewarding and satisfying in its way, it wasn’t a baby. She needed a man who wanted a family as much as she did. And where did you go to find one of those? I wasn’t sure at all.