The Dead Girls Detective Agency (11 page)

Edison was looking at me strangely. He cleared his throat. “So, Charlotte, what are you hoping to get out of our little field trip today?”

Very good question. “I want to find out more about what I,
we
, can do”—no point telling him about David just yet and my whole scare-off-the-cheermonsters plan—“so I can, you know, use all of my powers.”

“Your
powers
? Who do you think you are? Ghostgirl?”

I reddened.

“No, I just …”

Why? Why was I unable to form a sentence around Edison? I had a boyfriend (kinda), so why did I care what he thought? No matter how green his eyes were and how intently he was looking at me now.

I tried again. “You must remember what it was like when you first died. How you felt like you’d lost so many things. Didn’t you want to find out what you were capable of too?”

An emotion flickered across Edison’s face. In that instant, I realized I didn’t understand him well enough to know if it was hurt or regret. He shrugged and kicked the grass with his sneaker, bringing up lumps of dirt onto the green. (Note to self: Get Ed to teach me how to kick things sometime soon.)

Maybe I needed to try to understand him.

“Just how long
have
you been dead, Edison?”

“Long enough.” He lifted his head, but this time there was a smile behind his eyes.

“That’s not an answer,” I said.

“It is if you don’t want interfering young newbies knowing your private business.” His eyes really were the deepest green. I laughed, despite myself.

“Seriously though, does it get any easier?” I asked.

“Which part?”

“Any of it, I guess.” A couple around my parents’ age walked by, enjoying an early evening walk. They looked so content. A wave of loss passed through me so powerfully I shuddered. “Do you ever stop worrying about them?” I asked. “You know, the Living. My parents, I … I can’t even go there in my mind yet. Think about what all of this has put them through. Does there ever come a time when you don’t wonder if the people you left behind are doing okay? Do you ever let them go?”

Ed pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his jeans pocket and tapped the bottom on his palm until one fell out. He rolled it in his hand for a few seconds before shuffling around for a light. He sparked up, inhaling deeply, then sat back on the grass.

“Don’t ask easy questions, do you, Ghostgirl?”

“Maybe that’s my secret power.” Gah, why oh why did I come out with
that
? “Sorry, it’s just that I’m not sure even if I asked Nancy and Lorna this, they’d tell me the truth—amazing as they both are. And Tess certainly won’t.”

He squinted up at me, one eye half shut. “Why do you think that? Don’t tell me you’ve got on the wrong side of Tess already?”

I unsuccessfully tried to stop the answer from showing in my expression.

“Look, I can’t really tell you what it’s like for ‘us,’” Edison said, looking out at the river. “I think it’s probably different for every ghost.”

“Then how was it for you?” I asked.

He picked some grass off the lawn and threw it in the air, watching as the blades caught on the wind, briefly spiraling in the air before they fell back to earth. “You don’t give up, do you?” He brushed his hands on his jeans. I shook my head. “Okay, I’ll tell you how it was for me, but I don’t know that you’ll relate.”

I didn’t dare say anything or even move, in case he stopped speaking.

“For me, well, the worst happened way before this. My dad, he died suddenly when I was fifteen, and my mom kinda fell apart. Me and my brother, we had to look after her. We both promised we’d always be there for her. And I’m … now I’m not. What kills me about this”—he waved his hands at the world around him—“is that people talk about life and death, but they never talk about the moments in between. The ones where you’re stuck, just watching and unable to help because you’re not really meant to be here.”

I thought about my parents. At least they had each other. At least I didn’t have to worry about either of them being alone. Or having their heart broken twice.

“But, you know, my brother’s done a good job looking after her. He had to. After everything that went down. Aft—” He stopped short, not willing to tell me any more. Emptied of the smug and the wisecracks and cool, Edison’s face looked younger now. How old was he? Maybe only a year or so more than me—in Living years at least. In ghost time, I was sure it was a hell of a lot more.

He was on his feet now, clapping his hands on his jeans, putting back up the barricade, looking annoyed again. “I’ve got better things to do than sit around riverbanks with newbies, you know?”

“Oh, I’m well aware of that,” I said. “But I thought you were going to teach me about the dark arts of ghosting, instead of standing around talking like a sorority girl all night.”

He stared at me. For far longer than I can honestly say I was comfortable with.

“Drop dead, Ghostgirl.”

“Edison, as you know only too well, I already did.” I held his gaze. This time he was the first to look away.

“Right, let’s start small,” he said, the smirk back at the edges of his mouth. “I don’t know yet if you’re a fast learner or special ed.”

“Can we just get on with the lesson?” I asked.

Over the next hour, Edison calmly and patiently taught me what he considered to be the basics. And, whoa, were they different from Nancy’s. First up, I learned the Kick—all you needed to do was focus your energy and pretend you
hated
that grass—then the Jab (most effective if you wanted to poke an unsuspecting member of the Living on the shoulder as they walked by and freak them the hell out). Oh, and not forgetting the Throw (shout some words into your hand, then slam-dunk them into the mouth of a passing human and—hey, presto—they come out as their own). I tried it on a solo jogger first—watching him wonder if he’d gone cuckoo while simultaneously shouting my words, “Faster! Faster!” Ed dared me to Throw “you’re not my father!” into a baby’s mouth to mess with his parents, but the mom looked kinda sweet and—down with my bad side or not—I didn’t want to upset her.

Was I having actual fun with Mr. Oh-So-Serious?

“That’s almost enough for today,” he said eventually. “We’ll wrap up with what I call the Lifesaver.”

“Erm, isn’t it a little late for that?”

I swear I saw him roll his eyes.

Ed walked over and picked up my right hand.

Pow!

It felt like I’d been shocked by a thousand volts. I jumped back with a jolt and screamed. He dropped my hand immediately. What the hell was that?

“Hey, calm down, it’s okay,” he said, sounding genuinely concerned. Edison put his hand up and took a step back so I could see he wasn’t about to come near me until I was okay with it.

“I’m so sorry, I …” Boy, was I embarrassed. I pushed a black curl behind my ear and tried to get ahold of the situation. What
had
just happened? When I’d tried to make contact with David, it felt like running my hand through smoke. But that shock? I’d never felt anything like it before. Edison had only touched my hand. It wasn’t as if no one had ever done that before in my last life. But that was different.

“It’s just that, well, I think that was the first time anyone’s spirit’s touched me since I … you know,” I said quietly. “I guess I’ve not felt anything since the … since the subway train … and I guess you, your touch, that was why it made me jump.” I was suddenly afraid to meet his gaze.

“Subway train, hey? Well, that’s a hell of an act to follow, but I guess some ghost had to do it,” Edison said, shaking his head.

He looked back at me, silently asking for permission to try again. What the hell. I needed to get over this somehow. I nodded. Ed picked up my right hand again and this time—even though I still felt a surge of weird rushing through me—I refused to react. It was so strange, freaking out like that just because someone—some
dead
one—had touched me. Maybe being shoved under a speeding train by a psycho killer will do that to a girl.

Sure I wasn’t about to go loco on him, Ed raised my hand in the air, putting my thumb and middle finger together. He motioned for me to keep them there, took his hand away and made it into the same shape as mine. “Shhh,” he said and winked. He lifted his right hand higher, way above his head, and clicked his fingers.

It took me a couple of seconds to notice what had happened.

The highway, the gulls, the water lapping on the pier: They all went quiet. I couldn’t hear a thing—not the bus of tourists being driven by behind us, not the couple walking their Labrador to my right, not the plane overhead making puffy tracks through the clouds on its way out of LaGuardia. Edison had somehow found a way to mute the world. I swear that if my heart was still beating it would have been pounding at that moment, but instead? Just this total silence. Neat.

Ed smiled at me slowly. For the first time since I’d met him he looked somewhere near happy. It suited him way more than the perma-scowl he usually wore. Edison sat on the grass, his long legs neatly crossing under him and patted the spot next to him, silently asking me to do the same. So I did.

And there we sat. For I don’t know how long. Just watching the river, and the birds and the lights and not feeling weird about the lack of conversation because, even if we tried, there couldn’t be any. For the first time since all the bad stuff, I felt … somewhere approaching Charlotte again.

Then Edison took my hand again, put my fingers together, and motioned for me to snap.

Click!

It was like having water in your ears after a swim. The world sounded like it was happening down a long tunnel, not all around me. Then there was a
pop!
And just as quickly the volume turned back up on my life.

“Now, don’t get all excited and be trying that trick too much.” Edison’s voice made me jump. “If you get all on!-off!-on!-off!-on!-off! you will give yourself an earache. Trust me, I speak from experience.”

I looked at him, my mouth half open.

“So all of your tricks, are they not breaking the Rules?” I asked.

Edison shook his head. “We’ll talk about the so-called Rules next time, but suffice to say I don’t think any of what you’ve learned is technically a Rule break. We’re just enhancing your—what did you call them?—
powers
,” he said, his eyes laughing at me. “But hey, if you want to stick with the dull stuff, then go back to Nancy Drew, and the world will continue to be all hugs and puppies. Your call.” He shrugged.

Now it was my turn to look at the floor and kick the grass. Which—by the way—I could so now do. Which was kinda awesome.

“Nancy’s been teaching you basic apparition, right? How to appear to the Living as you did just before you died?”

I nodded.

“Good, well, keep practicing that and the next time we have one of our little tutoring sessions I’ll show you some more …
intense
materialization tricks. That is if you’re man enough?”

“
Girl
enough,” I said. “And always.” Ed smiled at me again. And for the first time, I felt okay about smiling back.

“Well, until next time then …”

Just as before the world swirled. The asphalt gray of the highway, mixing with a yellow taxicab, and the Hudson, which was now almost black. Then suddenly it all stopped and I was back in the Attesa again.

And Edison was nowhere to be seen.

Chapter 11

YOU KNOW WHEN YOU READ THOSE LAME
quick-fire interviews with “stars” in gossip magazines? They always ask them the same dumb questions. Like, “What’s your diet secret?” “What advice would you give to the teenage you?” or “What song would you want played at your funeral?” As if it’ll give us some serious, deep insight into the celebrity’s soul. And cover up the fact they’re actually about as interesting as waiting for your nail polish to dry.

But there’s one thing I know: If I’d lived long enough to get famous and some lamebrain had turned to me and asked, “Charlotte Feldman, what song do you want to be played at your funeral?” I know what I would
never
have said.

“Bring Me to Life” by Evanescence.

“Cool church, but the music sucks,” Jamie, dressed in something very tight and very black, said as she strutted past the spot where Nancy, Lorna, and I were watching my friends and family walk down the aisle and take their seats for the big event. My funeral.

So I’d been in limbo for, like, almost three days now (I figured) and, porting aside, there weren’t a whole lot of upsides to it. But getting to watch your own funeral? That seemed kinda neat. To see who turned up, how upset they were, find out who really cared for me and who was faking it …

Of course the downside was that I had nothing to do with the planning. Which meant my parents had been allowed to include Evan-freaking-escence on the playlist.

I mean, really? Could they have come up with more of a teen funeral cliché?
This
was the song that everyone here was going to associate me with forevermore? Like, if in twenty years time, one of the guys from my math class was old, married, and on vacation with his kids in Cabo—if this pumped out of a passing car stereo, he’d think, “Ah yes, ‘Bring Me to Life’ …. this reminds me of Charlotte Feldman, that girl from school who fell under a train.” Then he’d give his children a lecture on platform safety and say, “Charlotte: She always lent me a pen if I forgot mine, but she did have the
worst
taste in music.”

What an epitaph. I may have actually preferred Avril Lavigne.

“This was her favorite song. Her
favorite
,” Mom told my grandparents, who were sniffling in the front pew. Yeah, like
FIVE YEARS AGO
. “Charlotte played it constantly in her bedroom. She loved it. I was always asking her to turn the volume down.”

Jeez. You’d think David could have gotten involved and made this entire event sound less like something from the soundtrack of a substandard vampire movie. This is the kind of thing you should talk about with a guy before you start dating them. Like, “Do you promise to love, honor, and respect me. And, just in case I die in a freakish subway accident while we’re together, can you make sure that my musical taste is fairly represented at the funeral?”