The Dead Girls Detective Agency (15 page)

“Why am I …? How did I get down
here
?” I asked, my voice raspy. I was standing down in the middle of the subway tracks. And as much as New Yorkers complain about the city’s shitty public transportation system, as one of them, I was pretty sure another train would be coming in any minute. I had to get out. If I could get it together enough to move. Or port.

“I guess I owe you an explanation.” Edison squatted down on the platform, so he was almost on my eye level, and grinned. “So here’s the thing: After our last lesson, I was thinking that maybe I was a little too easy on you. Like, the tricks you learned, sure they’re fun, but would they really help if you found yourself in a death-and-death situation?” He tilted his head, like he was pondering the hardest math problem in the quiz. “I think not.”

Two guys pushed through the turnstile above me and took their place on the platform next to Edison.

“You’ve been a good pupil. You can Kick, you can Jab, you have apparition down pat—honestly, I’ve never seen a newbie pick that up as fast as you, Charlotte—but your porting skills … from what I’ve seen, they’re kinda crappy.” His grin had turned to a scowl now. I was beginning to wonder exactly how sane Edison was. Hot? Definitely. Unhinged? With every passing second, more than possibly.

Another guy arrived on the platform. When was the next train coming?

Ed continued. “It seems to me that, when it comes to porting, Nancy and Lorna are carrying you—
literally
today—and every time you port, you want to puke your guts up. Not that you have any guts anymore, right?” He laughed. “So I figured—surprise!—why not make our next lesson more practical? Why not put you somewhere where speed was of the
essence
. Why not take you down here and show you that porting quickly is a piece of cake. If you just try hard enough. If you know you really
have
to do it.”

The rumble. I knew that sound. Low. Really low. I could feel it vibrating under my feet and down the concrete tunnel. It was far off, but it still meant one thing: Another train was totally coming. I had to get out of here. Fast.

But not before I’d done one little thing.

I turned to face Edison.

“You
what
, Edison?” I shouted. “You are completely crazy.” I knew I was being loud, but I didn’t care. It wasn’t like anyone down here could hear me anyhow. “You saw me having a perfectly nice night watching a band and you thought, ‘Oh, I know, what poor recently murdered Charlotte needs is to be kidnapped and have the life scared out of her—again—that’ll make her a better ghost!’—is that it?”

Ed stared at me. His expression neutral. Like he was a mom letting her toddler get it all out before she decided to reason with it. Or spank its butt.

“Who gave you the right to do this to me?” I was ranting now. “What? You didn’t think I’d had a bad enough day with the funeral and the crying and the total lack of my Key, so you thought you’d freak me out some more, under the guise of ‘teaching me how to apparite quickly’?”

The rumble was building now.

“For your information, Edison, you do not have any hold over me—”

“Er, Charlotte?” he said, his forehead wrinkling.

“Shut up! I’ve heard just about enough from you with your ‘shhh … close your eyes’ and your ‘let’s take this party someplace more lively.’ You might think you’re
it
, but you, Edison Hayes, are the most pretentious, irritating, smug, conceited, senseless doofus I have
ever
laid eyes on—”

“Charlotte, I think you should …” Edison was pointing down the track. Actually looking nervous now. Whatever.

“I said,
SHUT UP
!” I shouted. “I am doing fine without your lessons, thank you very much. So fine, that if I never saw your dead ass again, it would be too soon. So fine, that—”

My words didn’t seem to be having any effect. Instead Edison stood up and slowly crossed his arms across his chest in a don’t-say-I-didn’t-warn-you way.

Idiot.

I turned back to the tunnel. Crap—there they were. The lights. The two lights. Speeding at me. Ohforgodsake. I was not being run down
three
times. Once is careless, twice is stupid, but three times, well … Concentrate, Charlotte, I told myself. You can do this. Just close your eyes and port and …

Bang!
I landed on the platform in record time—right on top of Edison, just as the train sped past.

“See, I said this would help your porting skills,” Edison said, the grin firmly back in place. “Though if you’d wanted to get me horizontal, all you had to do was ask.”

Right at that moment, I wasn’t sure if I was in more danger up here, sprawled all over Mr. Tough Love, than I was down there, in the path of a careering train.

“Well, looky what we have here …,” a voice said.

I unsuccessfully tried to pull myself off Edison’s lap, and saw Tess standing on the platform in front of us, with her hands on her hips and a quizzical expression on her face. She looked like a girl who’d just walked into her closet to find her little sister stealing her new clothes. Which was weird. Seeing as there could not be less going on between me and Edison—not now anyway—and, as far as I knew, Tess didn’t like anyone but herself (and sometimes Lorna/Nancy when they behaved).

“Um, Tess, what are you doing down here?” I asked, doing my best to sound casual, like getting caught lying on top of Edison on an empty platform after dark was no biggie.

“Nancy was worried when you didn’t port straight back to the hotel after her and Shop-a-lot,” Tess said. “She seems to think your porting skills aren’t up to snuff yet.” I tried to ignore Edison as he smugly poked me in the ribs. “Seems like you’re not that green in other areas though, doesn’t it? Is this your new tactic for holding on to guys now, Charlotte? Don’t worry, honey, we’ve had cheerghosts in the Attesa before—they weren’t Edison’s type then, so I doubt they would be now.”

Ouch. Could she just give me a minute while I pulled that knife out of my back?

Edison lifted me off his lap and onto the concrete beside us. For someone who looked like a dead poet, he was strong. He gracefully stood up, then reached a hand down, pulling me up too. This time I didn’t end up with my face in his chest, thank God.

“Thank you,” I said, before I could help it. Gah! Why was I thanking the strong mad boy? It was his fault I was in this mess in the first place.

Ed smirked. I half wanted to punch him and half wanted to kiss his self-satisfied grin away. Except, no, I didn’t want to do the last one. I so didn’t want to do any of that. I wanted to …? Ohmigod.

“Look, Tess,” I said, carefully taking a step away from Edison to show our total not-an-item-ness. “This is
not
how it looks.”

“That’s a shame, because it looks kinda interesting,” she said, pretending to look down at her nails. I couldn’t help but notice that her face looked—as my grandmother would have said—like thunder.

“No, sorry, it’s not interesting
at all
,” I said, trying to keep my voice even as Edison took a massive step toward me, and casually slung his arm around my shoulders, making my whole right side buzz. He smiled encouragingly, as if to say,
Go on, please finish your story
.

I straightened up, trying to take control.

“So it turned out that Edison was also at the Arctics’ show but when I bumped into him Lorna and Nancy had already ported back to the hotel so I couldn’t tell them he was there and then he suggested that we come here because he knew I was afraid of the subway after everything that happened and I’d not had the best day with my funeral and the dying and so you can see there is less going on here than you think.”

Tess looked from me to Edison, then back again. He gave my shoulder a deliberately obvious squeeze. Tess’s jaw tightened.

“What’s up, Tess, you look stressed out? Want to bum a smoke?” Edison offered her a cigarette and blinked at her innocently.

“No thanks, you know what those things do for your health,” she said evenly. “Now, Edison, if I can just have one second of your time on our own, that would be very helpful.”

“Oh, come on, Tess, it’s kinda late, I’m beat, and …”

Pop!

Talk about avoiding the issue. Edison was gone. Leaving nothing but a burning cigarette behind him. He’d ported off the platform to who knows where, leaving me with an angry Tess and a whole load of questions about what the bejesus had just happened. Could I actually be crushing on a guy who was dead, hot,
and
the object of Tess’s … what? Irritation?
Affection?
Jeez, the way my luck was going, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn she and Edison had dated at some point and, thanks to tonight, she now had even more reason for giving me the scowl.

Tess slowly and very deliberately walked down the platform toward me, stopping right in front of my face. For one horrible second, I thought she was going to push me on the tracks for a third time, but instead she pursed her lips into a small hard line, then focused on the burning butt on the concrete beside her.

“Look, Charlotte, I don’t know what went on tonight, and to be perfectly honest with you, I have no desire to hear the details. But I do know this,” she said, stamping out the cigarette, “the more time you spend getting distracted by Edison, the longer it’s going to take to solve your murder”—she put her arms around me, ready to port us home together, and looked me hard in the eyes—“and the longer I have to put up with you in my afterlife.”

I tried to hold her gaze as the platform melted and the Attesa lobby appeared.

As soon as she could, Tess dropped her arms.

“I think we’ll both agree that neither of us want that to be too long,” she said. Her eyes were harsh again now, there was no mistaking the flecks of hatred being fired at me. Just what had I done to annoy her this much? Was it
really
that I was another newbie who had the chance of a way out of here that it seemed she’d lost? “If I were you,” she said, “I’d stay away from Edison, get investigating hard, and then, let’s hope, everything around here will go back to normal.”

Tess turned on her heel and started up the stairs. “And I can forget you ever existed.”

Chapter 14

THE TITLE NANCY HAD SCRAWLED ON THE
blackboard wasn’t her most subtle effort, but it did the trick:
Murder Suspects
. Then underneath in smaller letters—as if to clarify anything Lorna, Tess, or I may not have
fully
understood:
People who might have killed Charlotte
.

Nancy stood by the board, chalk in hand, like some expectant teacher who’d just asked her class a tricky algebra problem. Lorna and I sat on small swivel chairs opposite her. Tess—typically—was slouching on the table to her right with her feet dangerously close to a pile of ancient case files. There was no way she could see Nancy’s board from that position. But I doubted she cared. Even her legs were pointing away from us, as if to say,
Yeah, whatever, I may be here, but don’t expect me to be into it
. Edison, who I’d not seen since what-the-hell-happened-last-night, was, as usual, sitting this one out.

“Let’s start then, shall we?” Nancy tapped her chalk on the board. White dust swirled and whirled in a shaft of morning light. “We’ll go through what we know and make some lists.”

Lists. Woo.

“First off, from observing your friends at the funeral and the high school, no one seems to suspect you were killed in suspicious circumstances, Charlotte,” Nancy said, walking back and forth in front of the board. “And the police don’t think that either.”

“Which means they either think you were a total clumsy-head who tripped onto the tracks or a jumper,” Lorna clarified.

“Thanks,” I said. Man, this was shaping up to be about as fun as a root canal.

“But”—Nancy raised an eyebrow—“we know that both of those conclusions are not true. If you’d killed yourself or just stumbled, you wouldn’t be here with us. Someone pushed you and meant to do it. That’s why you’re in the Attesa.”

Yes, the push, the heat, yada yada, I remembered all that. Way too clearly after Edison’s actions last night. Could we move it along?

“What about security cameras?” I asked. “There must have been cameras down on the subway platform. They must have seen something? Someone standing close to me, the moment I”—nope, still no easier talking about this out loud—“went under the F train?”

“Yes, we checked out the security footage while we were waiting for you to arrive,” Nancy said. “Well, Lorna ported to the nearest NYPD station and she watched over the officers’ shoulders while they looked at the tapes. Unfortunately there was a problem with the way the cameras had been set up, so they weren’t much help.”

“The cameras were pointing in the opposite direction to the tracks—to focus on the turnstiles,” Lorna said. “So there’s no footage of the platform or you being pushed under the train.”

Figures.

“So seeing as we don’t really have any evidence from the crime scene—because the police didn’t think a ‘crime’ had been committed—and there’s no Living investigation in progress, we’ll have to solve this case on our own,” Nancy said. Awesome. “I guess the first big question we have to ask is, who wanted you dead?”

Who wanted me dead? I looked blankly at the others. Sorry, no lightbulbs were about to ping anytime here.

“No obvious suspects, then?” I got the impression this was really not going the way Nancy wanted, but I’d been thinking this over since I’d arrived and I hadn’t come up with anyone.

“Okay, let’s think about things differently,” Nancy said, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Did you go home via that route every day?”

“Yes,” I said. Every day after school let out, at three thirty p.m., I caught the F train at Rockefeller Center, before getting out at Lexington and Sixty-Third. It might not have been the most direct route, but it meant I could walk home through the park, which gave me alone-time to think.

“So if someone wanted to push you under a train, for anyone who knew you, it would have been a pretty safe bet that you would have been on the F train platform at about three forty p.m. on a school day.”