Ghosts Like it Hot, page 10
“At this point I don’t owe you delicacy.” Our balcony was on the third floor, but I still kept my voice down given we were looking out over the pool area. “Tell me what happened. I know you know who murdered you.”
“That I don’t actually know. I’m being totally truthful. There’s a lot I don’t know, which is why I’m hanging around. I did not know that Jamie and Mark were so close. Like, I really didn’t know that.”
“Did you know Mark isn’t actually Mark?”
“What do you mean?”
“Mark’s real name is Rick Freed. Does that ring any bells?”
Austin was either a tremendous liar or he really didn’t know the name because he stared at me. “No.”
“Why did you and Jamie really come down to the Keys?”
Austin wouldn’t look at me. He was staring at his fingernails. “It was a reboot, you know? Shit went down in Boston and we needed a fresh start.”
“What kind of shit?”
“I had a little issue with pain pills. There was a skiing accident in Vermont that turned me on to oxy. I got clean and was living my best life here, man. Yoga, healthy eating, fresh air. I don’t even drink.” Austin gave me a look. “Something you might want to consider. Alcohol doesn’t bring happiness, Bailey.”
I couldn’t argue with that, but did I really need a lecture from the guy who was clearly lying to me? “Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind. So you’re going to sit here and maintain that you know nothing about how you could have wound up with a bullet in your head and yet your girlfriend is totally unharmed?”
“Yep.”
It was like when a little kid says they didn’t eat the cookie and their mouth is smeared with crumbs and chocolate. There was no way Austin was entirely in the dark as to why he might be a target. He didn’t seem particularly surprised that Jamie was alive, either.
How stupid would it be to try to find her and talk to her?
Probably very stupid.
I wondered if I could find Mark’s other boat at the marina. He had vaguely pointed it out to us after we’d found Austin’s body. Jake might be on board with that plan. I sensed he was itching to confront Mark.
Taking another approach, I asked Austin, “Did you love Jamie?”
“That’s a very personal question.”
“You told me to go to couples counseling. We’ve already crossed a line.”
“I don’t know. What is love, really? Aren’t emotions like love really a social construct?”
“No.” That I was sure on. None of us would ever put ourselves through the ecstasy and agony of loving someone if we could help it. “It’s not really a gray area. You either love someone or you don’t.”
“I loved Jamie. I did. That doesn’t mean we were good for each other.”
Interesting. “In what way?”
But Austin waved his hand around. “None of that matters. I’m dead. She’s not. She’ll do what she’s going to do.”
Clearly, given how cozy she had looked with Mark sitting at the bar the day before. “Was she having an affair with Mark?”
“I don’t know. That seems kind of weird, doesn’t it? I mean not to brag but I’m younger and better looking.”
That was actually bragging, but I couldn’t disagree with him. “Attraction is a mysterious thing. Where do you think Jamie was after you were thrown in the water? She was obviously still on your boat but I’m really confused as to the plan. Was killing you spontaneous?”
“You think she killed me?” He sounded surprised by that.
“Well, who else?”
“Our guests?”
“A middle-aged couple on vacation just randomly decided to murder you but leave your wife alive and she seems remarkably unconcerned about that?”
“Murder isn’t always logical.”
“I’m not buying what you’re selling. How am I supposed to help you if you are just straight-up lying to my face?”
“I guess you don’t have to. Just go on home after your vacation and don’t worry about me. I’ll just chill here for eternity. It’s cool.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. A passive-aggressive brat ghost. Wonderful.
Austin didn’t seem to require an answer. He started singing “Stairway to Heaven.”
“I’m going swimming,” I told him, when I couldn’t take his goofy rendition any longer. He wasn’t even being serious about it. “I’ll talk to you later.”
I went inside and checked on Jake. “Hey,” I whispered softly to him.
“Hmm?”
“Do you need anything? I’m going down to the pool.”
“Can you pick me up a new head?” His eyes opened for the first time in almost two hours. “And a Philly cheesesteak.”
“You want a cheesesteak?” Unbelievable.
“Doesn’t that sound good?”
I smoothed his hair back. He had dark circles under his eyes and a five o’clock shadow. “You’re a mess.”
He sat up and drained the glass of water I’d set on the nightstand. “Give me two hours and I’ll be totally fine.”
“Are you serious about the cheesesteak? Because I’ll go get one now before I go to the pool.”
“I am serious but only if you don’t mind.”
Jake was constantly feeding me, fixing things around my house, and being an overall quality boyfriend. I could get him a hangover cheesesteak. “I don’t mind.”
“Thank you, you’re the best.”
“Take a shower. You smell like stale beer and bad choices.”
“That means I smell like vacation. Perfect.”
Ten
After using Jake’s phone to do a search I found a cheesesteak place down the street and within twenty minutes was back with two sandwiches piled high with onions and whiz. Jake was straight out of the shower, wearing nothing but a towel and he fell on that sandwich like he’d been stranded at sea for two weeks.
In two bites, he ate half of it. “Holy shit, this thing is good.”
“I’m going to eat mine by the pool.”
“I’ll be down there in a minute.”
“Okay. I have your phone.”
Jake nodded, mouth full of another bite.
I took my beach bag and a towel and my sandwich and went to the pool area. There was only one other person there, a woman in her sixties. She was reading a book. My kind of gal. I had the exact same plan in mind.
But first, cheesesteak.
I had to agree with Jake. It was pretty damn good.
I was going to need a week straight of salads once we got home.
After I ate, I dozed in the warm sun, then opened my eyes to find Jake sleeping in the lounge chair next to me. I stood up and eased myself into the pool. It felt amazing. I did a few leisurely laps, but mostly I floated and bobbed, enjoying the fact that it was the first week in March and I wasn’t freezing my butt off.
I wondered how Ryan was doing at home without me around to harass.
Given I was his only contact down on earth, he must be bored.
Then again, Ryan was a bit of a lazy ghost. He probably didn’t mind a little downtime.
This was paradise. This was what I had imagined when we had booked this vacation. Nothing but sun and nowhere in particular to be. The woman reading her book had disappeared while I was dozing and it was just the two of us. I wondered how much it would cost to buy a place in Key West. Probably about 200 times what I had to spend.
It didn’t cost anything to daydream.
Jake stood up and stretched, then jumped into the water. I would have been annoyed at getting splashed but I was willing to let it go given my current state of Zen. He emerged from the water, shaking his head. He looked a hell of a lot better than he had in the morning and I envied his ability to bounce back after consuming an inappropriate quantity of alcohol. What was he, a buffalo?
On the other hand, my body made me pay a price so heavy that I rarely overindulged and that was a plus. It kept me on the straight and narrow. I was grateful as hell I felt as intact as I did.
“Do we have to go back home?” I asked him. “Or can we just stay here forever?”
“Don’t talk about home,” he said, coming closer and wrapping his arms around me. “We’re not even halfway through our vacation.”
“Maybe we should move here.” I indulged in the fantasy for a minute. I could build up a clientele in the Keys, setting up houses to be used as rental properties. Jake probably wouldn’t want to start his career over. We couldn’t afford even a studio apartment in Key West. I’d miss my family. We’d still have to work, so it’s not like it would be a permanent vacation.
Dammit. That was reality.
I needed to just enjoy it while I could.
“What do you want to do later? Can we go to that museum they mentioned on the tour?” I asked. I couldn’t get the story about Robert the Doll out of my head. I wanted to see Straw Boy for myself.
“What museum? But yes, we can do whatever you want.”
“I want to see that doll. Robert.”
Jake paused in the act of leaning in to kiss me. He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “You do? Why?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. It sounds interesting. Like an urban legend but with an actual physical doll.”
“Aren’t you worried you’ll see ghosts?”
“At a museum? What ghost would be there? It’s not like the doll has a ghost.” That didn’t seem logical.
He held his hands up. “Okay, just checking. We’ll go see the doll.”
* * *
You would think that by now I would have learned to research what the hell I was getting myself into. I had no idea the museum was actually in an old fort. Within two minutes of entering the grounds I had a soldier ghost following me. I was trying to pretend I couldn’t see him, but Jake was on to me. I kept moving closer to my boyfriend, winding my arm around his and leaning into his shoulder.
“Are you okay?” he asked as we waited in a group of people for the tour to begin.
I weaved around the front of him, wanting his body between mine and the Civil War soldier who had half of his head blown off. I didn’t usually see ghosts with their death wounds and this was really damn disturbing. “Um. I’m okay.”
I pretended like I was brushing something off the front of his shirt. Jake’s eyebrows shot up.
“You’re full of shit,” he said. “You just don’t want to admit I was right.”
“There is truth in that. Also, normally I see them as they were, you know, alive.” I dropped my voice to a whisper. “This guy looks like a bullet shot off the side of his head. I can’t look at him.”
“I feel like if you’re going to have this gift or talent or curse, however you want to look at it, it should have standards. Like rules and regulations.”
“I agree, trust me! I much prefer the pre-death look.”
The tour guide clapped his hands and asked us to get closer.
Jake put his arm around me and kept me tucked up against his chest. I appreciated the show of support. I didn’t dare look, but I didn’t think the ghost actually was aware I could see him. It felt like he was following me, but that was only because he was so disturbing in appearance. He didn’t actually seem conscious of who was around him. I thought maybe it was an imprint of the man’s death as opposed to a sentient ghost.
“I had no idea how many forts were in the Keys,” I said to Jake. “I feel like I missed a whole chapter in Civil War history.”
“I wasn’t that good of a student,” he said, “so I definitely had no clue.”
The tour guide talked about how the fort was abandoned at the end of the war without actually being finished and was left alone until the 1950s, when restoration began. I was actually intrigued by all the history of Key West I was being introduced to on this trip.
Then the tour took a turn down Crazy Lane. The guide started talking about some German x-ray tech who had a major crush on a patient dying of tuberculosis. She was thirty years younger than him and when she died, he swiped her body. Like, stole it out of her grave.
Kept it. Waxed her up to preserve her. Love her.
“That is not okay,” I murmured to Jake.
“I think that’s a serious understatement.”
There were photos hanging on the wall of her corpse from the funeral she was given after the guy was finally busted. Basically, everyone in Key West at the time came to the funeral to gawk at her body, which looked like a mummy dipped in petroleum jelly. Quite gross, I had to say.
“Why does every weird story have some kind of creepy German medical guy?” the woman next to me murmured.
She must have been more well versed in creepy stories than me because aside from the entirety of World War Two, I couldn’t say that I’d heard gobs of stories where German doctors were nuts. Certainly this was my first story where one kept a corpse in a wedding gown for a decade. That was next level batshit crazy.
“I want to remind you, this tour was your idea,” Jake said as he looked at the photos, shaking his head. “No bodies, we said. Remember? We’re on vacation. No bodies.”
“It’s just a picture of a body, not an actual body.”
The same women looked at us like we were serial killers.
“He’s a homicide detective,” I told her. “Don’t be alarmed.”
She still moved away from us like I might shank her.
We moved on to Robert the Doll.
“What the hell?” Jake said under his breath. “That is a jacked-up looking doll.”
It was. I couldn’t lie. Robert was about the size of a three-year-old child and had endured some damage to the face so that he looked pale and rough, with a maniacal grin. It wasn’t a realistic looking doll so much as cartoonish. If the cartoon came from hell.
The tour guide was suggesting if we wanted a photo we had to ask Robert’s permission or he would potentially bring us bad luck. I had absolutely zero intention of taking a picture of Robert.
It was as the guide was pointing out the letters on the wall behind the doll from guests who’d had experiences with Robert, that I saw the ghost leaning against the wall, looking amused. I don’t know why, but I instantly felt like it was the original owner of Robert, Gene Otto. He looked at me then, as if he could feel my stare on him.
He did something I’ve never seen before (you know, in my whole entire six months of dealing with ghosts). He changed form. First, he shrank and became a child. Then in a blink he was a living, walking Robert the Doll.
Holy…
That wasn’t a ghost. That wasn’t the spirit of Robert Eugene Otto. That was something else entirely.
The actual doll was still in the case, sitting on its little wooden chair, while tourists asked permission to take photos.
This… demon doll was marching toward me like an eighties horror movie.
The grin on his pocked face widened.
I turned and ran. Just ran like I haven’t run since, well, ever. I don’t think I made a sound. If I did, I wasn’t even aware of it. All I cared about was getting the hell out of there.
Bursting out onto the grass, I kept going. Straight to the parking lot. Panic just guided me to a giant tree, which I slumped against. Jake was right behind me.
“Bailey! What’s going on? What the hell did you see in there?”
I struggled to beat off the panic. “I think I saw a demon.”
“A demon?” His jaw dropped.
“I don’t know what it was.” I looked back toward the fort. “But it was evil. Pure evil. It was a man, then a child, then it took on the likeness of that doll. I don’t know what was going on in there, but I’m never going back inside that building ever again.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“No kidding.” I took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “Remember when you asked if I would give back this so-called ability? Right now, I’d throw it back like a fast ball if I could. I don’t want this anymore.”
“All right.” Jake pulled me against him. “You’re okay. It’s okay. Whatever the hell it was, it can’t hurt you.”
I shuddered. “We don’t know that.”
“I know that. Ghosts can’t touch you. They can annoy you, but they can’t hurt you.”
He was choosing the ignore the demon angle. I didn’t know if it was a demon. I didn’t know if I even believed demons existed. But if it was just a ghost, it was really damn talented.
Given what I knew about the ghosts I’d encountered, good or bad as human beings prior to death, they were all involved in a process to shuffle them off the after-life. Shape-shifting didn’t feel like something that would be sanctioned upstairs. But again, what the heck did I know? No one had sent me through a certification process to be a medium. Just one day, boom. Ghosts.
“Can we just get out of here?” I asked.
“Of course. You didn’t drop anything back there, did you? You took off like a track star.”
My purse was over my shoulder and across my body. “No. Just order a car. I think we’re too far to walk back to the town, aren’t we?”
“I think so.”
“I wish we hadn’t drank so much last night. This is a perfect time to have a cocktail.” My hands were actually still shaking.
“How about we go inside a church instead? That might make you feel better. Shake off all that crazy. I’ve seen a lot in my career but that guy keeping that chick around in a wedding dress was pretty nasty.”
“You’re right.” I may be a failure as a Catholic but I’d grown up in the church and thought Jake was right in that I’d find it comforting.
Ten minutes later, we got out of the car at a cream-colored church and entered the grotto. Jake had found on their website it was open to the public and we stepped into a lush garden with a stone structure presiding over a statue of Mary.
Instantly, the beauty and the quiet made me feel better. After strolling through the garden, we sat on a bench.
“I think I need to take a class for mediums or something,” I said. “I thought this would basically go away on its own, and that doesn’t seem to be the case. I’ve half-heartedly tried to establish boundaries, but that’s based off of one book I flipped through. If this is my reality, I need to be more in control.” I swallowed. “I can’t see something like that again. That doll was charging me. It was so not cool.”
