Death at the Door, page 6
“Shame about your friend. A good dealer’s hard to find. Then again, I never did the hard stuff. Just like cocaine and shit.”
I snorted and asked, “Cocaine isn’t the hard stuff?”
“Duh. It was the eighties,” Harp replied. “Your friend, did he ghost?”
I shook my head. “I waited for him as long as I could, but nothing happened.”
“Bogus.” He didn’t sound disappointed so much as bored. Harp hopped off the pony. Instead of answering me, he said, “If that’s all, I’ve got places to be. It’s always spring break somewhere.” Then he vanished.
“Show-off,” I grumbled.
It was just my luck that of the only two people on the planet who knew I existed, one was a breather—as Harp liked to call the living—who happened to share my home address, and the other was a flippant, chauvinistic ghost I had nothing in common with other than we were both dead. It sucked. Ruby was good company, but our communication was in shambles. Harp was a better conversationalist but had the attention span of a horny flea.
“The afterlife sucks,” I grumbled.
There had to be other ghosts in Boston. There had to be. I just hadn’t found them yet. Had I given up on Marty too quickly? The memories surrounding my own death were fuzzy. When I died, had I ghosted immediately? Had it taken a few hours to materialize? Days? What if Marty was just now coming to, wandering around confused, scared, and alone?
That sealed it. I was going to give him another shot, if not to alleviate my own loneliness, then to help ease him into the transition.
I swung by TrendCelerate first because it was close and I knew my way around. I checked the bathroom. No sign of Marty, physically or metaphysically. The only thing left behind was a prescription pill bottle jammed in behind the toilet that the police had apparently missed. Gotta love their attention to detail.
Next stop was the morgue. I’d lived in Boston my entire life, but I had no idea where the morgue was, and it wasn’t like I could google the address. There were times I really missed access to technology. Then again, there were benefits to being dead, especially when it came to commuting.
I closed my eyes and concentrated hard. Since I wasn’t sure where Marty’s body would have been taken, instead of focusing on an address, I focused on Marty himself. And then just like when Harp decided our conversation was over and went in search of a warm beach filled with bikini-clad women, I vanished from the TrendCelerate bathroom. When I opened my eyes, I was in a morgue surrounded by dead bodies.
Back when I was alive, that would have freaked me out. Although, to be fair, even dead, being in a morgue was still pretty freaky.
I’d always imagined morgues would be someplace dark and underground, with flickering lights and rows of antiseptic metal tables with sheet-covered bodies on them. In reality, I had no idea if we were underground or not, since there were no windows in the room. There were only two tables, and neither was occupied at the moment. All the bodies were neatly tucked away into what I presumed were refrigerated body drawers along the wall. I couldn’t see them, but I could sense them. And yes, the lights did flicker, but that was my fault.
“Marty?” I whispered, feeling foolish. It wasn’t like anyone could hear me, not anyone living at least. It just felt disrespectful to talk too loud when surrounded by all this death.
I surveyed the wall of drawers. I found one labeled “Spencer, Martin” and realized that up until now, I had no idea what his last name was. When I’d been alive, I’d seen him at least once a week at TrendCelerate. I had his number programmed into my phone. I’d bought drugs off him for Pete’s sake. And I’d never bothered to learn his last name.
A door behind me swung open, and a technician in scrubs walked in. I waited, hoping they would leave so I could open Marty’s drawer. Instead, the tech sat down in front of a computer on the far side of the room and started typing.
“Isn’t there somewhere else you can do that?” I asked, to no avail.
I briefly considered opening the drawer anyway, but decided against it. If I worked in a morgue and one day, the drawers opened by themselves and dead bodies started sliding out into the room, I’d quit on the spot. Besides, it didn’t seem fair to give the poor technician nightmares when they were just doing their job.
That left only one option. I stuck my head into Marty’s drawer. It was dark inside, but I didn’t need light to see.
“Marty?” I called. The body didn’t stir. It just lay there, stiff, silent, and dead. “Marty, you in here?” Still, nothing. If Marty was a ghost, he wasn’t hanging around the morgue. Not that I blamed him. It was depressing and made my skin crawl—or it would have, if I still had skin.
I withdrew my head from the drawer, and something caught my eye. I studied the tag closer. It listed his name, followed by the cause of death. “‘Asphyxiation by choking’?” I shook my head. “Really?” I double-checked. It wasn’t “aspiration.” It was “asphyxiation.”
A few months ago, I wouldn’t have known the difference, but Ruby loved her true crime podcasts and listened to them frequently, which meant that now I listened to them, too. True crime had never been my thing. It was too graphic, but now all those details I didn’t realize I was picking up came in handy.
“Asphyxiation” covered a range of conditions that could cause someone to stop breathing, from asthma to suffocation. Aspiration, basically suffocating from fluid in the lungs, was a common symptom of overdose, but I’d seen Marty’s body on the bathroom floor. There’d been no drool or froth around his mouth, which would be expected in aspiration.
But the tag on the body drawer clearly stated “asphyxiation by choking,” which was different. Choking was when a person’s airway was blocked. In this case, according to the notes on the tag, his throat and mouth were full of pills.
Marty hadn’t died of an accidental overdose. Someone force-fed him enough pills to block his airway. Marty had been murdered.
I couldn’t let the killer go free. The police weren’t taking Marty’s death seriously. They’d already cleared the crime scene without more than a cursory sweep. It was time to take matters into my own hands. Only, being dead, strictly speaking, I didn’t have hands. Which meant that, despite my desire to protect Ruby, I was going to need to enlist her help. Again.
CHAPTER SEVEN
RUBY
The day after Marty’s death, the atmosphere was subdued at TrendCelerate. It was rarely ever noisy at work, but there was always something going on. Conversations between coworkers. Music leaking out of headphones. Telephone calls. Clacking keyboards. Today, everything felt more muffled than usual, like Marty’s death had cast a shadow over the office.
The mood lightened a little when the mail was delivered. Mixed in with the standard flyers and advertisements were the office’s copies of Frolicking Ferrets Monthly, Worm Digest, and Sailing Yacht Weekly. The ferret and worm magazines were Seth’s idea of a joke. The yacht magazine was Blair’s. I didn’t know why he had it sent to the office instead of his house, unless it was his way of reminding everyone that he owned a yacht. I set the magazines aside to hand off to them the next time they walked past my desk.
When lunch arrived, I went out instead of eating in the break room. Quinn McLauchlan was the on-site executive today. It was unusual to see her in the office two days in a row and, unfortunately, she was going through a juice cleanse. Which meant that she had me order smoothies for everyone for lunch. I loved a good juice blend as much as the next person, but when I drank too much of it, I had to pee; and frankly, the last place I wanted to visit was the TrendCelerate bathroom the day after Marty died in there.
Instead, I headed down the street to Beantown Deli, where he used to work. It was the lunch rush, and customers were packed into the small space. I’d never been inside Beantown before. I always placed my order online and waited for Marty to deliver.
There were four tables, two on each side of the store and a wide aisle between them leading to the deli counter. All of the action, I presumed, happened in the kitchen behind that, not that I could see over the crowd. But being small had its advantages. I slipped into the pockets between hungry customers and made my way to the counter.
“Take a number,” the woman behind the register said, pointing to an old-fashioned ticket dispenser.
“I’m here about Marty,” I said.
“Take. A. Number,” she repeated, slower this time, punctuating each word.
I took a number.
The deli had mostly cleared out by the time my number was called. Many of the people had been waiting to pick up large office orders, like the kind I normally placed. I had the menu memorized. I ordered a spuckie special for myself, knowing it would fill me up and still leave half to take home as leftovers.
After I placed my order, I told the woman behind the counter that our office normally got deliveries from Marty.
“You and everyone else,” she grumbled.
“He’s the best,” I said.
“He was a bum,” she replied with a frown.
Marty had been a great guy, friendly and outgoing. He was never late, and never rude. I liked him, and was surprised by her attitude. “I’m sorry to hear about his passing,” I said. I guess, technically, I hadn’t heard about it so much as witnessed it firsthand, but there was no reason to bring that up now. Or think about it ever again. “We’re going to miss him.”
“Why?” She shrugged. “He was a bum when he was alive, and he got what was coming to him.”
“He was nice to me,” I said.
“He was nice to everyone. Doesn’t make him any less of a bum. Or any less dead.”
I wondered what made him such a “bum” in her opinion, but rather than asking and risking sounding argumentative, I nodded. “My office, TrendCelerate?” If she recognized the name, she didn’t react. Then again, judging by the crowd that had been here earlier, I suspected many of the nearby businesses were frequent customers. “We’d like to send our condolences to his family.”
“I’ll pass that along,” she said. I got the impression she had no intention of doing so. She looked over my shoulder. “Next!”
I was nudged out of the way by someone picking up a large order of four heavy-looking bags. The person after that advanced on the counter. “What’s a spuckie?” they asked.
“It’s a sandwich,” the woman behind the register said, looking annoyed. She pointed at the board behind her. It was hand-lettered in chalk, but as far as I could tell, it was the same as the online menu, and that never changed. “Pick one and order. There’s a line.”
Although, to be fair, the line had dwindled to almost nothing.
While the customer studied the list of sandwiches like there would be a test later, the impatient woman reached behind the counter and grabbed a single wrapped spuckie off the window. “The special?” she asked, gesturing toward me.
“That’s me,” I confirmed, taking it eagerly. “So, about Marty…”
“What about Marty?” she snapped.
“Like I was saying, my company would like to send flowers to the family—”
She interrupted me. “Knock yourself out.”
“You think you can give me an address or something?”
“You think you can give me an address or something?” she repeated back to me, her tone high-pitched and whiny. For the record, I did not sound like that. Much.
“Please,” I added.
“Please, she says,” she grumbled. She opened a drawer under the counter and retrieved a three-ring binder, faded with age. She flipped through it, found the page she was looking for, and slid it across the counter toward me.
I looked down at the employment application for one Martin Spencer. I didn’t recognize the street name, but I committed his address to memory.
“Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” the woman said with the same sarcastic bite to her words.
“Oh!” I fumbled my phone out of my pocket. Why hadn’t that occurred to me before? Living with a ghost who fried electronics if she got too close, I’d reduced my reliance on my phone. I bet my mom wished she’d had a ghost around when I was growing up so she wouldn’t have had to yell at me and my sisters all the time to put our phones away at the dinner table. I opened the camera app and took a photo. “Thanks.”
She glared at me as she yanked the folder back and slid it into the drawer. “Next!” she called out, even though the confused person in front of her still hadn’t ordered.
I cradled my spuckie as I made my hasty exit. As much as I appreciated her reluctant assistance, I was glad I didn’t work with her. TrendCelerate would never give out an employee’s personal information that easily, or at least I assumed they wouldn’t. If they did, then someone would have noticed by now that my home address was the same as their previous office manager’s. The fact that no one had put two and two together yet was baffling, but even if someone did realize that I was living in Cordelia Graves’s old apartment, no one would ever guess that I was roomies with a deceased employee’s ghost.
It was a nice day, for Boston at least. The high sixties didn’t sound like much, but after a long, dreary winter, it was my idea of heaven. I found an empty bench in the tiny sliver of green that passed for a park in this neighborhood, sat, and unwrapped my spuckie. Back home in Baltimore, it would have been a “sub sandwich,” but they would crucify me if I called it that here. No matter what it was called, it was delicious.
I could hardly eat half of the enormous sandwich. I rewrapped the remainder and headed back to the office. As nice as it was to eat my lunch outside in the sunshine, a breeze had kicked up and it was getting chilly. Besides, I had phones to answer. I felt guilty taking my break, which was silly. In addition to incentivizing employees to work from the office, a big part of the reason management bought lunch every day was to stealthily encourage everyone to spend more time at their desks. Capitalism. Amiright?
Before I could take two steps into the office, Blair blocked my path. He sniffed the air before zeroing in on my remaining sandwich half. “Is that a Beantown Deli spuckie special?”
I crossed my arms around the sandwich. Gone were the days that I didn’t know from where, or if, my next meal was coming. I still had leftover eggplant parm in my fridge at home, but that didn’t mean I was willing to give up the other half of my spuckie just because Blair wanted it.
“What if it is?” I jutted my chin out. I’d been planning on stashing my leftovers in the refrigerator in the break room, but now I knew that was a bad idea. Blair had no respect for others, and labeling food in the shared fridge was no deterrent to him. I’d only worked at TrendCelerate for a couple of months, and already he’d cooked fish in the microwave, burned popcorn, and stolen all of Melissa’s pudding cups. He was the office menace.
“I had a kale smoothie for lunch. Kale. I’d kill for a spuckie right about now.”
“They’re still open,” I said, jerking my head back toward the door. I wasn’t going to risk pointing, lest he snatch my sandwich out of my arms and make a run for it.
“I already called. They said they’re not doing deliveries today. Can you imagine?” he whined.
“Yeah.” I nodded vigorously. “I can imagine. Their delivery person died yesterday, remember? In our bathroom?”
“That was the Beantown Deli dude?” Blair asked, crestfallen. “You sure?”
“Pretty sure,” I told him, with a nod. His reaction surprised me. As far as I knew, Blair didn’t care about anyone or anything other than himself. I doubted he was actually bothered by the passing of a lowly delivery person, other than how it inconvenienced him. Disgusted by his lack of compassion, I sidestepped him and headed for my desk.
“Twenty dollars,” he said, stopping me in my tracks.
I turned around. “Twenty dollars? For what?”
He pointed at my sandwich.
“You’ll pay me twenty dollars to go get you a spuckie?”
“I’ll give you twenty for that one,” he clarified.
I looked down at my hand. I’d already eaten half the sandwich, which had cost me less than what Blair was offering. If I put it in the fridge, he would eat it anyway; if I left it at my desk, it would spoil. But if he was willing to pay me twenty for it … “Twenty-five,” I countered.
“Deal. I’ll Venmo you.” He whipped out his cellphone. I gave him my Venmo name and a second later, my phone beeped. Without checking it, I handed him the spuckie. “Thanks,” Blair said, hurrying back to his cubicle.
I checked my phone as soon as I sat down at my desk. Sure enough, I had twenty-five dollars from Blair in my Venmo account.
I wondered if Marty ever got paid that much for a single delivery. When I ordered for the office, I always tipped twenty percent on top of the delivery fee and put it all on the company card. I had no idea how many offices he delivered to, but based on the amount of folks waiting to pick up their orders at the deli, I guessed a lot.
Marty could have cleared twice as much a week on tips alone than I made at TrendCelerate. Not bad.
For a hot second, I considered going back to Beantown Deli to ask if they were hiring. I assumed they were, considering how busy they’d been at lunch and knowing that they were short one delivery person. But my common sense kicked in. Sure, running around on a day like today would be great. But Boston wasn’t exactly famous for its temperate weather, and those deliveries got heavy fast. The first time I had to hoof an order a few blocks in subzero temperature I’d be begging to get my desk job back.
And I did like it at TrendCelerate. On the whole, people were nice. Sure, Blair was a tool, Quinn was a nightmare when she was on a juice cleanse, and I didn’t trust anything Seth offered me. But I could see why Cordelia had stayed here as long as she had. It was a cushy job.
With nothing else to occupy me, I checked the TrendCelerate generic mailbox. As usual, it was mostly spam. Emails from the website all ended up here. If they were actual leads, I would forward them out to the team. Otherwise, I deleted them.
I was in the process of deleting several dozen emails ranging from people telling me I’d won contests I hadn’t entered, they could fix problems I didn’t have, to they’d tracked down a package I hadn’t ordered, when one jumped out at me. It was a perfectly ordinary email, a reminder for a dentist appointment. The email was addressed to Cordelia Graves.
