Royal Ghouls Read online

  Royal Ghouls

  A Greek Ghouls Mystery

  Alex A. King

  Copyright © 2017 by Alex A. King

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  For my sister, who likes this series. She is a woman of good taste.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Also by Alex A. King

  Chapter One

  The woman was poised on cliff’s sharp edge, threatening to jump from Merope’s highest point. A disturbing distance below, the Aegean Sea was slapping itself into a frenzy against the island’s rocks. The month was October—the cold end of October—but she was dressed for an August that happened twenty years ago. The jumper didn’t have a name, not one she was willing to give me, anyway. She wore Jennifer Aniston’s “Rachel” ‘do and lashings of matte lipstick, waist-high Levi’s 501s and something skimpy that was supposed to be a top.

  “Say something,” she said. “Stop me if you can.”

  Further along the cliff’s edge, I was lying on my belly, staring down the twin barrels of binoculars. I didn’t look up. This was the tenth time in the past hour that she had leaped to her death. For years, she’d been making the same jump. Ever since my family moved to Merope.

  “No. Don’t. Stop.”

  My name is Allie—“Aliki" if you’re my mother and I’m in trouble—Callas and I see dead people. In my experience ghosts aren’t spooky. Mostly they specialize in Too Much Information, and if I had to stick an adjective to them, I’d pick “annoying.’” When I’m not seeing dead people—and when I am—I run Finders Keepers, a business dedicated to finding things for people. Sometimes the job is hunting down missing people. Other times it’s information or an impossible-to-find knick-knack for that special someone. I’m the first stop when that cheating jerk is planning to rip you off and you need proof before you hire someone else for the revenge part. My job means I’m a magnet for useless and useful information. Sooner or later, everything reaches my ears. People with secrets—especially other people’s secrets—can’t help sharing. I’m thirty-one, single, and when my parents get back from their round-the-world cruise, it’s possible they’ll bring presents for my sister and her family and an international assortment of men for me.

  “Nobody will save me. Everybody hates me.”

  “I guess you’ll go eat worms?”

  The ghost turned around, questions all over her face. “Eh?”

  My American roots were showing. The product of two Greek-Americans, I’d moved to the island paradise of Merope at the age of thirteen, when my parents finally caved, after years of familial manipulation. There’s only so much “your insert-random-relative is dying—again!” a person can take without cracking up or moving back to Greece. My parents are emotionally stable, so they crammed everything into suitcases and dragged us across the Atlantic Ocean.

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’m trying to work here, so whatever you need to do, do it quietly.”

  The jumper sighed like I was killing her, then fell. Her non-corporeal body jerked as it soundlessly hit every rock on the way down, then landed in the Aegean Sea’s cooling waters.

  I started to count. “One … two … three … and …”

  “Say something. Stop me!”

  She was back, dressed head to toe in the same outfit. It was dry and so was she.

  “Okay.”

  “You are not going to say anything?”

  “Nice weather we’re having.”

  October is one of Greece’s kindest months. Skin doesn’t blister the way it does in July, and winter hasn’t spanked the land with its cold wooden spoon. This afternoon, the sky was a cloudless blue, and I had barely shivered at all since I peddled my bicycle to the sharp edge of Merope.

  “That is all?” Hands on hips. “You want to talk about the weather?”

  “Trying to work here.”

  “Who works on the edge of a cliff?”

  “Don’t you have to jump to your death again?”

  “Rude,” she said, and took a flying leap.

  One … two … three …

  “What are you doing up here?” she asked me.

  “I find things people can’t or don’t want to find on their own. Sometimes it’s stuff, sometimes it’s information, sometimes it’s other people. Today it’s a boat.”

  “Oh,” she said. “What’s on the boat?”

  “A man.”

  Suddenly we weren’t alone on the cliff. A barrel-shaped ginger cat appeared. He had an overbite and he looked pissed off at the entire world. But he seemed to like me enough to keep coming back for more of whatever it was that attracted him to me in the first place. Dead Cat was dead and had been for decades. And now he was my dead cat, thanks to someone who had meant the world to me.

  “Awww, a cat!” The ghost woman crouched down, wiggled her fingers. “I used to love cats. I had a cat once, until it tried to tackle a donkey.”

  Dead Cat sat his hefty rump down not far from the woman and looked her up and down. The wicked glint in his eye said this was a giant mouse and he was determined to drag it home and abandon it on my doormat.

  “Don’t even think about it,” I hissed.

  The inherited cat turned around in a circle, then stood with his hindquarters facing the dead woman. My Virgin Mary, was he going to spray her? He’d done it before with a living woman and she hadn’t felt a thing.

  Dead Cat’s back paw shot out, nailed her in the calf.

  “Gamo tin mana sou …” the woman howled as she toppled off the cliff again, suggesting that I make sweet love to my mother. Even in Ancient Greece that was frowned upon. There was a whole myth about the dangers of nookie with your own parent.

  I gave my dead cat a mock exasperated look. “You’re incorrigible.”

  He ratcheted his purr up to steam train.

  “Now I’m falling when I’m not supposed to,” the ghost woman said, reappearing. “Being dead is frustrating. I was hoping for more.”

  “There’s a whole organization for dead people in the Afterlife. You should check it out.”

  She shot me an interested look. “An organization? What kind of organization?”

  “One that helps people transition and cope with their new situation. It’s called the Council of the Formerly Living.”

  “How do I get there?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m still alive.”

  “Now you are just bragging.” She fell again.

  For the next four seconds I focused on the sea.

  I had told the ghost I was waiting on a boat, which was true. Angela Zouboulaki, my perennial client, had recently embarked on a new manhunt. She’d never met the man in question. Normally Angela hunts in meatspace, but this time she’d lined up a new boyfriend online. Johnny Margas was sailing into port this afternoon on a yacht named the Sand Witch, and my task was to snap pictures of the man in question, shooting them to Angela before he showed up on her doorstep. She wanted to make sure he was everything he said he was, visually speaking. Men are potato chips to Angela: she can’t eat just one. She had started life di
rt poor but married her way to the top of Greece’s financial food chain, confiscating assets from one dead husband and one ex.

  So far there wasn’t any sign of her imminent lover boy, but there were several promising blips on the horizon.

  Four seconds was up. The ghost popped back.

  “What can you tell me? Anything useful?”

  “Not much. I don’t know how to access the Afterlife or the Council. My impression is that you don’t have a choice. You’re sort of collected. Have you seen the light yet?”

  “No, just water. I cannot seem to stop jumping.”

  “Have you tried?”

  “No! I wish I had thought of that.”

  The sarcasm was strong with this one. “Any idea why?”

  “No.” Her foot stuck out again, as though she was about to jump. Then she stopped. “There’s a yacht,” she said. “Maybe it’s your man.”

  One of the distant dots had broken away from the pack and was floating this way. Hopefully it would be Angela’s beau, and hopefully he would be everything he said he was. Don’t get me wrong, Angela’s money was nice, especially in my bank account, but she was addicted to deadbeats and in dire need of an intervention.

  I twiddled the dial. Focused. Big yacht. Fancy. Expensive. Somebody who was somebody owned this yacht. Maybe Angela’s third ship really was coming in.

  “Maybe,” I murmured.

  The dead woman plunged into the sea again.

  One … two … three …

  “That boat is moving fast,” she said. “And I know because I see a lot of boats from up here.”

  She was right. The yacht was coming in fast—too fast.

  Refocus.

  Seven people on the deck. Five bikini-clad brunettes. Beautiful, bronzed women whose job it was to look pretty. The kind who came to the island all the time to shop and complain. One elderly man, six months pregnant, the kind of deep mahogany tan that made dermatologists twitch. King of all he surveyed. A sixth woman with a smooth face that reminded me of canvas stretched in an embroidery hoop. She was sixty faking fifty. They were your average seafaring tourists.

  The dead woman crossed herself frantically. “Stop them!”

  “I can’t. It’s too late.”

  “You have to do something!”

  “Did you miss the part where I said I can’t?”

  The yacht’s passengers suddenly noticed Merope’s cliff face staring them down. They jumped up and down, arms waving, screaming in the seconds before the yacht collided with the island and lost the world’s most epic game of rock, fiberglass, engine parts. None of them jumped overboard. It would have been pointless anyway. They were already dead, and had been long before the boat ran headfirst into Merope.

  Not the yacht, though. That was real, and now it was burning.

  Every law enforcement officer on Merope was leaning over the edge of the cliff, watching the yacht burn. Down in the water, emergency workers and local fishermen were dousing the flames from their boats. Lots of yelling. Creaking, groaning metal. One of the fishermen was using this opportunity to grab lunch. Using a fishing spear as a stick, he was cooking a fish in the flames.

  “This fire is making me hungry,” Constable Pappas said, eyeing the fish. Gus Pappas is a rookie cop. He looks like a good, hard sneeze could knock him over. He has hair but you wouldn’t know it because he attacks his head with a razor every chance he gets.

  “Pappas?” I said.

  “What?”

  “There is something seriously wrong with you.”

  “Why?”

  I shook my head. “Never mind.”

  “I have to make jokes,” he said, “otherwise I will vomit.” The blood drained out of his skin. A green tint took over.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I should not have thought about it.”

  He leaned over and projectile puked off the cliff. I handed him a tissue. He used it to wipe his mouth, then he tossed the tissue over the cliff. I watched it waft down to the fire, where it was immediately gobbled up.

  “Sorry,” Pappas said. “It’s my first disaster.”

  It was mine, too, but my stomach chose its own protests and it didn’t seem to mind this too much.

  A short distance away from Constable Pappas, Detective Leo Samaras was watching the whole thing unfold, ear pressed to his phone. His handsome face was grim. Leo is a hundred and ninety centimeters (six feet, two inches) of solid muscle and pale caramel skin. His hair is dark and his eyes hover in that ethereal place between green and brown. The man knocks my socks off with his sex appeal … and in the old days he was my sister’s high school sweetheart. A couple of weeks ago, we went on our first and only date.

  I didn’t want talk about it. Now. Or ever.

  As though he knew he was on my mind, Detective Samaras swiveled around to look at me.

  “Body,” he said.

  I looked down. Was he missing an adjective?

  “Thanks—I think.”

  His forehead crumpled like a napkin. He moved the phone away from his mouth. “What?”

  “You said something about a body.”

  His gaze cut to Constable Pappas, who was looking less green and more white now. “They found a body on the boat.” He frowned into his phone. “Two bodies. No survivors yet. It’s a mess down there. There won’t be anything left of the vessel at this rate. The Hull Identification Number is already gone.”

  “Would the name help?” I asked him.

  “Better than nothing. Why? Did you see it?”

  Behind him, the refugee from a 1990’s sitcom fell all over again. Pop! And she was back again. She waved at me. Now wasn’t a good time to wave back. Detective Samaras—Leo—already thought I was a kook with a thing for scaling out bathroom windows. Just because I wanted to avoid him for the rest of my life, didn’t mean I wanted him to doubt my sanity.

  I made eye contact with the ground. Parched dirt. Stones. Wisps of browning grass. “The Royal Pain. That’s the yacht’s name. English Alphabet.”

  He was staring at me, wasn’t he? My eyes flicked up then back down. Yup, he was staring. Rude … and also kind of hot. That was a problem. He was a problem.

  “Sounds familiar,” he said. “You know almost everything that happens around here. Does it sound familiar to you?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “None.”

  “Want to brainstorm together over bad food and worse drinks later?”

  “No,” I said. “But thanks.”

  I broke away from the pack, grabbed my bicycle, and kept on going.

  Vasili Moustakas was shuffling down the main street, one slipper at a time. As always, his sausage was dangling through the hole in his pajamas, searching for fresh air. No one except me noticed old Kyrios Moustakas. ((Kyrios and Kyria are the Greek words for Mr. and Mrs. To be on the socially safe side, it’s best to tack the correct one onto the front of everyone’s first or last name, if they’re from a generation older your own. Otherwise everyone will talk about you, and the talk will not be nice.) He had been killed a couple of months ago by a horny teenager with a fresh grudge against him and an old nose. The grudge was older now, but the teenager’s nose was new—and so was her prison jumpsuit.

  “Little Aliki Callas,” he called out.

  Greece is a country wrapped up in social protocols. Ignore someone’s greeting—especially an elder—at your own peril. Good people have become social pariahs after failing to say hello to an old widow with a big mouth and a desiccated fig for a heart. So the Greek blood that ran through my veins was okay with me waving to Kyrios Moustakas and wishing him a kalispera—good afternoon. Being considered crazy was far more socially acceptable than being rude.

  He waved me over. “Come over here.”

  “Are you going to show me your poutsa?

  He grinned. His rack of teeth had a lot of vacancies. “How did you know?”

  I shook my head. “Kalispera, Kyrios Moustakas.” I pushed
away from the ground, preparing to ride off into the sunset.

  “Aliki Callas!”

  I stopped. “What?”

  “Have you got a cigarette?”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Too bad. I could really use a cigarette.”

  “They don’t have cigarettes in the Afterlife?”

  “They do not have a lot of things.”

  Like pajamas pants that fastened, obviously. Like most ghosts, Vasili Moustakas was wearing the outfit he’d died in, and he’d died in his pajamas. Not because the car struck him at night but because he wore the loose fitting pants everywhere, and had for decades. It’s harder to be a flasher in regular pants. Zippers can bite; pajama pants just gum the sausage.

  I didn’t want to ask, but it had been that kind of day and my guard was down. Watching bodies burn will do that to a woman.“Like what?”

  He shuffled over to where I was straddling my bicycle, wondering which of my limbs I would need to chew off to escape. Both legs were required for peddling, but what did I really need my left arm for anyway?

  Kyrios Vasili widened his original grin. “The dead do not have an advocate in this world.”

  My mind boggled. “Why would dead people need an advocate here?”

  “I slept with your yiayia, did you know that?”

  Every time. Every damn time I got roped into a conversation with Kyrios Vasili, he circled back to his time in my grandmother’s pants. When it came to Yiayia, he wasn’t anything special. Half of Merope—male and (rumor had it) female—had taken a recuperative mini-break between her legs.

  “It never came up in conversation.”

  “You know what came up during our conversation?”

  “What?”

  He pointed down at his pajama pants.

  “I doubt if that has popped up in the past twenty years!”