Stolen Ghouls Read online

  Also by Alex A. King

  Greek Ghouls

  Family Ghouls

  Royal Ghouls

  Stolen Ghouls

  Kat Makris

  Disorganized Crime

  Women of Greece

  Seven Days of Friday

  One and Only Sunday

  Freedom the Impossible

  Light is the Shadow

  No Peace in Crazy

  Summer of the Red Hotel

  Rotten Little Apple

  Standalone

  Pride and All This Prejudice

  Women of Greece Box Set 2-4

  Stolen Ghouls

  A Greek Ghouls Mystery

  Alex A. King

  Copyright © 2018 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 Rosie, my first protagonist. I was five and she was a cow.

  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

  Also by Alex A. King

  Chapter One

  Detective Leo Samaras is a hunk. He lives directly above me in the apartment building where I’m a homeowner and he is currently a renter, and the island’s only dwarf sleeps on his fold-out couch. Back in high school, he used to date my older sister, a problem she and I have yet to discuss. His eyes occupy that ethereal space between brown and green, and right now they were focused on me. The crumpled up forehead said he was worried about my mental state. My mental state was just fine, thank you, but his was in serious jeopardy.

  “I don’t understand,” I said to the man who wasn’t my boyfriend and might never be at the rate we were going. “It’s right there.” My arms flailed, Kermit-style. “The Cake Emporium. Old English lettering. Fancy window display. More cake than anyone can eat in a lifetime, although I have to say I’m up to that challenge.”

  The Cake Emporium is owned by the very British Honeychurch siblings, Betty and Jack. Jack bakes and Betty is responsible for sales and window dressing.

  Leo dug in deeper. His hands burrowed into his jeans’ pockets. “And I’m telling you I don’t see it. My vision is great, and it’s telling my brain that there’s nothing there. This place has been empty ever since I got back to Merope.”

  “Then where have I been buying all my cakes and sweets lately? You’ve eaten them. Sam has eaten them.”

  “Sam?’

  Sam is Sam Washington, my former boss and current friend. The American expat taught me everything he knew about the private investigation business after I finished high school and embarked on my mission to pester him non-stop about the nuts and bolts of investigating.

  I waved my hand in front of the detective’s face. “Forget Sam right now. Have you eaten Cake Emporium cakes or not?”

  “I ate cakes at your place once,” he admitted, far too slowly for my liking.

  “Exactly!”

  “But I don’t know where they came from. They were cakes. Merope has a lot of zacharoplasteios.”

  Merope had several other confectionary shops, all good but not Cake Emporium quality. Jack Honeychurch, the baker, made magic when he spun sugar into desserts.

  “Trust me, you’ve had Cake Emporium cakes. And you know why? Because it’s a real place.”

  “Maybe it is, but not here.”

  “You’re making me crazy!”

  He grin, slow and lazy and infuriating. “You’re saying that like I’ve never heard it before.”

  Ten minutes later, we were embroiled in the same circular argument. My hands were on my hips, and according to my reflection in the store window my face was an unflattering shade of purple. Not Leo’s. He was leaning against the window, muscular arms folded, not smiling exactly but the smirk was simmering below the surface. One of us was enjoying this and it wasn’t me.

  “There’s an easy way to prove your point,” he said casually. “Go inside. Buy a cake.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Because it’s not there.”

  “No, kolopetho, because it’s closed at the moment. There’s the sign. CLOSED.” I waved my hands at the pretty sign in the door’s glass panel, with its cursive font and unyielding elegance.

  He tipped back his head and laughed. Normally his laugh made me melty and warm but today it ruffled my feathers and smooshed them.

  “What’s so funny?” I demanded.

  “Very convenient, don’t you think?”

  I opened my mouth to toss out an insult with more heft than butt-child, when something whistled past my ear. Before I could duck, the Cake Emporium’s front window shattered. Glass fell out of the frame, tinkling as it landed on the cobblestones that made up Merope’s streets in the heart of the village. Beyond the village’s ragged border, the island’s roads are mostly dirt or gravel.

  We stood there stuck on stupid, neither of us seeing the same thing. Leo was looking at a broken window in an abandoned store, and I was watching the demise of Betty’s impeccable staging. A brick had lodged itself in the forehead of one Jack Honeychurch’s Day of the Dead confections. Damn it, I’d been looking forward to buying one of those sugar skulls and cracking the shell open to see what kind of gooey goodness lurked inside. Now I knew it was dark chocolate and marzipan. The brick should have come wrapped with a note that read: Spoiler alert.

  My first instinct was to rush into the store, but that was out of the question because, as I had told Leo, my new favorite confectionary shop was currently closed. Which was a problem. I couldn’t go in and I couldn’t call Betty. In the past when she called me her number always came through as anonymous. Not that unusual for a Greek phone, so I hadn’t thought twice. Now, when I really needed her number, it was nowhere to be found.

  I did the only thing I could do.

  Betty? We have a problem. Call me. The thought was as big and loud as I could make it.

  Almost immediately my phone rang. “Oh dear,” Betty Honeychurch said in my ear, with her clipped British accent. “We do have a problem, don’t we, luv?”

  Betty Honeychurch is a delightful woman with an unusual gift. At first I found her mind-reading disconcerting, but lately I’d begun to appreciate its usefulness.

  “Your window broke. It had a run-in with a flying brick.”

  “The window? A window is nothing. No, no, you have a much bigger problem than that, I’m thinking.”

  Leo went off to investigate. He wandered into the main street, looking for brick-wielding vandals, while I talked to Betty.

  “I’ll be there just as soon as I can,” she told me. “Right now my hands are tied.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Some personal problems, but it will all be as right as rain, you’ll see. The store will be a little late opening today, I’m afraid.” There was a longish pause as she peeled back the wrapper on my thoughts and read them one by one. “Ah,” Betty said. “Your policeman can’t see the shop, can he?”

  My mind was jumping to all kinds of conclusions, including several where the real Allie Callas was locked up in a psych ward ala Buffy Summers in the Normal Again episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

  Betty gave a little laugh. “No, no, luv, you’re ab
out the sanest person I know. The problem isn’t you, it’s your policeman. He’s about as non woo-woo as a person can get. You have to have a little spark of magic in you to see our little shop. The only thing he sees is the shell it used to be before we moved in.”

  My mind was spinning in circles like a dog convinced its own tail was a bone thief. “Are you dead?”

  “Gracious, no. I’m every bit as alive as you are.”

  Interesting. I had questions but there wasn’t time to tackle the whole list—not at the rate it was expanding. “Is the Cake Emporium a …” I tried to formulate the thought without sounding like a nut. “Is it a ghost shop?”

  “No, it’s quite solid and present. There are always bound to be a few bugs when something exists in thousands of places at once the way the Cake Emporium does. One of the side effects is that those without our gifts can’t always see it. How bad is the damage? Jack won’t be happy about smashed sweets. He puts everything into his work.”

  Thousands of places at once? Was that possible? And how many laws of physics did the Cake Emporium have to violate to achieve omnipresence?

  Despite Betty’s assurance, I felt several bananas short of a bunch.

  I walked up to the shattered window to take stock of the confectionary casualties. Besides the brick was lying smack dab in the middle of the pink and white sugar skull with the chocolate and marzipan center, everything was varying degrees of undamaged and edible. Minimal casualties. Best case scenario.

  “One sugar skull down. Everything else is intact.”

  “Well, Jack will be relieved, won’t he? Otherwise he might sit down and have a good cry, and we can’t have that.

  Something inside the Cake Emporium caught my eye. A foreign object on the shop’s floor. From my vantage point I couldn’t identify the anomaly. Everything else appeared to be normal. The large display cases where Betty showed off her brother’s baking skills. The walls behind them shelved and laden with myriad supernatural objects, all carefully and expertly crafted from sugar. A spun sugar crystal ball. Jars of candied newt eyes. Chocolate tarot cards. Although I couldn’t see them from here, I knew the opposing wall was a mirror of the candy wall, except it contained the real supernatural deals. On the counter sat one of the shop’s white boxes, prettily tied with ribbon. A sale interrupted, perhaps?

  “Did you do some interior decorating?”

  “Not yet, but I’ve got big plans for Christmas. Why do you ask?” There was a short pause. Then: “Oh dear. That must be the bigger problem I picked up on.”

  My hand lowered all by itself, taking my phone with it. An icky feeling spread through my gut. I leaned in to get a better look at the object on the Cake Emporium’s floor. I spied with my little eye a human leg, encased in loose gray slacks and a worn black boot. There was second leg to go with it. Which meant if I clambered through the window, chances were high I’d find a torso and head to go with it. Human bodies being what they were, probably there were two arms as well.

  I stuffed the yelp back down while I processed the situation. Yelping would draw attention. Right now I needed to think.

  “Definitely a problem. There’s a body in your shop,” I told Betty. “Either someone is a deep sleeper, or—”

  “Oh, he’s quite dead,” Betty said. “I’m getting nothing from anybody in the vicinity, except the detective. And he’s coming back your way.”

  I swung around to see Leo reentering the street, his handsome face marred by a frown.

  “Whoever it was, they got away fast,” he said. “Probably children.”

  Probably. And their mothers would chase them around the island waving a wooden spoon and hurling slippers if they knew what their kids were up to. Greek mothers raised their sons to believe they were god, but even gods weren’t exempt from the slipper and spoon.

  “You got nothing?”

  “Someone dropped their salt.” He held up a generic white plastic salt bottle, the kind you could buy at any grocery store in Greece. “Lucky for me because I’m almost out.” As Greece’s most important seasoning, running out of salt would be dire.

  “You can tell him,” Betty said into my ear. “I would never expect you to keep secrets from your policeman. Keeping secrets never goes anyplace good. I’ll be there just as soon as I can, although I’m not sure when that will be.”

  The call ended. Not my questions; they kept on coming. But they would have to wait. I was standing within spitting distance of a corpse—provided I spat through the broken window. Lately, I seemed to be collecting bodies. Why couldn’t I collect knick-knacks or crappy ex lovers like a regular person?

  “There’s a problem,” I said to Leo.

  “What kind of problem?”

  “It’s like a dead body.”

  “What kind of problem is like a dead body except a dead body?”

  “Exactly.”

  He glanced over my shoulder. “In there?”

  I nodded.

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw legs. In most scenarios, legs come attached to bodies. I bet it’s a murder. Who randomly dies on a confectionary store’s floor after hours?”

  Leo stuck his head through the shattered window, then pulled it back out. He was already reaching for his phone. “Is it just me or are murders on Merope increasing?”

  “Technically the Royal Pain murders didn’t happen here,” I said, referring to the homicide that had lead up to this moment where we were outside the Cake Emporium, bickering over its existence. “Who are you calling?”

  “The cavalry. Then I need to open that door.”

  “Not necessary.” I pulled off my coat, wrapped the material around my hands, just in case, and shimmied through the broken window before Leo could say, “Stop, you lunatic.” Without looking at the dead man, I shoved the door open and greeted Leo with a grim smile. He shook his head slowly.

  “You and windows,” he said.

  “Ah, but this one is different. Normally I shimmy out of windows. This time I climbed in.”

  His lips quirked but his attention was on the inert body currently decorating the bakery floor with his inconvenient death. The deceased was sprawled out on one of Betty’s rugs, a Persian in deep reds and brilliant golds. My untrained gaze traveled over him, hunting for a cause of death. There was nothing apparent. His head was still attached. His blood was inside his body, where it was supposed to be. He didn’t appear to be wearing a necklace of bruises. No scissors stuck in his throat. No knives in body parts that weren’t knife-friendly. From where I was standing, by his feet, he appeared to be a regular dead person. Not a murder after all. No drama, just death.

  Leo crouched by the dead man. He looked up at me--Leo, not the dead man. It was important for me to make that distinction because some of my earliest memories have ghosts in them.

  My name is Allie Callas. I’m thirty-one-years-old, and I see dead people.

  “Do you know him?” Leo asked.

  Leo was born and raised on Merope, this tiny Greek rock in the Aegean Sea, wedged between Greece and Turkey. After high school, he moved away to become a cop. Recently, he had transferred back to Merope, but here on the island people had come and people had gone. The dead man on the floor was one of our imports. His name was Roger Wilson, an Englishman who decided Greece was a nice place to retire, which showed how little he knew about Merope before he packed up his English life to go Greek. On the outside, Merope is postcard pretty. Stark white buildings with their brilliant blue shutters. Winding cobblestone streets. Old men fiddling with their komboloi--worry beads--while they swill coffee at the local cafes and shout at their friends about politics. Like Santorini and myriad other Greek islands that wind up getting made into calendars, year after year, Merope has quaint donkeys that traipse around the village carrying various goods and senior citizens. This island has gorgeous wrapping paper, no doubt about it. But tear away some of that paper and you’ll find a whole lot of seedy underbelly. Poke that underbelly with a stick at your own peril.<
br />
  I told Leo what I knew, which wasn’t much. Roger Wilson wasn’t one of Merope’s more sociable denizens. After arriving, he had secured a small cottage on the far edge of the island, away from the thriving metropolis that was Merope’s only village. When he came into town it was on a bicycle much like my own, complete with a basket up front and a rack on the back. Over the years, I’d witnessed him bumping along the island’s dirt roads on dozens of different occasions. He would tip his flat cap, rarely stopping to make even the most basic of conversation. Nobody really talked about him because no one really cared. He wasn’t one of Merope’s own, and, as far as people could tell, he wasn’t a suspicious character. His life appeared to be quiet and private. If he’d been Greek the whole island would have been up in his business, sticking their noses in every nook and cranny and listening at windows. Quiet and private weren’t options on the local social spectrum.

  As previously mentioned, I see spooks, ghosts, ghouls, dead folks. Fantasma, as Greeks call them. Right now? Not a single ghost in the vicinity. There was no sign of Roger Wilson—no sign except his body sprawled on the ground. Translation: he didn’t die by someone else’s hand, foot, or weapon. Regular dead people don’t come back until their first forty days in the Afterlife’s waiting room are up. Recently I had learned an exception existed for spirits with urgent unfinished business, such as murder. They could pop right back into this mortal coil immediately if they chose, pestering somebody like me into figuring out whodunit and why, if they didn’t already know. Things tended to be hazy for newly deceased in those final, often violent moments. In my limited experience it made them less than helpful when investigating their murders.

  Tires crunched to a stop out in the main street. Curses rolled out of a male mouth as a rubber wheels bumped over cobblestones. A lot of the village isn’t accessible by car. Merope’s citizens dug their foundations into the dirt and rock before cars were a thing. In those days the primary mode of transport was donkey, so wider roads had no need to exist. I ride a bicycle because bikes kick less and move whether there’s hay or not. Currently the narrow street situation meant that vehicles had to be parked elsewhere. The main streets could accommodate two cars moving in opposite directions at different speeds, as though involved in a math equation, but alleys and side streets were strictly pedestrian, bicycle, moped, or donkey.