Royal Ghouls Read online

  I didn’t have answers to either question and I told him so. He took pictures of the door and windows, then he left, casting longing glances at apartment 201 on the way out.

  Alone again.

  I went to the kitchen for a medicinal shot of ouzo. As I was pouring, my eye caught something. Or rather, nothing.

  Kyria Eva had stolen my wine, two boxes of cakes, and all my sandwich fixings.

  Merope isn’t a big island. There are a limited number of hiding places, including several sea caves that are impossible to get to without a boat, a low tide, and prayer. Every other summer, a tourist goes exploring and discovers one of more of the caves, despite abundant warnings that our caves are bad tempered and homicidal. Most of the time they make it back. Sometimes they don’t, and a rescue team has to wait for the tide to ebb before they can haul the body or bodies back to dry land.

  There was no way Kyria Eva could be in the caves. The tide was high and the island’s rental boats were moored for the winter. Plus the police were on the lookout and the rental places would have been their first target. Wherever Kyria Eva was hiding, it was somewhere dry and sheltered.

  I saddled up and went in search of my missing booze, food, and cakes. You don’t just steal a woman’s wine and cake and expect to get away with it. Plus she’d destroyed my laptop.

  Crispy or not, Kyria Eva was going down, and I was going to be the one to do it.

  It was personal.

  For the next two hours, I took a tour of the island, one we keep secret from tourists. Abandoned houses. The shell of Ayia Paraskevi—Saint Friday—cracked by one of the region’s myriad earthquakes. Old factories and warehouses, crumbling and stinking of rotted olives. The fruit was long gone but the stench was part of the concrete and wood.

  I talked to people, ghosts, myself.

  No sign of Eva Vasiliko.

  Merope’s main road was mostly empty. The few people out and about were bustling home or rushing to dinner at one taverna or another. When Greeks eat dinner in summer, it’s a late meal that can stretch for several hours, long past midnight. But Merope in winter was a more conservative creature. Dinners happened early by Greek standards so everyone could take to their living rooms, where the wood burning ovens heated their homes via the long ventilation pipes that ran across the ceiling and out the exterior wall.

  Old Vasilis Moustakas was standing the middle of the road, eyes fixed on the road. They lit up as I approached and stopped.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  “You want to hear a joke?”

  “Is it your poutsa again?”

  He put on his best offended face. “No!”

  “Is it sex with my yiayia?”

  Cackle. “There was nothing funny about sex with your yiayia.”

  I shrugged. “Okay, tell me. I like jokes.”

  “Why did the chickens cross the road?”

  “To get to the other side?”

  He laughed. “I don’t know.”

  “Kyrios Moustakas?”

  “What?”

  “Your joke wasn’t funny or a joke.”

  “But they are funny. Look, here they come again.”

  What do you know, the chickens really were crossing the road. At least a thousand of them rushing past, feathers ruffled, red combs flopping around, polluting the quiet night with their clucking. One at a time, they vanished as they reached the other side.

  “That is a lot of dead chickens,” Kyrios Moustakas said.

  He was right. “Have you seen them before?”

  “Only tonight. Hey, Aliki Callas, you want to see something?”

  I rolled my eyes and got back on my bicycle. Roaming packs of ghost chickens weren’t normal, for Merope or for me. Most of the time, dead animals stayed dead. Something was bugging me about these particular chickens. There weren’t many chicken farms on the island, and only one was a thousand chickens strong. The Hondrou family’s farm.

  Virgin Mary help me, I did not want to encounter Kyria Hondrou’s monobrow in the dark. I don’t spook easily but that thing was the stuff of nightmares. Still, it couldn’t hurt to swing by the farm and see if they were missing some chickens—or all of them.

  At the Hondrou farm, the lights were on and Constable Pappas was parked out front. He was sitting behind the wheel of his police car, hands braced against the steering wheel, muttering to himself.

  I tapped on the window. “Pappas?”

  He rolled the window down. “Don’t make me go in there. Please. Don’t make me go in there.”

  “Is it the eyebrow?”

  He shuddered. “I have nightmares about that thing. When I was a boy, my parents used to tell me if I played with my poutsa too much I would grow one just like it.”

  “You know you’re a policeman with a big gun, yes?”

  “A gun would not work against that eyebrow. Only fire.” He looked up at me. “Why are you here?”

  “I was just riding past,” I lied. “Why are you here?”

  “More than a thousand dead chickens.”

  So the dead chickens did originate at the Hondrou farm. “What happened?”

  “Eleni Hondrou called half an hour ago to tell me the chickens were all dead. I heard the eyebrow screaming in the background.” His expression was imploring and pitiful. “Come with me?”

  “Forget it. I’m not going anywhere near that eyebrow.”

  The night shattered with one word: “YOU!”

  Gus Pappas slid down in his seat. He crossed himself repeatedly. “My God, she found me.”

  Kyria Hondrou was hobbling across the yard, arm outstretched, finger pointy and accusatory. And the person it was pointy and accusatory at was me.

  “YOU!”

  I pointed to my own chest. “Me? What did I do?”

  “Uh-oh,” Constable Pappas said, “now you’re done for. The eyebrow is going to get you.”

  Kyria Hondrou whacked the police car’s hood with her cane. “You killed my chickens!”

  Huh? “I didn’t touch your chickens!”

  She touched a claw to her eye. “You put the evil eye on them, you cursed them, and now they are all dead. I demand compensation. Where is that policeman?” She whacked the hood again. “I can see you hiding in there. Get out. Arrest her if she will not pay!”

  Constable Pappas angled out of his seat. He was quaking in his black uniform. “I can’t arrest her without evidence.”

  “What evidence do you need? My chickens are dead and just yesterday she was here.”

  “Do you have a murder weapon, Kyria Eyebrow? I mean Kyria Hondrou.”

  I gawked at him. Kyria Hondrou sucked her breath in—hard. Her black eyes gleamed in their potholes. The monobrow formed a dip, right in the center above her sharp nose. The constable was pale. I understood; that eyebrow gave me the willies, too.

  “What weapon? It was a curse, I told you.”

  Pappas cut his gaze to me. “Come with me.”

  “Where are you taking her? To jail?” Kyria Hondrou asked with unbridled glee.

  “I need to see these chickens,” he said.

  “For what? I already told you they are dead.”

  He ignored her, tilted his head at me. I followed Pappas to the chicken yard, where easily a thousand chickens had met their maker, scattered and in clumps. They had died before roosting time.

  “What do you do with these chickens?” Pappas threw the question over his shoulder to Kyria Hondrou, who was stumping along behind us. There was no sign of Eleni, her husband, or any of the Hondrou grandchildren. Probably they were hiding from the family matriarch’s wrath.

  “Who is this vlakas?” she asked no one in particular. “Who is your family? Do I know them? Are they good people? Do they know you are a vlakas?”

  “They know,” Constable Pappas said cheerfully. “Now can you answer the question please?”

  “What does anyone do with chickens? We cut off their heads and people buy them to eat.”

  Hands on
hips, Pappas surveyed the chickens. “So whoever killed them was doing you a favor, yes?”

  Those black beads in her matching face-holes glittered dangerously. “No. No favor. I like to kill them myself.”

  Yikes! I started backing up, hoping to make a quick getaway. Her cane jumped out and snapped me behind the knees. “Where are you going? You killed my chickens.”

  “Why would I kill your chickens?”

  “Jealously. Spite. What else could kill them this way except a curse?”

  Pappas and I looked at the chickens. Dead chickens, with no visible signs of death except death. “What killed them?” he asked me.

  “You’re asking me? I don’t know anything chicken physiology.”

  “It was a curse,” Kyria Hondrou said, pounding her cane on the ground. “And it was her.”

  I turned to Pappas. “It wasn’t me. You were at my place earlier, you know I was home and not out killing chickens.”

  Kyria Hondrou fixed her monobrow on me. “You. First you try to steal from me, then you curse my chickens. Now you are also a putana, entertaining this one in your bedroom?” She spat on the ground. “Skoupidia.” Garbage.

  “I don’t think she likes you,” Constable Pappas said.

  Garbage, my kolos. Okay, Yiayia was free and easy with her affections, but my family wasn’t garbage. And at least we didn’t have that facial hair problem swimming in our gene pool, like some kind of hideous eel.

  “You know what?” I said.

  The old woman grinned. “Why you do not tell us, Garbage Girl?”

  Okay, I’d had enough. More than enough.

  “I’m thirty-one—“

  “Old. A spinster And who would marry you anyway, Garbage Girl?”

  My eye twitched. “I have my own business, my own apartment, and …” I looked around “… and this bicycle. I don’t have to stand here and listen while you fling lies about me and accuse me of chicken murder!”

  I got on my bicycle.

  “Where you think you are going, eh?” Kyria Hondrou shoved her cane between my rear tire’s spokes. Nowhere. Apparently I was going nowhere.

  “Do not leave me,” Pappas pleaded.

  This was ridiculous. I reached into my bag for my phone. My intention was to call Leo. This situation called for a policeman who was more police-y than Constable Pappas. Someone who wasn’t afraid of Kyria Hondrou and her monobrow of horror.

  Kyria Hondrou zeroed in on my hand. “What are you doing? You going to pull some kind of gun on me? Get off that bicycle and give me that bag.” She snatched it off my shoulder, stuck her hand inside and began rifling around.

  I heard her fingernails clank against something metal, then she grinned. “I will show you what happens to chicken killers. Give me a moment. What is this?” She had found my pepper spray. “Why you carry hairspray? You wear your hair like a hippie. Boring. No wonder you have no husband.”

  “Duck,” I told Pappas.

  “Why duck?” the old woman said, twisting the pepper spray in her hand. “What does this do?”

  I heard the canister hiss, and then Kyria Hondrou emitted a blood-curdling shriek. Her howls dragged her family out of the house. Constable Pappas fell to his knees.

  “Make it stop,” he cried.

  The neighborhood was typical for this part of Merope. Narrow streets. Dirt roads. White houses butted up to white houses, the exception being a few larger pieces of property, like the Hondrou farm. The neighbors couldn’t resist the siren call; someone was in pain and they wanted to know every little detail. What they didn’t learn they would make up, changing the story slightly with every retelling. They came fast—mostly because they’d been perched behind their shutters since Constable Pappas pulled up in his police car, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

  “What happened?” Eleni asked me.

  “Pepper spray,” I said.

  Her lips quirked. “Awful.” Her face said no, not awful at all. “You should go before she stops howling.”

  “I didn’t kill the chickens.”

  “I know.”

  My adrenal gland told me to run, so that’s what I did. I scooped up my bag, kicked Kyria Hondrou’s cane out of my spokes and peddled until I couldn’t hear her screams anymore.

  Back at my apartment, I showered to get the stink of chickens out of my hair. Being in close vicinity to the birds, dead or not, had revived yesterday’s stench. I swapped clothes for flannel pajamas and went to the kitchen, where I realized my cupboards and refrigerator were still bare. I had two choices: starvation or Crusty Dimitri’s.

  Only one of those two things could kill me.

  Starvation was the safer choice.

  It was after midnight when Leo called.

  “Gus didn’t eat the bread,” he said. “And we confiscated every loaf from the More Super Market and the Super Super Market. The Triantafillos brothers were not happy. They asked to be compensated.”

  “That sounds like them. What did you say?”

  “That if they didn’t quit complaining, I would tell every baker in the village that they colluded with Harry Vasilikos to put them out of business.”

  I winced. Leo had thumped them in the wallet.

  “I’m sorry about our date,” he said. “And I’m even more sorry about Eva Vasiliko. How are you?”

  “My laptop is dead. Apparently bone beats electronics. Now I need a new computer.”

  “We haven’t found her yet, but we will. When we do, I’ll make sure she replaces it for you, one way or another.”

  I told him about the missing groceries. “She’s probably hiding somewhere, eating cake and drinking wine. How did she escape?”

  “Ceiling, just before the Thessaly Police transferred her. Those squares are light and flimsy.”

  “So I suppose she’s the main suspect?”

  “It looks that way. As the beneficiary of her brother’s business, she stands to gain the most from his death, along with Margas.”

  Conversation trailed off for a moment. Sleep tapped my shoulder, and I yawned.

  “Have you eaten?” Leo asked me.

  “No.”

  “What are you doing right now?” His voice was low, serious, and kind of sexy.

  “Kyria Eva emptied my cupboards, so I’m dying of starvation.”

  He laughed. The warmth of that sound stirred my estrogen. “As a policeman it’s my duty to not let you die. Come upstairs. I’ll make you glad you’re losing sleep.”

  “I’m in my pajamas.”

  “So take them off.”

  Yowza.

  I swapped my pajamas for yoga pants and a sweater (both black) that grabbed my breasts and said, “Look at us!” And Leo did look when he opened the door. Hard and for a long time.

  “Jimmy isn’t home,” he said, after a minute of appreciation.

  “He’s busy stalking Lydia.”

  Leo laughed. “Jimmy? Chase a woman?”

  My own personal code of business conduct prevented me from telling him about Jimmy and the roses. “Why—is that weird?”

  “Jimmy gets more women than—”

  My eyebrows jumped into the judgmental position. “You?”

  He grinned. “Than anyone.”

  I snorted in disbelief. “Jimmy? Jimmy Kontos. This high.” I held my hand out. “Hairier than all of 80s porn combined? That Jimmy?”

  “In some circles, he’s a legend.”

  “Are these circles small?”

  Leo laughed and pulled me into his apartment. This was my first time inside 302. Last time I’d stood in the doorway and accused Leo of having a revolving bedroom door. That’s when I discovered he worked out at home. Tonight, his gym equipment was neatly stacked against the wall. His place was cozy, considering two men lived here. Plush rug under the couch and coffee table. Big, comfortable furniture. Bookcase overflowing. Someone had a serious reading habit. That same someone owned a television almost as big as the wall.

  “Where does Jimmy sleep? In a drawer?
”

  “Couch.”

  I eyed the couch. It was more like a love seat. Too small for Leo to stretch out, but big enough to fit two Jimmys.

  Leo saw when my mind was going. “It folds out into a bed. Still hungry?”

  My stomach growled audibly. Yikes. If I didn’t feed it soon there would be a revolt.

  “What’s for dinner?”

  He opened the oven to show me a round pan of spanakopita—spinach and feta pie. “Sit,” he told me. “Be comfortable.”

  “I had wine,” I said wistfully. “Nice wine. And I had cakes. Little hazelnut filled cakes.”

  “I have wine.”

  “Too late. Give me wine now and I’ll fall asleep.”

  Leo dished up generous wedges of spanakopita, chunks of bread, pork souvlaki on long steel skewers. Everything went on to the table with small dishes of tzatziki for slopping all over the meat.

  He joined me at the table. That’s when they showed up again—succubi. Stupid succubi, bleeding and suffocating all over a perfectly good meal. Stupid, gorgeous, painfully beautiful succubi. It wasn’t fair. Nobody should look that good without photo-manipulation.

  I sighed.

  Leo looked up from his plate. “You’re not a vegan, are you?”

  “Omnivore.” I eyed the succubi, the self-satisfied succubi. They were enjoying the part where I squirmed. I was over this. Too many people had their fingers in the pie that was my life. It was time to crack some knuckles. “I need to tell you something.”

  The bleeder looked at the choker. “Uh—oh. She is going to tell him about us.”

  Her friend patted her on the shoulder. “He will not believe her. They never do.”

  Bleeder didn’t look sure. “Sometimes they do. Remember Cleopatra and Antony?”

  They both winced.

  I tore a piece of bread in two. “I know what you are and of course I’m going to tell him. But first I’m going to ask you politely to leave. So, please leave.”

  Leo frowned. “Allie?”

  I waved my bread at him. “Wait.”

  The succubi put their pretty heads together for a moment, whispering. I chewed on the bread while I waited. Leo watched me with a crumpled forehead.

  “I’m not crazy,” I promised him. He looked nothing like convinced. That’s okay, I knew they were there and I wasn’t crazy, thanks to Betty Honeychurch.