Royal Ghouls Read online

  I pushed away from the ground and zipped off towards home, leaving the grumbling ghost behind me, halfheartedly shaking his fist.

  Home to twenty thousand people and change, Merope is one of the Aegean Sea’s smaller jewels. I wouldn’t call it home, but on days when I’m not PMSing I’d call it home-ish. You’ve seen Merope or a Greek island just like it on calendars, Pinterest, and Instagram. People want to come here but most of them never do. The climate is furnace hot in summer with a dash of mild winter. Sometimes we get a sprinkling of snow. We always get sin. Merope is Mykonos and Athens on cheap steroids, cut with grime and smut. But Merope doesn’t lift its summer skirt and flash that at the tourists. No, the island saves its baggage for the locals.

  On the way home I stopped at the More Super Market, one of two grocery stores close to my apartment. The Super Super Market is bigger and brighter, but I haven’t stepped inside since my fiancé Andreas abandoned me while I was ordering cheese at the deli counter. I can’t even look at the Super Super Market. Even riding past punches a new hole in my gut.

  The More Super Market is the birthplace of salmonella. Dusty and dim, it is home to a host of pets. If rats and spiders are your thing, the More Super Market is for you. If you’re a pervert, I hear they’re hiring at the deli. And don’t touched the bagged candy.

  I bought groceries as I needed them. Lately, I was on a sandwich kick. My American roots were asserting themselves. I can cook—I do cook—but since my neighbor and best friend was murdered, I hadn’t been the mood to whip up anything more complicated than sandwiches.

  Peanut butter and grape jelly weren’t staples on the More Super Market’s shelves, so I made do with kaseri cheese, salami, and a jumbo jar of Merenda, Greece’s version of Nutella. The More Super Market wasn’t big enough for a conveyor belt, so I dumped my sandwich fixings on the single counter and prepared to defend my purchases.

  “What are you going to make with those?”

  Stephanie Dola, the store’s teenage checkout chick and high school dropout, flicked her buck teeth with her chipped manicure. If Stephanie was a knife in a drawer full of spoons, she wouldn’t be the sharpest object.

  “Sandwiches.”

  “Sandwiches?”

  “Two pieces of bread with cheese and meat in between.”

  “And the Merenda?”

  “Dessert sandwiches.”

  “Dessert sandwiches?”

  “Two pieces of bread, with Merenda in between.”

  “That’s the strangest thing I’ve ever heard. Bagged chocolate is on sale this—”

  “No thanks,” I said quickly. Stephanie was too busy picking her teeth to pack my things so I shoved everything into the bag that held most of my professional life. “Did you hear a yacht crashed in to the island today?”

  Fingers still in her mouth, Stephanie tilted her chin up then down. That little head tilt was what Greeks did instead of shaking their heads.

  “So far they’ve found two bodies.”

  She pulled her fingers out of her mouth to change the subject. “I heard Kyria Marouli’s granddaughter is going to be a movie.” She looked left. She looked right. She leaned forward. “A porn movie.”

  “A porn movie?” The details were right-ish but the players were muddled up. Olga Marouli, my recently deceased neighbor and best friend, did have a granddaughter of dubious morality. But porn? That was the bailiwick of Jimmy Kontos, Merope’s only little person and Detective Leo Samaras’s cousin.

  At least I didn’t think Lydia would be involved. Not that it was any of my business. I’m a live and let live person, provided no one is trying to kill me or mine.

  “That is what I heard.”

  “Probably you heard wrong.”

  She went back to picking her teeth. “Do you think you could ask her and find out?”

  I felt my eyes bug. “You want me to find out if Lydia is doing porn?”

  Stephanie’s gaze did another sweep of the store. We were alone in the More Super Market.

  “I could use the money,” she said.

  “You want to do porn?”

  “Forget it,” she said.

  “You work a lot of hours. Aren’t the Triantafillou brothers paying you for them?”

  “They said because I’m still a teenager they don’t have to pay me as much. Don’t tell anyone I said anything,” she pleaded.

  “There are laws—labor laws. You’re entitled to a fair pay rate and time off.”

  She brightened up. “Really?”

  I swore I was telling her the truth and scored a relieved smile in return.

  “I will talk to them,” she said.

  Kalispera, Stephanie,” I said, wishing her a good afternoon. I grabbed my things and scrammed.

  My apartment building sits a couple of rough blocks and twists down the road. Like almost every residence on Merope, it is white. Three floors, six apartments, one fountain in the courtyard, and a garden that is tended to by the ghost of a former gardener. Of course, most ghosts can’t affect the world around them, so a real gardener swings by regularly to pick up his slack.

  Recently I discovered that my best friend and neighbor was also my landlord. After her murder, when it was time for all her worldly goods to be divvied up, she left apartment 202 to me.

  And that’s how I became a homeowner.

  I would return it in a heartbeat if I could have Olga Marouli back.

  As if the number doesn’t give it away, my apartment is on the second floor. The apartment across the hall—and the rest of the building, except for 202—belong to Lydia Marouli, Olga’s granddaughter. Today German pop music was creeping under her front door and making a run for it. So far Lydia was a good neighbor. Sometimes we passed in the hallway and exchanged smiles. Occasionally, just to mix things up, we threw words into air between us. Small words without meaning. It was really working for us.

  This evening the only sign of Lydia was her music, and even that would be gone once I was contained within the protective shell of my apartment.

  I unlocked the door and stepped inside.

  Then I turned around and walked back out to give myself a moment.

  And then I went back in.

  Someone was in my apartment.

  Wrong. Someones—plural. And they were having too much fun with my dead cat, who was on his back, sucking up as much attention as he could get.

  “I don’t feed you, and this is how you repay me?”

  The overgrown, and very dead, marmalade cat closed his eyes. If he couldn’t see me, my disapproval didn’t exist.

  Asking my unwelcome and uninvited guests who they were was pointless. I already knew.

  Not long ago, I had watched them crash into the side of Merope.

  Chapter Two

  “Look at me,” I said. “Do I look like a policewoman?”

  The answer to that question was no. No, I did not look like any kind of person in law enforcement. If you want to get American about it, I’m five-seven (or 1.70 centimeters). My hair is long, dark, and was currently caught up in a claw clip. Fashionable, no. Practical, sometimes, when it wasn’t biting into my scalp. My eyes are dark and intense, beautiful, piercing, poop-colored, and “Oh God, is that pink eye?” depending on who you ask. I call them brown. Okay, so my wardrobe’s color of choice these days was black, but there was nothing cop-like about me.

  The group’s mouthpiece scraped his gaze up and down, from boots to hoodie. To his credit, he didn’t hold up a score card and rank me out of ten. “A policewoman can look like anything, especially if they are undercover.”

  “You want a cop?” I pointed at my ceiling. “Detective Samaras lives upstairs. He’s dragging your bodies out of the water right now, but he’ll be home sooner or later.”

  “If I wanted a policeman I would go to the police. What I need is someone who can solve my murder.”

  Me, me, me. I, I, I.

  I had a feeling he was a recurring theme in his life. The dead man even dressed the part
of the self-absorbed control freak. Captain’s hat. Navy blue blazer with gold buttons. White pleated slacks, for that impregnated-six-months-ago look that plagued men of a certain age and lifestyle. He looked like the kind of man who paid a hundred euros for a steak, then smothered it in ketchup.

  The thing about ghosts is that, with a few exceptions, they’re annoying. Somewhere between here and there they lose filters. Parts of their personalities are distilled—and not always the pleasant parts. Even Kyria Olga had been a blindingly bright shade of her former self as an apparition. So maybe I’d misjudged the man. Could be he used to be a sweet and polite, the human equivalent of a golden retriever. Here and now, the late-sixties man was already a pain.

  The rest of his entourage was what you’d expect. Lots of barely-there bikinis and oversized sunglasses. Their religion was Kardashian and their budget was billionaire. Dark hair. Same builds. Their features came from the same surgeon or the same DNA. The dead man’s daughters, maybe?

  There was only one standout in the crowd of seven, and she did it by being fully clothed. Fake Captain’s wife, perhaps? The two of them were located in the same decade—the sixth one—although maybe at opposite ends. She had big blond hair, and red lipstick that was migrating to the rest of her face, using the thin lines radiating out from her lips as tiny rivers. She had chosen a loose sheath dress to die in. Scoop neck. No sleeves. Cream with blue accents. Her jewelry was too big for her bird-like frame.

  Wallis Simpson was speaking out of her pancake butt when she said you couldn’t be too rich or too thin.

  “I don’t solve murders,” I said.

  Not for any old person, anyway. Kyria Olga was different. The septuagenarian had been my best friend in this whole world. Also, she’d nagged me in to accepting the job, so I had a choice between solving her murder or listening to umpteenth rounds of Tzeni Vanou’s S’Agapo. (In life and death, Olga Marouli had a thing for love stories, including Ghost. She believed repetition got results.)

  “That is not what I heard.”

  “You heard wrong.”

  He pulled a business card out of thin air. One of my Finder Keepers business cards. Not American Psycho quality, but tasteful enough. It’s hard to go wrong with black on white.

  “Do you find things, yes or no?”

  “Where did you get that?” I went to grab it but it wasn’t there. Not in any physical sense, anyway.

  “Message board.”

  My eyes narrowed. My body shuddered. Somewhere, a socially awkward and hungry tiger was pussyfooting over my grave. “Message board … where?”

  “In the Afterlife.”

  “You were in the Afterlife and you came back?”

  “He had unfinished business, and he hates unfinished business.”

  Finally someone else in the group had spoken up: one of women I had decided were the yacht owner’s daughters. She had been tussling with a straightening iron and won; every hair on her head was a limp stick. I couldn’t pin an age to her, but if I had to guess I’d say somewhere between sixteen and twenty-five. It didn’t matter really; in about thirty years, if she kept worshiping at the altar of the sun gods, she’d have the complexion of a leather sofa. No. Wait. She was dead. Sofa-skin averted.

  “Unfinished business?” I asked.

  “My murder,” the father-in-question said.

  The oldest woman, the one in the sheath dress, glanced around my apartment. “I cannot believe people live like this.”

  My apartment wasn’t much but it wasn’t tragic. The bones were excellent and maintenance worked on regular time, not Greek time. Greek time can be roughly translated as “whatever, whenever”.

  I raised my hand. “People are here, you know.”

  The maneuver was completely unnecessary, but I opened my front door anyway. Walls were not normally an obstacle for the dead.

  “Okay, time to go. All of you.” One of the bikini bimbos picked up Dead Cat. He didn’t seem too offended. “Except the cat. The cat stays.”

  The captain and his entourage look at each other, puzzled expression on their faces—what I could see if their faces anyway; those sunglasses were massive.

  My Virgin Mary, what now? “Is there a problem?”

  “No—no problem.” He stood there, stuck on stupid. They all did.

  “There is a problem. I can tell.”

  He popped his cuffs with those heavy gold buttons. “How do we leave?”

  “You came here, remember? Do that, but in reverse.”

  “You are not very helpful.”

  “And you are still here, in my apartment.”

  The dead man strode over to the living room window, where the view was currently limited to a smattering of lights. Arms behind his back, he stared into what he believed was the sea but was actually late evening gloom over a parking lot.

  Oh, no, no, no. Not okay.

  “The door is that way.” I pointed to the emergency exit, AKA: the door hole, in case death was messing with his vision.

  He didn’t turn around. “Normally I would fire an employee as unmotivated and unambitious as you, but because I am dead and I need your help, I am willing to be lenient and give you an opportunity to prove yourself.”

  This guy was a piece of work.

  Greeks have a word that covers a dizzying array of personality flaws: malakas. Taken literally, it means someone has devoted so much time to spanking the monkey that their brain has softened to mush. His brain wasn’t mush (he no longer had a brain) but the word still applied.

  “I don’t want to prove myself. I’m going to sit over there” I nodded to my desk “and work on cases that aren’t yours. Then, if you’re not gone, I’m going to buy some sage and wave it about until you leave. Your death—”

  “Murder.”

  “—is a police matter, and the police aren’t fans of outside interference.”

  “I have a list of suspects you can give to them.”

  Against my better judgement, my inner feline perked. All Greek DNA comes with a bonus cat hair. “You have suspects?”

  He whipped a sheet of paper out of thin air. “Take this.”

  The paper wafted to the ground. I couldn’t pick it up because it was ghost paper. Every time I tried it slipped through my fingers.

  The scantily clad peanut gallery giggled.

  My sigh was big and loud and clearly said that they were a major pain in several of my vital organs. “Give me a list and I’ll give it to the police. Afterwards, you float away and leave me alone. Deal?”

  He stuck out his hand. I couldn’t do a thing with it except stare.

  “I do not like being dead,” he said, returning the hand to its position behind his back. “I am finding it inconvenient.”

  The older woman who had opened her mouth to criticize my apartment opened her mouth again. “I have questions. Can we change clothes? Because I do not want to spend eternity in this old thing.”

  The answer to her question was “yes.” Too bad I wasn’t in an accommodating mood. Not after she had insulted my place—my place that she had chosen to infest.

  “If you would hop on your broom and whizz back to the Afterlife you’d find out. They have orientation, the Council for the Formerly Living, and all the help the newly dead require,” I said in a huff.

  Normally the dead don’t come back for forty days. That’s how long it takes to process their souls or some such thing. The Greek Orthodox church believes that the deceased use these forty days to visit their loved ones before jetting off to the big taverna in the sky. But in my experience they’ve got it backwards. First the taverna, then the visiting.

  Exceptions exist. Kyria Olga bounced right back like a boomerang after her murder. Apparently the rules are stretchy and bendy when there’s unfinished business like murder involved. At the time I thought I was going nuts, seeing someone who shouldn’t be there, alive or dead.

  “Just out of curiosity, when did you die?” I asked.

  “I was murdered,” the de
ad man said, tone indignant and superior.

  Virgin Mary save me from nitpicking ghosts.

  “Okay. When were you murdered?”

  “This morning.”

  Laptop on. New document open. “Okay, give me the suspects’ names.”

  Ten minutes later I had a list of names. “Who are these people?”

  The dead man was all too happy to puff up his shoulders and tell me. “Envious people. Former business partners. Politicians.”

  “What did you do? When you were alive, I mean.” Alive, as recently as this morning.

  “I was bread.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He sighed like my intellect was in the low double digits. “Royal Pain.”

  “Your yacht?”

  “My business.”

  A light came on in my head. Not a giant glowing ball of radiance; more like an LED nightlight in a closet. “Not pain—pain. The French word for bread, not the English word for, well, pain.”

  “I cannot believe you are the best I can do,” he muttered. “Yes, I am Harry Vasilikos and I own the Royal Pain bakery. As you cleverly deduced, Pain is French for bread and Royal is English for Vasilikos.”

  Royal Pain. I’d heard of it. The sliced bread had taken over supermarket shelves on the mainland years ago.

  “We don’t have that here,” I said.

  “It is just a matter of time until Royal Pain bread takes over Merope’s bread market.”

  I laughed. “Newsflash: It was never going to catch on.”

  Merope is one of those places where old habits take longer to die than a cockroach during a nuclear winter. The island has residents who refuse to believe cars exist. They get around on foot and by donkey, and if a car almost hits them they insist it was a devil. Grubby hole-in-the-wall bakeries exist in every Merope neighborhood. On any day except Sunday, men, women, and children on Merope can buy a loaf of bread hot enough to burn the whorls and loops off their fingertips. Soft, pillowy loaves with crusty shells, leaking steam and that intoxicating fresh bread aroma. There was no way Royal Pain’s plastic packages of sadness could compete with that.

  “Also,” I added helpfully, “you’re dead. You are officially no longer selling bread.”