Royal Ghouls Read online

  “True, but I did not get to the top of the loaf by being a fool. I have contingency plans. The expansion of my business will go on.”

  Dead Cat was still blissed out with a half dozen bikini girls scratching his various cat-approved zones. One of Harry Vasilikos’s daughters had wandered into my bedroom and was currently checking out my clothing situation, which was perfect for my job but not remotely suitable for Tweeting on a yacht. And Kyria Vasiliko, (the dropped “s” is not a typo; Greek women don’t typically get an “s” at the end of their last names; I’m one of the exceptions), if that was her name, was staring into the void. From her expression I could only surmise that it was staring back. If any of these people knew about contingency plans, their faces weren’t coughing up details.

  “Well … I don’t really care,” I said. “Mi casa not su casa. So I’m going to give this to the police, and then you can leave. I don’t care how you do it. Use the door if you have to, like a regular person.” I printed the list, snatched it off the printer, and left.

  As luck (good or bad, it was hard to say) would have it, Detective Leo Samaras lived directly above me. Given today’s tragedy, and the absence of footsteps above my head since I had arrived home, I knew his apartment was empty.

  Perfect.

  I jogged up to the third floor, folded the list of suspects in the Royal Pain murder, and slid it under 302’s door.

  Done. Go, me. Time to escape to the safety of my apartment and work on evicting the ghosts.

  Behind me 302’s door flew open, thwarting my getaway. My heart jumped up into my throat. I launched myself at the steps and rolled, hitting the wall.

  “You’re crazy, you know that?” Jimmy Kontos said, shaking his head.

  “Willow Ufgood, we have to find Madmartigan,” I said, hauling myself up off the floor. “Otherwise Bavmorda will kill Elora Danan!”

  Jimmy Kontos is more hair than man, all of it blond and wiry. He has big hair and a matching beard. Could be it’s some kind of elaborate hair balaclava. Technically he’s a dwarf, but that doesn’t stop him from being an average-sized malakas. For artistic reasons, he changed his last name from Samaras to the Greek word for ‘short.’

  Merope’s only little person, and Leo Samaras’s cousin, looked me up and down. He put two fingers to his lips and whistled, loud and sharp. “Did anyone throw some magic beans out the window, because I’ve got a giant situation here.”

  I peered over his head. “Where’s the chocolate?”

  His forehead bunched up. “Chocolate?”

  “This is Willy Wonka’s factory, isn’t it?”

  He shut the door, then opened it again. He was holding the suspect list. “What is this?”

  “A list of people who want to hear you sing the Munchkin Land song.” I looked him over. Something about him seemed weird—weirder than usual.

  “What are you wearing?”

  “Ugg boots,” he said, lifting up his feet, one at a time.

  Sure enough, he was wearing sheepskin boots. No wonder I hadn’t heard him padding around upstairs. On Jimmy the boots were knee-high.

  “No, that’s not it. Are you wearing makeup?”

  His eyes narrowed. “What’s wrong with makeup? You never seen an actor wearing makeup before?”

  An actor. Ha. Jimmy Kontos was the lead performer in a series of skin flicks called Tiny Men, Big Tools.

  “Not on Merope.”

  Merope is old-school. Men don’t wear makeup or women’s clothing unless it’s Sunday and their wives are at church.

  “But hey,” I went on, “you do you.”

  “How did you know?”

  I was lost. This conversation had spiraled out of control in one sentence. “Huh?”

  “The makeup is for reshoots. I have to act out some solo closeups and send them to the director.”

  Horrible thoughts danced around my brain, Rockette style. Lots of high kicks. Every one of my mind’s Rockettes had Jimmy’s face and a tool belt. Also, for some inexplicable reason, they were wearing high-heeled Uggs, which I prayed would never become a thing.

  Desperate to preserve what was left of my sanity and lunch, I pivoted on one heel and bolted.

  “Careful, Fezzik,” Jimmy hollered after me. “All that running, people might mistake you for an earthquake.”

  My apartment was empty when I barreled through the door, eager to escape the mental image of Jimmy Kontos working hard for the money.

  No, wait, everyone was crammed into my bathroom, crowded around the mirror.

  Great. Perfect.

  “What are you doing?”

  The gaggle of barely-dressed women-children giggled. “We’re invisible.”

  “Like vampires,” one of Harry Vasilikos’s daughters said. The way she said it, I knew someone was a Twilight fan-girl.

  “Are you leaving any time soon?”

  “No,” Harry Vasilikos said. He was standing in my shower, staring up at the sprayer. “It is hot in here. Why is it so hot in here? Have you solved my murder yet?”

  “The heat is probably some kind of residual effect from the fire when your yacht crashed into the island.”

  “Really?”

  “No idea,” I said cheerfully. “I’m just making it up, hoping you get sick of me and leave. Maybe the Greek Orthodox Church is wrong and hell does exist. That heat you’re feeling might be a portent of things to come.”

  “For a helpful person, you are not helpful.”

  “You promised to leave when I passed on that list of suspects.”

  “I already told you, I don’t know how. First I was in a waiting room, then I was here. If you can talk to ghosts, I suggest you show some initiative and ask some of them how I can leave.”

  “Try the door.”

  Seven ghosts lined up at my front door. One at a time, they took a stab at leaving. One at a time, they were bounced back.

  Harry Vasilikos peered down his leathery nose at me. “Even if I wanted to leave—and I do not, not until you find my murderer—I could not leave. In a way, I am as trapped as you are.”

  Kyrios Harry returned to the window. The dead women went back to my bathroom.

  “Wrong,” I said. “I’m not trapped at all. I can leave any time I want. In fact, I’m leaving right now.”

  I charged into the bedroom and stuffed my pajamas into a bag, then to the bathroom to get my toothbrush. Nobody moved, so I was forced to reach through a transparent rack of racks to grab my deodorant and toothbrush. “I’ll be back in the morning. Be gone or I’m calling the Ghostbusters!”

  Dead Cat gave me a woeful look.

  “Not you,” I said. “You’re my ickle, bickle dead kitty cat.”

  “Where are you going?” Harry Vasilikos called out.

  “Wherever I want, because I’m not dead.”

  Chapter Three

  My sister Toula is me but with bigger boobs and a couple of extra years on her odometer. She has two cute kids, a husband who can’t get his own beer from the refrigerator, and she possibly considers Leo to be her sole property, even though they broke up more than a decade ago. She also has a spare couch, which is really just her regular couch but with me on it.

  Halfway to her place—an easygoing, pothole-dotted ten minute bicycle ride away—I skidded to a stop, epiphany blooming in my mind. Goats flooded onto the dirt-packed road, prodded along by their goatherd. The goatherd was dead and so were his goats. I waited while the night congealed around me; one at a time, Merope was snuffing its lights. Riding through the dead is rude if you can see them, so I waited. The interruption didn’t bother me. It gave me time to mull over the ghost situation in my apartment. The last thing I needed was for my apartment to become a regular drop-in point for the local ghost population. I didn’t have answers, brochures, or travel tips. What I had was a business that thrived on the money of living people, and a penchant for long hours spent poring over the internet, hunting for the ungettable get.

  I had to get rid of the Vasilikos clan. W
hy they couldn’t poof! away like other ghosts, I didn’t know, but I knew someone who might be willing to give them tips. Which is why I turned my bicycle around at the ghost goats and peddled toward Merope’s main road.

  On Merope’s cobbled main road, Vasili Moustakas was crossing, just to get to the other side. Once he reached his goal, he crossed back over again, his desiccated poutsa flapping in the sea breeze. Occasionally he would stop in the middle of the street, waggle his withered wares, and yell, “Come and get me, you Turks!”

  I parked my bicycle against a lamppost and waiting for the old man to shuffle back to my side of the street. Autumn had thrown its dark blanket over the island, and now that there was a bone-clacking chill in the air, most people had flocked home to light their fireplaces and complain about the impending winter. Their feet were already hurting. It would be the hardest winter yet. I’d heard it all before—every year, in fact. Greeks weren’t Greeks unless they were complaining about their feet.

  Kyrios Moustakas stopped at the curb. His face split in a wide gummy grin. “Little Aliki Callas, you are out late. There are monsters around.” The shoulder-shaking way he laughed, anyone would think he had told the best joke ever.

  I ignored the bit about monsters. If there were monsters they probably had eyes. And for everything with eyes I carried pepper spray.

  “Kyrios Moustakas, you’ve always been known as a man who knows a lot of things. I bet even now you know a lot.”

  “More than I did before.” He said it proudly, chest out. Well, as out as something sunken can get. “What do you want to know, Aliki? I will see if I can help.”

  “How do you … you know … poof.” I added sounded effects and performed something dangerously closed to interpretive dance. Fortunately, the night was forgiving, with all its darkness and shadows and the absence of people.

  Kyrios Moustakas gawked at me like my baklava was missing its nuts. “Poof? What is this poof?”

  “Poof!” This time I limited my movements to arm-waving. “When ghosts disappear and go other places.”

  “Go other places? Where am I going to go, vre? After that girl hit me with her car, the bank took my house and my children took the rest. I have nowhere else to go, so I stay here, where I had the best times of my life. I spent my youth here, chasing girls, you know.”

  “So, you don’t know how to poof?”

  He and his walker turned around. At the speed of half-dry paint down a wall, he crossed the street. Once he’d reached his destination he turned back and met me at the curb.

  “No poof.”

  “Could you maybe ask another ghost how they do it?”

  “Come here,” he said, grinning. “I want to show you something.”

  “Is it your poutsa?”

  His grin fell. “How did you know?”

  I ignored his penis, thanked him for his time, and got back on my bicycle.

  Where to now?

  Ghosts have a tendency to come and go. Most, once they’ve seen all the sights and done the whole peeping Tom thing for a few years or so, choose to move on permanently to the next phase of their existence, whatever that is. Fun, games, and shenanigans in the Afterlife, I assume. Some stick around for various reasons. True love. Spite. Or because, like Kyrios Moustakas, they feel like they’ve got nowhere else to go.

  Most of the ghosts I’ve met in my life eventually moved on—and I’ve met a lot. According to my sister, I had a string of imaginary friends from the time I was tiny.

  Not imaginary. Not friends, exactly. More like a slew of dead relatives. We tea partied together. They cheerfully pretended to eat my leaf-and-dirt sandwiches and drink my toilet water tea. When my parents discussed getting me some mental help, I flipped a switch and ditched the dead ancestors when other people were around.

  Most people keep skeletons in their closet. With all the ghosts in my closet, there’s no room for bones.

  Kyrios Moustakas hadn’t panned out, so who would know about getting from A to B when you’re dead? There are ghosts sprinkled all over Merope. Because they can be annoying, I don’t make a habit of making friends with them or letting them know I can see them, so I wanted to keep my options limited.

  I rode back to the tip of Merope, where the Royal Pain had crashed hours earlier. Emergency workers were still toiling away down below, picking the yacht’s bones apart, hunting for meat. The police had left dry land; they were on the police department’s boat, observing the operation.

  No problem. I wasn’t here for them.

  The dead woman was in her usual place, poised on the cliff’s edge.

  “What happens if I fall now?” she asked me as I whacked the bicycle’s kickstand with my boot. “It’s a mess down there. I don’t want to fall into a mess.”

  “Can’t you move along the edge a bit? That way you’d miss the yacht.”

  Hands on hips. “How about I tell you how to die, eh? How would you feel about that?”

  “Newsflash: you’re already dead. Every jump since the first one is a rerun.”

  “And they said life was strange. Death is stranger.” She stared out to sea for a long moment. “Will I ever be able to stop falling?”

  “You’ve stopped now, right?”

  She made a face and went diving off the cliff all over again. A moment later she popped back in to position, clothes dry, hair neat.

  “That!” I said. “That thing you do where you’re down there and then you’re back here again. How do you do that?”

  Her face scrunched up. “The poof! thing?”

  “Exactly. The poof! thing.”

  “I don’t know. It just happens.”

  My shoulders slumped. And here I thought I was really on to something. I thought for sure the woman would know, but she was another dead end—pun unavoidable.

  “I don’t suppose you could zip on over to the Afterlife, grab a definitive how-to manual for me, and zip back here?”

  I was a loon; her face said so. “Do you think I would be here if I could go to the Afterlife?”

  “Merope is nice in summer. A lot of people swear they’ll never leave. Maybe you’re one of them.”

  “If I could leave I—”

  She fell again.

  My phone rang, banishing the woman to the backseat in my attention span. Angela Zouboulaki, the client who’d sent me to the cliff in the first place, was on the other end.

  “Did you find him yet?”

  “Not yet. You missed all the drama.”

  Her voice got sharp and point. “What drama?”

  I told her about the yacht crash but not the dead cargo that was currently stashed in my apartment.

  “Probably it was sabotage,” she said. “Rich, successful people do not kill themselves unless there is an indictment for money laundering headed straight for them.” There was a moment of silence. “What was the yacht called?”

  When I told her, I heard her eyebrows fail to rise. Angela is one of Botox’s devoted victims. “Harry Vasilikos is dead?”

  I could neither confirm or deny without making myself look like I had one foot in the psych ward and the other on a squashed fig. “The police haven’t released the victims names yet. Do you know him?”

  Of course she did. Angela knew everyone who slept on a pile of money. She’d married two of them and collected their millions.

  “I know the family. Harry is bread on the mainland and on the larger islands, you know.”

  I bit my tongue. I had questions … and mixed emotions to go with them. Apart from shooing them out of my apartment, I had no business with Harry Vasilikos and his family. But that cat hair in my DNA was wiggling again.

  “Interesting,” I said. Something was tickling the box in my brain where I stored random useless information. “You didn’t marry him, did you?”

  “Of course not. His lifespan would have been much shorter if we had married. You know how hard I am on husbands.” It was true, her husbands had the longevity of pantyhose. Her second husband dropped de
ad just months after their divorce. “Now go, do that thing I pay you good money for, eh?”

  “I’m on my way to the dock now to see if Johnny’s boat showed up.”

  Technically I wasn’t, but I could be. Now that I’d thought about it, the dock was a hotbed of ghost activity. Maybe one of the deceased denizens would be willing and able to help me with my poofing issues. Dead sailors and fishermen never leave the sea. Even when it’s the sea that killed them they just make excuses for her behavior. “I was asking for it,” is the most popular. They don’t care that the Aegean Sea, like all large bodies of salty water, is a serial killer.

  Coasting downhill on Merope was dangerous business, so I took it slow, alternating braking with dodging stones and the occasional lump of what I hoped was animal kaka, not human. When summer was done with the island, the waterfront businesses closed early, except for a few eateries the locals favored. Back on blacktop and concrete again, I sailed past Crusty Dimitri’s and didn’t make eye contact with the trio of rats scurrying along the sidewalk, away from the restaurant, which sells something that resembles pizza and souvlaki. Crusty Dimitri’s meat is a mystery. The eatery is a shack with Medusa’s head on the wall, two wobbly tables, and five chairs that will never match. I’ve heard there’s a scoreboard on the kitchen wall to keep track of many people lose bowel control after a feed of souvlaki with random bacteria in the filling. Crusty Dimitri’s owner is the local health inspector’s brother, so nothing gets inspected. The only reason Crusty Dimitri’s is open past summer is because they deliver. Why you would want toxic waste delivered to your home is beyond me, but I guess even the self loathing have to eat.

  The dock was swathed in darkness, with a few lone puddles of pale yellow light from street lamps. A quartet of luxury vessels were tethered to moorings. Unlike the smaller fishing boats, they didn’t bob. They sat heavy in the water, weighed down by golden bathroom fixtures and teak flooring. I moved from yacht to yacht, checking the names, hunting for Angela’s latest potential mistake. No sign of the Sand Witch or Johnny Margas. He was running late, or not running at all.