The Dead Girls Detective Agency (2 page)

I pinched again. And again. Nope, still not awake.

Ping!
The elevator stopped and Nancy led me down a red-carpeted corridor. I couldn’t help but think that, if I were conscious and this hotel didn’t just exist in my dream, it was exactly the kind of place I’d love to stay in. If my parents didn’t think hotels were “a complete waste of our money,” that is. It was super-classy, old yet pristine.

Nancy opened the door and the room inside was even more gorgeous than the lobby—white walls, antique lights, prints of old Hollywood movie stars in sleek black frames, a sink-into-me bed and floor-to-ceiling windows on one wall. I walked over to the windows, which looked out on Fifth Avenue and the Empire State Building. Wow. Nice imaginary view.

“Don’t get
too
excited by the location,” a high-pitched voice said. I turned around to see a blond girl standing über-close to me. Another ghost? Awesome. This one was like something from an Abercrombie ad, all glowing skin, Mac-counter makeup, and perfect hair. She wouldn’t look out of place in one of those frames on the wall.

“Want to know the suckiest thing about the afterlife?” she asked. “It’s all look, look, look, but don’t touch. Like, there’s all this on our doorstep …” She motioned to the streets below. “And us? We can’t even enjoy it.” She leaned on the window so closely she would have left a breath mark. If she was still breathing, that is. “I’m Lorna by the way.”

This was getting ridiculous. “What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Oh, Nancy didn’t tell you that little Rule yet? It’s a bummer. Totally and utterly hideous. I mean, there are some great things about being dead: no eating equals no dieting. No more split ends or breakouts. Of course, style-wise, death sucks. The rule is that we ghosts have to spend all our time in whatever outfit we died in. Which as you can see, for me, is a baby blue Marc Jacobs Spring/Summer ’06 dress. Not a bad choice. I mean, I’d totally be seen dead in it. It’s just that I’ll never get to wear anything else. Ever.”

I looked down at my outfit and saw my gross school uniform: a blue-and-yellow plaid skirt, white shirt, my navy blazer … and Mom’s DVF heels. Wouldn’t my favorite Seven jeans and Converse have been more eternity appropriate?

I smiled politely, all the while pinching my arm like a crazy person. Like the worst thing about being dead would be the limited clothing decisions. What about missing your family or your friends or, I don’t know, being alive? Then, on the eighteenth pinch, something in my brain clicked. A memory broke through. When I was on the platform, right before I opened my eyes here in the hotel, I felt something. What was it? A push. In my lower back. So hard I lost my balance. Then there was that scream. And the heat. And then I was here.

What if this
wasn’t
a dream? What if I had been pushed? Right onto the tracks and under the F train. What if … what if, like Nancy said, I was dead?

Shut up, Charlotte, I told myself, stepping backward and landing awkwardly on the bed. I mean, come on. There was no tunnel with bright lights at the end, no big pearly gate, no old bearded guy welcoming me in. I held up my hand to the light—I couldn’t suddenly see through it. I hadn’t turned into Casper or anything.

“So what else do I need to know?” I asked, trying to play along and make sense of whatever was happening. Maybe this was some elaborate practical joke. “I mean, this whole hotel thing is nice and all, but I always thought heaven would be more sitting on a cloud with unlimited Ben and Jerry’s and less downtown fancy hotel.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Nancy said, turning her attention back to me. “I was getting to that. So here’s the deal.” She sat on the bed beside me and gave me another of her reassuring smiles. Worrying, I realized that she had the air of someone who had done this before. A lot.

“When teenagers die in mysterious circumstances—like you being pushed under that train—they don’t pass straight over to the Other Side, as people do when it’s their natural time to go. Instead, in New York, they come here, to Hotel Attesa—”

“It’s kinda like a waiting room,” Lorna interrupted. “But adults, they go to this other hotel uptown. It’s, like, way nicer because it’s more modern and it’s nearer the park and whoever decorated it did this thing with pink paint and …”

“Lorna! Be quiet?” Nancy glared at her friend. Note to self, do not cut Nancy off mid-sentence. “While you’re here, you’re stuck. You can’t go over to the Other Side until you’ve worked out who killed you and why. Basically, you need to set things straight before you can move on. And we—me, Lorna, and Tess—”

“Yes, you so need to meet Tess,” said Lorna.

“
And
Tess.” Nancy ignored her this time. “We’re here too, trying to help out those who come in because, you know, then they might get to the Other Side faster.”

“Nancy calls us the Dead Girls Detective Agency,” Lorna said, smoothing down her skirt. “And she’s actually proud of it.”

I tried to focus. Maybe, just maybe, if this actually was some big, stupid, fainty dream, if I solved my murder, I’d wake up. Like, it was a coma and not a dream. Ohmigod, if I was in a coma my mom was going to freak. And she was going to know I stole her boots.

“So this Other Side,” I said, trying to stay calm. “If we figure out who killed me, how do I get there?”

“Through the Big Red Door,” said a new voice behind me. I spun around to see a brunette standing in the doorway. She was not channeling Nancy’s reassuring smile or the kindness in Lorna’s eyes. Instead she looked bored. As if she’d been here a million times before and couldn’t care less. I wondered how long she’d been standing there, just listening.

“That’s Tess,” Lorna said, checking out her cuticles. “She’s been here the longest of all of us girls. Tess is the best, but she can be kind of …”

Nancy shot Lorna another look and gave me an eye roll. “Subtle, Lorna.”

“I can be kind of what?” Tess asked. “Honest? Harsh? A mega-bitch?”

When Lorna shrugged vacantly, Tess turned to me. “Well, seeing as I appear to have a rep, I may as well live up to it. All those little fantasies you’re currently having? The ones where you’re trying to convince yourself that this isn’t real and any second now, Mommy dearest will come into your bedroom and wake you up? Forget them. They’re all lies.”

She carried on talking before I could tell her I’d already worked out I was in a coma.

“These two”—she paused to gesture toward Lorna and Nancy—“they’re all, ‘Let’s make it easy for newbies, let them come to terms with it in their own time.’ Well, that tactic didn’t help me. In fact, nothing helped me. So here’s the truth: You’re dead. End of story. The only thing you can do is deal with it and hope you’re lucky enough to move on.”

Tess gave me a look that practically screamed
capisce?
and walked out of the room, leaving Lorna and Nancy gaping after her. Outside a cab horn honked.

“Got to say it,” Lorna said eventually. “That girl has a way with words. You’re totally dead, Charlotte.”

And that’s when I tried to throw up. Except I couldn’t throw up anymore. I couldn’t do much of anything anymore. I, Charlotte Louise Feldman, of Twenty-One West Seventy-First Street, was, apparently, no more.

My head was swimming. I wasn’t sure if it was the having-just-died part or the it’s-impossible-to-take-in-all-this-information part of the situation that was freaking me out the most; but on reflection, I guess it was probably the part where I was dead. That morning all I had to worry about was where to meet David for lunch, whether I’d get tickets for the portrait exhibit at the Met, and what Dad was going to say when he heard I’d flunked chemistry. Again. Now? Now I had to deal with the fact that (a) I was dead, (b) OMG, I was dead, and (c) someone really didn’t like me. As in, didn’t like me so much that they decided to murder me.

What about my poor parents, did they even know yet? And David? Did this mean we’d broken up?

Tears welled at the corners of my eyes. I tried my hardest not to think about the “Living,” as Nancy had called them. Come on, Charlotte, I told myself, biting down on my lip and waiting for it to hurt. But it didn’t. Hold it together. There must be a way to fix this.

“I better show you the Door,” Nancy said, all businesslike again, desperately trying to distract me. “I know it’s a lot to take in, but we have to get moving. Every second we waste could mean we miss out on a vital clue to what happened to you and we can’t have that, or we’ll never find your Key.”

“My what?” I asked, pressing my finger to my lip. No blood.

“Your Key,” Lorna said. “Don’t worry, it’s taken me four years to understand all this stuff. It’s more complicated than applying a streak-free fake tan!”

I followed Lorna and Nancy out of the room. My new room. For that moment, at least. One thing was for sure: dead or not, I wasn’t ready to leave my life behind just yet.

Chapter 3

I’D LOVE TO SAY THAT THE BIG RED DOOR
—the mighty gateway to the Other Side that Tess had so
kindly
told me about without so much as a sit-down-this-is-major—was the most impressive thing I’d ever seen. But honestly? I’d seen more impressive entrances to clubs on the Lower East Side.

“This,” said Nancy, with all the drama someone under five foot five could muster, “is it: the Big Red Door.”

I politely pretended to take a moment to admire it (Mom didn’t raise me
that
badly), but in truth? Nancy hadn’t given me a minute to deal with the whole train/death/afterlife issue. Sure, I heard her when she said that, if we were going to find my murderer, we didn’t have time to waste, but I was too thrown to take it in. What felt like seconds ago I was standing on the subway platform. Now I was expected to be all breezy about my death and impressed by a door that might take me to some Other Side.

“Um, wow?” I finally managed.

You didn’t have to be a Mensa member to see how the entrance to the Other Side got its name. It was big (say, one story tall), red (wood, in case those kind of details interest you), and a door. Though it was hard to check off the last point, seeing as it was firmly shut. And apparently staying that way until I solved my murder and found my Key. Whatever that meant.

Big Red sat—almost hidden—in an unassuming alcove just off Hotel Attesa’s main lobby. So this was what my way out of this nightmare looked like. So far, so unhelpful.

“Run me through how it works again.” I turned to Nancy and tried to look super-interested. Maybe the sooner I got the hang of things, the sooner I’d feel less … messed up, confused, and low-level terrified.

“Well,
where
shall I start?” Whether she sensed my bewildered horror or not, Nancy was clearly loving this part of her job. “Rule One: The Door can only be opened by a ghost’s personal Key. So, when we solve your murder …” She smiled as if that was a sure thing—like getting your period on the day of an important swim meet or your cell battery dying just as the guy you like finally calls. “You’ll get your Key, put it in the door and—whoosh!—off you go to the Other Side.”

Whoosh. Just the sort of noise I imagined the entrance to the next world making.

Finally Nancy sensed my lack of okay.

“We have no idea how long it’s been here,” she said, desperately trying to get me involved. “It could have been around for hundreds or thousands of years in some form or other. After all, kids must have been murdered in New York ever since time began.” Nancy took a second. I got the impression that, for once, there was something she hadn’t thought through. Shocker.

“Well, definitely since the Dutch rocked up anyway. Or the Native Americans. Or the … Or maybe even years and years before that,” Nancy finished unconvincingly.

Super. Now she was giving me a
history
lesson. This was getting more and more surreal.

“Though getting pushed under a T. rex was probably more painful than the F train,” Lorna said. She was examining the ends of her hair like a pathologist from
CSI
. I bet she massively regretted not booking a pre-death spa day. Imagine spending eternity with split ends or an imperfect manicure. How did she end up here? Someone spike her Mac lip gloss with cyanide?

“Let’s start with the basics,” Nancy said. “Rule Two: In the Attesa, things work in pretty much the same way as they did when you were alive—give or take a few little changes.” From the back pocket of her pristine, pressed jeans, she produced an equally pristine, pressed booklet with
The Rules
typed on its front cover. It was about as thick as the length of a thumbnail.

Nancy handed the book to me, way too eagerly for someone about to talk about my death. “Everything is covered in here”—she smiled encouragingly—“but obviously it’s my job to talk you through things too.”

Lorna groaned.

“As the Attesa exists in—what we assume to be—a kind of limbo, you interact with everything in here as you did when you were Living.” I looked at Nancy blankly.

Nancy sighed. I wasn’t catching on as fast as she’d hoped. “In other words, in here, you act like you did when you were alive. So you can open this curtain, use the elevator, move these pieces of paper.” She ruffled some stuff on the table in front of the Door for effect. “Of course, as you’re a ghost now and formed of a ball of kinetic energy rather than cells, you
can
walk through the walls if you really want to.” She put her hand clear through the white plaster to my left. “But that’s just showing off. Oh, and before you ask, no, you can’t fly. That would be stupid.”

Riiight, trying to find Keys to another dimension and walking through walls = fine. Flying = stupid. Of course.

“On to Rule Three: Like I said before, the Attesa is protected, which means the Living can’t see it or us when we’re in it. When we’re outside, in the human world, the Living can’t see or hear us
unless
we want them to.”

Wait a second—the Living could see us if we wanted them to?
This
sounded interesting.

“But we’ll get on to that later.” Bummer. “Right now, what I really want you to see is HHQ.”