The Dead Girls Detective Agency (21 page)

“No,” Five continued, waving her arm up and down—there it was, the Signal for me to get off the bench and get involved—“you never know
when
they are going to come back, especially if you hurt them. And they want
revenge
.”

Right, this was my cue. Kristen was staring at the Blondes like they’d flipped their lids, but according to Nancy’s Plan, this was my moment to apparite. Seeing as Lorna’s and Nancy’s undercover interrogation hadn’t got us a full-on confession (yet), it was time to bring out the big guns. I had to make myself appear to Kristen and see if my ghost scared her into saying anything else.

I closed my eyes, concentrated real hard, and tried to make that warm feeling grow.

As usual, it started at my feet. I looked down and watched as the color returned to them. Awesome. Now all I needed to do was make the rest of my body go, haunt Kristen, and we’d know once and for all if she’d killed me or not. I’d scare her into admitting what she really thought of me.

Maybe we’d get a confession. Maybe I’d get my Key.

“Sorry to be a party pooper, Feldman, but you couldn’t scare a five-year-old at a sleepover with those moves,” said a male voice behind me. I breathed out in frustration and felt my power—and visibility—go. I didn’t even have to turn around to see who it was. I recognized that tone. Edison.

“Don’t fool yourself, Ghostgirl.” Ed jumped down off the bench he’d ported onto from who-knows-which-mysterious-place he hung out in all day, and came to stand by me. His T-shirt really was incredibly tight.

Edison stared out at the field, just in time to see Nancy attempt the splits with Five’s body, fail spectacularly, and fall over.

“Nancy Drew seriously thinks one of those vapid rally girls committed your murder?” he asked.

Nancy pulled Five’s body up, tripped, and went down again. Smooth.

“Kinda. Well, it is a possibility. After all, the head one did just threaten to push the entire squad under a train—and seeing as that’s how someone killed me, maybe she’s speaking from experience,” I said.

Looking at Kristen now, bossing Jamie and the others around, I knew more than ever that she was capable of a lot of things: blow-drying her own hair to salon standards, making other girls feel hideous about themselves on an hourly basis, and still being seriously thin despite the fact she always seemed to have a full-fat frappuccino in her hand. But was she actually capable of murder? Despite what she’d just blurted out, I wasn’t so sure.

“You know Nancy,” I said. “She likes to be thorough. We had to cross these suspects off the list before we start investigating the next ones.”

“‘Thorough,’ hey? That’s one way of putting it.” Edison brushed his hair back off his face and squinted in the lunchtime sun. “Though ‘slow’ and ‘criminally dull’ would be another.”

I wondered what Edison wore in the summer when he was alive. I couldn’t imagine him in anything but lead singer black even if someone made him go to the beach.

Ed gave me a slow smile. “Why does Nancy think one of the pom-pom posse had it in for you anyway?” he asked.

“Look, Nancy seems to know what she’s doing,” I said, desperately trying to change the subject. I didn’t want to get into the David Conversation with him now. Things were WTF? weird enough between us already without bringing David into it. “Without her and Lorna, I wouldn’t have even got this far.”

“And how far is that?” Edison asked. “Far enough to be one week dead and still Keyless? Far enough to have watched your ex making out with half the school before you’ve even got one decent lead? Or far enough to be standing here, trying to scare a borderline-anorexic lip-gloss addict into confessing something she doesn’t have the brainpower to pull off?”

“How did you know about my ex?” I asked. Calling David that out loud with Edison there made my stomach turn.

Ed turned to look at me, his green eyes searching, but said nothing.

“Isn’t a ghost allowed a bit of privacy?” I asked.

“Not around here it seems. That guy is a loser if he didn’t know what he had.”

For about the ninetieth time, I wished Nancy had given me a book on understanding Edison along with the Rules.

The squad had pulled themselves back up now. Nancy was madly waving Five’s arm above her head. She
still
seemed to think that if I apparited it might scare Kristen into saying something more.

“Okay, so I don’t know what’s going on over there, but Nancy’s giving me the Signal that means I really need to apparite now,” I said. “Would you mind porting off someplace else so I can concentrate?”

“Got stage fright?” Edison smirked.

“Hardly, it’s just that when I apparite and Kristen and the squad see me, they are going to be so scared they’re going to run screaming from this field like extras in a B movie—and I don’t know if you have the stomach to handle that.”

“Clearly,” Edison said, raising an eyebrow. He moved toward me, then suddenly stopped, like he thought better of whatever he was about to do. “Look, I know when I’m not wanted. I’ll leave you to it.”

He climbed back up the bleachers. I couldn’t help but notice that his skinny jeans were pretty Ed-hugging too. “Oh and Charlotte? When you want to know how to really scare the bejesus out of someone who might actually need it, you let me know. It won’t be as … exhilarating as our last lesson. I promise. I’m”—he looked deep in my eyes for a second too long—“well, I’m sorry about that. Maybe it wasn’t what you needed after all. But I still have a couple of tricks up my sleeve. All perfectly legal. Just more effective than this.” He smiled.

Pop!

Edison was gone.

I turned my attention back to the field. Thrown as I felt, I couldn’t focus on Edison and his surprisingly toned arms and his wooo!-check-out-all-the-bad-things-I-can-teach-you speeches right now. Not when I had detecting to do. Lorna and Nancy were waving madly at me now. The cheerleaders were packing up their bags. Practice was over. Either I did this now and found out once and for all what Kristen was really made of, or I stopped trying and just accepted the fact that I might never find my Key.

I forgot about Edison, walked forward, and focused until the warm feeling came. Up my legs, my stomach, my arms, whirling around my head. My body took on that familiar pink glow. I looked back to the field, and while the rest of the squad were too busy chattering away to have noticed me, the Blondes were staring at me with their mouths open. Which I figured meant it had worked.

I was a fully visible-to-the-Living ghostly apparition. And Kristen was walking straight at me. Ohmigod, this was
it
.

She looked at where I was standing, flipped her hair again—urgh, even when I was trying to be scary I could not help but notice that she was like something out of a barf-worthy shampoo commercial—and stopped about five steps in front of me.

Kristen slowly took me in, looking me up and down—twice—before staring straight into my eyes. Her gaze didn’t flinch or even flicker. If I hadn’t been dead and her immortal enemy, I would have put bets on her launching into an epic put-down about my shoes or my hair right then and there.

Oh God, this was it. She could so see me. Come on, Charlotte, I told myself, haunt her a bit. If she knows anything about your death—if she was the one who pushed you—she’ll be so freaked out, it will totally show. Scare her!

But suddenly I had no idea what to do. Wave my arms? Woooo a bit? Instead I stood rooted to the spot. Every bit as pathetic as Edison had predicted. Unable to do anything apart from watch her stare at me. And stare right back.

Kristen opened her mouth. Here it was: the scream. The OMG!-I’ve-just-seen-Charlotte’s-ghost wail.

But there was no scream. No wail. Instead Kristen rolled her eyes. “For God’s sake,” she said to herself under her breath. “Those idiots have talked about that stupid girl so much, I am actually hallucinating her. It must be the stress. Enough already. I’m not wasting any more of my day on someone dumb enough to trip under a train. I need to go lie down. Or shop.”

Kristen stomped off the field, walking right through me.

I meant so little to her that even when I tried to haunt her, she thought I must be a figment of her own imagination.

I was so shocked, I breathed out, quickly making myself invisible again, so that when Kristen slammed the locker room door shut, and the other cheerleaders looked around to see where their captain had gone, I was nothing more than air.

Crap. Edison was right. It was time to admit that Kristen was many things (an uptight-boyfriend-stealing-mental case for a start), but she wasn’t a murderer. Not mine, anyway. If she had been, she wouldn’t have put me down to a lack of beauty sleep.

Back on the field, I saw Four’s and Five’s bodies shudder as Lorna and Nancy stepped out of them.

“Whoa, that must have been an intense practice,” Four said. “I totally zoned out during the whole thing.”

“Ohmigod! I, like, totally did too,” said Blonde Five. “Kristen must have worked us way hard. I feel like I’m coming out of a Bikram coma or something.”

Out of the cheerleaders’ bodies, Lorna and Nancy expectantly ran over to where I was standing.

“Well, what happened? She didn’t look like she freaked out,” Nancy said. “What did Kristen say?”

“Enough for us to draw one of your red lines through her name on the suspects’ list.”

Nancy sighed.

“So I’ve just spent the last thirty minutes taking part in physical education for no good reason?” Lorna asked.

Behind her, I saw Kaitlynnn talking to Brian. His eyes were glowing and she’d somehow persuaded him to give her four candy bars out of his backpack. Now she was stuffing them into her mouth—two at a time.

“Tess, will you get out of that cheerleader already?” Nancy shouted at her.

“Oh, cawm ohn. Ah jusht whanna hahve ohne mohre.” She swallowed. “Just let me eat two more. It’ll mess her up for weeks when she comes around and realizes she’s consumed an empty calorie. Well”—Tess turned over the label of one of the bars—“five hundred of them! In one go. I can put the wrappers in her pocket, so when Kaitlynnn wonders why she’s feeling so full she’ll find them. She’ll think she was sleep-eating or something. It will be excellent.”

“Tess …” Nancy shot her a look.

“Fun sponge,” Tess said, as she stepped backward and left Kaitlynnn’s body.

Kaitlynnn shrugged, blinked, and then looked down in shock at the two candy wrappers in her hand. “What the …?” She spun around to check that no one had seen her eating, then dropped them on the ground and ran into the locker room—no doubt already calculating how many squat thrusts she needed to do to work off the calories.

Tess appraised the situation. “Cheerbaiting aside, that,” she said, slow clapping, “was what I’d call an
epic
fail. You apparite in front of someone and she doesn’t even believe you’re a ghost?”

“Well, I guess you’re right, Charlotte. It proves that Kristen’s not feeling guilty about your death.” Man, was Nancy perceptive. “I don’t think she pushed you.”

“Or any of the rest of them,” Lorna added. “They just don’t seem that bothered about you. Not even Jamie—unless she is an Emmy-worthy actress and I don’t think she’s that smart. Sorry, Charlotte.” She looked away at the girls walking back across the field.

“So I told Emily, if she buys a party dress from Acne again without checking with me first, we are so no longer lab partners.” As if on cue, Jamie pushed through me and shivered.

“Oh, totally.” Blonde Four nodded. “Like, you said you were getting an outfit from there for the Halloween dance
weeks
ago. It’s off the girl-rules chart if she violates your store.”

“But, guys, it’s a costume party,” Five said, trailing after them. “We have to get costumes that make us look like, like, ghosts or busters or something.”

“Oh,” Jamie said. “Well, that still doesn’t mean I’m letting the Acne go.”

We watched as they walked through the locker room door.

“Halloween dance?” Lorna asked. “When’s the Halloween dance?”

“Repeat what you just said out loud in your head, think about it, then have the decency to blush,” Tess said.

“Oh.” Lorna did.

“Saturday then,” Nancy said, trying to make Lorna feel less like an idiot.

“And David is going with Kristen,” I said. “Which is weird because he hates dances. And the whole popularity BS. But then, he seems to have done a one-eighty on most of these things in the last week. He used to tell me he hated cheerleaders too.”

“Charlotte, whatever lies he told you when you were dating, it seems David will now make out with anything with a pulse and, sadly, that removes you from the equation.” Trust Tess to drag me down one notch further.

Maybe it was time to stop being so nicey-nicey. Maybe—risk or not—it was time to take another lesson from Ed.

Chapter 19

AS SOON AS PRACTICE FINISHED, TESS SULKILY
ported back to the Attesa muttering something about “time wasters” at a volume she knew I could hear. Charm personified.

“Let’s port back to HHQ,” Nancy said. “I guess the next step is to cross off Kristen and Jamie and reassess the suspects’ list. Maybe we could go through some more old case files for inspiration.” She smiled hopefully.

Lorna scowled. “I spent most of yesterday in that dungeon,” she said. “I’m not really ready to go back yet. Charlotte, how about you and me port part of the way, then walk back to the hotel through the West Village?” She looked at Nancy intently. “It’ll give Charlotte a chance to think about everything that’s happened today—you know, if there are any major clues we’re just not seeing because we’re too close to the case.” She winked at me. “And it’ll give me a chance to look at a couple of new window displays in the shops on Bleecker Street,” she whispered.

Typical. Though seeing as my only other option was another episode of
Who Killed Charlotte Feldman?
I might as well just go with it.

“Sure.” I smiled.

Outside, it was unseasonably warm, and people had left their coats at home. Bleecker Street was one of my favorite places in the city. I loved the way trees lined parts of the wiggly street, the cute secondhand bookshops and quirky boutiques, and the brownstones where I had hoped I would live one day. The whole neighborhood felt relaxed. None of the buildings down here were more than a few stories high, so you could look up and always see the sky. It was a world away from the madness of midtown. When I graduated college, I’d wanted to run an art gallery here. Or open a really cool coffee shop where photographers could exhibit their work. Maybe I’d even have taken some pictures myself and sold them.