The Dead Girls Detective Agency (3 page)

“H-H-
what
?” I asked.

Nancy led us out of Big Red’s alcove and pulled aside a velvet curtain to the left of the reception desk. Behind it was a set of winding stairs. I followed her down them, Lorna and her perfectly respectable split ends trailing behind, to a badly lit corridor below. From what I could see it was dark, dingy, like the areas of any hotel that guests weren’t meant to see. Clearly the glamour of the Attesa didn’t extend to the lower floors. Why were we here?

At the end of the corridor was a regular-size door. Above it was a cardboard sign with HHQ written in very neat, deliberate letters. Whoever made that sign had probably practiced writing the letters over and over to make sure they were perfect. That said, the sign’s effect was slightly ruined by being placed over the door’s original, professional hotel sign. The first and last letters (an
O
and an
E
) peeked out behind the cardboard. I decided the original sign had probably spelled out Office.

“Now this,” said Nancy, opening the door, “this is the
heart
of our operation: HHQ.”

She swung the half-wood, half-frosted-window door open a couple of feet and I squinted inside.

The room was about twelve by twelve feet in size. More than enough to “swing a jackrabbit,” as my grandmother would have said, but certainly not as big as I’d expected from an HHQ. Whatever that was.

Nancy walked inside and beckoned for me to join her. Three oblong windows spanned the top third of the facing wall. Through them, I saw a pair of feet walk past. I realized that, having come downstairs, those windows must be at street level with the road outside. And, from down here, you could see people’s shoes as they walked by.

It was so weird seeing them—Mr. Nike, Ms. Stiletto, oh and hello, Mr. You-
Really
-Need-to-Visit-the-Shoe-Shine-Guys-in-Grand-Central—and thinking that even if they bent down right now, they couldn’t see me.

I looked at the passing feet and wondered, Had I walked past the Attesa before? I must have. After all, there was that amazing boutique at the end of the street that always had great sales. And that basement dive bar where they never asked for ID. Even when David’s mom had just made him get a haircut and he looked, like, two years younger than the week before.

Had some newly dead girl stared up at my sneakers as I stomped past? Wondering what kind of person stood in them? Had she thought how much easier everything had been before? Before some idiot stole her future away and she ended up in this place, trying to solve her own murder.

I sighed and looked around the room properly. On the wall to the left of the windows was a map. A massive map of Manhattan. I leaned in more closely. Someone had drawn sharks in the Hudson (um, not cute) and put a pin in a spot labeled School on East 49th Street and Madison Avenue. Another on West 71st labeled Home. And another at the Rockefeller Center F train stop, labeled Murder Scene. And another …

Hey, wait a minute! That was
my
school and
my
home and most definitely
my
murder scene. This map was all about
me
.

I swallowed, even though I had nothing to gulp down. School, my apartment, the subway … those things I could deal with. But murder scene? Seeing it written out like that was so … disturbing.

Someone had carefully tagged this map with all the places I’d visited on my last day—was that
still
today?—the very same person who had neatly written HHQ over the door. And I’d bet my afterlife that I knew who that was.

“Um, Nancy, not to sound all drama queen when we’ve only just met, but this map? It’s all about me. I know it is. And it is freaking me out. What gives?” I asked.

Nancy took a step to her left—to reveal a large blackboard behind her, opposite the map wall. Oh, great, so we were back in school. Then I read what was on it.

17:01 Police arrive at CF’s house.

17:04 Police enter.

17:10 Mother of CF informed of her death.

17:16 CF’s mother contacts her father to pass on the news.

17:22 Police rule out foul play.

17:30 Case closed. Cause of death: Accidental.

“Will someone
please
tell me what is going on?” I heard myself say.

“Okay, Charlotte, sit.” Nancy patted a chair beside her.

Sit? Sit on the black couch, sit on the bed, sit on the weird spinny office chair in HHQ. “Sit” seemed to be Nancy’s default setting when I looked like I was dangerously close to fainting.

I sat down with a thump.

“So when I got to Hotel Attesa—two years ago now, Tess and Lorna were here, but so was another girl called Lyndsay. She was the longest resident, so she taught me some stuff, just as she’d taught Tess and Lorna when they first arrived.”

My head was whirling more than ever.

“Lyndsay said that, when she’d arrived, another ghost had given her the Rules book—and told her to pass it on to whoever came in next before she left.”

So the Rules were passed down from dead girl to dead girl?

“But the rules clearly didn’t help you solve your murder,” I said. “You’re still here.”

“It might have,” Nancy admitted quietly. “I’m sort of ninety-nine percent sure who killed me.”

“So why haven’t you gone through the Big Red Door?” The words tumbled out before I had a chance to worry that it might be too early to ask something like that.

Nancy looked down at her feet, tilting her head until a wave of her thick hair fell over her face. “I guess I … I don’t want to move on yet,” she said in a small voice. “The information Lyndsay gave me when I first showed up here … well, it was invaluable to me. In helping me, um, come to terms with things. I kinda figured: if I could stick around and help other kids the way she helped me, then maybe I wouldn’t have died in vain.

“What I’m trying to say is that I have my reasons for sticking around.” Nancy gave me a small smile. “You may find yours. Anyway! We’ve solved the murders of the last—what?” She looked at Lorna for reassurance. “Six kids who have come through these doors.”

Six?
Six?
Um, that did not sound like a Series-winning stat to me.

“It seems that when we die, some power in the Attesa takes our stories from out there”—Nancy pointed to the window where the outside world was going on as normal—“to here,” and waved the ancient-looking letter she was still holding at me. “One of these arrives just before each new ghost does. We don’t know how or who sends it, but it’s always the same. It tells us basic information: your name, how, and when you died.”

So there was some spectral scribe out there sending letters about teenage deaths? Awesome.

“Er, so if another one of those letter-things arrives, another dead kid is on the way?” I managed.

“Well, yes, but—aside from our current residents—it’s not often that we have two new ghosts here at the same time. I mean, it does happen. But if you look at the
New York Times
murder map, around seventy-four people are unlawfully killed each year in Manhattan and only six percent are under eighteen. Which means, in theory, we get less than one new case a month. Quite a manageable workload, wouldn’t you say, Lorna?”

I tried not to audibly gulp.

“Now, as you can see from the board, both of your parents know,” Nancy continued, as if she were reading out a grocery list. “We did some basic recon when we got your letter before your arrival, and the police had already ruled your death an accident. That’s quick, really. Especially considering how you went.”

“There must have been a real mess on the tracks,” Lorna said. “They shut down the F train line for a whole two hours for you. Two hours!
And
in rush hour.”

My final achievement. Man, I hoped Mom was getting that put on my gravestone. “Here lies Charlotte Feldman. She pissed off commuters. A lot.”

“Since the police have no clue you were murdered and in the absence of your murderer confessing in the next few days, finding out who pushed you is down to us,” Nancy said.

Super. Down to a Nancy Drew wannabe, AWOL Tess, the Abercrombie model, and me. What murder squad wouldn’t want a lineup like that? I better get some posters for my bedroom wall. I was going to be here for some time.

“That’s why Nancy calls this room HHQ,” Lorna explained with a look that said,
If you thought Dead Girls Detective Agency was lame, just wait till you get a load of this one
. “It’s the official dead girls’
Haunting
Head Quarters.”

Inspired. “And the map?” I asked.

“I just put it up on the wall because it helps me visualize a case.”

“What about the sharks drawn in the Hudson?” I asked. Did I really want to hear the answer? Was the river haunted by some supernatural sea life they’d failed to warn me about?

“Rule Four,” Lorna said. “Ghosts can’t travel over water. Nancy just drew those in to show that we can’t go in the river.”

Of course. I turned to Nancy hoping she’d explain.

“Basically, ghosts are landlocked. Who knows why? Maybe so we’ll stay in the city and concentrate on solving our cases. But if you are going to be stuck on an island, I can’t imagine a better one than Manhattan, can you?”

Awesome—so now that I was dead and didn’t appear to have a curfew, I still couldn’t go and watch bands in Brooklyn. Double, triple, quadruple
fun
. Uh, unless I was about to find out that Rule 5 was that all teen ghosts did have a curfew after all.

“So is that it then?” I asked. “Are those all the Rules? No water walking, lots of crime solving, and don’t forget to treat the hotel and everything in it like you would if you hadn’t been pushed under a subway train?”

Nancy tucked her hair behind her ear. “Oh no, there are a
load
more.” She pointed to the thin red book. “I just thought I’d ease you in with the simple stuff.”

Great.

“And what if I don’t abide by these Rules?” I was getting sick of all the dos and don’ts. “What happens to me then? According to you, I’m already dead. How much worse can it really get?”

Nancy looked shocked. Lorna actually looked up from her split ends. Crap. Had I gone too far?

“Now you sound like my kinda ghoul,” a low voice dead-panned behind me.

I swung around to see a guy with a sarcastic look on his face, leaning on the door frame. His coloring was as dark as David’s was fair. His black bangs were swept to one side, but fell across his face, threatening to obscure his green eyes. He was wearing a tight black T-shirt and black skinny jeans. Even his Adidas—which were either vintage or a proof he’d been dead a lot longer than everyone else—were black. Something in the way he looked at me made me want to put my hands over my face and hide like a kindergarten kid. Why had everyone failed to mention that there was a dead boy next door?

“Just ignore him,” Nancy warned. “He’s used that line many, many times before. And not one new arrival has laughed at it yet, have they, Edison?”

“Tess did,” he shot back.

Tess? Was
he
friends with
her
? Not that I knew the girl, but I strongly suspected that made this Edison guy trouble.

“So you say, but seeing as you were both here before Lorna and me, we don’t have any proof that’s the case,” Nancy said. One thing I could not imagine Tess doing was cracking a smile.

Edison raised an eyebrow at her and smirked at me. Oh boy.

“See you around.” He walked out of the room. No “hey, nice to meet you,” “who are you?” or even a “how did you die?” Men: Clearly some were as incommunicative in death as in life.

“So, um, these Rules,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “Sorry to sound stupid, but I’m not really getting them. Can we run through the important stuff again?” Without making me read the book because it looks really, really dull, I silently added.

“Oh, we can do better than that,” Nancy said, brightening and leading the way out of HHQ. “I’ll show you how they work—out in the real world. In practice.”

Chapter 4

I’D BEEN IN WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK A
million times before. After all, I’d lived in New York all my life. Me and my best friend, Ali, used to cut through to go shopping in Soho (the thought of that gave me an instant pang). Mom’s favorite Italian was around the corner (double pang). But if you said “Washington Square,” I always thought of one person: David.

I’m not one of those boyfriend name-droppers. I hate those girls—who doesn’t? Ali and I used to say they had broccoli syndrome. Like, they could work their boyfriend’s name into any conversation. So even if you were discussing something as blah as broccoli, they’d be like, “Oh, Pete, my boyfriend, he
loves
broccoli.”

I’m so not a broccoli girl. But, being here, I couldn’t help thinking about how we met.

David transferred from his super-fancy private school uptown to my regular one near Rockefeller Center last spring. When he walked into my homeroom, all shy looks and baggy pants, I decided he was probably the hottest guy I’d ever laid eyes on right then and there. He was tan, had messy blond hair, and a guitar case permanently slung over his shoulder—he looked like a cute surfer who’d run away from the beach to join a rock ’n’ roll band. But I also figured the omnipresent Strat and remnants of last weekend’s guyliner meant he was probably one of those try-hard prep kids too. You know, the ones who figure they’re hip, but blow it by thinking it’s okay to actually use words like
summered
and
supper
.

After school one day in his first week, I was walking down Fifth, when I saw him smiling across the street. If I’m being honest, I had to stop and take a second to check he was waving at me and not some other girl standing behind me.

“Hey, where are you going?” he asked, bouncing across the street like an overenthusiastic puppy dog. Was he for real?

“Just down to the Village.”

“Great! Me too!” He smiled and I noticed that, when he did, his eyes crinkled. “Mind if I go with you?”

I was totally prepared for this to be the most awkward subway ride of my life. But the bizarro thing was, as soon as we started talking, we couldn’t stop. It was like he’d read every book I had and downloaded all of my favorite songs. We talked about discovering Hole
years
before
Jennifer’s Body
came out, how we knew we should have read
A Clockwork Orange
, but hadn’t made it past the first page, and how—even though he’d only just started—David could totally tell our school sucked and was full of a bunch of vapid morons.