Chapter 7

She stared at me, a blue-eyed blonde who looked like she just stepped out of the chorus line in a Busby Berkeley musical. “Can you see me?”

I nodded. I could see her, but was she real?

“And hear me?”

I barely noticed as the backpack and laptop bag slipped off my shoulder to the floor. “Yes.” My voice sounded strangled. What was happening?

She had the arched penciled brows and cupids-bow lips of a Jean Harlow wannabe. She pursed those lips now and gave a low whistle. “Well, if that don’t beat…”

“Who are you?” I asked.

She looked as amazed as I felt. “Eighty years,” she said. “More than that, I think? What year is it?” She looked confused for a moment, then focused on me again.

“All that time and nobody’s ever seen me. I mean, some people thought they saw something, maybe out of the corner of their eye, a flash of light or something. I was holding a flashlight when it happened, you know.” Her hand fluttered up to her forehead. “Well, no, you don’t know. How would you know? You weren’t born yet.” She shook her head and then beamed at me. “But now you’re here.” She made a delighted sound that was half laugh and half gasp. “You can really see me? I haven’t finally gone crazy?”

If one of us was crazy it probably wasn’t the hallucination. It was probably the person having the hallucination. I groped my way to the couch and sat down hard as my legs gave out. This is what a mental breakdown felt like.

“Say, are you all right?” She stood, and I held up my hands. I didn’t want her coming any closer to me.

“Don’t be scared,” her face crumpled in concern. “Honey, please don’t be scared. I promise I’m not that kind of ghost. I’m just so darned glad you can see me. You don’t know how lonely I’ve been.”

One word of that declaration stood out to me. I had a hard time repeating it.

“Ghost?”

She nodded, curls bouncing. “Ghost, spirit, apparition, specter…I don’t mind what you call me.” She came around the desk—not through it, thank heavens—and sat on the couch, at the far end, away from me. I scooted back. “But, gee, I’d like it if you called me by my name. Nobody’s said my name in all these years. It’s Trixie—Beatrix, really, Beatrix George, but everyone calls me Trixie. Or at least, everyone did.” She shrugged and smiled encouragingly.

“Trixie,” I repeated faintly.

She sighed. “Boy, that sounds good. It makes me feel like I’m really here again. What’s your name?”

“Nora,” I said. I was having a conversation with a ghost named Trixie. That’s all. Just a normal, everyday conversation with a ghost named Trixie. Happens all the time. To crazy people.

“Nora,” she repeated, then grinned. “If you tell me your husband’s name is Nick, I’m going to think you’re pulling my leg.”

A ghost who made jokes about the Thin Man movies. That sounded about right. That’s just the kind of ghost I’d hallucinate when I lost my mind. Sure.

“Now, tell me, Nora—”

But whatever the ghost was going to ask was interrupted by the boom and thunder of Marty blaring the 20th Century Fox fanfare. I jumped and yelped. Trixie gasped and vanished.

One minute she was sitting there at the end of the couch, little blue cap on her head and look of delighted anticipation on her face, and the next minute she was gone.

“Trixie?” I felt like an idiot.

There was no response.

Of course there was no response.

“Trixie, are you there?”

“Who’s Trixie?”

I may have screamed the tiniest little bit at the sound of Marty’s voice. I jumped to my feet and turned to the door. “Did you do that?”

He crossed his arms. “I told you I require an overture to start my day.”

I waved my hands. “Not the music. Did you…” But the look on his face had turned from defensiveness to bafflement. And how could he have made Trixie appear? I’d seen state-of-the-art holograms in Hollywood, but they’d been nothing like as realistic as the ghost I’d just been chatting with.

“Nothing,” I said. “Never mind.”

His eyes narrowed. “Who’s Trixie?”

“I’m writing a screenplay.” The lie surprised both of us. “I was just trying out some dialog.”

He looked at me suspiciously, and I really couldn’t blame him, but he let it go. “Whatever. I just wanted to tell you that there are doughnuts in the break room.” He gave me one last look, then shrugged and left.

I sat down, shaking, and looked wildly around every inch of the room.

“Trixie?” I whispered.

Nothing.

  

There was no way I was going to sit in that office alone after that. I bolted.

I found Marty in the break room, pouring a cup of coffee. A box of doughnuts was open on the table next to the latest issue of Classic Monsters of the Movies.

I almost didn’t go in, but I figured even grumpy Marty was going to be better than solitude in my current state. He may have been a lot of things, but at least he was undisputedly human.

“Finished writing?” he said in a way that implied he didn’t believe for a minute that I’d been writing a screenplay and not talking to myself like a crazy person.

“Thanks for the doughnuts,” I non-answered, perching on a chair at the table.

“I didn’t bring them. Monica did. She’ll be back up after she’s had a look in the basement. She wanted to meet you.”

“Monica?” I repeated. “Wait, who’s in the basement?”

“Monica.” He put the pot back on the warmer and turned to the table, piling three doughnuts on the magazine before picking it up to go. “She was a friend of Kate’s.”

“The Monica who runs the pot shop?”

He stopped on his way to the door, looking surprised. “How do you know that?”

“Callie mentioned her. What’s she doing in the basement? There’s still crime scene tape—”

“I know. I told her not to go back there. But she’s looking for a pair of earrings she loaned Kate for a lobby display a while ago.” At my look of utter confusion Marty sighed heavily, put the magazine back down, and sat. “Kate staged displays in the lobby for some features. A few months ago we showed Jezebel, and she put up a mannequin in a red ball gown. She got a wig from a costume shop, and Monica loaned her these old earrings she had. Now she wants them back, so she’s looking down in the prop room for them.” He raised his eyebrows. “Satisfied?”

“I didn’t know we had a prop room.”

“If you saw it on your first day you probably assumed it was a junk room.” He took a huge bite of a jelly doughnut and wiped the red filling off his chin with the back of his hand.

“Should we put a display together for the mad scientists?” The movie lineup would change on Tuesday, and we would be showing a double feature of Dr. Jekyll and The Mad Ghoul (1943, Turhan Bey and Evelyn Ankers). “Maybe something with lab coats and beakers?” Anything to avoid going back to Kate’s office and facing the fact that I was losing my mind.

Marty finished the doughnut in one more bite. “That’s a management call,” he said when he’d swallowed. Then he raised his eyes to something behind me.

I turned, half expecting to see my bubbly delusion waving from the doorway. What I saw instead was a fortyish-looking Asian woman in workout clothes. “You must be Nora,” she said.

I stood. “And you must be Monica. I’ve heard so much about you.”

She looked surprised. “Really? Did you know Kate? I thought—” She glanced nervously at Marty.

He stood, gathering up coffee, magazine, and doughnuts. “I have things to do,” he said. “I always have things to do.” He gave me a pointed look before leaving me alone with Monica.

She still hovered near the door. “Um, did Kate mention me?”

“Oh,” I said. “No. I never met Kate. Callie told me about your shop. She said I should go see you.”

“Oh, right.” She seemed weirdly relieved. “Yes, please do. I hear you’re going through a challenging time. I’m sure I have something that could help.”

I’d been going through a challenging time yesterday, when I’d only had to contend with the public humiliation of a divorce and one, or possibly two, murders. Now I was losing my mind on top of it. I didn’t think pot candies were the best of all possible ideas.

Nevertheless, “Thank you. And I’m so sorry for your loss. I know you and Kate were close.”

She nodded and moved into the room. “It’s been hard. It isn’t easy to make new friends as an adult. Everyone already has their own lives, their own interests…” She sat, and I found myself joining her at the table. “But Kate and I clicked from the beginning. Both of us were running neighborhood businesses, and she’d started her life over again when she came here all those years ago, too.”

And suddenly I forgot all about the morning’s hallucination. This was the source of information about Kate’s past that I’d been looking for.

I gave Monica a very genuine smile. “Can I get you some coffee?”