I woke up from my nap with an even worse headache than when I’d fallen asleep. Had someone hit me with a bag of rocks while I was asleep? There was a weird taste in my mouth, too. I needed something to get rid of it, but that required moving. Why couldn’t my powers be more useful?
Why hadn’t I taught Tilly to fetch my things for me?
Slowly. I needed to move slowly.
First, I swung my legs around. Then I paused, because my head was throbbing again. Nope, I wasn’t going to keep going without more painkillers.
‘Edie,’ I croaked.
She appeared from the kitchen. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Water and painkillers please,’ I said. ‘Why do I feel so terrible?’
‘Do you remember what happened?’
I squeezed my eyes shut. The hand. The probably dismembered hand.
‘I found…was it another victim?’
‘Probably.’ Edie leaned against the doorframe. ‘Ben had an idea, before he left to check on Fadil. He thinks we should summon Tessa.’
I wrinkled my nose. Despite how much I disliked the idea, the more I thought about it, the more it felt like our only option. ‘Do you want to summon her?’
‘No, but I think we need to,’ she said with a sigh.
‘All right. Once I’ve had a drink we can get started.’
‘You don’t have to help. I can do this on my own, or get Ben to come over. You should rest,’ said Edie.
I smiled. ‘Thank you for worrying about me, but I’ll be fine.’ Probably.
*
While I didn’t like the idea of summoning my daughter’s bully into my living room, I was also aware that we needed to find out what she knew to get rid of her sooner. Talking to her with Josh around was out of the question, and the only way to temporarily break her tie to him was to summon her.
So, our options were limited. We moved the living room furniture out of the way, then created a thick salt circle around the room, just in case. And shut Tilly in the kitchen with a fish treat. I’d tried to kick Spectre out, but in true cat style he refused to move. So he floated above the sofa, watching us, instead.
‘Are you ready?’ I asked Edie.
She stood in front of the window – which had the curtains closed, obviously – while I stood opposite her. She took a deep breath. ‘As I’ll ever be.’
I nodded and we recited the spell.
Tessa appeared, looking around in confusion. ‘Oh. I always wondered what your house would look like.’ She paused, studying our small living room. ‘Not what I expected.’
I almost asked what she’d envisaged, but I honestly didn’t care. Edie clearly did. ‘What did you expect?’
‘Something messier and more goth. Less grey. Did you know grey is the millennial beige?’ She gave me a dirty look. Yes, I was an elder millennial. She could also kiss my ass. It was our house and Edie and I were happy with it.
I rolled my eyes. ‘Would you like to continue insulting our interior decoration or would you prefer to find your murderer?’
Tessa studied her fake nails. Why I didn’t know. It wasn’t like the pink marble-effect gel nails would ever fall off now that she was dead. And she’d never be able to change the colour of them again. Or salvage her natural nails. ‘I’m listening.’ She couldn’t have looked less interested if she’d tried, but I had a feeling she was putting on a front. People like her got good at doing that to protect themselves.
‘Tell us what you know,’ I said.
‘Like what?’
Edie crossed her arms. ‘It’s a fairly simple question. What do you remember about your murder? Or do you just not want to find out who killed you? And continue haunting Josh for the rest of your afterlife, seeing him move on with someone else and being helpless to stop it?’
Tessa stiffened. Edie had clearly hit a nerve.
I was pretty sure she’d described what it’d felt like when Josh had moved on with Tessa, but I doubted she wanted Tessa to know that. Admitting that would’ve been a weakness in Tessa’s eyes. And therefore more ammunition. Like she needed any more.
Tessa clenched her jaw and her fists, clearly arguing with herself about if she should help us.
‘Just imagine: if you stay as a ghost, you’ll have no one to talk to except for us and our friends,’ I said, smirking. Being stuck that way would definitely bother her. Pretty much every ghost got bored of talking to the same people all the time unless they were deluded or loners. It was why most crossed over or became angry, and eventually, poltergeists. There were exceptions, of course, like Thomas and Gwendoline, but they were rare.
Tessa’s eyes went wide. Gotcha.
‘I don’t remember much. It’s all kind of blurry.’
‘Start with what you do remember. Some ghosts find it comes back to them as they replay it,’ I said.
Ghosts often suppressed the memories of how they’d died because it was traumatic. They blocked it out to protect themselves, particularly if they’d met a violent end like Tessa had. I didn’t really blame them. But in this case, we needed something or we had no chance of catching her murderer.
‘OK. Um…I was walking back from a party. It wasn’t that late. Maybe just after one? I wasn’t that drunk. There wasn’t much alcohol there, and the stuff there was cheap and lame, so I just made out with Josh for most of it.’
Edie flinched. If Tessa noticed, she didn’t react.
‘Then I felt…something hit me. From behind. I face planted the grass.’ She tried to spit, as if getting rid of the grass from her mouth. ‘It tasted gross. But that wasn’t the worst of it. He rolled me over. Then he started punching me, I think.’ She froze, turned away, and curled into herself. It couldn’t have been easy reliving all of that. We were hearing it, sure, but she was seeing and feeling it all over again.
‘Thank you, Tessa. I know this must be hard for you.’ Compassion was always important in a situation like that, even if the person receiving said compassion didn’t know how to return the favour. Also it would calm her down enough to get her to answer my next question: ‘Can you remember anything about what he looked like?’
She paused, turning back around. Biting her lip, she looked around as if she was a startled child. Her gaze landed on Spectre, who was hovering above the back of the sofa. ‘You have a ghost cat?’
I shrugged. ‘Came with the house.’
Her shoulders fell. ‘Must be nice for him, living with people who can see him. I wonder how many houses are haunted by animals.’
‘Not many, as far as I’ve seen. It’s pretty rare thankfully,’ I replied.
She nodded slowly, her eyes glazing over. ‘That’s good. That’s good. The…the monster who did it was…I think…really tall.’ Her nodding increased in pace as his image returned to her. ‘Yeah. Yeah. He had on some sort of hat and an apron. Was this guy in fancy dress or something?’
We paused, not looking at her.
‘Wait. Do people dress like that? Was the red stuff on his apron…was it…blood?’ Horror flickered across her face.
‘Maybe,’ I said. Who was this ghost?
‘Whatever. That guy was a psycho.’ She shuddered. Whenever something got too much for her, she seemed to dismiss it as if she didn’t want to think about it too hard. I didn’t really blame her, but it did make me sad for her. ‘Is that everything? I was helping Josh revise.’
Edie folded her arms. ‘How? He can’t hear you.’
‘I managed to nudge a couple of pieces of paper like, a millimetre. I’m sure he noticed.’
Edie and I exchanged a look of doubt. I supposed Tessa had to cling on to something to keep herself going.
‘If you think of anything else, and you really do want us to solve this, will you tell Edie right away?’ I said. Even though it was clear Tessa disliked me, I was hoping she’d still been raised to respect her elders. Or at the very least care enough about herself to cooperate with the only people who could help her.
She nodded. ‘Yes.’
*
‘Well that was a waste of time,’ said Edie, sinking on to the sofa after Tessa had gone. Spectre was still hovering above it, so she stroked him while we talked.
‘No it wasn’t. We have a better idea of what he looks like.’
She looked up, a frustrated expression on her face. ‘How does that help us defeat him?’
‘It doesn’t, but it might help with identification. Maybe he was a doctor or surgeon or dentist or something. It narrows down our search. Until we know what we’re looking for, we don’t know what’s useful.’
I went into the cupboard under the stairs and took out the vacuum to get rid of the salt before I let Tilly back in. I didn’t want her getting the grains stuck in between her toes or pads, or spreading salt through the rest of the house.
Edie hugged her feet to keep them away from the vacuum. Once I was done, I let Tilly in, and the four of us sat on the sofa, Edie stroking our ghost cat and me stroking our dog. What a group.
‘Do you really think it’ll lead to us finding something?’ Edie asked. Her tone suggested she thought it was a dead end.
‘It’s more information than we had before, and every piece helps us to form some sort of image of what we’re up against.’ I put my hand on her arm. ‘We’re a long way off from giving up just yet.’
‘We can’t give up! I wasn’t suggesting that! If we give up, he could come after any of us next!’
I stroked her hair, pulling her in to me. ‘It’s OK. We’re not going anywhere. He’s not going to get us. We have a lot more protection than your average victim does.’
Edie seemed to relax at this reminder. ‘Yes, you’re right.’
But truth be told, I was just as worried as she was. After all, I’d been hearing whistling since Tessa’s death, and he still hadn’t come for me. Was I on borrowed time?