Fastening the Grave (Kali James Book 1) Page 4

  CHAPTER 4

  A side perk of costuming half of West Bottoms was that I didn’t have to go chasing after information; it came to me, whether I wanted it or not. As I rotated through my regulars and a steady stream of Halloween shoppers, I learned that Jack Gates had been making the rounds of the haunted houses before his death, asking a lot of questions. I also learned that he wasn’t exactly well-liked. On the coasts, people expected reporters to be pushy, but here in Kansas City, there was an ironclad expectation of Midwestern courtesy that Gates had apparently lacked. People resented that sort of thing.

  By the time Riley showed up, I’d given up on talking about anything other than Jack Gates’ murder. Riley worked at The Dungeon, a haunted house just down the street from Howl. Today, she was here for mummification. I hauled out the strips of cloth I’d ancientified last week with a combo of tea stains and good old-fashioned fire. Mummies might be typical haunted house fodder, but if I was going to dress one, I was going to do it up right.

  Riley didn’t waste any time on small talk. “I heard you were the one who tripped over the dead guy.”

  “Lucky me, huh?”

  “You okay?” she asked, looking me over as if she was searching for injuries.

  I waved her off. “As good as can be expected.”

  Riley jumped up on the dressing platform, wearing nothing more than a nude unitard. If any other customers walked in, they’d no doubt think she was naked, not that it would phase her. Just the same, I positioned myself between her and the door.

  She turned expectantly toward me. “Tell me everything.”

  Riley had more energy than a toddler on pixie sticks, which made dressing her something of a challenge. Whereas everyone else got the short version, for Riley, I drew the story out, hoping it would keep her still long enough for me to wind yards of cloth around her fidgeting body. Throughout the story, Riley begged for each and every gory detail. By the time I’d finished the retelling, only her eyes were visible.

  I stepped back, giving her the full mirror experience. “All you need is blood-red contacts, and you’ll rock this mummy costume.”

  She held her arms stiffly in front of her and mmmmmed through the fabric, doing her best mummy impersonation. Satisfied, she attempted a little happy dance. Hampered as she was by the cloth wound haphazardly around her body, the best she could do was an awkward series of wiggles.

  “All set. I hope you’re walking.” Riley didn’t drive, but I hated to think of her trying to climb on a city bus dressed like a mummy.

  She nodded, or at least I thought she nodded. It was hard to tell in her current wound-up state.

  “So back to Jack Gates,” Riley said, dropping the mummy act, her voice still muffled by fabric.

  I should have known I wasn’t going to get out of the conversation that easily. I dropped into one of the chairs next to the changing rooms. “What about him?”

  “I did some snooping.”

  I groaned. “Riley!”

  “What? It’s not every day some guy gets offed in a haunted house.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. “What did you find out?”

  “Apparently, he showed up yesterday afternoon and was grilling the actors.”

  “He was a reporter,” I reminded her. “And he was writing a review of the place. It makes sense he’d want to interview the actors.”

  “True, but these questions came after the review was already out. I heard he was trying to dig up dirt on Howl’s owner.”

  I leaned in, taking the bait. “Who would that be?”

  Riley did her best to shrug, but the yards of fabric wound around her restricted movement. “Some richie-rich businessman.” Her voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper. “He runs the place like a mob boss. No one crosses him.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure how someone would cross a haunted house owner. I tried to imagine the entertainment version of trade secrets. Actors double-dipping with a competitor? Spilling special-effects secrets? Stealing props and selling them on the haunted house black market?

  “Cross him?”

  Riley just nodded.

  “Do you know him?”

  She looked away. “I keep my distance from authority types. Nothing worse than some self-important jackass trying to tell you what to do.” She attempted to bend over to pick up her clothes, but bound up as she was, she ended up knocking them off the chair and onto the floor.

  “Hold up,” I said.

  I grabbed the jacket she’d ditched last night along with a big plastic bag and stuffed everything inside. I worked the bag up to her shoulder, and she held her arm up to keep it from sliding off again. Before I could ask any more questions, Riley shuffled to the door.

  “Gotta scoot. You call me if you need anything,” she said on her way out.

  I couldn’t stop myself from fishing for more information during the rest of my afternoon appointments. None of the actors knew any more about Jack Gates than I did. They shared even less about the mysterious owner of Howl.

  I stayed in the shop later than usual, trying to distract myself. When I did go upstairs, the apartment was quiet. I went to bed early, but every time I closed my eyes, I pictured Jack Gates’ face. Even though I told myself it was none of my business, I lay awake, wondering who would have had it out for him enough to cut his throat in a crowded haunted house. How many enemies could an entertainment reporter for The Kansas City Star make?

  After a couple hours of tossing and turning, I reached for my ratty terrycloth robe, the one concession in an otherwise fabulous wardrobe, and reluctantly climbed out of bed. At this rate, I wasn’t going to get any sleep. I decided I might as well make good use of the time. What harm was there in satisfying my curiosity? I brewed a fresh pot of coffee and waited for my computer to boot up.

  A quick search for “Jack Gates” revealed multiple pages of hits, which wasn’t all that surprising, since he was a reporter. The first page was dominated by his death. Although KCMO was no stranger to murders, this one was splashy enough to garner a lot of local media attention. I waded through a few articles and video clips. The clips were variations of the same theme. A perfectly manicured woman, usually blonde, held a microphone in front of the hazy entrance to Howl and narrated the few details they knew, all while a professional-looking headshot of Gates was inset on the screen. The haunted house, the reporter would announce, had “no comment,” and the investigation, according to police, was “ongoing.” Standard murder fare, followed, of course, by a lineup of eager customers clamoring for ten seconds of fame. Sometimes, people were gross.

  Rather than get bogged down in his death, I turned my attention to Jack’s life. Whether I wanted to admit it or not, I was looking for potential motives for his murder. I found the published review of Howl easily enough. “Kansas City is known for two things: Barbecue and haunted houses,” it read. He wasn’t wrong. The review was what you’d expect of a profile of a haunted house. It was descriptive enough to pull in some new visitors and nostalgic enough to lure old ones back for a yearly reunion.

  If I were the owner of Howl, I’d be pleased at the free advertising the piece provided. I scanned for an owner’s name, but it wasn’t listed anywhere in the article. The only names I could find were the names of customers providing feel-good quotes. Apparently, Howl was “world-class entertainment” and “the best show in town.”

  There was a photo of a forty-something-year-old man with a receding hairline who was standing next to the entrance, looking up in mock horror at a looming werewolf on stilts. Next to the photo was a quote labeling him as a regular. Leon Matthews proclaimed Howl as “the only adrenaline rush in town that won’t land you in prison.”

  I snorted coffee out my nose. Not anymore.

  I looked through the headlines on the next couple pages, focusing on those authored by Gates. Most were fluff pieces: restaurant openings, wedding venues, the local music scene. Nothing remotely worth killing over.

  Despite the second cup of Joe, my eyes were burning. It was going to take more than a thirty-minute Google search to give me a lead, not that I was looking for one. A case this sensational would hopefully find a quick resolution, one that didn’t require anything more of me than the police statement I’d already given. I headed to bed, exhausted enough that I might actually be able to fall asleep and leave the sleuthing for the police.

  The next time I saw Jack Gates, I was elbow deep in cantaloupe. Given the sad state of my nearly empty refrigerator, I’d made a run to the closest grocery store. I had one objective: to load up on fruits and vegetables that would slowly rot in my crisper drawer before I threw them out, then repeat the whole cycle again in a few weeks. While I’d never been the homemaker type, there was something about a crisis that sent me to the produce aisle.

  As I diligently tap, tap, tapped the bottoms of the cantaloupe with my pilfered penny and lifted them one by one to my nose to sniff out the ripest fruit, I glanced up to see a familiar face hovering in the aisle. Startled, I dropped the cantaloupe but managed to hold on to the coin. Before I could catch it, the cantaloupe hit the polished cement floor, splitting the rind and exposing the light orange flesh inside, the stringy, slick seeds landing on my shoe.

  The woman next to me looked at the fruit splattered across the floor and pursed her lips in disapproval. A little boy leaned out of the school bus cart his mother was pushing him in and laughed, his small hand reaching for the splattered fruit as he passed. I ignored them both, keeping Jack Gates in my sights. For his part, Gates’ gaze never wavered, locked as it was on my own.

  I knew that if I spoke to him, if I gestured for Gates to leave, the woman still glaring at the mess would give me that look of pity people reserved for the crazy and the homeless before walking away. The boy, still
trailing his hand out the side window of his little school bus wouldn’t so much as brush Gates’ pant leg as he went by him. By now, I’d had plenty of practice learning why I should keep ghost sightings to myself.

  Although my body was primed for escape, I stayed where I was, ignoring the fruit carcass squishing under my feet. I studied Jack Gates as intently as he watched me. I concentrated on my breathing, trying to maintain calm, and on the coin, pressing into my palm. I traced the familiar outline of Abraham Lincoln’s face, the surface warming beneath my thumb. With the stand of fruit between us, I watched Gates as people milled around us.

  The last year, devoid of dead people trailing after me, had lulled me into a false sense of security. I had thought, optimistically, that moving from Chicago to Kansas City had given me the possibility of a normal life. As I looked at Gates, I knew that some things were inevitable, and that death would always follow me.

  For a second, I considered bending over and picking up the sticky fruit from the floor, smiling sheepishly at the other shoppers. I imagined turning my back on Gates and pretending I was like everyone else, that I didn’t see him there in the grocery aisle. I thought about burying the coin inside the busted cantaloupe, shoving the metal so deep into the flesh that I wouldn’t be able to find it again. I could walk away from this, from him.

  But in the end, I did none of those things. I’d learned years ago that no matter how much I pretended not to see them, if they appeared more than once, they were likely going to stick around. Once the bond had been forged, most ghosts would stay tethered to me like a ball on a chain until I solved whatever kept them tied to this world.

  Ms. Granger, the elderly neighbor who fell down a flight of stairs leaving her apartment when I was in tenth grade haunted me until I harassed the maintenance guy into fixing the loose board that had caused her fall. Others I acknowledged had wanted simple things: a retraction of words hurled in anger, a new job for a struggling mother, the completion of a half-done crossword puzzle. Given that I’d stumbled on Jack Gates’ body nestled in a pool of his own blood, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what he wanted. Justice was the long game.

  Until now, the only ghost who had turned to me for justice was my sister Claire. In the weeks after her death, she’d show up in the bedroom we’d shared since we were kids or in the kitchen where we had bickered over the last bowl of cereal. She didn’t speak at first, either, just pleaded with those brown eyes that I knew better than my own. At first, I thought she stuck around because I hadn’t been ready to let her go. When she finally spoke, though, it was to ask for the one thing that only I could get for her: justice.

  Everyone else was content to believe her death a tragic accident, the product of a drunk driver. But I knew better. Over and over, Claire relived with me the moments before her death and the details about the man who had been driving. She told me how he waited until she was in the crosswalk to accelerate, how he swerved to make certain he hit her. She described the way he had smiled right before the grill of his SUV struck her body.

  No matter who I told or how much I begged them to search for her killer, no one listened. I failed her, and eventually, I lost her all over again.

  Now here I was, looking at another pair of pleading brown eyes. Ignoring the man who bent down to clean up the cantaloupe, I watched Jack instead. Since we were going to be fast friends whether I liked it or not, I might as well drop the formalities and consider us on a first-name basis.

  Although Jack still couldn’t speak, I could read his lips: “Help me.” He formed the words twice, and then waited, watching to see what I’d do.

  I thought about all the reasons I should walk away: the fresh start I’d chased halfway across the country and the fact that I was the last person he should turn to for justice. But when I closed my eyes, it wasn’t Jack’s face I saw. Before I could second-guess myself, I answered him.

  “I’ll help you.”

  Jack stayed for another second before he nodded and disappeared.

  The man still cleaning up the fruit looked at me, assuming I had been talking to him. Sighing, I dropped the penny back into my pocket and bent down to help him. Once the fruit was picked up, I left the store empty-handed. No amount of produce was going to help me navigate this crisis.

  I wanted to believe this time would be different. No one doubted Jack was murdered. It was a high-profile case, and the police would probably announce an arrest soon. Worst case, I’d babysit a ghost for a few days while they wrapped up the investigation, and then I’d get back to my life.

  I climbed in the driver’s side of my 1979 Volkswagen Beetle convertible, a surprise gift from my grandmother’s will. Although she had paid a mechanic for a rebuilt engine and a new lemon-yellow paint job, the car was as finicky as she had been, so I always held my breath when I started it.

  My cell phone rang before I left the parking lot, the theme song from The Wizard of Oz announcing Emma’s call. “Hey Em.”

  “Kali.” Her voice sounded weird, tired and wary. “I should have checked on you last night. I’m sorry.”

  I didn’t doubt her sincerity. Emma was a dyed-in-the-wool Midwesterner, the kind of Kansas nice that had become a Hollywood trope, except on Emma, it always felt believable. When I first met Emma, she had walked into my shop asking if I could transform her into a medieval fairy princess for the Renaissance Festival. With her golden hair, like wheat ripening in the field, and her bright blue eyes, all that was left for me to do was dress her in silk and gauze.

  “It’s okay. I’m okay,” I assured her. “Are you all right?” I asked, even though I knew she wasn’t.

  Death rarely touched women like Emma. When death did come calling, it was a heroic boyfriend draped in the American flag or a great-grandmother who lay wrapped in talc and rose water, resting after a long and gentle life. It came as a condolence card, a version of sacrifice, or the natural order. It certainly wasn’t like the death that kept finding me. I couldn’t help but think that if it weren’t for me, maybe she would have been untouched by this death, too.

  Emma was quiet, as if she was searching for just the right words. She cleared her throat. “Do you want me to come over tonight?”

  I didn’t expect it. As soon as we found Jack’s body, I recognized the shift, the inevitable pulling away point in our relationship. Ghosts were great for campfires and slumber parties, but when dead people started turning up in your life, it was only a matter of time before your friends ran the other direction.

  It had happened with the theater kids I’d hung out with before my sister’s death and with the hellraisers I befriended after. And it repeated with the business students I gravitated toward in college. Bonding over the hot guy in Business Math got you invited out for drinks. Mentioning the dead marketing professor who hung out by the vending machines was met with uncomfortable silence.

  The only friendships that lasted were the ones I kept light-hearted, centered around girls’ nights and pedicures, oblivious to the stench of death that clung to me like a rancid perfume. I didn’t have a lot of practice with postmortem friendships, and it took me a second to respond.

  “Are you sure?” I hated how my voice sounded, desperate and vulnerable, so I kept talking. “I mean, yeah. What time?”

  “6:30,” she said. “Order some pizza, double-cheese. I’ll pick the movie.”

  “Deal.”

  I hung up, battling the stupid lump in my throat. I’d figure out how I was going to deal with Jack Gates later; for now, my priority was getting myself together enough to leave the grocery store parking lot. It had been a long time since I’d cried, and I wasn’t ready to open the floodgates yet.

  CHAPTER 5

  The quiet moments were the hardest. It was when the foot traffic died down, when I had nothing else to focus on, that the weight of what I’d promised Jack bore down on me. I coped the only way I knew how: by throwing myself into my work.

  The back of my shop was set up for costume construction. After collecting what I needed, I got busy on one of the special-order costumes I was working on. My current project was a Queen of Hearts costume. By the time Bennie sauntered in, I’d sewn and ripped out the same seam three times. Clearly, post crime scene sewing wasn’t my strong suit. I was happy for the distraction.