At Chambeaux & Deyer Investigations, we consider taking any case that involves human/unnatural relations, and sometimes we’re hired to take the human side.
Sheyenne ushered in the new clients for their intake meeting. “Dan, Robin, this is Brad and Jackie Dorset, and their children Madison and Joshua.”
Nice-looking human family: urban (or suburban) professionals, mom, dad, and the requisite two kids, probably a golden retriever at home. However, the Norman Rockwell family portrait stopped there: All of the Dorsets looked gaunt and haggard, their eyes bloodshot, as if they hadn’t gotten sleep or a decent meal in ages. Accompanying them was a freelance medium they’d hired, but I wasn’t impressed; if the medium’s efforts had been successful, they wouldn’t be here.
Brad automatically extended his hand, not seeming to realize that I was undead. My cold grip startled him.
Robin stepped up, smiling. “We’re very pleased to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Dorset.”
“And I’m here in a professional capacity,” said the medium. “Millicent Sanchez.” She was a middle-aged woman with beautiful golden skin, and she wrapped her dark hair in a colorful red-and-green scarf. Silver hoop earrings dangled from her ears, and a crucifix the size of a deck of cards hung at her throat; so many silver bracelets lined each wrist that they looked like Slinkys crawling up her arms.
I realized that I had seen her previously. How can you forget all those silver bracelets? “We met before, Ms. Sanchez, back when I was alive. The ribbon-cutting ceremony for new wing of the Metropolitan Museum?”
She brightened. “Ah, yes, of course! I was there to summon spectral members from the guest list.”
The two Dorset children, around eight and ten years old, respectively, looked as anxious as their parents. “Could we please get on with it?” Jackie Dorset asked. “We, um, don’t have a lot of time on the parking meter.”
“We validate for the lot across the street,” Sheyenne offered. “Remember that for next time.”
We all took seats at the table in the conference room. When Joshua and Madison looked ready to burst into tears, their mother reached into her purse (which was large enough to double as a rucksack). She withdrew two handheld video games, and the children fell into contented, obsessive silence.
“Now then, what seems to be the problem?” Robin asked.
Millicent Sanchez took the lead. “The Dorsets are being haunted—and it’s not a pleasant haunting, either.”
Brad Dorset locked his fingers together and squeezed his hands, like a pumping heart. “He won’t leave us alone! We can’t get any sleep. He ruins every meal. He disrupts any gathering we have. Jackie and I can’t even go out to a restaurant.”
“We’ll never be able to get a sitter again,” the wife added.
“We don’t need a baby-sitter,” the two children said in perfect unison.
“Do you feel you’re in any physical danger from the ghost?” I interrupted.
Brad and Jackie looked at each other, surprised by the question. Jackie said, “No, of course not—it’s just Uncle Stan.”
“He was something of a pest in life,” Brad added, “and he’s worse now that he’s dead.”
Robin jotted down notes on a yellow legal pad. “Tell me about Stan.”
“We’re his only family.” Jackie sounded more sympathetic than her husband. “He sold used cars, he belonged to the Odd Fellows club. We used to have him over for dinner every Sunday because he didn’t have anyone else.”
“He was a widower, then?” Robin prompted.
“No, a lifelong bachelor,” Jackie said.
“He was gay, I think,” Brad muttered, which earned him a flash of indignation from his wife.
“He was not! He just never found the right person.”
“He certainly found us again, didn’t he?”
I could see this was an argument they’d had before.
“Stan was my mother’s only brother,” Jackie continued, looking at me. “We felt sorry for him.”
“Sunday dinner became Sunday and Wednesday,” Brad said. “Then he joined us on Friday evenings too. And then he died.”
“Was it murder?” I asked. “Anything suspicious?”
Again, Brad and Jackie Dorset blinked at each other, baffled. Brad answered, “No, he slipped on a patch of ice and split his head open on a brick planter. Just like that.”
“And he’s been haunting us ever since!” Jackie cried. “At first he thought he could go on as if nothing had changed. He popped in for Sunday dinner, then Monday and Tuesday, and all week long. After his tragic death, we were glad to see him … at first. But he’s, um, not a very good dinner companion.”
“Drank too much,” Brad said. “He always was a little hazy and wobbly.”
Jackie seemed embarrassed. “The coroner said his blood alcohol level was a little high when he slipped and hit his head.”
“Very high,” Brad corrected. “Uncle Stan could get insufferable when he was drunk. Then he died drunk—and now he’s a rambunctious and obnoxious drunk ghost.”
“I’ve tried to communicate,” said the medium. “I summoned his spirit. I spoke with him the last time he appeared uninvited for dinner.”
“I made lasagna,” Jackie said, “an old family recipe, one of Uncle Stan’s favorites.”
“We told him to go away,” Brad said. “But he wouldn’t listen. He insisted that we were his family and that he was going to be with us always.”
The two kids looked up from their video games and groaned. Madison was especially loud. “He’s a creepy old man. I don’t want him popping in and out of our house at night.”
“I can see how that would be very alarming,” Robin assured her. “We’ve found that in family disputes, the best way to solve things is through frank and open discussion. I’ve seen many cases of ghosts who hang on to their old lives and refuse to move on. Sometimes the families can get along well enough, but other times it’s just tragic for all concerned. The adjustment can be pretty painful.”
I remembered that Sheyenne had had a terrible first few days after she returned as a ghost. She tried valiantly to adjust, pretended to go on as if nothing had changed, but the loss never stopped tugging at her.
One day, not long before my own murder, Sheyenne had floated up to me with a troubled expression on her face. “Would you come with me back to my apartment? Just to have another look around, in case we find any clues?”
“I packed everything up and put it in storage,” I said. “Your landlord’s probably cleaned the place by now.”
“I know … but it’s something I’d like to do.” Her sad expression pulled at my heartstrings. “Would you go with me? Please?”
“For you, I’d go anywhere,” I said, and it was probably true.
We returned to the apartment building where she had lived while going to med school and working at Basilisk to pay the bills. She drifted beside me up the steps to the entrance.
I had an odd déjà vu of the night we’d strolled here after our date, the two of us in light conversation, occasionally and then more frequently bumping against each other as we walked along, finally holding hands. Every unnatural in town had probably smelled the pheromones we exuded….
“I don’t know if I can convince your landlord to let us in,” I said. I had not made a good impression in my previous encounters with him.
“I had a spare key,” Sheyenne said. “You can use that.”
“What if he’s changed the lock by now?”
“He’s too cheap. Besides, the former tenant is dead—why would he bother?”
We went up the stairs to the second floor. The third step creaked, and I remembered it from before. We had laughed at it then. Odd how little details like that stick in your memory.
Her door was 2B (“Or not 2B?” I remembered my Hamlet joke from that night). The hall floor was covered with weathered peel-and-press carpet squares. Sheyenne bent down and lifted the corner of one with a ghostly hand to reveal her spare key. “I knew it’d still be here.” She handed me the key, and I inserted it into the lock. Sheyenne, being a ghost, simply melted through the door, eager to see what she could find.
As I turned the knob, I heard startled yelps from inside. I pushed the door open, afraid Sheyenne was in trouble—and saw a terrified Korean family seated around a table playing dominoes. Parents, three kids, and an old grandfather.
“What are you doing here?” Sheyenne demanded.
Upon entering the apartment, I experienced a flood of memories, and not the good ones … not memories of how Sheyenne and I had started kissing as soon as we passed through the door, not the memory of her low-lit bedroom down the hall. No, what I remembered was when the landlord and I had found her sprawled and dying on the living room floor, already jaundiced and emaciated, too weak to move from the toadstool toxin.
This Korean family playing a game of dominoes did not fit the picture.
The three children screamed—not an unexpected reaction when a ghost floats through the wall and a strange man barges through the door. The father and grandfather stood together, ready to defend their home; the mother gathered her children. One young boy grabbed a handful of domino tiles and hurled them at me. “Go away!”
“He’s rented it already, Spooky,” I said. Her landlord had wasted no time. “This isn’t your place anymore.”
“But there’s got to be a clue in here. I know we missed something!”
I apologized to the terrified Korean family. “We’re very sorry. We didn’t mean to intrude. Wrong address.”
Dying had been hard enough for Sheyenne. Then she had to confront the fact that all the everyday details of her life were quickly and completely erased.
Yes, I could understand why Uncle Stan would try to cling to his lost loved ones. But he didn’t have to be obnoxious about it.
Although Brad Dorset looked skeptical about the suggestion, Robin continued, “I’ve had some successes with mediation in cases like this. While I’m not a family-practice lawyer, I am a specialist in unnatural law, and we do have many clients who are ghosts. I presume you brought the medium along so you could summon Uncle Stan?”
“I can go into a trance right here and call him.” Millicent Sanchez extended her forearms across the table so that her silver bracelets rattled. “Whenever you’re ready?”
Robin studied her yellow legal pad and double-checked her notes. “I have enough information for an initial discussion.”
Turning her hands palm up, the medium touched thumb and forefinger together and began to hum deep in her throat, as if practicing some form of Buddhist meditation.
Before she could finish her formal summons, the ghost of a chubby man appeared behind her, put both thumbs at the sides of his mouth, and stretched his lips in an inane clownish gesture. “I’m already here. I come and go when I want to!” He let out an exaggerated huff. “And I’m very offended. Jackie, you were always my favorite niece. This hurts my feelings!”
Jackie Dorset hung her head, her lip trembling as she fought back tears.
“She’s your only niece,” Brad said.
“You were never good enough for her!” The ghost loomed over Brad. “Jackie should have waited for someone better.” Uncle Stan stormed and wove around the room, fluttering papers, rattling the doorknob, setting up a spectral wind. “You’re not getting rid of me—I’m family! You have to keep me around.”
Hearing the ruckus, Sheyenne flitted through the closed door of the conference room and gave Uncle Stan a withering frown. “That’s not acceptable behavior from a ghost.” Stan huffed at her, and she was about to scold him further when the office phone rang and she whisked herself back to the receptionist’s desk.
The medium said in a thready voice, “The family respectfully requests that you leave them in peace, that you move on. Travel toward the Light.”
In response, Uncle Stan jangled her silver bracelets, then yanked off her scarf, flapping it in front of her face like a matador taunting a bull. Millicent Sanchez grabbed at the fabric, trying to snatch it out of the air, but Stan kept taunting her.
Jackie began sobbing. “Uncle Stan, stop it, stop it!”
“Sir, we’d prefer to keep this amicable, but if you persist in this unreasonable behavior, we will be forced take formal legal action,” Robin said.
“Go ahead and try!” Stan chortled. “What are you going to do, send some charlatan with a Bible and a dowsing rod? Paint the house doors red?” He stuck out his tongue, gave a loud raspberry, and flitted past the kids—who looked up in shock and dismay.
“He deleted our high scores!” wailed Joshua.
“You can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do.” Uncle Stan hiccupped, then farted—mere affectations, since no air traveled in or out of any orifice of a poltergeist. Then his ghost vanished with a popping sound.
The Dorsets looked shaken and hopeless. The medium grabbed her scarf and tied it around her hair again in an attempt to regain her dignity.
“That could have gone better,” I said.
Brad Dorset rose from his chair, upset. He glanced down at his wife. “I know he’s your uncle, but we’ve got to do something.”
She turned to Robin. “Take whatever legal action is necessary, Ms. Deyer. Make him rest in peace, so we can get some peace.”
Robin escorted them out of the conference room and to the office door. “I’m sorry about this. We’ll do everything we can.”
Sheyenne was at her desk, talking on the phone, her expression filled with alarm. She hung up. “Dan, Robin—you’ve got to get to the museum right away—they need you!”
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“It’s Ramen Ho-Tep—he’s taken hostages!”