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  Get Up and Ghost

  A Chantilly Adair

  Psychic Medium

  Cozy mystery

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Get Up and Ghost A Chantilly Adair Psychic Medium Cozy Mystery (The Chantilly Adair Psychic Medium Cozy Mystery Series)

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Acknowledgments

  About The Author

  Other Books By | Carolyn Ridder Aspenson

  Carolyn Ridder Aspenson

  COPYRIGHT MAY, 2019

  CAROLYN RIDDER ASPENSON

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

  Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

  Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

  No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

  Cover Design by Carolyn Ridder Aspenson

  Paperback Cover Design by Tatiana Villa

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.

  To keep up with Carolyn and her new releases, sign up for her mailing list at carolynridderaspenson.com

  For My Kids

  (Who never read my books and won’t ever see this!)

  Chapter One

  AGNES HAMILTON HANGED herself from a ceiling rafter of the two-story foyer of her home wearing her hand beaded wedding dress for a wedding that never happened. Lying on the ground below her was a letter from her fiancé, Josiah Dilts, saying he’d run off with another woman and planned to marry her.

  Agnes was a tomboy of sorts and could lasso a bull better than half the men in town, so not a soul dared question how a twenty-year-old woman no more than five feet tall could get a rope all the way up to a rafter like that. Her pa, John Hamilton’s ladder leaned up against the wall, and everyone in the town knew she used that, and even though she killed herself, and it was tragic, there was awe in the talk of her lassoing and roping skills ever since that fateful day in 1872.

  Her pa was the one that found her. He’d come in from a two day trip to South Carolina to her hanging there, all bloated and swollen-like. John Hamilton climbed up the ladder, reached for his little girl, and cut the rope. Rumor has it when she hit the ground, her arm came off.

  “Oh gosh, whoever wrote this didn’t understand the value of word choice.” I sighed after reading the file for Hamilton House, a historic Georgia plantation home turned restaurant in my home town of Castleberry Georgia. “I can’t believe that’s what’s written for a historic home like this.”

  Delphina Beauregard, or Del for short, the owner of Community Café, the best coffee shop this side of the Mason-Dixon Line, poured me a fresh cup of her most robust brew, Del’s Geterdone. “You talkin’ to yourself again, sugar pie?” Del came in a compact package with a head full of bleached blonde hair usually slicked back into a tight ponytail and a wrinkle-free face any woman over forty-five would kill for, and she was upwards of sixty-something. With a warrior personality and a sword-like tongue to match, people knew not to mess with her. Most people, anyway. Some hadn’t figured it out yet, but they would eventually, whether they wanted to or not.

  I stabbed my index finger onto the piece of paper. “Look at this. Who writes this stuff, kids in elementary school?”

  She gazed at the document and read it out loud. When she finished, she walked away saying, “You’re the gal with the big college diploma, you tell me.”

  I threw a packet of sugar at her backside as she sashayed away. “You’re no help.”

  She flipped around and winked at me. “I filled your cup mighty fine, didn’t I, sugar?”

  “Yes, ma’am, you sure did.” I breathed in the alluring, smoky scented coffee before taking another sip. I loved the aroma of freshly brewed steaming hot coffee, sometimes even more than the taste of the stuff itself. The fragrance wrapped around me like a warm, cozy blanket on a cold winter’s night, and was a refreshing reminder of the eventual coming of fall during the never-ending boiling summers of northern Georgia. And that’s what we were in, a never-ending bout of humid heat with temperatures topping out at ninety-eight degrees and higher every day for the past three weeks. August in Georgia was hotter than Hades. It was already the start of September, and the temperatures hadn’t even begun to cool.

  Thelma Sayers scooted her chair across the floor to my table. “What’s that you’re working on now, Chantilly?”

  Del hollered at her from behind the counter. “There you go again scratching up my floor. Why can’t you just sit in the chairs that go with the table?”

  Thelma Sayers, Del’s best friend, recently purchased a new pair of hearing aids, one of those fancy kind that probably cost more than they were worth. She adjusted the one in her right ear, the ear closest to the counter. “That’s better. I don’t want to hear that old bag yelling at me.”

  “In her defense, you’re scratching her wood floor moving the chairs on it.”

  She rolled her heavily made up eyes. “Well, that’s her problem. She knows I got me a bad sciatica, and I can’t sit in those chairs without the cushions. If she got chairs to match this one, I wouldn’t have to ruin her floor.”

  There wasn’t much I could say to that. “I’m working on the new copy for the Hamilton House.” I tucked my pencil behind my ear. “Do you know who wrote this originally?”

  She moved her large leopard print glasses, ones that went out of style in the 80s and magnified her bright blue eyeshadow and dark black eyeliner, to the tip of her nose and held the paper down her stretched out arm. “’Course I do. That’s Bubba Aldridge’s work. You remember him, don’t you?”

  I grew up in Castleberry Georgia, a cozy little town of two thousand about seventy-five miles north of Atlanta, but I went to college in Alabama—Go Auburn—and hadn’t moved back until my divorce was finalized three months ago. Twenty-seven years away was a long time, even though I’d visit my parents quite often, especially during their illnesses, but Castleberry hadn’t changed a bit.

  My parents, Hank and Addie Hansard, died within months of each other while my ex-husband and I battled out the fine print of our failed marriage.

  Thelma waved her hand in front of my face. “Honey, you in there?”

  I’d been in stare mode, lost in the memories of a happier, simpler time. “Oh, I’m sorry. No, I can’t say that I met him personally, but I certainly know of him from the historical society.”

  Thelma slurped her coffee and stared out the large café window. “Good ol’ Bubba, God rest his soul. He was a good man, and he did a lot of good things for Castleberry, that’s for sure. Never made it past the sixth grade though, what with having to take over being the man in his family and running the farm and all.”

  Way to make me feel bad there, Thelma. “I’ll just tweak it a bit, and it’ll be perfect.” I opened my laptop and created a new document titled Hamilton House and typed away.

  “Look at those fingers go.” Thelma mimicked my typing by tapping her fingers on the round Formica table top. “If I could type like you, I�
��d have three columns a week instead of one.”

  “I think one of your gossip columns is just perfect.”

  Del hollered from behind the counter. “What she means is there ain’t a soul in town that could handle reading more than one of those things you write.”

  Thelma twisted something on her hearing aid. “Did you hear that screeching? It was hurting my little ear.”

  I chuckled. “Those hearing aids work mighty fine, don’t they?”

  She pulled the one out of her right ear and set it on the table. “That ought to do the trick.”

  I giggled again and went back to my writing as she chatted away at me about the upcoming BBQ competition. “It’s going to be so much fun. I love a good barbecue.”

  When I finished the rewrite, I asked her to read it, and she offered up rave reviews. “I think you told the story well, but what about the lassoing part? You don’t mention that.”

  “I’m not sure that’s something people need to know.” I’d eliminated the mention of Agnes Hamilton taking her own life, instead only saying her father found her hanging from the rafter. Alluding to a tragic death felt more respectful to me, and I didn’t want poor Agnes Hamilton’s memory continually stained with an action that likely happened because of a clouded, broken mind.

  Thelma’s uniqueness aside, she had a kind heart. “Oh yes, I see. Nobody wants to be remembered for their mistakes.”

  Especially their last ones.

  Thelma adjusted her Dolly Parton-esque wig. So far I’d counted seven different styles; one I realized, for each day of the week. Today’s choice, an ash white up ‘do with a red and white polka dot scarf wrapped around the bun, matched perfectly with her white and red polka dot dress and red slip on sneakers. The sneakers, she’d once said, helped ease the pain of her bunions.

  Del scooted out from behind the counter, complaining about the noise in the place the entire five steps to our table. “What’s all the fuss about? You find a new place to sit all day yet, Thelma? Maybe something on the other side of Atlanta? Lord knows this place could use the quiet.”

  Thelma pushed herself up from the chair, groaning in the process, gripped the back and guided it slowly back to the other table. The metal chair legs screeching and whining as she did.

  A dark shadow floated in front of us, and I glanced out the window to see if someone was coming inside, but saw nothing. When I turned back around, the shadow was gone.

  Del shook her head. “Can’t get rid of her no matter how hard I try. Even raised the price of her drink to three dollars, but she still comes around.”

  “And I don’t pay it neither. Who pays three dollars for a cup of coffee?”

  I wondered if the three men that founded Starbucks ever asked themselves that question. “Well ladies, I hate to miss any more of this endless but highly entertaining bickering thing you two love to do, but I have to get over to the office.”

  Del grunted and mumbled while Thelma waved and hollered, “You take care now, Chantilly. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Those two women loved to hate each other, but they didn’t fool anyone. All of Castleberry knew they were the best of friends no matter how poorly they treated each other. My mother used to laugh at their antics, and I remembered the day two years ago when Thelma’s husband Charlie passed, how Mom said Delphina closed the café for a week and handled everything for Charlie’s arrangements.

  Frenemies didn’t do that kind of thing, true friends and family did, and Del and Thelma were family, no matter how much Del liked to complain.

  I walked the two blocks to the historical society on the corner of Main and Castleberry streets. The blazing hot sun beat down on my bare, pasty white arms, and I wished I’d thought to apply sunscreen before leaving home that morning. My half Irish skin and curly red hair stood the test of time, and no matter how much Vitamin D I soaked up, my freckled body just wouldn’t tan.

  Thanks, Mom, I thought. Though, to my benefit, at forty-five years old, the only wrinkles I could find on my body required me to perform circus acts in front of the mirror to see. Nobody was that flexible. I thanked my mom for that, too.

  I enjoyed the walk even though the morning temperature had already hit eighty-six, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock. The history of the buildings filling the street in the short distance was one of the reasons why I loved Castleberry, and the reason I’d chosen to take the job with the historical society. Each building shared their own hint into the past, to the lives lived before mine. The Castleberry Bank for example, was once the Volk Family home. The Volks came to Georgia from Germany in the early 1900’s hoping to make a living raising chickens. Their success in chicken farming allowed them to build a large family home in town, where the patriarch, Daniel Volk, promised his wife Clara they’d live out their lives. The story said she’d always wanted a big home in the center of town, one that everyone could walk to for parties and celebrations. Daniel gave her that wish, and after they both passed, their children sold the property to the bank. They only sold under the premise that certain rooms on the main floor and all of the lower level would remain as a museum to honor the family, and the bank kept their side of the agreement.

  I particularly admired the walk up front porch with the extra wide brick steps and the white rounded columns. The Volk home was the perfect example of Georgia history. A Plantation style, only smaller, and in the main part of town.

  Castleberry’s Main Street was what every romantic at heart wanted a small town to be. Crepe myrtle trees lined each sidewalk, providing shade for walkers and the occasional high school cross country practice run. Sometimes, when a fresh, calm breeze whipped through, the petals from the trees settled into my hair and I carried the fresh flowery scent with me the rest of the day.

  Unlike other towns, Castleberry didn’t commit what some called, crepe murder, pruning the beauties to practically nubs. The town let them grow at will, only trimming up the wild branches that blocked the way for town folk.

  Henry Getty, the tallest man in town, petitioned for the higher branches to be trimmed when a rebel branch poked him in the eye and scratched his eyeball. Henry was six feet nine inches tall, so he’d offered to do the job himself, and the City Council members let him.

  Every time I arrived at work, my heart skipped a beat, and I wanted to jump for joy. I loved my job, and I adored my office. The building itself was marked as a historical property in town, having received the honor several years prior to my coming to work there. The office was originally the home of Annabelle Castleberry, the daughter of the town’s founder, Andrew Castleberry. She’d passed the stunning two-story house, built in 1845, over to her children, and eventually it was donated to the city as a historical site and made the historical society’s offices and museum.

  The over five-thousand square feet home was indeed a historic masterpiece. Andrew Castleberry wanted the best for his daughter, and paid attention to every detail, ensuring the home out-classed every other one in town. It held all of the detailed work from the era including the tall ceilings, vast entry hall that was bigger than my kitchen and den combined, heart pine floors, and ornate trim work. The grand staircase, still the home’s original, curved up to the second floor to the society’s offices, while the first floor was used as the town museum.

  I unlocked the door, flipped the sign on it to open, and closed the door behind me. Every morning I followed a specific path, flipping on the lights in each of the museum rooms first and then headed to the kitchen to fill my water bottle. As I did, I saw someone out of the corner of my eye in the main parlor area, but when I flipped on the light, the room was empty. My head ached, a low, dull pain very likely caused from a recent trip down the last few steps of those grand stairs, but I ignored it and carried on.

  My assistant, though I preferred to call her co-worker, because I honestly felt we were a team, Olivia Castleberry, a how many greats I wasn’t sure, granddaughter of Andrew Castleberry, and a sweet young woman stood at the back counter in the ki
tchen preparing a pitcher of iced tea. “Hey, Miss Chantilly, you ready to hit the ground running today?”

  I watched the water as it filled my bottle, making sure it didn’t spill over the top. “I could be. Where are we running to?”

  “You didn’t get my text, did you?”

  I retrieved my phone from my pocket. “I did, but I forgot to turn my phone volume on, so I didn’t realize you’d sent something. Sorry about that.” I read her text. “That’s right, we’re doing a meet and greet with some of the barbecue competition people today.” The BBQ competition was just a few days away, and there was still a lot of work to do.

  “And because you’re one of the judges. You can’t forget that. The judges always participate in the meet and greets.”

  Bless her heart, Olivia had all but forced me into being a judge. Olivia and I were like fraternal twins born nineteen years apart. I was the more organized, structured twin, and she was the flighty, spacey one. Except since the tumble, I felt like we’d switched roles. “I’ll be ready, I promise.”

  She smiled. “I’ve already got our files ready. Yours is on your desk. There is a list of the committee heads, with a photograph and brief bio for each, a list of the most current applicants for the competition, which of course, I’ve also included photographs and short bios for, and the map of the layout for competition day.”

  I screwed the lid onto my water bottle. All that info sounded like overkill, but Olivia understood I’d been gone a long time, and she wanted to make sure I knew the people involved. “Wow Olivia, that’s wonderful, thank you.”

  She dismissed my appreciation with an it was nothing hand wave and placed the pitcher in the refrigerator. “How’re you feeling by the way?”

  “I’m fine. It really wasn’t anything.” She worried about my tumble, and the lump the size of a walnut on the back of my head to show for it. It hurt, but not enough to warrant a trip to the doctor.