A Little More Dead Read online

  “I thought I told you to go to bed?”

  “You did,” I said, staying where I was. “You also told me that I look good without makeup.”

  Oz’s frown deepened. “What?”

  “I’m explaining why I don’t listen to you.” I pointed to the front door as he moved into the lounge. “Why are you double-checking the locks?”

  “I always check the locks at night.” He moved into the lounge. I followed him and watched from the lounge doorway as he checked the fastenings on the windows.

  “Yes, but you check them before you come to bed. So this is you checking them again. After Officer Leonard’s visit.”

  Oz turned to face me, his arms out to the sides. “I’m checking the house is secure. The safety of everyone in it is my responsibility. What’s your problem with that?”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Is it my imagination or are you extra touchy tonight?”

  “I’m just trying to do my job here, Bridget. That’s all,” Oz said and there was a hardness to his expression I’d not seen before.

  “Okay,” I said and drew the word out while I adjusted my fringe and finger-combed the rest of my pom-pom hair. “I’ll just leave you to it, then.”

  I backed out of the room since I didn’t really want to turn my back on Oz at that particular moment and headed into the kitchen.

  Mark and Clem, two of our housemates, had completed their ten years of parole and graduated into well-adjusted members of afterlife society, which meant they had moved out. Mark had given us a huge chocolate cake as a goodbye present. Clem had just left. I had the chocolate cake on the counter, about to cut myself a very modest slice and then I remembered calories didn’t count anymore. I felt a ridiculously huge smile spread over my face and I cut a large slice, not quite a quarter, because I wasn’t greedy, but it was close.

  In life, it would’ve taken me a week to come back from this sort of indulgence; in death, I could eat the whole thing and my clothes would still fit me in the morning. Or they would if I’d had any. My limited wardrobe momentarily dimmed my joy, but then I forked a piece of cake into my mouth and everything was okay again.

  Nearly all of my cake was gone when I felt eyes on me. I turned to find Oz leaning against the door frame, watching me. I looked from him to my cake and back again. I gestured with my fork to the cake, asking if he would like some. Maybe he wouldn’t be so grumpy with me if I shared my food with him. And there really wasn’t much left anyway.

  His lips kicked up into a small smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes and he shook his head. Something was wrong, really wrong, if cake couldn’t fix it.

  “I’m heading out for a while,” he said and moved across the kitchen to the back door. “Lock this behind me?”

  “With the deadbolts?” I asked.

  “Yep, I can tunnel directly into the kitchen, remember?” Oz said and stepped outside.

  I walked over and secured the three deadbolts. Oz had his body turned sideways to the door so he could see the garden as well as me. A heavy unease settled in my stomach, and it had nothing to do with the pound of chocolate cake I’d just devoured. It was the way his eyes swept across the shadowed lawn, not looking for something exactly, more like checking something wasn’t there. Oz turned back and gave me what I was pretty sure he thought was a reassuring smile. It wasn’t.

  “Everything is okay, Bridget. Don’t worry,” Oz said before he tunnelled away.

  “Y’know,” I wagged a finger at the empty garden, “no one ever says that unless there’s something really bad that you need to be worried about.”

  Obviously, none of the inanimate objects in the kitchen challenged that statement, so I quickly polished off the last of my cake, washed my plate and then headed back upstairs to bed. I paused at the boys’ floor and briefly considered hiding out in Oz’s room for the rest of the night, but Oz’s completely unreassuring smile flashed up in my memory. The tea and cake churned together in my tummy. I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I was wide awake now. Maybe the sugar hadn’t been the best idea, after all.

  I carried on up the stairs. My three housemates would be awake. They usually required a lot of energy. They’d use up my excess sugar and have me ready for bed again in no time.

  “No, the bathroom’s empty.” Petal’s voice came clearly through the door.

  “She’s not going to be in there.” Lucy’s voice was heavy with scorn. She must have been talking to Pam. She wouldn’t have spoken to Petal like that. Petal could be fragile. “Why would she be hiding in her own wardrobe?”

  “Don’t take that tone with me, young lady.” Pam’s voice sounded muffled. I assumed because she had her head stuck inside my empty wardrobe.

  I opened the bedroom door. Petal’s head poked around the bathroom doorway, her teenage expression hopeful and the cloud of blonde candy floss she called hair floating around her head like a halo. Pam’s head popped out from inside the wardrobe. She’d tied her grey hair up in something that had once resembled a bun. Combined with her pale blue and flowery nighty, which looked more like a sundress than sleeping attire, she gave the impression she was just coming home from a stroll by the river. Lucy stood on top of my dresser, hands on hips and bare foot tapping, scowling at everyone. She’d recently had waist-length hair extensions added to her dark hair and by the way she kept tossing her head she hadn’t quite become accustomed to the extra weight yet.

  “We were just looking for you.” Lucy’s tone made it sound like an accusation.

  I watched Pam step out of my wardrobe and Petal move into the bedroom. Lucy, however, made no move to step down from my dresser.

  “No kidding,” I said.

  “You have cobwebs up here,” Lucy informed me.

  “And you thought I’d be hiding in them?” I asked.

  “No, silly, Lucy’s scared,” Pam said.

  I looked at Lucy. She was wearing red pyjama shorts and a cherry patterned T-shirt, both of which she kept adjusting as though they itched her. I glanced over to Petal, who had the sleeves and legs of her purple-and-green check pyjamas rolled up like she was going paddling, and Pam had accessorised her nightie with a pair of green wellies.

  “Okay, what’s going on?” I asked, folding my arms. There was drama everywhere tonight, it seemed.

  “We think you have some sort of insect infestation,” Pam said.

  “What?” I retreated out of the room so fast I nearly tripped over myself. I didn’t stop until my back was pressed against the opposite wall of the landing. I stared into the sliver of the room I could see through the doorway. I was not a fan of bugs. Except bees. I liked bees. I liked their fashionable stripes and their “don’t hurt me and I won’t hurt you” mentality. “What makes you think I’m infested?” I scanned the bedroom floor from the hallway.

  “There’s this intermittent buzzing,” Pam said. “It starts and then—” Pam stopped speaking and angled her head. “There it is again.”

  Lucy squealed and stamped her feet on my dresser while Pam and Petal darted around the room, heads tilted like dogs hearing a high-pitched whistle in an open space and trying to work out which direction it was coming from. Tentatively, I stepped forward and leaned through the doorway to listen.

  I sighed, in part happy I wasn’t infested, in larger part unhappy at what could possibly be causing Sabrina to call me at this time.

  I walked into the room and across the floor to the wardrobe. It had four ornate feet which supported the bottom roughly four inches off the floor, which meant I could, on my hands and knees, reach directly under the centre of it and pull up a small section of floorboard that I’d taken a lot of sneaky time and energy to loosen.

  Lucy squealed as I reached inside the hole. “Don’t Bridget! You might lose a hand! Wait,” she said, and her tone changed, “are you wearing one of Oz’s T-shirts?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, ignoring her dramatics and pulling out a mobile phone just as it stopped vibrating.

  “He’s never offered me one o
f his T-shirts to sleep in,” Petal said, her voice thick with hurt at the perceived slight.

  “I don’t think he offered it to Bridget either.” Pam’s voice almost cooed comfort. “I think she probably stole it to make a point about her lack of clothes.”

  “Oh.” Petal sounded sufficiently mollified. “Well, she does have a point. And very nice legs. Even with the scar. It gives her an air of mystery.”

  “Thanks, Petal.” I gave her shoulder an appreciative squeeze as I moved past her to sit on the bed and check the missed calls.

  Since I’d managed to get myself in a bit of trouble in my first few weeks of being dead Oz had thought it a good idea to hire an adjustment companion for me. And because said adjustment companion would just not let me have a private conversation, I’d “borrowed” three mobile phones, one each for me, Sabrina and Edith, which we topped up regularly when Edith “borrowed” top-up cards from supermarkets. I purposely didn’t think about the repercussions when Oz found out. We’d just deal with it when it happened. And I had no doubt that, at some point, he would find out.

  Edith was the third point in the triangle of our illegal behaviour. Sabrina and I had met her when Madame Zorina, who probably made our triangle of illegal behaviour into a square, had dragged me into her life to help her clear her name as a murder suspect. Sabrina and I had helped her and been paying for it ever since. Madame Zorina was still alive and a medium. Edith was dead and an outlaw. Neither were company a well-adjusted dead person should’ve been keeping. Pretty sure that was one of the many reasons I had an adjustment companion.

  Pam pressed herself to the floor and angled her face, trying to peer beneath the wardrobe and inside the hole. “I don’t think there’s anything else in there.” Pam’s arm snaked out and reached under the wardrobe.

  “No, Pam!” Lucy screeched, her hands covering her face. “No!”

  “Such a drama queen,” Pam muttered and dipped her hand into the hole. She pulled it back out a few seconds later and pushed herself into a cross-legged position on the floor next to Petal, shaking her head. “It was just a phone.”

  “Oh.” Petal’s shoulders sagged in what looked like disappointment.

  “What’s wrong with you two?” I asked, Petal’s dismay catching my attention. “You actually wanted the house to be infected with some sort of vibrating bugs?”

  “No,” Petal dragged the word out, implying the opposite. “But it would’ve been a little exciting.”

  I arched an eyebrow at Petal. “A bug infestation is exciting to you?”

  Petal nodded energetically. “Bugs are fascinating.”

  I looked to Pam, who shrugged, and then to Lucy, who rolled her eyes and shook her head in response.

  “Are you coming down now?” I asked Lucy. “Now you know we’re bug-free.”

  “I’m good for the moment,” Lucy said, sitting down on top of the dresser, her legs dangling over the side.

  “Why do you have a phone?” Petal asked, climbing up next to me on the bed.

  “Life,” I said with a shrug and called Sabrina back. At least now I could ask her to check on the reason for Officer Leonard’s visit.

  “But we’re dead,” Petal said with a childlike confusion.

  If someone else had made that comment I’d have made some sarcastic remark about how shocked I was to learn that I was dead, but that would’ve hurt Petal’s feelings and then I’d have had to spend the night apologising, so I just patted her knee instead.

  “Finally!” Sabrina’s exasperated tone came clearly and very loudly through the speaker on the phone. I jerked it away from my ear to turn the volume down. She was talking before I had it back to my ear. “Where have you been? I’ve been calling for an hour.”

  “I was sleeping. And eating cake,” I said. “Y’know, the things you normally do at night. What’s up?” I asked and noticed that my housemates were inching oh-so-subtly closer so they could hear Sabrina’s side of the conversation.

  “Oh nothing, really,” Sabrina snapped. “I was just worrying myself sick thinking you’d been bludgeoned to death and shoved in your own locker.”

  “Oh, that’s nice. Any particular reason why?”

  “Because that’s how people kill other people here. They have no imagination. Initially, I had envisioned that you’d been shoved into a combine harvester and your remains used to fertilise a field, but then I realised that no one here has the brainpower to think up that kind of body disposal,” Sabrina explained. Pam and Petal, who had been crowding around me, pulled back a little and grimaced at each other.

  “As lovely as that imagery was, I meant why would I be dead?” I asked. There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. “Sabrina?”

  “Oz must know by now …” Sabrina said and left the sentence hanging.

  “Know what?” I asked and as soon as I had I was pretty sure I didn’t actually want to know. If it required a late night call from Sabrina it couldn’t be anything good. But I doubted she’d let me get away with pretending the connection was breaking up and just going to bed.

  Sabrina hesitated a moment longer, as if we were living in a sitcom and the director had told her to milk the silence for dramatic effect. “He must know that Katie has escaped.”

  Chapter Two

  “You were serious about the cake?” Pam said as she watched me get four plates from the cupboard and the large knife from the wooden block by the kettle.

  After the panicked screeching over Sabrina’s revelation had finally ended I’d convinced them we needed to share information, which was code for them to tell me everything they knew about Katie, since I knew pretty much nothing and their reaction was a touch excessive for the little info I did have.

  All I knew was that she had been one of Oz’s previous wards before she’d failed to adjust to the afterlife, had gone crazy and then been locked away. To me, that didn’t necessitate lots of panicked screaming on finding she’d escaped, but then I didn’t find bugs fascinating either. Even with all the screaming and Sabrina’s call I still wouldn’t have been all that concerned about Katie’s escape except Officer Leonard had considered her dangerous enough to pay a late-night visit to Oz. At least that’s what I was assuming the visit had been about. Then again, Oz had gone out and left us alone in the house so we must have been pretty safe. So was Katie dangerous or not? Something about this situation just wasn’t adding all the way up.

  If Sabrina hadn’t stressed how crazy people always return home to murder everyone they used to know I’d probably have just gone to bed. I seriously doubted Sabrina was right about Katie coming back to murder us all. I figured she had some sort of plan to find Katie and was just trying to goad me into some more illegal behaviour – but after Sabrina had painted an overly gruesome picture of me waking up amongst the dismembered limbs of my housemates I just couldn’t go back to sleep.

  “There’s never a wrong time for cake,” Petal said as she climbed onto a stool at the breakfast bar and began swinging her legs while she waited.

  “Thank you.” I waved my large knife in the air as I placed the plates on the centre island next to the cake. “Finally, someone who gets me.”

  “I think I’ll take that.” Pam slid from her stool and removed the knife from my hand. She positioned it over the cake ready to cut what looked, to me, like a slither. You wouldn’t even get a proper taste of it from that. I couldn’t bear to watch so I left them to it and returned to my tea making. And then I had to glance back in morbid fascination to see if she really was going to cut the tiniest slice.

  “Do you mind if Bridget cuts my piece?” Petal asked just as Pam pressed the knife into the chocolate frosting.

  “Why?” Pam asked in a tone that said she did mind.

  Lucy settled herself onto the stool next to Petal. “You cut healthy slices of cake whereas Bridget cuts healthy slices of cake.”

  Pam pointed the knife at Lucy. “You mean slabs.”

  I placed the four mugs of tea on the island counte
rtop and slid the knife from Pam’s hand. “I think I’ll take that.”

  Once everyone had their tea and slab of cake I got right to the point. I didn’t feel subtlety was necessary. Everyone had tea and cake after all. “So what’s the big deal about Katie?”

  All three of them choked. I watched them all struggle for air and slap each other on the back. I would remember this for future. Apparently, tea and cake did not negate the need for subtlety.

  “I don’t want to talk about Katie,” Petal said when everyone had got their breath back. She jabbed at her cake with her fork, tears already brimming in her eyes. I handed her a tissue. I was ready for the tears and I was not letting them deter me.

  “We’re going to have to.” I gave Petal’s hand a squeeze. She seemed to find those types of gestures reassuring. Apart from the occasional hug I got from Sabrina when my afterlife was in danger, which was usually on any day that ended in “y”, I wasn’t really up on the touchy-feely stuff. I actually found being touched quite offensive, so it confused me when other people were happy about it. Even welcomed it.

  Petal glanced up at me with wide, watery blue eyes. “Okay.”

  Before I knew what I was doing I climbed off my stool and quickly put my arms around Petal. Only super quick. The contact lasted less than a second. I pulled back more in shock that I’d done it than anything else. I had no idea what had come over me. It must’ve been the sugar. Too much sugar can make people act strange. Petal smiled at me as I sat back down and it was like the sun was shining out of her face.

  “I told you we just needed to wear her down.” Petal wiggled happily in her seat in a similar fashion to Sabrina when she was overexcited. Though Sabrina was usually excited about murders and lawbreaking, not hugs.

  Lucy shook her head at me in disgust. “Being dead has changed you. You used to be mean.”