A Little More Dead Read online

  “Yeah,” I said. “There’s nothing like nearly being murdered every day of your afterlife to change your perspective.”

  I’d been dead nearly three weeks and pretty much for the first fortnight I’d found a dead body every other day. Most of the time they’d been stuffed in my locker and stained my work uniforms, but now I had a new locker that only Sabrina knew about. Hopefully that meant no more stained uniforms and no more being a murder suspect.

  “Suppose.” Lucy inclined her head, her curtain of dark hair extensions falling forward over her shoulder. She heaved them back and out of her way in annoyance. “I just liked mean you better.”

  “Yeah, me too.” I nodded, though I wasn’t actually sure if that was true. “Now, tell me everything you know about Katie. What’s the big deal? What was with all the screaming?”

  “Didn’t Oz tell you?” Pam asked.

  “Oz told me she failed her assessment and was sent to a readjustment centre. She failed that process too, which I didn’t think was possible, and is now classed as a poltergeist – a ghost serial killer.” I paused and thought about that for a moment. “And now I’m saying it out loud it seems like an odd leap to make. You fail a couple of assessments and you’re branded a serial killer. I assumed he meant potential serial killer, but that wasn’t what he said. Which is weird. He also made me promise not to talk to any of you about it because he said you’d all get upset, but now I’m getting the feeling there was an ulterior motive.” I looked around the table at the shifty expressions. “Is that what happened?”

  “If that’s what Oz told you …” Pam shrugged and let the sentence trail off, still not meeting my eyes.

  I looked around the counter. Nobody would meet my eyes. “Oh, come on, guys, give me something.”

  “She tried to kill Petal,” Lucy said with a matter-of-fact tone usually reserved for stating something innocuous, like the fact it was going to rain tomorrow.

  I blinked, as if that would somehow help my brain process that comment faster. “I’m sorry, Lucy. What did you say?”

  Petal lifted her gaze from the table and looked me square in the eyes. “She said Katie nearly murdered me.”

  I blinked again. It still didn’t help with the brain processing speed. I looked between the three of them, waiting for someone to say “Gotcha”. Nobody did. I opened my mouth to speak but it took several seconds for the words to actually find their way out. “She tried to murder you? She tried to murder Petal? Are you serious right now?”

  A flurry of tears rolled over Petal’s cheeks as if it were a race and they were all desperate to win.

  “No.” I gestured for Pam to sit back down when she moved to comfort Petal. “Petal, you tell me right this second what happened.”

  Pam hesitated and then climbed down off her stool and reached for Petal again. “She’s upset—”

  I pointed to Pam’s vacant seat. “Pam. Sit back down. Petal. Explain that last comment. Cry if you need to, but explain.” I handed her a tissue and waited.

  “I think mean Bridget is back,” Lucy mumbled.

  I didn’t respond. I gave her my best quelling look. One, in my old life as an event planner, I usually reserved for Bridezillas who were getting on my last nerve.

  Lucy looked back down at her untouched cake. “Yep, she’s definitely back.”

  “You did say you liked her better,” Pam mumbled as she hopped back up onto her stool with more agility than I’d ever known. Pam reached across the counter and patted Petal’s hand, giving her an encouraging nod. “Tell Bridget what happened.”

  Petal swiped at her tear-crowded cheek. “I was in Katie’s room waiting for her to get home. She’d only just scraped through her adjustment assessment and it was the end of her first week back at work—”

  “Oz told me she failed her assessment.” I looked around at the three faces. Again, not one would meet my eyes. “Right. So he lied. I’m sorry to interrupt, Petal, carry on.”

  “I wanted her to have a happy face to come home to. I was waiting a while so I thought I’d be helpful and rearrange all her lipsticks for her. They were all red but slightly different shades. I was trying to put them in an order for her, like light to dark. I thought that would be helpful. But she was upset when she found me in there. She said some really mean things to me … and I told her it was okay and that I knew she didn’t mean it, and then … and then …” Petal pressed the back of her hand to her mouth to cover a sob and Pam was once again up and out of her seat. I didn’t say anything. I just snapped my fingers and pointed back at her stool. Pam paused, scowled at me, but sat back down.

  “And then what, Petal?” I asked.

  Petal swiped at her tears. She looked up at me, her eyes red and swollen. It was all I could do not to wince at the sight. See, this is why I was reluctant to cry. Yeah, you might get your own way in an argument, but it took so long for the puffiness around the eyes to lessen.

  “And then she tried to strangle me.”

  “She tried to strangle you?” I dropped my fork. The clatter as it hit my plate was the only sound around the kitchen. I’d assumed the whole “she tried to murder Petal” thing had been an exaggeration and Katie had just thrown a cup at Petal or shoved her really hard and Petal had tripped down the last three stairs or something. Not a “she wrapped her hands around my neck and tried to choke the afterlife out of me” type deal.

  Petal shook her head quickly. “She wasn’t trying to kill me or anything. Katie was a nice person. I think she was just tired and I was talking too much. I was messing with her makeup. It was really my fault. I felt so bad when Oz sent her away.”

  I got up from my seat and grabbed the chopping board, a clean knife and the cucumber from the fridge. “Okay, Petal, this is not your fault. It’s the fault of the crazy person who tried to strangle you.” I cut several slices and put them on a plate before returning the cucumber back to the fridge.

  Petal shook her head. “No, it was. If—”

  “Be quiet,” I said, pointing the knife at her before tossing it in the sink with the chopping board. “I can learn to tolerate your eternal peppiness, your fondness of hugs, your unwavering enthusiasm, your reciting dialogue from films, your perpetual happiness, yada yada yada. However, I absolutely will not tolerate you assuming blame for the actions of other people. Do you understand me? Everyone must be held accountable for their own actions. I mean, do you hear me whining about my community service?”

  “You do whine about it a bit,” Lucy said quietly.

  “Maybe to you,” Pam mumbled. “She whines about it a lot to me.”

  “Actually, she whines about it a lot to me too but I didn’t want to undermine her because she was sort of making a good point,” Lucy mumbled back.

  “Hey!” I slapped the cucumber plate on the tabletop to get everyone’s attention. “The point here, Petal, is that if someone, anyone, wraps their hands around your throat you have numerous options. You can beat the afterlife out of them until they take their unwelcome hands off you. If you can’t do that then you scream for us and we’ll beat the afterlife out of them. If you’re not happy with either of those choices you could, of course, call Oz or the police, or even the GBs. But there is absolutely no option here for you to blame yourself. Am I clear?”

  Petal jumped off her stool and threw her arms around me and hugged me so tightly I was sure I felt a rib crack. “I love you, Bridget.”

  I patted her back. “I love you too, now get off me.”

  Petal sat back in her seat and a munching caught my attention.

  “What are you doing?” I asked Pam.

  Pam looked down at her cucumber-topped chocolate cake. “What?”

  “Why is there cucumber on top of your cake?”

  “I thought you’d cut them to make our cake healthier.” Pam looked from me to her cake and then back again. “Didn’t you?”

  I stared at Pam, thinking she was joking. She wasn’t. “They were to reduce the puffiness and soothe her eyes,�
� I said, pointing to Petal’s face.

  “Oh.” Pam bit her lip and pulled a slice of cucumber from her cake, one side smothered in chocolate frosting, and handed it to Petal. “Sorry.”

  “What world did you people live in before you died?” I asked in horror as Petal licked the chocolate frosting off the cucumber slice before placing it over her left eye. “How do you not know this stuff?”

  Pam shrugged, pulled off a second piece of cucumber, licked the frosting off and then handed it to Petal.

  “Do not put that on your face,” I said, taking it from her hand and dropping it back on the plate. I plucked the other slice from her eye. It had left an almost-perfect ring of chocolate from the edge of the cucumber slice.

  I looked at my three housemates, Petal with her chocolate eye ring happily eating her cake, Pam hungrily staring at the sliced cucumber and Lucy trying to sneak a chunk of Pam’s cake while she wasn’t looking, despite still having plenty of her own left. These were my housemates. I adjusted my fringe and wondered if this was what being a parent was like. I was sure I never gave my mam this much trouble.

  “Okay, so Katie attempted to strangle Petal but she didn’t actually kill anyone?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, she killed a whole heap of people.” Lucy gestured to me with a fork heaped with cake. “She started with her best friend, then a couple of people from her GA group, then some messenger guy and then—”

  Pam shook her head. “No, the messenger guy was a rumour.”

  “No. She totally killed him.” Lucy corrected.

  Petal shook her head. “I thought it was—”

  “Hey!” I slapped the countertop to get their attention.

  “What?” Lucy asked before shovelling some more cake in her mouth.

  “How many people did she kill?” I asked.

  “Nine,” said Lucy.

  “One,” said Petal.

  “Three and a half. The half being Petal,” Pam explained. “Nine was a rumour and Petal’s trying to be nice.”

  I exhaled slowly, regaining my patience. Finally, a straight answer. Not an answer I particularly wanted but beggars couldn’t be choosy. “How did they catch her?”

  Lucy pointed her fork at me. “That detective that’s always trying to arrest you for something caught her.”

  “Oz said they’d suspected her of the other three murders but didn’t have enough proof until she tried to kill Petal,” Pam added.

  “And Oz just let her continue living here when the police suspected her of murdering people?” I asked.

  “He lets you live here,” Pam pointed out.

  I thought about that for a moment and then nodded. “Touché. But how was her attacking Petal proof of the other murders?”

  “We’re not detectives,” Lucy said. “And have you tried to get information out of Oz that he doesn’t want to tell you?”

  I nodded. “Once again, touché.”

  Before I could try to extract any other nuggets of information, the phone vibrated on the counter. I checked the text and moved to peer out of the kitchen window at the long garden. There was definite movement by the weeping willow tree at the far end.

  “Sabrina’s here.” I moved to unlock the bolts from the back door.

  On discovering a homicidal crazy person who used to live in our house had escaped, and after watching Oz double-check all the window and door locks, and after Sabrina’s colourful imagery of our gruesome demises, I’d thought it wise to have some way to defend ourselves so I’d asked Sabrina to bring over some of the non-lethal kind of self-defence stuff.

  Lucy darted over to the door and grabbed my wrists before I could open it. “Are you sure it’s her?”

  I jerked my head in the direction of the tree since Lucy had my hands accounted for. “Well, there’s a figure where she said she was waiting, so, yeah.”

  “That might be Katie.” Pam shuffled behind Lucy, adding another layer of human barricade to the doorway.

  “Okay. Let’s not get overexcited,” I said, extricating my wrists from Lucy’s hold. I placed my hands on Pam’s upper arms and shuffled her to the side so I could get through the door.

  Pam jabbed a finger in the direction of the weeping willow. “That could be Katie in disguise. Here to murder us in our beds.”

  “Then I guess it’s a good job we’re not in our beds. And there’s four of us and one of her,” I said and gestured at all of us. “If it is Katie and not Sabrina I’m pretty sure we can take her. Even if she is crazy.”

  “I’m with you, Bridget.” Petal put her hand on my shoulder. “Let’s go get her.”

  We all turned to stare at Petal. Lucy snapped her fingers to get my attention and pointed to Petal. “Did you inject her with something when you hugged her?”

  The phone vibrated on the counter. I read the text. “It’s Sabrina. Let’s go.”

  Lucy gripped my wrist. “It could still be Katie. She could have put Sabrina in that wood chipper to fertilise that farm and stolen her phone.”

  I removed Lucy’s grip from my hand. “It’s Sabrina.”

  “But how can you be sure?” Pam persisted.

  “I’m sure, okay?” I said.

  “But how?” Lucy grabbed both of my wrists and shook them, her red talons digging into my skin. “It could still be a trap!”

  “Okay.” I was losing my temper and fast. Mean Bridget was about to come back out any second. I prised Lucy’s hands off me and rubbed my wrists. “You stay here. I’ll go on my own.”

  Petal stood behind me. “I’m coming. I’ve got your back, Bridget.”

  Pam blocked the doorway again and pointed to Petal. “What did you do to her?”

  Petal lifted her chin and the fluffy blonde mane she called hair floated around her head like a cloud. “She accepted me. Let’s go, Bridget.”

  I gave Pam a shrug. I had no clue what was going on with Petal but as long as she wasn’t standing in my way I was good with it.

  Lucy plastered herself across the doorway, effectively pinning Pam between her and the door and nearly suffocating Pam with her hair. “I’m pretty sure she’s accepted us all but that’s no reason to run blindly into Katie’s evil clutches so she can stab us all to death with a twig.”

  The phone vibrated in my hand again. I read the text.

  “What now? Is fake Sabrina still trying to lure us outside?” Lucy crossed her arms, still blocking the doorway, oblivious to Pam suffocating under her wall of hair. I held the phone up so she could read the message. Her eyes widened. “Well, that’s just rude.”

  “What did it say?” Pam asked as Lucy moved away from the doorway.

  Lucy flipped her long hair. “I don’t feel comfortable repeating it.”

  Pam edged away, following Lucy, and I undid the bolts. I stepped onto the patio. I was about to turn around and tell them to keep the door locked if they were staying inside but then I felt all three of them crowding my back.

  “Please tell me one of you closed the door?” I asked, without looking back.

  The click of the door closing echoed in the stillness of the night. We crept as a group along the garden. The grass was dry and, despite the time of night, the air was warm and still. Scarborough was a seaside town and usually had good summers, but in England you could never really guarantee anything when it came to the weather.

  We made it all the way to the weeping willow to find an irritated Sabrina waiting, arms folded and scowling. It would have been an intimidating sight if she’d not been wearing blue pyjama bottoms patterned with pink unicorns and a grey T-shirt, stretched a little too tightly over her ample chest, with a unicorn jumping over a rainbow. Her usually neat blonde bob was slightly dishevelled from sleep and she had a duffle bag at her bare feet.

  Pam gestured to Sabrina’s attire and opened her mouth to comment.

  Sabrina shook her head slowly. “Don’t even think about it.”

  “I like them,” I said. “They match your knife.”

  “Shut up.” She patted
her pyjama trouser pocket as if reassuring herself her unicorn-handled knife was still there. No, I didn’t know why she had a knife that boasted a unicorn handle. A smile stretched across her face as she noticed what I was wearing. “Is this part of your plan for getting new clothes?”

  “That and so I have something to sleep in that’s not my work uniform or my birthday suit.”

  Sabrina nodded. “Good plan. So I brought what you asked for and … a little extra.” Sabrina covered her mouth with the back of her hand to stifle a yawn and then reached for the bag by her feet.

  “What’s the extra?” asked Lucy as she crouched down and reached for the zip of Sabrina’s bag before Sabrina could.

  Sabrina grabbed Lucy’s hands and lifted them away. “Never touch another woman’s weapons cache.”

  I pulled Lucy up by the back of her T-shirt. “I’m sorry. She has personal boundaries issues.”

  “I can see that!” snapped Lucy, flipping her monstrous amount of hair over her shoulder again and narrowly missing hitting me in the face.

  I turned to Lucy. “I meant you.”

  “I do not have personal boundary issues.” Lucy tossed her head like a five-year-old, making sure her extensions rippled down her back.

  Petal snuck her hand through Lucy’s folded arms and cuddled up to her side. “We love you anyway.”

  “I don’t have personal boundary issues,” Lucy insisted.

  Pam raised her eyebrows at me and subtly nodded in Lucy’s direction. I was fairly sure she was implying I should apologise.

  I sighed. This was why I didn’t like being around people. You express an opinion and they get upset. You tell the truth and they get upset. You fire them for incompetence and they get upset. Then you have to apologise whether you mean it or not and the whole cycle starts over. If I was going to survive this cohabitation, and I was thinking it might be touch-and-go, I’d have to find a way to toughen them up.

  “I’m sorry, Lucy,” I said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  Lucy eyed me and spoke grudgingly. “That’s okay, I forgive you.”

  I turned back to find Sabrina grinning at me. I pursed my lips at her. “Just open the bag.”