Inside the Executive's Pocket Read online

  Chapter 2

  Highly Unusual

  A ghostly form appeared in the backseat. A darkened blur at first that slowly morphed into a young woman in her early 20s with round glasses, straight light brown hair that fell lifelessly along her shoulders, and a vertical striped, wrapped pantsuit jacket with matching pants.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  Jackson motioned to her. “Like I was trying to tell you before, our newest client haunts here in the outskirts of the Dead Forest. This is Sylvia Darcy. She was one of the victims in ‘the incident of 1978.’”

  I tried not to smile like a 20-year-old tax attorney, but I was sure I was way more eager to work with her than she was with me. I wanted to see that Dead Forest. I needed to, and channeling was a relatively safe way to do that.

  “I would love to get your help on this,” she said as I pulled back onto the road. Her voice was no-nonsense and practical. “I just want to figure out what happened, that’s all. I’ve been waiting for a strong medium for forty years.”

  I nodded. It was what all the ghosts said. I wasn’t sure why I had these strong mediumship abilities suddenly after returning to Landover, but I was trying to help as many ghosts as I could to find closure in their deaths, while also trying to rid the town of the curse that seemed to be plaguing it, and maintain a semblance of normalcy. I had a very complicated life now.

  “Tell me what you remember,” I said.

  “The woods are not what people think they are,” she began.

  “What if people think they’re a deathtrap and an all-around bad idea,” Jackson asked, unhelpfully.

  She didn’t seem to hear him. Her voice trailed off like she was lost in her own world, but then she’d probably been trapped in it since the incident happened. “I have no idea what happened that night. When I try to remember, it comes in bits and chunks.”

  “Do you think it was something paranormal?”

  “I’m not sure. Something was weird, off. But I don’t remember what. We’d all heard the rumors about the Dead Forest before. Sure. Who hasn’t? The ranchers in the late 1800s whose bones were found lined up along the perimeter. Of course, that was why we thought it’d be funny to scare Rebecca and Curtis.”

  “So you went into the woods,” I said, keeping my voice calm and relaxed even though I was desperate to know what that was like. “Tell me everything you remember. Start from the beginning.”

  She used the same drawn-out tone that Shelby used when she flew into a fit of crazy on our way to that makeup party ten years ago. I wondered briefly if just talking about the Dead Forest made people want to break into their spooky voices.

  “Like I said, I don’t remember much. It was Friday, October thirteenth, I do remember that. 1978. We’d just finished up a meeting at the Young Executives Club. Curtis and Rebecca couldn’t make it. They told Jay they were sick, but Rebecca told me the real reason. They were going to the movies.”

  Sylvia stared out the window a second. Ghosts seemed to have a very hard time pulling certain details from their memories outside of a channeling.

  The roads seemed particularly quiet today, and even the woods that weren’t technically a part of the Dead Forest seemed deadly. I knew I was just feeling jumpy from seeing the weird shadow earlier, but it was definitely an uneasy feeling I couldn’t shake.

  “Who was Jay?” I asked.

  “Jay was my boyfriend,” she said after a long pause, her voice barely rising above the sound of my wheels tumbling over potholes. “He was also the founder of the Young Executives Club.“

  “So you were an executive too?”

  “Yes. Kind of. My parents owned a roller rink. I was the CFO.” She laughed a little. “We all thought it would look good on my resume when I finished college.”

  I kept my eye on the road as she talked, taking my foot off the gas a little to slow down as I turned onto the street the Purple Pony was on. I was almost to work and I hadn’t heard too much of the story yet.

  Jackson was by my side in the passenger’s seat. He turned around. “We’ll have time to talk more about the club and the people involved later,” he said. “Skip to the gruesome part.” He nodded to me like he knew that’s what I was most interested in.

  She was trying to make her voice confident and strong, but I could still hear the undertones of fear. It must’ve been hard to go over the details again. “Rebecca told me she and Curtis were heading to the drive-in instead of the meeting. This slasher movie was playing. Texas Chainsaw Massacre. So Jay wrapped the meeting up early and we went to go scare them.”

  “Whose idea was it to go there?” I asked.

  She paused for a moment. “I don’t remember. It might’ve been mine.”

  I turned into the strip mall’s parking lot that the Purple Pony shared with a couple other small businesses, checking the time on my dashboard clock. Right on time, which meant I was going to be late because I wanted to hear more about this story.

  Sylvia was still talking. “They always parked along couples path when they went to the drive-in. Same spot too. So it was pretty easy to set up a prank.”

  I parked my car but didn’t get out.

  Sylvia went on. “There were three of us. Me, Jay, and his friend, Danny. We parked near the front of the theater because no one ever parked there. Then, we got out and snuck over to couples path.”

  I knew that was the path the police were about to go into. I had heard it was like a “lovers lane” back then.

  “Danny had an old chainsaw that didn’t work, or I don’t think it worked, and we waited behind some trees. We were maybe fifty yards inside the path, tops. And sure enough, Curt and Rebecca pulled up in Curt’s new Camaro right next to us. I guess they saw us or heard us. Who knows? We wanted them to, but I can’t remember how that happened. Curtis got out of the car, popped his trunk and pulled out a tire iron. We weren’t expecting that, and I started to get afraid that someone might get hurt.”

  “A tire iron?” I said. “I heard it was a baseball bat.”

  “So, you already know what happened then?”

  “Only the basics. You were the stuff of legend, my friend,” I said. Checking my cell phone, I realized I was going to be late if I didn’t hustle across the parking lot right this second. That didn’t necessarily mean I was going to hustle, though.

  It was my new goal in life not to let the dead affect my living anymore. I’d taken off from work, called in sick, gone in late, essentially cut my own hours for the ungrateful dead and I swore it wasn’t happening anymore. I needed this minimum wage job, no matter how “beneath me” my mother thought it was to work retail when you have two degrees.

  But I needed to hear this story. It was the story Shelby started ten years ago. The one that scared every child in Landover to this day whenever October had a Friday the 13th in it.

  “Okay, so what happened next,” I said, getting out of my car.

  “I don’t remember.”

  I practically jogged across the parking lot, lowering my voice as I did. “What do you mean you don’t remember? You have to remember something. How do you know it might not have been something paranormal that killed you if you don’t remember anything other than you all hid behind trees with a broken chainsaw?”

  “That’s where you come in, I guess.”

  “Done. We’ll talk more tonight,” I said dismissively, passing under the purple and yellow glittery unicorn that adorned the front entrance of the hippie shop I worked at.

  I was technically “late.” But then, I knew Rosalie wouldn’t mind too much.

  Sylvia hovered next to me as I walked. “Far out,” she said, pointing up at the unicorn, probably because these kinds of stores were all the rage in her day, along with the expression “far out.”

  Rosalie yelled to me as soon as she heard the wind chimes. “I’m in the back. And you’re late.”

  I walked past the potted plants and earth-toned dresses adorned in beads and fringe. The inside of the Purple Pony was
a lot different than the loud, colorful outside. It was mostly beige and understated with Oriental rugs and potted plants to break up the dresses and jewelry. The smell of incense lingered in the background.

  I hugged the 60-year-old hippie from behind as she sat on a stool, scrolling on her phone, a blue scarf dangling from her tied-back gray dreadlocks. The look on her face was somewhere in between eating a lemon and seeing a dead body.

  “Shapewear too tight?” I asked.

  “That too,” she said, pulling the waistband of her Spanx out so she could take a deeper breath.

  When I first started working here, Rosalie never wore makeup, or scarves in her hair, and she loved those shapeless dresses that let everything hang out without showing it too much. But that had all changed when she recently got back together with the man who inspired the unicorn out front. (After their breakup in the 1970s, Rosalie had been drawn to create a glittery unicorn to show everyone the beauty of moving on with your life.)

  She pointed her finger at her phone screen and grunted. “My cousin’s coming for a visit.”

  “That’s nice,” I said in almost a question.

  “No, it’s strange,” she corrected me. “Our mothers were sisters, but Jean… Jean and I were never close. I wonder what she wants. She says she’s not coming to just be social. She’s coming for business. The woman is a retired gym teacher. What business does she have? But then, she’s always been a little on the…” She paused and lowered her voice. “Unusual side.”

  I had no idea how to respond to that. Rosalie was pretty far from usual herself. We all were. This made me wonder if Jean was actually like the blonde in the Munsters. Unusual only to the weirdos.

  “Well, I can’t wait to meet her,” I said.

  “Comin’ in day after tomorrow, and get this. She’s staying at the bed and breakfast. My own cousin. I don’t know why she chose that place. Landover has some very nice motels.”

  And there it was. The real reason Rosalie seemed a little upset about the visit. She hated the owner of the bed and breakfast more than she hated most anyone else, and that probably included mass murderers and politicians.

  She motioned around the backroom. “We can’t give stuff away around here at my shop during the off-season, but that damn bed and breakfast is always filled up. My cousin said Paula wasn’t even sure she had a spot for her. How do you like that?”

  I twisted my curls into what I hoped was a cute bun. “On a good note,” I said, trying to create a positive tone. “If the B&B is booked up, that means there are a lot of tourists already coming into Landover. So, they might need a palm reading or some beaded dresses.”

  Like most everyone else around Landover Lake, the Purple Pony relied on tourists for its business.

  Rosalie considered this for a second, turning her head to the side. “No. I heard a lot of them are police officers from upstate.”

  I gulped. The ones at the Dead Forest. “I saw them when I went over to the old drive-in today with Justin,” I said. “Okay, technically, I was hiding from them because I wasn’t supposed to be there. About ten officers. A couple of dogs too.”

  “That’s a lot of officers for a missing man and his brothers,” she said, blondish gray eyebrow raised.

  She was right. It was suspicious, especially now that I knew they were staying at the bed and breakfast. Officers looking for a missing bear shifter while staying at a known bear shifter’s B&B instead of one of the motels was probably not a coincidence.

  I would never say all that to Rosalie, though. She didn’t believe in shifters. “Do you think they think there’s a connection with Bobby’s disappearance in the Dead Forest and the mysterious deaths that happened there forty years ago?” I checked my cell phone again to see if Justin had gotten back to me yet. He hadn’t.

  Rosalie put her phone down and stood up. “Those deaths weren’t mysterious. They were planned. One of that group was tried for the massacre, but the DA couldn’t prove it in court. Rebecca somebody. Total scandal. Look it up.”

  Sylvia appeared as Rosalie made her way into the next room, and the ghost followed closely behind her, looking Rosalie over from head to toe and back again, studying her almost. “I know this woman,” she finally said as she floated back to the back room where I was about to put my stuff away in the cabinet. “She was Louie’s ex-girlfriend. He was one of the members of the Young Executives Club. We did him a solid by talking him out of marrying her. He was much happier with Priscilla.”

  “Wait a second, what?” I whispered, coughing on the air I’d somehow forgotten how to inhale properly.

  “Rosalie was nice but she was always a little high-strung and…” Sylvia paused. “Unusual.”

  “So, you were behind the breakup?”

  “Who in the hell are you talking to?” Rosalie called from the front room.

  “Just my new ghost client, but it’s nothing,” I replied because there was no way I was going to tell my high-strung, unusual boss that she was high-strung and unusual.

  I hustled into the main part of the Purple Pony where Jackson was already leaning against the checkout counter, arms crossed, smug smile peeking out from his pretentious beard. “My, my. This became awkward quickly,” he said.

  I ignored him and went to the gemstone section, straightening beads that didn’t really need to be straightened. For some odd reason, my ex never liked Rosalie. To be fair, she never liked him much either.

  He went on. “I think Rosalie has a right to know that our newest client is the reason she created that glitter monster out front.” He paused to smile at my boss who was busy sifting through a rack of dresses. “And don’t forget to mention why they talked Louis Peters into breaking up with her, because she was weird and high-strung. If only there was a way I could tell her myself…”

  Rosalie watched me suspiciously from the corner of her eye. She pulled a tie-dye maxi dress from its spot along the rack and waved me over to her. “We should put this on the mannequin,” she said. “You’re right about the tourists. Probably some are already here. The Landover Ladies Club loves breezy dresses, and we should stop displaying winter stuff, anyway.”

  Sylvia hovered next to her, lifting one of Rosalie’s gray dreadlocks and plopping it back down again. Rosalie swatted at her head and looked around. “Something is going on here, huh?”

  “Like I said, I have a new ghost client. I picked her up at the Dead Forest this morning.” I admitted. “Name’s Sylvia Darcy.” I paused to see if Rosalie recognized the name. If she did, she didn’t let on. “She says she knows you.”

  Rosalie shook her head. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Sorry. But could you please tell her to quit playing with my damn hair.”

  I took the dress and went over to the window display. The current mannequin was a bright white, headless thing with fused fingers, wearing an olive green top, long Bohemian sweater, and light jeans.

  I pulled the sweater off her arms as I talked. “Sylvia was one of the victims in the incident in 1978. A member of the Young Executives Club that apparently Mr. Peters was also a member of.”

  Rosalie’s face turned whiter than the mannequin. “That was around the time Louis and I broke up. I remember that now. He proposed, and I told him I needed my space, and that he needed to get out of that club.”

  Sylvia rolled her eyes. “That’s not the way I remember it.”

  “I told him that cult was dangerous,” Rosalie continued. “And after the incident in 1978, he probably figured out that I was right. We’d already broken up by then, so I didn’t care one way or the other about the cult anymore. I had already moved on…”

  “Cult?”

  “Yeah,” Rosalie said. “They were like Hare Krishnas with sideburns and attitudes. They tried to control everything about your life back then. And once you joined, it was very hard to quit.”

  My phone beeped and I dropped the mannequin on its fused hand to pull my phone out of my back pocket.

  Justin had finally texted me back to let me
know he was okay. My shoulders relaxed, making me realize I’d been tightening them this whole time.

  We’re fine. Never saw anything strange in the forest like you described.

  I texted back that it had probably been my imagination, even though we both knew that was far from the truth.

  There was something weird going on in the Dead Forest, and it wasn’t just how many people were assigned to look for a missing man and his brothers or how many people were killed from a cult back in 1978.

  Chapter 3

  Cookies

  As soon as I got off work, I headed to the library. Mrs. Nebitt, the town librarian, stood over the “computer section,” which was basically a table with two humungous desktop computers from the 1990s. Her coke bottle glasses had fallen to the edge of her pointy nose, her lips were pursed.

  I could just see over her teased-out hair that she was helping someone. I craned my neck to see who it was. There weren’t too many people in Landover who even knew we had a library.

  A tuft of wild blonde hair peeked out from behind the librarian. I knew instantly it was Mrs. Carmichael.

  They both looked over at me when I entered and I waved to them as I unzipped my black flimsy jacket that was doing absolutely nothing for me, except making me look just as cold as I was.

  “What’re you doing here, Mrs. Carmichael?” I asked when I got to them.

  “Now, don’t you start too,” she replied, adjusting a pin around her 50s waitress hat. “Shelby just about gave me the fifth degree when I told her I was gonna be late because I was going to the library first.”

  “Third degree,” Mrs. Nebitt corrected her. Mrs. Nebitt was a small woman in her 80s who was set in her ways, and one of those ways was grammar police.

  I looked at the screen in front of them. Mrs. Carmichael had been looking up signs of dementia. I tried to look away so she wouldn’t know I noticed, but it was too late.