All Died Out Read online

  Table of Contents

  Excerpt

  Praise for Misty Simon

  All Died Out

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  A word about the author…

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  Also available from The Wild Rose Press, Inc. and other major retailers

  Almost no one came out this way, as she was pretty much the last stop for miles, and there were easier ways to get to the next town than down her narrow two-lane country road.

  When she reached the end of the drive, sure enough there were two moving trucks, the big huge ones, not those tiny in-town movers or vans. And another one pulled up as she stood at the mailbox. The first driver blocked the sun from his eyes with the flat of his hand, nodded at her, and then spoke into a radio of some kind. What was he saying, and who was he saying it to? She had paid her taxes, and the house had been paid off years ago. This couldn’t be the county coming to move her out of her home, could it? No, it had to be something else.

  And then she heard the familiar rumble that was always the harbinger of all things that made her life a living hell. Sure enough, there was the helmet she’d come to both hope to see and dread seeing, and the loud motorcycle that always had either a treasure or some kind of mischief in the saddle bag. Her father pulled to a stop at the mailbox in a cloud of dust. When he flipped up the visor on the helmet, he smiled. “You ready for a new shipment, sweetheart?”

  Holy crap.

  Praise for Misty Simon

  POISON IVY: “I loved this book…laughing during most of it.”~Rae, My Book Addiction and More (4.5 rating)

  THE WRONG DRAWERS: “…a sass filled, one-two punch of delightfully quirky humor and intriguing mystery.” ~Jacki King, bestselling author

  WHAT’S LIFE WITHOUT THE SPRINKLES?: “...has warmth, her characters seem like real people, and her plotting drew me in…”

  ~Angie Just Read, The Romance Reviews

  “If you enjoy romance stories about two people burned by relationships gone bad…then look no further.”

  ~Xeranthemum, Long and Short Reviews (4.5 Books)

  ~*~

  Misty Simon’s books at The Wild Rose Press:

  The Kissinger Kisses Series

  What’s Life Without the Sprinkles?

  Making Room at the Inn

  Go Ahead, Make My Bouquet

  Christmas in Kissinger

  The Ivy Morris Mysteries

  Poison Ivy

  The Wrong Drawers

  Something Old, Something Dead

  Frame and Fortune

  For Love and Cheesecake

  Adventures in Ghostsitting

  Desperately Seeking Salvage

  Don’t Dream It’s Rover

  Every Death You Take

  Having a Ball

  All Died Out

  All Died Out

  by

  Misty Simon

  Adventures in Ghostsitting, Book 5

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  All Died Out

  COPYRIGHT © 2018 by Misty Simon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: [email protected]

  Cover Art by Debbie Taylor

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First Fantasy Rose Edition, 2018

  Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-2173-8

  Adventures in Ghostsitting, Book 5

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  To Nan and the whole team at The Wild Rose Press—

  I couldn't do this without you!

  Chapter One

  A rattling cookie jar was never a good thing in Mel Hargrove’s kitchen. Especially the one on top of the refrigerator.

  Mel mentally girded her loins and went to have a talk with Mrs. Hatchett, the old schoolteacher who had died decades ago and attached herself to a cookie jar, of all things. If given a choice, Mel would have thought a ruler, or a piece of chalk. A cookie jar would have been far down the list, even behind a bar of soap, which—if the rumors were true—the teacher had often used to wash out her students’ mouths if they said anything less than polite.

  And now she was rattling her jar. That could mean several different things, none of them good.

  After pulling her lace gloves tighter on her hands, Mel made sure her frosted bangs were still fanned above her forehead and went to do battle.

  “What on earth is wrong in here?” she demanded as she entered the country kitchen. Half the items in the room had someone attached to them. That was just life at the junkyard that was a sanctuary to ghosts of every age and kind. They came here to be safe and to live out their afterlives until they were ready to move on, or figured out why they couldn’t move on.

  The job to protect them in their sanctuary had been passed down through the generations, and now it was up to Mel. She didn’t mind it. In fact, she loved it, most days, but sometimes she wished Mrs. Hatchett would decide to move on to the great beyond and leave her alone.

  Speak of the ghost and she will appear.

  “There is something in my jar, Melanie, and I want it out now. As in right this minute.”

  “There’s nothing in your jar except cookies.” Ones Mrs. Hatchett guarded fiercely and rarely let Mel have, unless she was with Becker, her boyfriend; then Mrs. Hatchett became sweet as pie.

  “I want you to look. There is something in my jar, and I won’t rest until it’s gone. Now get it done, or there will be detention.”

  Mel barely held in her snicker. Mrs. Hatchett could be formidable, but even she couldn’t make Mel have detention in her own home.

  “Fine, move out of the way. I’d rather not pass through you, if it’s all the same.”

  The old ghost’s only response was to huff out a non-existent breath, but eventually she did move, and that was enough for Mel. Grabbing the jar from the top of the refrigerator, she rattled it first, under Mrs. Hatchett’s watchful eye. Nothing sounded off, but then who knew what could be in there?

  After taking the lid off, Mel peered inside. And found a royal blue velvet box. She reached her hand in to retrieve the thing. Running a finger over the familiar silver-scrolled calligraphy, she wondered how a jeweler’s box from downtown had gotten in there. She had others with things attached to them, but they were ratty and old. This one looked brand new.

  “Oh!” Mrs. Hatchett exclaimed. “Oh, my, I remember now. Put it back. Put it back right now. Oh, mercy, Becker is going to be beside himself.” The ghost flapped her arms and circled around Mel, whose eyes had started smarting. Was this what she thought it was? Had Becker bought her a ring?

  “Please, Mel, please put it back. Becker wants to surprise you, and my dotty old mind will ruin it. He’s been working on this for months.”

  Mel finally took pity on the lady and put the box back in the jar
, but only after she cracked the lid just a little bit to see something definitely sparkly and beautiful in the box. Her heart beat fiercely. Was he going to pop the question? Of course she had no doubt she’d say yes, but when was he going to do it, and was it going to kill her to wait?

  Chester, the resident ghost with all the gossip, came zooming into the kitchen, up through the floor. “Ah, Gertrude, Becker is going to be so disappointed when he finds out you let the box out of the jar.” He chuckled at his own joke.

  Mel wasn’t laughing, though, because Mrs. Hatchett truly looked distraught and lost.

  “It’s okay,” Mel promised the woman. “I won’t say anything. I’m glad he trusted you with the merchandise. I’m sure it’s beautiful.”

  Mrs. Hatchett’s eyes watered, or at least as much as they could for a ghost. That is to say, the illusion was there, but no real moisture.

  And now Mel felt worse. She had only been trying to help, and here she was with a watery ghost and a secret that it might actually kill her to keep. How was she going to stop herself from assuming every second of every day that Becker was going to pop up on his knee with the ring in his hand and words of love on his lips? She had been horrible with Christmas, and that was a specific day. She was going to have to seriously curb herself from demanding he do the deed as soon as possible so she didn’t faint from anticipation.

  “Hey, Mel, where are you?” Becker called from the front of the house, and her heart stuttered in her chest while her hands fumbled horribly. Fortunately Mumford, her beloved dog, came in and caught the box on his flat back as it spilled out of the jar. She snatched it up, shoved it into the jar, and crammed the jar back on the refrigerator just as Becker rounded the corner into the kitchen. Damn, that had been close. Mrs. Hatchett sniffed, and Chester smiled slyly. She would have to talk to both of them about the incident after she found out what Becker needed.

  “Hey, sweetie, how’s it going? How was your day? Things okay with all the dogs and cats and cows? Had to castrate anyone today?” She clamped her lips shut mid-ramble and glanced at the jar, then wanted to smack her head for that. Could she be any more obvious?

  “Uh, no, no castration, and the dogs and cats were fine.” Baffled was an adorable expression on him, but she was sad she put the look there this time. “Did you know there are two moving trucks on the side of the road out front? I wasn’t sure if they were in the right place. Should I tell them to take off?” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the main road almost a mile from the house.

  “Two trucks? Holy crap. I guess we’d better go out and check.” She really had no idea why anyone would be here with two moving trucks. Probably stuck, or missed a turn back at the stop sign. But anything to get Becker out of the kitchen, hopefully without knowing that she now knew his secret and where he kept it hidden.

  Grabbing his arm, she moved him down through the hallway and out to the front porch. They strolled down the lane with a few ghosts trailing along behind them. Almost no one came out this way, as she was pretty much the last stop for miles, and there were easier ways to get to the next town than down her narrow two-lane country road.

  When she reached the end of the drive, sure enough there were two moving trucks, the big huge ones, not those tiny in-town movers or vans. And another one pulled up as she stood at the mailbox. The first driver blocked the sun from his eyes with the flat of his hand, nodded at her, and then spoke into a radio of some kind. What was he saying, and who was he saying it to? She had paid her taxes, and the house had been paid off years ago. This couldn’t be the county coming to move her out of her home, could it? No, it had to be something else.

  And then she heard the familiar rumble that was always the harbinger of all things that made her life a living hell. Sure enough, there was the helmet she’d come to both hope to see and dread seeing, and the loud motorcycle that always had either a treasure or some kind of mischief in the saddle bag. Her father pulled to a stop at the mailbox in a cloud of dust. When he flipped up the visor on the helmet, he smiled. “You ready for a new shipment, sweetheart?”

  Holy crap.

  Chapter Two

  Mel paced in the front room of her house, waiting for her father to come in with the new, apparently enormous, shipment. Last weekend he had attended a huge estate auction. He’d never called to tell her what he bought. He certainly hadn’t warned her that hundreds of items had ghosts attached to them and were coming in, or that he’d bid on them all and won them all. Hundreds of ghosts! Where was she going to put them all? Hargrove Junkyard was big, but not that big.

  She’d figure it out once everything was unloaded. If her father ever actually let the trucks into the junkyard.

  They’d talked an hour ago, and he’d said he would be ready in about ninety minutes. He’d better step on it and get moving quick. Quick had better be real quick. She was tired of waiting. She wanted to get this done so she could spend some time with Becker, who had left for an animal emergency a half hour ago.

  It was funny, but while she had been alone for years, and fine with just the ghosts for company and the occasional interaction with townspeople if she had to get groceries, she now craved being around him. They’d been living together for a while now and had been through some wonky things with the ghosts she had in her junkyard. Since he was still hanging around, she figured maybe this was actually going to last. And that ring spoke volumes, if he’d ever give it to her…

  “You need to settle down, or you’re going to be sick,” her mother, Penny Hargrove, said from the Victrola she’d inhabited since her death. She hadn’t been ready to move on when she died, so she’d attached her spirit to the old-time record player to be able to stay with Mel in spirit, if not in life.

  “And I just can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong.” Mel kept pacing, even when her mother stood in front of her. Going through your mother was not an experience Mel would recommend, but she hadn’t had time to veer around the apparition. She shook with a chill, then made sure to move her path to the other side of the room. Not that her mother couldn’t move with her, but she hoped the woman would get the hint and not follow.

  “It’s going to be fine. You’ve had large quantities come in before. You just log them into the book and then send them out to play with the other ghosts.”

  “It’s just that all this weird stuff has been happening over the last few months, with that ghost trying to come back to life, and that woman who was possessing Dougal, and then the ghost that did her awakening in front of my eyes. I guess I’m skittish.” Mel shrugged and sat on the corner of the couch closest to the Victrola.

  “It makes sense, sweetie.” Mel’s mom stroked her hand over Mel’s cheek.

  Mel barely felt it, but a calm stole over her nonetheless. “If it makes sense, then why are you telling me that it’s all going to be okay?”

  “Making sense doesn’t mean that anything’s going to happen. Making sense means you have the feeling and then you let it go because, even if it makes sense, that doesn’t mean you should anticipate trouble. You can be ready for it, but you shouldn’t anticipate it. Like attracts like—what you put out to the Universe is what you get back. The Universe knows what you’re thinking and might give it to you just because you’re thinking it.”

  Mel snorted. “I’ll try to think happy thoughts with flying horses and romping puppies.”

  “That would be a Pegasus, dear, and your romping puppy is coming in through the kitchen.”

  Sure enough, Mumford came trotting in from the kitchen with a dog biscuit in his mouth. About a month ago, she’d lost her favorite cookie jar to the dog. Where Mrs. Hatchett kept the cookies was off limits to her, and so Mel had bought her own jar at a discount store at Halloween. It was shaped like a traditional ghost, which incidentally looked nothing like the real thing, but it still made her snicker. And at least with that one she could take a cookie out anytime she wanted. But then Becker had put dog biscuits in the jar for the dog, and she�
��d lost another place for her cookies. Though Mrs. Hatchett lived on top of the fridge, she now kept the dog biscuits under guard, too, and doled them out far more frequently than she should. As evidenced by the way the happy puppy’s belly was getting closer to the floor.

  “Mumford,” Mel said, shaking her finger at him.

  He just dropped the bone-shaped cookie and smiled, then picked it back up and came to stand at the couch. She didn’t need to lift him up, because a ghost automatically appeared to boost the spoiled dog. His legs were too short to jump up on the furniture, and Mel had thought that made her couches and chairs safe. She hadn’t counted on the ghosts being the equivalent of an apparitional elevator at his whim.

  “You know you’re not supposed to be on the furniture,” she said, knowing full well it wouldn’t make a difference.

  Dougal, the ghost attached to the dog’s collar, flowed out of his receptacle to take his place next to Mumford on the couch. “He understands perfectly, but he’s not going to listen. I had a talk with him, and he likes the couch more than that dog bed Becker brought home.”

  Mel snorted. “Of course he does. Spoiled, that’s what he is.” She smiled until she heard a truck rumbling up the drive and four ghosts zoomed into the room through various walls, all chattering about the twenty-six-foot moving truck that had just pulled in through the gate.

  “Finally!” she said to no one in particular.

  Mumford got a lift down to the carpet, then trotted along behind her as she exited the house onto the wraparound porch. It wasn’t just three trucks, though. Her father, on his motorcycle with a sidecar of small items, led four trucks down the lane. Where on earth was she going to put all these objects? To have those big trucks must mean that some of the ghosts had attached to armoires or couches. She had plenty of couches already and not enough room in the house for more bulky furniture.

  Not that she’d turn anyone away. She never had before. Hargrove Junkyard had been passed down through her family for several generations now, and they always took in any ghost who needed refuge.