Desperately Seeking Salvage Read online

  “So with months on your hands, why would you make a statue of an old woman who barely said anything nice to anyone?” Becker asked, sounding as perplexed as she felt.

  “I have no idea.” And she didn’t, not the foggiest. “Should we try to move it?”

  “I don’t think we’d be able to make it budge a foot before we’d be tired out. This thing is solidly constructed.” He knocked on Mrs. Buzzard’s head. “We’d have to have someone come with machinery.”

  It was a problem for another time, though, because Officer Standish walked up at that point with his patrol dog.

  “What the heck is this?” he asked in his deep voice. His dark hair was cut so close against his head it barely peeked out from under his standard-issue cop cap. “Did you put this here, Mel? That’s not funny. Mrs. Buzzard is going to whup your ass if she sees this.”

  “Come on, Standish. You were in art class with me. I can’t even make decent papier-mâché.”

  “Then what the hell is this, and why does it have a coat on?”

  He stepped forward to unzip Becker’s coat and got to it before she could stop him. “Holy Mary, Mother of God…”

  His ears turned bright red, and Mel tried everything in her power to stop the snicker from coming out of her mouth. They might have gone to school together, but that didn’t mean he ever gave her a pass on anything. Just last week he’d calmly handed her a ticket for going thirty in a twenty-five. Maybe this was karma biting him in his tight ass.

  “Yeah, you might want to close that back up before you have to cite the statue for indecent exposure.”

  He was quick with the zipper and bright red when he turned back around. “This has to be moved.”

  “Who are you going to get to move it?” Mel asked, her hands on her ample hips.

  “Whitley over at the gas station might have something to move it with.”

  She shook her head at his ridiculousness. “I doubt it. And it can’t go anywhere.” She didn’t want to move it in case its maker came back to check out the goods. Horace, a ghost attached to a compass, loved to do recon work and might just be her best bet if she could leave to get him and come back before anything else happened. “Leave it for now. I’ll nose around to see what I can find out about where it came from.”

  “I think this is a police matter,” he said in a voice that brooked no argument.

  Mel was bad at not brooking where she wasn’t supposed to. “Look, just leave it for right now, okay? I’ll come back soon with some real clothes. I promise. Then we can dress her and pretend like she was commissioned for some school thing until we find out what’s really going on.”

  Standish looked skeptical, but she kept pushing because he was near the edge of letting her have her way.

  “I promise,” she repeated. “It will be fine if we can find a dress or something. I’ll run now to get one. Just don’t touch anything.”

  His brow furrowed, but she noticed he didn’t say no.

  “Do you have anything pressing to do right now, Becker?” She glanced at him, trying for her most innocent expression.

  “Oh, no, you don’t.” He picked up his groceries from the ground. “I’m not staying here watching over the statue in case Mrs. Buzzard shows up before we get back.”

  He had a point, and she acknowledged it with a sneaky smile as Standish started edging away from the statue. She was pretty sure it wasn’t going anywhere.

  Twenty minutes later she and Becker arrived back from the local thrift store with a muumuu and a headscarf, as well as a pair of sunglasses that might just fit over the woman’s ears. It was worth a try, anyway.

  Except that when she and Becker parked back in front of the pharmacy and walked to the gazebo, Mrs. Buzzard had been joined by Mr. Foster, who was also naked and very accurate, as far as she could tell without inspecting too closely.

  Mel averted her eyes while Becker went to stand in front of the seventy-year-old man whose manly bits dangled in smooth stone.

  “Give me the muumuu for the old man. I’m not going to have my jacket touch him like it’s touching Mrs. Buzzard.”

  “You got it.” Mel shook the big flowery dress out of the recycled plastic bag and handed it over while still averting her eyes. Mr. Foster had worked at the bike shop for as long as Mel had been alive, and she certainly didn’t need a mental image of his kickstand and jingling bells.

  “It’s safe to look now,” he said. She trusted him, she really did, but she still kept her eyes almost shut when she turned around. Mr. Foster did not exactly rock the island grandmother look, but at least it was better than having to not look at his junk.

  “Where did this one come from?” she asked as she circled around it. It was the middle of the day, and no one would have had time to back up a truck, wheely a statue off, and then leave the scene of the dump before someone, anyone, would notice. No way was that possible. And yet here was another statue, thirty minutes after they’d found the first one.

  “Something is going on. This can’t be natural.” She wasn’t quite sure why she got that feeling. It wasn’t anything in the air or a spirit talking to her. Even without those things, something still felt off about these two statues, something humming in the air that made her look more closely at Mr. Foster.

  She’d been in the bike shop yesterday, and he’d had a cut above his eye that he told her he got that morning when his dog jumped up and knocked his glasses into his brow. And right there in front of her, clear as day, was the slice in his eyebrow. No way could someone have done a whole statue like this in less than twenty-four hours.

  Reaching up carefully, she felt the slice in the marble. A brief and startling flash of heat flared under her hand. Marble was cold, especially in Pennsylvania in autumn. And the sun was not out, so it couldn’t have been warmed in the sun. It had to be something else. Something more up the alley of her junkyard residents.

  Her mind started racing, and her heart along with it. “We have to get back to the house, Becker. Like now.”

  He didn’t even hesitate, the awesome man, and just led her right to her car, where he closed her door for her, then ran to his own truck.

  They were home much faster than the trip into town had taken. She ran up the porch steps and through the front door without checking to see if Becker had followed. She did hear his boots on the porch, though, and kept on going.

  Booking it down the hallway, she hooked a fast right and scrambled into her desk chair. There was an inventory on the bookshelf, and if she could find what she was looking for, then they might be dealing with a whole lot more than south-facing nipples and kickstands.

  Chapter Three

  “Can you get me a cup of coffee?” Mel asked Becker just as he walked through the doorway into the office.

  She desperately needed that coffee and the creamer. But, crap! She had forgotten the creamer in her stunned observation of the statues. She groaned. “Tell me you have creamer in that bag of groceries. Please!”

  “Of course I do.” And he went off to make her coffee.

  She sat for a moment trying to correlate all the things she wanted to do, along with whom she might have to tap to get them done.

  The junkyard had to have a way to make money somehow, since people didn’t pay them to take ghosts off their hands. This was not The Ghostbusters. Few people, if any, even knew they had a ghost. Even fewer figured out it was attached to something in their home until after that thing was gone. Her father spent days out on the road hunting down objects and bringing them in. But they still had to put groceries on the table.

  So sometimes Mel rented the ghosts out. They did far more than people realized and could be counted on to be discreet about it. She had a network of friends across the country who did something similar to what she did, or helped in some way with the business. With an email or text, she could tap a number of professionals like psychics, hunters, or mediums who would help the ghosts cross if they wanted to. But many of the ghosts enjoyed working and continu
ing to be useful after their deaths.

  There had been rogues across the centuries, of course, ghosts who were not good or helpful, but she and others like her had a way of corralling them.

  And maybe that was what she was dealing with now. As she’d run from her car, she’d put in a quick call to the school, only to find out that Mrs. Buzzard had not shown up for work today and no one seemed to know where she had gone.

  Now to find out about Mr. Foster. A few phone calls to the shops on either side of him revealed that he had been cleaning a bike for Swenzy Stevens over her lunch break, but when she came back to pick it up, he was nowhere to be found and her bike was only half done, with the wheels off and resting against the wall.

  Mel wasn’t sure what that meant. She had some ideas that she needed to explore, but only after she got her coffee.

  As if sensing her ravenous need, Becker walked in with a huge steaming mug, bless him.

  The computer was already humming, so she logged into a chat room and typed a quick question and then waited. Now she’d be able to check for answers and also concentrate on other, non-electronic, means of getting answers.

  Along with the steaming mug, Becker had brought a plate of cookies. He was certainly a keeper. She’d have to start thinking about maybe broaching the subject of moving him out to the boonies with her. They’d been together for a little over nine months now. She couldn’t leave, but maybe he’d be willing to move out to her. His veterinary clinic in town was prosperous, and she wasn’t all that far from town if there was an emergency.

  That, however, was a question for another time, since her computer had just chimed.

  Reading the message didn’t make her feel better. She’d just been told that there was every possibility she was dealing with an angry, vengeful spirit. Dana in Carson, Nevada, must have been up earlier than usual, because she’d gotten on quick enough and posted to the chat room.

  This would be a first for Mel, and she wasn’t entirely sure she was up to it. She had to be, though. Only so many statues could ring that gazebo. And only so many townspeople could disappear before things got even more out of hand. She needed to move fast, and she needed to move now. She had a rogue to find.

  Pulling up the chat room again, Mel looked for any other answers. They all seemed to point to one of two things. Either she had a rogue out there, or someone had stolen an object from the junkyard without her knowledge. Both possibilities sucked, but one was easier to determine than the other.

  Out came the inventory. It was an enormous book, faded with age and wear, its gilt-edged pages made hundreds of years ago. It catalogued every single thing in the junkyard. Some lines were crossed out—ghosts who had decided they were tired and wanted to move on. But many lines were still active, the ghosts probably playing chess out in the side yard or bowling with their heads by the chain-link fence.

  It wasn’t an easy way to keep track of who was in her sanctuary, but it was better than trying to load it all into the computer. With three hundred years of comings and goings of a variety of paperweights, vases, furniture, and random forks and spoons that for some reason the ghosts chose to connect themselves with, she would never survive that monumental task.

  The book fell to the desk with a heavy thump. She flipped it open to start at the beginning. One of the many perks of being the junkyard keeper of the dead involved tools that had been passed down for generations. One of those tools was in the top drawer of the desk. Sliding the drawer toward her, she took the small velvet pouch from its cubby, untied the string at the mouth and dumped the contents out.

  They looked like ordinary glasses from before the 1900s. The pince-nez had no arms to go around her ears and nothing more than very old glass in the wire frames. But when she hooked them on her nose, they opened up a whole new world when looking at the book.

  Hovering over her shoulder as he was, Becker wouldn’t be able to see anything, but he didn’t want to be left out, either.

  She got down to business because the way those things clamped on her nose was not always comfortable.

  How to phrase the question, though, as she looked through what pretty much amounted to a telephone book listing of the dead housed in her ghost yard?

  “I’m looking for a statue maker.”

  The book popped open to lie flat on her desk and fluttered its pages for about two minutes, going back and forth through sections and times. It landed on nothing.

  “I can’t believe we don’t have a single statue maker here.” She shoved the glasses back up on her nose.

  “What about someone who works, or worked, with marble?” Becker offered.

  “Why not?” Mel glanced back and gave him a smile. “Okay. I’m looking for someone who is capable of chiseling marble.”

  More fluttering, more shuffling back and forth fast enough to send a light breeze tousling her frosted hair. She played with the jelly bracelet on her wrist while she waited for the thing to settle down.

  The book halted suddenly, the air stilling as she looked down at the name highlighted in red. “Jameson McElroy Cleverton.”

  Well, she knew where he was because she’d rented him out in his shaving kit to Mrs. Paisley to clear her house of negative energy brought on by her family fighting during a family reunion last week. “Next.”

  More flapping followed by a slowing down, and one page at a time slid across each other. Another name was highlighted in red. “Casey Deavers.”

  Casey in his sea-glass bubble was on a trip to the Martins’ house to dust the knickknacks standing on the shelf that no one wanted to use a ladder for, ten feet above the floor. “Next.”

  One page slid slowly to the right but settled back down before it fully flipped.

  She tried to move it herself, and it was as if it had been welded to the other pages. Grabbing a letter opener from her Gem and the Holograms cup, she tried to wedge it in between the pages, but the bugger wasn’t budging.

  She slapped both hands on the desk, stared hard at the book, and said, “Show me the next.”

  The page rippled like water in a pond after a rock had been thrown, but it didn’t flip.

  “What’s going on?” Becker asked.

  She shook her head at him, not wanting to break her concentration. “Show me the next,” she said louder and with more force.

  The page wrinkled and crinkled and twisted and squirmed but didn’t actually turn.

  “Now!” she yelled like a drill sergeant.

  The page surged against the rest of the book, humping up enough for Mel to get her fingers in under it. She would see this freaking page if she had to tear the damn thing out.

  It flipped, the rest of the pages turned on top of it, and the back of the book slammed down on her hand, pinning it so tightly her fingers began to ache.

  “What the hell?” Becker stepped back.

  “Get me the phone, please,” she said trying to pull her hand out of the book. It was futile. The book just compressed harder. Her circulation was being cut off.

  “What is going on?” he asked while handing her the phone.

  “Can you hit the speed dial five?”

  He did that, too, but one eyebrow kicked up, which wasn’t surprising since her hand was caged in a book that looked like it was trying to eat her.

  “I promise to answer all your questions in just a minute.”

  The other eyebrow joined the first, high on his forehead.

  The phone rang in her ear. Mercifully Serena picked up on the second ring. “What’s up, chickie?”

  “I’m stuck in my book. What do I do?”

  Serena whistled through the phone, a long sound of disbelief. “Did you piss it off?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What happened?”

  “Do we have to go through all this? I need to get my hand out of the book before my fingers fall off. The book is clamped down around me and won’t let go.”

  “Tell it you withdraw the question.”

  But she didn’t wa
nt to withdraw the question. Whatever was in red on that page was probably the exact name she needed. Without it she had no way of knowing who to go after or what they were attached to. She’d be at a dead end.

  On the other hand, well, she’d still have her hand.

  “I withdraw the question,” she said in a clear voice, not wanting to play games when she couldn’t feel her fingertips anymore.

  The book flopped open, jumped up to dump her hand out, then slammed shut.

  But not before she had a chance to rip off just the tiniest corner of the page on the left.

  Chapter Four

  “Are you okay?” Becker paced the living room. They had moved across the hall to get away from the book for a moment while Mel got the circulation back into her fingers. Blood spots had formed on the tips, not unlike the tiny pricks she’d cleaned on her mother’s fingertips from testing her blood sugar.

  Shaking her hands up and down like she was doing jazz hands from fifth grade jazz class, she tried to get the circulation back into the hand that the book had almost taken off in its quest to keep her from seeing what had been on the damn page.

  “Well, are you?” he demanded. “You’re not going back in there until you explain to me what just happened,” Becker said from across the room, where he’d stopped pacing to take up a post on the couch between her and the room they’d just left. She didn’t think it was coincidental that he was going to make her go through him before she could go back into the office.

  “I don’t know, okay?” Massaging her fingers helped, so she started from the base of her palm and made swooping motions up to her fingertips and back to the base of her hand. “I asked for the marble worker. I knew where the first two were, but the third I couldn’t see because the book slammed shut on my hand. You saw it the same as I did.”

  “Has that ever happened before?”

  “No.”

  He frowned, but she sat strong in her chair while she nursed her injury.