The Dead Girls Detective Agency Read online

“These two”—she paused to gesture toward Lorna and Nancy—“they’re all, ‘Let’s make it easy for newbies, let them come to terms with it in their own time.’ Well, that tactic didn’t help me. In fact, nothing helped me. So here’s the truth: You’re dead. End of story. The only thing you can do is deal with it and hope you’re lucky enough to move on.”

  Tess gave me a look that practically screamed capisce? and walked out of the room, leaving Lorna and Nancy gaping after her. Outside a cab horn honked.

  “Got to say it,” Lorna said eventually. “That girl has a way with words. You’re totally dead, Charlotte.”

  And that’s when I tried to throw up. Except I couldn’t throw up anymore. I couldn’t do much of anything anymore. I, Charlotte Louise Feldman, of Twenty-One West Seventy-First Street, was, apparently, no more.

  My head was swimming. I wasn’t sure if it was the having-just-died part or the it’s-impossible-to-take-in-all-this-information part of the situation that was freaking me out the most; but on reflection, I guess it was probably the part where I was dead. That morning all I had to worry about was where to meet David for lunch, whether I’d get tickets for the portrait exhibit at the Met, and what Dad was going to say when he heard I’d flunked chemistry. Again. Now? Now I had to deal with the fact that (a) I was dead, (b) OMG, I was dead, and (c) someone really didn’t like me. As in, didn’t like me so much that they decided to murder me.

  What about my poor parents, did they even know yet? And David? Did this mean we’d broken up?

  Tears welled at the corners of my eyes. I tried my hardest not to think about the “Living,” as Nancy had called them. Come on, Charlotte, I told myself, biting down on my lip and waiting for it to hurt. But it didn’t. Hold it together. There must be a way to fix this.

  “I better show you the Door,” Nancy said, all businesslike again, desperately trying to distract me. “I know it’s a lot to take in, but we have to get moving. Every second we waste could mean we miss out on a vital clue to what happened to you and we can’t have that, or we’ll never find your Key.”

  “My what?” I asked, pressing my finger to my lip. No blood.

  “Your Key,” Lorna said. “Don’t worry, it’s taken me four years to understand all this stuff. It’s more complicated than applying a streak-free fake tan!”

  I followed Lorna and Nancy out of the room. My new room. For that moment, at least. One thing was for sure: dead or not, I wasn’t ready to leave my life behind just yet.

  Chapter 3

  I’D LOVE TO SAY THAT THE BIG RED DOOR—the mighty gateway to the Other Side that Tess had so kindly told me about without so much as a sit-down-this-is-major—was the most impressive thing I’d ever seen. But honestly? I’d seen more impressive entrances to clubs on the Lower East Side.

  “This,” said Nancy, with all the drama someone under five foot five could muster, “is it: the Big Red Door.”

  I politely pretended to take a moment to admire it (Mom didn’t raise me that badly), but in truth? Nancy hadn’t given me a minute to deal with the whole train/death/afterlife issue. Sure, I heard her when she said that, if we were going to find my murderer, we didn’t have time to waste, but I was too thrown to take it in. What felt like seconds ago I was standing on the subway platform. Now I was expected to be all breezy about my death and impressed by a door that might take me to some Other Side.

  “Um, wow?” I finally managed.

  You didn’t have to be a Mensa member to see how the entrance to the Other Side got its name. It was big (say, one story tall), red (wood, in case those kind of details interest you), and a door. Though it was hard to check off the last point, seeing as it was firmly shut. And apparently staying that way until I solved my murder and found my Key. Whatever that meant.

  Big Red sat—almost hidden—in an unassuming alcove just off Hotel Attesa’s main lobby. So this was what my way out of this nightmare looked like. So far, so unhelpful.

  “Run me through how it works again.” I turned to Nancy and tried to look super-interested. Maybe the sooner I got the hang of things, the sooner I’d feel less … messed up, confused, and low-level terrified.

  “Well, where shall I start?” Whether she sensed my bewildered horror or not, Nancy was clearly loving this part of her job. “Rule One: The Door can only be opened by a ghost’s personal Key. So, when we solve your murder …” She smiled as if that was a sure thing—like getting your period on the day of an important swim meet or your cell battery dying just as the guy you like finally calls. “You’ll get your Key, put it in the door and—whoosh!—off you go to the Other Side.”

  Whoosh. Just the sort of noise I imagined the entrance to the next world making.

  Finally Nancy sensed my lack of okay.

  “We have no idea how long it’s been here,” she said, desperately trying to get me involved. “It could have been around for hundreds or thousands of years in some form or other. After all, kids must have been murdered in New York ever since time began.” Nancy took a second. I got the impression that, for once, there was something she hadn’t thought through. Shocker.

  “Well, definitely since the Dutch rocked up anyway. Or the Native Americans. Or the … Or maybe even years and years before that,” Nancy finished unconvincingly.

  Super. Now she was giving me a history lesson. This was getting more and more surreal.

  “Though getting pushed under a T. rex was probably more painful than the F train,” Lorna said. She was examining the ends of her hair like a pathologist from CSI. I bet she massively regretted not booking a pre-death spa day. Imagine spending eternity with split ends or an imperfect manicure. How did she end up here? Someone spike her Mac lip gloss with cyanide?

  “Let’s start with the basics,” Nancy said. “Rule Two: In the Attesa, things work in pretty much the same way as they did when you were alive—give or take a few little changes.” From the back pocket of her pristine, pressed jeans, she produced an equally pristine, pressed booklet with The Rules typed on its front cover. It was about as thick as the length of a thumbnail.

  Nancy handed the book to me, way too eagerly for someone about to talk about my death. “Everything is covered in here”—she smiled encouragingly—“but obviously it’s my job to talk you through things too.”

  Lorna groaned.

  “As the Attesa exists in—what we assume to be—a kind of limbo, you interact with everything in here as you did when you were Living.” I looked at Nancy blankly.

  Nancy sighed. I wasn’t catching on as fast as she’d hoped. “In other words, in here, you act like you did when you were alive. So you can open this curtain, use the elevator, move these pieces of paper.” She ruffled some stuff on the table in front of the Door for effect. “Of course, as you’re a ghost now and formed of a ball of kinetic energy rather than cells, you can walk through the walls if you really want to.” She put her hand clear through the white plaster to my left. “But that’s just showing off. Oh, and before you ask, no, you can’t fly. That would be stupid.”

  Riiight, trying to find Keys to another dimension and walking through walls = fine. Flying = stupid. Of course.

  “On to Rule Three: Like I said before, the Attesa is protected, which means the Living can’t see it or us when we’re in it. When we’re outside, in the human world, the Living can’t see or hear us unless we want them to.”

  Wait a second—the Living could see us if we wanted them to? This sounded interesting.

  “But we’ll get on to that later.” Bummer. “Right now, what I really want you to see is HHQ.”

  “H-H-what?” I asked.

  Nancy led us out of Big Red’s alcove and pulled aside a velvet curtain to the left of the reception desk. Behind it was a set of winding stairs. I followed her down them, Lorna and her perfectly respectable split ends trailing behind, to a badly lit corridor below. From what I could see it was dark, dingy, like the areas of any hotel that guests weren’t meant to see. Clearly the glamour of the Attesa didn’t extend
to the lower floors. Why were we here?

  At the end of the corridor was a regular-size door. Above it was a cardboard sign with HHQ written in very neat, deliberate letters. Whoever made that sign had probably practiced writing the letters over and over to make sure they were perfect. That said, the sign’s effect was slightly ruined by being placed over the door’s original, professional hotel sign. The first and last letters (an O and an E) peeked out behind the cardboard. I decided the original sign had probably spelled out Office.

  “Now this,” said Nancy, opening the door, “this is the heart of our operation: HHQ.”

  She swung the half-wood, half-frosted-window door open a couple of feet and I squinted inside.

  The room was about twelve by twelve feet in size. More than enough to “swing a jackrabbit,” as my grandmother would have said, but certainly not as big as I’d expected from an HHQ. Whatever that was.

  Nancy walked inside and beckoned for me to join her. Three oblong windows spanned the top third of the facing wall. Through them, I saw a pair of feet walk past. I realized that, having come downstairs, those windows must be at street level with the road outside. And, from down here, you could see people’s shoes as they walked by.

  It was so weird seeing them—Mr. Nike, Ms. Stiletto, oh and hello, Mr. You-Really-Need-to-Visit-the-Shoe-Shine-Guys-in-Grand-Central—and thinking that even if they bent down right now, they couldn’t see me.

  I looked at the passing feet and wondered, Had I walked past the Attesa before? I must have. After all, there was that amazing boutique at the end of the street that always had great sales. And that basement dive bar where they never asked for ID. Even when David’s mom had just made him get a haircut and he looked, like, two years younger than the week before.

  Had some newly dead girl stared up at my sneakers as I stomped past? Wondering what kind of person stood in them? Had she thought how much easier everything had been before? Before some idiot stole her future away and she ended up in this place, trying to solve her own murder.

  I sighed and looked around the room properly. On the wall to the left of the windows was a map. A massive map of Manhattan. I leaned in more closely. Someone had drawn sharks in the Hudson (um, not cute) and put a pin in a spot labeled School on East 49th Street and Madison Avenue. Another on West 71st labeled Home. And another at the Rockefeller Center F train stop, labeled Murder Scene. And another …

  Hey, wait a minute! That was my school and my home and most definitely my murder scene. This map was all about me.

  I swallowed, even though I had nothing to gulp down. School, my apartment, the subway … those things I could deal with. But murder scene? Seeing it written out like that was so … disturbing.

  Someone had carefully tagged this map with all the places I’d visited on my last day—was that still today?—the very same person who had neatly written HHQ over the door. And I’d bet my afterlife that I knew who that was.

  “Um, Nancy, not to sound all drama queen when we’ve only just met, but this map? It’s all about me. I know it is. And it is freaking me out. What gives?” I asked.

  Nancy took a step to her left—to reveal a large blackboard behind her, opposite the map wall. Oh, great, so we were back in school. Then I read what was on it.

  17:01 Police arrive at CF’s house.

  17:04 Police enter.

  17:10 Mother of CF informed of her death.

  17:16 CF’s mother contacts her father to pass on the news.

  17:22 Police rule out foul play.

  17:30 Case closed. Cause of death: Accidental.

  “Will someone please tell me what is going on?” I heard myself say.

  “Okay, Charlotte, sit.” Nancy patted a chair beside her.

  Sit? Sit on the black couch, sit on the bed, sit on the weird spinny office chair in HHQ. “Sit” seemed to be Nancy’s default setting when I looked like I was dangerously close to fainting.

  I sat down with a thump.

  “So when I got to Hotel Attesa—two years ago now, Tess and Lorna were here, but so was another girl called Lyndsay. She was the longest resident, so she taught me some stuff, just as she’d taught Tess and Lorna when they first arrived.”

  My head was whirling more than ever.

  “Lyndsay said that, when she’d arrived, another ghost had given her the Rules book—and told her to pass it on to whoever came in next before she left.”

  So the Rules were passed down from dead girl to dead girl?

  “But the rules clearly didn’t help you solve your murder,” I said. “You’re still here.”

  “It might have,” Nancy admitted quietly. “I’m sort of ninety-nine percent sure who killed me.”

  “So why haven’t you gone through the Big Red Door?” The words tumbled out before I had a chance to worry that it might be too early to ask something like that.

  Nancy looked down at her feet, tilting her head until a wave of her thick hair fell over her face. “I guess I … I don’t want to move on yet,” she said in a small voice. “The information Lyndsay gave me when I first showed up here … well, it was invaluable to me. In helping me, um, come to terms with things. I kinda figured: if I could stick around and help other kids the way she helped me, then maybe I wouldn’t have died in vain.

  “What I’m trying to say is that I have my reasons for sticking around.” Nancy gave me a small smile. “You may find yours. Anyway! We’ve solved the murders of the last—what?” She looked at Lorna for reassurance. “Six kids who have come through these doors.”

  Six? Six? Um, that did not sound like a Series-winning stat to me.

  “It seems that when we die, some power in the Attesa takes our stories from out there”—Nancy pointed to the window where the outside world was going on as normal—“to here,” and waved the ancient-looking letter she was still holding at me. “One of these arrives just before each new ghost does. We don’t know how or who sends it, but it’s always the same. It tells us basic information: your name, how, and when you died.”

  So there was some spectral scribe out there sending letters about teenage deaths? Awesome.

  “Er, so if another one of those letter-things arrives, another dead kid is on the way?” I managed.

  “Well, yes, but—aside from our current residents—it’s not often that we have two new ghosts here at the same time. I mean, it does happen. But if you look at the New York Times murder map, around seventy-four people are unlawfully killed each year in Manhattan and only six percent are under eighteen. Which means, in theory, we get less than one new case a month. Quite a manageable workload, wouldn’t you say, Lorna?”

  I tried not to audibly gulp.

  “Now, as you can see from the board, both of your parents know,” Nancy continued, as if she were reading out a grocery list. “We did some basic recon when we got your letter before your arrival, and the police had already ruled your death an accident. That’s quick, really. Especially considering how you went.”

  “There must have been a real mess on the tracks,” Lorna said. “They shut down the F train line for a whole two hours for you. Two hours! And in rush hour.”

  My final achievement. Man, I hoped Mom was getting that put on my gravestone. “Here lies Charlotte Feldman. She pissed off commuters. A lot.”

  “Since the police have no clue you were murdered and in the absence of your murderer confessing in the next few days, finding out who pushed you is down to us,” Nancy said.

  Super. Down to a Nancy Drew wannabe, AWOL Tess, the Abercrombie model, and me. What murder squad wouldn’t want a lineup like that? I better get some posters for my bedroom wall. I was going to be here for some time.

  “That’s why Nancy calls this room HHQ,” Lorna explained with a look that said, If you thought Dead Girls Detective Agency was lame, just wait till you get a load of this one. “It’s the official dead girls’ Haunting Head Quarters.”

  Inspired. “And the map?” I asked.

  “I just put it up on the wall because
it helps me visualize a case.”

  “What about the sharks drawn in the Hudson?” I asked. Did I really want to hear the answer? Was the river haunted by some supernatural sea life they’d failed to warn me about?

  “Rule Four,” Lorna said. “Ghosts can’t travel over water. Nancy just drew those in to show that we can’t go in the river.”

  Of course. I turned to Nancy hoping she’d explain.

  “Basically, ghosts are landlocked. Who knows why? Maybe so we’ll stay in the city and concentrate on solving our cases. But if you are going to be stuck on an island, I can’t imagine a better one than Manhattan, can you?”

  Awesome—so now that I was dead and didn’t appear to have a curfew, I still couldn’t go and watch bands in Brooklyn. Double, triple, quadruple fun. Uh, unless I was about to find out that Rule 5 was that all teen ghosts did have a curfew after all.

  “So is that it then?” I asked. “Are those all the Rules? No water walking, lots of crime solving, and don’t forget to treat the hotel and everything in it like you would if you hadn’t been pushed under a subway train?”

  Nancy tucked her hair behind her ear. “Oh no, there are a load more.” She pointed to the thin red book. “I just thought I’d ease you in with the simple stuff.”

  Great.

  “And what if I don’t abide by these Rules?” I was getting sick of all the dos and don’ts. “What happens to me then? According to you, I’m already dead. How much worse can it really get?”

  Nancy looked shocked. Lorna actually looked up from her split ends. Crap. Had I gone too far?

  “Now you sound like my kinda ghoul,” a low voice dead-panned behind me.

  I swung around to see a guy with a sarcastic look on his face, leaning on the door frame. His coloring was as dark as David’s was fair. His black bangs were swept to one side, but fell across his face, threatening to obscure his green eyes. He was wearing a tight black T-shirt and black skinny jeans. Even his Adidas—which were either vintage or a proof he’d been dead a lot longer than everyone else—were black. Something in the way he looked at me made me want to put my hands over my face and hide like a kindergarten kid. Why had everyone failed to mention that there was a dead boy next door?