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Glaring, I took the die and rolled. “D.E.S.K.”
“Mother Gaga desk?” I said. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“L.O.V.E.,” Andrea said, after rolling the die. “Aw, that’s nice.”
“Love you, too,” I told her. “And please, don’t stick around this plane for me. I need to know that you’ve moved on to a better place. And that you’re happy.”
Gabriel rolled nothing but As over the next few minutes.
“It would seem your grandma took your advice,” Andrea said, nudging it with her pen.
We tried rolling the die again but ended up with more nonsense Klingon words.
“I think that’s all we’re going to get out of her. I’m sorry I put you through all this, Nola. I don’t think we got a lot of usable information,” Jane said, pushing up from the table.
Andrea grabbed her wrist and dragged her back into her chair. “Sit down!” Andrea yelped. “You don’t leave the table without closing the circle, the portal, the connection, or whatever. Otherwise, the spirit can attach itself to you like a parasite and hitch a ride to your house.”
“What movies have you been watching?” I asked.
“You are on a strict regimen of the Oprah network after this,” Jane told her. “No more Celebrity Ghost Stories for you.”
“Please?” Andrea pleaded.
“Fine,” Jane sighed, then called, “OK, spirit world, we are hereby hanging up, closing the channel. Don’t call us. We’ll call you.”
I asked, “Don’t you own a whole section of books on appropriate ritual language? And it’s not true, what you said earlier. We did learn quite a bit tonight. We learned that Nana was a closet Gaga fan.”
“What do you think she meant? Love. Mother. Gaga. Desk. Those words don’t make any sense,” Andrea complained.
“Maybe I need to look through your desk again, Jane,” I said, returning some of the candles to the display shelf.
“You looked through my desk?”
“We refinished Jane’s desk before we moved it into her office. There were no papers or anything left in the drawers,” Andrea said, squinting when I turned the lights back on.
“Are you sure your mother hasn’t taken any other objects out of the shop?” I asked, my voice trailing off as I noticed one of Jane’s photos hanging over the shelf where the candles were displayed. It showed Jane’s mother, wearing a black T-shirt with two white triangles on the chest and a logo that read, “FFOTU.” Was this more Klingon nonsense? She was standing next to the cash register with this thunderstruck expression on her face. Jane’s mama was a funny little thing. It seemed odd that Nana would mention her twice, when we’d already located the candle. What did Nana want us to know about Jane’s mother?
I looked at the picture more closely. “Hey, Jane, what’s that?”
“It’s a picture of our first meeting of the Friends and Family of the Undead. It was the first time my mother saw the shop, and Andrea wanted to capture my mother’s stunned expression when she saw how nice everything was.”
“That’s horrible,” I told Andrea.
Jane shook her head. “No, it’s fair. The moment she stepped inside, she said Andrea must have worked very hard to organize and decorate everything.” Andrea snickered when my face drooped in disbelief. Jane added, “Mama and I used to have a pretty rocky relationship.”
I poked at the photo, my hands shaking. “And that little brown blob by the cash register? The one vaguely shaped like an acorn? The one I’m pretty sure is the altar plaque representing Earth?”>I wouldn’t quibble with a vampire about the existence of ghosts. It seemed like a doomed argument. And Nana Fee had all but told me she would come back to haunt me if I didn’t accept her task. I sincerely hoped that she’d run out of postmortem steam with her otherworldly reminders and had moved on to the next plane.
“Wait, ghosts can date?”
“Apparently,” Jane said. “The pair of them stuck around for almost a year. Until they both decided that it was time for them to move on. They couldn’t define it, and I don’t want to try to explain it, but wherever that is, we aren’t supposed to be able to contact them.”
“So why are you telling me this?”
“We aren’t ‘supposed’ to be able to contact them, but that doesn’t mean we can’t. I haven’t tried yet because I wanted to respect their wishes. But I figured between a vampire mind-reader and a witch, we might have enough mojo to make a connection for an emergency call.”
I grimaced, thinking of my surreal chat with Mr. Wainwright in the panda dream. If that was the sort of conversation I could expect, I wasn’t sure I wanted to make that call. Of course, it might be different, since, ostensibly, we would be speaking to Mr. Wainwright and not my imagination’s version of him. I hoped it would be different. I didn’t think my imagination was being very kind to him.
Then again, Ouija boards weren’t something my family toyed with. We respected the life cycle. While it was often devastating, death was as much of the process as life, so it didn’t make sense to bother a spirit after the person had moved on. For Nana Fee’s sake, I hoped she’d moved on. I didn’t like the thought of her hovering around semirural Kentucky just in case I needed her. “So, what, we’re going to break out a Ouija board and leave him a voice mail?”
