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“I just can’t stand Little Miss Matching Everything.” Jettie sneered as I toted the basket into my cheerful yellow kitchen with blue gingham curtains and set it on the white tile counter next to the cookie jar shaped like a cheeky raccoon. Jettie perched next to the sink. “Back when she was living, she tried to talk me into listing this place with her. Said that maybe I needed to go into one of those nice assisted-living places. The little snot.”
“Why couldn’t she see you? I thought seeing ghosts is one of the benefits of being undead.”
“I didn’t want her to see me,” Jettie said.
“Well, she brought treats, so she’s not half bad in my book,” I told her, removing the ginormous pink bow. As my stomach rumbled, I read over the label of Faux Type O. From what I had heard, it was the Rolling Rock of artificial bloods. Light and palatable, with a smooth finish and 120 percent of your recommended daily allowance of hemoglobin.
“A stranger drops fake blood on your doorstep, and you’re going to drink it?” Jettie asked. “I thought we had a nice long talk about stranger danger when you were seven.”
“There’s a safety seal.” I held it up for her inspection. “It’s either this or I go hunting for hitchhikers to feed on.”
Jettie covered her eyes, but she was able to see through her hands. I was not exactly thrilled at the prospect of snacking on the blood equivalent of Cheez Whiz, but I needed to get used to it. There was no way I was feeding on live victims on a regular basis. I couldn’t stand the thought of hunting when I was living. Obviously, that was some sort of cruelly ambiguous psychic foreshadowing.
What the hell. If it was gross, I had a package of fudge Pop Tarts that I could rub on the raw hamburger in my fridge.
Faux Type O came in little plastic jugs that reminded me of milk bottles. I popped the top and sniffed. It wasn’t bad, vaguely yeasty and salty. Jettie came in for a closer look.
“Do you mind?” I asked as she picked up a pencil and poked at my right upper fang. I brought the bottle to my lips, pinched my nose, and swallowed. It rolled past my lips, thick and smooth. I didn’t gag, which I took as a good sign.
“How is it?” Jettie asked.
“Not bad,” I said, rolling the remnants off my tongue. “It has a kind of Diet Coke aftertaste, artificial and beefy.”
“You make it sound just delightful,” Jettie snorted as I drained the bottle. I wiped my mouth and tossed the bottle into the recycling bin.
“So, you’re dead,” I said. “I wasn’t together enough last night to ask, what exactly do you do all day? Besides hide my keys.”
“I listen to your phone calls. Make you feel like you ’re being watched. Move things around. Create cold spots.” At this point, I glared at her. Unmoved, she levitated my dish of Hershey Kisses just to show she could. “Sometimes I visit other spirits around town. You wouldn’t believe how haunted the Hollow is.”
“Oh, I think my mind is opening up to the possibility,” I said dryly. “Give me a for instance?”
“Well, the golf course. If people realized how many dead men in ugly pants are wandering around there, they wouldn’t go near it,” she said, smirking like the proverbial cat with a canary and/or cream. “Including your grandpa Fred.”
“Aw, I loved Grandpa Fred,” I said, pouting, which was difficult considering the fangs. “I hate to think of him wandering the earth for eternity in plaid polyester.”
“Oh, he’s fine, honey.” She waved a hand. “Happy as a clam. And even happier now that we’ve been seeing each other.”
“You mean you’re seeing him as in dating him? I honestly don’t know what to say to that.” I shook my head.
“I can’t help it if your grandma married all of the good -looking men in town. We were bound to cross paths sometime,”
Jettie said, shrugging.
She had a point. To recall childhood memories of my grandmother, I didn’t need the scent of oatmeal cookies or Ivory soap, just Designer Imposter Chanel No. 5 and hearing the phrase, “Darling, I’ve met the most wonderful man.” My grandma Ruthie, Jettie’s sister, had been married four times, so many times that I started calling every old man I saw at the grocery store Grandpa.
Mama put a stop to that after Grandpa Number Four, Fred. He was a nice man. Shame about the lightning strike.
All of Grandma Ruthie’s husbands had died under weird circumstances. A milk truck hit Grandpa John, my real grandpa, back in the days when milk was actually delivered door-to-door. Grandpa Tom had a heretofore-unknown allergy to rhubarb and had an anaphylactic reaction while Grandma was baking her famous strawberry-rhubarb pie. Grandpa Jimmy died from a brown recluse bite on the inside of the throat. His doctor’s article on the improbability of such a bite was published in several medical journals. And poor Fred, struck down on the twelfth hole at the Half -Moon Hollow public golf course. It’s a wonder Grandma hadn’t been questioned by the police or at least gotten a cool nickname like the Black Widow.
Of course, that would probably be in poor taste, given what happened to Grandpa Jimmy.
That was why I was allowed to go to the Wacky Rivers Water Park with Rae Summerall on the day of Jimmy ’s funeral.
Apparently, Mama realized that it wasn’t normal for a little girl to have a designated funeral dress. After Fred, she told Grandma it was time to slow her prolonged death march down the aisle. Grandma had been dating a very nice man named Bob for the last five years. They’d been engaged for four and a half.
Bob was proof that medical science could keep pretty much anyone alive. He’d had his gall bladder, one of his lungs, part of his pancreas, and his prostate removed. He spent more time in the hospital than out. Why was this sweet man engaged to my Grandma? I can only imagine that he actually wanted to die, and he saw marriage to her as his only way out.
“As long as Ruthie keeps killing off husbands, I’ll have an active social afterlife.” Jettie preened.
