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“And we don’t need you to go to any bother for us,” Mum waves her hand. “We might nip out for dinner and get an early night. Although we would love to get to know your not-boyfriends. We’ve just been visiting Innsbruck in Austria. Very dull, too much sausage and recycling, not enough sexy Italian men for my liking.”
Edward extends his hand in front of Mum’s face, knuckles facing up. “I will allow you to kneel and kiss my ring.”
“Did you um…do any fishing?” I add quickly, when Mum makes a puzzled face. “I heard that the fishing is very good in Innsbruck.”
“In…Austria?” Dad looks confused. “It’s landlocked. Are you alright, darling?”
“Don’t fuss, Mike,” Mum scolds. “Bree’s still reeling from all the murders. Why else would she have all these boys staying in the house and look like she hasn’t brushed her hair for days?”
Why indeed.
“Hey, where’s the rug?” Dad frowns as he lifts Mum’s suitcase. “I traded that rug with Albert for a handmade birdbath ten years ago. Did you move it? And what’s this stain on the flagstones?”
“Oh, um, it’s raspberry daiquiri mix,” I say quickly. “Dani and I had a party that got a little raucous.”
“I hope you weren’t too loud,” Mum admonishes me. “We have to think of our guest. Father Bryne probably doesn’t enjoy your death rocker music.”
“It’s heavy metal, Mum, and Father Bryne left early. He was called away on an important church matter. I’ve tidied up his room.”And hopefully removed any evidence that a blind ghost accidentally shot him in the foyer.“I’ll get the stone professionally cleaned as soon as I—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dad says with a smile. “I kind of like it. It makes the room look like something interesting happened here.”
You have no idea.
“Mike, don’t be ridiculous. Our guests don’t want to see a huge red stain the moment they walk in the door. It looks like one of the Grimdale murders happened right here.” Mum furrows her brow. “We’ll get that cleaned up this week. Now, Pax, was it? If you’re keen to make yourself useful, I have several suitcases that need bringing inside. And Ambrose, you can come down from the staircase and help Mike make us all a cup of tea. You may be blind but you have two working arms. Brianna, you’d better fetch him his stick, and you’d better not be rolling your eyes behind my back…”
11
Bree
Bree: Hey, Dani, are you okay? Are we okay? I don’t know how much you want to know about what happened, but we sorted it all out. I think. I hope. And you won’t believe it – my parents have come home. I really want to talk to you, but only if you’re ready to talk to me.
I’m tugged from sleep by Entwhistle batting my eyelid and a desperate, all-consuming need for coffee. I glance at my phone – 10:14 – a thoroughly respectable time to be getting up. I drag myself out of bed (alone this time. Edward moped off to his boudoir and I managed to convince Pax and Ambrose to share one of the other guest rooms to keep up the story I told Mum about them being friends I met on my travels who we were putting up for a bit. Ambrose looked so gutted when we went our separate ways, but I’m not quite ready for my parents to find out what I get up to with my seventeenth-century ghost prince and two ex-spirits.), and follow a delicious, familiar scent toward the kitchen.
Down the hallway, a door opens. Pax stomps out, dressed in dark grey jeans and a black t-shirt that tugs at his huge chest and shoulder muscles. He drags Ambrose behind him, who is forced to wear the same outfit he’s been wearing for the last hundred and fifty years because in all of yesterday’s excitement Edward and I forgot to buy him some clothes. Poor Ambrose is trying to use his walking stick as a cane to dodge around the various pieces of junk shop furniture my father has painted in bright colours, but Pax is too excited to slow down for him. With the wondrous scent permeating the whole house, I don’t blame him.
I fall in step behind them as we make our way to the kitchen. Mum stands over the stove, flipping bacon and sausages in the pan. Beside her, Dad butters toast. I still can’t believe they’re here, in the flesh.
“I’ve been craving a Full English,” Dad says as he sets down a bowl. Baked beans slosh over the sides. “In Norway, it was nothing but herring for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I’ve been dying for some beans and hash browns and black pudding.”
“I am starving.” Pax circles the table, heaping food onto his plate.
I collect a plate for Ambrose. “What do you want? There’s bacon, hash browns, baked beans, fried tomato, black pudding…”
“Yes.”
“And what about a—”
“Yes,” he says with vehemence.
I grin as I fill his plate and coffee cup and direct him to a chair between Pax and my dad. It takes Ambrose a couple of attempts to remember how to use a knife and fork, but Mum and Dad are too busy whispering to themselves to notice. I fill my own plate, pour a huge mug of life-giving coffee, and sit down next to them, expecting Mum to start rattling off a list of jobs our strange guests can help us with around the place, but their heads are still bent together, their whispers tense.
“Mom? Dad?”
My stomach sinks as my parents turn to me, guilty expressions on their faces. This isexactlythe way they looked when they video-called to tell me about Dad’s Parkinson’s diagnosis.
I drop my fork. “What? What is it now?”
“Nothing!” Mom says brightly. “Have more beans—”
