Addicted to Love
Table of Contents
Title Page
Front Matter
Addicted to Love
About the Author
Addicted to Love
An Olympia Investigations Story
by
Sherry D. Ramsey
Copyright © Sherry D. Ramsey 2015
Cover Artwork © Sherry D. Ramsey 2016
Background image credit: jgolby for Shutterstock. Rune Circle brush by ObsidianDawn.
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No part of this book may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission from the author.
This book contains works of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, entities or settings is entirely coincidental or due to flaws in the space-time continuum.
Sherry D. Ramsey
Email: sherrydramsey@gmail.com
Web: www.sherrydramsey.com
Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada
Addicted to Love: An Olympia Investigations Story
ISBN: 978-0-9938973-4-4
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The first time Frank Garret sat down in the blue leather chair on the opposite side of my desk, I didn't know he was dead. My cousin Oliver didn't seem to pick up on it either, when he showed Frank in from reception. My new client wasn't looking great, mind you; he was obviously a man who'd been through some stuff. But he seemed as solid and well, alive as any other client I'd ever had.
Hell, more alive than some. And I didn't notice anything strange when we shook hands, except that his grip was cool and firm.
Oliver left us reluctantly, as usual—he hadn't quite grasped the concept of "assistant" as opposed to "partner" yet—and the client didn't waste any time.
"I need you to find my wife," he said, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, hands twisting a battered Jays ball cap nervously.
I thought, another divorce case, here we come, but I didn't say it. Before I could say anything, in fact, he held up a hand.
"I know what you're thinking, Miss Sheridan, but it's not like that. She doesn't even know I'm looking for her. And I promise you that she hasn't run away from me." He paused and glanced out the window, although there was not much to see on the other side but a dingy back alley. "Not deliberately, anyway."
The guy wasn't making a whole lot of sense, but I decided to hear him out. I didn't have much on the go, and these days I could track down a "missing" person in twenty-four hours or less if they'd used a credit card or checked into social media.
"Would you like a cup of coffee, Mr. Garret? Tea? Oliver will be happy to bring it." Oliver would fume to me afterwards that he wasn't the maid, but the clients don't need to know that.
He shook his head. "Call me Frank. I'd love one, but it's not possible. And I don't have much time."
"All right, we'll get to business, then. And please, call me Acacia." I pulled my notebook out of the drawer and wrote his name at the top of a blank page. "Your wife's name?"
"Ellie Garret. E.P. Wyse-Garret," he added. "The writer."
I felt my eyebrows lift slightly in surprise. E.P. Wyse-Garret was the acclaimed author of the Frankie and Ellie mysteries, featuring a wise-cracking and lovable pair of middle-aged sleuths based loosely on herself and her husband. Something tickled the back of my brain. She'd been in the news a few weeks ago, but I couldn't remember why. I'd been in the middle of the Medstrom case without a lot of attention to spare for local celebrity news.
"How long has she been missing?" Funny there'd been nothing on the newsfeeds about her disappearance.
"A month now," he said, misery twisting his features as he continued to mash the hat. "But look, you gotta understand, no-one else thinks she's missing. It's only me who can't find her."
I squinted. "So, she's on vacation? Or a writer's retreat or something?" I cudgeled my brain. What had that news item been?
He shook his head. "I don't know. She's not home, hasn't been there since just after—well, about a month. I don't have any way to contact her, but I need to. She needs me to. She just doesn't know it. And I don't have much time!"
His voice rose to a despairing wail and I stared at him, trying to get that news story back from my recalcitrant memory. And then the right mental file drawer opened. Weeks ago, Ellie Garret's husband Frank, inspiration for the beloved sleuth Frankie Pasquale, had been killed in a car accident.
He must have seen the penny drop behind my eyes, because his shoulders slumped even further. He seemed to...shimmer...a little, and for a second the chair back wavered into view behind him. "Yeah," he said, "I'm dead. And the Frankie and Ellie series will be dead, too, if I can't find Ellie. And you're my only hope."
~*~
I don't take on many ghosts for clients. Most of them are too caught up in the whole clanking chains and walking through walls schtick, even the ones who'd like you to find out who murdered them or whatever. It gets tiresome, and my job should never be tiresome. Olympia Investigations offers somewhat niche services to non-humans, along with our more mundane clients. I'd named my detective agency after my (100% mortal, as far as I knew) maternal grandmother, since the family quirk was generally acknowledged to have started with her. Whatever the provenance, my mother and her siblings, and now their children, are able to see, communicate, and interact with all manner of beings, many of whom slide under or past the radar of most humans. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, demons, fae...these make up a lot of my clientele.
Which is why my cousin Oliver was a decent choice when I decided I needed an assistant. He's arrogant, bossy, and wants to be a full partner even though he doesn't even have a PI license, but he has the requisite sense—sixth, seventh, who knows?— to deal with any client without freaking out.
But ghosts are rare, and ghosts who can appear normal enough to fool me into thinking they aren't dead are really rare. I was intrigued. First things first, though.
"All right, Frank, I do have to get this out of the way first. If you're a ghost, how do you propose to pay me?"
He nodded. "Thought about that. I feel certain Ellie will take care of it, but if she doesn't, I can direct you to a couple of places where you'll find items of sufficient value to cover the fees."
I frowned. "Items?"
"I lost a gold ring at the back of our garden once, digging flower beds for Ellie. Never could find the thing, and was Ellie upset—she'd given it to me. Now—I can see it plain as day. You could retrieve that and sell it." He shrugged diffidently. "There are a few things like that."
The possibilities of ghosts as lost item finders had never come up before. Interesting, but I shelved it for now. "All right, we can work with that. Tell me about your wife's disappearance."
He closed his eyes and wavered for a moment. "After—the funeral, she announced that she wouldn't write any more Frankie and Ellie books. I thought that was a terrible shame—and worse, those books are her livelihood! If she keeps writing them, I'm sure she can live comfortably off the royalties for the rest of her life. I could go in peace if I knew she'd be okay."
I nodded to encourage him.
Frank drew a
deep breath. Or appeared to. Maybe it was just a habit. "I wanted to tell her not to be so foolish, to go on writing them. At first I didn't know why any part of me was still hanging around. Why I couldn't just go on to whatever's next. Then I thought it must be to give her that message. And--I couldn't bear to leave her. When I stayed close to her, I felt better. Stronger. Like maybe if I stayed close enough, long enough, I'd be able to, well, manifest. Talk to her." He got up from the blue leather chair and paced my small office. Looking closely, I could tell that his feet didn't really touch the worn brown carpet, but hovered an inch above it.
He stopped behind the chair and put his hands on the back, one still clutching the Jays cap. "It was like...like a physical hit, when I was near her. Like I was addicted to my wife." Frank chuckled nervously. "Sounds weird, I know."
I shook my head and smiled. "Not weird. Sweet. So did you do it? Appear to her?"
His face sagged. "I did, finally. A couple weeks after the funeral I felt like I was strong enough. I didn't want to be some see-through horror and frighten her. I wanted this." He gestured to his surprisingly solid-looking body. "I waited until she was alone, and I put all my effort into manifesting."
I could guess what was coming next. "It didn't go well?"
He shook his head. "She thought she was hallucinating, going crazy—I don't know what. I tried to calm her down, tell her why I was there, but she wouldn't listen. Ran out of the house crying, and drove off somewhere. I didn't have the strength to follow her, didn't know where she'd gone." He circled to the front of the chair and sat down again. "Then three days later, she came back with her sister. Ellie packed some stuff, they left, and I haven't felt strong enough to go hunting for her." Tears seemed to glisten in his eyes, and I wondered what would happen if they spilled over. Would they leave little ectoplasmic droplets on the carpet?
Frank sighed. "All my energy went into that meeting, and when it went south, it drained me. I've been hanging around our house, getting as close as I can to her things since then, building up the energy to appear to someone else. It takes a lot longer when she's not there physically. The energy for me to...er, feed on, is weaker. I didn't go to her sister, or her agent, or her editor, because I'm afraid it'll go down the same and I won't be able to come back from it again. If I could even build up enough energy to do all that. I need someone who can do it for me." He looked at me very steadily from blue eyes that, at the moment, didn't look ghostly at all. Just sad. "Will you do it for me? Will you find my Ellie?"
The dust in my office must have been particularly bad that morning. I had to blink my own eyes a couple of times to clear them. "Frank," I said sincerely, "I'll give it a try."
~*~
"Just let me come along. I can help! I haven't been out in the field in weeks!"
Oliver stood blocking my exit from the office, arms crossed over his chest and a delicate frown darkening his brow. Frank had...left, not by the front door but by unceremoniously dissipating to—somewhere. I'd told Oliver that I was going out to check out the house where Frank and Ellie had lived, and that's when he'd leapt elegantly in front of the door and made his demands.
I protested automatically. Oliver and I have always had a prickly relationship, even when we were kids, and it's followed us into adulthood. My mother says we're too much alike, at which observation I usually roll my eyes and abandon the conversation. "Who's going to watch the office, answer the phone, if we both leave? I hate to break it to you, but that's sort of your job, you know?"
Oliver closed his eyes momentarily, as if to ask some higher power for strength. "You said I'd have a chance to learn the job from an investigator's point of view," he reminded me. "That it wouldn't be all office work. We're supposed to be a team. And we can forward the office phone to my cell."
I sighed. "Oh, all right." I suppose I had said the team thing when I hired him. And a second pair of eyes might come in handy at the house.
Oliver grabbed his windbreaker from the hook behind the door and slipped it on with a grin. "Excellent. I'll even spring for coffee on the way."
Frank had told me where I could find the spare key to the house he and Ellie had shared, and on the way I filled Oliver in on the parameters of the case. The neighborhood was middle-class tidy, with well-groomed yards fronting homes that ranged from new to fifty or sixty years old, but well-maintained. I parked on the street a few houses away from the address Frank had given me, and Oliver and I walked casually up the drive and around to the back of the two-story saltbox, sipping our takeout coffees and chatting as we walked. I found the key just where Frankie had said, taped inside one of the hollow tubes of a set of wind chimes by the back door. We slipped in, and I felt pretty sure no-one had taken particular notice of us.
The porch featured windows covered with rattan blinds, lush greenery, a couple of wicker chairs, and a small closet. It led into a kitchen with clean, white-painted cupboard doors and red brick accents; homey, cozy, and cared-for, but chill now with the extended absence of its inhabitants. Ellie and her sister must have tidied up before she'd left—it didn't have the air of a hasty exit. I opened the fridge and found it empty of pretty much anything but long-lasting condiments. Oliver stood in the middle of the room, sipping coffee and observing. A wall phone hung nearby, but the notepad on the counter beneath it was blank. I pulled a pencil from my bag and rubbed the side of the lead lightly over the surface of the top page, revealing a jumble of marks from notes written on previous sheets. Nothing was particularly legible or seemed important. I hit the phone's redial button, but the number that appeared on the screen matched the one Frank had given me for Ellie's sister.
In the dining room, the light from the large windows tinted slightly green as it passed through the plants lining the windowsill and suspended from plant hangars. They looked healthy enough, so someone must be watering them. The sister? In the living room, a book lay on the sofa. A paper protruded slightly from near the back cover, so I crossed the room and picked it up. The book was a mystery by another well-known author. The paper turned out to be a brochure from a local real estate agent. I raised an eyebrow and showed it to Oliver.
"You think she wants to sell?"
I shrugged. "Could be. Maybe too many memories here." I pocketed the paper and returned the book to the sofa. Dust lay thick on the coffee table, another testament to the house's deserted state.
As I turned to leave, a shimmer distorted the air near the doorway, and Frank appeared between me and Oliver. A little less solid-looking than he'd been in my office, but he smiled thinly.
"You found your way in."
I returned the smile. "No problems. I hope you don't mind that I brought Oliver along to help me out."
"Not at all." Frank gave Oliver a nod and a smile.
"Nice house," Oliver said.
Frank nodded and the smile faded. "Sure is," he agreed. "I miss it already, and I'm still here, sort of."
"Well, I haven't found much yet," I told him, hoping to distract him from that line of thought. "There was a real estate brochure in a book in the living room. Think Ellie's planning to move?"
Frank shook his head. "We were looking at cottage properties before…"
"Ah, okay." So that was a dead end, so to speak. "I'm just heading down the hall."
"I'll walk with you," he said. "Just along here is Ellie's office."
I stood for a moment, studying the room. This one might warrant a more careful search. It was a bright, cheery space, with plants crowding the windowsills and a hand-hooked rug covering most of the laminate floor. Two of the walls held floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Oliver ran his finger along the spines on one shelf, while I inspected her desk. A stack of colorful sticky notes contained jottings and scribbles that I assumed related to story ideas—at any rate, nothing looked like travel plans.
"Can I check the computer?" I asked Frank.
He shrugged. "Sure, I guess."
I sat down in the padded leather desk chair and booted up the machine, loo
king the question at Frank when the screen paused, asking for a password.
"FridayNightCoffee," he said with a sad smile. "It was a little joke between us. We never went to bed early on weekends, so we could drink coffee as late as we wanted on Friday nights."
I typed in the phrase and the machine completed its startup routine. By the time it finished, Oliver had come to look over my shoulder. I clicked open the files list and groaned. It would take a month to look though this many files, hoping to stumble upon something useful. I glanced over some recent documents, but they seemed to also pertain to her writing, or research she'd been doing for the current book. Nothing helpfully labelled "travel plans" or "itinerary," so that was a dead end. A laptop desk leaned against the wall, but I didn't see a laptop—presumably she'd taken it with her, wherever she was. Eventually I shook my head.
"Nothing I can see here."
"Were you upstairs yet?" Frank didn't sound too hopeful, but he looked a little more solid now. Maybe talking about Ellie, and being in her space, helped him, too.
I shook my head and shut the computer down. We climbed the stairs to the second floor, Oliver trailing behind us, unusually quiet.
Frank led me into the master bedroom. On one side of the bed, a pile of books had been haphazardly stacked in a basket that was too small for the task it had been set. I checked the closet and drawers. All of Frank's clothes still seemed to be in the closet. Ellie must not have had the heart to deal with them yet.
The second bedroom had been used for storage. I popped the lid on a large storage container marked "summer clothes" and found it full to the top with women's wear.
"I guess it's safe to assume she hasn't taken off for warmer climates to the south," I said, snapping the lid closed again.
"That doesn't narrow things down much," Frank observed in a glum tone.
"No, but it's something."
I glanced around the bathroom, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary or appeared to be a clue.
"That's it for the house, with the exception of the basement," he said, leaning against the bathroom door jamb and crossing his arms over his chest. "You want to go down there?"