Spookygirl - Paranormal Investigator Read Free Page A

several of the ties off of me, and the trunk slammed shut. A hurt, angry whimper chastised me from inside.
    “Sorry,” I said, “but you know the rules. I’ll let you out as soon as the service is over.” I took a U-shaped piece of polished stone—obsidian—from a nearby shelf and slid it through the hole on the trunk’s latch where a lock would normally go. Obsidian was supposed to be good for controlling misbehaving spirits. I wasn’t sure why it worked, but it would keep him locked up until I set him free. With that taken care of, I gathered Dad’s ties, unknotted them, and hung them back in the closet. Exceptfor the occasional light thump as the trunk rocked back against the wall, Buster was quiet and calm.
    Buster’s not really such a bad ghost. Like a puppy, he just gets a little crazy sometimes if we’re not strict enough with him. In his own ghostly way, I think he loves us. Mom was his favorite—she was the one who crate trained him—but he seems pretty attached to me, too. “He knows you’re like your mom,” Dad would say when Buster happily squawked at the sight of me or levitated one of his favorite toys in my direction. “He’s much more active when you’re around.”
    Muted noises carried up from downstairs. Car doors slammed outside; the front door opened and closed; voices droned too quietly for me to hear what was being said. For the next two hours or so—or longer, if Mrs. Morris had lots of friends who wanted to pay their respects during the viewing before the service—I had to tread lightly. Sound traveled too well through the old building; improving the soundproofing between the apartment and the funeral home was high on Dad’s list of things to do, a list he often threatened to rename “Things That’ll Never Get Done.”
    The sound restriction always made me a little stir-crazy. I couldn’t watch TV, and I couldn’t listen to music unless I used headphones. Hoping for a distraction, I browsed the bookshelves in the living room. My paperbacks were mixed in with Dad’s textbooks and reference books fromwhen he’d gone back to school for his mortuary science degree. That was a few months after Mom died, once the police investigation into her death ended and no charges were filed against Dad.
    Aunt Thelma, of course, disapproved of her kid brother’s career change. (In fact, she disapproved of everything.) They never discussed it in front of me, but I had eavesdropped on plenty of their conversations over the years. Aunt Thelma nagged him a lot.
    “And what happened to being a doctor?”
    “You know I gave that up years ago.”
    “When you met Robin and decided to be a ghost hunter.” No one could drizzle their words with disdain quite like Aunt Thelma.
    “I was struggling with my internship before I met Robin.” Dad’s voice always sounded soft and weary when Aunt Thelma brought up my mom.
    “You can still go back to medical school,” Aunt Thelma urged. “Take more classes. Try again.”
    “It wasn’t right for me.”
    “Oh, and ghost hunting was?”
    “Paranormal investigation, Thelma.”
    “At least you outgrew that. But funerals? Is this what you want to do with your life? Spend all day looking at dead bodies?”
    “Maybe it is.” I knew what he was saying—at least these dead people would stay dead. For the most part. Even though he couldn’t sense ghosts the way Mom had, he’d had enough of them.
    “A little girl shouldn’t grow up surrounded by the dead.”
    “That’s why I need you to help me with Violet for a little while. It’ll be a tough couple of years—I’ll have to go to school, get an apprenticeship, establish myself in the field. I can’t do all that and take good care of her, too.” Dad’s voice had sounded rough and choked when he’d said that.
    “She’s like her mother,” Aunt Thelma replied. The way she said it made it sound like there was something wrong with me. Ever since then, I’d always hated her a little.
    I had