Ghost Fire (The Ghost Files Book 3) Read online

  As if reading my mind, Sandy asked, “So, how were the chocolate crepes?” She slid open the big door of her green-and-white, seven-passenger City of Santa Monica cab-van, putting out a stepstool for me and offering her hand, as if I was an old man. I took her hand anyway and got in. Just to be courteous. Her hand was warm and her grip was strong. I liked her already.

  “The crepes were very weird but still delicious. Not what I expected. They put Nutella in the crepes and did some sort of melted dark chocolate drizzle over them. A few ground hazelnuts got sprinkled over, then a lot of whipped cream, the real thing, not that non-dairy stuff. And then they just garnished it with mini-chocolate chips over the whipped cream. I liked the filling, but the crepes were too melty in my mouth. They had very little substance. I tried to chew them but they dissolved before I could get a grip on them with my teeth. I like more texture in my actual pancakes, the rich filling notwithstanding.”

  “You’re a gourmand!” Sandy laughed. “I’ve tasted the crepes there. They’re sublime. We’ll just have to get you something different tomorrow on your quest for the perfect chocolate pancakes. Something from a truck stop.”

  “I’m game,” I said. “I’m not a food snob.”

  “I can see that.” She smiled. “Too bad I am. There will be no truck stop food on my tour of West L.A. Nor any food trucks either. I was joking. Buckle up, sir. You are Mrs. Drew’s precious cargo.”

  I buckled my seat belt.

  Sandy got in the driver’s side, snapped her own seat belt, clicked buttons on her cab’s computer, and we were off to fetch the missus from the store where ladies bought their expensive face paints, lip gloss, eye makeup and all manner of primping paraphernalia from foot-scrubbing brushes to eyelash curlers. I’m sure that Dr. Seuss could have written a rhyming book about all of the girl stuff in a Sephora store. Ellen loved that store. I loathed it. It made me sneeze and my ears always rang from the awful thumping bass music from screeching girl bands. Oh, I was getting too old to even be thinking of listening that kind of music. I supposed that I was getting old, but Enya’s “Watermark” was more my taste. Or even Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports.”

  I steadied my hand on the takeout containers on the seat next to me as Sandy expertly wove the cab-van in and out of heavy traffic. I said, “I got some strawberry crepes for Ellen with extra whipped cream. She loves strawberry shortcake, so maybe she’ll like these. She’s hardly eaten lately. I think she might be getting a little too thin.”

  “Well, I think she looks chic and svelte,” Sandy said, pulling up next to a supermodel standing near the taxi stand on the corner of Third and Arizona in Santa Monica.

  “Who’s that?” I asked. “I mean, she looks familiar in a magazine cover sort of way, but—”

  And then realization dawned on me when Sandy said, “Ding! Ding! Ding! She had a makeover and is wearing a different outfit. Mr. D., that bombshell in the black halter dress and strappy high heels is your wife.”

  “Wow,” was all I could manage. My mouth went sort of dry in that way that it did when my body liquid went elsewhere to make a statement. My longtime wife was now centerfold material. She stood on a street corner in the posh part of Santa Monica, looking for all the world like she was someone famous and waiting to be discovered by a Hollywood director. I was floored at how much she looked like Lauren Bacall, my favorite actress of all time. Even her hair was done in that famous side-sweep look.

  “Holy chocolate pancakes,” I said. “It is Ellen!”

  “Of course it is. Stay seated, please, Mr. D.” Sandy double-parked, threw the gearshift into park, flipped on the van’s flashers and stepped out to help Ellen with her Sephora bags and another shopping bag from Burke Williams, the massage and day spa joint. Ellen was wearing a spectacular halter dress and looked like she stepped right off of a movie poster. Sandy handed up a Victoria’s Secret shopping bag stuffed with Ellen’s morning outfit of jeans and a T-shirt, her tennis shoes, and a VS shoebox.

  I held out my hand for Ellen and when she got in, I pulled her into my lap and gave her a passionate kiss, which she returned. “You look beautiful, Ellen. Ravishing, in fact.”

  She giggled in a way that brought back dating memories. “It’s the Miraculous Push-Up bra-top dress and shoes from Victoria’s Secret, the professionally applied makeup from Sephora, and the massage that left me feeling glorious.”

  “No, it’s not that stuff. It’s all you, shining like a…new penny.” I paused and reassured myself that she was still wearing the blue chalcedony necklace. “You’re smiling again, from all the way inside of you. Like…before.” And she knew I meant before we were terrorized by the Dark Master at the haunted Bible college, an earlier paranormal investigations case. “You look so stunning! Will you…will you marry me?”

  My wife laughed and said, “It’s been a grand morning, hasn’t it? But you know what, Monty? I tried to take a paranormal-free vacation day, but I still see dead people.”

  “Again?”

  “Yes. There was a pathetic girl in front of Victoria’s Secret on the Third Street Promenade. She had tracks across her flapper-era clothes but didn’t seem to know it. It was a classic case of possibly not knowing what hit you, a sure cause for being a ghost trapped on Earth.” Ellen sighed. “I told the girl that she was dead, hit by a train and it might be time to move on. And she said, ‘Nah, it was just the trolley over on Trolleyway in Venice. And, thanks, but it isn’t time yet.’”

  “Oh no, the poor thing!” I said.

  “I know. It was awful because she’s just wandering around, almost like she just sees something or someone interesting and follows them for a little while and then latches onto the next person who seems to attract her. She seems to have been doing it for years. I asked her, ‘Do they still have trolley cars in Venice?’ And she said, ‘I haven’t seen any for a long time. I think they left, to go into the light. Ha ha!’ She joked about it.”

  “Excuse me,” Sandy piped up from the front seat. “It just dawned on me that Trolleyway is now called Pacific Avenue. It hasn’t been called by the old street name for decades.”

  “Pacific Avenue? Isn’t that where we’re going today?” I said.

  “Yep,” Sandy said.

  “Coincidence?” I asked Ellen.

  “There are no coincidences,” Ellen said. “Everything is a cog in the grand turning of the wheel of time.”

  “Poetic,” Sandy said. She honked the horn at someone who dallied on a left turn and then switched lanes to get around the red Ferrari and bulldoze through the honking traffic. Sandy apologized, “Sorry about the cutting through traffic. You are perfectly safe with me. Now go on and tell Monty about the dead flapper. I have chills up my spine that you actually talked to someone who died in the 1920s. Run over by a trolley in Venice. A real retro ghost encounter!”

  “They’re all retro,” Ellen said and laughed. “That’s the point.” Sandy laughed with her.

  “What happened next with your conversation with the girl?” I asked.

  “I asked if she ever saw a light and tried to go into it, just because I encourage that, as you know. And she said she saw it a few times but she felt like she had not achieved her special purpose on Earth and wasn’t ready to leave yet.”

  “What do you think is her purpose?” I asked Ellen.

  She smiled. “I’ll tell you when and if I learn it. She said she ran away from the big tunnel of light. Several times.”

  “Oh, my gosh,” I said. “It’s heartbreaking that she missed the next big journey.”

  Ellen nodded. “I think so, too. She’s been wandering all over Venice, the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market and the Promenade ever since the twenties. She said they removed the pier where she used to go in Venice and see seems pretty bereft about it.”

  “What a sad story for that girl,” Sandy said. “If you wanted to help her, how would you do it?” She glanced in the rear-view mirror at Ellen.

  “I’d try to find her purpose for both living
and leaving. So she could pass on to the next part of her existence.”

  Sandy nodded. “Makes sense to me.”

  “So, she really won’t leave?” I asked Ellen.

  “Right,” she replied softly. “She has unfinished business but she doesn’t even know what it is.”

  “So, what’s her story?” Sandy asked. “What is her name?”

  “We didn’t get too far. Angelina is her first name. That’s all I know. When you pulled up in the cab, Angelina got spooked, probably from getting run over by a trolley and another vehicle coming close to her. She disappeared into the crowd on the Third Street Promenade. I don’t know if I will ever see her again. She seemed receptive behind that bravado that no way was she going into the light unless she accomplished something worthwhile here.”

  “It seems kind of late for that,” I said. “I mean, when you are dead, what good are you to anyone?” I said.

  Ellen turned her head and wiped a tear away and pasted a smile on her face.

  “Oh, hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything bad by it. It’s a classic case of Monty’s foot in mouth this morning,” I apologized. “I have one of those a day, at least. I guess I just don’t have a clue what a ghost could do to feel okay about leaving Earth. At this point, it seems like that bus has already left. No offense.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Monty,” she said softly. She was empathic and felt other people’s pain as her own, especially spirits and ghosts.

  Sandy stepped on the gas and zoomed us through the traffic at a dizzying speed and in a weaving pattern. I tried not to look at the speedometer. She was fast but confident, more than I would be in such heavy traffic.

  Then Ellen changed the subject, as she often did when the conversation got too emotionally charged. Ellen said, “So, what did you think of the chocolate pancakes at the place that Sandy suggested?”

  “I inhaled the crepes despite the fact that they were not up to my expectations.”

  “I prefer crepes,” Ellen said. “Over pancakes.”

  “I know you do.” I handed Ellen the takeout container of strawberry crepes with whipped cream. “I brought you some. I was told that they are also still good at room temperature, so I hope that’s true.”

  She opened the container and I handed her a plastic fork. She said, “Bless you. I was starving. At the spa, they gave me what felt like slivers of fruit and flavored water but I needed…carbs, sugar.”

  “Welcome to my world,” I replied.

  She dug in with what seemed to be her old appetite. “Yum! I love this. It tastes like summer. How were the chocolate crepes?”

  “Delicious, but not the be-all, end-all of chocolate pancakes. Hey!” I suddenly thought of something and posed the question to Ellen: “Do ghosts eat?”

  Her eyes flickered to Sandy’s, who caught her reflection in the rearview mirror. Ellen’s newly shaped eyebrows raised a little as she redirected the question to Sandy with a shrug. Ellen sure looked like a million bucks in that bust-lifting, black halter dress and high heels from Victoria’s Secret. I immediately wanted to take her back to the hotel and have her again. But I needed to be a gentleman and wait until she did everything she aimed to do today. So I was patiently making conversation and trying to not think about her naked. Because, she always knew when I was thinking of her naked. Ellen was tuned in like that.

  Ellen gave me a look and said, “Focus, Monty!”

  I chuckled.

  Sandy repeated: “Do ghosts eat? As you know, I believe in ghosts, but I’ve never thought about it, if ghosts eat. But if I was a ghost, I would want to eat. With thousands of top restaurants here, if I was able to eat, and calories and money were no object, I would become the ghost girl who ate LA.”

  “And where would the ghost girl find the best chocolate pancakes?” I asked.

  “You have a one-track mind, Mr. D.,” Sandy said. “I’ll take you someplace tomorrow. One pancake meal a day. Right, Mrs. Drew?”

  Ellen laughed. “That was supposed to be between us, the one-pancake-meal-a-day thing.”

  “Oops,” Sandy said.

  “That’s okay. Good icebreaker,” Ellen said.

  “Yeah, it is. You can call us Ellen and Monty,” I said. “After all, we call you Sandy.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I will. Monty. Ellen.”

  Ellen and I exchanged glances and she laced her fingers in mine. I felt a rush of affection for her.

  “You’re my beautiful girl,” I softly said to her. “Tonight—” I promised, kissing her bare shoulder.

  At the word, “tonight,” Ellen blushed mightily.

  We held hands in the back of the cab and smiled at each other like newlyweds.

  Sandy grinned and looked away from us, concentrating on her driving while Ellen delicately scarfed up the strawberry crepes in the cab, then stowed the empty Styrofoam container in the litter bag.

  After about ten minutes of driving, Sandy announced, “Okay, here’s the co-op art gallery on Pacific Avenue where you wanted to go to for your meeting with Ellen’s old anthropology professor.” She glided the van into the parking lot of a decrepit-looking warehouse building on Pacific Avenue in Venice Beach. Each floor of the building had a different style of window and even the brick sizes were mixed from floor to floor, as if the building had floors added on over a long period of time. It was broad daylight and yet the building gave off a vibe that something wasn’t quite right, that something strange was afoot. And by strange, I meant spooky.

  Ellen and I looked at the building and then at each other. Her eyebrows knit together.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” I said to Ellen. “It’s obviously a ghostly place. You should see your face. Anyway, you’re the one who wanted to come and see your old pal from the university.”

  She sighed. “He wasn’t a pal. He was my anthropology professor. I did a summer of fieldwork with him for credit. He was a wonderful mentor to me. And he invited us to come and see his artwork before the grand opening of his co-op gallery. He’s going to give us some good deals on things for our home redecoration project. You saw his gallery catalog.”

  “I saw his prices, too. We can always go to IKEA instead, if you want to skip this,” I offered, only because she seemed reluctant to get out of the cab. “I mean because of the yucky building vibe. It’s a haunt, right?”

  She paused. “Yes. But I want to go in. Please. Just give me a minute, Monty. I’m getting something.”

  Whenever Ellen said she was “getting something” that meant that she was feeling the presence of spirits and trying to connect with them or identify them.

  Ellen closed her eyes and when she opened them almost a minute later, her face was flushed.

  “I see you’re having one of those hot flashes. It’s haunted big time, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Yeah. With a hot ghost. Hot. Hot. Hot. He’s angry and he’s desperate. And he has company. Bad company.”

  “Ellen? Do you want to pass on this outing?” I asked.

  Ellen fingered the chalcedony necklace, her talisman against malevolent ghosts. “No. I’ll be fine. Let’s go inside and see my old mentor, Professor Diego Francisco.”

  Chapter Three

  Ellen and I left Sandy in the cab van with her well-worn deck of Tarot cards and her El Pollo takeout lunch that she’d snagged before she picked me up from the crepe place. On her lunch hours, Sandy did Tarot readings on her cell phone—she told us to take our time shopping for furniture, artwork, and items for the new home décor that Ellen envisioned. And to call her if we needed some psychic support for whatever was inside the building.

  We were just about to enter the front door of the gallery building when Ellen suddenly stopped short in front of the entrance, laid her very hot hand on my arm, and said, “Wait! I smell smoke coming from inside.”

  I sniffed. “I don’t smell anything except the Santa Ana wind and it’s a snootful of yuckiness. Are you sure it isn’t just the Santa Ana that you smell?” I looke
d up at the old three-story warehouse that had been converted to a co-op art gallery and artists’ co-op community. “I don’t see smoke coming out of the windows. I don’t see flames.”

  “Wait a moment,” she replied. After a pause, she said, “I know what this is. It’s ghost fire.”

  “Ghost fire? What the heck is that?”

  “It’s the psychic energy disturbance before an actual fire breaks out. I can smell it. It’s very unusual. It’s like a match being struck, just before the flame.”

  I took a deep breath and all I could smell besides the Santa Ana was a gritty auto exhaust from the traffic intersection on Pacific Avenue, a smidge of ocean breeze from the beach, which was a block away, and Ellen’s amazing perfume that she must have spritz-tested in Victoria’s Secret. In fact, my nose was all confused by so many smells. How did women do it? Smell anything besides their own perfume?

  “Maybe we shouldn’t go in if you smell ghost fire,” I suggested, shifting my new leather aviator bag with the ghost-hunting gear to the other shoulder. I began to turn away. She caught my arm.

  Ellen got that look on her face that she always gets when she sees or feels a ghost. “Monty, wild horses couldn’t keep me away. I have to know what this is all about with the hot, angry ghost and his connection to my old professor. And this creepy building. With horrible secrets in it.”

  “Oh boy,” I said. “I feel our vacation slipping away into a huge paranormal investigation.”

  She nodded to the door and I opened it for her. “I won’t let it,” she promised. “No matter what happens, we are going to end up on the beach, sipping cool drinks and working on our tans with very few clothes on. I vow this!” she said dramatically.

  I laughed. “I’m holding you to that promise. But not really.”

  “Of course you are,” she said. As she passed me, she said, “Besides, the gallery has a stunning art collection and I want to see it before the First Friday opening; the pieces I want are calling me. Getting an invitation to come and look before the big event is just so cool of Diego.”