Home for the Haunting(42)
“The e in shoppe is silent.”
She glared at me. “I was making a joke. How come no one ever gets my jokes?”
“Sorry.” I forced myself to smile. Cookie was right; I’d been a Grumpy Gus all day long, while she’d been relentlessly cheerful. I suspected the two were connected. “Anyway, we’re not here to shop. Like I told you, I’m taking a class in ghost busting.”
“Oooh, creepy.”
“No need to be scared,” said a short, pudgy man as he rushed up the stone steps to open the black-painted shop door. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Spirits operate in other dimensions, but they have no intention of hurting us.”
Cookie favored him with a brilliant smile and swept into the spiritual shoppy. Pudgy followed her in, allowing the door to swing shut in my face. Just inside the door was a bulletin board bristling with notices and announcements, many hand-printed and hand-illustrated. Although Olivier’s shop had only been open a few months, it had already become a hub of activity, both spirit-hunting and personal, for the “open-minded” folk, as they liked to call themselves. Covering the bulletin board were flyers for ghost walks, the kind the tourists take in Chinatown or the Haight, or on Olivier’s own Pacific Heights tour. There were also signs touting the services of spiritual cleansers to rid homes of haunting, advertisements for the services of those who liked to document hauntings, and information for those in search of meditation classes, spells for protection and hexes against neighbors, and séances. It was one-stop shopping for spiritual needs of all kinds. I found it fascinating.
While I was scanning the board, a long arm reached around me and yanked down a bright pink flyer advertising hexes.
I watched Olivier Galopin crumple the paper in one large hand.
“Not a fan of curses?” I asked.
“I don’t believe in such things, nor do I associate with those who do.”
“Good policy.”
Olivier took down a few outdated notices from the bulletin board. “You are looking lovely today, Mel, as always.”
“Thank you,” I said, though I didn’t put much stock in his flattery. Olivier was French, and he knew his way around women. I could only imagine what he’d say when he saw my sister. “You’re not looking bad, yourself.”
Olivier liked to dress for the occasion and often wore a formal jacket that appeared to be straight from the Victorian era. The effect was rather dashing and suitably un-twenty-first-century. Olivier’s dramatic streak—and the fact that he led the touristy Pacific Heights ghost tour—was one of the reasons I had been slow to trust him. But he’d turned out to be much more helpful, and far less larcenous, than I had at first expected.
“Oh, hey, I’m sort of babysitting my sister tonight. I hope you don’t mind; I was thinking perhaps she could audit the class? She’ll be quiet.”
“You do not think the subject matter will frighten her unduly?”
“I don’t think so. . . .”
“Then she is most welcome to join us this evening. Where is the little darling?”
“Talking to Dingo, over at the counter.”
Upon spying her, he raised his eyebrows. “I thought you were talking about a little girl, but your sister—she is a beautiful woman, no?”
“Yup.”
Cookie was pawing at trays of Celtic jewelry while chatting nonstop with the odd fellow named Dingo, who was clad in a tie-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirt and who ran the register. The two were getting along famously, and I overheard Cookie recommending a cream rinse of avocado, salt, and olive oil to tame the flyaway gray hair that stood out sideways from Dingo’s head.
And here I’d thought that in this setting, at least, Cookie’s easy charm would fail her and I’d be the one smoothing the way. But I had underestimated my sister, and not for the first time.
Olivier led me over to meet our guest lecturer for this evening’s class.
“Mel, I’d like to introduce you to Rosie Parker. Rosie, Mel is one of my star students, a gifted medium, though she still doesn’t like to admit it.”
“I’m happy to admit it,” I said. “The problem is, I still have no idea what I’m doing. Nice to meet you.”
“Same here.” Rosie was probably many years younger and a few inches shorter than I, with dark hair and hazel eyes. Around her neck she wore a rusted piece of metal on a hand-forged copper chain.
“I love your necklace—it’s so unusual.”
“It is, isn’t it? It’s an old key, actually. From the fourteenth century.”
“Are you kidding? I’ve never seen anything like it.”