Christmas Spirit (The Middle-aged Ghost Whisperer Book 1): (Ghost Cozy Mystery series) Read online

  Christmas Spirit (The Middle-aged Ghost Whisperer Book 1)

  Copyright © 2015 by Morgana Best.

  All Rights Reserved.

  License Notes.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should purchase your own copy from your favorite ebook retailer. Thank you for respecting the author’s hard work.

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The personal names have been invented by the author, and any likeness to the name of any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book may contain references to specific commercial products, process or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, specific brand-name products and/or trade names of products, which are trademarks or registered trademarks and/or trade names, and these are property of their respective owners. Morgana Best or her associates, have no association with any specific commercial products, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, specific brand-name products and / or trade names of products.

  By this act

  And words of rhyme

  Trouble not

  These books of mine

  With these words I now thee render

  Candle burn and bad return

  3 times stronger to its sender.

  (Ancient Celtic)

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Connect with Morgana

  Next Book in this Series

  Other books by Morgana Best

  About Morgana Best

  Chapter 1

  “I do not want to go into a retirement home,” I said rather too loudly to the patronizing young man on the other end of the phone. I had called my bank with an insurance inquiry, and the consultant was now trying to talk me into a reverse mortgage. Of all the nerve! “I’ll have you know I’m only two years older than the Millionaire Matchmaker!”

  “Who?” the voice said.

  I shook my head. “I’m younger than Kris Jenner! Would you put her in a retirement home?” I hung up.

  I cracked open a bottle of chilled water and washed down an aspirin. I had been taking more and more aspirin as the tour wound on. It had been my longest tour to date, countless stops in a packed three and a half month stretch. I had done my thing in gymnasiums, libraries, conference rooms in hotels, anywhere I could book.

  I am a clairvoyant medium. I get impressions from the dead. I cannot see ghosts, but I get senses, feelings from those who have passed on. I ‘hear’ what they are telling me as words in my head, not audible words. Sometimes it comes in sentences, and sometimes it is simply impressions. This is not the case with everyone who has passed on, mind you, only those who choose to come through. I cannot initiate contact with anyone. It is always the deceased who choose to contact me.

  On a good day, I can make contact with many of the deceased in one of my shows. It seems that the dead continue to surround those they loved.

  But the current tour was different. I was finding it harder to get impressions. I was burned out. In fact, it had reached the point where I dreaded going onstage. I thought it had something to do with the strain I was putting on myself, trying to reach the land of the dead. I was desperate to make connections for the people in my audience so I could offer them some comfort, and I was pushing myself so far that it was becoming an effort.

  Christmas was only a week away, and I was anxious to get home to my two cats, my garden, and my own bed. I tried not to think about how hard it had become to do a reading. I didn’t want to think about what my life would be if I couldn’t get impressions from the dead. I wasn’t qualified to do anything else. I was in my fifties, and I was certain that employers would rather hire young jobseekers.

  My last night happened to be in the best setting on the tour. It was a large room with a stage, and chairs bolted to the floor for the audience. Usually those who came to see me had to sit in uncomfortable folding chairs. Yet on this, the last stop of the tour, I even had a room backstage.

  I would have been in a good mood if I hadn’t decided to do some admin stuff and sort out my insurance. The knock on the door startled me. “Come in.”

  A baby-faced stage manager peeked in. “It’s time, Mrs. Wallflower.”

  I grimaced. I hated being called Mrs. Wallflower. It made me feel old, and it reminded me that I was divorced. I took a quick look in the mirror and then closed my eyes. I took three quick breaths and then one long one.

  Even though what I did was real, it still carried with it a sense of entertainment. I commanded a whole room, often hundreds of people at once. I had to have a stage presence, and the whole thing more often than not made me nervous. The breaths were a ritual, one designed to calm me. Once I was on stage, the nerves always faded and I usually enjoyed myself.

  When I reached the stage, the lights were up. I never had them dimmed, as what I did required me to see the audience. There was hearty applause, something that always made me somewhat uncomfortable. I waved and went to a stool next to a microphone on a stand. I picked up the microphone and held it to my mouth. “Can everyone hear me?”

  There was a sea of nodding heads. I knew the ticket sales were three hundred and ten people, a pretty good crowd for someone like me, considering I didn’t have my own TV show. “Let’s get started then, shall we?” I said, and the show was on.

  I always started each show with a quick introduction. I told them who I was and what I did. I told them about the first time I had ever felt an otherworldly presence.

  I was a child in school, and a girl had lost her mother in a car wreck. When she had come back to school, I had felt her mother with her. It was overpowering almost, such a strong sense of sadness. Her mother wasn’t upset about dying, not for her own sake at least, but she told me she was distressed about her daughter going through the rest of her life without her. I had told the girl all of this, and she had never spoken to me again. That was when I learned that not everyone was receptive to the fact that I could communicate with the dead.

  And then, as was the next step in all of my shows, I walked slowly across the stage, hoping a deceased person would come through. Anyone. I always feared that it wouldn’t happen, but it always did.

  I had closed my eyes, and now I opened them. There was a man close to my age, sitting four rows back. He was wearing thick-framed glasses and was balding. He looked me straight in the eye.

  “Sir, your wife has passed,” I said. It wasn’t a question, but I needed him to confirm it for the others in the audience.

  He nodded. “Yes.�
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  “She’s showing me that it was recent.”

  “Two months ago,” he said.

  “You were married for a long time,” I said. “Is that right?”

  “Since we were eighteen.”

  I took a moment, and let the woman send me more. “She was sick for a long time, but now she is at peace.”

  And with that, the guy burst into tears, and someone next to him patted his shoulder. It hurt him, of course, that his wife was gone, but it was clearly a relief to him to know that she was no longer in pain.

  Feelings rushed to me, impressions of the dead. Sadness, joy, all of it. The spirit of a young woman came forward. I knew she wanted to speak to her mother. I looked at the left of the stage and swept my arm over the area. “It’s someone in this area,” I said. “It’s a woman. Her daughter passed recently. It was sudden and unexpected. The daughter is around thirty years old and has blonde hair.” Again, I only received impressions, but this one was coming through strongly.

  A short woman stood bolt upright. “That’s my daughter, Barbara!” she exclaimed.

  “There is a big tree behind your house,” I continued, “and she is waiting there, with her old pony. He has a long scar down one side.”

  The woman gasped. “Yes, that was her old pony, Harry. She had him when she was a child. He had a long scar down his nearside from being caught in a fence. We buried him under that big tree!”

  Everyone gasped.

  “And you have her ashes sitting on the TV,” I continued.

  “Yes!” the woman shrieked, and the crowd continued to gasp. “Do you know how she was killed? She was found in her house. The police didn’t come to any conclusions.”

  Impressions flooded over me. The daughter did not want me to tell her mother about a big argument she’d had with a man just before she passed. He had not killed her, as far as I could tell, but there was more to it, and the daughter did not want her mother to know.

  “She hasn’t told me,” I said, “but just know that she is at peace, and she’s happy. She’s with James. Who is James?”

  The woman collapsed into her seat. “Oh my gosh!” she said through her tears. The woman sitting next to her patted her on the arm. “Three years before I had Barbara, I had a miscarriage, and we were going to call the baby ‘James’. Barbara didn’t know this as a child, but she had an imaginary friend she named ‘James’.”

  I nodded. Barbara had come through strongly, and not all came through as clearly as this. Sometimes I surprised myself as much as I surprised the audience.

  I did what I could, moving around the audience. It took me a while to get another read, but then three came all in a row after that. Sometimes people come to my shows just to argue with me, or try to get me to mess up in the hopes of revealing me to be a fraud. To my relief, this hadn’t happened in this show.

  Time was getting away, so I wrapped up the last reading I was going to do. A woman in the audience believed that someone had killed her son on purpose, and the son wanted her to know, after all these years, that she was wrong. It had truly been an accident. Sometimes things happened, and there was simply nothing anyone could do.

  “Thank you,” the woman said.

  I nodded and smiled. I was about to say goodnight to everyone, when a voice called out. “Can you hear me?”

  My eyes scanned the audience, but I couldn’t see who had just spoken. “Who said that?”

  The voice came again. “Can you hear me? Can you see me?”

  I turned, and standing on stage with me, was a ghost, full-bodied, yet shimmering eerily under the bright lights of the auditorium.

  My blood ran cold. All my hair stood on end.

  Chapter 2

  I was sitting in my motel room. It looked like every other motel room I had stayed in over the last few weeks: a double bed, a dresser with a TV on top, a desk and chair, and an en-suite bathroom. There was always the faintest scent of eau-de-disinfectant.

  I thought over the evening’s events. I had never seen a ghost before, and this one looked flesh and blood. If it hadn’t been for the shimmering, I would have mistaken him for an actual, live person.

  What did this mean? I didn’t have a clue, but his appearance had left me shaken. If only he hadn’t vanished so quickly, I might have been able to get answers. I sighed and sat on the end of the bed. At that moment, the ghost man materialized right in front of me.

  I jumped to my feet, knocking my notepad to the floor.

  “I frightened you,” the ghost said.

  “It’s fine,” I shrieked in horror, clutching at my throat.

  The ghost took a step toward me. “I’m so sorry. It’s clear that it’s not fine. I’m sorry to frighten you. It’s just that you’re the first person who’s been able to see or hear me.”

  Goosebumps broke out on my arms. “I’ve never seen or heard a ghost before,” I said, backing away in fright. “You look like a real person. I can hear you like I can hear a real person. This has never happened to me before!” A wave of nausea swept over me and I clutched at my stomach.

  “This is all new to me, too.” The ghost spread out his arms. “I saw some of your show. You’re a clairvoyant medium, so you should be able to help me.”

  The room started to swim and I thought I might faint. I at once sat back down on the edge of the bed, and put my head between my knees. I was alarmed that the ghost was no longer shimmering, but looked like a real live person. If I hadn’t seen him appear as he did, I might even have thought that he wasn’t a ghost. After a few deep breaths, I sat up slowly. “I don’t know! What do you want from me?”

  “I need your help to solve a murder.”

  “Murder?” I asked weakly. “You were murdered?” This was all too much for me. I was going to need a long vacation, with plenty of wine and chocolate, not to mention ice cream, in a ghost-free place, if I could find one.

  The ghost held up his hands. “No, I don’t want you to find out anything about me. I need your help about someone else.”

  I was confused. “You weren’t murdered?”

  “Yes, I was, but it’s not about me.”

  I shook my head. This was going from bad to worse. Still, I was in the business of helping loved ones reconnect with their departed. Just because this ghost came through far more strongly than any had previously didn’t mean I should treat him differently. Get a grip, I told myself. Aloud I said, “Why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me what this is all about?”

  The ghost looked pleased with my suggestion. He crossed the room and sat on the hard chair opposite the bed. “My name is Alum Mullein,” the ghost began, “and I’m a cop. Well, I was. A homicide detective, to be precise.”

  I found it hard to concentrate on what he was saying, but I made the effort.

  “The victim was Brady Wayland, the actor. Have you heard of him?”

  I nodded. “Yes, of course. His death was all over the news. I thought they said it was suicide.”

  Alum’s eyes narrowed. “Brady Wayland was going to play the lead role in a film about the infamous real life crime boss, Martin Taylor.”

  “Is the crime boss still alive?” I asked, intrigued in spite of myself.

  “No,” the ghost said. “He died a decade ago. We had reason to believe that his son, Jason Taylor, took over the business, but for some reason we were never able to prove it.”

  “So you think he had something to do with it?”

  “Lady, you should have been a detective, with all these questions,” Alum said. “But yes, maybe. You see, Brady Wayland contacted the son and the associates of the criminal he was going to be playing. He followed them around for weeks, researching the role. It’s not a stretch to think he uncovered something that led to his murder.”

  I scratched my head. “So it wasn’t suicide, despite what the media said?”

  “That’s what I was working on when I was shot,” Alum said, clutching at his side. “We were treating it as suspicious circumstances.�
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  “How did you die?”

  “Well, this pertains to the case, so I’ll tell you. The last thing I remember was my partner shooting me.”

  I couldn’t believe what the ghost had just said. His own partner had killed him? “He shot you?”

  “Yes.”

  I gasped. “How long had you two worked together?”

  “Fifteen years,” Alum said. “Believe me, it was quite the shock.”

  I, too, was in shock. It was bad enough that my first-ever visible ghost had appeared in my life, and now he was telling me that he had been murdered, not only by another cop, but by his own partner at that.

  Alum was still talking. “I can’t remember the last few hours leading up to my death. I remember that I’d made a breakthrough with the gang, but I can’t remember what it was. I know I’d uncovered evidence that Jason Taylor and his associates were, in fact, criminals, but I have no clue what the evidence is. I suppose the shock of being killed played havoc with my memory.” He shrugged. “But now I have you.”

  I stood and held up my hand. “Wait a minute,” I said. “You have me? What do you mean by that?”

  The ghost stood up, too. “I meant that I have someone I can speak with. I can tell you what I know. I need to solve the case. I thought I would just have to be here, stewing forever. I can’t go on to the other side. I feel no sense of peace. I figure I need to solve the case before I can go.”

  I thought that over. I had always suspected that people passed on to somewhere else when they died, but that some people stayed behind. I believed that some of the living had deceased people around them, but some people didn’t. I was unable to get any sort of feeling from some people’s departed loved ones. Why would some people have the dead present, and some people not? The only answer was that there was somewhere else that some chose not to go to, or couldn’t. And Alum was telling me, as long as the case wasn’t solved, he wasn’t able to go on, or he was unwilling. If that man was ever going to be at rest, he needed me to help him solve the case.

  Yet surely I couldn’t. I wasn’t a detective, or even a police officer. I couldn’t solve a murder. And then there was the danger. He had been murdered in pursuit of the very case he was asking me to help him solve. It was all too much.