Spooky Business (Jane Garbo Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  “We do try. You should come and check it out sometime,” I added dryly as I hefted my bags and started moving away from him.

  He bobbed his head in the way people do when they want to seem agreeable but are never really going to do what you’re suggesting.

  Not that I blamed him. I myself had tried to escape this place, and look where that had gotten me.

  “Thanks for the help with the bags,” I smiled.

  The man swallowed hard and then, in an almost shaking voice, he said, “Want me to help you carry them in?”

  “I can handle it,” I said.

  The instant relief on his face was typical. He told me to have a good day and nearly sprinted back to his car.

  Dusk was falling, and the cab driver certainly couldn’t be blamed for not wanting to be in the vicinity of Haunted Bluff Mansion when night came. I let him go without further ado, gathered my courage, and turned to face the house.

  At that exact moment, three rotting eggs exploded on the ground next to my feet. I was under attack!

  I gasped and ducked, then leapt out of the way and dashed for the big front door as fast as I could, dragging my luggage behind me. Eggs continued to explode, just missing me and my stuff every time.

  Once I had gotten to the safety of the doorway, I glanced up and yelled, “GUS! STOP! NOW!”

  Floating above me was a fat ghost, looking very pleased with himself. “You don’t like the welcome?” he pouted.

  “No throwing eggs at the family,” I huffed. “Don’t you remember the rules?”

  Gus only looked more petulant. “You’ve been gone a long time! What do you know about the rules now? Maybe they’ve changed.”

  “Have they?” I challenged.

  I tried the door, but it was locked, even though my grandmother Cookie had just run through it.

  If it wasn’t one thing it was another.

  I pounded on the door and then pounded some more, while Gus grumbled something about picky Garbo women and floated away.

  “That self-righteous cloud must be comfortable,” I yelled after him.

  He waved.

  Fall was arriving, and the air was cold. Fighting to get my breath under control, I glared after Gus until he was out of view. Then I started worrying about how mussed my brown hair probably was. Not the greatest state in which to come crawling home to the family business.

  While I waited for someone to let me in, I gazed around to see how they were keeping the place. Random hay bales dotted the yard, interspersed with crinkling old leaves and unkempt grass. There was something oddly charming about the mansion, and I had always liked the fact that people came here to spend their precious weekend evenings. It was fun, much more so since they didn’t know it was real. And how they did appreciate our efforts at authenticity!

  When I was almost tired of pounding, the thick wooden door finally flew backwards, almost knocking me off balance. I had to stop my hand in mid-swing lest I punch my grandmother.

  “What do you want?” Cookie demanded as if she didn’t even know who I was.

  Thank goodness I’d avoided inheriting the nose, but it suited her well, like when she wanted to turn it up at people.

  At the moment she was using her wide body to block my entrance.

  “Hi Gram, nice to see you, too,” I said, scrutinizing her and concluding that nothing much had changed since the last time I’d seen her. She was as short and squat as ever, with flyaway gray hair, a large nose, and an overgrown propensity for making life difficult.

  I was hot and sweaty and I desperately wanted to get to my room, my one haven in the house, to lie down. After years of work I’d gotten my room just the way I wanted it, and it was the only thing that had made the thought of coming home bearable.

  “Whatever. You said you were never coming back here,” Cookie said, glaring at me from under the wide brim of her witch’s hat. “You in trouble? Ran out on your rent? Can’t blame me for believing your lies.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” I said. “Anyhow, you told me you’d stop stealing spoons, but I see you haven’t done it,” I said, pointing to one of her bulging pockets.

  “They’re coins,” she said, never looking away from me. “Don’t come home and be nosy!”

  “Sure they are,” I shot back. She was still physically blocking the door, and I was itching to get inside before Gus came back with any more bright ideas.

  “What’s the magic word?” said Cookie.

  “Move?” I offered.

  She shook her head, a sly smile creeping across her old lips.

  “Now?” I tried again.

  “WRONG!” she cried gleefully.

  The sun was setting and I was starting to feel cold in the gloom. I thought I might finally get into my own house when Cookie’s milky blue eyes, ceaselessly roving behind me, caught sight of something that interested her.

  “What’s that?” She pointed and I looked over my shoulder, realizing my mistake too late as she slammed the door in my face.

  I stood there for several seconds, wondering if the watching ghosts could see the steam coming out of my ears. Then I pounded on the door some more, and waited.

  The next instant, the door was opened by a familiar and less crazy face.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said, trying not to sound desperate.

  “Cookie said there was a homeless person on the stoop. I guess for once she didn’t lie,” said my mother, eyeing me up and down.

  Cookie was my dad’s mom, so my mom didn’t look anything like her. Mom was taller, and she still had black hair and dark brown eyes that could pin you to the wall with a look, as my younger brother could tell you in detail. Cam had been having a lot of experience with that look during his teenage years, i.e., recently.

  “Good to see you.” She sounded measured, but she stepped aside all the same.

  I was home.

  Chapter Three

  Once I was inside, Mom did give me a hug, which for her was the equivalent of throwing a party. Maybe Cookie’s plan all along had been to make me feel lucky for getting to enter the house at all.

  “You too,” I said.

  Then Mom reached down and hauled in my second trunk. Mercifully, I’d bought this one secondhand from a human, so all it had on it was a peace sticker.

  As she maneuvered the luggage, I examined the sweeping interior of my family home and decided that nothing much had changed from when I’d last been there.

  “You have a lot of stuff. More than you bring at Christmas. Planning to stay for a while?”

  I told her I was.

  “Good,” was all she said.

  “Place looks good,” I observed.

  “Mostly looks the same,” Mom shrugged.

  She kept the place running like clockwork, and unlike most of the rest of us, she always dressed in serious clothing. She was too busy worrying about entertaining the paying customers to dress up like Cookie.

  “Luckily Cookie worries about that,” she had commented once, “and not much else.”

  The black marble floor was scuffed and darkened by a thin layer of dust; it hadn’t been mopped in years. If I craned my neck far enough backwards I could just see the chandelier high above my head.

  The silver desperately needed a shining and had also turned black. The cobwebs were so thick I imagined ghosts took delight in hiding precious little odds and ends in the strong webs they’d stolen.

  The sweeping staircase stood out in front of me. To its right was the ghosts’ section of the haunted house; to the left, the bats’ and skeletons’.

  My mother led the way up the staircase, but instead of turning right or left, she pushed on the wall in front of us. It looked like the rest of the wall, but a door had been carved out of the wood. If you hit the right spot, it would swing inwards.

  The family inhabited the third, fourth, and fifth floors, while the haunted house started on the second floor and you worked your way down.

  The second staircase we now walked up was worlds a
way from the grand staircase of the entrance hall. It was practical, with uncarpeted wooden steps. On either side of it hung family portraits, charms, and other bits of decorations the family had acquired over the years. My mother insisted that we not have anything too nice in the family areas, because of what had happened to her favorite grandfather’s clock many years ago. The short story was that it involved an overconfident cat and a very angry Cookie with a broom.

  The family also used the back wing of the house, which was good some of the time but sometimes awkward. A handful of incidents had occurred over the years where very determined guests had come barging into the kitchen or the library looking for the exit. Some were particularly afraid of the ghosts or vampires in the haunted house, while others were just curious about the famous Garbo family that lived there. Locally famous, mind you; I never gave in to praise, but our house was quite the well known oddity around town.

  My mom led me up to the fourth floor, where the bedrooms were, but when I started to turn off toward mine, she kept climbing.

  “Um?” I demanded, stopping on the landing instead of following her further upstairs.

  Standing outside the door to the family’s living room, I could hear voices coming from inside it.

  “My room is on the fourth floor, remember?” I asked.

  Mom’s face paled a little, not a good sign.

  My mom was brazen; she had stood up to all sorts of supernaturals over the years. But to deal with her own children was another matter entirely.

  “What did you do to my room?” I breathed.

  “You weren’t here,” Mom fumbled, her face going from pale to bright red. “Had to move to the big city, you did. You can’t expect that room to stay empty forever!”

  Without another word I burst through the door and into the living room. Three pairs of eyes turned to look at me, and then my cousin Pep, who was just my age, uttered a cry and flung her arms around my neck. I wrapped my arms around her shoulders and we both cried into each other’s hair.

  “Girls are so confusing,” came a guy’s voice from behind Pep. I rolled my eyes, even though no one could see them because they were buried in Pep’s hair.

  The voice was that of my brother Cam, who was standing behind Pep. Next to him were Kip and Corey Woodson.

  Kip and Corey were brothers and friends of the Garbo family. They had been raised by their father after their mother left, and then, when their father died, they’d come to live and help out at the mansion, since both my aunt Meg’s husband and my dad were also gone. Kip was the talent and strength behind haunt hunting. He was very capable and showed it every day. Corey was also capable, but he preferred labs and experiments to real fighting.

  What had happened was that back when my brother was a baby, there had been an entire group of haunt hunters: my dad and Meg’s husband (two of Cookie’s sons), and Kip and Corey’s father, among others. They had been ambushed by a particularly nasty set of vampires and none of them had survived. Corey and Kip had already lost their mother, so we took them in at Haunted Bluff. They might not be blood family, but they were family just the same.

  Cam was forever trying to keep up with them, and usually failing. We all babied him, but don’t tell him I said that.

  “Probably why you’re still single.” Kip reached out to ruffle Cam’s hair, but Cam swatted his hand away.

  “Jane, good to see you!” Corey came forward and wrapped his arms around both Pep and me. “Glad you’re back!”

  “Get off, you big lug,” Pep choked out. “I can’t breathe.”

  “Sounds like you can breathe just fine,” said Corey, grinning broadly and stepping back to survey us.

  Cam came over and gave me a hug, but he also whispered so no one else could hear the question: “Why did you come back? You got out!”

  I pulled away and glared up at him. He got taller every time I saw him, and I wondered when he was going to stop.

  “Don’t make me regret my decision,” I teased.

  For a split second I thought Cam’s face clouded, and I wondered why. But he recovered quickly, so I filed the question away for the time being.

  “You headed to your room?” asked Kip, the quietest of the crew.

  At that, all four young people exchanged concerned looks, then looked past me to my mom, who cleared her throat and shifted uncomfortably.

  “She didn’t tell you?” Pep squealed.

  “Didn’t tell me what?” I demanded.

  This was bad, I knew it was going to be bad. Anything that inspired Kip to say a full and complete sentence was definitely worth worrying about.

  Without another word I brushed past my cousins and hurried down the hall. I dropped my bags halfway, because I had a feeling I’d be taking them somewhere else pretty soon. I could hear the sound of feet hurrying after me, and maybe even a call for me not to be unreasonable, but I ignored all that.

  What had she done with the place? I wondered. Turned it into a sewing room? No one in my family sewed . . .

  A happy sigh of relief escaped me as I saw my doorway, light streaming through it as though welcoming me.

  But when I stepped around the corner, I gasped in horror.

  The room was perfectly neat. A bed with a blue bedspread was pushed into a corner, and a desk devoid of paper and writing implements sat near it. The rug had been removed and the window curtains had been changed from rebellious to boring.

  “What is this?” I barely managed to get out. My bedspread had been a quilt that had been in the family for generations, I had a well-worn antique rug of the brightest blue, and you better believe my curtains were filled with pizzazz!

  There was a long pause.

  “Don’t be upset,” said my mother, almost sounding desperate. “We gave your room to Lizzie.”

  I choked. I had expected it was going to be bad, known it was going to be bad, but how could it truly be that bad?

  Lizzie was another one of my cousins. She hadn’t lived at the mansion growing up, unlike Pep and her sister Lark, but she’d always been nearby. I had always been able to feel her presence, like a leech. She was a year younger than I was, and unlike me, an exemplary witch. She did everything properly and as she was supposed to. Oh, and she was blonde and blue-eyed and pretty.

  I couldn’t stand her.

  “You gave my room to Lizzie?” I breathed, so shocked I was unable to move.

  “She needed to come here for training. You knew that day would come. She’s learning with flying colors. That girl really is a marvel.”

  Lizzie’s parents were modern types. They didn’t care about their only child and spent their lives traveling. That was why they had given Lizzie permission to become a haunt hunter: no respect for tradition. No matter how much I wanted to hate them, there were times when I thought their behavior proved that they were the sanest of the lot.

  I choked again. Pretty soon my mother would rush me to the hospital, except that she wouldn’t, because she thought I was being too dramatic.

  In my opinion, there was no such thing as too dramatic where Lizzie was concerned. The biggest dose of skepticism was the most accurate in any matter whatsoever that applied to Lizzie.

  Just as my mom put her arm around my shoulder and led me away from my former beautiful room, the fourth floor door burst open and Grandma Cookie came storming in.

  “Seen it already has she? Did she make a fool of herself? You should have waited for me,” said Cookie gleefully.

  “She’s handling it just fine,” Pep said. I gave her a swift glance to thank her for defending me.

  “I’m never going to be the same again,” I moaned, sinking down into a nearby chair. “Everything is lost!”

  “Yeah, see, she’s fine,” said Pep.

  “Where’s she going to stay now?” Pep asked, looking concerned. “She could bunk with Lark and me, but it’s already a tight squeeze.”

  “Absolutely not,” I said. “You and Lark don’t have enough room as it is, and anyhow I’d get i
n the way of all the black Lark puts everywhere. This place is big enough, you’d think we had enough bedrooms.”

  Lark liked black clothing, black decorations, and black possessions of all sorts. She felt that anything black was more real than anything else of any color whatsoever.

  “There are the guest bedrooms,” I said brightly. I had never once been allowed to stay in the nice rooms set aside for guests, but I had never really cared, because I until now I’d had my own beloved room. But the guest rooms were by far the best rooms in the house, and I was already starting to feel a little intrigued about them. They had views of the cliff and the ocean, which family members didn’t have in their own rooms because my mom didn’t have any use for time wasters like ocean-gazing when there was so much work to be done.

  “You’ll have to kick Lady Oakley out of the attic. That’s the only option,” said my mom.

  I groaned loudly. The punishments were adding up.

  “Pep, will you help Jane get set up in the attic? Lark should be back soon, and she can help too.”

  I brightened a little bit at the prospect of seeing Lark, younger than Pep by a year. The poor girl had to share a birthday with Lizzie, but that’s where their similarities ended. She was one of my favorites in the family, and we had always been close.

  Lark and Pep might share the same parents, but that was about all they had in common. Where Lark was sarcastic, Pep was serious. Where Pep thought that success at test-taking was the secret to a happy life, Lark burned her assignments in front of teachers. Unlike her sister, Lark was slower and more methodical most of the time, while Pep pinged around life as if she were forever being shot from one cannon to the next. Still, they loved each other with an unbreakable bond.

  Lark had the brightest, reddest, curliest hair I’d ever seen. Her strands escaped hair ties so often they’d have made exceptional career criminals. Usually, she did a fishtail braid slung over one shoulder to keep her hair under control. She also liked to dye one streak of hair bright white. Her mother told her she looked like a Santa Claus skunk, but Lark thought it made her stand out.

  As if she needed a white streak to accomplish that.