Crazy Spooky Love

Crazy Spooky Love

Chapter One

“So, what do you do with your spare time, Melody?”

I look my date square in his pretty brown eyes and lie to him. “Oh, you know. The usual.” I shrug to convey how incredibly normal I am. “I read a lot . . . Go to the movies. That kind of thing.”

I watch Lenny digest my words and breathe a sigh of relief when his eyes brighten.

“Which genre?”

“Umm, in movies or books?” I’m stalling for time because, in truth, I don’t get much in the way of spare time to do either.

“Movies. Action or romance? No, let me guess.” He narrows his eyes and studies me intently. “You look like a sucker for a rom-com.”

“Do I?” I’m genuinely surprised. I just scrape five foot and look more like Wednesday Addams than a Disney princess. Maybe Wednesday Addams is over-egging it, but you get the idea; I’m brunette and my dress sense errs on the side of edgy. I don’t think anyone has ever looked at me and thought whimsy. Maybe Lenny sees something everyone else has missed, me included. I quite like that idea, mainly because everyone who knows my family has a head full of preconceptions about me.

“Four Weddings?” He shrugs. His outdated suggestion tells me that he’s not really a rom-com guy either. There’s hope.

I shrug, not mentioning that the only part of that particular movie I enjoyed was the funeral.

“The Holiday?”

Again, I try to look interested and hold my tongue, because I’m sure he doesn’t want to hear that I’d rather stick needles in my eyes than ever watch an overoptimistic Kate Winslet drag some old guy around a swimming pool again. My mother tries to get me to sit and watch it every Christmas, and every Christmas I think of a new reason to say no.

I’m relieved when the bill arrives and we can get out of there, because so far Lenny has turned out to be a pretty stellar guy and somehow I’ve managed to convince him that I walk on the right side of the tracks. Maybe this time, things will be different. Lenny pulls his dull, salesman’s sedan into the cobbled cartway beside my building and kills the engine. I don’t mind dull. In fact, my life could really use a bit of dull right now, so I shoot him my most seductive smile, cross my fingers that my mother will be in bed, and invite him in for coffee.

I tug him by the hand through the dark back door, placing my finger against my lips to signal he should be quiet as we tiptoe past my mother’s apartment and up the old wooden staircase to my place.

He rests his hand on my waist as I turn the key, and a small thrill shoots down my back. Look at me, winning at this being-an-adult thing today! Dinner with an attractive man, sparkling conversation, and now back to mine for coffee . . . and maybe even a little fooling around. It’s not that I’m a virgin or anything, but it would be fair to call my love life patchy of late. By of late I mean the last two years, ever since Leo Dark and I called things off. Well, by Leo and I, I mean Leo called things off, citing conflict of interests. Ha. Given that he was referring to the fact that my mad-as-a-bag-of-cats family are the only other psychics in town besides him, he was, at least in part, right.

But enough of Leo and my lamentable love life. Right now, all I want is for Lenny to not know anything at all about my peculiar family, to keep seeing me as a cool, regular, completely normal girl, and kiss me senseless.

“You remind me of Kate Middleton,” Lenny whispers behind me at the top of the stairs. I mean, I’m considerably shorter and distinctly un-regal, but I’ll take it.

“All big brown eyes and clever one-liners. It’s very sexy.”

I’m fairly sure Kate Middleton has green eyes and isn’t especially known for clever one-liners, but I don’t even care because I think he’s just brushed a kiss against the back of my neck! My door sticks sometimes so I shoulder-barge it open, aiming for firm and graceful but, I fear, more like a burly police SWAT team ramming it down. Thankfully, Lenny seems to take it in his stride and follows me into my apartment. He probably doesn’t register the heady scent of Chanel No. 5 hanging in the air, but I do and my heart sinks.

Just when it had all been going so well. Why couldn’t I have just given him a good-night kiss in the car, sent him on his way with maybe the smallest hint of tongue as a promise? He’d have been up for a second date, I’m sure of it.

I sigh as I flick on the table lamp. My mother is standing on my coffee table in a too short, too sheer, baby-blue negligee with her arms raised toward the ceiling and her head thrown back.

“Shit!” Lenny swears in my ear, clearly startled. He isn’t to blame. My mother’s a striking woman, ballerina-tall and slender with silver hair that falls in waves well beyond her shoulder blades. It isn’t gray. It’s been pure silver since the day she was born, and right now she looks as if she’s just been freshly crucified on my coffee table.

I huff as I drop my bag by the lamp. So much for me being normal.

“Err, Mother?”

She takes several heaving breaths and opens her eyes, glaring at us.

“For God’s sake, Melody,” she grumbles, dropping her hands from above her head and planting them on her hips. “I almost had the connection then. He’s hiding out in the loft, I’m sure of it.”

I risk a glance over my shoulder at Lenny, who sure isn’t kissing my neck anymore.

He lifts his eyebrows at me, a silent “what the hell?” and then looks away when my mother beckons to him like a siren luring a fisherman onto the rocks.

“Your hand, please, young man.”

“No!” I almost yell, but Lenny is already across the room with his hand out to help her down. My mother sly-eyes me as she steps from the table, keeping a firm grip on Lenny’s hand.

“Long life-line,” she murmurs, tracing her scarlet nail across Lenny’s palm.

“Mother,” I warn, but my somber, cautionary tone falls on her selectively deaf ears. I expected nothing else, because she’s pulled this trick before. Admittedly, the standing-on-the-table thing is a new twist, but she’s got form in scoping out my prospective boyfriends to make sure they’ll fit in with our screwball family from the outset. Not that her romantic gauge is something to put any stock in; Leo passed her tests with flying colors and look how that ended up. I got my heart broken and he got a spot on Morning TV as the resident psychic. Where’s the justice in that? Look, we may as well get the clanky old skeleton out of the family closet early on here, people. It’s going to come out sooner or later, and despite my attempts to pull the wool over Lenny’s eyes, there’s never any running away from this thing for long.

My name’s Melody Bittersweet, and I see dead people.

It’s not only me. I’m just the latest in a long line of Bittersweet women to have the gift, or the curse, depending on how you look at it. My family has long since celebrated our weirdness; hence the well-established presence of our family business, Blithe Spirits, on Chapelwick High Street. We’ve likely been here longer than the actual chapel at the far end of the street. That’s probably why, by and large, we’re accepted by the residents of the town, in a “They’re a bunch of eccentrics, but they’re our bunch of eccentrics” kind of way. What began as a tiny, mullion-windowed, one-room shop has spread out along the entire row over the last two hundred years; we now own a run of three terraced properties haphazardly knocked into one big, rambling place that is both business and home to not only me, but also to my mother, Silvana, and her mother, Dicey. Gran’s name isn’t actually Dicey. It’s Paradise, officially, but she’s gone by Dicey ever since she met my grandpa Duke on her fifteenth birthday and he wrote “Dicey and Duke” inside a chalk heart on the back wall of our building. He may as well have written it on her racing heart.

“Silvana!”

Speak of the devil. Does no one go to bed around here?