Ghouls Just Want to Have Fun
Read Ghouls Just Want to Have Fun Online
Authors: Kathleen Bacus
GHOULS JUST
WANT TO
HAVE FUN
KATHLEEN BACUS
LOVE SPELL
NEW YORK CITY
LOVE SPELL
®
October 2006
Published by
Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
200 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."
Copyright © 2006 by Kathleen Cecile Bacus
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
ISBN 0-505-52694-8
The name "Love Spell" and its logo are trademarks of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Visit us on the web at
www.dorchesterpub.com
.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As a writer, it really goes against the grain to parrot what others have said before me, but in this case, I'll gladly make an exception. So, here goes:
"No one writes in a vacuum."
Books don't appear simply by pulling one out of a hat or by virtue
of
crossed arms and an
I Dream of Jeannie
blink. There are so many wonderfully gifted and talented folks who work so diligently behind the scenes to put out the best books possible--often under impossibly tight deadlines and amid massive workloads, so a thank-you to those folks is long overdue.
My sincere appreciation goes out to Tricia, Daniel, and the entire Editorial, Art and Production departments for their commitment to excellence in all that they do--and for being so easy to work with. A big thanks to "go-to gal," Brianna, Manager of Public Relations, for always being so quick to respond to this newbie's SOSs (and for having all the right answers) and for being incredibly patient and so darned nice that she makes this ongoing learning process painless. And to Brooke and Tim, who get the books into the hands of our readers so efficiently--what would we do without you?
It goes without saying (but I'm saying it anyway) that I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my superb editor, Chris Keeslar, without whose total acceptance of a story and characters that refused to fit neatly in any one genre gave me permission to write outside the lines and introduce readers to a cast of characters I truly love to create stories for. Thank you so much for taking a gamble on two small-town, good ol' girls. Your vision provided the opportunity for a little filly called Tressa to kick up her heels--and a chance for a somewhat longer-in-the-tooth brood mare named Kathy to prove she isn't just a one-trick pony. Thanks for betting on us, Chris.
And to my all-knowing and all-seeing agent, Michelle, who never doubted for a minute that I could meet a deadline tighter than thigh-high hose, thank you so much for believing in me. We did it, kiddo!
And lastly, to my brother, Gary, a fellow monster movie aficionado, remember those monster stories we wrote as kids? Guess what? Your Tree Monster story beat my Wolfman story all to heck. Go figure.
GHOULS JUST
WANT TO
HAVE FUN
Content
A blonde, a brunette, and a redhead went out for lunch. After a stimulating, healthful meal, all three decided to visit the ladies' room, and found a strange-looking woman sitting at the entrance, who said, "Welcome to the ladies' room. Be sure to check out our newest feature: a mirror that, if you look into it and say something truthful, will reward you with a wish. But be warned, if you say something false, you will be sucked into the mirror to live in a void of nothingness for all eternity!"
The three women quickly entered and, upon finding the mirror, the brunette said, "I think I'm the most beautiful of us three," and in an instant she was surrounded by a pile of money. The redhead stepped up and said, "I think I'm the most talented of us three," and she suddenly found the keys to a brand-new Lexus in her hands. Excited over the possibility of having a wish come true, the blonde looked into the mirror and said, "I think..." and was promptly sucked into the mirror.
* * *
Name a dumb blonde joke--any blonde joke--and chances are I can recite it backwards. I'm rather an authority on the genre, having been the inspiration for more than a few since I first made my appearance as a bouncing baby blonde on one snowy April-first morn twenty three and a half years ago. For those of you who subscribe to astrology, that of course makes me an Aries--and the target of year-in-year-out harassment for having been born on April Fools' Day. As if folks need a reason to harass me.
Those of us born under the sign of Aries are described with such alluring adjectives as "brash" and "bombastic"--the latter I had to look up just to make sure it wasn't some unpleasant gastrointestinal condition--not to mention quaint descriptive phrases like, "Aries strut their stuff with more moxie than most can abide." Ouch. Now that hurts.
I was born at the ungodly hour of 4:06 A.M., making my rising sign--whatever that is--Pisces. According to one Internet site, that means I'm supposed to be intuitive and possessed of psychic powers. Ha! That's a good one: "intuitive" in reference to a person who was generally the first one out at dodgeball in elementary school (this before they made us quit playing after the second-worst player, Chubby Chad Dinkins, suffered a mild concussion and his folks threatened to sue) and who had to watch
The Sixth Sense
six times before she figured out Bruce Willis was dead all along. Oops. Sorry I've spoiled the ending for those of you who populate caves and survivalist camps and have never seen the flick.
I'm one of those people who love to be scared to death in a movie theater with a hundred-plus other moviegoers, sucking down Coke and licking butter from their fingers. But when I'm home by myself watching a horror flick on one of Snoopy's infamous dark and stormy nights? Well, let's just say the sound of the furnace kicking on can get me running to the doors to check the locks, and to the kitchen to make sure all the sharp knives are present and accounted for.
Hey now. Come clean. You've done the old look-in-the-closet-or-under-the-bed move yourself a time or two, haven't you? It's okay. I won't tell a soul. Honest. We 'fraidy cats have to stick together, you know.
It's not that I've personally had any "close encounters of the paranormal kind" that would make me particularly susceptible to supernatural suggestion. But I did have a great aunt who loved to scare the pants off her "favorite" great nieces and nephews with spooky ghost stories and who swore up and down that she'd been visited regularly by the spirit of her dear, departed, dead sister, Misty Sue, who had tragically passed away at the age of five from a brain tumor. Aunt Eunice even showed us family photos taken years after little Misty Sue had passed, and would point to faint blurs in the photo and insist those blurs were Misty Sue. Aunt Eunice also had a rather disturbing practice of taking her camera to funeral home viewings of folks she knew and snapping pictures of them in their caskets "to remember them by." Bleah. Like, how creepy is that? She kept a photo album of her stiff snapshots that she'd bring out to show off like a new parents' brag book whenever we visited. So, while I'm not strictly a believer in every sense of the word, this youthful indoctrination in things-hereafter was compelling stuff for an impressionable young girl with a vivid imagination and a history of chronic misadventure. So, while my mouth might say something is total hooey, the heart beating a mile a minute in my chest declares otherwise.
All things considered, I've elected to abstain from all forms of dark entertainment this Halloween season due to a series of, shall we say, unfortunate events that have seriously impacted my ability to watch slasher movies or to read any book that doesn't feature the words "cowboy," "bride," or "baby" in the title. I've sworn off anything remotely related to zombies, vampires, werewolves or clowns. Yeah. You heard right. Clowns. Hmm. I guess I should explain.
After playing a leading role in my own hometown murder mystery earlier this spring--a role that I assure you I did not audition for or aspire to--I headed off to enjoy two weeks of down-home good-time fun at Iowa's annual celebration of great food and simple pleasures, only to end up in my own nonmusical--and strictly PG-rated--cockeyed-cowgirl version of "Calamity Jayne Does the State Fair," complete with a supporting cast of characters only Mel Brooks could love. From my dweeby cousin Frankie, out to clear his name, to a pair of geriatric Joe Fridays, to an insult-spouting midway dunk-tank clown gone way off the deep end, the fair was one wild ride for which Dramamine was of zilch therapeutic use. The effects, I'm sorry to say, have been lasting. Even now I can't watch
Scooby-Doo
without someone else in the room. How sad is that?
After having my face plastered across multiple issues of Iowa's capital-city's daily newspaper during the summer season, I was ready to fade from the public eye, content to feature other folks' mugs--or mug shots, depending on the story--on the front of the
Grandville Gazette,
the small daily newspaper where I sporadically found myself employed.
I'd been let go from the newspaper previously due to technical difficulties relating to the labeling of obituary photos. It's a long story, but let's just say that my publisher's wife took offense at having her favorite aunt identified as Stubby Burkholder, the strange little man who for years used to cut grass in area cemeteries while wearing what looked suspiciously like a ruffled frock. Personally, I always thought Aunt Deanie benefited by the photo mix-up. She'd never looked better.
Mowing graveyards must be a nice, quiet, relatively safe vocation. You sure wouldn't get any complaints from residents about your job performance. Still, how creepy would it be bouncing over the graves of hundreds of people for a living? And since, in my present frame of mind eating Count Chocula cereal gave me the willies, I was hardly signing up to take Stubby's place.
As a rookie cub reporter for the
Grandville Gazette
--the newspaper's founders garnering a D-minus for creativity but a B-plus for having the cojones to actually go with such a lame name--I had finally attained byline status for a series of eyewitness articles relating to the bizarre crime spree I'd been embroiled in the previous summer. Now that autumn was in the air, I found myself surprisingly satisfied to cover school board meetings--okay, so this assignment was a total yawner--sports events, and the occasional human interest story. I shied away from the crime beat, though, and not just because I was still freaked out by my past brushes with danger. I was also trying to mend some fences with local law enforcement officials over what they lovingly referred to as "multiple counts of interference with official acts" during the course of my earlier mission to gain a little hometown R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Okay, so I may have undertaken what many considered Mission: Impossible with a little more, uh, enthusiasm than law enforcement authorities anticipated. Or could stomach. That's what happens when a slightly grumpy cowgirl-type fed up with being taken about as seriously as a rent-a-cop at a rock concert discovers a corpse in her car, loses the corpse and can't get anyone to believe it was there in the first place. Well, anyone except the killer, that is.
Anyway, at least for now, I was okay with writing short articles on the employee of the month at the local hospital, reporting the successes (and failures) of the high school cross-country teams, and doing a fluff piece on the candidates for homecoming queen. I'd inherited the assignment from a fellow
Gazette
contributor who, once he'd interviewed the king candidates, decided he wasn't up to doing the same with their frilly female counterparts.
It was this gem of a story that brought me to my former high school on a chilly late-October morning. I was finishing up my interview with queen candidate number four, Kylie Danae Radcliffe, a perky, over-the-top brunette (I
so
have a problem with perky brunettes, but that's another story) with teeth so bright I was tempted to stick my cheapo Bargain City sunglasses on my nose and pull my Dairee Freeze visor down low on my forehead to combat the glare.
In case you're wondering, my uncle Frank owns the Dairee Freeze, a local ice cream establishment where I currently put in at least twenty hours a week--more when I really need the moolah, which is, like, all the time. It was hawking Uncle Frank's dairy delights at the state fair in August that had reinforced my earlier aversion to clowns and to slithering serpents that invade the sanctity of private living quarters, and had heightened a sense of tension of both a sexual and a nonsexual nature between a certain gorgeous if exasperating ranger-type and me. Rick Townsend is an officer with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. He's an avid sportsman, he loves to hunt and fish, and he loves to play games. With me. I've known Townsend--or Ranger Rick, as I like to call him--since before he grew hair in manly places, and when a six-pack meant a half-dozen cans of Coca-Cola.
I have issues with Rick Townsend. He's the jerk who stuck me with a nickname that's proven harder to lose than a bad credit rating--or weight from that stubborn thigh area. I was called Calamity Jayne so much in high school, at graduation Daniel Tremont had to give me a poke in the ribs when they called Tressa Jayne Turner up to receive her diploma.
I'll admit to having some pretty steamy daydreams--okay, and some pretty hot night ones, too--over the sexy ranger; however, I'm not ready to make any great leaps of faith--or into bed--with a man who has a soft spot for reptiles and who not so long ago had me convinced he was falling for my cover model, could-be rocket-scientist little sister, Taylor.
I'm playing what used to be called "hard to get" with the good ranger. I figure if he's "the one," he'll hang in there long enough for me to figure it out. And if not, he never was. Does that make any sense?
Let's just say that for my own heart health I'm taking it slow and easy with Rick. And believe me, ladies, if you saw Ranger Rick, you'd agree that such uber-amounts of self-restraint and sheer good-girliness ought to more than qualify me for sainthood--right alongside Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II, God rest their souls.
"So, why would
you
make the best homecoming queen?" I asked the prep sitting across from me at a table in the commons area of Grandville High School. "What sets you apart from the other four candidates?"
With a toss of her head, Kylie shook a long, shiny length of dark hair over one shoulder, and I winced. Don't you just hate when girls do the hair-toss move? That annoying pivoting of the head like the girls in the shampoo commercials do, where their silky hair fans out in all its glory and makes all us frizzy-haired females jump into our cars and head for the nearest hair-care aisle in search of a miracle cure for split ends and flyaway hair? Okay, so I admit I'm totally jealous because I can't do the Pantene flip. My hair is a bit on the wild side. If I tossed it around like that, I'd hurt someone.
"I'm, like, a shoo-in for queen," Kylie said, clicking a set of perfect black-and-gold-decorated nails on the off-white tabletop. "Everybody likes me. I'm nice to just about everyone I meet. I'm in the top ten percent of my class. I'm a member of the GHS dance line--front row--and the National Honor Society. I'm also a football cheerleader. I'm in Chamber Choir and sing the national anthem at all the basketball games. I've had the lead in the school musical for the last two years. I play varsity basketball and volleyball, run track and play golf. I volunteer regularly at Grandville Nursing Home--the residents just love to hear me sing--and I work at Shady Pines Country Club. My father is a family practice physician at Grandville Community Hospital and my mother is vice president of Central Iowa Savings and Loan."
Kylie Radcliffe rattled off her resume like I recite my to-go order at China Buffet on my way from one job to the next.
I'll have the pineapple chicken, fried rice, two egg rolls, half a dozen crab Rangoon and sweet-and-sour sauce on the side.
Oh, buddy, I thought, suddenly making a connection between the candidate for queen and a certain banker I'd had occasion to deal with recently. Conflict-of-interest time. I knew Kylie's mother. She'd turned me down for a car loan six months back when I'd badly needed to distance myself from an '87 Plymouth that held some not-so-great memories for me.
I wrinkled my nose. I'd lay odds that little Ms. Shoo-in here wasn't driving around in a beat-up white Plymouth Reliant. But I put my car envy on hold and focused my attention on the matter at hand--retaining regular employment so that I could suck in that new used-car smell down the road.
"But what is it about Kylie Danae Radcliffe that makes her a better candidate for queen than, say"--I looked down at my notepad and searched for the name of the only candidate I hadn't yet interviewed--"Shelby Lynne Sawyer?" I asked.
Kylie gave me a "duh, are you for real?" look. Trust me. I've seen it before. I usually identify it by brows that suddenly meet above the nose, and by the repetitive rapid eye blinks.
"You're kidding, right?" Kylie asked. "Like, have you ever met Shelby Lynne Sawyer?"