A Triple Scoop of I Scream (9 page)

Toni Bianchi stood at the corner of State and Main and looked across the street at the renovated building on the opposite corner—
her
renovated building on the opposite corner. The broken windows had been replaced and the smooth glass shone in the setting August sun. The crumbling bricks had been repaired and the mortar joints repointed. The wood trim had been scraped and given a new coat of paint. Above the freshly stained door was a bright new sign, ‘Ghost of a Chance Sweet Shop’.

She crossed the street and peered in through the window on the river side of the block. The interior of the shop had also undergone a facelift with the help of Liam and the Paranormal Research Team. They’d had to work exhausting hours in order to have the grand opening on the Fourth of July holiday, but there had been few complaints. Each evening as they’d unwound over beer and takeout pizza, the conversation had invariably turned to Vinnie and Daisy and the experience they all had shared. The magic of it seemed to fuel their labours.

The guys had focused on the downstairs renovations. They’d replaced the broken mirror behind the soda fountain and repaired the plaster where the shelves had ripped away from the walls. Mike had spent two neck-wrenching weeks on a tall ladder stripping and refinishing his beloved tin ceiling.

Toni and Bridget had concentrated on cleaning and repainting the upstairs. The bedrooms were the priority. Toni had claimed the larger one. Mike and Bridget had moved their suitcases into the smaller. They’d kept the art deco bureaus but swapped out the beds and linens for more modern—or as Bridget called them ‘fuck-friendly’—versions.

The bathroom had required a little elbow grease, but, by the time they were done, the glass gleamed, the fixtures sparkled and the window sills looked brand new.

The women had saved the most daunting project—the catch-all room—for last. It had taken them two full days to go through the stacks of dusty boxes. Most of what they had found was trash—old ledger books and yellowed newspapers shredded by mice. But the few treasures they had uncovered were wonderful. They’d pulled back a yellowed sheet to find the shop’s original hanging planters and plant stands in near-perfect condition. A cache of framed 1920s advertisements had been stacked neatly against one wall, their colours still vibrant behind dusty glass.

A sheet-covered box—taller than Toni—had stood against the far wall and piqued her curiosity, but it had been blocked by decades of clutter. They’d had to haul boxes full of garbage down to the dumpster before they could get to it. Once the path was clear, she’d hesitated. It felt as though the mysterious object held the last of the building’s secrets and uncovering it would be like saying goodbye to her resident ghosts. Bridget had finally been the one to break the stalemate. “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Toni,” she’d said, yanking away the cloth.

The women had stood, hands on hips, facing an oak two-door armoire. “Victorian?” Toni had asked.

Bridget had nodded. “Probably late 1800s. That would make sense given the age of the building. Nice piece.”

Toni had tugged open the doors. A single item hung inside on a simple wire hanger. Toni had reached in and gently lifted out the short-sleeved, white work shirt. A black bow tie was stuffed into the breast pocket. Above it was an embroidered monogram. Toni traced the letters
Vinnie
.

* * * *

Toni walked into the cool building, smiling at the jangle of the polished brass bell above the door. Lush green ferns filled antique wicker planters and hung from the ceiling in woven baskets. The freshly painted walls were decorated with advertisements from another time. On display, in a shadowbox, behind the counter was Vinnie’s shirt—complete with bow tie—and Daisy’s journal, open to the last entry. The booths and most of the bistro tables were filled with people chatting and laughing. Bridget was manning the candy counter and Toni blushed when the redhead handed a length of liquorice laces to a young couple.

Mike was working the soda fountain and joking with a man to whom he’d just served an enormous banana split. Thomas was sitting beside the customer on one of the newly-upholstered stools. Mike caught Thomas’ eye and motioned to Toni. Thomas swivelled in his seat and smiled at her. He got up and took her hand. The two wound their way through the crowd and into Liam’s shop. Ex Libris also was teeming with customers. Liam smiled when he saw Toni and Thomas enter. He told his part-time clerk that he was calling it a day and walked out from behind the cash register. Thomas released Toni’s hand and let Liam gather her into a bear hug.

“Can you believe this?” Liam whispered into her ear. She could barely hear him over the din of patrons.

Toni pulled away and winked at him. “Who’s up for dessert? It’s on the house.”

The three waited for a break in the stream of people passing between the shops, then found seats at the counter with Toni in the middle.

“What’ll it be?” Mike asked.

“Chocolate sundae with three spoons,” Toni answered.

“Heavy on the chocolate sauce and whipped cream,” Thomas added.

Liam looped his arm around Toni’s waist. “Should we take that to go?”

A wicked grin crossed Toni’s face. “You read my mind.”

Also available from Total-E-Bound Publishing:

Ghost Encounters: Soldier of Love

Gabrielle Holly

Excerpt

Chapter One

It was well past sunset and Toni Bianchi stood shivering in the stinging rain, up to her ankles in icy mud, her ridiculous Civil War costume clinging to her curves. She glared at the decrepit pickup truck—its bed made over to look like a mid-nineteenth-century military chow wagon—and wondered at exactly which moment her life plan had gone astray.

Admittedly, her ‘life plan’ was a bit fluid. Toni had always believed that spontaneity made life—and her—more interesting. But, as her wet curls clung to her neck and her toes grew numb, she was beginning to rethink her philosophy.

“Impulsive,” she muttered to no one. She’d had yet another knee-jerk reaction. This time, as a result, she’d found herself ankle-deep in unfamiliar muck.

Toni’s ability to think on her feet and execute snap decisions had made her successful at managing luxury hotels. She’d become something of a legend in the business for her ability to pull together grand-scale events in record time. She could simultaneously shuffle appointments, juggle contractors and sweet-talk caterers. The exhilaration of a looming deadline became an addiction. Toni’s inability to snap out of crisis mode in her personal life had made her disastrous at managing relationships.

Six months ago Toni had finally buckled under the stress. She had walked out on ‘Sparky’—her mooching, noncommittal boyfriend—and her cushy salary without so much as a backwards glance. She’d sold her sports car, her furniture and her condo, cashed in her fat stock portfolio and rolled the proceeds into a one-way plane ticket and a down-payment on a new life in a tiny tourist town.

She’d been duped by the fine folks of Soldiers Orchard, Iowa, who had flimflammed her into believing that the answer to her troubles lay in their tiny Midwestern town. The night she’d decided to trade in her hectic life, Toni had typed the words ‘peaceful’, ‘friendly’, and ‘opportunity’ into her Internet search engine. She’d been directed to the Soldiers Orchard Realty website and was greeted by a lovely pen-and-ink image of a tidy brick Federal-style inn. Five divided light windows were spaced evenly along the second story, each neatly framed with a set of proper black shutters. A pair of identical windows flanked each side of the arched double door entry. The caption below read, “A Diamond ‘Inn’ the Rough! A Rare Investment Opportunity! Historic Civil War-era charmer in booming tourist town awaits a handy person with an entrepreneurial flair! Come discover friendly, peaceful Soldiers Orchard. The town council will provide a generous tax incentive to the right buyer. You provide a little elbow grease to make this fixer-upper sparkle.”

“‘A little elbow grease,’ my ass,” she grumbled as she slogged through the deep tire ruts and wrestled open the carriage house door.

The ‘carriage house’, much like ‘the inn’, was deceptively named. Both conjured up romantic images of bucolic rural living and friendly folks stopping by to say howdy and chat a spell over iced tea and molasses cookies. The buildings were, in fact, a pair of decaying two-hundred-year-old money pits—which Toni had purchased, sight unseen, based on a misleading line drawing and an equally misleading real estate agent.

Now, a couple of centuries after it had been built, the carriage house had begun to lean. Toni yanked on the weather-beaten door but it ran aground on a hill of mud before it could be opened wide enough to clear the way for her battered truck. Everything about this financial boondoggle was a struggle. Try to fill the sink with wash water and the faucet crank came off in your hand. Flip a switch in anticipation of electric incandescent light and something deep within the crumbling plaster and lathe walls sputtered and hissed and moments later the entire inn went dark. The roof leaked, the foundation seeped and—according to a parade of plumbers and electricians—every major household system needed a complete overhaul. As she stood in the bone-chilling rain, trying to get the carriage house door to simply do its intended job, Toni wanted nothing more than to get out of the cold and into a hot tub.

The sanctuary of a warm bath seemed an eternity away as Toni wrestled with the seemingly simple task of getting her repurposed pickup into its parking spot. She widened her stance and tried to find purchase on the slippery drive. She gave the door a mighty yank. The age-softened wood groaned as it gave up the screws holding the handle in place. Toni had time to notice that the handle in her hand was no longer attached to the carriage house door, but not enough time to register what that meant—until her plump butt plopped into the mud. Toni jerked her hand out of the muck, and with a primal snarl flung the door handle. The moment it left her fingers, she wished it hadn’t. She cringed as she watched the heavy iron hardware slice through the air and ping off the pickup’s windshield. The crack didn’t form immediately, but once it started its sickening crawl, it didn’t stop until it had drawn a craggy horizontal line the entire length of the glass.

“
Fuuuuuuuuuuuck,”
she screamed and slapped her hands against the ground, consequently splattering herself with a spray of ice-cold sludge.

Rage bubbled up. Her mind began to race as she tried to find something or someone—other than herself—to blame for the mess she’d found herself in. She thought of the eighteen-hour work days and shady contractors and neurotic brides that had been part of the career she’d left behind. Back in the city she had slept fitfully, worried obsessively, and regularly gulped stomach medication straight from the bottle.

Each evening, when she had finally arrived back at her condo, exhausted and stressed to the breaking point, she had invariably found Sparky sprawled out on the sofa with a video game controller in his hands and a regiment of empty beer bottles standing in formation on the coffee table.

Sparky worked about ten hours a week as a wedding reception DJ, which was how the two had met. He and Toni had exchanged brief pleasantries every time he emceed a wedding at her hotel. One evening Toni was leaving her office just as Sparky was wheeling his DJ equipment out through the lobby. He’d asked her to join him for a drink in the hotel lounge after he’d loaded his van. Toni would always remember that he’d ordered several rounds of expensive, imported beer and then apologised profusely for having ‘forgotten’ his wallet.

Indulging in luxury at Toni’s expense fast became a habit. Toni’s frenetic work life had left her little time to meet men or develop relationships. She had been so grateful for companionship that she’d ignored the glaring warning signs surrounding Sparky—including his nickname. She’d once overheard the caterers at a wedding reception comment, “‘Sparky’? Really? That’s a name for a Dalmatian or a Little League baseball shortstop—not a grown man.”

Right from the beginning Toni had chosen to disregard every red flag. Sparky had got so drunk on imported beer the night of their ‘first date’ that Toni had driven him back to her condo and tucked him in on the couch—where he’d remained for the next three years.

Toni shivered, not sure if it was due to the memory of her ne’er-do-well ex or the fact that she was soaked to the skin. Toni had, she realised, traded in one set of problems for another. Six months ago she had convinced herself that the only way out of her predicament was to create an entirely opposite circumstance. Well, she’d certainly done that, and now as she sat seething in the frigid mud, she decided that she hated the broken-down inn, and the off-kilter carriage house, and the decrepit pickup truck, and the whole stupid town of Soldiers Orchard.

The economy of the town of Soldiers Orchard hinged on two industries—the factory that took perfectly good bar soap and cooked it down into a soupy liquid to be pumped from bathroom dispensers, and the historic Civil War trade. The truck had originally been part of the delivery fleet for the former before being sold off and converted into a food vending vehicle for the latter.

The pickup had come with the inn. No surprise there as its specialised modifications made it virtually unsalable. The front end looked like any other rust-riddled old truck. The rear, however, had been made over to suggest a battlefield chow wagon. The bed had been outfitted with a bowed frame over which was stretched a canvas cover. Every sheet metal surface had been faced with rough-hewn boards, and wooden pegs on each side were strategically placed to act as hangers for old wagon wheels. Stowed away in the bed were crates of period-correct—or almost so—props. A cast-iron pot and a tripod to hang it from, cast-iron skillets and cooking utensils to dangle from the wagon’s sides, and a purposely tattered oil-cloth apron that Toni tied over her calico costume. Hidden from view—so as not to shatter the illusion—was a collection of modern coolers that stored the deli sandwiches, individual-serving sized bags of chips, cans of pop and beer, and cases of bottled water that Toni sold to the men who came to Soldiers Orchard to act out the brief moment in American history. Toni had learned early on that the doctors and lawyers and accountants who made Civil War re-enactments more obsession than hobby thought nothing of paying a four-hundred-per cent mark-up for the privilege of enjoying a frosty beverage between make-believe battles. Nor, it seemed, did they mind breaking character—ever so briefly—to toss their empty aluminium cans and plastic water bottles into the recycling bin, as long as it was disguised as a wooden whisky barrel.