Another One Bites the Dust (Jensen Murphy) - Softcover

9780451417008: Another One Bites the Dust (Jensen Murphy)
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Jensen Murphy is back in the spooky sequel to Only the Good Die Young.

Some people think that ghosts are spirits that refuse to go to the other side because they have unfinished business. Take my word—that’s true. I should know. I’m a ghost.

I was an ordinary eighties California girl, dead before my time, until psychic Amanda Lee Minter pulled me out of the time loop where I was reliving my death over and over. Now I’m Jensen Murphy, Ghost for Hire. I decided to put my spooky talents to use in helping Amanda Lee track down bad guys and killers (including my own).

It’s taken time to figure out exactly how that will work (our first case was definitely a learning experience for all involved), so when a young woman asks Amanda Lee for help convincing her best friend to leave a dangerously hot-tempered boyfriend, I’m ready and willing to use our collective powers on her behalf. But some people are dangerous not only to the living—especially when there are darker forces involved....

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About the Author:
Chris Marie Green is a full-time writer who has published under her own name and the pseudonyms Crystal Green and Christine Cody. This is the second book in her Jensen Murphy, Ghost for Hire series, following Only the Good Die Young. She is also the author of the Vampire Babylon series, including In Bad SpiritsRaising the Darkness, and Deep in the Woods.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
In the Beginning . . .

“I know you have no idea who I am,” said the college-aged girl standing on Amanda Lee Minter’s porch, “but I really need your help.”

The psychic and medium was looking through the peephole at her visitor as the morning sun burnished the girl’s straight, dark brown hair. Her eyes were a cherub’s blue, and she had on a long-sleeved, baggy gray shirt that covered the top half of her jeans, the light jersey material swallowing her hands. She had a solid form and didn’t appear to be a materialized version of one of the invisible spirits who had been knocking on the doors and windows lately.

Spirits who were terribly curious about the woman who had worked with a ghost to bring down a murderer nearly a month ago.

Since Amanda Lee was clearly dealing with a human, she opened the door. The girl hitched in a breath, then launched into an introduction.

“My name’s Heidi Schmidt. I’m here because I know Wendy Edgett from some forum boards online—”

“Wendy Edgett?”

Heidi bit her lip, then nodded.

Amanda Lee’s hand slid down the door. Fifteen-year-old Wendy Edgett. The last time Amanda Lee had seen her was . . .

Shame breathed over her. It had been the night of the séance in the Edgett mansion—an event that had flushed out a dark spirit that had disappeared and never returned. Not yet, at least.

A chill covered Amanda Lee’s shame like a shadow crawling over a patch of heat. She searched her yard—the late spring–leaved trees, the pathway to her house. But everything was as seemingly safe and as perfect as ever, no darkness looming.

“You are Ms. Minter, right?” Heidi asked, no doubt wondering why Amanda Lee was acting so strangely. “Because this is really embarrassing if I’ve got the wrong house. I used a reverse phone number lookup on your address because you haven’t been answering my calls, so . . .”

“You have the right one. Did Wendy . . . send you here?” Why would she do that? She had been avoiding Amanda Lee like the pox, in spite of the apologetic phone calls she’d been making, revealing her real identity to Wendy, telling her that she had only wanted to make the world right again by catching a killer during the séance.

Heidi was shaking her head. “Wendy didn’t actually send me, Ms. Minter.”

“Is she all right?”

“Yes. It’s just that she didn’t want to come with me.” Heidi shuffled her sneakers. “She’s still not up to seeing anyone socially. She said she and her brother moved to one of his other properties, and she’s doing schoolwork from home. She doesn’t even go on the chat board anymore, but she sends e-mails to me. I think I’m the only one she really talks to. It’s the grief, you know? Seeing her sister Farah kill her brother because he knew too much about the murder she committed, then dealing with the knowledge that Farah was evil . . .”

Amanda Lee gripped the edge of the door, her knuckles whitening. “If she didn’t send you, then why are you here?”

Heidi pulled at her sleeves. “Over a month ago, Wendy started posting on a social San Diego paranormal chat board I hang out on, too—you know, the kind for fans of reality ghost shows and stuff? Well, back then, she said she couldn’t believe it, but she thought there was a spirit in her house. The last time she checked in with us as a group, just before the crap hit the fan with Farah, Wendy said there was a psychic coming over to help make contact and see what the entity wanted. It was all so cool to her.”

“You want me to make contact with a spirit, then.” Amanda Lee itched to close the door, shut herself in among the antiques and the dusky rooms where the shades were drawn. It was only intuition that had told her to respond to the doorbell, and she always listened to her inner guide, even if it occasionally steered her in odd directions.

Heidi rushed on. “Wendy said that you hang with the ghost who was haunting her old house, and during one of your phone messages, you told her that the ghost is the one who uncovered Wendy’s sister as a murderer. This Jensen ghost girl went inside all the suspects’ heads and figured them out, then flushed out the true killer. It’s true, right? This ghost drove Farah to a confession?”

“Yes,” Amanda Lee said, her heartbeat quickening for some reason she couldn’t pinpoint yet.

“Wendy . . .” Heidi’s face was red. “She said that you would help me because the two of you owe her.”

Oh.

Amanda Lee took that in, realizing just how true it was. Obviously, this girl had seen Wendy’s ghost adventures on the chat boards, asked for her help, then come here because something was scaring her and she needed Amanda Lee and “her ghost” to intercede.

Was this fate’s way of granting absolution for everything Amanda Lee had done wrong with the Edgetts?

All she had wanted was a reckoning for the woman Farah Edgett had killed—Elizabeth Dalton.

God. Her Elizabeth . . .

But there were also many other spirits in need of justice. Jensen, the ghost Heidi had been talking about, was one. Was Heidi leading her to another?

Fear of ruining more lives during an investigation made Amanda Lee’s heart beat even faster. Fear in general had been keeping her inside the house, full of doubt, frozen. But at this girl’s anxious expression, Amanda Lee stepped outside, feeling the sun on her skin for the first time in weeks. Now that she was closer to Heidi, she could sense the girl’s nerves screeching.

“Why is it that you’re on edge?” she asked.

Heidi seemed relieved that Amanda Lee wasn’t shooing her off. “I’m really worried about someone I care about, and I can’t go to the cops about it. And I definitely can’t go to my best friend Nichelle because she’s the one in trouble, and she won’t accept that reality.”

Yes. A chance for absolution had arrived on Amanda Lee’s doorstep.

Heidi took a deep breath, exhaling harshly. “After I heard what you and your ghost did, I realized that I could use at least one of you to go inside the head of Nichelle’s boyfriend to see if he’s capable of killing her.” She swallowed. “Because I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going to happen if nobody does anything about it.”

To any other person, it would have been a nearly insane request, but Amanda Lee understood perfectly.

She closed the door behind her, then placed her hand on Heidi’s shoulder, leading her to the little casita at the side of the bigger house.

When she opened the door and guided Heidi into the antique-rich room, the girl peered around, as if intuiting that something was off about it. As if feeling a coldness that wasn’t coming from any air conditioner.

She obviously couldn’t see the ghost who’d looked up from her spot near the car battery on a table, getting a charge from it, her normally grayish color high, her energy strong.

“Heidi,” Amanda Lee said, her voice more animated than it had been for a while. “Meet Jensen Murphy.”

1

When I’d encountered Amanda Lee for the first time a month and a half ago, I’d already been dead meat for about thirty years. Supposedly, I’d only gone missing but . . . nope. It was more like I’d been murdered in the early eighties after a party up in Elfin Forest in North County, my killer unknown, my body never found.

But now, as Amanda Lee stood next to this Heidi girl, giving me the basics about why an unexpected visitor was in my casita, Amanda Lee was the one who came off like the dearly departed, garbed in a dark ruffled skirt and boots, with a matching blouse hanging limply from her tall frame. Her usually perfect red hair with the white streaks framing her face was even as drab as a black-and-white B-horror movie.

And why not, when the woman was as haunted as anyone I’d ever met?

I could tell Heidi wasn’t sensitive enough to see me, because she kept peering around the room, her eyes wide. The only humans I knew who could get a lock on me were Amanda Lee and Wendy Edgett. It’s not like I would’ve made any kind of awesome impression on Heidi, anyway—I’d died in tennis shoes, jeans, and a pale blue button-down rolled up to my elbows with a white tank underneath. Just your average twenty-three-year-old American girl with my strawberry blond hair, green eyes, and freckles. A Tom Petty song in the flesh . . . or not.

By this point, I had a few questions for Amanda Lee. And, by the way, it’s pronounced “A MANdaley” with a Southern flair she’d brought with her from Virginia when she was young. Quirky as hell.

“So Wendy’s been talking to this chick?” I asked her. I’d mostly been concentrating on the Wendy parts of the story I’d just been told.

“Yes,” Amanda Lee said. “They’ve exchanged e-mails.”

“I noticed that Wendy does spend a lot of time on her computer.” I’d been watching over her and her older brother Gavin, who I’d nearly driven insane while trying to decide whether he was guilty of killing Elizabeth Dalton. That’s mainly why Wendy was pissed off at me, and I didn’t know if she was ever going to forgive me. Even so, it was my duty to see that the two of them were okay, that the dark spirit Amanda Lee had summoned during that asinine fake séance was leaving them alone.

I wasn’t all that sure it would stay away from them since I had a bad feeling that Amanda Lee had accidentally released their very deceased craphead father from wherever naughty people went after they died. Being a ghost, you’d think I’d know exactly where that was, but no. No matter who I asked, no one ever had a good explanation.

Boo World wasn’t exactly a place where every question you’d had as a mortal was answered.

Speaking of sketchy things Amanda Lee had done, I should mention that she’d also lied about why she’d recently resurrected me from the residual haunting phase I’d been in for nearly three decades—a time loop where I’d been living my death over and over again because I’d been so traumatized by it. She’d wanted me to haunt the truth out of the man she’d suspected of murdering her lover, Elizabeth Dalton. See, Amanda Lee had told me she didn’t know Elizabeth, that she was only seeking justice for a friend. None of that turned out to be true, because Amanda Lee had been very close to the victim, indeed; she’d been manipulating me—the dumb new ghost—the entire time only to make me do her bidding.

Needless to say, trust wasn’t exactly high on my Amanda Lee To-Do list.

I float-walked closer to Heidi, and she crossed her arms over her chest, warming herself.

“I meant to ask before,” she said to Amanda Lee. “Exactly how much do you charge to help people?”

“Charge?” Amanda Lee and I asked at the same time.

“Yes, I want to hire you.”

I didn’t need money, and Amanda Lee’s spine straightened at the very mention of it because she was what was known as “affluent.”

“There’ll be no charge,” she said.

“Oh. Okay. I only thought . . .”

“No charge,” Amanda Lee repeated, and she said it with such dignity that I knew the topic was as dead as disco.

While Amanda Lee was bristling, something caught my attention at the window. Movement, outside. And when I saw an old man’s grayish, bearded, ghostly face peering in, I flew over and waved bye-bye.

Dammit, there’d been ghosts swirling around here a lot lately, drawn by all the rumors of what me and Amanda Lee had done with the Edgetts. Apparently, we were high entertainment for the bored denizens of Boo World.

The old man stuck out his tongue and zoomed away. In the meantime, the curtains were stirring with the wind I’d caused. Heidi looked ready to do a Major Tom and shoot into space, fueled by fear.

I have to say that her fear did charge me up a tad.

Amanda Lee strode toward the window. She probably hadn’t seen the old man—I was the only ghost she’d ever fully connected with—but she’d noticed my reaction to him, so she could make an educated guess.

She shut those curtains. “That was only Jensen brushing by the window, dear. Don’t mind her.”

Heidi’s voice shook as she continued, but the kid was brave to stay. I’d give her that.

“It’s all good, Ms. Minter.”

Excellent. Then the girl wouldn’t mind a little of this.

I turned on the computer by manipulating the electricity in the atmosphere. Ghosts were pure energy, after all.

Heidi made a surprised sound.

With a lowered glance at me, Amanda Lee took the hint, sitting down in front of the computer. “Getting a little pranky, are we, Jensen?”

“Me?” Hmph. I wasn’t the pranky type—that was for the ghosts who’d already gotten bored with their existence, looking for stimulation from the responses pranks got from humans.

I wasn’t bored. Or maybe I was. After the Edgett situation, I’d been, well, dying to move out of the casita, just to put some space between me and Amanda Lee. But all the annoying ghosts and the threat of the dark spirit had kept me here to watch over her as much as I could.

I’d leave soon, though, I kept telling myself. Someday I’d find an abandoned house that was just right for me.

“What is your friend’s name?” Amanda Lee asked Heidi, her fingers poised over the keyboard.

“Nichelle Shaw.”

“And her boyfriend?”

“Tim. Tim Knudson.”

“Address, please?”

Heidi rattled off a place in Pacific Beach, and Amanda Lee typed it all in. The search engine came up with several links, and she clicked on one of them.

My energy was humming, mostly because I was feeling the growing apprehension in Heidi. “Why does she think he’s going to kill Nichelle?” I asked Amanda Lee.

After she translated for Heidi, the girl answered, “It’s just . . . a hunch. I read a book once, and they called this kind of intuition the gift of fear. And that’s why I can’t go to anyone else, because all I have are creepy suspicions about this guy. He and Nichelle have been with each other for a couple months now. They live together. At first, he was fascinating for Nichelle. She hasn’t had a lot of boyfriends, and Tim rides a beat-up motorcycle and has a blue-collar thing going on, so he’s edgy and kind of wow for her. And he had a steady new job in a department store warehouse, working the swing shift. I found out a week after they were dating that he has a spotty work history, though. When I told her, she asked him about it, and he said that the past didn’t matter—he was going to make himself better for her.”

Amanda Lee had brought up a profile on that Facebook thingie. Frankly, I couldn’t stand the site. It was the type of distraction I would’ve hated when I was alive, too. I had true, close, dear friends that I used to go out and toke with and drink with every once in a while, face-to-freaking-face. That, and my waitressing gig at Roundtable Pizza, had been enough of a social life for me.

Anyway, Tim’s picture showed a handsome guy in his twenties with buzzed sandy hair and a Tom Cruise smile. He was a smaller man. I could tell because he was posing near a bar, and it provided some scale as he toasted the camera with a draft beer.

Amanda Lee said, “He looks harmless enough, but that’s always the problem. We know better than anyone that bad people are good at hiding who they really are.”

“Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt right now,” I said. We didn’t know Heidi very well, and I was eager to get an empathy reading off her to...

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  • PublisherAce
  • Publication date2014
  • ISBN 10 0451417003
  • ISBN 13 9780451417008
  • BindingMass Market Paperback
  • Number of pages416
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