Perilously Fun Fiction: A Bundle, Pauline Jones [top 100 novels of all time .txt] 📗

Her favorite male strippers. Great. On the other hand…

“Maybe they’re entertaining the guests for us.”

Luci smiled. “That’s what I’m afraid of. Strippers and bad hearts aren’t a good combo.”

“I’ll take the ambulance back with me.” He turned, then stopped and looked back. “I love you.”

Her smile lit up the whole area.

He turned and walked out to the ambulance, trying to figure out how to explain what he needed from the two EMT’s. Life was just dang interesting, he decided. Here he was, headed home to his haunted house, going to a tea party he’d rather miss, with some geriatric friends of the former Miss Weena who didn’t kill Gracie, but were probably watching Miss Weena’s favorite strippers, and he was grinning like an idiot. Even though his mother-in-law was there. Dang. Just proved you could teach an old dog new tricks. Or maybe just teach him not to mind.

Mickey stopped in front of the EMT’s. “Guys, I may have some more work for you.”

Luci stroked Gracie’s petal soft cheek, wondering if Lila had ever felt this way about her. She pressed a kiss to the tiny cheek.

I’ll never do to you what she did to me, Gracie. I promise to be there for you. She’d changed their family history by marrying Mickey and she’d change it some more by being a hands-on mom. She’d join the PTA and—all those other things normal moms did, well she’d do them, too—once she found out what they were. There was probably a book somewhere about it. Or a website.

“I think she looks like me,” Miss Theo said, her voice preceding her ectoplasmic arrival in the room.

Miss Hermi and Miss Weena appeared beside her with almost simultaneous but lady-like pops.

They still looked like they’d marched off the assembly line for Russian nesting dolls, only newer. In fact, they all looked younger. The round buns on each head were brown instead of white and the wrinkles had been smoothed from their round faces. The blue of their eyes had brightened and the bowed mouths were red, not pink. Death did become them.

“I think she looks like me,” Miss Hermi said, trotting around the bed.

Miss Weena kept her distance, looking disapproving as she said, “I was sure she was a he.”

“It’s not like Louise can do anything about the bet now,” Luci pointed out, smiling up at Miss Theo. Luci almost asked her what they’d bet on, then decided she didn’t want to know—something she’d learned from Mickey.

“If I’d been murdered, would you have named her after me?” Miss Weena’s caftan fluttered as she bounced in the air, not quite landing on the floor again.

“If you had been murdered, then it would never have been solved,” Luci pointed out, hoping to change the subject. “You’d have needed you to solve your murder.”

Miss Weena looked pleased instead of confused. “True.”

Luci smiled at her other two aunts. It was good to see them—and she hoped they’d be gone before Mickey got back.

“So, you all got your closure?” It wasn’t an idle question.

Miss Theo’s eyes twinkled. “We’re not staying…”

“Though we reserve the right to visit when we feel like it,” Miss Hermi inserted.

“We all have dates waiting,” Miss Theo continued. “We just wanted to make sure you were all right.”

“Your Arthurs?” The aunts had each had an Arthur as a beau when alive, so why not when they were dead?

“Heavens no. Our Henrys.” Miss Hermi looked coy.

“And our Ichabods,” Miss Weena added.

“You each have an Ichabod?” Luci’s eye felt like it might start twitching again. How popular could that name have been?

“Well,” Miss Theo gave her an impish look, “we like to each have at least one beau we can count on to lose his head.”

Do Wah Diddy Die Already

Three years after Do Wah Diddy Dead.

Luci Seymour eased her little 4x4 into the garage, and did it without scraping anything. Clearly she was in that zone place that normal people were always talking about and she liked it. It was the zone.

As evidence, look at Luci’s Aunts’ Bed & Breakfast. It had been open for three months now and, contrary to Mickey’s expectations, no one had died—not even of food poisoning.

That was probably because Luci had hired a new cook-cum-housekeeper-cum-au pair, though she still missed Louise. Saffron talked. A lot. Of course, she hadn’t killed anyone either, and Luci’s three-year-old adored her—so much so, she wanted to have multi-colored hair, too. So far Mickey was holding out against that, but Luci’s money was on their daughter wearing him down. He was pretty much wrapped around her tiny pinkie.

Luci still had trouble wrapping her brain around the idea that her aunts’ housekeeper, Louise, had been the one who killed Miss Gracie all those years ago, leaving her to haunt the house in typical Seymour style. No real surprise the denouement had been mixed up in the birth of her and Mickey’s daughter. All the aunts, dead and alive, had put in a bid to have the little girl named after them, but it seemed right to name her after Miss Gracie.

Mickey had been afraid the now-dead aunts would start haunting them, too, but while they hadn’t completely passed into the next life, they didn’t seem inclined to hang around the way Miss Gracie and Delaney, Mickey’s former partner, did.

Luci had toyed with the idea of using their gentle haunting as a selling point for the business, but the two ghosts had decided to take a vacation. Since Miss Gracie hadn’t left the house in over fifty years, she’d certainly earned it, and Delaney went where Miss Gracie went. He’d been smitten with her before he got shot.

She missed them and she missed Louise, who was out on bail, awaiting trial. Mickey wouldn’t let her come back to work. Men were so unreasonable. It’s not like she’d killed anyone else. Okay, so she thought she’d killed someone else, which is why she’d killed Miss Gracie, but she hadn’t actually killed her former boss when she pushed