Unfinished Business: Ace Stubble, #2

By Richard Levesque

It's another open and shut case for Ace Stubble, lawyer for the undead and disembodied. At least that's what he thinks. When Cordelia Dearborn—a ghost with a shady past—hires Ace to rid her home of pesky, freeloading descendants, Ace figures he'll have no problem collecting his fee. But there's more to this case than a cranky old ghost and houseful of unwanted people. 

Everyone in the Dearborn family—the living, the dead, and the mentally ill—has a secret or two, and Ace can't avoid getting caught up in all of them. It doesn't help that Cordelia's beautiful granddaughter seems willing to do anything to keep from being evicted. It's all such a mess that no one—neither the living nor the dead—seems aware that there's bigger trouble brewing in the house. Ace Stubble has faced danger before, but is he ready for what's living in the basement of the Dearborn estate?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Levesque
• Release date: Jun 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386791812

Richard Levesque

Richard Levesque has spent most of his life in Southern California. For the last several years he has taught composition and literature, including science fiction, as part of the English Department at Fullerton College. When not writing or grading papers, he works on his collection of old science fiction pulps and spends time with his wife and daughter.

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Unfinished Business

Richard Levesque

Copyright © 2013 By Richard Levesque.

All Rights Reserved.

Cover design  © 2018 Duncan Eagleson

Detective:  © Ivan Vander Biesen / Dreamstime.com

All Rights Reserved.

Used by Permission.

Thanks, as always, to my wife Kari for her feedback and enthusiasm.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Author’s Note

Sneak Peek: Strictly Analog

Other Books By Richard Levesque

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Chapter One

So there I was—alone in the dark with the woman I loved. We held each other tightly, our hearts beating hard against each other, our emotions beyond anything words could express. You’d think it would have been a perfect scenario, one of those times you look back on later as a defining moment in your life, a time when everything lined up just right and yet just so fleetingly that you’d spend the rest of your life trying to find that perfect combination of touch and intimacy again.

Like I said, that’s what you’d think. Unfortunately, the moment was far from perfect. For one thing, she was bleeding from several nasty cuts. For another, the thing that had done the damage to her still had us in its sights and appeared to be gearing up for another attack. Worse, it had more tentacles than I’d yet been able to count. And to top it all off, I knew that if I could somehow manage to get us out of this mess, there was still a good chance the house would be torched by a well-meaning but misguided mob before my lady love and I could make it out the door.

Not my best Sunday evening by a long shot, and yet still likely to be remembered as a defining moment in my life. Maybe the final one. And to think that two short days before, I’d been fantasizing that the weekend’s work would be nothing less than easy money. Not exactly taking candy from a baby, but close.

More like taking candy from a ghost.

Maybe if I start at the beginning, it’ll make more sense.

*****

Some people have a tough time knowing when a ghost has entered the room. A spirit can waft past them, mess with them in creepy or humiliating or just plain harmless ways, and the poor sap never knows he’s been toyed with or even haunted unless the ghost wants its presence known. Not me, though. I’m pretty finely tuned when it comes to picking up the vibrations of the undead, and though a ghost may be subtler than a vampire, it’s still all the same to me.

I usually like working with ghosts, actually. They make good informants—the ones you can trust anyway—and they work cheap. Most are so damned bored by their afterlife existence that picking up a job or two from me comes as a relief from the monotony. It only works, though, on spirits whose post-corporeal existence isn’t tied to a specific place. It takes an awful lot of luck to run into a ghost who’s haunting the particular building you need information on. No, it’s the free agents, the wandering spirits looking for some sense of purpose who make the best apparitional contacts for a guy like me.

It was a Friday afternoon when I met Cordelia Dearborn, or should I say the former Cordelia Dearborn. The clock on the wall said 3:20, a little early for closing up, but that’s exactly what I was pondering. It had been a busy week with three court dates, a couple of depositions, and a judge who’d chewed me out because my client had been late, only to find out that the client—a shape shifter—had been in the courtroom all along in the form of a seeing eye dog. It was just my luck that no one had noticed he wasn't attached to a bona fide blind person. So, with my calendar cleared for the rest of the day and a lazy weekend stretching out ahead of me, the prospect of hanging around the office until 4:00 just wasn’t all that attractive. My favorite barstool at the Gaudy Mirage was calling to me, and I was ready to answer.

I scanned my date book to see what insults the coming week had in store for me, then flipped it shut and pushed away from my desk, ready to stand up and head out. That’s when I felt it—a sense of cold that’s not exactly cold, a chill that doesn’t come from a drop in temperature or even one you can feel on your skin. It’s more like being chilled from the inside out, like your marrow’s just been replaced with ice water and your body wants nothing more than to shudder and shiver itself into warmth again. It’s a feeling I don’t get any other time than when a ghost is in the room and hasn’t chosen to make its presence known. The sensation began to fade after a few seconds, the same way you get used to a bad smell or the sight of a corpse in a casket, and I leaned back in my chair to look around the office.

It’s not polite to lurk, you know, I said, glancing toward the ceiling. I didn’t like the thought of addressing a particular spot in the room, of talking toward the other chair, say, or the door when the ghost was actually perched on my desk or looking out my window. Making it obvious that I didn't know where the presence was would only give the spirit the upper hand, and a ghost with a superiority complex is hardly something I relish dealing with.

My comment got no response, so I kept talking.

You here for a reason, or just bumping around old office buildings looking for a chain to rattle? Still nothing. I shrugged and then leaned forward to put my elbows on the table, making a show of flipping through scattered papers as though I had better things to do. You looking for a lawyer? If so, you came to the right place. Not many other people in this town’d be willing to give a ghost the time of day. Me, though, I’m happy to help. Another shrug. Can’t read minds, though. Sorry if my ads made it seem like I’m more than I am.

I was referring to the ad I'd started running in the little throwaway papers the last couple of weeks. It had a picture of me, one I wasn’t happy with, standing between a werewolf and a vampire. I pointed at the camera while my companions looked earnestly at it. The caption read, Is the law making you feel less than human? Ace Stubble can help. It had my phone and license numbers and a couple of testimonial quotations in bubbles around the perimeter. I hated it, preferring to get business through word of mouth—the method that had always worked best. But the salesman who’d come around a few weeks before had talked a good game and made lots of promises; the ad was cheap and the exposure wide, so I figured I hadn’t much to lose—beyond a few dollars and my dignity.

In response to the continued silence, I just let go with a heavy sigh and got up from my desk the way I’d been planning to a few minutes before. Sorry I can't help you, then, I said and began moving toward the door. I’d ask you to lock up, but I suppose that would be absurd, I added, pulling the little ring of keys from my pocket. You should drop in again sometime if the spirit moves you. Oh...sorry about that. Where are my manners?

I was a good three feet from the door when she materialized in front of it, appearing before me as a solid form, not the wispy see-through sort of apparition that usually bespeaks lack of confidence or just ghostly confusion. For all I know, she’d been there the whole time, but something told me she’d planted herself there at just that moment when she saw that I really was going to walk out on her.

She was good looking for a ghost—late twenties, tall and statuesque with blonde hair cascading around her shoulders. She wore old style clothes, the kind of thing the society ladies would have worn in my grandmother’s day with lots of buttons, conservatively cut but not so modest as to completely hide her figure. Her face had an elegance to it that was marred by haughtiness and an aristocratic bearing. I decided almost immediately that I wouldn’t have liked her when she was alive. Dead, she might have had some strong points, but that remained to be seen.

I stopped, looked her up and down for a second, and then nodded. Nice to see you finally, I said. Ready to tell me how I can help you? Or shall I just pass through your midsection?

You will do no such thing, she said, and the haughtiness in her voice matched her bearing. Clearly she was type of person—or former person—used to having things go her way. In life, she’d likely been the boss, and I had a strong feeling that she had found a way to run the show in the afterlife as well—that, or she’d gotten really good at fooling herself into thinking she was still in charge.

I figured the best way to play it would be to defer to her highness for the moment, if only to find out what she was after. Letting her think she had the upper hand would prove problematic if I allowed it to go on too long, but for now . . .

You’re absolutely right, madam, I said and turned back toward the desk, waving my arm toward an empty chair in an invitation to sit. I forget my manners. Please forgive me.

I took my seat again and watched as she just stood there for a few more seconds, staring at me, trying to figure if I was putting her on or not. Finally, she raised an eyebrow—giving me a look that said she hadn’t yet decided I passed muster—and then moved forward to sit across from me.

Is this a professional call? I asked amiably, resisting the snarky urge to lay it on too thick. Or social?

The eyebrow had only just gone down. Now it popped back up again. If I really wanted to know what was going on with her, I decided I’d better lay off and let her reel it out on her own. My Jeeves act was bound to get her riled any second if I kept it up, so I just smiled and waited.

Professional, she finally said.

I picked up a pen and slid a notepad in front of me, clicked the pen into life and held it poised. At your service, I said as sincerely as I could. May I have your name?

After only a twitch of the eyebrow and no measurable pause, she said, I am Cordelia Dearborn, formerly Cordelia Hampstead. My mother was a Westcott, and my husband...my late husband was Woodbury Dearborn of the Waterston Dearborns.

She rattled off her pedigree as though fully expecting me to know what all those names meant. I wanted to remind her that I’d asked only for her name but kept my mouth shut, doing my best to scribble what she’d said, or at least to make it appear that the scratches of my pen approximated something like the information she’d just imparted.

Excellent, I said. "And how