A Haunting of Ghosts

Chapter 1 It was a dark and stormy Tuesday night. All right, not stormy. If it had been, Van thought, he and Gene probably wouldn’t be standing in the entryway of a shop, looking at their dead bodies sprawled on the pavement. They’d be at home, where it was warm and dry. “We’re really dead. It isn’t a nightmare,” Gene said, sounding both horrified and interested. Interested because, as a writer, it gave him new insight into what being murdered involved—like the shock and pain as bullets tore through him, for starters. Or so Van figured as he replied, “Nope, it’s real.” He put his arm around Gene’s shoulders, or tried to, as they watched the police and an ambulance arrive at the scene. Instead, his arm went through Gene as if he had no substance. It took Van less than a second to realize that his partner didn’t have substance, any more than he did, if the fact he could see the pavement through his feet was any indication. Van was Vance Acker. Gene was Eugene Norton, his writing partner and also his life partner. Together, under the pen name V.G. Ackton, they’d written a series of fairly popular mysteries. They’d also done two of what a reviewer who wasn’t too fond of them called speculative non-fiction—Who Killed…?, and more recently Who Killed…? Book 2, each book covering three separate murders. They don’t tackle high-profile cases, like JonBenet Ramsey or Marilyn Sheppard. Everyone and their brother had written about them. They chose smaller cases, laying out all the known facts before adding their own two-cents-worth on who might have had the best motive, and the best chance, to have committed the murder. People seem to like them, so they’d started on a third one. Guess we’re not going to finish it. Van sighed, recalling why they were standing in the entryway looking at their bullet-ridden bodies to begin with.