CHAPTER 1
Persnickle and I shared a love of five inch stilettos; the only problem was I loved to wear them, while he loved to eat them. I awoke in my new house in Queensland after crashing fully clothed on the lumpy bed, only to find Persnickle, who was a wombat, and my familiar, nibbling on one heel of the most expensive shoes I’d ever bought.
“Get off.” I shooed Persnickle away. I almost called him a little devil, but then I remembered the devil likes to wear Prada, not chew it.
I struggled out of bed, grumbling, and said good morning to the great love of my life: my coffee machine. Persnickle, satisfied he’d chewed all he could chew, softly snored in the background as I made my first cup of the day.
As I drank, I tried not to think about Thomas, my ex-boyfriend. Not only had he cheated on me, but he didn’t even have the good grace to grow a humpback and catch some horrible disease that made his skin go all purple, like all terrible ex-boyfriends should. It was the only decent thing to do.
After one cup of coffee, things were starting to look a little brighter. At least I had slept in a bed the previous night rather than in the tent of the night before, and who would have thought that only the previous day I had tripped over a dead body, and a woman had tried to poison me? And I had been told small country towns were boring!
I was a little on edge, so I made another coffee. The unpacked boxes that had arrived the previous day were piled high, and I figured it would take me a while to adjust to my new life in a small beachside town with a population of around two thousand. The week before, I had been living in a tiny apartment in a trendy, inner-city Melbourne suburb.
I sighed. So much had happened in that time. I had caught Thomas, who also happened to be my boss, with Alexis, a real estate agent he had promoted over me. Thomas had promptly sent me to run his real estate office in Southport, on the Gold Coast in Queensland. The very same day, I discovered I had inherited the house in which I now was, on the condition that I live with a room mate for one year.
I had bought the shoes as soon as I discovered all this. I don’t think anyone could blame me.
The room mate turned out to be Persnickle, a wombat who, as my familiar, enabled me to see and communicate with ghosts.
The house was in a small town on the ocean and was in a northern—and I mean northern—suburb of the Gold Coast. I sipped my coffee and counted myself lucky that I had a whole month off before I had to start work in Southport. If only my uncle had left me enough money to start my own business.
The house was a bit of a mess, what with all the boxes stacked in every available corner, but it was mine. I had never owned a house before, and I had always loved the photos of the old Queenslander houses I had seen online. I just wasn’t so sure about the poisonous cane toads and the giant pythons that were said to live in this part of Queensland.
I looked at Persnickle again. Oleander had left me a huge printout of do’s and don’ts for the care of wombats. On the top, in capitals, it said that wombats sleep most of the day. That suited me fine. Although I wasn’t a people person, far preferring the company of animals, I was pleased that I had made a ready friend in Oleander. She and her close friend, Athanasius, lived at the nearby retirement home.
No sooner had I turned on the fan and the air-conditioning and leant back to rest my eyes, than my mobile phone woke me. I looked at the screen.
“Oleander! I was just thinking about you.” I hesitated, and then looked at the time. It was nine already? I must have been tired.
“Goldie,” she said urgently, “there’s been a death at the retirement home.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “It must be hard for you, but given that everyone there is around the age of one hundred, I assume it happens from time to time. Still, I’m sure it doesn’t make it any easier.” I had no idea of the right words to say on such an occasion.
“You don’t understand,” she began, but I interrupted her.
“I said the wrong thing, didn’t I?”
“You don’t understand,” she said again. “It was murder. And they think I did it.”
