Hark! The Herald Angel Screamed: An Augusta Goodnight Mystery (with Heavenly Recipes) (34 page)

“Idonia! Idonia, I’m coming!” a man shouted. His voice sounded far away.

“Melrose?” I paused on the stairs. “It’s Lucy Nan. Is that you?”

“Oh, Lucy Nan, thank God! They’ve locked me in this place down here and I can’t get out. You’ve got to get the police!”

“They’re on the way,” I said, although I knew no such thing, and hoped they wouldn’t hear me upstairs. I had been in such a hurry to find Idonia, I had left my cell phone in the car. Had Paulette Morgan relayed my message?

All was quiet upstairs until somebody cursed—a man. “You’ll not get away with this!” Idonia said. At least she was still alive.

I froze when I heard the sound of a car pull up in front of the house.
Oh, please, let it be the police!

“Lucy Nan, what on earth’s going on in here?” Ellis said, shining a light in my face.

I hurried down to shush her and almost stumbled in the darkness on the bottom step. “For God’s sake, be quiet!” I whispered. “Somebody’s got Idonia upstairs and they’ve locked Melrose in the basement.”

I felt Ellis stiffen beside me as Idonia cried out again. Below us, Melrose, or I thought it was Melrose, banged and clattered about as if he meant to send the old house crashing down on top of us.

Ellis grabbed a splintered board from the front door and stepped in front of me. “Come on!” she said, shining her light on the stairs. I was about to follow when the light came to rest on a pair of shoes. The shoes had feet in them.

“Run!” Idonia shouted, but it was too late.

“Jeremiah Tansey!” Ellis muttered under her breath.

“Looks like a party down here,” Jeremiah said. “You didn’t tell me you were going to invite your friends, but since you’re here, let’s all go into the living room—
now!”

I switched on my light to see him shove Idonia in front of him with one hand while he held a gun in the other. Idonia’s hands were tied in front of her and she had trouble maneuvering the stairs, although Jeremiah appeared to be accustomed to making his way around the house in the dark. He didn’t seem to have noticed Ellis was holding the board. If she could just get close enough, I thought—

“Whatever that is you have in your hands, drop it right now!” he commanded as he herded us into what was once the drawing room, and Ellis did as she was told. “Now what in hell am I going to do with you?” Forcing us into a corner, he waved the gun about, mocking us. “First the old guy comes poking about, and now you!”

It occurred to me then that Augusta was no longer with us but I knew she would find a way to help if she could—and the sooner
the better. If we all rushed him at once, I thought, he probably wouldn’t be able to take aim. But if he did, I would surely be the one he hit. Still, I was contemplating such a move when a figure entered from the room behind him, the yellow gleam of her flashlight bouncing on each of us in turn. “Well, Jeremiah, what now?” Louella Tansey said.

“Thank heavens you’re here!” I said. Surely he wouldn’t shoot us in front of his mother. But why was she just standing there?

“What’s all that racket about in the basement? Sounds like a wild man down there? And what are all these people here for?” Louella said.

“He has a gun, Louella,” I shouted, “and he’s locked—” But Louella Tansey didn’t seem the least bit concerned. I couldn’t see her face in the darkness but her voice didn’t sound at all like the mousy woman we knew. “Be quiet!” she said.

“As you can see, I have a little problem here,” Jeremiah said. “I had the old man tied up down there but he must’ve gotten loose somehow.” He gave Idonia a shove and she would’ve fallen if Ellis hadn’t steadied her. “Then this one comes crashing in—pulled half the boards off the front door and came in here hollering for the old guy—and now these two! What am I supposed to do with them now?”

“Put them down there with that other one, I reckon,” his mother said. “But we’ll have to hurry, Jeremiah. The police have been here looking for you. We can’t stay here any longer.”

“And then what? Somebody’s sure to find them, and you know they’ll tell,” he said.

His mother didn’t answer, but her silence lay like a suffocating shroud around us.

If we could only delay them!
“You were the one who killed Dexter Clark,” I said to Jeremiah. “Why?”

“I’ll tell you why,” his mother answered. “Dexter was afraid to come to our house, afraid he might see Dave or me. My husband
never forgave him because of what happened to Dinah. But Dexter got religion, it seems, and wanted to return the locket—”

“So we’d have something of hers to keep, he said,” Jeremiah added. “When he called, I told him I’d meet him here. Hell, I didn’t mean to kill him!”

“It was an accident,” Louella added, with unmistakable impatience in her voice, “but nobody would’ve believed it.”

“We had a slight disagreement,” Jeremiah said.

Ellis spoke from behind me. “And you pushed him from the balcony?”

“We fought. He fell.” Jeremiah’s account sounded almost as if he were explaining away a broken lamp. “He was going to—”

“That’s enough, son!” Louella spoke sharply.

I threaded my arm through Idonia’s. If we had to run, I would try to pull her along. “Why are you doing this?” I asked. “What are you hiding here that you don’t want anybody to see?” If I was going to be locked away—or worse—I wanted to know the reason why.

I didn’t get one. “Come on, better get ‘em on up there,” Louella said, heading for the stairs.

Up there? I thought they were taking us to the basement
. “I’m not going,” I said, hanging back.

“I’m not either!” Ellis spoke beside me.

With a sudden jerk, Jeremiah wrenched Idonia away from me. “I don’t think you’d like to see me shoot your friend here right in front of you.”

“He means what he says,” Louella said, stepping in front of us. “Get up the stairs, all of you.”

“Where’s Augusta?” Ellis whispered as we climbed the stairs ahead of them.

“She’s here. Don’t worry,” I said.

“Shut up!” Jeremiah gave us a push from behind. “You know, with a little help, this old place would go up in a minute,” he muttered aside to his mother.

If Augusta was going to help us, she’d better hurry, I thought. And that was when I heard footsteps above us—or was that just wishful thinking? But Ellis heard it, too. Her hand tightened on my arm, and behind us, Idonia gave an encouraging gasp.

Melrose DuBois stood at the top of the stairs with something that looked a whole lot like a gun and he pointed it at Jeremiah Tansey. “If you don’t drop that gun right now, I’ll shoot you where you stand,” he said in a voice as solid and steady as the heart-of-pine stairs beneath us.

elrose! Where did you come from?” Idonia would have run to him if we hadn’t held her back.

“Idonia, honey! Are you all right?” he said, then added to Jeremiah, “I’d drop that gun
now
if I were you. I’m about mad enough right now to shoot you anyhow.”

“Where did you get that gun?” Jeremiah asked, hesitating. But Ellis had had enough of Jeremiah Tansey. His gun clattered to the floor below as she gave him a push that sent him sprawling backward, his head banging on the treads.

“Oh no! You’ve killed him! Jeremiah, baby, are you all right?” His mother ran to gather him into her arms, and holding to the railing, I stepped quickly around them and made my way down the stairs to retrieve the gun he had dropped.

Ellis used her cell phone to call the police while the rest of us kept an eye on the two Tanseys. Jeremiah had managed to pull himself into a sitting position and now sat on the bottom step with his head in his hands while Louella hovered over him.

“Why didn’t they send somebody out here the first time I called?” I asked.

“Because Paulette sent them out to Winternook,” she said. “You know, that retirement community on the way to Columbia. “Told them Idonia was in big trouble out there.”

And I’m not sure, but it sounded like a giggle came from Idonia Mae Culpepper.

“How did you manage to get upstairs all the way from the basement?” I asked Melrose.

“There’s a narrow stairway that goes all the way up from there. I found the door to it down there while I was trying to feel my way out, but it was so dark, I couldn’t see where it came out. That’s where I was when I heard you, but I wasn’t sure where I was.”

“So how did you see the exit in the dark?” Idonia wanted to know.

“After I heard all that was going on, I was determined to try again,” Melrose said. “I felt my way up on my hands and knees until I couldn’t go any farther, but I knew there had to be an opening somewhere … and then the strangest thing happened. The door just started to open by itself. It was behind a bookcase in that big old room upstairs at the very back of the house. The bookcase just swung out, and let me tell you, I got out of there in a hurry!”

“You must’ve touched something,” Idonia suggested. “A lever or a button or something.”

“But I didn’t!” Melrose insisted. “It just happened. And you know, this is a funny thing, too, but it smelled just like strawberries up there.”

I couldn’t see Ellis’s face in the dim light, but I knew she was smiling, too. “But where did you get the gun?” I asked.

“There’s a room down there you can’t see from the other part of the basement and that’s where he had me tied up until I managed
to work loose. The door to it appears to be just another part of the wall, and it looks like it’s been that way forever. That’s where the stairs come out and that’s where I found the gun along with enough stuff to stock a store,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe all the things down there: computers, televisions, jewelry, even a motorcycle. And guns—several guns. That one wasn’t loaded, of course.”

A motorcycle. According to Weigelia, Kemper had said that when Dexter Clark disappeared he had been riding a motorcycle.

Melrose put his coat around Idonia when she began to shiver and encouraged us all to go out to the car and turn on the heater, but Idonia didn’t want to leave him with the Tanseys and neither did Ellis nor I. I could barely stand to look at Louella Tansey crouching beside her son. After all the terrible things he’d done, she still excused him, though she knew he was responsible for Dexter Clark’s death and had probably sold the locket that had belonged to his sister. Of course it had to have been Louella who hid the locket in the flour canister, I thought. We should have known right away it wouldn’t occur to a man to put it there.

Idonia sighed. “Surely that locket wasn’t worth all this!” She directed her question to Louella who continued to fret over her son. “What was so important about that locket that one of you drugged my drink to get it back?”

“And it very nearly killed her!” Melrose added in a voice trembling with rage.

Jeremiah struggled to stand but a shouted warning from Melrose sent him back to his seat on the stairs. “Look,” he said, “I only meant for it to make her sleepy. You’ve got to believe me! I didn’t know it would—”

“Stop it, Jeremiah!” Louella said. “Can’t you see my son is delirious? He has a head injury and doesn’t know what he’s saying. Why, he might even have a con—”

“Oh, shut up!” Jeremiah shoved his mother’s hands aside. “It was your idea and you know it.”