Phantoms Can Be Murder: Charlie Parker Mystery #13 (21 page)

While hoping for some result from
the pain meds I continued my trek through the purse. One of Dolly’s knitted
afghans lay over the back of my chair and I used it to wipe lotion off each
item that I pulled from the purse. I wanted to feel badly about messing up her
handiwork but I was at that screw-it-all point in the evening where my own
comfort was selfishly taking precedence over everything else.

I tried to remember what the
doorknob at the top of the stairs looked like. When I’d been here with Louisa
we’d just left the door standing open. As near as I could remember it was
secured with a rather old-fashioned lock that might easily be circumvented with
a piece of plastic. I pulled a credit card that I rarely use out of my wallet
and handed it to Archie.

“Go up there and see if this will
work,” I told him.

He gave it a blank look and I
explained in detail how to do it. What planet had this man grown up on?

“Sorry. I didn’t have much call
for this skill as manager of a sales team,” he said as he trudged up the steps.

I heard a lot of fiddling around
and a few grunts. No reassuring squeak of the door coming open.

“It’s the other lock that seems
to be the sticking point,” he said, coming back down and handing me the card.

“There’s a deadbolt on it?” I
hadn’t remembered that part.

“Well, yes, apparently so.”

Sheesh. I gritted my teeth and
resumed the search through the purse. If only I’d thought to pack my hammer and
chisel we could tried digging our way out through that old bricked-up doorway
into the tunnels. And end up god knows where. A better use would be to remove
the hinges from the door, but without the tools that wasn’t happening either.

Archie continued to stand there
and watch me rummage.

“You might check around and see
if there is anything in this cellar in the way of tools,” I suggested. “Maybe
the movers left a hammer or something behind.” Did a girl have to think of
everything
around here?

“Oh, here’s something that might
do the trick,” he called out after a few minutes. He held up a pair of office
scissors.

I wanted to cry when he handed
them to me. How on earth were those going to open a locked door? I set them
beside me and continued to pull things from the purse—besides wallet and pill
bottle, I came up with my ring of keys from home which I sent Archie up the
stairs again to try. By some miracle one of them might work. But no such luck
on that.

Other than that it seemed we were
reduced to using a hairbrush, a lip balm, a ballpoint pen or my small spiral
notebook. I was just about to consider how the pen and metal coil from the
notebook might be disassembled into lock picking tools when I heard a sound
from above.

A second later the door opened.
Gabrielle was back.

Chapter
26

She closed the door behind her
and came lightly down the stairs. “Almost ready, darling,” she said. “I’ve been
to the market for food, and I’ve collected my things from home. By tomorrow
night, we’ll be in a posh hotel room in Paris.”

Her eyes were on Archie the whole
time she was outlining her plan. Then she noticed that I was up. Her face
hardened.

I tried to imagine what I must look
like. Blood from the cut beside my eye had probably dried in a trickle all the
way down to my chin. My hair must be tangled and full of floor grime and dust
balls. Same for my clothing, with rips and tears added.

“What’ll we do with her?”
Gabrielle said to Archie.

He gave her a blank stare.

C’mon Arch, speak up for me,
I begged silently. But he didn’t.

“You can just leave me here,” I
said.

Gabrielle didn’t seem to notice
that I’d spoken. I debated launching myself out of the chair but knew that she
would move a lot quicker than I possibly could right now.

“Well, no matter. I’ve got only
one more little errand, my love, and then we’re off,” she said, her smile back
in place. She pointed toward the ceiling. “I’ll just pack a little bag for you.
Your passport’s upstairs?”

Without waiting for a response,
she whirled around and rushed up the stairs.

“Catch her!” I hissed at Archie.
“Hold the door open!”

But he didn’t react quickly
enough and we heard the deadbolt snap firmly shut.

I jammed all my stuff back into
my battered purse and edged my way forward on the chair seat, hoping my legs
would hold me a bit better now that the pain was subsiding.

“What’s going on here, Archie?” I
demanded. “You’re planning to run off now with Gabrielle? What about Catherine?”

I hobbled toward him and faced
him down.

“What about it!”

His pallid skin faded another two
shades. “I—I . . . I don’t know. I never planned this.”

“Well, Gabrielle seems to think
the two of you are going off together, toward some happy life in Paris. Where
did she get that idea if you didn’t have a hand in the plans?”

Upstairs, I heard muffled sounds.
Archie rolled his eyes up toward them.

“Archie! Explanation!”

He crumpled. His shoulders
slumped and he backed into a straight upright chair. “I never thought she would
. . .”

I stood in front of him. “Start
at the beginning.”

“I’d hoped to make Dolly give up
the idea of this silly shop. I wanted back in our home, be with our friends at
the club. I figured if we were back there, close to our old lifestyle, I might
get my job back or at least have the contacts among the country club set to get
another good position.”

“And to stay close to Catherine?”

“Well, yes, right.”

“But Dolly knew about the
long-term affair between the two of you and she did all she could to keep you
here in town. Not that it made much sense to locate her shop in this building,
which Catherine Devon owns.”

“That was the one suggestion of
mine that Dolly actually accepted. The location is top-notch and the rent was
reasonable. It’s not as if Catherine were in the building much time at all
anyway.”

“And the pranks started as a way
to get Dolly to reconsider moving back to your old house? Were you behind all
of them?”

“Only a few. I accidentally made
the muddy footprints the first time. Slipped off my shoes and stowed them away.
When Dolly became so upset, it gave me the idea that she might be convinced,
with a little persuasion, that the place was haunted. From time to time I made
noises in the night. Whenever she took her sleeping pills I could sneak
downstairs and spray some perfume or make footprints. Back in the bedroom I
would pretend I’d been awakened by a noise and she would insist that we both go
downstairs to investigate. Once I released a tiny smoke bomb and she became
convinced it was an apparition.”

“You probably fed her a lot of
stories of the haunted places around town, adding a little fuel to the fire or
something?”

He nodded. “But I never did
anything to cause her harm. I swear it.”

“You didn’t switch the tea cups
when she scalded her hand?”

“No—absolutely not.” He looked up
at me.

I pulled another of the straight
chairs over and sat gingerly on it. “How does Gabrielle fit into all this?”

“I began to suspect her of some
of the nastier pranks after one time when she and I . . . um . . .”

“Were you also sleeping with
her
?”
My incredulity began to climb.

“She began to come on to me,
right after she started working here,” he said. “Young woman, older man. I know
I should have fended her off, but that sort of thing can appeal to a man’s
self-confidence, you know. By that time Dolly had ended the physical side of
our relationship.” He squirmed as he said it. “And I was rarely able to get out
and see Catherine. But I swear it was mostly a matter of a few stolen kisses in
moments when no one was around.”

I watched his face for signs of
deception, certain that he was still hiding something.

“There was just the once,” he
said. “Down here in the cellar one evening when Dolly went to a card game with
her friends. Gabrielle had worked late and she asked me to carry something down
for her. When I turned around she was right behind me. Threw herself at me, she
did. I . . . well, we ended up on the leather sofa that was here.”

Gabrielle had given that sofa a
loving stroke with her hand as the movers carried it out. Maybe that small
motion brought it home to her that Archie would soon be going away. With
someone else.

I glanced around the cellar. The
night Louisa and I had stayed here I’d taken a short nap on that same sofa. And
I’d had a vivid dream about Drake and myself. I blushed. Maybe suggestive
scents on the leather or within the fibers of the woven blanket had exerted an
effect on me. Ew. I forced myself to follow a different line of thinking.

“So, when did Gabrielle reveal
this plan to you—the idea of running off together?”

“I swear, it was never a plan.
Not the way you’re thinking. She’s cooked up the whole thing herself.”

I mulled it over. Archie, for all
the deceptions he pulled with his wife, had seemed genuinely concerned when
Dolly died. And his surprise at Gabrielle’s recent actions felt authentic to
me. Maybe the clues to the younger woman’s state of mind had been there all
along.

“I don’t know . . . I truly don’t
know . . .” Archie murmured, his head in his hands.

Upstairs, the few sounds had
stopped I realized with a start. How much time had gone by? Much longer than
Gabrielle needed to grab a few clothes for Archie. I gazed again at my watch
for several seconds, forgetting that its shattered face wasn’t going to tell me
anything.

“I can’t go with her,” he said.
“Do you think she’ll understand that?”

I didn’t see Gabrielle being very
sympathetic toward what she would perceive as a change of heart on his part.
The girl was obviously thinking that her romantic crush on Archie was
reciprocated. She seemed quite firm in her plans.

“I don’t hear anything upstairs,
do you?” I asked, trying to bring myself back to more practical matters—like
how on earth we would get out of here.

Archie raised his head and cocked
an ear toward the door.

“Can you go up there and check?”

He came back down in less than a
minute. “I don’t hear a thing.”

“What was it she said before she
left—that she had one more small errand to do? Any idea what that might be?”

He shook his head slowly. He
might have been successful in the business world but I swear that I’ve never
met a man more clueless about women. I’d felt sorry for him, being pushed
around by his wife all those years, but I was beginning to see her side of it.
If anything was to happen, someone needed to take charge and Archie was clearly
not doing it.

Edging forward in my chair again,
I decided I better test my own limits, find out how much I might be capable of
when the moment of truth arrived. I stood and took a few steps. The sharp jabs
earlier had eased into a dull overall ache now. Except for my ribs. The first
deep breath almost brought me to my knees.

“I’m going back to the softer
chair,” I said. “Tell me if you hear any sounds from the shop. Anything at all.
If someone other than Gabrielle should show up we need to bang on the door and
shout for help.”

He dutifully climbed to the small
landing and stood there with his ear to the door. I used baby steps and an
old-woman’s groan to get me into the depths of the armchair. I tried to
calculate how long we’d been down here, but with no idea how long I’d lain
unconscious on the floor there wasn’t much way to know.

Plus, what did it matter? We were
here now.

I rested my head against the back
of the chair, trying to focus on plots for escape and rescue. At some point I
dozed. I know this because I woke myself with a buzz-saw snore. A trickle of
saliva trailed out of the corner of my mouth and I wiped at it with the grimy
sleeve of my blazer.

Archie had given up his post at
the door and come back down to find a warmer surface than the stone steps. He
sat on the edge of a console table, picking at his cuticles.

I stood up too fast. My head swam
and every single one of my aches and bruises screamed at me. The ibuprofen’s
effects had worn off, which meant it had been at least four hours since
Gabrielle left. What type of ‘quick’ errand could she possibly be doing? What
if she’d had a traffic accident or been picked up by the police, or simply
headed off to France without Archie? We might be down here for a hundred years before
someone found our skeletons with scary, toothy grins.

Stop it, Charlie. Right this
instant.

For one thing, at least one
person had to be looking for me—Louisa. And Catherine would start wondering
where Archie was. She had a key to the building. Surely someone would come
along.

As if by divine response, I heard
a small noise upstairs. I sucked in my breath. Ouch. Slowly breathed out again.

The doorknob rattled, but of
course it was Gabrielle.

“All done,” she announced gaily.
She practically skipped down the stairs and put an arm around Archie. “We’re
ready to go.”

“I’m not going with you,
Gabrielle,” he said quietly.

“Of course you are. It’s all
planned.”

He shook his head.

“Darling, all the obstacles are
out of the way now. We’re free. I’ve taken care of all of them.”

“Them?” I said. “Gabrielle, what
have you done?”

She gave me a glare that made me
wish I’d just stayed quietly in my corner until they’d gone.

She turned back to Archie. “The
car is packed, darling. A few hours to the coast, through the Chunnel, and
we’ll be ready to start our new life.”

He shook his head again. She
slapped him.

“We
are
going! We have
plans. We’ll have a life together. With all of Dolly’s money.” Her overly-sweet
tone had gone rigid and hard. “You told me I was the love of your life.”

“I never—” His mouth hung open.

“I got rid of that possessive
wife of yours for you. When we couldn’t scare her off, I gave her the pills.
And now I’ve taken care of the other one too.”

“Catherine? You’ve hurt
Catherine?” Pain contorted his face.

Gabrielle’s eyes sparked with
fire. “It’s the two of us now, Archie. You’ll not reject
me
.”

She spun toward me. “What trash
have you been telling him?” Her words came out through clenched teeth.

“I’ve not told him anything,
Gabrielle. This is crazy. Just let me go and the two of you can do whatever you
want.”

“Oh, and have you running right
to the police? No bloody way!”

What did that mean? Did she plan
to get rid of everyone who knew what she’d done?

“Come, Archie. We’ll go quietly,
leave the place locked up. No one will ever know she’s down here.”

My mind raced through the
possibilities but if Catherine truly was gone that didn’t leave anyone who
could get into the cellar. I really would become a stack of dried out old
bones.

I tried to send visual signals to
Archie—get out, call for help, jam the door so she can’t lock it—anything. But
he was speaking quietly, trying to reason with her and make everyone play nice
again.

I pushed past the pain to rush
her, thinking maybe I could reach the top of the stairs first. But she elbowed
my ribs the moment I got within striking distance, and that took the breath out
of me.

“Get over there,” she said,
shoving me backward into the armchair.

“Gabrielle, listen to me,” Archie
said. “Please don’t do it this way. Please listen to reason.”

But she was way beyond reason.
She grabbed up a heavy silver bookend and advanced on me. I wanted to melt into
the chair’s depths. I gripped the edges of the seat cushion and my fingers
closed around something hard and cold. The scissors.