Resort to Murder (7 page)

Jasmine opened her mouth. Marlow shook her head and the little girl said nothing, but her eyes flashed with disdain.

Jasmine wasn't convinced. But that didn't matter. My words had not been intended for her.

 

I smiled as I turned the page. Jules Verne certainly knew how to tell a good story. It was fun to reread this classic entertainment, a reminder that readers once were pleased by humor and adventure sans violence. An extraterrestrial trying to understand our world by reading current fiction would very likely conclude serial killers were the norm. I put down my book and relaxed sleepily against my pillow. I suppose I'd drifted off because it took me a moment to realize someone was knocking on my door.

I pushed up from the bed and glanced toward the clock. Almost eleven. I hurried toward the door, remembering Steve Jennings's experience the night before. I looked through the peephole and felt an instant shock. I would not have been surprised, frankly, had the hallway been empty, or to have seen one of my grandchildren. But I would never have expected to see Connor Bailey. She'd changed after dinner to a silver silk blouse, red linen slacks and woven sling sandals. She pushed a pair of glasses higher on her nose, looked uneasily up and down the hall.

I opened the door. “Hello, Connor. Please come in.”

“I wanted to talk to you.” Her words were faintly slurred. As she brushed past me, I smelled a heady mixture of Scotch and perfume. I closed the door and followed.

Connor stood by the circular table, staring at the miniature tower. “Mine got broken.” She shivered.

“Please sit down.” I gestured toward a chair.

She reached out, picked up the tower, and flung it to the floor.

I was startled and my voice was sharp. “Connor—”

“See?” Her tone was triumphant. She wavered on her feet, but her gaze clung to the tower. “It didn't break. Lloyd kept saying the damn thing fell off the table. He said maybe Jasmine knocked it over. But see”—she pointed with a bright red fingernail—“I threw that one down and it didn't break.”

I saw. I also saw that her hand was trembling and her eyes, magnified by thick lenses, were wide and frightened. I'd never seen her in glasses.

A woman intensely attuned to others' perceptions of her, she touched the gold wire frame. “Already took out my contacts, decided to talk to you.” She blinked, stared down at the ceramic tower. She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes.

“It's breakable.” I picked up the ceramic piece, put it back on the table. “Someone broke the one in your room.”

She swallowed convulsively, wrapped her arms across her front. “How?”

I wasn't at all certain she'd believe me. But she needed help and I thought I could reassure her. “Some person—some living person—carried the tower out onto your balcony and whacked it on the railing. There's a sliver of ceramic out there.” I wondered if she'd challenge me. Demand to know what I was doing on her balcony. I was ready to admit to curiosity and hoped she wouldn't be angry. But she didn't say a word, she simply stared at me with those huge, frightened, myopic eyes. “I found a piece of ceramic on your balcony this afternoon. Someone's playing tricks—”

“Marlow told me what you said at dinner.” She slipped the glasses on, then moved forward so eagerly that she stumbled, caught herself on the table. “What
did you mean?” She wavered against the table. “I need a drink. Fix me one.”

I don't usually respond to peremptory orders. But I didn't hesitate for that reason. Connor shouldn't have another drink.

She didn't wait for me to answer. She moved with great determination to the bar provided by the hotel. I never use minibars. I prefer tea to whiskey and it's cheaper to travel with my own candy.

Connor fumbled with the key, pulled open the door, reached without hesitation to the second shelf for a small bottle of Scotch.

I tossed some ice cubes in a glass and handed it to her.

She waved away my offer of soda, poured the whiskey, drank deeply. “You told everyone the ghost was a trick. How do you know?” She paced unsteadily back toward the table.

“I heard about the ghost, so I checked around with some of the staff.” I dropped into a chair, looked up at her. “There's nothing much to it. And actually, nothing to connect the ‘ghost' to Mr. Worrell.” I gave her time to digest that. “Something white moves around the top of the tower…”

“White,” she muttered. “That's what that waiter said out on the point this morning. He said he saw something white. White.” She shuddered. “Roddy always wore white—white shirt, white trousers, a white hat when he was out in the sun.” She thumped onto the end of my bed, stared at me.

“That's why something white's been seen there.” I was impatient. I have little tolerance for credulity. “Someone planned it that way.”

She lifted a shaking hand. “What if it's Roddy? What if he's come back?”

“It isn't. He hasn't. Connor, relax. The ghost isn't coming back. Trust me.” And I'd better talk to Lloyd first thing in the morning, make sure he would ante up the thousand.

Connor stared at the tower on my table. “Roddy was mad at me that night.” She pulled off her glasses, rubbed her eyes. “I didn't do anything.” The denial was that of a frightened child. “Roddy fell in love with me. Men do. I can't help it. R.T. understood.” Her voice was soft and the words folded into each other until the syllables were hard to discern. “And now”—she swallowed and tears spilled down her cheeks—“Lloyd wants me to leave Steve out of things. He didn't want Steve to come to the wedding. I told Lloyd that I had to have him here. Why, Steve has been wonderful to me. And that nice man from Texas—Lloyd doesn't like him. I don't want to marry someone who doesn't like people.”

“Oh, Lloyd likes people well enough, but he loves you, Connor, and he wants to spend time with you. Perhaps this trip isn't the time to make new friends.” It was the best I could do in the Ann Landers line.

“I can't help it if men fall in love with me.” Her look at me was an odd mixture of defiance and sadness. “Why can't Lloyd understand?”

I didn't have an answer for that.

She tried to stand. Some of the whiskey splashed out of the glass. Her face puckered in dismay.

I reached down, helped her rise. “It will evaporate,” I said briskly.

She patted ineffectually at her blouse.

I smelled the Scotch. It reminded me of the odor of gin in her room that afternoon. “And it was real gin someone spilled on your floor today. No ghost did
that.” I shepherded her toward the door. “Don't worry anymore, Connor. Get a good night's sleep. Tomorrow will be fun. Remember we're going to Spittal Pond.”

“Spittal Pond,” she murmured as I turned the knob, stood aside for her. “Yes, Spittal Pond.” She walked unsteadily down the hall. I waited until her door shut behind her before I closed my own.

I walked slowly toward the phone. Should I call Lloyd? I shook my head. They were in adjoining rooms. If Connor wanted his help, she could knock on that door. I doubted that she would. She was half-drunk, scared, upset. I wondered if I should call Marlow. I decided to stay out of it. Connor was a grown woman and, when distraught, as vulnerable and lost as any child. But surely if the night went without incident, Connor would be in better shape tomorrow.

I stepped out on the balcony, grateful in the cool of the night for the heavy terry-cloth robe. The tower glimmered in the moonlight, silent as a grave, unnerving in its pale whiteness. I turned away, impatient with myself. The memory of violent death tainted the tower. Tomorrow I would climb those curving steps again, stand on the platform in bright sunshine, banish any and all ghosts.

A
SCREAM roused me. I struggled out of bed, flailing and disoriented. The ragged, tortured cry penetrated the walls, punched deep into my mind. After a frozen moment, I ran to the sliding glass door of the balcony, lifted the bar, flipped the lock, pulled the glass wide. A second scream rose to a piercing crescendo, higher, higher, then abruptly cut off.

Doors scraped open on the other balconies. Voices rose in frantic calls.

“Where is it?” Lloyd's voice was gruff, sodden with sleep. “What the hell is it?”

“Oh my God,” Connor moaned. “Look, look!”

I was aware of so many fleeting images at once:

Connor clinging to Lloyd's arm on her balcony and my scarcely conscious realization that she must indeed have knocked on their connecting door.

Neal clambering over the railing of his balcony, climbing down a wrought iron pillar toward the ground.

Diana whirling toward my balcony and the obvious relief when she saw me. Dear child.

Aaron Reed shouting, “Stay where you are, Marlow,” and throwing one leg over the railing of his balcony.

Marlow holding Jasmine tightly in her arms, but Jasmine struggled to see and her high voice rose, “He's there. Mr. Worrell's there!”

Steve Jennings pointing toward the tower.

But all of these images were peripheral to the luminous glow that moved as softly as a drifting cloud near the top of the tower, formless, insubstantial, frightful.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God…” Connor's voice wavered. She buried her face in her hands.

The silvery glow hovered near the platform, slid sideways, dipped, rose, disappeared behind the tower.

The scream sounded a third time, its intensity shocking, so loud I cupped my hands over my ears.

Neal thudded to the ground, ran toward the tower, his bare feet slapping on the cement walk. Aaron was only a few feet behind him, shouting, “I'll circle to the right, you go to the left. We'll catch them.” Aaron was fastening his jeans as he ran.

Lights glowed along the garden paths, but the shadows were dark and deep away from the paths. Neal and Aaron ran toward the tower. There was no movement at all in the shadows near the base of the tower. The white radiance that had hovered near the platform was gone.

Was it gone? Or hidden behind the tower? Or was the glow now inside the tower?

I turned and hurried into my room. I always travel with a small flashlight, a precaution against a hotel fire and loss of electricity. I've been lucky enough to avoid a fire, but was grateful once to have the pocket flash in California when an earthquake downed electric lines. Tonight I snatched it up from the top of the TV, ran to the hall. I couldn't move nearly as fast as Neal and Aaron, but I was only a few minutes behind them.

As I hurried up the garden walk, Diana called out, “Grandma, wait for me.”

I didn't wait but she, too, swung over the edge of the balcony, dropped to the ground and, running fast, caught up with me. When we reached the tower, the door was open. The boys' voices echoed hollowly inside.

I flashed the light and began to circle the tower.

Diana caught my arm. “What are you looking for?”

“Everything. Nothing.” I didn't know. But surely somewhere there would be some trace of what had just occurred. Except, I thought coldly, the glow had moved high in the air, had never come near the ground. The excruciatingly loud scream—wasn't it almost too loud to be real?—had seemed to come from the tower, though at night it was hard to pinpoint the source of any sound. It was easy to imagine the cry was that of a man plummeting to his death, falling and knowing he was going to die, having just a few seconds left, and those seconds hideous with an agony of fear.

My light swept back and forth across the walk. A few fallen leaves, a crumpled cigarette package, a discarded cup.

Diana held tight to my arm. “Grandma,” she whispered, “someone must be hurt. Do you think we should look in the garden?” She stared out into the dark grounds beyond the lighted paths.

“I don't think we'll find anyone.” We had circled the tower, were once again at the entrance.

Steve Jennings stood in the doorway, peering inside. “Hello. Who's up there?”

Far above, Neal leaned over the platform railing. “It's okay. Nobody's here. Nobody's been here so far as we can tell.”

I believed him, but I wanted to see for myself. “I'm going up.”

“I'll go with you.” Diana still held firmly to my elbow.

Jennings shrugged and moved out of the doorway. “Maybe you'd better wait a minute.”

“Yes?” I frowned. Why shouldn't I go up in the tower?

Jennings rubbed his bristly jaw. “There's a light coming up from the lower terrace. I'm afraid it's Mrs. Worrell. She lives in a cottage down that way.”

The light bobbed toward us.

I hesitated, then decided to wait.

The flashlight in her hand was huge, throwing our shadows thin and black against the tower. Neal and Aaron clattered down the tower stairs and spilled out beside us.

“There's nobody up there, absolutely nobody!” Neal announced. He was shirtless. Red reindeer pranced on his boxer shorts.

Aaron squinted up at the platform. “Hell of it is, nobody came away from here. Neal and I ran up on either side of the tower. I don't see how anybody could have been up there and had time to run down and get away before we came. So what the hell do you suppose that white thing was?”

Mrs. Worrell's shoes clipped against the flagstones. She stopped a few feet away. Her light, stark and harsh, flooded over our small group, all of us in various kinds of night attire.

“May I ask what is happening?” The light revealed her mercilessly, too, her hair tucked tight beneath a pink cap, her face colorless, one hand tightly clutching the lapels of her red corduroy robe.

No lawyer ever lacks for an answer. Jennings was combative. “Who the hell knows. Did you hear the screams?”

“Screams?” Mrs. Worrell forced out the word.

“Yells. Shouts. Loud enough to wake—” He broke off, cleared his throat.

“A scream. The same sound. Three times.” I was sure about that. Although the first cry had awakened me and I could not re-create it exactly in my mind, the second and third were the same in tone, in duration, in scale. “The sound seemed to come from the tower. And up there”—I pointed toward the platform—“we saw some kind of white glow.”

Aaron jammed a hand through his tangled curls. “Yeah, kind of white, kind of silver. Maybe two feet by five feet. Bobbing around by the platform.”

“Not on the platform.” Neal was precise. “Off to the side. And then, all of a sudden, nothing.”

Mrs. Worrell stared up at the tower, one hand pressed against her lips. “A bird,” she began.

“No way,” Aaron said flatly. “Not unless it was as big as a moose.”

“We all saw it.” Jennings shrugged. “Not a bird, Mrs. Worrell. As for what it was, I don't think we'll ever know. Not in this lifetime. And I don't think we'll accomplish a damn thing by standing here talking about it.”

Mrs. Worrell's voice was thin and tired. “I regret very much that some prankster…”

Neal stared up at the tower, his face creased in a frown. “You can call it whatever you want to, a joke, some crazy deal. But how? We all saw it and it wasn't even in the tower, it was out there in the air.”

“We'll find out.” I spoke with more confidence than
I felt, but I was damned if I was going to succumb to hysteria. Even though there didn't appear to be a rational explanation, I had to believe that somehow, some way, the apparition had been rigged. “I'm going up there.”

Mrs. Worrell shivered. “Mrs. Collins, perhaps it would be better if you stayed here. I'll get the keys, lock the tower. Then there can't be any more of…” She trailed off.

Any more of what? Mrs. Worrell didn't know. None of us knew.

“There's nothing up there, Grandma.” Neal shook his head, folded his arms across his chest.

“I know. But the exercise will do me good.” I moved through the tower door.

“Mrs. Collins…” Mrs. Worrell's voice was sharp. I kept on going.

Diana and Neal climbed right behind me. When we stepped out on the platform, I drew in deep breaths, trembling a little from the effort. We looked over the railing at the dark masses of shrubbery far below. The lights on the paths didn't penetrate the dark grounds. Beyond the shoreline, surf foamed bright in the moonlight on the black surging water.

Neal gestured over the parapet. “That stuff was right out there. Maybe five or six feet from the platform. I don't see how anybody could have held something out there. Besides that, there wasn't time for anyone to run down the stairs and get away before Aaron and I got to the tower.”

I turned away from the railing, held up my pocket flash, swept the light up and down the white limestone slabs of the tower.

Neal understood at once. He moved faster than I did.
But when we'd circled, reached the spot where we started, he ran his hand over the unbroken slabs. “Nope. No ladder. Nobody went up. Nobody went down. Where does that leave us?”

“In the morning, we'll look thoroughly through the garden—”

Diana gripped my arm. “That won't do any good. There wasn't anyone in the garden. We'd have heard them running away. There wasn't anyone anywhere.”

“No one,” Neal said reluctantly, “alive.”

“We'll look in the morning,” I said firmly.

We didn't talk as we climbed down the curving steps. When we reached the garden, Mrs. Worrell was waiting, holding a padlock in her hand. The others were gone. The manager said nothing to us. She waited until we were outside the tower; then she pulled the big wooden door closed, slipped the padlock through a hasp, clicked it shut.

The snap of the lock had a permanent sound.

But as we walked back toward the hotel, Neal bent and whispered in my ear. “Locks can't stop ghosts.”

 

I splashed water on my face, scrubbed it dry, wishing I could wash away the memory of the night. I was unhappy on several counts. I didn't like remembering the frightened sound in Diana's voice or Neal's dogged insistence that there was no one near the tower, no living person. I didn't like the fact that I'd reassured Connor, insisted the ghost was a prank. Most of all, I didn't like the fact that George had played me for a fool.

I intended to have a talk with George. As soon as possible.

I plugged in the coffeemaker. The coffee perked as I dressed, a white cotton turtleneck and navy slacks. But
it wasn't until I poured the steaming dark brew into a mug, a blue mug with a white tower on one side, and moved toward the closet for my shoes that I saw the square white envelope lying on the floor where it had been slipped beneath the door.

I stared at the envelope. Obviously, it had been put beneath my door after our wing quieted down. As we came back into the hotel, Aaron was insisting that a chaise longue was a great place to sleep as he stepped into Marlow and Jasmine's room. Connor clutched Lloyd's arm and said, “We'll pack. We'll pack right now.” As their door shut, Lloyd said sharply, “But we can't leave…”

Jennings and I had exchanged swift glances as we stood by our doors.

“That's what you saw last night.” I made it a statement.

He grunted, “Yeah,” stepped into his room, slammed the door.

Neal had checked my room and Diana's, making sure the balcony doors were locked, waiting to hear us snap the chains in place.

It was almost two before I'd turned out my light, lain wide-eyed and angry in my bed, rerunning the moment in my mind, the sound of the screams—why precisely the same each time?—and the luminous swath of whiteness so tantalizingly near the tower, so far from the ground, so inexplicable.

No one there.

The words had ricocheted in my mind for the remainder of the night, sometimes an angry shout, sometimes a forlorn mumble, but over and over again, an ugly counterpoint to recurring screams.

But now in the brightness of a new morning, I was not so much angry as determined. I was going to find out what
had happened last night. And maybe this envelope would show me the way. I bent down, snatched up the envelope. I didn't know what was in it, but I knew that I held in my hand the beginnings of a trail, one that I could follow with sharp questions and quiet observations. By God, here was a specific discrete entity. Somebody had slipped a message beneath my door and I never doubted that it was connected directly to the apparition near the tower.

I put the mug on the table, studied the envelope, turning it over in my hands. It was hotel stationery, the Tower Ridge House address in the upper left corner, and, of course, the white tower, outlined in blue. My name was printed neatly on the outside in red ink:

 

MRS. COLLINS

 

The envelope was sealed. I loosened the flap, pulled out a folded sheet. The message was printed in bright red block letters on a sheet of hotel stationery:

The first sum was crossed out, the second sum circled.

A simple sketch at the bottom of the page showed a headland jutting into the water, sharp rocks below the prong of land. The time—8
A.M.
—was written below.

There was no signature, of course. But George didn't need to sign this missive. Only he and I knew that I had offered him one thousand dollars to lay the ghost to rest. Oh, well, to be precise, perhaps he and I and one other person were aware of that fact. Because
someone else, obviously, had paid him two thousand to raise the ghost last night. And now, for five thousand dollars, he was willing to reveal the truth behind the screams and the luminous apparition near the tower.