The Fortune Teller (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 5) (2 page)

It had been a bed-and-breakfast in the meantime. It had been decorated lavishly, but the house seemed to be cursed or something. I had been worried that it would be purchased by some loon who was actually
looking
for ghosts, or somebody who’d put in a wax museum or something, and when it was bought by a Tropical Breeze legacy, somebody everyone in town had known as a girl, I was pleased. Maybe she’d break the curse.

She had purchased it furnished, but she hadn’t finished moving in yet. When she offered it to me for the Halloween event, I jumped at it. We could let people ramble around the house at will, and at a price of fourteen tickets, make a nice little pile of money by the end of the day. We probably could have charged more.

Walking around the house, I couldn’t believe our luck. Everybody in town was curious about the place, and Edson had created lighting and sound effects that would have made a theme park proud. When I’d checked in on things earlier in the day, I was thrilled with the results.

In the 2-storey foyer with a second-floor gallery, Ed had created the Mummy’s Tomb, with drapes of cobwebbing, a few dung beetles, grasping mummies (volunteers, hamming it up), and an animatronic coffin that popped open as you walked by. The low-lights were directed straight at the floor, and left looming shadows above, making it look like the chamber went up into infinity.

The dining room was the Dracula Room. Ed had been in the room for some meetings with the previous owner, and claimed he’d always thought the long table would make a perfect bier for a coffin. I believed him. That’s how Ed saw things in general. We also had a couple of cute Brides of Dracula, draped in the ever-useful ectoplasm gauze and wearing big-hair wigs and big-time make-up.

But my favorite was the Room of the Living Dead, formerly the living room, where eyeballs hung out of eye sockets, complexions were a thick and pasty green, and the zombie-volunteers staggered around grunting and running into things and popping out from behind furniture when you least expected them. They were having a ball.

There was also a small sitting room which had been filled with display tables depicting a miniature Halloween village, where you could wander around and admire the set-up without having anything jump out at you.

Since I’d already seen it all, I bypassed the line by going in the service entrance at the back, and joined a couple of volunteers who were taking a break in the kitchen. It was off-limits for the tour.

Angie Kelly was there, along with Edson Darby-Deaver and Florence Purdy, who ran our resale shop, Girlfriend’s, over on Locust.

Ed was pontificating.

Ed was a few years younger than me, somewhere in his mid-fifties, and on the small side. His hair had been pure white since he was in his 30s. He was very slim, and a good six inches shorter than me, but then I’m tall for a woman.

“What’s to eat?” I said, suddenly realizing I’d skipped dinner and I was famished.

“Messed-up cupcakes and broken cookies,” Angie said. “Justine Decker brought them over from The Bakery, but not all of them are nice enough to sell at the goodie table. She forgot to grease one of the cupcake pans, and they wouldn’t come out.”

“Ah, yes, Justine,” I said, and said no more. I never look a gift horse in the mouth.

Justine Decker was a rich young woman from St. Augustine, just up the coast. Apparently, she woke up one day and decided she was going to start a business. Any old kind of a business. A very immature 24-year old, she’d become entranced with the image of herself as a small-town shopkeeper somewhere near the beaches. Since there was a vacant store next to our used bookstore, which was called The Bookery, she decided she’d slide in next to it and call her store The Bakery. Barnabas Elgin, the bookstore owner, didn’t seem to mind. His establishment had been on Locust Street since 1910. Other stores would come and go, and The Bookery would still be there. If anything, he seemed quietly amused. The Bakery, everybody in town agreed, would be one of those to quickly go.

Justine didn’t know what the heck she was doing. She’d taken a few business courses in college, but she didn’t know how to run a business in the real world. She didn’t have much experience baking, and she didn’t like getting up at 3:00 in the morning to bake. I think she started the whole gag with the vague notion that she’d hire people to do the drudge work, but drudges cost money, and start-up businesses were like magic acts: they instantly made money disappear. Her daddy had bought her all the professional equipment she needed and paid up the rent, but nobody thought she was going to make it.

When she had volunteered to donate baked goods for our goodie table, I’d accepted and hoped for the best. I took a broken (and slightly burned) chocolate cupcake and sincerely hoped the ones we were selling outside hadn’t come from this batch. At least the orange frosting was good.

Ed was regarding me warily. “Well,” he said, seeming to brace himself for the worst, “what do you think?”

“Ed, you’re a genius. The house looks like it’s really haunted.”

“Technically, it is,” he said, obviously getting ready to present an analysis of his EMF readings, his infrared camera images and his research on the Whitby family. I was in no mood just then, and apparently neither was anybody else, because they all started to talk at once.

“My sister is watching the Girlfriend’s table,” Florence said, sliding off her highboy chair with considerable agility for 72-year old. “So I’d better get back out there.”

“Myrtle is here?” Ed asked squeamishly.

Unless they turn out to be the spawn of the devil, I stand up for my volunteers. Even Myrtle.

“She insisted on coming tonight, even though she was tired from doing housework. She’s a trooper,” I said, boring into Ed’s eyes with my own, hoping to insert the idea straight into his head.

“But she’s never been very good at arithmetic,” Florence fretted. “Back in grammar school, they had to keep pushing her ahead to the next grade anyway.”

I winced, but didn’t say anything. Even the thought of Myrtle Purdy out there in the dark with Girlfriend’s gently-used treasures wasn’t going to throw me. We were cleaning up on tickets, and Orphans of the Storm was going to have money in the bank come Monday. Even Myrtle would be able to count up 50-cent tickets, wouldn’t she? You put two together, you got a dollar.

Angie rested her elbows on the cooking island and looked tired. She’d worked herself into the ground to make the Halloween event a success.

I sat down on another chair by the cooking island and took a broken cookie. This one wasn’t burned, it was a little under, but an underdone sugar cookie is still a good cookie. Nice and soft and chewy.

“I’m a little worried about Eden, over at the fortune teller tent,” I said. “I just checked on her, and she’s all but predicting the end of the world.”

“Really? I’ve never seen Eden depressed,” Angie said. “And we all agreed she’d tell everybody happy-happy things. I wonder what’s wrong with her?”

I shrugged, picking through the plate of broken cookies for another underdone sugar cookie. I kind of like underdone cookies. “She was late. Maybe she had a fight with her boyfriend. The skinny redheaded guy, whatsisname –“

“Rusty. Boyfriend is kind of a loose way of putting it. He’s just a guy in her usual gang of friends. They seem to change partners like square dancers. Yeah, maybe she had a fight or something.”

“Women are particularly sensitive about their love affairs,” Ed commented. As if he knew. “And everything else. Oh, hello, Barnabas.”

I turned around to take a look at our “creepy butler,” and gasped. Barnabas Elgin is a man who carries an eerie stillness about him, even on an average day. He always dresses in black, so he didn’t look much different in his approximation of a butler’s get-up, but in the fluorescent kitchen light he looked much more pale than he did in his bookstore, which was the only place anybody ever saw him. His skin seemed to be the same color as his gray hair. It was a disconcerting effect.

He noticed my reaction and inclined his head. “Our friend Edson gave me a subdued make-over. Nothing frightful, nothing obvious, but a subtle, overall dimming of the life that glows within the skin. I rather like the eyeliner, don’t you? And the lips – just a touch redder than would be natural.”

I looked more closely, because the make-up really
was
extremely subtle – so much so that I didn’t realize he had color on his lips at all. They were just liverish.

“You look great,” I told him. “You can haunt my mansion any time.”

“Cadbury Place?” he said. “Ah, yes. Perhaps I will, at some hopefully distant date. If my silent companions in The Bookery will allow me to have days out.”

“Very funny,” I said, creeped out in spite of myself. Barnabas is the only living thing in The Bookery besides his cat, Ishmael.

“We have just closed and locked the front door,” he announced in a slightly louder voice, becoming still and straight, and posing formally. Then he came toward the cooking island to study the plates of Justine’s cookies and cupcakes. After inspecting them and letting his eyebrows rise higher and higher on his forehead, he decided not to take any.

Instead, he turned to me and said, “A great success, Taylor. The children were particularly titillated, and I believe more teenagers were susceptible of the atmosphere than were willing to admit it. Edson, I congratulate you. A Haunted House to be remembered from childhood into old age, to be re-envisioned and relived at harvest time, year after year, and treasured as a special memory of Halloween.”

Ed was overcome. “Thank you, Barnabas.”

Ed and Barnabas are the two most complicated wordsmiths I’ve ever known, and to watch one formally congratulate the other was like listening to blank-verse poetry.

Angie and I both grinned. Ed deserved every word of it, and Barnabas had said it much more elegantly than we could have.

“Well, troops,” I said, heaving myself off the high chair, “time to shut this rodeo down and see what we got.”

By the time I got outside and walked over to the ticket booth, Michael was there taking charge of the cash box, volunteers were shutting down the colored up-lights and fog-makers outside the house, and Marian was off to the side, breaking down the fortune teller’s tent.

I walked over to her. “Didn’t Eden stay to help? She said she would.”

Marian fixed me with a flat stare. “She also said she’d get here early to help set up the tent, and she didn’t do that either.”

“Well,” I said, moving in to help, “at least she made everybody happy describing their future boyfriends.”

“I don’t think she did that either,” Marian said. “I heard some of her customers grumbling. You’d better check out what she was telling people.”

“Yeah. I guess I will. And apologize where necessary.”

I didn’t get into what I thought about Eden’s performance, after she’d begged to do the fortune teller act in the first place. Like I said, I never dis my volunteers. At least she showed up, I reminded myself.

It wasn’t until late the next day that I found out that actually, Eden hadn’t shown up after all.

On the way home, I let Michael drive while I closed my eyes and relaxed in the passenger seat. Myrtle was in the backseat; she’s our housekeeper, and also lives at Cadbury House with us. The cool autumn air and the mental strain of counting 50-cent tickets all night had really worn her out. When I looked back to check on her, she was sleeping.

It was about a thirty minute drive from downtown Tropical Breeze to the Cadbury Estate, and almost half of that was getting over the nearly 4-mile dirt road after the turnoff on Old King’s Road. If you took it at more than 25 miles per hour, you were bounced around like a pinball.

The 1,500-acre estate, complete with riverside mansion, had been the little weekend getaway of a robber baron of the Gilded Age. Since then, the Cadbury-Huntington family has propped it up so it won’t collapse absolutely, but a few things have been neglected. It has the superficial glamour of old money, but if you look too closely, you’ll find outdated, unhandy details originally intended to be dealt with by servants. At least the bathrooms have been modernized. And the kitchen, which used to be in a separate building behind the house, is now inside, in a space at the end of the great room defined by a long breakfast bar.

When my landlord, Graeme Huntington, inherited Cadbury House, all he saw was a white elephant. On the other hand, several generations of his family were buried in the cemetery on the premises, and he was too sentimental to walk away from the place entirely. So he rented it to me for not much more than I’d have paid for a one-bedroom apartment. He was an animal lover, and I think he liked the idea of playing the benevolent prince. Michael had kept his own house in town, but he spent most of his time with me, out at the estate.

Michael and I were slowly bumping along down the dirt road when I remembered what Marian had said.

“Did you get any complaints about anything tonight?” I asked. “Any grumbling going on?”

“Not really. Everybody seemed to be having a good time. Why?”

“Marian said something about Eden going off-script with her fortunes. I actually caught her act myself at one point, and she gave me some jive about the dead rising, but I figured she was just being cute for the boss. She even changed her voice, which was weird. I hope she wasn’t talking to everybody like that. Most of her customers were teenage girls, and they like to act like they’re all grown up, but they’re still part little girl yet. They might take it seriously.”

He frowned, but said, “I wouldn’t worry about it. It was just a charity event, and everybody knew that. Everybody in town knows Eden O’Sullivan, and they were going to take anything she said with a grain of salt. She’s too much of a self-promoter for anybody to have believed her when she started bragging about having psychic powers. I seem to remember her getting into trouble when she was just a kid for telling lies. Once you get a reputation as a liar, nobody takes anything you say too seriously.”

“She’s been living in Atlanta for ten years and just moved back. None of the younger kids in town know much about her. I don’t know her very well myself.”

“Trust me, they’ve been told about her. This is a small town. Everybody knows everything.”

I let my head fall back against the headrest. “I promised Rita I’d get back to her house first thing in the morning and make sure things are cleaned up to her satisfaction.”

“Get Jasper to help.”

“He already said he’d meet me there after sunrise. You know Jasper. He considers the sunrise a personal appointment. He doesn’t like to disappoint the sun. I think he really believes that if he’s not there to serenade it while it rises, it might not come up at all.”

Michael smiled, but said nothing. I turned my face to the left, letting it rest against the seatback, and looked at him in the dashboard lights. Even in the eerie glow, he projected a comforting steadiness, a quiet confidence I had always admired, even before I fell in love with him. His hair was neatly cropped, thick and white, and he had a smile that warmed his ice-blue eyes. I closed my eyes and felt safe.

By the time we got home, we were both exhausted. We woke Myrtle up, and the three of us got inside. While Michael locked up, I put the cashbox in the office safe. As I was coming out of my office, I stopped, staring at my cat, Bastet.

“What got into her?” I asked.

Michael was standing outside the kitchen, watching my black cat pace nervously back and forth in the great room. “I don’t know. She’s usually so detached. I’ve never seen her like this before.”

I lowered my voice and muttered, “I have.” Michael didn’t hear me, and I didn’t speak up and repeat it when he asked me what I’d said. Instead, I said, “She’ll settle down. Let’s go to bed. I’m just about dead on my feet.”

While I was in the master bathroom washing up, I noticed the rinse water coming out a funny orange against the white of the sink basin. I looked at my right hand and noticed a smear of heavy pancake make-up, the kind people use to cover birthmarks and dark circles under the eyes. My mind was pretty cloudy by that time, and I remember puzzling over it for just a moment. But with all the people running around the event in costumes, wearing every color of make-up from alien gray to Frankenstein green, I didn’t wonder about it for long. I’d shaken a lot of hands that night. So I just scrubbed it off and forgot about it.

Jasper is a funny old guy, but he’s dependable. What exactly he does for a living I’m not sure. He seems to know how to do everything that needs to be done around a house or a yard. The hands-on, practical things. Back in the day, he’d been the caretaker for Rita Allen Garnett’s family, and she had a soft spot in her heart for him. When she’d decided to make an offer on the Whitby House, she’d gone to him first, because she truly wanted his opinion on its condition. She’d been hiring him as a handyman ever since.

When I pulled up at the Whitby House he was already dragging a black plastic garbage bag around and looking for any last bits of garbage that might be stuck in the lawn. We’d left the place pretty clean the night before, but we’d left in the dark.

He was singing in his scrawny, tortured voice as I walked up to him, and he pretended not to notice me until I spoke to him from three feet away. When I got his attention, he finished the line from his weird little song, then switched to his talking voice, which was lower in pitch, but still scrawny.

“You’re late. Job’s all finished.”

It was only half an hour after sunrise, and Jasper lives further north than I do. I was surprised he’d gotten there soon enough to finish the job before I could get there.

“Did the sun come up early today?” I asked.

“Yes she did. Wanted to accommodate me, knowing I had work to do.” Then he laughed, a sound with more breath than voice.

“Nice to have friends in high places,” I said, realizing the pun too late. Jasper ratcheted his voice up into eldritch laughter.

About that time Rita came out and invited us in for coffee.

I had wandered around the house the day before, watching Edson and his teenage volunteers transform it from an over-furnished B&B to a twilight world full of staggering zombies. Somebody had forgotten to switch off the mummy-in-the-casket robotic, and it nearly gave me a heart attack. It was motion-activated, and when I walked by, the door popped open. Suddenly there was a mummy in front of my face. Its eyes were flashing green and it was making growly noises. Cute. Jasper screeched with delight while I went behind it and yanked the plug out of the socket.

One of the rooms had been entirely filled with table displays of scale-model Halloween houses, spread out like a miniature village. It had crooked little streets, crooked little houses, and a hillside cemetery full of crooked little tombstones. On the main street was a tiny, ornate, glass-sided hearse drawn by two horses with black plumes in their headdresses. I wondered where Ed had found the collection, because it obviously was something put together bit by bit, year after year, by some Halloween fanatic. Now that I had the chance, I asked Rita about it.

“Oh, it’s mine,” she said. “I made sure I got it in and set it up myself, especially for the Haunted House. I’ve been collecting the pieces all my life. I’m going to leave it here, displayed in the morning room. I enjoy looking at it and rearranging it.”

“Womenfolk like to play with their dolls and houses,” Jasper said loftily.

“Men like to play with their model trains,” Rita retorted smoothly. I grinned, while Jasper rolled his eyes.

I gazed at the display a few moments longer. To each his own, I figured, but still, it seemed an odd pastime for a woman like Rita Allen Garnett.

Rita was nearly fifty, with the figure and sun-blond hair of a surfer girl. She tended to dress like a New England socialite on a weekend off, which I suppose she was. She usually wore skirts and expensively simple blouses, and the pearls she habitually wore looked real. I hadn’t worn dresses or skirts since I’d been a schoolgirl. She was of average height, and very, very ladylike, with a quiet air of confidence.

I followed her into the kitchen and sat at the breakfast bar in the chair I’d used the night before. Jasper washed up at the sink. Rita had set out an assortment of breakfast pastries arranged on a glass plate, and Jasper came over wiping his hands and staring at the sweet rolls.

“I’m afraid they’re from The Bakery,” Rita said as she went to pour coffee.

Jasper grabbed a large Danish and ate it in two bites, then took another one and put it on a napkin to eat more slowly. I lifted one filled with cream cheese and looked at the bottom. Yep. Burned. Only my good upbringing made me put it on a side plate and eventually manage to eat it.

“I want to thank you again for letting us use your house,” I said to Rita when she was sitting with us.

“The pleasure was all mine. Let’s make this an annual event. Halloween is my favorite day of the year, and having the whole town come over and celebrate is wonderful, especially when I don’t have to do all the work.”

I told her she had a deal, then asked how she was settling into her new house.

“Very well, thanks,” she said. “In a way, I’ve always lived here. My family owned the house for about ten years, when I was a kid. I remember coming into it for the first time and deciding I wanted to live here forever. I was about seven at the time. My little sister and I were thrilled with the town, and thrilled with the house. We learned how to surf that first summer, over at the beach.”

“Somebody told me about how well-liked your family was,” I said. “Always throwing parties, and having your friends come for sleepovers.”

“We had a lot of fun. Everything is so relaxed here, I enjoyed the freedom from nannies and school. There were quite a few kids our age in town at that time, and they were all very friendly, and very curious about this house. I found it gave me a certain prestige, being brave enough to live in the haunted house.”

“Did you ever feel it was haunted?”

“By the Whitbys? No. It was never spooky here. Everything is so bright and beautiful, how could it be spooky?”

Jasper made a rumbling noise and had another pastry.

“My grandmother loved the place especially,” Rita went on. “Violet. I always called her by her first name. I thought her real name was so much prettier than ‘Granny.’ She loved this house. By the time she passed away, my sister and I were too old to take our summer vacations with our parents anymore, so they sold the house. I really hated to see it go out of the family. We had so many great memories here. I guess I think of it the way most people think of their grandmother’s house. The woman who ran the B&B really gussied it up, but I like it. It suits the place, somehow. She managed to modernize it a bit from when my family used to come here, but I still need to do a few things. For some reason I can’t seem to get the Wi-Fi to reach every room of the house, and I don’t know why. It’s really been a nuisance. One of the dead zones is the master bedroom. I’m afraid I’m getting a little superstitious about why I can’t get electronics to work up there. It was the bedroom of the original owner of the house. You know – the one who committed suicide.”

Jasper crossed himself. “Well, gotta go,” he said abruptly.

“No, wait, Jasper,” Rita said. “I haven’t paid you for the yard clean-up yet.”

“Oh, let Orphans do that,” I said. “After all, it was our event that made the mess in the first place.”

Jasper held up a hand. “No payment necessary, either one o’you. Volunteer work. For the kitties and doggies. You be sure and tell ‘em,” he added, leering at me.

“I’ll make an announcement in the kennel as soon as I get back home,” I said.

We thanked him and told him good-bye.

“Where does he put it all?” I asked, more to myself than Rita. Jasper weighed about 130 lbs., and he’d eaten at least three sweet rolls.

“He works very hard. Then he spends his time off wandering up and down the beach, singing.”

“What exactly does he call himself? A handyman?”

She smiled. “He likes to call himself a Jack of all trades and a master of song.”

“Uh huh. I’ve heard him sing.”

“Don’t let that crazy-old-man act fool you. Jasper’s pretty sharp. He just doesn’t like people to know it. That’s why I asked him to go over this house with me and let me know what he thought. He found a few little problems that the home inspector had missed. But he’ll never admit he really knows what he’s doing. When I asked him what kind of condition the house was in, he said, ‘Prissy.’ He didn’t like the B&B makeover. You know why he got here so early this morning, don’t you?”