The Gallery of the Dead (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 3) (12 page)

From the journal of Edson Darby-Deaver

Misty was dead. Teddy was babbling about Jane being his stalker, and I’ve never had a more miserable moment in my life. He’d been right all along and we hadn’t believed him. Jane was a dangerous maniac.

I stood up and called into the gallery, “Did you find her?”

Jinx popped his head over the railing and said, “She went through
my
room,” in an outraged voice.

“Of course she did,” I said. “She knew it had a fire escape.”

“Is anybody going after her?” Teddy demanded, looking up.

“Carmilla almost got her, but she slipped away.”

“
Carmilla?
I thought she was sleeping.”

“Through all that?”

“Oh, yeah.” Teddy had gently laid Misty back on the floor and we stood by her body, trying to think straight.

A garish face in a bald head appeared next to Jinx’s, and Carmilla’s baritone voice came down to us. “I made a grab for her, but all I got was her backpack. Her sandals are here in the hall. She must have lost them while she was running.”

I realized that what made her look bald was a wig cap that compressed her natural hair. She hadn’t had time to put her wig on. Her deep purple lips and exaggerated make-up made her look like a ghoul.

“I was sleeping, and when I opened my door the lights were out. I realized I was the only one whose eyes were adapted to the dark, and I could see her running into Jinx’s room while everybody else was stumbling around.” She shrugged. “I ran after her. Instinct. Anyway, there’s this,” she said, holding up the backpack and pulling something out of it.

“It’s a tee shirt, and it’s wet. Ugh – it’s blood.” Something dropped out of it and fell on the gallery floor. Carmilla looked down at it and said, “It’s a knife. She must have wiped it on the tee shirt and rolled it up inside it.”

“Don’t touch it!” I said. “She kept a clean set of clothes in the backpack. She must have changed out of her bloody shirt before you caught her.”

“Yeah,” Carmilla said thoughtfully, having dropped it on the floor. “She was crouching on the ground when I found her under the fire escape. She must have had her backpack stashed there.”

“Did you find any letters in it?” Teddy asked.

She dug around. “Yeah, there’s some letters here.”

“Don’t handle them,” I said sharply. “Leave them for the police.”

“Do they have smiley hearts on them?” Teddy asked, ignoring me.

She pulled one out of its envelope and unfolded it. “Yeah.”

“It was her – she’s the one who’s been stalking me. She planned to murder me all along.” Teddy said hysterically. “She had her escape route all worked out, and she had a knife. She was going to murder me, right in the middle of a ghost hunt!”

“Sounds like a stupid plan,” Carmilla said blandly. She had recovered her dead-girl persona. “I’m going to put my wig and boots on. I feel naked without them.”

She’s pretty much naked with them, though they do cover more square inches of her than her costume does.

Everything had happened in a kind of time warp. We had gathered in the loft at 9:00 for the shoot, and by 9:30, Misty was dead. The police came, more and more of them, in a swirl of flashing red lights, two different styles of uniform (Tropical Breeze and Flagler County), ambulance personnel and forensics specialists.

I knew Kyle Longley, the Flagler County Sheriff. He was Bernie Horning’s boyfriend, sort of. He’s about thirty years younger than her, but that doesn’t seem to bother them.

He had gotten full descriptions of Jane Holowell. I had forgotten her last name, but the police found it on some papers in Misty’s office.

“We’ll get her,” Kyle said. “She won’t get far barefoot, without her backpack. It’s got her I.D. and money in it. In fact, it looks like her whole world is in the backpack. Was she homeless before she got a job here?”

“She may well have been,” I said, feeling like a louse for my thoughts about her wardrobe. “Nobody here really knows her. She said something about meeting Teddy in Denver a while ago, but only as a fan of his show.”

“We’ll talk to him about that,” he said, writing. “How long ago was that?”

“She didn’t say. Teddy may know. He said he didn’t remember her, but he’s going to try harder now, I’m sure.”

Paul McBain didn’t come home until after 1:00, and he came into the house like a madman, screaming to know what happened, screaming for his mother.

“This is Misty’s son,” I told Kyle quietly.

Nobody knew exactly where in Flagler Beach Paul’s friends lived, and nobody had exchanged phone numbers with him, so we hadn’t been able to locate him; we had to wait until he came home and saw that something horrible had happened. Teddy had collapsed and was being tended by Lily in their room, so Kyle and I had talked and decided that I would take Paul into the kitchen and explain what happened, with Kyle standing by.

Paul stood in the foyer and looked down at the marble floor. “Blood,” he said, in the voice of a small boy.

I took him by the arm and guided him to the breakfast table and told him what had happened. I don’t think much of it registered.

When I told him Jane was the one who had killed his mother, that she was an obsessed fan of Teddy’s, his only comment was, “She’s crazy.”

“Undoubtedly.”

I asked him if there was anybody we could call to stay with him, and he shook his head. I knew that his father was dead and he’d been an only child.

“What about the guys you were with tonight?” I asked.

“Nah. Don’t bother them. They’re in bed by now. I’ll call them in the morning.”

Kyle cleared his throat. “What are their names, son?”

“Huh? Oh. William Royal and Danny Danvers. Flagler Beach.” He handed over his cell phone. “They’re in here.”

Kyle nodded, taking the phone and writing the names and numbers down, and it hit me that he was going to check up on Paul’s alibi. Kind of a cop knee-jerk reaction, I thought, because Paul couldn’t have had anything to do with his mother’s death. It was all about Teddy. Everything always seemed to be about Teddy.

In the days that followed, Paul worked to get her bloodstain out of the marble floor. His friends helped him, and suggestions came in from everybody in town when word got around about it, but a shadow of the blood pool remained. It made me think of the beach gnome, Jasper, and his idea of a bloodstain that couldn’t be removed. It was a coincidence, of course, but I recorded it in my notes for the sake of completeness.

From the Journal of Edson Darby-Deaver

The next morning, at a meeting called for 10:00, Teddy announced that he was abandoning the Royal Palm project.

We didn’t see Paul until hours later, and when we did, he was bewildered and useless. All he wanted to know was when we would be leaving.

Lily and I managed breakfast. Carmilla was apparently not a domestic diva. She refused to help, and strenuously objected to another early meeting. She sat at the table smoldering and occasionally muttering an expletive.

“So what are we going to do now?” Jinx asked as he shoveled some gaily colored kid’s cereal during the meeting.

“We’re moving down the road,” Teddy announced. “Everybody pack. The only decent thing to do now is to get out of Paul McBain’s hair.”

“Moving?” I asked, putting my dry toast down. It was the first I knew that Teddy had a plan. “Moving where?”

“A place called Cadbury House. My father is staying there now, as a guest.”

“Another B&B?” Elliott asked.

“No. A mansion on a private estate.”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “That’s an animal shelter now. Did you talk to Taylor Verone about this?”

“Taylor has nothing to do with it. She’s only renting the property. My dad’s friend still owns it, and he says it’s okay.”

“But – but – but –“ I stuttered, and I might have gone on for some time if Lily hadn’t interrupted.

“Didn’t you guys already investigate that place and put the ghost to rest?”

“As a matter of fact, we did. This has nothing to do with that. As a promotion for the shelter, Taylor Verone has been experimenting with ghost walks at night.”

I’ve gotten to know Taylor pretty well, one way and another, and she had discussed her plans for Cadbury House with me when she’d first moved her animal shelter there. She hadn’t mentioned ghost walks. But she had mentioned . . .

“Are you talking about the mystery dinners with ghost stories?”

“Exactly. She’s knocking it out of the ballpark with those dinners. She hired a chef, but all the serving is done by volunteers, and a lot of the food is donated by local farmers and groceries, so it’s been a great fundraiser.”

“And how do you see us participating in this thing? Are we going to wait tables or something?”

Wyatt held up a hand and said, “Hold on guys. You both know what you’re talking about. Would you mind explaining the set-up to us? A mansion with an animal shelter?”

Teddy gestured for me to take over.

I gathered my thoughts before beginning. “Cadbury House is a wealthy family’s winter retreat, situated in 1,500 privately-owned acres on the Intracoastal Waterway. They’ve owned the place for three generations now, and the mansion really isn’t manageable any more. It’s a lovely, quiet place, but when Graeme Huntington inherited it, he saw it as a white elephant. He offered it to Taylor Verone for her animal shelter, Orphans of the Storm, and she snapped it up. She runs administration from the house, keeps the dogs in the barn, and the cats in some old cabins. But she needs promotions to get people out to the shelter, and as anyone running a shelter will tell you, they’re always looking for ways to make money.

“So we came up with the idea to have mystery dinners there on the weekends. A three-course gourmet meal is served in the great room, and between courses and after the meal, guests are taken onto the grounds for a visit to the family cemetery, the story of the haunting in the barn, and finally, a campfire gathering at the seawall in front of the river, where guests can tell their own stories, or hear about hauntings and legends from all over the Tropical Breeze area. The dinners have been extremely popular, and Taylor has bookings well into the summer. It was a brilliant idea, if I do say so myself.”

“You thought of it?” Teddy asked, surprised.

“Taylor and I brainstormed about it together, but yes, the original idea was mine. And I don’t see how on earth that kind of thing leads us to an episode of
Haunt or Hoax?
unless you plan on sitting around the campfire with the guests and spinning stories for them. Has it come to that, Teddy?”

“Sounds stupid,” moaned Carmilla.

Teddy glared at her.

Lily had been looking up and down the table like she was watching a ping pong match, and finally she said, “Come on, Teddy, give. What
is
your idea, exactly?”

“There is a tradition of haunting at the location,” he began.

“And you’re not going to be able to delve into any of it,” I snapped. “Graeme can’t possibly have given you permission to go into any of your lunatic theories about his ancestors.”

“I can’t understand it,” Teddy said.

I stared at him down the length of the table. (He was at the head and I was at the foot.) “You were trying to make his
grandmother
out to be some kind of demonic entity. What I can’t understand is why he would ever let you on his property again.”

Teddy gave me a smug look. “He and my dad are pretty tight.”

“I know,” I said. “They’re old fraternity brothers, right?”

“Brothers forever. Actually, my dad has always wanted to work in the restaurant and catering business. He’s having a great old time putting the dinners together and coordinating the volunteers and food donations. He’s talking about buying a place in Tropical Breeze just so he can keep arranging the dinners for the shelter.”

A light began to dawn. “Graeme is doing this for Taylor,” I said. “She wants the free publicity for her events. As long as we don’t make up any more ridiculous stories about his family, he’s agreed to let you do an episode there to showcase the property, and I’m willing to bet he also agreed to give us free room and board, right? The state of our budget being what it is.”

“What’s wrong with the state of our budget?” Wyatt asked.

“Nothing,” Teddy lied. “We’re fine.”

“Aren’t we forgetting something here?” Jinx asked. “We have a show about hunting for ghosts. Is there a ghost out there to hunt for?”

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” Teddy said.

“What ghost is that?” I asked.

“We’ll find one. The place has atmosphere; that’s all we need. Meanwhile, it gives me some measure of safety, being out of the public eye for a while. I’ve still got a homicidal maniac after me, in case that slipped your mind. Out there at Cadbury House, we can screen who comes in.”

“I can’t believe they haven’t caught her yet,” Lily said, taking Teddy’s hand.

He held her hand for a moment, then made a light gesture. “Poof, she was gone. The cops still haven’t got her, and that I.D. they found in her backpack was phony. There were no fingerprints on the knife. It looks like she got it from the set in the kitchen here. They did get fingerprints from some of the cleaning supplies she’d been using, and they’re running them now. If she doesn’t have a record, they don’t even know who they’re looking for. By the way, the Sheriff asked if anybody here took any pictures of her.”

He looked around, but we were all shaking our heads.

“We weren’t filming yet,” Wyatt said. “I would have tried to keep her out of the frame anyway.”

“I was afraid of that,” Teddy said. “Who takes pictures of the maid?”

“Or even looks at her,” Jinx added. “I, for one, can’t remember what she looks like. I couldn’t give a description to save my life.”

There were a few murmurs of agreement. When I looked around the table, I began to see signs that as a group, we were coming unglued. Before that could happen, Teddy asserted himself.

“All right,” he said, rising from his seat. “Let’s get this show on the road. Everybody upstairs. Go pack.”

“Shouldn’t we clean up first, so Paul doesn’t have to?” Lily asked, looking around the table at the dregs of our breakfasts.

“Oh, yeah. Go ahead and take care of that, will you?”

He left, along with Jinx and Carmilla. Wyatt, Elliott and I stayed behind to help.

When the four of us were in the kitchen, I asked Lily, “What do you think of Teddy’s idea about going out to Cadbury House?”

“He hasn’t discussed it with me,” she said shortly. “I’m not sure what he has in mind, but I’m sure he’ll come up with something. He always does.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

I wanted to ask her what in the world she’d seen in Teddy that had made her want to get engaged to him, but with Elliott and Wyatt there, I couldn’t. Still, she wasn’t married to him yet. The thought made me a little happier, until I realized that I was just the kind of mope who would actually stand up in the church when the preacher asked if anybody knew why they shouldn’t be joined in holy matrimony. I never mean to do things like that, but somehow I always do.

Elliott finished loading the dishwasher, leaned against a cabinet and said, “Hey guys, did you see Carmilla after the police interviewed her?”

We all said no.

He was bursting to tell us. “She was steaming.”

“She’s always steaming,” Lily said. “And growling.”

“No, this was a first-class melt-down boil-over. They made her give them her real name. She tried to get away with telling them she’d had it legally changed to Carmilla, but they wanted her birth name. It’s Marva. Marva Craddock.”

Lily chuckled. “Not a name to strike fear in anybody’s heart, is it?”

“Neither is Carmilla, as far as I can see,” Elliott said. “Actually, it’s kind of pretty.”

I am always astonished at that kind of ignorance, but I paused to remind myself that my chosen field has somewhat affected my book list. So I was calm when I said, “Actually, the name is very appropriate.
Carmilla
is the title of a vampire novella – possibly literature’s first female vampire star – by Sheridan Le Fanu. It’s a classic. Read it some time.”

“Oh, yeah,” Wyatt said. “I think I ran across it once. Lots of atmosphere, but, you know,
old
.”

I caught Lily’s eye and saw her swallowing a smile as she watched me coming to a boil. Quickly, before I could say words we would all regret, she thanked the men for staying to help (“Unlike some people I could name”), and got me out of the kitchen.

“Marva Craddock,” she mused as we walked toward the foyer. “Who’da thunk?”

“Yes, indeed,” I said. “Carmilla suits her much better.”

I wasn’t happy to have the knowledge. I’m the kind of person who slips on things like that. I’d probably call her Marva one of these days, and then she would kill me.

They got their things gathered up and headed out the front door. Then they stood in the street sorting out who was going in which car. I had Petronella waiting at the curb, and I offered to let somebody ride with me, but they all looked at my little Metro and declined. It was fine with me. Passengers make me nervous.

It seemed rude to just pack up and walk out, so I went looking for Paul. I found him in the back wing, where he and Misty had planned to live together as innkeepers.

The entry was through the kitchen and the door was open, so I stood in the threshold and knocked on the doorframe. “Paul,” I called out. “Are you there?”

Before me was a little sitting room with a bare, hardwood floor and some furniture that looked shabby compared with the pristine period pieces and antiques decorating the rest of the house. There were two doorways in the far wall, both of them open, and I guessed that they were Misty’s and Paul’s respective bedrooms.

His appeared in the doorway on the left.

“Yeah?” he said. His hair was wet, but he didn’t look shower-fresh. He looked like he had dressed out of a duffel bag, and he hadn’t shaved. “You want something else?”

I jabbed my thumb back over my shoulder and said, “I just wanted to let you know that we’re leaving now. I can’t tell you how sorry I am that things went the way they did.”

He was nodding, and slowly coming across the room. “Yeah, I know. Thanks. If it’s any consolation, I don’t blame you guys. Mom actually hired her, and we had no idea she was a nut job.”

I struggled for something positive to say. “Is there anybody you can call to come stay with you? You’re going to need help running the business, if you have any bookings.”

“I canceled them,” he said shortly. “It was my mom’s dream to have the B&B. I never wanted it. My best plan now is to put the place up for sale, furnished, and hope for a greater fool to come along – quick. Maybe I can declare bankruptcy to hold off the creditors long enough to find a buyer.”

“I don’t know about the greater fool, Paul. It’s a beautiful house, and with the right management, I can see it being profitable. Are you sure you don’t want to give it a go, trying to run the place?”

He gave a hopeless gesture with his whole body. “I don’t know anything about running a B&B, and neither did my mother. I only came to help her because I knew she’d bit off more than she could chew. She begged me. If I’d been around when she bought the place, I would’ve stopped her. Now I’m stuck with it. I’ll tell you one thing, though – I’m moving out of these rat-hole back rooms and going into the master suite. The Ephraim. May as well live it up for as long as I can.”