The Gallery of the Dead (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 3) (9 page)

“And now with Teddy’s people in the house, there’s a lot more work.”

Paul sniffed and pouted.

“How long are they staying?” I asked Misty.

“Teddy didn’t say. I can’t imagine they’ll be here more than another couple of days.”

I knew that Paul had just come down the stairs from where Teddy and his people were doing their thing, and I wondered if they had something to do with Paul’s demeanor. I sent out a feeler and hit a nerve.

“It must be exciting, having showbiz people around,” I said.

He gave me a nasty look and said, “That’s because you don’t know any of them.”

“And you do?” I asked innocently.

“I was married to one. Greedy little bitch –“

“Paul,” his mother said quietly, “it would be better if we just didn’t talk about her.”

“Or think about her,” he added. Then his nasty glare turned into a nasty smile. “Best day of my life, when she took off, but if she’d hung around maybe I could’ve gotten her a job with the crew upstairs. Her big break,” he added sarcastically.

“I don’t think she really had any talent,” Misty said. “An aspiring actress who never gets an acting job is not an actress. And she wasn’t very nice. I did warn you about her when you brought her home. Let’s just forget about her.”

“Already done,” Paul said in a tone of voice that said he would never forget. He was looking at the floor now and I couldn’t read his expression.

It clicked in with everything I’d heard about Paul so far. He was one of those serial failures, and when he’d run out of money and his marriage had ended, he had come home to mama. Working in The Royal Palm was probably the last thing on earth he wanted to be doing now, but there was nowhere else to go.

At least Misty was happy. Sad sack that as he was, she apparently wanted him back.

I took a picture of the bed and then we all looked up at the ceiling because a fight had broken out upstairs.

From the Journal of Edson Darby-Deaver

We proceeded to the gallery. I paused at the top of the stairs and gazed at the spot from which Cassandra must have thrown herself. Sadness came down over me, and though I’m vague about religion, I took a moment to compose something in my own silent words.

“It’s over here, Ed,” Teddy said from across the gallery.

I lifted an eyebrow at him, standing my ground for a few seconds. Then I walked over to where our motley crew was gathered. Below me, I could hear murmurs from the kitchen, and I could only hope Bernie was making more progress than I was.

“Ed, if you wouldn’t mind taking some readings?” Teddy said.

I set my messenger bag down and got my EMF reader out, but I have to admit, my heart wasn’t in it. I activated the device and did a sweep. To my shock, I picked something up. To make sure I wasn’t getting a false reading from all the hardware on Carmilla, I stepped back.

“What is it, Ed?” Lily said.

The rest of the group had been ignoring me, but at her question they turned to look. “Just a minute,” I said, staring at the meter and holding a hand up.

“Got anything?” Teddy asked.

“I – I think so. Look.” I turned the device so they could see the readout.

Teddy gave me a smug look. “See? Forget the research and go with your gut. You weren’t getting any readings over
there
, were you?”

He was indicating the historically correct area of the tragedy, and when I walked back to it, the numbers dropped.

Even the spirits seemed to be against me.

When I walked back almost to the group, the needle began to dance again. “I give up,” I said in frustration. I turned the meter off and abandoned myself to Teddy’s madness. It seemed to work better than common sense.

“Now come on, Ed,” Lily said kindly. “We need both of you, and your research really was interesting. I’m beginning to think, Teddy, that we should take a little more time here at The Royal Palm. Something’s up and I’m not sure we have a handle on it yet.”

“We are shooting tonight at midnight,” Teddy declared, emboldened by the EMP meter. “It’s the 100
th
anniversary and we don’t have another hundred years to get it right.”

As I stood a little away from the rest of the group, I looked down and saw Misty and Bernie skirting the foyer and walking into a room below us.

Wyatt was wandering around across the gallery from everybody, possibly checking for good camera angles, looking detached. Elliott was lounging against the far wall, and everybody else was looking expectantly at Teddy.

Suddenly Paul came out of Carmilla’s room.

“Hey, man, what were you doing in there?” Carmilla said savagely.

“Chill, O Vampire Tramp,” he said, glaring back. “You want your bed made or not?”

She growled like an animal.

“Here’s a little tip,” Paul went on, lowering his voice and getting right into her face. “Vampires are so yesterday. It’s zombies now. You might want to update your
thang
.”

Her whole body became rigid, she leaned forward slightly, almost touching him, and I was afraid she was about to bite him.

“Paul! We didn’t know you were in there,” Teddy said brightly. “You’ll have to excuse us. We’re having an important meeting.”

“No sweat, dude,” Paul said, backing away from Carmilla’s teeth and heading past me to the stairs. “I’m done anyway. Your rooms are clean. You’re welcome.”

Teddy waited until Paul was down the stairs and out of sight, then he continued.

“We gear up at ten pm. Everybody into the suits and gear.”

“Not me,” Carmilla said. “The supernatural entities know me as I am.”

“Okay, not you,” Teddy conceded. “You already have an identity with our fans. You come as you are. The rest of us, into the jumpsuits – that includes you, Ed. We have a killer new design, and once you’re suited up the psychic energy begins to flow, so be ready. Observe. Report to me immediately if you begin to have experiences. By 11:00, we should have our sound and light ready . . . .” He looked at the 2-man crew and they nodded. “Then we roll. By midnight we’ll be getting results.”

I raised my hand.

“Ed, just ask,” Teddy said. “This isn’t Kindergarten.”

Any other time I would’ve argued the point, but the fire had gone out of me. “What precisely are we going to do?”

“Ah, yes, you’ve never participated in a real ghost hunt before. We open ourselves, psychically, use our technical equipment, of course, and call out to the spirits. Then, we exercise discipline and let them come to us. We promise to show them the way to a peaceful afterlife. They want that very much, and because of that, they come to us.”

“I see.”

“And any negative energy,” he said, glaring at me, “will be counterproductive, so watch the attitude, Ed. I can feel it from here.”

“Don’t worry about me, Teddy. As a matter of fact, I have been on real ghost hunts before.
Real
real ghost hunts, without the cheesy costumes. I’ll be giving my attitude over to making observations. It’s never been my practice to wander around yodeling for ghosts.”

“Yodeling! You amateur wannabe ghost-groupie hypocrite! I was laying ghosts when you were still trying to figure out what an IVF meter was!”

“
A-and
here we go!” Jinx said, relaxing against a wall and crossing his arms.

“You don’t like my attitude, Teddy? Fire me. Fire me, please! You know you don’t want me on your show, and you don’t want the major distraction in the leather thong over there, either,” (she growled), “because when she’s on camera you are going to turn into wallpaper, as far as the audience is concerned. You can’t hold anybody’s interest while she’s flashing her boobs around. You may have weird green eyes and a stack of muscles that goes all the way up to and including your brain, but that’s not going to be enough when every man watching the show is just praying for her to have a wardrobe malfunction. Fire me! Release me! Let me go!”

Jinx began singing something, a take-off on my begging for freedom, but everybody ignored him. Lily was beside me all of a sudden, taking my arm and murmuring nice things, and below us, beginning to climb the stairs, was Bernie The Beach Buzzer, sniffing out a story.

Teddy extended his arm fully, pointing at Bernie, “You stay out of this! I thought you had left. Get out!”

“Don’t you talk to her like that!” I yelled, dropping the EMP meter and going for Teddy like I was going to throw a haymaker. I don’t know what I was thinking. The man outweighs me by sixty pounds and towers over my head. Fortunately, Lily was holding me back or he would have cracked me like a walnut.

In the midst of the testosterone fog, a quiet voice penetrated.

“This is my house and I’ll decide who stays or goes,” Misty said. “Bernie is my friend. I don’t think you should talk to her that way, Teddy.”

Paul was standing in the foyer with his mother, looking up and smiling.

We froze.

I gazed at Misty with new respect. I hadn’t known she had it in her, especially when it came to her hero.

Teddy backed down.

His hair had fallen attractively over his eyes and he brushed it back in a distracted, manly way. “My apologies, Misty. It won’t happen again.”

“Apology accepted. Would you like some cookies?”

“No thank you.”

“I would,” Lily said, peeling away from the squadron and heading for the stairs. She had me by the arm, and I went along meekly. “You just come with me,” she murmured, “and just settle down, little mister.”

“But my EMF meter,” I whimpered.

“Somebody will pick it up.”

I felt so small.

Bernie called my cell phone while Lily and I were silently consuming cookies at the dining room table. She was still waiting for me to settle down before she said whatever it was she had to say. Fortunately, I keep my cell phone in a pocket, not in my satchel, which was still lying on the floor in the gallery. I wasn’t worried about anybody going through my things. Nobody here was interested in my things.

I looked around the table sadly as I ate. The notes that I had stayed up until 2:37 in the morning to type were laying around like so many autumn leaves, waiting to be raked up and burned. I counted, and saw that there were five sets left on the table. Bernie could be counted on to have swiped one. Lily had probably taken the other one.

“Yes, Bernie?” I said limply.

“My hero,” she said.

“Whatever.”

“Poor Ed. Where are you now? Is Teddy still browbeating you?”

“No. I’m having cookies with Lily.”

“Give her my love.”

I looked across the table. “Love,” I said.

“Right back at her,” Lily said.

“She loves you too. What did you find out?”

“Well –“

She proceeded to tell me, finishing with, “and her cleaning lady’s a disaster.”

I had listened patiently while she described the spot on the pretty purple carpet, too depressed to interrupt the stream of useless information.

“Well, that was interesting,” I told her listlessly, and we wound it up.

For no reason at all, I found myself staring at the gold Egyptian statuette on the buffet. I was more sure than ever that it was from the collection of Vesta Cadbury Huntington. I blinked, trying to sort something out. Bernie had just told me about Misty’s stray black cat (to show how scatter-brained Misty was). Taylor had a black cat that sounded exactly like the one Misty had described, one that she had acquired immediately after Vesta’s murder. And Misty had one of Vesta’s Egyptian objects. As a scientist, I try not to extrapolate grand theories out of scraps of information, but the scraps were beginning to pile up, though they weren’t making sense yet. The presence of the cat disturbed me in a way I couldn’t define, and I ended the call with a frown on my face.

“What was that all about?” Lily asked.

I popped a cookie into my mouth and didn’t even bother to chew and swallow before I answered, “Nothing.”

She did cheer me up in the end, because she’s just that kind of a person. You can’t sit across the table from a perky young thing wearing a flowery green shirt who’s sincerely trying to make you feel better and not oblige her. It would be rude.

From the sound of things, everybody else had gone out to see the town and the beach, with the exception of Teddy, who was pouting somewhere, and Carmilla, who was probably resting up so she could “walk the night.” The creep.

After a while, Misty came in to clear the table and Teddy called for Lily, saying, “Get your bikini on. We’re going to the beach.”

“I’ll bring your messenger bag down,” she whispered to me as she got up to go. She did. The contents were jumbled, but everything was there.

I sat there in the empty room staring at the table for a while, then wandered off.

There was no further violence until Porter arrived, hours later.