Top O' the Mournin' (26 page)

“But shoppin’ wasn’t Bernice’s idea,” Nana informed us. “When Alice found out dinner was gonna be late, she told Bernice the two of ’em was gonna take a cab into Derry so’s Bernice could buy her a replacement scarf. They’re still not back yet. Paisley’s hard to find anymore.”

“How long have they been gone?” I asked, concerned. I’d fallen into bed when we got back from the causeway, trying to catch up on some of the sleep I’d lost the night before.

“Four hours,” said Nana. “That don’t surprise me, though. After they get the scarf, Bernice needs to find a new camera to replace the one that washed away when she got knocked on her beam today. That could take a while. Bernice might not dress too good, but she’s real picky when it comes to camera equipment.”

I sensed a shift of energy in the room as Osmond Chelsvig got up from his chair and headed toward the dining room. He’d started a buzz. Voices rose. Feet shifted. Ethel Minch popped up. Then Ernie. Then the whole lobby came to life as everyone joined in the usual mad dash.

“Dining room must be open,” said Nana, catapulting herself to her feet. “C’mon, Tilly. Sorry, dear.” She blew me a kiss. “Gotta run before all the good seats are taken. You want we should save you each a place?”

“Sure,” I called at her retreating back. In the space of ten seconds, the guests were gone and the lobby was empty. I nuzzled against Etienne, resting my head on his shoulder. He kissed my forehead and laughed.

“Your grandmother displays amazing stamina for a woman of her advanced years. What’s her secret?”

“Senior aerobics. She’s in the accelerated class.” I inched my arm around his waist, enjoying the quiet bliss of the moment. “Tell me your day was better than mine.”

“It was rather a mixed bag. I conducted my interviews but discovered nothing of consequence. I stopped at the Garda Station again to urge them to contact a forensics expert about the bloody footprints, but a big brute of an officer by the name of O’Conor told me to bugger off.”

I wondered if
bugger
was the Irish equivalent of
uff da.
It sure was a popular expression over here. “O’Conor. Isn’t that the desk clerk’s last name?”

“The officer is her brother. If I had to guess, I’d say they’re twins. And since there were no police cars in the parking lot when I arrived back at the castle this evening, I would venture your grandmother didn’t turn up any more dead bodies in her room today.”

“There’s always tonight,” I said, not trusting the status quo.

“It doesn’t matter what happens tonight, darling. It will be of no concern to you.” He found the lobe of my ear and stroked it softly with his thumb. “You’ll be otherwise engaged.”

A tingling sensation arrowed down to my toes. I liked the sound of this. Could that Wishing Chair really work? Nuts. Maybe I should have included an addendum about an open date for the Knights of Columbus hall. Hindsight was always twenty-twenty.

“Are you ready for dinner?” he whispered against my hair.

I had a better idea. “If we skipped dinner, we could toodle down to my room and get a head start on the evening.”

“In the interest of our continuing investigation, I’d like to sit down with some of the guests this evening to see if I can tease any information out of them. A relaxed setting, a little food, a little drink—even the most recalcitrant of people can be forthcoming.”

Despite my eagerness to cut to the chase, I could see merit in his suggestion. He was the crime expert. Who knew what would happen if he had a chance to strut his stuff? “All right,” I conceded. “But I’ll warn you ahead of time, these people are hard nuts to crack. All I’ve come up with is goose eggs.” As I started to detach myself from him, I thought about the footprints I’d found in the dungeon last night and wondered if he’d thought to pick up the flashlight and skeleton key I’d asked for earlier. “Did you happen to run across a hardware store in your travels today?”

He snapped his fingers. “I nearly forgot. I didn’t have any luck at the hardware store, but I believe I found just the thing at a craftsworks gallery two villages over.” He removed two small packages from the inside pockets of his sportcoat, freed them from their tissue paper wrapping, and set them on my lap.

I looked down at a paperweight and a dog. The paperweight was the size of a bagel with a series of triangular kites in bright jelly-bean colors floating in the center of the crystal. The dog was a shaggy little porcelain terrier who stood about two inches high, was attached to a wooden base, and carried a shamrock in his mouth. They were lovely, but terribly impractical. I wouldn’t dare use them for breaking and entering, especially if the paperweight was Waterford.

“A paperweight and a dog,” I mumbled, confused.
Hmm.
Okay. Maybe the paperweight lit up. Maybe the terrier’s tail doubled as a key!

Etienne seemed confused by my confusion. “Isn’t this what you asked me to pick up for you this morning? A glass kite and a Westie?”

“Umm…not exactly. But you were close. I asked you to pick up a flashlight and a skeleton key.”

As far back as the days of the caveman, women have accused men of not listening to them. A recent study explained why. A man listens with only half his brain. That’s because the other half is too crammed with thoughts of sex, money, football, beer, and maintaining possession of the remote control to absorb any new information.

“I’m sorry, Emily. I misheard. The taxi…the engine…Vehicles are much quieter in Switzerland.”

“No problem.” The study further indicated that this erosion of listening skills only occurred in married men. Etienne had been married once, so I guess he’d already suffered partial damage. “I’m going to be otherwise engaged tonight anyway,” I assured him. “Why would I need a flashlight and a skeleton key?”

When we entered the Great Hall, I noted the configuration of the dining tables had changed. Instead of dozens of separate tables, arranged in random order around the room, the staff had pushed all the tables together in an E pattern, with chairs situated on all sides. And the buffet tables were empty. I guess this meant we were being served our meal tonight, and if any rowdiness broke out, we’d be confined in a small space rather than spread out all over the room. All the better to deal with the uprising. Good thinking.

I scoped out the diners, apprising Etienne of a few odds and ends as we made our way to the seats Nana had saved for us. “I caught Ira Kuppelman in a private discussion with Michael Malooley this morning. A paper passed hands. Instructions? Money? Who knows. It’s very suspicious. Something is definitely going on there. But at least Gladys made it through the day so far. Ira might be trying to knock her off, but I still don’t see how that relates to our ghost. And I think the Englishman who built the castle fathered an illegitimate child whose present-day descendants might have reason to haunt the place, but I don’t have anything concrete to go on yet. I don’t see Michael here tonight. That’s not a good sign. I bet he’s in the dungeon. I bet he—Hi, Nana. Thanks for saving us a place.”

She’d reserved two chairs for us in the middle of the E, at the junction of where the short, center table right-angled with the long, outer table. Etienne pulled out the corner chair for me, then seated himself beside me. “I’m glad you came along when you did,” Nana confessed. “I didn’t know how much longer I could hold those chairs. They’re in a real prime spot.”

People surrounded us at every compass point. Nana and Tilly were seated opposite us at the short table. To Etienne’s right sat the Minches. Opposite them, on Tilly’s left, were the Kuppelmans. To my left, on the outer side of the long table, were Jackie and Tom. Behind me sat Osmond Chelsvig. Behind Nana sat George Farkas. We were packed in tighter than sardines. If anyone moved, he’d bump into himself. But it wasn’t the close quarters I was worried about. It was the group dynamic. With Jack on my left and Etienne on my right, I feared I was one step away from disaster.

“You dried out pretty good,” Ernie Minch called down to Jackie. “That was a real heroic thing you did today.”

Jackie shrugged modestly. “It was nothing. My outfit was wash ’n’ wear, so it wasn’t a big deal. Besides, I bet all of you have done things in your lives that were a lot more heroic than plucking an old woman from the jaws of imminent death.”

A thoughtful pause traveled around the table. “I never done nothin’ heroic like savin’ someone from drownin’,” Nana offered. “Mostly on account of I can’t swim.”

Tilly chimed in next. “When I was doing field work in the Amazon fresh out of grad school, I lopped the head off an anaconda who was crushing my guide to death. Of course, in subsequent years I’ve come to think that what I did was based more on survival than heroics. Without a guide, I never would have found my way out of the jungle.”

“And you never woulda seen the
real
survival show on CBS.” Nana gasped her horror. “Think what you woulda missed.”

“I once took a taxi ride with a cabbie who didn’t speak English,” Ethel volunteered. “I thought that was pretty heroic. I didn’t know if I’d ever get to the place I wanted to go.”

“That surprises me,” Etienne said to her. “I’ve discovered that cabdrivers in foreign capitals sometimes speak four, maybe five languages. Where were you traveling?”

“Manhattan.”

“Pretty stupid, huh?” hooted Ernie. “She ends up in Newark and I gotta fight rush-hour traffic to pick her up. I ask you, who’s dumb enough to get in a cab with a guy who don’t speak English?”

Ernie obviously traveled exclusively by subway these days.

“Are you starting with me?” Ethel fired back. “I’m warning you, don’t start with me because I got stories to tell too.”

“You got a short one?” asked Nana. “The food’s not here yet.”

Ethel boosted her elbows up on the table. “Heroic? You want to hear heroic? I’ll give you heroic. I get up last night to use the toilet. I hear someone crying in the hall. I peek out and I see wet footprints all over the carpet.”

I came to attention. Wet footprints in the hall? Wet, not bloody? Oh, my God. The other ghost. I’d seen footprints in the dungeon that I knew belonged to Michael, but how could I have missed the ones in the hall? Had Michael made those too? Busy guy, being able to be in two places at the same time. I wonder how he did that.

“I run back to the bed to get Ernie,” Ethel continued. “I drag him out to the hall. I point at the footprints. ‘There’s something not right here,’ I says to him. ‘Look at these footprints. There’s something real odd about them.’”

Uff da.
I bent forward to catch Ethel’s eye. “Were they webbed?”

“No. They were big. Really big. Abominable Snowman big.”

“Had to be at least a size eighteen,” Ernie conceded.

I swallowed slowly. I knew the footprints in the dungeon belonged to Michael, and they hadn’t been that big. So if the supersize prints in the hall didn’t belong to Michael, who
did
they belong to?

Ethel went on with enthusiasm. “So Ernie opens an eye and looks at the footprints and says,‘This guy has flat feet, a narrow heel, and probably stands seven foot tall. You see someone like that, let me know. I’ll be in bed.’ Some hero, huh?”

The ghost was a giant? A ghost, I could believe. A giant seemed a little over the top. “Did you notice any smell in the hall when you were studying the footprints?” I asked Ethel.

“I sure did. It about knocked me over.”

Ta da! Michael Malooley.

“It smelled like lavender. And lots of it.”

Lavender? As in lavender bubble bath? Uh-oh. Not Michael Malooley. I swung my head around to slant a look at Jackie. She slanted a look back. Oops. We both slumped in our chairs and tried to look invisible.

“What’s the most courageous thing you’ve ever done, Emily?” Tilly asked in her professor’s voice.

“Umm…” No-brainer.
Sitting between Etienne and Jack and worrying what was going to happen next,
but I couldn’t really say that. “I don’t know if I’ve ever done anything really courageous,” I admitted.

“That’s not true,” Nana objected. “She rescued a hair-piece from the River Reuss last year,” she announced to the table.

“She saved my leg from sinking to the bottom of Lake Lucerne,” George proclaimed.

“She faced a maniacal killer single-handedly,” Etienne said softly, holding my gaze to his, lifting my hand to his lips, warming my flesh with his mouth.
Unh.
Excuse me while I melt. “Emily is the bravest woman I have ever known.”

I blushed at their flattery. They were making me sound pretty good. Etienne had even remembered about my facing the maniacal killer. What a good memory he had. It was nice to be in love with a man who could remember what you were like on your good days.

“I didn’t hear anyone crying in the hall last night,” said Gladys Kuppelman. “Why didn’t I hear anyone crying?”

“It’s your snoring,” accused Ira. “Who can hear anything over that racket?”

“Oh, sure, and I suppose if I’d heard something, you would have run right out to investigate, you being so heroic and all. Bugger you.”

Gee, Gladys was really picking up the language.

“I always thought Ira was pretty heroic to agree to the number of operations he’s been involved with,” said Ethel.

Ira froze in place. Gladys froze too—everything except her mouth. “I told you
never
to say anything about that,” she spat at Ethel.