What a Ghoul Wants (33 page)

“And I bet that’s what Merrick was referring to, and I also bet that’s why he put
us in that room in the south wing, to ferret out the truth about what’s going on here,
but unfortunately, someone must have discovered what Merrick was up to, or worried
that he was getting too suspicious and they murdered him.”

“But who?” Heath asked. “Who murdered Merrick?”

“Me,” said a voice behind us. We all jumped and turned in our seats to find Arthur
Crunn standing in the doorway holding a pistol. The inspector reached for his own
weapon and Crunn cocked his gun and said, “Ah, ah, Inspector. I’d hate to shoot you
and ruin this carpet. It’d make such a mess for Mary to clean up.”

At that moment Mary came into the dining hall and dropped the tray she was carrying.
Dishes clattered and broke and she reeled backward a few steps. “Arthur!” she gasped.
“What do you think you’re doing?”

“They know, Mary,” he said, his eyes full of meaning.

Mary’s hand flew to her mouth and it took her a moment to reply. “But. . . but. . .
you can’t kill them all!”

Crunn tugged at his collar with his free hand, clearly nervous. “Of course I can,”
he said. “They’ll find them all floating in the moat, their boat capsized. Just another
dreadful accident.”

My eyes slid to the inspector, who was watching Crunn like a tiger considering its
prey.

“I’m too young to die!” Gil cried as big wet tears filled his eyes. I wanted to comfort
him, but I was afraid to move.

Crunn glared hard at him, as if Gilley’s pleading face was an irritation. “Stop blubbering,”
he snapped. “Now all of you, get up and move against the wall. Mary, go get a good
length of rope. You’ll need to tie their hands and feet, but not too tight. Just tight
enough for them to struggle for a bit before the Widow gets them. Not to worry, I’ll
show you. I’ve had some practice with Merrick.”

Mary stood frozen in place, and while she didn’t move, neither did we. “Now!” Crunn
yelled, and we all jumped.

Mary hurried off to get the length of rope and I wanted to call out to her to stand
up to her brother, but I realized that Mary wasn’t the type to stand up for herself.
Not with her brother, her late husband, or the dowager, who’d likely enslaved her
here at the castle as repayment for killing Mary’s husband.

In the silence that followed, the inspector softly said, “He can’t shoot all of us.”

“Stop talking!” Arthur yelled. “And move over to the wall or I’ll shoot you first,
Jasper.”

The inspector took a subtle step to the side, close to a table stacked with clean
dishes. I chanced a look at him, and he glanced meaningfully at the dishes. I understood
immediately, and my heart quickened.

“I said move!” Crunn yelled again. Gilley sniffled loudly and said, “Is he really
going to kill us?”

I ignored him and focused subtly on the inspector. I saw his right hand—hidden from
Crunn—count down, three. . . two. . .

“Hey, guys, sorry about that. Sometimes it’s hard to shut Chris up,” Gopher said as
he came hurrying into the room wiggling his cell phone.

Arthur turned and began to raise his gun toward Gopher, and that’s when Heath, the
inspector, and I all reached out and grabbed for a plate, hurtling them toward Crunn.
Two of the three found their mark, striking him in the forehead. Crunn’s gun went
off, Gilley screamed, Gopher fell to the ground clutching at his chest, and Heath
took off like a rocket. He covered the floor in six paces and launched himself into
the air, tackling Crunn and taking him down. The pair hit the carpet and there was
a loud crunching sound, and Arthur screamed in pain.

Meanwhile I raced forward to get to Gopher, who was lying on his side, his face away
from me. “Gopher!” I cried, falling to my knees in front of him. “Are you hit?
Are you hit?
”

The inspector was at my side in a moment and together we gently rolled Gopher over.
To my immediate relief I could see that Gopher’s eyes were open and he was conscious,
but he was quite pale. “Owwwwwww!” he moaned. “What the hell?”

“Are you hit?” I asked him again, gently probing his bubble vest for any signs of
a wound.

Gopher lifted his hand, which was bloody and badly cut. “He shot my phone!”

I gave a huge sigh of relief. “Oh, thank God,” I whispered, bending forward to hug
Gopher.

“We’ve got Mary!” Gilley called, and I looked behind me to see that Gil and Michel
were busy using all of Mary’s rope to bind her to a chair. That woman wasn’t going
anywhere.

Meanwhile Crunn was still squirming under Heath, his face contorted in pain. Clearly
he’d broken something—probably a hip. Heath didn’t seem to have an ounce of pity for
him, and he held him in a headlock until the inspector could come over and handcuff
him.

* * *

Several hours later the inspector had made half a dozen arrests: Crunn and his sister,
Mary; Lady Hathaway; her butler (who’d been the primary hit man and the one to actually
pull the trigger and murder Lumley’s father so many years before, we later learned);
Mrs. Lefebvre; and, sadly, the inspector’s mother.

I couldn’t imagine how difficult it must have been for him to arrest his own mother,
but Lumley seemed to see her with a different set of eyes now. I could tell from the
news broadcast that evening that he had emotionally, and perhaps permanently, divorced
her.

Mr. Hollingsworth was brought in for questioning on the murder of his wife, which
Crunn and the others flatly denied having a hand in. But Hollingsworth had already
had many years’ practice denying the abuse of his wife, and he wasn’t about to confess
to her murder. Still, his DNA was collected, as the inspector had noticed some scratches
on the top of Hollingsworth’s hand when he’d interviewed him on the night of Fiona’s
murder, and the coroner had discovered some foreign skin particles under her fingernails
after she’d been pulled from the lake. I figured it was only a matter of time before
it came back from the lab pointing to him as a match. I had no doubt the trail would
lead back to the bastard husband, and he’d spend the rest of his life rotting in some
cold prison.

As for us, well, at first we didn’t know if we were even allowed to stay on the premises.
Lady Hathaway’s solicitor had her out on bail within a few hours and I was sure she’d
kick us out. But the inspector intervened, declaring the entire castle a crime scene,
and with his permission we were allowed to stay in a small section that didn’t fall
under the area of investigation—namely, our rooms, the front hall, the kitchen, and
a small section at the back of the dining hall next to the kitchen.

I told my crew that the minute the Widow was taken care of, we’d be out of there,
never to set foot on those moors again. At least that was the hope.

We met the next day to come up with an actual plan, and to my surprise, it was Gilley
who proved just how valuable a team member he was. “I was thinking about Sam’s idea
to stage a prison break,” he said, hoisting up a box the size of a large radio onto
the table. “And I think I have an idea.”

“Is that what I think it is?” Heath asked warily.

I knew it was. Several months earlier we’d been involved in a particularly nasty ghostbust
in Scotland, and on that shoot we’d come across a gadget that could enhance the electromagnetic
energy within a given area. The effect was to thin the veil between our realm and
the realm that spooks walked in. With the veil weakened, a powerful spook would become
even more so, and any living creature within the vicinity would be vulnerable. In
other words, it could turn a dicey situation downright dangerous, and a dangerous
situation downright deadly.

“It’s the Super Spooker,” Gilley said with a big ol’ grin. “Like it?”

“No!” we all said at once.

Gil made a face. “I’ve tweaked it a little,” he told us, like that was supposed to
make us feel better. “It has directional controls now.”

“Meaning?” I asked, afraid of the answer.

“Meaning that if you want to give your spooks a boost of energy, you can actually
control in what direction you aim the electrostatic ray.” Gilley demonstrated by turning
the dial to the right. “This will give you about a three-foot-wide by six-foot-long
ray to the right, and moving the knob to the middle shoots it in the middle, et cetera.
In other words, if you find yourself at an odd angle to the portal where the prisoners
are, then just turn the dial and point the electrostatic ray.”

“But, Gil,” I said, already seeing a dozen problems with that. “How’re we supposed
to boost their energy to escape the portal without making the Widow crazy strong?”

Gil nodded to Michel, who pulled out from underneath the table a tennis racket strung
with what looked like piano wires. “Tennis, anyone?” he said merrily.

I leveled a dark look at Gilley. “Are you kidding me?”

Gil waved his hand with a flourish and said, “Show ’em what it can do, Michel!”

Michel pulled a handful of paper clips from his pocket and tossed them up into the
air. He then swung the racket and we all ducked, covering our heads. I heard several
small thwacks and waited another half second to lift my head, preparing to yell at
both of them. To my surprise, Michel was holding the racket like a trophy and immediately
I could see why. All the paper clips were stuck to the metal wires. “It’s magnetized?”
I said.

“Yep,” Gil said proudly.

Next to me Heath began to chuckle, and he held out his hand for the racket, which
Michel gave to him. “Nice work, Gil,” he said.

Gilley eyed Michel adoringly. “It was Michel’s idea.”

“Is there only one?” John asked.

Gil nodded. “We didn’t have time to make any more than that.”

Heath turned to me. “Should we wait until we can make more of these?”

“That’ll take time,” Gil said. “Those things aren’t as easy to string as you might
think.”

“How’d you come up with this?” I asked. We’d stuck to our spikes for so long that
I’d stopped thinking there was anything better.

“Well, at first we thought maybe a bat or a club would work,” Gil said, “but when
John described how the Widow’s demon could break itself up into small parts, I thought
a racket might be better. You could have yourself a nice Whac-a-Mole party with it!
Every time the Widow or her demon comes at you, just whack ’em, and whack ’em hard.
They’ll begin to weaken soon enough. I figure the demon will tire out first and he
should go back through the portal, leaving the Widow without her power source. You’ll
need to keep after her until she’s so weak that she goes back through the portal too,
and once you accomplish that, just start yelling to the prisoners—you have their names,
right?”

Gil had given me the list of known names of the nine men drowned in Kidwellah’s moat.
The reason the list was only nine names long was that we didn’t think that the men
the Widow had drowned when she was alive were in the portal with her, because she
wouldn’t have had the ability to capture their souls while she was alive. “Got it
right here,” I said, pulling the list from my own pocket.

“Good,” he said. “Call them one by one and tell them to come to the top of the portal.
Then point the Super Spooker at them and hope it gives them enough energy to break
free.”

Heath sat back in his chair and ran a hand through his long black hair. “This is seriously
dangerous,” he said. “Are you sure about this, Em?”

“No,” I said with a halfhearted laugh. “But what choice do we have? I mean, we can’t
just leave them to spend eternity with the Widow. And what about Clarence? Doesn’t
the inspector deserve to have his father’s remains back? As long as the Widow remains
on the loose, he’ll never be able to retrieve those remains and get closure.”

Across the table Gopher had been sitting silent—unusual for him—while he played with
the thick bandages covering his hand. “You don’t have to do it,” he said, and we all
turned to look at him.

“What did you say?” I wanted to be sure I’d heard him correctly.

Gopher cleared his throat and lifted his chin. “We have enough footage. If it’s too
dangerous, we can just walk away, and tell the audience that the Widow still haunts
this castle.”

“Not!” I said, and Gopher looked back at me in surprise. “Dude, the minute we say
something like that, you
know
some dumb amateur ghost hunter is gonna come across the Atlantic and go on a hunt
for the Widow and they’ll not likely live through the encounter. And you know what?
That guy will be followed by a dozen more after him.”

“Then we could lie,” Heath suggested. “We could say something like the Widow was imprisoned
in her portal and will never haunt the castle again.”

I shook my head. “You’ll still get the same group of amateur ghostbusters checking
out Kidwellah to see if that’s true. Naw, I’m afraid we’ve opened up this can of worms,
and we’ve either gotta put the lid on or scrap the film altogether.”

All eyes turned to Gopher, who squirmed in his seat. “Chris would never go for scrapping
the film.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “So it’s settled. We’re definitely taking on the
Widow. Tonight. But we’re not taking a full crew with us. That’s too many people for
Heath and me to worry about, so we’ll take volunteers, but before I open it up to
that option, let me just say right up front, Meg and Kim, you’re out. You stay here,
wear your vests, and keep Gil safe. Understood?”

The girls looked immensely relieved and they both pumped their heads up and down like
a couple of bobbleheads.

I motioned to the boys. “You may volunteer at will.”

Michel immediately raised his hand and Gilley tried to get him to lower it, but the
photographer was insistent. I winked knowingly at Heath. Gil was so cute when he was
enamored. “Michel volunteers,” I said, just to irk Gil. It worked. He glared hard
at me.

“I’m in,” John said, and I couldn’t help but notice the way that Kim bit her lip and
barely held back from reaching out to touch John. I had a feeling their little romance
wasn’t quite as over as they both pretended.