Elizabeth Webster and the Court of Uncommon Pleas

by William Lashner

  “Natalie?”

  “And remember when Barnabas came to Henry’s house and asked us if we had anything of Beatrice’s to summon her ghost with, and we didn’t?”

  “I remember,” said Henry.

  “Now we do.”

  “Wow,” said Henry. “Do you think it will work?”

  “I don’t know,” said Natalie, lifting the whistle to her mouth. “Maybe I’ll try.”

  “Don’t!” I yelled.

  “I was just teasing,” said Natalie.

  “Not a good idea,” said Henry. “Beatrice doesn’t like being teased.”

  I looked at Natalie, whose eyes widened along with mine. We waited for Henry to laugh at his joke, but there was no laughter.

  “Well, if you want to hear something creepy, I have creepy,” I said. “That little skull in the box? I think it was the skull of the squirrel in my dream.”

  “That is creepy,” said Natalie. “Good and creepy.”

  “That sounds like a candy name,” said Henry.

  “Good and Creepy,” said Natalie in an announcer’s voice. “For the ghoul in all of us.”

  “There were two people in both my dreams,” I said. “I only saw the face of a boy. The other person must have been Beatrice.”

  “Who was the boy?” said Henry.

  “I don’t know, but I’d bet he had something to do with what happened to her.”

  “So what do we do now?” said Henry.

  “I think it’s time we talk to Beatrice’s old boyfriend, Anil Singh,” said Natalie as she took out her phone and started tapping. “Oh, lucky us. His office is on the way home and we still have time before they close.”

  Singh Electronics was on the fifth floor of a big glass office building in a section of Willing Township filled with big glass office buildings. We had to check in at the security desk in the lobby, sign our names in the register, and pin little name tags on our shirts before we went up in the elevators.

  “Yes?” said the office receptionist, who smiled brightly at us. “Can I help you?”

  “We’re looking for Mr. Singh,” said Natalie, who had apparently become our lead investigator.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No,” said Natalie. “But we’re Willing Middle School West students working for the school newspaper, and we have some questions for one of our most successful alumni.”

  I took a step back. Where did that lie come from? We had created a beautiful monster.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Singh is quite busy today,” said the secretary. “Is there anything specific you wanted to ask?”

  “We’re doing an article on a former classmate of his,” said Natalie. “Beatrice Long.”

  The receptionist wrote the name down on a pad.

  “She died while still in high school,” said Natalie. She looked left, looked right, lowered her voice. “Murder, they say. We just wanted to clear up some issues with Mr. Singh before we printed our article.”

  “Have a seat, please,” said the receptionist, “and I’ll see if he can spare the time.”

  We sat in the waiting room, ignoring the magazines. Natalie and I played with our phones. Henry leaned back, putting his arms behind his head.

  “I didn’t know I was a reporter for the school newspaper,” said Henry. “Maybe Charlie’s right about the old résumé. Tomorrow we should pretend to do community service.”

  I glanced up at the receptionist and noticed her trying not to stare at us as she spoke with hushed tones into the phone.

  “Is she looking at us funny?” I said quietly. “And I don’t mean oh-look-how-cute-they-are funny, more like what-are-they-doing-here funny.”

  “A little paranoid, Webster?” said Henry.

  “I guess so,” I said before standing and heading to her desk.

  The receptionist looked up and immediately put her hand over the phone. “Yes?”

  “Is Mr. Singh going to be able to see us or should we come back later? We can come back, no problem.”

  “No, you should definitely stay,” she said. “They’re looking for him now. He must be in a meeting. They told me to ask you to wait.”

  “‘They’?”

  “Mr. Singh’s assistant. She’s trying now to locate him.”

  “Okay,” I said, but when I sat back down I saw the same nervous glance, the same hushed conversation.

  “What’s going on?” said Natalie.

  “I don’t know, but something’s not right. It’s like she’s keeping tabs on us.”

  “You’re seeing things, Webster,” said Henry.

  “Maybe, but it seemed as if the second Natalie mentioned Beatrice’s name everything changed,” I said. “I think we should get out of here.”

  “You want to just up and leave?”

  “Yes I do.”

  “Maybe I should blow the whistle,” said Natalie.

  “Let’s just go, please.”

  As we all got up, the receptionist looked startled. “It will only be a few more minutes.”

  “We have to get back home,” said Natalie. “We’ll call later for an appointment.”

  “You really should stay.” And just as she said that, the door to the inner offices opened and out they came. Two big guys in tight sport coats.

  Security.

  The receptionist pointed at us.

  And that was when we started to run.

  We dashed out of there before security could get hold of us. We stopped at the elevator just long enough to press the button before we saw the security guys bang out of the office door, and then we sprinted to the stairwell.

  Down and around and down again, more leaping than stepping, two flights, three flights. We didn’t even know why we were running—we hadn’t done anything wrong, had we?—but still we ran. There was something in the whole setup that gave us the creeps and had us racing madly. And it was sort of fun, too.

  Until we burst out the door to the lobby, ready to tear past the security desk, and were stopped by a cop. A real cop in full uniform.

  “Yikes alive!” said Natalie.

  The cop was smiling, but his right hand rested calmly on his gun. Behind him were the beefy security guys from the fifth floor, huffing and puffing. My brother, Peter, would have laughed, but I wasn’t laughing.

  “Ms. Webster, Ms. Delgado, Mr. Harrison,” said the cop.

  “What’s this about?” I said, taking a brave step forward. “You can’t stop us. We didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “That might be true,” said the cop, “but the three of you are still going to have to come with me. Chief’s orders.”

  Next thing we knew we were in the back seat of a police cruiser with a metal screen between the three of us and the cop in front as we drove through the darkening streets of Willing Township. Natalie was on one side of me, looking around, seeming to be enjoying the ride. Henry was on the other side, his confidence lost as he contemplated what an arrest could do to his swimming career. And me, I was in the center, wondering how our attempts to help a ghost had gone so wrong. Why had Anil Singh called the cops on us? Why was there still so much fear about a girl who had died so long ago? What had we gotten ourselves into?

  Things grew even more alarming when the police officer drove us to the township building and calmly led us in the back door and up the stairs to an imposing office at the end of the hall.

  Do you know the name of your chief of police? I surely didn’t. But the name on the office door of the chief of police of Willing Township was still somehow not a surprise.

  Johansson.

  That’s right, the same name as our Officer Derek Johansson, the lead investigator of Beatrice Long’s murder.

  The door opened. Chief Johansson stared at us from behind his desk. And something in his eyes told me our creepy missing-head case had just taken a turn.

  We were shoved into the office and pushed down, each of us, into one of three chairs facing the desk. Chief Johansson sat like a block of granite behind hi
s desk.

  He was tall and wide, with a blond crew cut and a fake smile. He clasped his hands together like he was keeping himself from reaching out and slapping us silly. How many times had a teacher sat like that when a class had been a bit too noisy? How many times had my mother sat like that at the dinner table after I blurted out something she didn’t want to hear?

  “Thank you for coming down and visiting with us this evening,” said the chief.

  “Did we have much choice?” I said.

  “No,” said the chief. He was old, but not old enough to have been a police officer way back in Beatrice’s day. The other Officer Johansson mentioned in the articles must have been his father. “How are you doing, Henry? We were all proud of your swims at the state finals. Give my regards to your father.”

  “Sure thing, sir,” said Henry, so eager to please he had become almost Frayden-like. It was embarrassing.

  “Now, I received a call that you three are dredging up a long-past tragedy,” said the chief. “Normally, we encourage historical research by our students—Willing Township has a fascinating history dating back to the days of William Penn. But when digging into the past can torment some of our citizens, we take a less tolerant view. I think the Longs have suffered enough. Don’t you agree, Miss Webster?”

  “It’s a sad story,” I said. My arms were crossed, my hair hung over my eyes. This was my usual position in response to the whole hands-clasped-on-the-desk thing. I would have refused to eat my vegetables if there were any in front of me to push away.

  “Your mother teaches in the high school, isn’t that right, Miss Webster?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good for her. I’m sure she enjoys the job.”

  Was that a threat? It smelled like a threat.

  “Now, I know that you live in the house that used to belong to the Longs, Henry,” said the chief, “and that might have sparked your interest. But interest itself isn’t reason enough to force people to relive the most difficult time in their lives.”

  “Mrs. Long didn’t seem so upset about it,” said Natalie.

  “You’re the one who stole the whistle, isn’t that right, Miss Delgado?”

  “I didn’t steal anything,” said Natalie. “It was a gift.”

  “I checked with your history teachers. It seems there is no research assignment like the one you told Mrs. Long and her daughter about. You lied. There is something in the law called theft by deception.”

  “Are we under arrest?” I said.

  “Not yet,” said the chief. “But there’s still time. Once I heard from Mrs. Long’s daughter, I assumed that Anil Singh might be next on your list. I asked his office to contact me if you came by so we could have this chat. What are you three really up to?”

  “We’re just curious about what happened to Beatrice,” said Henry.

  “Beatrice? You act like you know her.”

  “She was only a little bit older than us when she was killed,” I said. “A Willing High freshman trying to make her way in the world. We feel like we do know her.”

  “Except you don’t, you see. She died long before you were born.”

  “But you knew her, didn’t you?” I said.

  He pulled back, surprised. “Why would you say that?”

  “Just something we heard.”

  “I knew her a bit, yes, but Beatrice was quite a few years older than me. I only knew that she was a very sweet girl.”

  “We just want to find out what happened to her,” said Henry.

  “Somebody should,” I muttered under my breath.

  “Don’t be impertinent, young lady,” he said sharply. “Just wanting to know is not a good enough reason, not when you’re causing pain. It’s time you three put this whole thing to rest. It’s time to leave the Long family alone. Let me tell you about the way a community works.”

  The start of his lecture was a cue for me to tune out. Why adults think long speeches are the way to convince kids of anything is beyond me. Candy works better, always, but the chief evidently got the wrong memo. While he blathered on, I looked around the office. On the walls and bookshelves was a flag, a college diploma, framed citations, plaques, and personal photographs, among them an old family portrait that snagged my attention as if it was a hook and I was a flounder.

  A man, a woman, two boys, all looking into the camera with serious expressions. The man had on a police uniform. The woman’s face was lined and tired. And then there were the boys—one young, the other much older, taller, with a flat nose and a split upper lip.

  I recognized him with a dread that slipped down my neck and seeped into my bones like liquid nitrogen.

  Yes, of course, it was the boy in my dreams, the one who captured me when I was first a squirrel and then a snake. It was the older Johansson brother who had been Beatrice’s friend.

  “Is that your father in the police uniform?” I asked, interrupting Chief Johansson’s boring little speech and pointing at the picture.

  The chief stopped talking (yay!) and turned his head to follow my pointing finger. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Derek Johansson, the officer who investigated Beatrice’s murder?”

  “He was one of the investigators on the case. He put in forty years on the force. He died just a few years ago.”

  “And who’s that, the boy on the right?” I said.

  “That’s my brother, Vance,” said the chief, and at that moment the atmosphere in the office changed, as if the dread I had felt upon seeing the picture had spilled out to cover us all in a foul mist.

  “He looks sad,” I said.

  “He had a difficult childhood.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “That is none of your business,” snapped the chief. “Now, to get back to our business here, I brought you in to tell you that your research project concerning Beatrice Long is over.”

  “Is that an order?” said Natalie.

  “Absolutely,” said the chief. “Disobey at your own risk.”

  “What does that mean?” said Henry.

  “You don’t want to find out,” said the chief as he pressed a button on his desk. The office door opened and two cops in uniform, a man and a woman, their guns holstered, came in and stood on either side of the doorway. One of them was the officer who had driven us to this building, shaking his head at us as if he had just caught us egging a neighbor’s house.

  “Right now,” said the chief, “you three are guilty of trespass and theft. I’m willing to overlook—”

  “Where’s her head?” I said, interrupting him again.

  He turned to me. There was something dark and frightened in his eyes.

  “Beatrice’s head,” I said. “Where is it?”

  “Where did you hear anything about a missing head?”

  “The articles in the paper.”

  “The articles mentioned nothing specific about the condition of her body. My father made sure of that.”

  “The articles said identification was difficult,” said Natalie, giving me a warning look. “We just assumed the head was missing.”

  “As opposed to a hundred more likely possibilities? No, only the killer knew exactly what was done to Beatrice Long’s body. Only the killer, the police, and now you. What have you gotten yourselves into?”

  What indeed?

  “We brought you in to give you a kindly warning,” said the chief. “I was going to let you three leave after the talk. But now I think we’re going to have to take you down to processing as we consider our options. Officers, will you please escort these three to the cells.”

  “The cells?” said Henry.

  “Let’s hold them in lockup while I make some calls to determine if the Long family is going to press charges.”

  “The cells?”

  “Please stand,” said the cop who had driven us. As he said it he took a couple sets of handcuffs off his belt.

  “You can’t be—”

  “And put your hands behind your backs.”r />
  We looked at each other, Natalie, Henry, and I, and tried to act as if it was no big deal, but I’m sure my face betrayed me. It felt as if my life was veering off whatever course it might have finally and heroically assumed. Instead of becoming a lawyer for the damned, I was headed to the cells.

  I knew what that meant: monochrome tattoos and stolen cigarettes and fights in the cafeteria. Later, I would spout slang out of the side of my mouth and tell stories about the big house. Spoons, you’ve got to steal the spoons. The one thing in the slammer you can never have enough of is spoons. I was letting my worst fears swirl inside my head when I heard a commotion outside the office door.

  “No, no indeed,” came a familiar voice. “I will not wait. I intend to go right on in without delay, and any attempt to stop me will be duly noted for the lawsuit we will be filing forthwith.”

  We all turned to see what was happening as, with suit on and tie tight and briefcase in hand, my father entered Chief Johansson’s office.

  It was my stepfather, actually, who stepped through the chief’s door—Stephen Scali, attorney-at-law, specializing in patents and trademarks and such.

  “Stephen?” I said.

  “Be quiet, Elizabeth,” said my stepfather. “Not another word from any of you. I’ll do all the speaking from here on in. Why have you abducted these children, Chief Johansson? Why are you questioning them without their attorneys or parents present? What in tarnation is going on?”

  Natalie and I looked at each other. Tarnation?

  “It’s good to see you outside of a Board of Commissioners meeting, Stephen,” said the chief.

  “I expect not,” said my stepfather.

  “We have ourselves an issue here.”

  “You may have an issue, but these young students have rights. And now they have an attorney. If you ever want to talk to them again, get in touch with me and I’ll arrange something consistent with their constitutional privileges. Is that understood?”

  “You shouldn’t be meddling in this, Stephen.”

  “I’m a lawyer. Meddling is what I do.”

  “We’re just having a discussion. You’re blowing this all out of proportion.”