The Mint Julep Murders

by Angie Fox

  No doubt the multiple passageways offered an abundance of places to access the basement. And the dead-body dumbwaiter provided almost instant access from the third floor. It would have been fairly easy for the Burowskis to sneak down and kill Barbara if they knew where they were going—which they would have if they’d secured a layout of the property they intended to buy.

  Right now, the passage looked clear.

  I hurried in the direction of the spiral staircase, careful to avoid the patches of loose gravel littering the uneven floor. I didn’t want to make any noise that would give my location away.

  I’d feel so much better once I got upstairs with Ellis. If the Burowskis wanted Barbara’s asylum, it wouldn’t make sense to kill her. With the owner dead, the property would be tied up in probate for heaven knew how long. All they’d had to do was wait for her to miss a payment.

  Unless Barbara had dug up the cash or sold an obscene amount of overnight rooms for a thousand dollars each.

  Or unless the Burowskis had a more sinister motive.

  Cold air swept down the passageway, tangling in my hair like the caress of ghostly fingers.

  Oh, mother. I was so glad I didn’t have Frankie’s power. Of course, the living didn’t always need extra powers to feel the presence of a ghost.

  I braced a hand on the rough stone wall and took a second to slow the frantic beat of my heart. I didn’t want to see anything. I didn’t want to feel anything, but I’d endure the very real, very definite cold creeping up the back of my neck as long as I’d be safe soon.

  Up ahead of me, the door to the morgue creaked open.

  I clicked off my flashlight and stood in the complete darkness that could only come from being underground.

  The cold spot settled just behind my left ear. It felt like something lingered right there.

  I stood perfectly still, tamping down the urge to flip on my light, rub my ear, and run straight for the stairs, screaming as if my life depended on it. Which it might.

  But if the killer was hiding in the morgue, they’d catch up with me before Ellis ever could, and I’d end up with my head smashed in like Barbara.

  So I eased my back against the cold stone wall, trying to make myself as small as possible, my shallow breath sounding loud in my ears.

  I jumped at a bang echoing from the morgue. It sounded like one of the metal doors in the body storage area.

  Sakes alive! I wanted to run.

  Only they’d hear me. I’d be charging over gravel and debris. I couldn’t make it past the morgue, and I couldn’t retreat through the swampy puddles the opposite way. I hadn’t explored that part of the tunnels, so I wouldn’t know where I was going. Barbara said the underground tunnels were like a maze, and the last thing I wanted was to get lost down here.

  Still, I had to do something. The rock wall dug into my skin, and my back went entirely cold. I didn’t know if it was from the awful ghostly presence or the fact that I was trying to press myself into the wall as if that would solve anything.

  “We’re clear.” A man spoke low and urgent.

  Oh, cripes. It wasn’t Tom Burowski.

  I gripped my flashlight tighter. There was a strange man in the basement. A live one.

  “Then let’s get out of here,” another man insisted.

  Make that two strange men. And I had no weapon save for my light and the fact that they thought they were alone.

  I eased toward the boiler room. Maybe I could hide in there with the body. Unless that was where they were headed. But there was no telling what lay farther down the hallway, if I could even get inside another room.

  The crackling debris under my shoes sounded as loud as gunshots, and I froze.

  “Who’s there?” the first man demanded. A blinding light filled my eyes, and I was caught like a rat in a maze.

  It was too late to make a break for it. Too long to wait for an injured Ellis. And definitely not the time for charm.

  Men who slunk around in basements feared only one thing.

  I threw my shoulders back, turned, and hit him with my own beam. “Aha,” I shouted like I knew what I was doing, holding out a hand, as if that would keep him at bay, “I’m with the police.”

  There were at least two of them, all right. They appeared younger, thin, but still way bigger than me. I didn’t stand a chance if this got bad.

  “Officer Wydell!” I shouted, my voice echoing down the hall.

  “Frack,” the first man muttered. He kept his high-powered flashlight trained on me. He wore a second light strapped to his head and also had a video camera pointed straight at me. The other man I saw in shadow as he raised his arms in the air. He held a flat black box in his hand. It didn’t look like a gun, more like a recording device.

  “Hey, look,” the shadow guy’s words came fast. “I know we said we’d never come back here again.”

  “That’s right,” I agreed, having no idea, but it sounded good and they weren’t attacking me, so that was an A plus in my book.

  “Please don’t arrest us.” The guy lowered the video camera. He looked to be about twenty years old, with spiky blond hair dyed red on the ends. “I’m applying to grad school this fall, and I can’t have a police record.”

  “I’m up for an accelerated doctoral program in astrophysics,” his buddy hastily added.

  “Well…” That was unexpected. “Were you two the ones who broke in upstairs?”

  The men exchanged a look but didn’t answer.

  “We’ll go up to the lobby and sort it out,” I said, maintaining my air of authority. “You two first.” I ushered them down the hall ahead of me, careful not to get too close lest I be forced to pull out my nonexistent weapon or use the judo skills I might have picked up while driving past the Sugarland Goshin Academy for Kids of All Ages.

  They wore packs on their backs, stuffed full, with strange-looking gadgets poking out of multiple pockets. I could see a red light blinking under the canvas pocket on the second guy’s pack.

  The guy with the video recorder looked back at me with pleading eyes. “We were just looking for Crazy Charlie. We got an apparition the last time we were down here, and we couldn’t just give it up, you know?”

  “Like a sighting?” I’d assumed Barbara had made the whole story up.

  He nodded fast. “I swear we saw smoke forming on camera, and then that owner gal barged in on us yelling and, whoosh—it was gone.”

  “You’d think Barbara would be excited to have ghost hunters find her a spirit,” I stated.

  “Not us,” the first one balked. “She can’t stand us. We won’t give her squat.”

  His friend stopped. “We wouldn’t even show her when we captured an EVP.”

  “EVP?” I asked, turning my light on him. He appeared to be about the same age as his friend, African-American, with a silver cross dangling from one ear.

  “You don’t know much about ghost hunting, do you?” he asked.

  “I’ve dabbled,” I told him.

  “EVP means electronic voice phenomenon,” he explained, as if I’d never heard the voice of a ghost, or had one talk my ear off.

  “Keep moving,” I told them, careful not to let these men distract me. I was alone with two strangers in the dark. They might be students like they claimed, but I wasn’t taking anything for granted until I got them upstairs.

  “The EVP said ‘die,’” the guy said, holding up his voice recorder.

  “Or it could have been saying ‘hi,’” his friend countered as we reached the spiral staircase.

  I really hoped Ellis was at the top.

  “Why would an insane murderer say hi?” demanded the dangly-earring guy, shifting the pack on his back.

  “Crazy Charlie was a person too,” his friend countered.

  Maybe the spiky-hair guy wasn’t so bad. I might give him the benefit of the doubt as long as neither one of them tried to flee as soon as we made it upstairs. “What are your names?” I pressed.

  “Brett Peterson,�
� said the earring guy. “Cash,” his friend said at the same time.

  “Verity Long,” I said, ushering them up the stairs. “And I won’t arrest you for trespassing this time,” I added. Technically, I couldn’t arrest them for anything, even murder. “Did you see Barbara tonight?”

  “Only when we snuck past her trailer in the rain,” Brett said.

  Cash followed close on his tail. “You’re the one who wanted to sneak across the bridge before it flooded.”

  His friend huffed and yanked on his backpack strap. “I was not going to hike this equipment through the woods again.”

  “Through the woods? You mean there’s a back way out?” I asked, redirecting the conversation.

  “There are trails,” Brett explained. “Public ones.” He eyed me over his shoulder. “We weren’t trespassing on those.”

  “The river is too high to get to the trails,” Cash added. “Has been for days. Totally impassable.”

  Darn. I’d been hoping we had another option.

  A flashlight at the top of the stairs caught Brett’s profile and he turned to me. “Look, we’re really sorry.”

  “Go,” I told him, relieved to finally get the two men into the lobby and find Ellis up top, leaning heavily on his crutch, but standing. Thank heaven.

  “Verity,” he said, eyeing the two men, “where have you been? Why isn’t the power on?”

  “Barbara’s dead,” I said, watching Brett and Cash for their reactions. Ellis swore under his breath.

  The other men stood stunned. “What?” Cash managed after a few long moments.

  “Are you positive?” Ellis asked under his breath.

  “She’s gone,” I confirmed. “You didn’t see her down there?” I asked the ghost hunters. “After all, you were next door in the morgue when it happened.”

  Brett looked from me to Ellis. “We heard her,” he sputtered. “She and a group came down all loud and looking for the generator. We had to hide somewhere.”

  Ellis eyed him. “So you were inside the morgue.” His mouth formed a thin line. “I knew it.”

  He’d sworn someone had been inside, and Ellis’s instincts rarely steered us wrong.

  “Which of you hit me with the chair?” Ellis asked pointedly.

  Both the men appeared stunned. “We didn’t hit anybody. We…we were hiding,” Brett sputtered.

  “I heard you yell.” Cash swallowed hard. “Dang.” He kicked his work boot against the marble floor. A chunk of gray mud broke off and scattered. “It must have been the ghost. Crazy Charlie is powerful.”

  “He’s real?” Ellis asked.

  “They think so,” I offered.

  Brett shook his head. “We didn’t see anything. We slid into the body drawers.”

  My word. “That’s awful.”

  Brett’s lip tugged up into a slight grin. “It was kind of awesome. I got a wicked high meter reading in mine.” His friend gaped, and he added proudly, “Middle drawer in the second row.”

  “Mint Julep Manor is the best,” Cash gushed.

  That was up for debate.

  “You’re ghost hunters?” Joan asked, turning the corner at the top of the stairs.

  Brett nodded. “Astrophysicist by day, ghost hunter by night,” he said sheepishly. “Boy, there sure are a lot of people here tonight.”

  My light caught the gray mud on Joan’s black loafers as she hurried down the stairs. “These two men were in the basement at the same time you were,” I said, testing her.

  The mud could have come from outside, but I doubted it. I’d dragged some in, and it had been a dark brown.

  Joan eyed me as she joined us. “I wasn’t in the basement.”

  “She was too busy making friends with Rodger,” her husband said, his tone suggesting he thought we were all nuts.

  “I apologize,” I said. “Maybe I’m a little jumpy. I walked in on Barbara in the basement. She’s been murdered.”

  Joan gasped.

  Brett’s EVP box clattered to the floor.

  “You didn’t say murder.” Cash scanned the group like one of us was about to pull a knife on him. “I figured she had a heart attack or something.”

  Tom didn’t seem nearly surprised enough. “Have you called the police?”

  “I am the police,” Ellis answered dryly.

  “So is she,” Brett added, pointing at me.

  “I said I was with the police,” I muttered as Ellis raised an eyebrow at me. “And I am. But we have something more important to discuss right now.” I told everyone what I’d found.

  Joan’s eyes widened. “How awful.”

  “For us and for her,” Tom added.

  Joan narrowed her eyes at him.

  “Sorry,” Tom said automatically.

  “We’re the only ones here,” Cash said, his voice going up an octave. “That means one of you did it.”

  “Or one of you,” Joan countered.

  Cash gaped. “We didn’t even talk to Barbara tonight.”

  “We were upstairs the whole time,” Tom reminded the group.

  “Unless somebody else is here,” I said, scanning the faces in our little circle.

  “No.” Brett gulped. “There were no other cars. We parked on the other side of the bridge and were the last ones in before the creek flooded.”

  “So one of you is the killer,” Tom said icily.

  “Somebody here is,” Cash agreed, looking to me. Hopefully, because I was with the police.

  Tears welled in Joan’s eyes. She took a step back. “I don’t think I want to stay here anymore.”

  Ellis watched her carefully. In fact, he’d done nothing but observe. I wished I knew what he was thinking. “Nobody’s leaving until I say so.”

  “We can’t leave with the bridge out, anyway,” I said to the group.

  “We can at least get power,” Tom said. “Two of us can move Barbara’s body away from the generator. We’ll get it going and then we’ll have lights and phones to call for help.”

  “No good,” Ellis stated. “We can’t move the body.”

  “Not with your leg,” Tom agreed. “I’m talking about the teenagers.”

  “I’m twenty-four,” Cash balked.

  “We’re not moving the body,” Ellis grated out.

  Brett cleared his throat. “Barbara has—er—had a landline in the trailer.”

  Ellis turned to him. “How do you know?”

  Cash wet his lips. “She ran out there to call the police on us last week,” he said, exchanging a look with Brett. “It gave us the extra time we needed to split.”

  Ellis stiffened but kept his focus on the murder instead of the break-ins. “She should have mentioned a landline when we first told her we needed to get out of here.”

  “Not if she’d rather have your muscle to move all those boxes and get her generator working,” I observed. In any case, we needed a phone. “I’ll head out to the trailer.” I still had Barbara’s keys. I should be able to get in.

  “Why you?” Tom countered. He hitched a thumb at Ellis. “Or are you not a suspect because you’re the cop’s girlfriend?”

  “She found the body. She could have killed Barbara,” Brett reasoned.

  “Hey—” I tossed up a hand to stop him. “It’s not like I can get very far.” I crossed to the door, ending the debate. “I’m just going to call for help,” I said, turning the knob and yanking the door, which refused to open. Stunned, I tried it again. It wouldn’t budge.

  “Son of a gun.” Frankie’s voice sounded in my ear. “I was hoping one of the living could get it open. This is worse than I thought.”

  I closed my eyes. “What did you do now?”

  “I had nothing to do with this,” Cash said from behind me.

  That was not who I’d meant.

  Frankie shimmered into existence next to me, his jacket mussed and his hat askew. “It wasn’t my fault.”

  It never was.

  “Frankie…” I muttered, trying the door again.

&nb
sp; “I had Scalieri’s leg iron off,” he blurted, his words running over themselves. “The guards were none the wiser. I figured I’d pop out and work on the outside bars, only—bam!—I couldn’t even make it through the window!”

  “The door isn’t budging,” I warned.

  “If it was my fault, the guards would have gotten me already,” Frankie pointed out.

  True.

  “We’re trapped?” Cash croaked.

  “That’s impossible,” Brett said, scooting around me and trying the knob himself.

  Joan tried the front window. Cash joined her.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Tom said, taking over for Brett, “maybe you’ve just got to jiggle it.” He grunted, trying with all his strength to wrench the door open.

  Frankie paced behind him. “This is awful. The worst!” He dug a finger under his tie and yanked it loose. “I wasn’t meant to be locked in anywhere.”

  Then he should stop doing things that could land him in prison.

  I stopped. Drew a breath. “Let’s think. There has to be a logical reason why this is happening.” A door was low-tech. It couldn’t go out like a phone system or an electric grid. Same for windows. You lift them, they open.

  Unless we were dealing with a very powerful ghost.

  “We can always use the jimmied window in the office,” Cash said, earning a look from Ellis. “Let me just check,” he added, embarrassed, crossing over into the supervisor’s office.

  “I’m up for a window,” I said, watching Tom try to heave open the door and fail, over and over again.

  Cash emerged from the office, grim-faced. “That window is stuck shut.”

  “Stand back.” Ellis lifted his crutch and smashed it down hard on the front window. The glass remained whole.

  “No way,” Tom stated, his voice hard. “Allow me,” he said to Ellis.

  My injured boyfriend obliged, and Tom put all his muscle behind a hit to the same window.

  Tom yelped with the pain of the impact and didn’t even manage a crack in the glass.

  “We’re trapped,” Joan shrieked.

  “Thanks, Einstein,” Frankie shot back.

  “It has to be the ghost,” she said, rubbing her eyebrows. “Rodger? Maybe he doesn’t want me to leave.”