The Mint Julep Murders

by Angie Fox

  “How wonderful,” I said. “How progressive.”

  “Class of 1915. She graduated near the top. She’s just not allowed to practice, being a woman,” he added.

  “Ain’t that the way,” Frankie mused.

  “Not anymore,” I corrected.

  Dr. Anderson put his glasses back on. “I gave her a good job here and the authority to do the work she trained for, even if she can’t be called a doctor,” he said as if we would argue her worthiness. “And lockdown will take as long as it takes. Nurse Claymore works for me, but I’d trust her with my life. If she saw a need to bar the exits, I’m sure she had a reason. She was as upset as I was when poor Charlie escaped.”

  “She cares, Dr. Anderson,” I said, trying to calm the thumping of my heart. “I’m sure that makes her quite effective at her job.”

  “So you two are just going to doctor forever,” Frankie said as if he couldn’t quite figure out why.

  “We’re the only two left. These patients are like family to us,” he said. “We can cure them. We just need more time.”

  As in eternity.

  Yikes. I could understand Nurse Claymore—or should I say, Dr. Claymore—had something to prove. But Dr. Anderson must really be dedicated. No wonder his picture was on the wall.

  Now we needed him to help us.

  “Visits like yours really help,” he assured me.

  “Sure.” Scalieri had been thrilled. “Listen, what you’re doing is very noble,” I managed. “It is. But you have a lot of scared live people in your lobby. I don’t know if you realize, but the current owner of the property was killed less than an hour ago down in the basement.”

  He parted his lips in surprise. “Have you called the police?”

  “I’m with the police,” I said. At least as far as he was concerned, that should be close enough.

  “And you got on me for lying,” Frankie muttered.

  I shot him a look. We didn’t need to worry about details at a time like this.

  The doctor nodded, thinking to himself. “Thank you. This changes everything.”

  “Fantastic,” I said, shooting a look to Frankie that said see? I turned back to the good doctor. “Now if you could just open the doors—”

  He smiled sympathetically. “I’ll inform Nurse Claymore we may have a new resident. Not as a patient, but if the newly deceased would like to haunt her death spot, we will certainly make accommodations.”

  “That’s very kind of you, but I hope Barbara has moved on.” Spirits went to a transition period immediately after death. Then most went to the light. “We’d like to leave, too.”

  The ease faded from Dr. Anderson’s expression. “I’m afraid you’re not going anywhere.”

  My throat went dry. “You said we could go soon.” As soon as the lockdown was over.

  “Circumstances have changed,” he said, matter-of-fact.

  He didn’t understand. “There’s a killer inside your asylum. Right now.”

  “Exactly,” he said, not getting it at all.

  I tried again. “This person already murdered Barbara. We need to get out and find help before he or she kills again.”

  All the warmth dropped from his countenance. “I will not let a murderous soul out into the world. These doors and windows stay locked.”

  “I refuse to accept that,” I said.

  “I don’t think you have a choice,” Frankie reminded me.

  Oh, now he was the logical one?

  “When are you going to let us out?” I asked the doctor.

  “When I have the violent soul under my care and control,” he said as if it were obvious.

  That was ridiculous. “We are talking about living people trapped with a living killer. This is a living matter, so please let the living police do their duty before someone else dies.” He had to understand. “The killer could be alone with me in this very hall.” Despite Frankie’s presence, when it came to defending myself in the mortal realm, I was very much alone.

  He held up a hand as if he’d heard enough. “Since someone has died, it is now a matter for the dead to manage. And if you cannot find the killer, then presumably everyone will die except for the murderer, and this whole matter will be much easier for me to sort out.”

  “We can’t wait until everyone else is dead to find out who the murderer is!” I wanted to shake him. “You’re a doctor. You’re supposed to respect life.”

  “I do. In all forms,” he said mildly. “You’re free to leave after you’re dead. But I’m afraid I must put the good of society ahead of your individual interests.”

  “So that’s what you want us to do?” Frankie demanded. “Stay until we find the killer?”

  “Or until the killer finds us,” I said.

  10

  “Excuse me. I’m very busy,” Dr. Anderson said, consulting his clipboard like we were the ones holding him up.

  “Wait,” I said quickly as his image began to fade. “Do you have any clue who the killer might be?” I knew I was on borrowed time, but I could really use a hand here. He was clearly in charge. He might have seen something unusual or at least been alerted to it.

  Dr. Anderson stopped halfway through fading away, his image transparent but steady. I could see the glow of the energy crisscrossing the window behind him, trapping us in this place.

  “I’m a doctor, not a police officer,” he admonished, and I felt my face fall. I didn’t bother to hide it. I was scared enough, at my wits’ end already.

  “Please,” I said.

  The old doctor must have seen the desperation pulsing through me because he softened slightly. “I’m sorry, miss. I wish I could say I’d seen something unusual, but tonight seems no different from any other night in the last century.”

  “Maybe your staff witnessed something,” I suggested. If he was going to make me responsible for nailing our killer, he could at least help me with a few clues, or point me in the right direction. “Nurse Claymore seems to know everything that goes on around here.”

  The corner of his mouth quirked. “She doesn’t miss much.” He studied me for a moment. “I admire your spirit. You remind me of a young Nurse Claymore, ready to take on the world.” He lowered his clipboard. “I’ll let her know it’s all right to talk to you and give you any insights she has. But please don’t disturb her too much. She’s the only staff member I have left, and she works too hard as it is.”

  “I promise I won’t take her away from her patients,” I said. “If anything, I’d like to help her make this a better place.”

  His gaze flicked over me. “As would I,” he said before he faded away.

  “Okay,” I said to Frankie, who stood frowning at the glowing lines of energy barring the window. “Let’s see if we can find Nurse Claymore. While we’re at it, we’ll have to let the group know we’re trapped in here until we discover who killed Barbara.”

  “Scalieri is going to kill me,” Frankie said, sticking close to my left shoulder while I backtracked out of the abandoned room and shined a light down the hall in both directions. “I told him I’d have him out by nightfall.”

  “We need to find Nurse Claymore and the killer or nobody’s getting out of here,” I reminded him. “Scalieri is on the back burner for now.”

  At the far end of the hall where the leaves had swirled, I saw a door. It might lead out to the yard. Too bad for us, the doctor’s sparkling silver energy glowed from the lock.

  “Look, I get that you want to go all Verity on this place,” Frankie said, chilling my entire left side with his nearness, “but as far as I’m concerned, we have one objective: freedom for the mobster.”

  “That always seems to be your objective,” I said, shining the light to our left, at the double doors leading to the lobby. “Maybe they’ll open if we try them again.”

  “And maybe your friend Nurse Claymore will invite us out for a cupcake,” Frankie continued, like the devil on my shoulder.

  I stepped out into the hallway. “Have a littl
e faith.”

  The ghost snorted. “You realize he can keep us here forever,” he said, not helping things at all. “It won’t even seem that long to him.”

  “It already feels like an eternity to me,” I said, giving my ghost the side-eye.

  But he wasn’t paying attention to me anymore.

  “Look,” he said as the doors to the lobby shuddered on their hinges.

  “Thank Jesus and hallelujah,” I said, hurrying that way.

  “No,” he called, trailing behind. “No. I don’t know where you come from, but rattling doors in haunted asylums are not good.”

  Then he started cursing, which I tuned out completely because it was either my imagination or the silvery light from the locks glowed hotter and then began to fade.

  “Lookie, lookie!” I sped up.

  “Did you hear me?” Frankie demanded as I made a full-out run for the doors.

  “Now!” I urged. I didn’t want to leave him behind, but if these things flew open, I was going for it.

  It was our only way out of the north hall at least.

  For all his platitudes about patient care and healing, the dominant ghost definitely had a thing for control. He’d spent a lot of energy barring the windows, jamming the locks, slamming the doors. Or at least lending Nurse Claymore the power to do it.

  Maybe he’d decided to at least let us go look for her.

  The doors shook even more violently, but they didn’t open.

  Yet.

  “Ready?” I asked Frankie, reaching out for the ghostly cold handle, not waiting for an answer. The wet, invasive feeling of the doctor’s energy shook me and made me want to huddle on the dirty linoleum floor like a baby, but I gripped the handle hard and pulled.

  The door groaned open, and Frankie and I wasted no time barreling out into the lobby, straight into Cash the ghost hunter. He let out a cry and his camera went flying.

  “E-yahh!” Frankie passed straight through Cash, screaming like he was running through a nest of spiders while I landed on top of the ghost hunter with a crunch and a rattle.

  “Get off!” Cash hollered, rolling sideways.

  “I didn’t zap you,” I said, fighting for purchase as he dumped me on the floor. “That was my ghost.”

  “That. Was. Awesome!” Cash lay flat on the floor with his arms spread. “I can feel the ecto-ference right down to my bones.”

  I sat back, rubbing my knee. “Yeah, it’s really great,” I said, with a lot less enthusiasm.

  “Verity!” Ellis reached down to help me. I accepted his unsteady grasp and shot to my feet a lot faster than I should have.

  “I’m good,” I said, glancing toward the north hallway. The doors stood silent, closed. The only sign of our recent adventure was the trace of gray, ghostly light filtering from the small gap under the doors.

  “This haunting is real,” Tom announced to the group.

  “No kidding,” Brett said. He held his cell phone over his prone friend and moved it slowly over Cash like a Star Trek–style scanning device.

  “What are you doing?” Ellis asked, simultaneously checking me over to make sure I was still in one piece.

  Brett spoke to us, keeping his focus on the work he was doing. “I developed a ghost-detector app that uses EVP technology to let them speak to us.”

  “This guy’s nuts,” Frankie said, cowering against the wall, his hair sticking out at odd angles, still shaking off the effects of passing through Cash.

  “Peanuts,” the recorder said, in a mechanical voice.

  I froze. “Wow.” It worked.

  Sort of.

  “I think you might be onto something,” I told the ghost hunter.

  Frankie snorted and pushed off the wall, still a bit unsteady as he ran a hand through his hair. “Lucky guess.”

  “Bet,” the recorder said.

  “That’s another way to put it,” I told the ghost.

  “Is that what he’s saying?” Brett asked, waving his phone in the general direction of an annoyed Frankie.

  “It’s not picking up his actual words,” I said, “but it is passing along the general idea.” All in all, it had promise. “Can I try it?”

  “You can download it,” Brett offered.

  Not at the moment. My phone was at the crime scene, and nobody had internet access in this place.

  “My phone has a beaming functionality,” Ellis said. “You can send it to me.”

  “Give me your number and I’ll do it now,” Brett said happily. “Maybe you can write a review.”

  “This is all well and good, but what the hell happened in there?” Tom demanded, pointing toward the north hall.

  “Frankie and I met the ghost who is keeping us here, a doctor named Anderson.”

  Joan gasped. “Dr. Seymour Anderson? I saw his picture on the staircase wall.”

  “He has this entire place on lockdown, and we’re trapped until we discover who killed Barbara.”

  The group erupted in protests. When they quieted down, I explained what had happened in the hall.

  It was a job in itself to ignore Tom’s snide comments mixed with Joan’s tingling fingers and toes while stopping a bit too often for the excited rattlings of the ghost hunters.

  Ellis merely nodded. He knew I was speaking the truth.

  In the milky glow of the flashlights, I could also tell he’d gone paler, but I didn’t know if that was from his injury or from dealing with the ghost issues. Either way, he wouldn’t appreciate me bringing it up in public, so I let it slide.

  For now.

  “So what you saw was a full apparition,” Brett clarified while Cash hitched his camera on his shoulder and filmed me.

  At least our little collision hadn’t done any permanent damage to him or his equipment.

  “It doesn’t matter what she saw,” Tom interjected. “We need to find a way out of this horror house.”

  “You heard Verity. We can’t leave until justice is served,” Joan insisted.

  “Which means we’re all sticking together,” I said, “while we all look for clues.”

  “Where?” Brett asked, truly baffled.

  He had me there. I wasn’t sure where to look, either.

  “Verity.” Ellis motioned for me to step aside with him.

  The group continued their speculations without us. “You heard what the ghost said. We can’t just leave our murder suspect alone in this place,” Joan reasoned.

  “Who cares as long as we’re out of here?” her husband countered.

  Ellis drew me away from the others, to a spot at the back of the stairs. “I have an idea,” he said, leaning close, talking low into my ear. “It’ll keep everyone safe while we figure out who killed Barbara.”

  “All right.” I nodded, bracing a shoulder against the wall.

  He glanced at the bobbing lights of the group still debating among themselves as he continued. “You’re sure nobody can get out?”

  “As positive as I can be.” The ghost said he had us on full lockdown, and we hadn’t found a way out yet.

  “Okay.” Ellis’s breath tickled my ear. “Then we need to split into groups to investigate.”

  “But—” Somebody would be with a murderer.

  “Back me up,” he said as Tom approached us.

  “Joan and I are going to go find a way out,” he challenged, clearly expecting Ellis to try to stop him.

  “Do it.” Ellis nodded, ignoring Tom’s surprise. “Let’s split into the groups we know. You and Joan; Brett and Cash; me and Verity.”

  “That’s—okay,” Tom barked.

  “Fine by us.” Cash nodded, the light from his camera bobbing up and down.

  “Totally,” Brett agreed. “Cash and I want to get a look at the north hall.”

  “Don’t do it, sweetie,” Joan said to the young ghost hunter. “The roots of my hair are tingling like crazy, and even the tips of my ears are sizzling.”

  “You sound like a crazy person,” Tom said, taking her hand and dragg
ing her toward the main staircase.

  “We’ll send the police after we get out,” Joan promised.

  “I am the police,” Ellis reminded her.

  “Come on,” Tom said, in a hurry to get Joan out of there with him.

  “Kind of hard to get out when you’re going up,” Brett commented.

  “We’ll look for a fire escape,” Tom tossed over his shoulder, dragging Joan along.

  “As long as we don’t turn our backs on any of these people.” Joan’s voice filtered down the stairs after they’d started up.

  “Let’s go,” Brett said, clapping Cash on the shoulder. “Maybe the doors will slam closed behind us, too.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a thing to get on camera?” Cash gushed.

  “Be careful,” I called over the groan of the door as Brett dragged it open for his buddy. “Watch your back,” I added after they’d already gone.

  If I had to bet, I’d say Tom was our heartless killer. Maybe because he was my least favorite person here.

  I turned to Ellis. “So now we have a killer wandering the halls.”

  “We do,” he confirmed.

  Frankie raised his hands. “Hey, don’t look at me. I am what I am.”

  “A ghost who doesn’t like haunted places?” I asked.

  Frankie shrugged and reached into his coat pocket for a cigarette. “One who doesn’t like to be caught and trapped for eternity.”

  “I hear you,” I said. And I heard what he wasn’t saying—that it went for my place as well.

  “Okay, here’s the plan,” Ellis said when he was sure we were alone. “We’ve got our potential killers in the pairs they showed up with, so if there is an innocent companion, that person is most likely safe.”

  “All right.” I liked that.

  “At the same time, our suspect can’t escape the asylum because the ghost is keeping us all here,” he continued, leading me back toward the main lobby.

  “Smart,” I said, keeping up with him.

  He stopped at the door to the basement. “Everyone wants a way out.”