by Morgana Best
“Of course, if he hadn’t seen the article, he’d still be alive,” Laurence said.
“That’s a good point.”
“Not just the article—if he hadn’t seen the photo of Ben Parrish years ago and the article hadn’t mentioned the Great Bank Robbery of 1955, then Angus would have been none the wiser. Funny how things work out, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I said as I walked to the door, relieved that Laurence hadn’t tried to throw me over the balcony.
I still didn’t know if he was the murderer, but at least I was now fairly certain that the motive was revenge. And if the motive was revenge, then the murderer had to be Laurence, Doug, Charlie, or Melissa. One thing was still bugging me—why did Angus Burns go to that house?
Something else was bugging me, but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was.
Chapter 18
I was stuck at the road works going back down Tamborine Mountain. I called Oleander and told her what Laurence had said.
Oleander sounded disappointed. “So you don’t think he’s the murderer?”
I shrugged and then realised she couldn’t see me. “I don’t have a clue, to be honest. I mean, he doesn’t seem like a murderer, but if it was easy to spot murderers, then they’d all be in prison, wouldn’t they?”
“I suppose so,” Oleander said, “but what about your intuition?”
“My intuition has never worked in a murder case before,” I said, raising my eyebrows. The man flipped his sign from ‘Stop’ to ‘Slow’ and pointed in the direction I had to go. I pulled out slowly.
“You know, I think I need to go back and speak to Angus.”
“Dead Angus?” Oleander said.
“Yes, Angus Burns’s ghost. I still think he’s keeping something from me and he hasn’t got the most pleasant personality.”
“But why would he keep something from you if it would help solve his murder?”
Athanasius’s voice came over the phone. “I’d say it’s his guilty conscience.”
“Could you speak up, Athanasius?” I said as a large truck flew past me, shaking my car.
“I said, guilty conscience,” he repeated. “That’s the only reason he wouldn’t be telling you.”
“But he’s dead,” I said in exasperation.
“Just ask him straight out, Goldie. What do you have to lose?”
“I’m not afraid to ask him anything,” I said. “I’ve tried to ask him things before and he vanished.”
“Well then, try again,” Oleander said. “Look, we’re all right in the office. Why don’t you go back to your house, fetch Persnickle, and go straight over there?”
I sighed. “I don’t know what good it will do, but if you think it could help, I’ll give it a go. Who do you guys think the murderer is? Have you come up with anything?”
“Athanasius and I have been discussing it all morning, and we still don’t have a clue,” Oleander said. “The suspects are all criminals and experienced with lying.”
“Their fathers were criminals. We don’t know if they were,” I corrected her.
Oleander disagreed. “We know Doug has a criminal record. Maybe Charlie doesn’t have a criminal record, but we know he spent up big, thus benefitting from the crime, and we know that Melissa Fowl is up to no good.”
“You’re right,” I said, slowing down at a particularly sharp corner. “Laurence said something that’s been bugging me, but I just can’t figure it out.”
“You’re thinking about it too much,” Oleander said. “Maybe you need to meditate and then the answer will come to you.”
“I’ll meditate tonight,” I said, “in a nice bubble bath with a glass of wine. I hope you’re right—I know I’ve been overthinking this. I know it’s all to do with the article in the paper. I just can’t figure out what it is.”
“You mean it all started with the article in the paper?” Oleander asked me.
“Exactly,” I said. “There’s something I’m sure that’s obvious that we are overlooking, but I just can’t quite figure out what it is.” I took a deep breath and added, “Have you heard anything more about Max moving out of his house?”
“No, I haven’t, Goldie, but I did call the resident who told me and she said there isn’t a for sale sign outside his house. Max hasn’t said anything to you?”
“No, he hasn’t, although a couple of times he said he wanted to tell me something and then we were interrupted. He surely wouldn’t move. He owns that house—why would he leave it if he’s not selling it?”
“Maybe he’s selling it through another real estate agent and didn’t want to offend you, Goldie,” Athanasius said. “Ouch, why did you kick me in the shins, Oleander?”
Oleander made a sound of frustration. “Of course he’s not selling it through another real estate agent. Goldie, there’s no use speculating. You’ll just have to wait until he tells you. For now, concentrate on getting back to East Bucklebury safely. Fetch Persnickle and go straight to Doug Greer’s house.”
“Will do. And then I’ll bring you some coffee to the office.” With that, I pressed the red button on my bluetooth screen.
Oleander was right—I was overthinking everything. There were so many facts swirling around my head that I couldn’t make sense of them. I needed distance. But how was that going to happen? What’s more, I had to solve the case before Detective Power took me back in for questioning, or worse still, arrested me. I knew he didn’t have any evidence, but that hadn’t stopped him arresting people before.
When I got home, Persnickle was running around in circles, angry that the TV had somehow turned itself off. “You poor thing,” I said. I soon found out why. Apparently he had sat on the remote control. I turned the TV back on. Starsky came into view, sliding across the front of the red Torino, and Persnickle let out a grunt of pure happiness.
I put some carrots in my pocket and fetched Persnickle’s harness out of the cupboard. “Ride in the car!” I said, shaking the harness.
Persnickle took one last fond look at the TV and then waddled over to me. I put on his car harness, and soon we were driving out to Doug Greer’s house. I was relieved that Doug’s car wasn’t parked out the front. How would I have explained taking a wombat into his house? I figured if he did turn up unexpectedly, I would simply say I was passing by, and thought I’d see if the police had left things in a mess. He would have no reason not to believe me.
I took Persnickle into the bedroom and once again the ghost of Angus Burns appeared immediately. “Have you solved the murder yet?” His tone was irascible.
“No, which is sad, because if I don’t do it soon you’re going to be stuck here on this property forever.”
“Forever?” he snapped. “What makes you think that?”
“You’re not the first murder victim I’ve spoken to,” I reminded him. “New ghosts only have a small window of opportunity to cross over.”
The ghost looked quite angry. “Why is it taking so long to solve?”
I stepped forward. “Because you haven’t been honest with me.” I jabbed towards his chest. “I already told you that the detective running this case is incompetent! If it was any of the other detectives, they would have solved it by now. That means I’m going to have to solve it.”
I plastered a stern look on my face and added, “I’m your only hope of going to the hereafter.”
He appeared to be thinking over my words. “Are you sure that I’ll be stuck here forever?”
“Yes, and I know you’re keeping something from me. What could be so bad?” I held up both hands, palms to the ceiling. “I know you’re an armed robber. Have you killed someone, is that it?”
When he didn’t respond, I tried again. “Look, you’re already dead! Are you worried about my opinion of you? You have two choices—either you don’t tell me the whole truth and you stay here forever, or you tell me the truth, no matter how bad it is, and then you can cross over. Once I solve your murder, you can move on with your life.” I amended that to,
“Move on with your death.”
“Well, when you put it like that,” he said. “If I tell you everything, do you think you’ll be able to solve my murder?”
“Of course.”
He sighed again. “I gave Ben Parrish most of my gold. I was looking for him for years to get my gold back. When I found him, I was going to force him to tell me where it was and then I was going to shoot him.”
He did look somewhat embarrassed which I found strange, but I gave him a smile of encouragement. “Go on.”
“I wanted my gold back. Years ago, Ben told a mutual friend where he’d hidden the gold.”
This was news to me. “Where was it?”
“My friend was in hospital at the time. Ben had been visiting him and they’d gone out spotlighting. There was an accident, and my friend was shot in the leg. Ben went to the hospital, drunk, to apologise, and told my friend he’d hidden the gold in an old coal mine shaft on his property.”
“Why didn’t your friend fetch the money?”
“For a start, Ben didn’t tell him where his property was. And my friend’s leg was badly infected. He figured he knew he’d be in the hospital for a long time, so he called and told me what Ben said. We made a deal to go halves if I could find the gold. Just after that, he was found dead.”
“Dead?” I echoed.
The ghost nodded. “I figure Ben sobered up and went back to take care of him. Like I said, my friend didn’t know where Ben lived, only that the gold was down an old coal mining shaft on his property.”
I nodded slowly. “So when you saw the article in the paper, you realised the gold was hidden here, on this property.”
“Exactly. The article said the house was vacant. I came inside to see if it was really was vacant, and… well, you know the rest.”
I nodded. “But you don’t remember who shot you?”
“I didn’t see anyone. I thought there was someone here, but there were possums in the roof. I remember there were two angry possums fighting just before I got shot. I figure that must have masked the noise of whoever crept up behind me.”
“Thanks for telling me that,” I said. “So what makes you think Doug hadn’t spent all his father’s gold?”
“I didn’t know, of course,” he said. “Not for certain. Maybe he had, maybe he hadn’t, but Ben always told us he was saving all the gold for his son to use after his death.”
“Well, his son couldn’t find the gold,” I said.
“Obviously! That was in the article.” Angus was back to being snarky again. “Does that help you solve the murder?”
“I’ll discuss it with my friends,” I said, but Angus was still speaking.
“If I hadn’t seen that article, I’d still be alive. It’s really annoying. And the TV.”
“What TV?” I said.
“It was on one of those morning shows as well. Anyway, one of them picked it up. I don’t know which one it was, but you couldn’t miss it. It was everywhere.”
Finally, something was starting to make sense. It did all revolve around the article. “You make a good point,” I said. “I’m going to email the journalist and ask who wrote the article and find out what prompted them to do the story. That’s what’s been bugging me—it all started with the story.”
“Come back here as soon as you solve it and tell me,” Angus said in a demanding tone.
“You will most likely have crossed over by then,” I said, “but I’ll come back to check.”
With that, he vanished.
I pulled my phone from my jeans pocket and googled the article once more. This time I took note of the journalist’s name. I scrolled to the bottom of the article to see if there was an email. There was, and there was a phone number as well. I decided to call and leave a message.
To my surprise, the journalist answered at once. “Hi, I’m Goldie Bloom from East Bucklebury,” I said. “You did a feature article on East Bucklebury recently. The main photo was of a blue house with a decades-old photo of a man on his horse sitting outside it. He was one of the Great Bank Robbery of 1955 gang. Do you remember it?”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “We got a lot of good feedback about that article.”
Before he could say anything else, I said, “How did you find out about East Bucklebury?”
“Doug Greer sent in a press release about it, and he had contacts at the paper.”
A cold chill ran up my spine. “So that’s how you found out? Through Doug Greer? You didn’t happen upon the story by yourself?”
“Yes, that’s right,” he said.
I thanked him and hung up.
I turned around and looked straight down the barrel of a gun.
Chapter 19
I caught my breath.
Surely this couldn’t be happening. “Doug! You’re the murderer?”
He just looked at me. Was he about to shoot me on the spot? I had to keep him talking until I figured out what to do. I couldn’t influence the weather to provide a means of escape because we were inside a house. I wondered if I could get him outside somehow.
“So you figured it out, did you?” His gun lowered ever so slightly. Maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part.
I broke out in a cold sweat.
“I don’t really understand any of it,” I told him. “I only realised you did it just then, when I found out that you gave the story to the journalist. I didn’t think of that before.”
“It did look all very innocent,” he said with a sneer. “People will think I wanted the publicity because I was putting my house on the market.”
“So, you murdered Angus Burns for revenge? Did you use the article to lure him here? What if it hadn’t worked and he hadn’t seen the article?”
“Then I was going to think of something else,” he said. “I used my contacts from my journalist days.”
I’d missed that. “So why did you murder Angus?”
“Isn’t that obvious?”
When I didn’t respond, he said, “Angus had been looking for my father for years. He was going to murder my father. One of my old prison mates contacted me and said Angus was looking for me after he found out my father died. He was clearly going to do away with me too. I couldn’t take the chance.”
“So you shot him on the off chance he would find you and murder you?”
“He was going to kill me for sure,” he said. “He’d been looking for my father for years too. But I killed him for revenge. He spent the share of the gold my father had given him.”
“So, where did you hide the murder weapon all this time?” I asked him. “Surely the police went to your house looking for it?”
“It was in the old coal mining shaft with the gold, of course,” he said. “It’s on this property, out the back. It’s taken over by mangrove swamps now.”
“So your father did tell you where the gold was, after all.”
Doug laughed. The sound sent a chill up my spine. “Of course he did. I lied when I said I didn’t make it to his deathbed in time.”
“The murder’s been solved, and I’m still here. You said I wouldn’t be here once the murder was solved!” The voice came from behind me and was filled with accusation.
“Possibly he has to be arrested first,” I said.
“Who are you talking to?” Doug said. “I heard you talking to someone earlier too.”
“It’s the ghost of Angus Burns,” I said. “I can speak to ghosts.”
“You’re a clairvoyant medium?” he said in obvious disbelief.
“Something like that,” I said.
“You’re nuts!”
“Probably,” I said. To Angus I said, “Angus, do you have any suggestions? Is there anything you can do?”
“Well then, I hope if he shoots you that you don’t hang about here. I’m not one for company.”
I turned back to Doug. “If you shoot me, they’ll know you did it.”
“Of course they won’t,” he said. “They don’t have a clue I shot Angus a
nd they won’t have a clue I shot you. In fact, even if they did find you, which they won’t, it will throw them off the track because you have nothing to do with the Great Bank Robbery of 1955.”
“But your house is the common denominator,” I said.
He shrugged. “They won’t even know you were here. I’ll throw you down the mine shaft.”
That puzzled me. “Why didn’t you throw Angus’s body down the mine shaft? Why did you leave him here?”
“To fool the police, of course. The fact I left his body in my house would make the police think I didn’t do it. It would be too obvious, you see.”
He raised his gun and took a step towards me.
“Someone will hear the shot,” I said.
I had to do something and fast. I shut my eyes and focused on manifesting a thunderstorm. Moments later, a crack of thunder shook the house.
“What good luck!” Doug said. “Anyone will think the gunshot’s just thunder. Not that there are any houses close by. Sorry Goldie, it’s not personal. You know too much. I can’t let you go.”
Was this the end? Had it come to this?
I shut my eyes tightly and pulled myself together. I was a powerful sea witch. I should be able to get myself out of this one. There was no way I could get him outside to have him struck by lightning and he was too far from the windows.
I realised Doug was still talking. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure your wombat gets back to your house safely. I’m an animal lover.”
I opened one eye. That’s when I saw it. He was wearing a jacket and under the jacket, I could see the edges of an orange shirt.
“I have one last request.”
He shot me a look of pure suspicion. “What is it?”
“I’m wearing Zimmermann. I don’t want people to find me dead in a bloodstained Zimmermann shirt. Could you give me your coat before you shoot me?”
“Are you serious?” he asked in an incredulous tone.
“Deadly serious,” I said. “Fashion is important.”
“Sure, but don’t try anything.” Holding the gun on me, he very carefully took off his jacket with his other hand, leaving him standing there in a bright orange shirt.