Zach and Kyle took aim.
“No!” I walked calmly towards them and pushed the barrels of their handguns down. “She’s just a young girl – a human girl.”
My mood of serenity seemed to settle them down, though they looked at me strangely. Then the creature bounded and bolted towards the Inn.
It ripped the back door leading to the basement stairs right off, and ran down. We were going to follow, but then…another figure came out of the woods. It was a man with a bloody face.
“Wally!” I shouted as we all ran towards him. He sauntered like a zombie out of the woods as far as he could.
“I tried to…”
That was all he could say. Then he dropped to his knees and fell face first into the grass.
Chapter Eight
The huge super moon was directly over the Inn now. It was illuminating the courtyard quite brightly as the as the law enforcement crew taped off the entire area between the Inn and the pine trees and attended to the dismembered body. There were other investigators in the trees, and some had gone into the basement to look for the creature, which hadn’t been seen since the incident.
“I’m going to have to start charging you for yellow crime scene tape, Miss Delacroix,” Sheriff Matthew Muldoon quipped dryly as he sat at the round table with Kyle, Zach, Ginny, and me…and Arthur.
Whispering Pines had, unfortunately, been giving the Sheriff a lot of business over the past several months. But we did frequently let him use the Inn as a base of operations, since he came from the county seat across the river in Stony Point.
“And I guess I’ll have to start charging you rent for office space, Sheriff.”
That got a rare smile out of him. He was a tall man – over seven feet with his pointy state police hat with the broad round brim. It always reminded me of Smokey the Bear. He was one of those slow-walking, critical-thinking, cowboy-detective types who took everything slowly, rationally, and seriously.
Lexi (my Tea Room manager and wife of Kyle, the town’s head of security – remember?) brought us a pitcher of Arnold Palmers and a tray of glasses. She poured the first one for the Sheriff, and he took a sip immediately as Lexi disappeared back into the Tea Room.
He leaned back in his chair, which looked like a toy beneath his large frame, and rubbed his chin. “Well, I’m not really sure if this is a crime scene or a job for animal control. From what I’ve heard so far, I have no idea what we’re dealing with.” Then he leaned forward putting both arms on the table and looked me square in the eye. “The only thing I know for sure, is that we’re not going to be looking for a werewolf – or for a unicorn or a leprechaun or an alien from outer space.”
We all understood that he was a rational man and wanted a rational solution to this murder – except for Ginny, of course. She would only deal with reality, no matter how unreal it might seem.
“Well then, Sheriff…” She set her glass down firmly on the table and spoke matter-of-factly. “…if you’re not going to look for a werewolf, then you might as well go home, because you’re not going to solve this thing by looking for anything else.”
Easy, girl. That’s not what the Sheriff wants to hear.
“I assure you, Miss Vandersnoop, there’s a rational explanation for this whole thing -- not to mention, there are a dozen folks in werewolf costumes still all around us here. I don’t know what kind of smoke and mirrors the victim used out front to trick so many people into believing his illusion, but people don’t turn into wild animals, except in the movies.”
Ginny opened her mouth to speak, but I pinched her leg and gave her the evil eye. At least she didn’t contradict him, but she still had to say a few words.
“Looks like they’re tossing those imaginary arms and legs of Colonel Tramador on a stretcher right now.”
The Sheriff harrumphed and lifted his hat to scratch his head.
Zach and Kyle got up to check out a little argument back by the pines. The EMTs who had been attending to Wally were insisting that he get on the stretcher and let them take his blood pressure and pulse, but he was refusing and walking away. Zach stopped him not far from our table.
“I’m fine now, guys. I just want to go home.”
It was a little odd but good to see him feeling so much better so soon. His color was good, and with the blood wiped off his face it appeared that he didn’t have a single scratch or bruise.
“You boys better detain him long enough to get a statement. He’s probably the closest thing we have to an eye witness,” Sheriff Muldoon told them.
Kyle nodded and put his arm around the dear man’s shoulder. The threesome walked across the driveway and sat in the grass next to my carriage house. A moment later I saw the black dog he had arrived with walk out of the swampy area by the trees and limp slowly up to Wally holding an injured front paw off the ground. He scooped the dog up in his arms and hugged it tenderly.
The Sheriff’s two deputies came out of the basement door and started walking towards us.
“Looks like Rodney and Edgar are coming, Sheriff,” Ginny told him. “Maybe they found something downstairs.”
They were walking slowly. The two men seemed to be bickering about something and shaking their heads.
The Sheriff just looked at them approaching and smiled. “Those two are complete idiots by themselves…but together they’re a perfect 10.”
I didn’t really understand what he meant until I looked at them walking. One of the men was tall and lean and the other one quite rotund. As they walked side-by-side, they really did look like the number “10” coming towards us.
“Tell me something good, boys,” the Sherriff said, sitting up as they approached. “I could use a real lead in this…case.”
The two men looked at each other, as if they both wanted the other to tell him the news. Edgar’s shirt was untucked and unbuttoned, wide open with his large bare stomach protruding out, and he looked a bit disheveled. Rodney just looked at his feet.
“Spit it out boys. What’d you find down there? A couple of werewolves and a genie in a lamp?” Muldoon gave Ginny a glancing look and she just shrugged.
Rodney, the tall thin one, finally spoke up. “Sheriff…we followed the muddy footprints and some drops of blood into a hallway and through a door to…” He looked at Edgar.
The Sheriff was getting a little impatient with his men. “To where, Rodney?”
“I…I’m not sure, Sir…”
“To some place in France, Sheriff. They were chopping off people’s heads, so we didn’t stay long.” Edgar, the short round one, finally spoke up, and everyone got very quiet. Ginny and I looked at each other.
The Sheriff seemed disgusted and shook his head. “I see. Did you see any werewolves there?”
“Uh…no, Sir.” Rodney tried to bring some rationality back to the conversation. “The only unusual thing we saw there was a young woman…She had a lot of blood on her and seemed exhausted…and she was trying to catch her breath. She wasn’t speaking French like the others, but she was…um…”
“Naked as the day she was born, Sheriff!” Edgar said as he reached for a small sandwich from the stack on the table that Ashley had just dropped off.
“And let me guess,” Muldoon said, looking deflated and disgusted. “You gave her your undershirt so she could cover up.”
“Yes, Sir! It hung all the way down to her ankles, and she was very thankful. She kissed me on the cheek!”
Muldoon shook his head again. I really didn’t want him to go into the basement and see all this for himself, so I needed something to distract him. I saw a lovely redhead in a white lab coat come out of the solarium, and she was walking toward our table. It was Audrey Gastineau, Muldoon’s head crime scene investigator and, for quite a few months now, his girlfriend.
“Okay.” Muldoon looked at his men. “So a monster, which is our presumed killer, ran into the basement here and disappeared into France. I’ll get Scully and Mulder on it right away…”
“Sher
iff…” Audrey arrived with some papers in her hand and some information about the investigation.
I was expecting her to put her hand on her man’s shoulder and smile at him, but she seemed a little bit distant today.
“Yes…Dr. Gastineau?”
“The victim had no passport or ID on him or in his room, but he signed in as Colonel Aldous Pennington Tramador. There’s no record of him in U.S. databases, so since he seemed to be European according to the desk clerk and others, I called in a favor from a friend at Scotland Yard. They contacted Interpol and did a broad search and came back with this.” She handed him a fax of some kind of contract.
“Hmm…” The Sheriff looked it over carefully. “It seems to be a very old contract between this Colonel Tramador fellow and P.T. Barnum’sGreat Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Hippodrome in 1875. Tramador was consigned to find novelty acts for Barnum’s freak show.”
“And he affixed his thumbprint next to his signature – which seems to be the same signature as on the Inn’s registry log.” Audrey pointed to the thumbprint and then waved to the men who had loaded the stretcher and were rolling it towards the ambulance.
“Well, obviously our victim was trying to imitate the life of this Tramador fellow for some reason,” Muldoon opined. “The man who signed this contract would have to be close to 200 years old by now, so…”
“Or else he came here from the past,” Ginny suggested. I pinched her again.
“Guys,” Audrey said to the men rolling the stretcher, “bring it here.” She pulled the sheet back on the grisly heap of body parts.
I had been to the morgue a few times and seen some bodies that had been autopsied, but this was right next to me and fresh enough for me to smell the death. It was unnerving. She pulled out the right arm like it was a loaf of bread and examined the thumb.
“Oh, please, Audrey…not you too,” the Sheriff mumbled silently in his mind, which I may have been poking into to find out what was wrong between him and Audrey. It was obvious that he had no clue why she was upset with him. Then he looked at her and spoke aloud. “Audrey, you can’t compare fingerprints just by looking at his thumb. You can’t see any detail unless it’s inked and magnified…”
“It’s got the same scar, Sheriff.” She held the thumb in front of his face as the other end of the severed arm dripped on the ground next to her shoe. She pointed to the contract again and then rubbed the Colonel’s thumb clean with her own. “You see…it’s almost like a backwards number ‘7,’ and on the faxed contract we see the mirror image, since it’s a print.”
She was right. We all stood and gawked at the thumb and the thumbprint. The scars matched. Then Audrey rubbed a little blood from the shoulder area onto the thumb, blotted most of it off on the sheet on the stretcher, and pressed it onto the contract next to the other thumbprint. They looked identical. Then she put the arm back and covered up Tramador’s remains.
“Thanks, guys.” She sent them on their way and handed the document to Rodney. “Have these prints checked at the lab and see if they’re a match – besides just the scar, will you please?” She gave Rodney a pleasant smile, but it became more of a scowling glare when she looked back at the Sheriff. I figured that might be a good time to dig into her brain.
It was. I figured out what was causing the problem between the couple that had always seemed so happy. I whispered to Arthur and then sent a few more telepathic messages to Granny. I knew she was in there, since the pup was so quiet and still. He gave me a yip of acknowledgement and ran back into the Inn. We would have them back together in no time.
Chapter Nine
“Don’t look now,” Ginny said to me, nodding her head toward the back of the Tea Room, “but we have some visitors from France.” She whispered the final words so the Sheriff wouldn’t hear them.
Sure enough two men in white wigs, royal blue coats with tails, ruffled shirts, white knee socks, and black shoes with large buckles were on the porch outside the Tea Room. Fortunately, they didn’t look too out of place, given all the costumes for the Ball. They were looking around like small town tourists in Times Square, and one of them came down the steps on the side to examine the cars parked near my carriage house. He reached out timidly and touched a little green convertible and then quickly pulled his hand away. One of the tourists in town who had been shopping for antiques gave him a disapproving look…and really freaked out the Frenchman when he started the car and drove off.
Then Lexi came out and leaned over the rail of the back porch with a live chicken under one arm and several long loves of bread under the other. She gave me a pleading, helpless look, so Ginny and I left Audrey and the Sheriff alone at the table and went to see what was going on.
“Jessie!” Lexi seemed a little bewildered. “I’m kind of used to odd things happening around this place, but these two men just came and demanded that I prepare 100 pierogies for them to take to the Revolutionary Council – and they paid me with this chicken and these loaves of bread. I…I…!”
I had to hide my smile. “Do we have enough pierogies, Lex?”
“Carlo just made a huge batch during the Ghost Walk because they’ve been so popular, so yeah. I’m sure we do.”
“Ginny, take the chicken and find Arthur’s old kennel from when he was a pup…it’s in the garage in the carriage house. Lex, put the bread in back – we’ll give it to the birds – and pack up the order for these gentlemen. We’ve got to get them out of here and back to where they belong.”
I brought the men back into the past where they came from, and I had Lionel come along to get the door closed and to lubricate the levers and dials a bit. He never asked questions, and didn’t bat an eye when he looked into the French Revolution in our basement. Hopefully now we would get no more unexpected visitors, and maybe it would be easier to get to the exact time and place we were looking for.
When I got back upstairs, Lexi was carrying a cake out to the table where Audrey and the Sheriff were still sitting. There was one big candle in the middle of the cake, and Ginny was alongside Lexi with a shoebox-sized gift with gold wrapping and a bow on top. I joined them as they began to sing happy birthday to Audrey.
The courtyard had no customers because of the crime scene tape, but the investigative unit and other nearby costumed onlookers stopped what they were doing to give her a nice cheer and some applause.
“Compliments of Matthew Muldoon, ma’am,” Lexi said with a bright smile. Apparently Granny had magically whipped up a beautiful cake with white vanilla frosting and wrapped an empty shoebox, as I had whispered to her earlier.
Sheriff Muldoon was expressionless, which was normal for him anyway, but when he saw the bright smile on Audrey’s face he couldn’t help but smile back at her.
“Happy birthday, sweetheart.”
We were all standing now as she hugged his neck and kissed his cheek. “You remembered! I thought you had forgotten, you old goose.” Then she hugged him tightly.
He looked at me suspiciously and a bit perplexed.
Audrey looked at the cake and paused for a moment after she picked up the knife. “What kind of cake is it, dear?”
“It’s you’re kind,” Ginny said. “It’s whatever your heart desires. Cut it open and take a look.”
Ginny looked at me, and I shrugged.
“Ahh!” she gasped. “Red velvet! How did you know, Matthew?”
“I…well…uh…”
“Let’s all sit down and give ’er a taste,” Ginny suggested, and we sat. “But first why don’t you blow out the candle and wish for something you really want to be in that big ol’ golden package there, lady.”
“Oh, this cake is all I need. My big lug remembered my birthday, and then kept it a secret all day. I never expected this.”
Ginny pushed the gift towards her. I really hadn’t figured out what to put in the box yet. I could let it contain whatever her heart’s desire was, I suppose…but what if she was hoping for a ring or something like that?
> So I was happy when Ginny asked her, “So, what do you want for your birthday gift, Audrey?’
“Ha!” she said pulling the box closer. “I want a Jimmy Choo natural leather python skin shoulder bag and that little black dress in the window at Shroeder’s – and a nice pair of heels to match both of them!” She laughed as she tore off the wrapper, but her eyes grew huge as she opened the box. She pulled out the handbag and raised it slowly up in front of her face. Then she grabbed it by the strap and swung it against the Sheriff’s arm.
“Are you crazy, Matthew? This is a thirty-seven-hundred dollar bag! We can’t waste money on such frivolous…”
“No, ma’am.” Ginny was always there to smooth things over. “It’s a knock-off. Sheriff Muldoon here had me order it online from a friend of mine in Thailand a month ago.”
“But look at the craftsmanship…and it says Jimmy Coo on the zipper tag.”
“Look closer, Audrey…” Ginny looked at me to help her out with her scheme. “It says Ginny Choo…”
I nodded and touched my cheek twice. Hey…maybe I’ve finally found my trademark move for casting a spell. Blinking and wiggling my nose seemed too cliché, and Anika already owned the wiggling fingers technique. And doing nothing didn’t seem very cool.
“You’re right. I could have sworn it said Jimmy Choo a minute ago.”
Then Audrey opened her new purse to look inside. She pulled out the beautiful little black dress of her dreams, and a tear came to her eye.
“It looks like it’s just the right size,” she said, hugging the Sheriff’s arm with her hands and cheek.”
“Of course it is,” Ginny told her. “It has to be – it’s your size. I would say it’s about a size four-point-three-seven-five with an extra narrow waist and a little extra room in the caboose.”
She put the dress back into the purse, which she tried to put back in the box – but something was in the way. She looked in the box to see a pair of size six black leather heels with a silvery python skin bow.
Jessie Delacroix: Fright Night at the Haunted Inn (Whispering Pines Mystery Series Book 4) Page 5