He ushered me forward. “I’ve been clearing up the last of the things in there. Once the buyer came and took the fixtures away it seems quite barren in here, doesn’t it?”
I followed him to the back room, where it appeared he’d made quite a bit of progress. A few boxes were stacked against the wall and the metal shelving was dismantled now. The large work table in the middle of the room still held a ton of clutter.
He looked oddly relaxed, completely businesslike. I still had a hard time picturing him grinding up pills and putting them in Dolly’s food. He seemed like a man quietly going through the motions of adapting to a new life.
“Archie.” I cleared my throat and wondered if this was the best approach. “I know about the affair.”
He looked up from a box he’d just taped shut, his bland expression giving away nothing.
“You and Catherine Devon. Dolly suspected it for a long time.” I held up the journal.
He gave it a cursory glance, as if he’d never seen it before.
“I don’t know—”
“You do know what I’m talking about.”
“Actually, Ms Parker, I was about to say that I don’t know that I want to discuss this with you.”
“Fair enough. You don’t owe me an explanation.” I set the journal on the work table. “But you did ask me to look into Dolly’s death because you didn’t think she purposely took those pills.”
“And I still don’t believe that.”
“But don’t you see? If the police were to look into it, wouldn’t you be the most likely suspect?” I lifted the sheaf of legal pages. “You certainly have the most to gain from your wife’s death.”
“What’ve you got there?”
“Archie, surely you’ve seen this? Dolly’s father’s trust. He left her quite a lot of money. I tracked it down after hearing Nigel Trahorn’s message on your answering machine.”
I took the micro tape out of my purse and set it with the journal.
“I’m sorry that I took these things from your apartment, but I was following your instruc—”
I swore I heard the bells at the front door. Archie must not have locked it after I came in. I stepped to the doorway and peeked out, only to find myself face to face with Gabrielle.
Her eyes went wide, matching my own I felt sure.
“You too!” she said.
What? I backed into the storeroom and bumped into the table.
“What are you doing here with him?” Her peach complexion was now suffused with blotches of red, her eyes wild.
“Gabri—”
I have to admit that I barely saw it coming. She advanced on me, picking up one of the steel cross pieces from the metal shelves Archie had disassembled. She grasped the thing like a baseball bat and swung it at me. I stumbled around the work table, backing away from her wild movements. The cellar door stood open and she drove me toward it. My foot went off the edge of the uneven stone landing. I felt myself cartwheeling into space.
Everything went black.
* * *
A hazy roar sounded in my ears, like the steady pounding of surf on a windy day. My eyes tried to open but felt heavy and dysfunctional. One lid raised partially, my vision blurred, it closed again. I gave in to the feeling, succumbing to the desire to sleep.
Voices intruded—one male and one female—but I couldn’t make out the words. The roar in my ears kept intruding. Everything felt cold and rough and painful. I rested again but something deep inside warned me not to allow myself the luxury of real slumber. I stretched the fingers of my right hand, felt a hard surface like concrete. It was cold to the touch and I began to realize that my whole body ached with it. I squeezed my eyes tight, trying to work up enough moisture to open them.
When I finally peered out through a web of lashes, all I could see was a nondescript expanse of gray, heavy shadows, large unfamiliar objects. I blinked again and worked to make the other eye open. A ghostly image moved in the distance, but when I got both eyes to focus on it I realized it was a foot in a smooth leather shoe.
“. . . ready, my darling,” said the female voice.
A mumbled response in deeper tones told me that the man had replied but I couldn’t understand his words. My hearing remained muffled. I wanted to shake myself, like a dog, rid myself of the hurts and the fuzziness.
“Soon,” she said. “I shall . . . soon.” The words faded in and out but the voice was vaguely familiar. Gabrielle.
Footsteps sounded crisply—tap-tap-tap-tap—across the floor, then a more uneven pace. I tried to turn my head to see where they went, but the tiniest motion sent excruciating pain and a wave of nausea through me.
A thump, somewhere above me. I closed my eyes again.
“Ms Parker?” A small touch on my shoulder woke me. “Ms Parker, wake up. Are you all right?”
Do I look all right? Something inside told me that I must be fine if I could conjure up that thought.
I wiggled my fingers again, brought my right hand up to my face. It came away bloody.
“Ms Parker, it’s Archie Jones. Please wake up.”
I must have drifted off again for a second there. Okay, Charlie, you have to get moving. I rolled over to my back and stretched my legs out. I must have been lying on my left side, fetal position, for quite awhile. The bones felt like they’d flattened to the shape of the floor.
“Where—?”
“We’re in the cellar at the shop,” Archie said.
I raised my hands to my face, taking a little inventory, noting that some kind of gash at my right temple seemed to be the cause of the blood. I groaned, rolled over, pushed myself into a sitting position. Kept my eyes closed, head in hands, against the vertigo. In a moment I felt like I could open them.
Archie knelt beside me, clearly having no clue what to do. He looked a little gray in the face but otherwise unharmed. I imagined his wan expression came from looking at me.
“What happened?” I asked.
He looked a little discomfited. “Gabrielle pushed you.”
I remembered. “We were in the shop.”
“Yes. You fell down the steps.”
And you really came to my rescue there, didn’t you, he-man? I didn’t say it. I shifted my weight a little. My lower back hurt like hell. Breathing was agony around my ribcage. I could see where my jeans were ripped across one knee, and the left sleeve of my blazer was barely hanging by a few threads. I looked over toward the stone steps leading up to the shop. It was a wonder Gabrielle hadn’t killed me.
“Give me a hand,” I said.
I worked to get my legs under me. Archie helped pull me to my feet. A blade of pain ripped through my left hip when I put my weight on it.
“Where is she now?” I asked.
He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped at a tiny smear of blood on his hand.
“She’s gone. Said she was getting something ready and she would be back soon.”
I limped over to a chest of drawers that the movers hadn’t taken away yet and leaned on it for support.
“Archie, what the hell is going on here? Why did Gabrielle come after me?”
But my question fell on deaf ears. He’d already crossed to the far wall and turned to pace the distance again.
“I’m so worried for Catherine,” he said.
“Catherine?”
“Gabrielle just seems so very determined.”
I didn’t know what strange little games this bunch were playing but I knew I wanted out of there. Now. I looked toward the stairs, calculating whether I could possibly climb them.
“It’s no use,” Archie said, guessing my thoughts. “She’s locked it from the other side.”
“You don’t have a key?”
“She took them.”
Once again, I cursed his passivity. How could he sit back and just let himself become a victim? Let alone stand for what Gabrielle had done to me. I glanced at my watch but it was smashed. Surely Louisa would get worried when I didn’t co
me home and she would come to check on me.
And find what? There was no way she could know we were in the cellar. At least she might contact the police and tell them I was missing. I clung to that hope.
“Is there an opening from the street down to this cellar?” I asked Archie. “You know the type, where businesses receive deliveries?”
I knew the answer to that almost as soon as I’d phrased the question. Louisa and I had spent the night down here and examined every nook and cranny for traces of the unexplained haunting. There was no delivery chute.
“What time is it?” I asked.
Archie pushed up the sleeve of his cardigan but his arm was bare. “I guess I left my watch in the apartment.”
Well, fine. I was back to hoping that enough time had gone by for Louisa to get worried about me. I tested my legs to see if I could walk. Each step sent a jolt through my left leg and each breath was agony. I could probably get up the stairs in a life-or-death move but it would be foolish to waste the energy to go up there to find that the door was locked, and then have to make the painful journey back down. I needed to think this out before I exhausted my small reserve of energy.
“Have you checked the door?” I asked. “Maybe she closed it but forgot to lock it?”
He shook his head. “It’s locked.”
“Is my purse down here?”
Archie turned his head, glancing around.
“Can you look for it? I might have something in there that could help us.”
He moved around the room, finally spotting it beside the steps. He picked it up in that uneasy way that most men carry a woman’s purse and brought it to me.
I spied a chair in the corner. I wasn’t at all sure I could get back up from its overstuffed depths once I sat, but standing around wasn’t helping my hip at all either. Limping over to it, I sank down into the cushion and allowed myself to simply melt. It was the only scrap of comfort I’d felt yet.
My bag sported a few new scuffs and when I unzipped the top I was greeted by the heavenly scent of the bottle of eucalyptus lotion I carried with me. The plastic cap had split and nearly everything in the purse wore a coat of it. Would this night just keep getting better and better? I scraped enough of the silky stuff off my small bottle of ibuprofen to get it open and wiped the spare lotion into my skin. Tapped four of the little brown pills into the palm of my hand.
“Is there any water down here?” My luck, it would be a bottle that one of the sweaty movers had left behind but I could hardly afford to be picky.
Archie dithered around some more but didn’t come up with anything. I worked up as much spit as I could and worked the pills down. A dozen swallows or so and they felt like they might actually make it to my stomach.
While hoping for some result from the pain meds I continued my trek through the purse. One of Dolly’s knitted afghans lay over the back of my chair and I used it to wipe lotion off each item that I pulled from the purse. I wanted to feel badly about messing up her handiwork but I was at that screw-it-all point in the evening where my own comfort was selfishly taking precedence over everything else.
I tried to remember what the doorknob at the top of the stairs looked like. When I’d been here with Louisa we’d just left the door standing open. As near as I could remember it was secured with a rather old-fashioned lock that might easily be circumvented with a piece of plastic. I pulled a credit card that I rarely use out of my wallet and handed it to Archie.
“Go up there and see if this will work,” I told him.
He gave it a blank look and I explained in detail how to do it. What planet had this man grown up on?
“Sorry. I didn’t have much call for this skill as manager of a sales team,” he said as he trudged up the steps.
I heard a lot of fiddling around and a few grunts. No reassuring squeak of the door coming open.
“It’s the other lock that seems to be the sticking point,” he said, coming back down and handing me the card.
“There’s a deadbolt on it?” I hadn’t remembered that part.
“Well, yes, apparently so.”
Sheesh. I gritted my teeth and resumed the search through the purse. If only I’d thought to pack my hammer and chisel we could tried digging our way out through that old bricked-up doorway into the tunnels. And end up god knows where. A better use would be to remove the hinges from the door, but without the tools that wasn’t happening either.
Archie continued to stand there and watch me rummage.
“You might check around and see if there is anything in this cellar in the way of tools,” I suggested. “Maybe the movers left a hammer or something behind.” Did a girl have to think of everything around here?
“Oh, here’s something that might do the trick,” he called out after a few minutes. He held up a pair of office scissors.
I wanted to cry when he handed them to me. How on earth were those going to open a locked door? I set them beside me and continued to pull things from the purse—besides wallet and pill bottle, I came up with my ring of keys from home which I sent Archie up the stairs again to try. By some miracle one of them might work. But no such luck on that.
Other than that it seemed we were reduced to using a hairbrush, a lip balm, a ballpoint pen or my small spiral notebook. I was just about to consider how the pen and metal coil from the notebook might be disassembled into lock picking tools when I heard a sound from above.
A second later the door opened. Gabrielle was back.
Chapter 26
She closed the door behind her and came lightly down the stairs. “Almost ready, darling,” she said. “I’ve been to the market for food, and I’ve collected my things from home. By tomorrow night, we’ll be in a posh hotel room in Paris.”
Her eyes were on Archie the whole time she was outlining her plan. Then she noticed that I was up. Her face hardened.
I tried to imagine what I must look like. Blood from the cut beside my eye had probably dried in a trickle all the way down to my chin. My hair must be tangled and full of floor grime and dust balls. Same for my clothing, with rips and tears added.
“What’ll we do with her?” Gabrielle said to Archie.
He gave her a blank stare.
C’mon Arch, speak up for me, I begged silently. But he didn’t.
“You can just leave me here,” I said.
Gabrielle didn’t seem to notice that I’d spoken. I debated launching myself out of the chair but knew that she would move a lot quicker than I possibly could right now.
“Well, no matter. I’ve got only one more little errand, my love, and then we’re off,” she said, her smile back in place. She pointed toward the ceiling. “I’ll just pack a little bag for you. Your passport’s upstairs?”
Without waiting for a response, she whirled around and rushed up the stairs.
“Catch her!” I hissed at Archie. “Hold the door open!”
But he didn’t react quickly enough and we heard the deadbolt snap firmly shut.
I jammed all my stuff back into my battered purse and edged my way forward on the chair seat, hoping my legs would hold me a bit better now that the pain was subsiding.
“What’s going on here, Archie?” I demanded. “You’re planning to run off now with Gabrielle? What about Catherine?”
I hobbled toward him and faced him down.
“What about it!”
His pallid skin faded another two shades. “I—I . . . I don’t know. I never planned this.”
“Well, Gabrielle seems to think the two of you are going off together, toward some happy life in Paris. Where did she get that idea if you didn’t have a hand in the plans?”
Upstairs, I heard muffled sounds. Archie rolled his eyes up toward them.
“Archie! Explanation!”
He crumpled. His shoulders slumped and he backed into a straight upright chair. “I never thought she would . . .”
I stood in front of him. “Start at the beginning.”
“I’d hoped
to make Dolly give up the idea of this silly shop. I wanted back in our home, be with our friends at the club. I figured if we were back there, close to our old lifestyle, I might get my job back or at least have the contacts among the country club set to get another good position.”
“And to stay close to Catherine?”
“Well, yes, right.”
“But Dolly knew about the long-term affair between the two of you and she did all she could to keep you here in town. Not that it made much sense to locate her shop in this building, which Catherine Devon owns.”
“That was the one suggestion of mine that Dolly actually accepted. The location is top-notch and the rent was reasonable. It’s not as if Catherine were in the building much time at all anyway.”
“And the pranks started as a way to get Dolly to reconsider moving back to your old house? Were you behind all of them?”
“Only a few. I accidentally made the muddy footprints the first time. Slipped off my shoes and stowed them away. When Dolly became so upset, it gave me the idea that she might be convinced, with a little persuasion, that the place was haunted. From time to time I made noises in the night. Whenever she took her sleeping pills I could sneak downstairs and spray some perfume or make footprints. Back in the bedroom I would pretend I’d been awakened by a noise and she would insist that we both go downstairs to investigate. Once I released a tiny smoke bomb and she became convinced it was an apparition.”
“You probably fed her a lot of stories of the haunted places around town, adding a little fuel to the fire or something?”
He nodded. “But I never did anything to cause her harm. I swear it.”
“You didn’t switch the tea cups when she scalded her hand?”
“No—absolutely not.” He looked up at me.
I pulled another of the straight chairs over and sat gingerly on it. “How does Gabrielle fit into all this?”
“I began to suspect her of some of the nastier pranks after one time when she and I . . . um . . .”
“Were you also sleeping with her?” My incredulity began to climb.
“She began to come on to me, right after she started working here,” he said. “Young woman, older man. I know I should have fended her off, but that sort of thing can appeal to a man’s self-confidence, you know. By that time Dolly had ended the physical side of our relationship.” He squirmed as he said it. “And I was rarely able to get out and see Catherine. But I swear it was mostly a matter of a few stolen kisses in moments when no one was around.”
Phantoms Can Be Murder: Charlie Parker Mystery #13 (The Charlie Parker Mystery Series) Page 19