Murder Ghost Foul: The Complete Mystic Springs Paranormal Cozy Mystery Series

by Mona Marple

  “I loved my wedding dress,” I gushed.

  “It was incredible. Your dress was fit for a fairy princess,” Connie said.

  “It should have been! I saved up for a year for that dress!”

  “You’re kidding?”

  I shook my head. “I told everyone it cost half as much as it did, and that was still a lot! But as soon as I saw it, I just knew it was the one.”

  “And you pulled it off. You looked stunning.”

  “And so will you,” I said.

  I left Connie alone to her breakfast, and I went for a little explore of Hawthorne Winery.

  Why?

  Because my sister is the best medium in the business, but nobody sees ghosts as well as other ghosts do. If there’s a real ghost hanging around this place tormenting people, I’m going to find it.

  I round up Patton, who frankly would follow me to the ends of the Earth without asking any questions, and head outside.

  The tree where Libby Louth met her demise is damaged, but still standing.

  “It’s an ultimate example of ‘you should have seen the other guy’,” I joked as Patton and I stood and looked at the tree.

  “That’s a little insensitive,” Patton scolded.

  I rolled my eyes. “Funny, though. Has it occurred to you that Libby herself could be here, haunting the place?”

  “Sure. But the haunting started before she died, so that wouldn’t explain everything.”

  “True. And why would anyone return to the tree that killed them? Seems a little masochistic.”

  Bored by the tree, we returned indoors and worked our way through all of the rooms. We found some dubious fashion choices in Petunia’s wardrobe, and a torch on Sidney’s bedside table, but uncovered no signs of a resident ghost.

  “There’s nobody here,” I said as we finished our grand tour in the library.

  “Nope. The only dead people hanging around are me and you, baby,” Patton said with a wink.

  “Very cosy,” I said with a giggle. Patton leaned in and was about to kiss me when I moved out of his reach.

  “Hey, what’s up?”

  “Is that a door?” I asked.

  Patton followed my gaze, to the imitation bookcase wallpaper. We approached and, sure enough, there was a panel of the wallpaper that wasn’t quite flush with the rest of the wall.

  “Can you push it?” I asked.

  Patton nodded. He was much stronger at touching physical objects, but it still wasn’t easy even for him.

  He took a breath and a step back, then moved forward and pushed with all his might. The wall didn’t budge.

  He took a bigger breath and a bigger step back, and took a run up to the wall. He grunted as he pressed his whole body against the wall, but it didn’t move an inch.

  “Maybe it’s an old door that was blocked,” he said, as he moved away from the wall.

  I leaned in closer and saw that a circular gold embossed logo on the spine of one of the fake books actually stood out from the wall.

  “Here goes nothing,” I said, then gripped on to the knob, turned and pulled.

  With a creak, the door opened and a blast of frigid air was released.

  I looked at Patton and raised an eyebrow. Ever the gentleman, even in death, he moved in front of me and pulled the door fully open.

  In front of us was a narrow staircase with a naked brick wall, stone steps and no light switches in sight.

  “Shall we go up?” Patton asked.

  “Of course we will!” I exclaimed, although I let him enter the staircase first.

  The space was tiny, claustrophobic, and freezing cold.

  We climbed the stairs and saw a shape ahead, abandoned on the steps.

  “It’s a cloak,” I said as I examined the item. A heavy, black cloak with a hood.

  “Ideal for a pretend ghost,” Patton said.

  “Whoever Connie saw last night, they must have disappeared in here and took this off,” I said.

  “We have to show this to Connie,” Patton said.

  “It’s her wedding day! She should be focused on that. Let’s see what else we can find before we bother her with this.”

  We continued up the stairs, looking for any other clues or signs of who might have been using this space.

  “Do you think everyone knows about this staircase?” Patton asked.

  “I’d guess so. This place was built to the family’s specification. It’s not as if they inherited it and never discovered the hidden staircase.”

  “So any one of them could have used it last night.”

  “I guess so,” I admitted.

  “There’s nothing else here,” Patton said.

  He was right. The rest of the staircase was empty. There were no windows, no windowsills, no hiding places or nooks.

  “Let’s find Connie,” I said.

  And then, from behind us, the door at the bottom of the staircase closed with a thud and we listened as a key was put in the door and turned.

  I shuddered as I realised that we were locked in the secret staircase.

  13

  It turned out that my bedroom wasn’t that far from the one hosting Taylor and the twins, and occasionally I could hear Scarlett or Axel giggle.

  As soon as I heard Scarlett cry, I knew I had to get out of the room or I wouldn’t be able to resist going to her.

  I pulled on a sweater and left the room.

  As I crossed the hallway, I heard a muffled sob, and moved towards the noise, which appeared to be coming from behind a thick green curtain.

  “Hello?” I whispered into the curtain.

  The sobbing continued, together with the soothing tones of a male voice, and I pulled the curtain back to reveal a stone door with an imitation ruby as a doorknob.

  I pressed my ear to the door and the sobbing was definitely coming from inside.

  With a grunt, I pulled open the heavy stone door and peered into the dark space it revealed.

  I leaned in and fumbled around but there was no light switch, so I turned on the torch function on my phone. The space was revealed as a staircase.

  “Hello?” I called into the space.

  The sobbing grew louder but there were no footsteps, and I knew enough as a medium to recognise the signs of a spirit approaching.

  “Show yourself. I mean you no harm,” I said.

  Around the corner of the winding stairs came none other than my dead sister and her besotted man-friend, Patton.

  “You two! What are you doing in here?” I asked.

  I realised that it was Sage who was crying, and my stomach lurched.

  “What’s happened?”

  “We’re okay. We got locked in here. Sage was panicking that we’d miss the wedding,” Patton explained.

  “Really? You were this upset about missing my special day?” I flushed.

  “Well, you can’t put your make-up on without my guidance,” Sage said as her breath returned to normal.

  I rolled my eyes and examined the staircase a little more. It was a dingy, cold space.

  “You know the door wasn’t actually locked, right?” I asked.

  “We tried to open the door at the top but it was too heavy for us.”

  “The one down there is. We crept in and then someone locked the door behind us,” Patton said.

  I eyed the door at the top and realised that there was no knob on the inside of the door.

  As my stomach churned, I made a dash back up to the top of the stairs. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  Back in the safety and warmth of my bedroom, I switched on the kettle to make myself a strong coffee.

  “Are you okay?” Patton asked me.

  “I don’t like that staircase,” I admitted.

  “Me either! Try being trapped in there for an hour!” Sage exclaimed.

  “It was more like ten minutes,” Patton said with a wry smile.

  “What were you doing in there, anyway?” I asked.

  “We were trying to
solve the case for you. I can’t let someone get away with ruining your wedding dress!”

  “Oh, Sage. The dress doesn’t matter. This pretend ghost has done worse things than that,” I said, although I was touched by how much Sage cared.

  “Like kill Libby Louth,” Patton said.

  “Exactly. It was good of you both to try and help, but you shouldn’t have been taking risks like that without telling me. What if you’d been stuck in that staircase for the whole of your afterlives?”

  “We just wanted to help,” Sage said with a pout.

  “I know. I’m really touched. Thank you both. But no more risks, okay?”

  “Okay. I guess this mystery is coming to an end anyway, since the winery is being put up for sale,” Sage said.

  I gasped. “The winery’s up for sale. Oh my, that’s it! I know who our ghost is!”

  14

  I gathered the Hawthorne family in the library.

  “Connie, I’ve tried everything,” Petunia apologised as she walked into the room. Her face was sombre.

  “It’s fine, please don’t worry,” I reassured her.

  “I’m not a seamstress, but I thought I might have been able to do something. The lace is so delicate, it’s impossible to work with. Well, impossible for me to work with.”

  “Really, it’s fine,” I said. I’d made my peace with the fact that I’d be walking down the aisle in a pair of jeans and a fairly nice floral blouse.

  Petunia squeezed my hand and moved across the room, where she sat next to Sidney on an old Chesterfield sofa.

  Tammy sat poker straight but with her gaze focused on a pile of paperwork. Bess watched me eagerly from a spot on the floor, where she sat cross-legged, as if she was in school. Heidi had spread out, taking a whole settee to lounge across, her attention firmly fixed on her phone.

  “Well, thanks for all joining me here,” I said. My voice was shaky as I began, but I knew I’d find my stride as I continued.

  “Have you worked it out?” Petunia asked.

  “I have. I realised quickly that there is no ghost of Hawthorne Winery,” I said.

  Petunia shook her head. “But, there is. We know that much. The noises in the night, the stolen jewellery. Your dress!”

  “All of those things have happened, I’m not suggesting you’ve made them up or imagined them. And I know the damage to my wedding dress was very real. But none of it was done by a ghost,” I said.

  “But, poor Libby…” Petunia said.

  “Poor Libby?” Tammy asked with a snort.

  “Let’s start with you, Tammy. You told me you barely knew Libby, but that’s not true, is it? You were actually very close to her. You were the reason she spent so much time here and got to know your whole family.”

  Tammy shrugged. “We were closest in age, that’s all.”

  Heidi eyed her sister but said nothing.

  “But that’s not all. You loved Libby, as more than a friend. I don’t think your parents knew, but your sisters suspected. The two of you were in a relationship, weren’t you?”

  Petunia gasped from across the room. “Tammy? Why wouldn’t you tell us?”

  Tammy’s whole chest had flushed deep red and she stared daggers at me. “Is there any reason why my personal business is relevant?”

  “It’s hugely relevant. Whenever a person dies in suspicious ways, the person closest to them becomes a person of interest.”

  “Well, I wasn’t the person closest to her. Sure, we had a bit of a thing, but we’d broken up. I found out some things about her. That’s what I meant when I said I barely knew her. Turned out she wasn’t the person I thought she was,” Tammy said. She choked on the words but kept a straight face.

  “And her death wasn’t suspicious. She saw something and crashed her car,” Sidney said.

  “She saw the ghost. She told me that herself,” Petunia said.

  “No, she didn’t. I believe you misheard her exact words. It would have been easily done, given the difficulty Libby would have had to make herself clear, and the emotion of the situation,” I said.

  “She definitely said it was the ghost,” Petunia said, but her voice was small as she looked down at her lap.

  “Someone did cause Libby’s death, but I can promise you that that person was very much alive. And they’re in this room right now,” I said.

  I watched as the family members looked around at each other. Heidi had even placed her phone down in her lap and appeared fully engaged for the first time since I’d met her.

  “In this room? Connie, I don’t understand. Are you saying that one of us is responsible?” Petunia asked.

  “Yes, that’s it exactly. And Tammy was the obvious first suspect.”

  “I didn’t do anything!” Tammy exclaimed.

  “You lied to me about your relationship with Libby. You’ve made no secret of the fact that you don’t have a high opinion of her,” I said.

  “That doesn’t mean I wanted her dead. Why would I need to kill her? We’d split up, she was already leaving my life!”

  “Maybe the end of the relationship wasn’t punishment enough for whatever she’d done to you. Or maybe she was the one who ended things, and you couldn’t let her get away with it. I’ve heard that there were arguments between the two of you, but can anyone else say who ended the relationship?”

  I looked from face to face. The family looked back at me.

  It was Heidi who cleared her throat and broke the silence. “Tammy ended things.”

  “You know that for sure?”

  “I overhead Libby asking her for a second chance on the night she died. Libby said if only she could get Tammy away from this place, away from this family, they’d be able to work things out,” Heidi said.

  “Very interesting. What did she mean by that, Tammy?” I asked.

  “I have no idea. She’d got it into her head that there was something dangerous going on here.”

  “And a few hours after saying that, she was dead. Maybe she was on to something,” I said.

  Tammy met my gaze and shrugged. “I have nothing else to say.”

  “That’s fine. You weren’t my only suspect. It seemed to me that the haunting was an attempt to convince Petunia to sell this place, and so I considered who would want to see that happen,” I said.

  Petunia looked around the room at her family, her expression sincere. “This is our family home. None of us would want to leave here.”

  “That’s not the case, I’m afraid to say. None of your daughters seem to have the attachment that you have to this place, and Sidney has been suggesting moving and leaving the ghost behind for a while.”

  “Well, I guess, but…”

  “Heidi in particular seems unhappy about how much of the family wealth is tied up into this place,” I said.

  Heidi laughed. “Of course I am! All of these bricks and empty rooms. What a waste!”

  “What difference does it make to you, Heidi?” Petunia asked.

  “It makes a big difference! Especially when I’m being forced to say no to big opportunities like the retreat!”

  Sidney groaned.

  “What big opportunities?” Petunia asked.

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  Petunia looked at Sidney, who shook his head.

  “I didn’t want to worry you,” he said.

  “Worry me?”

  “Heidi asked for $5,000 to attend some kind of quiet time holiday. I said no.”

  “It’s a silent retreat! And not just any silent retreat. It’s the one that every influencer worth a verified status needs to be at!” Heidi objected.

  “Why did you say no?” Petunia asked her husband.

  He gawped at her. “It’s $5,000 to learn how to sit in a room and be quiet! Of course I said no. Heidi has to be supporting herself now.”

  “Why? I wasn’t supporting myself at her age,” Tammy said.

  “Exactly! Thank you! That’s just what I said to him!”

  Bess watched the ba
ck and forth. “Daddy was still paying for my pursuits when I was your age too. Sorry, daddy.”

  “We allow these girls to explore all of their interests. That’s always been our position. What’s changed?” Petunia asked.

  “I just couldn’t see the sense of this…” Sidney stumbled over his words as the women in his life all focused their attention on him.

  “It’s not the first time he’s said no. It’s as if he values education but only if it comes with a qualification,” Heidi whined.

  “And yet, if the winery was sold, your parents would settle down in some place smaller. They’d free up a good chunk of money and no doubt split the equity between you three. Your life is in need of a cash injection, Heidi. Isn’t it?”

  “Of course it is! I have places I need to be seen at!”

  “Did that drive for money cause you to become the Hawthorne winery ghost? In an attempt to convince your parents to sell the place?”

  “What? Of course not!” Heidi exclaimed.

  “Well, if it wasn’t you, who was it?” I asked.

  Bess looked down at her lap, took a breath and then rose to her feet.

  “It was me,” she said.

  The others gasped.

  “Sit down, Bess. This whole investigation is nothing but a role-playing game for someone who wishes she’d joined the police. Don’t say anything else!” Sidney commanded.

  Bess met his gaze and gave an almost imperceptible nod. She remained on her feet and turned her gaze back to me.

  “You’re confessing to stealing the jewellery, to being responsible for Libby’s death, for ruining my wedding dress?” I asked.

  “All of it,” she said.

  “Tell us why.”

  “I… erm… it’s hard to put into words. I wanted some adventure,” Bess stuttered.

  I noticed Taylor appear in the doorway and gestured for him to come in. He had the handcuffs ready.

  “And that adventure included killing someone?” He asked.

  Bess’ eyes were wide as she took in the sight of him, dressed in his full Sheriff’s uniform.

  “I didn’t mean for Libby to die. I’m so sorry that she got caught up in it all,” Bess said. She began to cry.