Popcorn and Poltergeists

by Nancy Warren

  My heart was pounding, and I was very glad Rafe was close by, though no one would ever know it. He was more quiet than the books and just as still. I needed to copy his example and remain motionless.

  I wondered if this was a false alarm and these were students sneaking in to check research material, but no light was turned on. There was something incredibly stealthy about the way they moved. The one leading the way was short and wiry, while the one behind appeared larger and bulkier. They walked unerringly to the handicrafts section. Yes. My plan was working.

  Except, of course, now I was about to come face-to-face with a couple of people who’d quite possibly committed murder. I felt safe enough with Rafe here, but even so, I dreaded coming so close to that kind of evil.

  The only way Rafe had let me come tonight was if I promised to leave everything to him. I was only too happy to do so. I was nothing but a silent witness and the probable dialer of 999 if we did trap Wilfrid Eels’ killer.

  A flashlight was turned on, and in its reflected light, I recognized the Travis the maintenance guy. “It’ll be in here, Mr. Cameron,” he said in a soft voice. I watched and waited, and I felt Rafe watching and waiting, as the two took down several manuscript binders before getting the right ones. We’d given Amelia Cartwright general descriptions of the two binders but hadn’t wanted to be too specific in case our rat smelled the trap. To my surprise, I even recognized the big guy. It was the man I’d seen with Cassandra Telford outside my shop the very night Wilfred Eels was murdered. So this was Reginald Cameron. I felt hot and annoyed. Why hadn’t I connected the billionaire book collector with the man I’d seen escorting Cassandra Telford? I could have saved us all a lot of time in apprehending the culprit. Well, we were going to get him now.

  Of course, I was impatient for them to find the Brontë and the Shelley. I had my phone ready to film them in action, but not yet. We waited until the exact moment that they had the two bound books open on the table and Reginald Cameron, after studying the precious manuscripts, let out of a cry of delight. “Finally,” he said, almost in reverence.

  His joy didn’t last long. Amelia Cartwright, who had refused to be left out of the sting operation, flipped on the big lights, and I got busy filming with my camera. The two men looked up with identical expressions of horror and surprise. And then their reactions became markedly different. Travis dropped the flashlight and sprinted for the door. Rafe was on him in a second, chasing him out the door.

  Amelia Cartwright walked up to the American billionaire book collector. He remained with the books as though he knew he only had a few minutes to spend with them and he couldn’t waste a second. She said, as though he were an extremely poor student she was about to expel, “Reginald Cameron, I am very disappointed in you.”

  “Please, Professor Cartwright. I’ll pay anything. I must have these.”

  “Tell it to the judge,” she said in a clipped headmistress tone and, taking him by the arm, led him toward the door. “No manuscript is worth killing over.”

  “Killing? What are you talking about? Look. We can make a deal. I’ve got enough money to set this college up for eternity. You can keep the Shelley. All I want is the Brontë.”

  When they got to the door, Amelia turned, knowing I was there somewhere. “Please, Lucy, stay with these manuscripts until I return.”

  Cameron was still trying to make a deal when the door shut behind them. I turned off my phone and walked over to where the manuscripts lay open on the table. I stared down at them. I imagined the two women writers, bent over pages very much like these, writing their stories without a clue that one day people would pay millions for these scribbled-on pages. Would kill for them.

  Betrayal. The word echoed around me as though Georgiana Quales had whispered in my ear. Danger. Something didn’t feel right.

  Betrayal. Danger.

  Then I realized how stupid I’d been as all the bits and pieces of the pattern suddenly came together in my mind. We’d made one error in our planning. I knew it now, so clearly.

  I had to get out of here, had to protect the real manuscripts. I had to tell Rafe.

  I turned around suddenly, the urge to run so strong I couldn’t resist it. That sudden turn saved my life.

  A marble bust was crashing down toward me. Vaguely I noted that it was Charlotte Brontë being used as a weapon. Had I not turned, it would have crashed into the back of my skull, no doubt crushing it. As it was, I jumped but not quick enough. As I put up my arm to ward off the blow, I was struck in the arm and shoulder. The pain was so sudden, shocking, and intense that I stumbled and fell. Fiona McAdam stood over me clutching the bust of her idol, a disturbing light in her eyes.

  I heard the crack as the back of my head hit the table, and then I was tumbling into darkness. Fiona McAdam. Hers was the betrayal. It was she who was a danger to me. Now I knew it all, and it was too late.

  She put down the bust. I heard it hit the table, and then I was vaguely aware of her hands hooking my armpits, and she was dragging me. The pain was so intense in my shoulder and in my head that I cried out, weakly, “No.”

  “Quiet.”

  “Betrayal. It was you.”

  How could I have been so stupid? “You published Landscapes of the Mind eleven years ago. You even spent months at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Why? Unless you were studying original manuscripts.”

  I moaned as she bumped me along the ground.

  “You knew about the Brontë here at St. Mary’s. You must have met with Georgiana Quales, and she’d have let you study it as a professional colleague. But you wanted more, didn’t you? You wanted that manuscript for yourself.”

  She laughed softly. “Bit late to figure it out, aren’t you? You’re no Sherlock Holmes, my dear. You’re not even a Miss Marple. At least she was an efficient knitter.”

  Talk about kicking a person when they were already down.

  “Georgiana Quales began to suspect that you were obsessed with Charlotte Brontë. I should’ve realized when I was in your apartment that day. I just thought you were a thorough teacher.”

  She’d been pulling me forward, but slowly, and she kept grunting and moaning almost as badly as I was. Suddenly, she dropped me, and my head hit the floor. Dimly, I saw her sitting near me and rubbing her own arm. It hadn’t completely healed from her injuries of last week. Too bad, especially now I realized they had to be self-inflicted.

  “Why did you kill Wilfrid Eels?”

  She was flexing her fingers and stretching out her arm as though she were doing her therapy exercises. “I wouldn’t have. It was entirely his own fault. I thought he’d found it, you see. He was forever in here working, but I often saw him searching through books. I was certain somebody was paying him to search for the manuscripts too. I’m sure he used to break things to give him more time here in the library. He was so ignorant, I doubted he’d know those manuscripts if he found them, but then one day I saw him giggling with glee, carrying a leather-bound book.”

  “And you thought he’d discovered the Brontë?”

  “It was the only one I cared about.” She was shrugging her shoulders now and shaking her hand about, maybe trying to get the feeling back. Take your time, I wanted to say.

  “I heard him. ‘I found it. I found it.’ He was talking to himself, dancing up and down with glee. I didn’t recognize the binding as a book I’d seen before. And I had been going methodically through this library novel by novel, volume by volume, and yet this stupid, ignorant man had stumbled upon what I had searched years for. After all the sacrifices I’d made, I was not letting him get away with that book.”

  “So you pushed him down the stairs to his death.”

  “Technically, he fell. I politely asked for the book. He refused to give it to me. I may have pushed him, but he tripped and fell the rest of the way himself.”

  “Just like Georgiana Quales?”

  She seemed to think about it. “No, I definitely killed her. I bashed her in the head first, like I tri
ed to do with you. Only she wasn’t so young, and her reflexes weren’t so good.”

  How could anyone be so casual about killing two people? And be in the middle of going for a third.

  I really had to pull myself together. If only I could think. My head was throbbing so hard I felt sick, and I couldn’t even lift my bad arm. I had to try to find a weapon. Or help.

  “Don’t look at me that way. You’d already be dead if I hadn’t had to throw myself off that ladder to avoid any suspicion falling on me. I’ll have to make another appointment with the physiotherapist after this. She won’t be pleased with me, overdoing it like this. She said gentle exercise.”

  “But Wilfred Eels didn’t even have the Brontë manuscript.”

  “No. Stupid man. He found a mis-shelved early edition of Jane Eyre with handwritten notations in the margins. He believed he’d found the missing manuscript. What he found was a student who’d scribbled notes for their essay in the margins of the novel.”

  “So he died for nothing.” I couldn’t understand her obsession. “It’s just a book.”

  “Just a book!” I thought she might strangle me with her bare hands for my insolence. “Those pages are full of the thoughts that spring from a brilliant mind and a pure heart, written in her own dear hand. I have spent my life worshiping Charlotte Brontë. Those pages were touched by her, moistened by her own bitter tears. Those are her own drawings. But the best part is the letters. She may not have known it, but she was writing to me. It will be a private correspondence, you see, as no other eye will ever see those beautiful letters.”

  “Are you going to write back?” I used sarcasm to try and push past my fear and sickness. It didn’t work.

  She got to her knees and said, quite briskly, “All right, that’s enough chitchat. Let’s get this over with.”

  Since the thing she wanted to get over with was my death, I was not interested in cooperating. I reached out my good hand, which was my left and not much good at all. But fear would lend me strength; I was sure of it.

  I was a witch, I reminded myself. I could use my magic. Think. Think of a spell. The tidying spell came to mind. I discarded it. My head hurt so badly I couldn’t think clearly. Panic wasn’t helping. I glanced around, looking for inspiration. If I had an hour to spend with my grimoire, I could stop this woman in her tracks. Maybe. But here I was surrounded by books, nothing but books, and I bet there wasn’t a decent grimoire among them.

  Wait. Books. As a weapon went, maybe a book wasn’t much, but maybe I could manage to call one to me.

  “Book to my hand, I now command, So I will, so mote it be.”

  Probably the worst attempt at a spell ever.

  And yet, my left, reaching hand caught the edges of a book as she dragged me by the cases of books. It was a paperback, but I clutched it. If I could smack her in the face, maybe I could roll away. Run.

  I was growing cold. Probably already dying. I could feel her dragging me, and I didn’t have the strength to resist. I tried to bash her in the face with my paperback but she batted it away.

  Behind her, I could see how close we were getting to the staircase of death. There was rope across it and a sign warning library patrons to steer clear, but that wasn’t going to stop Fiona McAdam.

  “Help.” My voice was husky and weak. Rafe. Why didn’t he hear me? “Help. Rafe.” They say that drowning victims see their lives flash before their eyes. What I saw was a flash of white, and then I heard a scream. For a moment, I thought it was me screaming.

  But it wasn’t. Fiona’s head jerked back, and a book fell to the floor beside me. I looked around, and another book came flying across the room and hit her in the head. And then another. She shrieked. “Stop it! Stop it!”

  Fiona McAdam was nothing if not determined. Books kept flying at her and bouncing off her, and still, she dragged me forward. We were close to those treacherous, murderous stairs now. I had to do something. The poltergeist was an ally, but I was going to have to save myself. I managed to get hold of one of the books that hit Fiona and bounced off. It was a hardback. With my good arm I tried again, going for the nose. I gave it everything I had and had the satisfaction of knowing I’d hit my target when she screamed and fell back. A voice yelled, “Lucy, move!”

  I didn’t recognize the voice, but I followed blindly. In that instant when Fiona let go of me to put a hand to her nose, I rolled. It was all I could manage, and that effort nearly made me pass out again. Then I heard an almighty crash. A bookshelf had smashed down between us. It didn’t hit Fiona, but the books all cascaded on of top of her, leaving her immobilized at least for a couple of minutes. I got to my hands and knees. An agonized scream was dragged from my throat.

  Make that hand and knees. Holding my poor, wounded arm against my chest, I crawled on my one good arm and two knees toward the door. If only I could find my phone. “Rafe,” I yelled again. It came out like a tired squeak.

  But it was enough.

  The main door crashed open, and he was there. He ran toward me, and three police officers came running behind him. “Fiona,” I said. “It was Fiona.”

  They ran past me to Fiona McAdam, who was pinned beneath the books, shrieking and bucking as she tried to free herself.

  Rafe gently lifted me up off the floor and cradled me to his chest. “Lucy. My darling. Lucy.”

  “Rafe.”

  His voice seemed to come from far away. “Stay with me,” he commanded, his voice ragged.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I said, and then I closed my eyes and drifted away.

  Chapter 19

  I woke up in the hospital. Rafe was sitting beside me. A nurse came in almost immediately and told me I had a concussion and my shoulder was dislocated and the whole arm badly bruised.

  Needless to say, Rafe was devastated that he had left me in danger. If a vampire could look pale, he would have. To make both of us feel better, I said, “The good news is I’m not dead.”

  “And the arm’s not broken.” Then he took my left hand in his. “I promised to keep you safe. I failed.”

  “You came when I called you.” I felt dry-mouthed and disoriented. “You always do.”

  “I was so caught up in my anger and wanting justice for Georgiana Quales that I didn’t hear you at first.”

  “I think Georgiana saved me.”

  “It should have been me.” He couldn’t do enough for me. I refused to let him take me back to Crosyer Manor for my convalescence, as he called it. I had a strong feeling I’d be wrapped up in cotton wool and pampered so much I’d never want to leave. It was an alluring prospect, but I did have a shop to run and an independent life to live.

  Rafe did his best to be understanding and, thanks to my concussion, didn’t waste a lot of time arguing with me. Gran and Sylvia picked me up from the hospital in the Bentley, and I was driven home in style. Rafe sent William Thresher to cook my favorite foods and stock my fridge. Beautiful bouquets of flowers arrived, and every third day they would magically be replaced with fresh ones.

  All the vampires visited me, and I discovered the best part about a dislocated shoulder was not having to knit. I didn’t even feel guilty as they sat at my bedside, knitting and crocheting away while they shared all the news.

  Rafe was my most frequent visitor, and with every look, every small gift, every new bouquet, he was saying, “I’m sorry I nearly got you killed.”

  I felt protected and pampered by all of them. If I so much as groaned, Gran or Sylvia would be at my bedside flipping my pillows, feeding me painkillers, bringing snacks and drinks. It was Gran who told me that Rafe had insisted they be constantly on the alert in case I needed anything. She was quite indignant when she told me that. “As if he had to tell your own grandmother how to nurse you.”

  The worldly-wise Sylvia explained to Gran, “He’ll never forgive himself for not being there when she needed him. He wants to be here himself night and day, but his sense of guilt and propriety forbid it.”

  Putting it into
more modern English, I said, “He doesn’t want to come across like a creepy stalker.”

  Sylvia shook her head. “You modern women have no sense of romance. Lucy, he’s telling you he loves you.”

  I knew that. I also knew that I needed time. Nearly getting killed does put your life in perspective. I found myself savoring every minute, from the taste of my morning coffee to the scent of each fresh bouquet that arrived.

  While I was incapacitated, I read Jane Eyre. Not the priceless manuscript, but a paperback copy. I’d read it once years ago, but having nearly died because of Charlotte Brontë, I felt a kinship. And, strangely, as I read the novel, I felt a strong connection to that heroine.

  She’d begun friendless and out of place as I had. And Mr. Rochester bore a striking resemblance to Rafe Crosyer, with his brooding ways and commanding character. I got to the end of the book. Reader, I married him, echoed around in my head.

  Fiona McAdam had been arrested the night she tried to kill me. Theodore told me he suspected her lawyers would go for a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, which would see her go to a hospital for the criminally insane rather than jail. If there was literary justice, she should end up locked in an attic. I didn’t mind where she went, so long as she couldn’t hurt anyone else.

  It was Sylvia who told me Reginald Cameron’s lawyers were hard at work to keep him from even being charged with a crime. I was initially furious. Maybe he hadn’t turned out to be a murderer, but he’d definitely had theft in mind when he hired the St. Mary’s caretakers to search for those manuscripts.

  He’d tried to buy them from Georgiana Quales, and when she refused, he began inviting Cassandra Telford to lunch and tea. She’d made the appointments in Georgiana Quales’s calendar, but she was the one who’d attended, not her boss. She admitted she’d been initially flattered that a man like that would be interested in her, and it wasn’t until recently that she’d understood he was more interested in her connection to the college. That showed a definite want of delicacy, but apparently you didn’t go to jail for using women.