by Mary Bowers
“If it was used as a weapon on our victim, it should match up with a head wound.”
“Okay. So let’s hope they find it.” As it turned out, they did, but there was so much circumstantial evidence already it was just icing on the cake.
“Anything else up your sleeve?” Weyer asked me.
I thought about it. I looked at my cat. She was absent-mindedly licking a paw. “Nope,” I said. “That about covers it.”
I turned to look at Ed and he read my mind.
“It’s entirely possible,” he told me.
“What is?” Frane asked.
“That we’ll be going home early. I think even Oliver will agree that he’s gotten his money’s worth out of us.”
* * * * *
We found Oliver holed up in his room, and when he let us in, I saw young Horace across the room in the window seat with a large, open book in his lap.
Ed was already talking rapidly by the time we got inside, and I left him to explain everything to our employer. Oliver tamped him down, trying to take it all in, and I left them and walked over to Horace.
“I thought he’d be mad, but he wasn’t,” he told me excitedly.
“Who’s mad about what?” I asked, pulling up a heavy chair and sitting down close to him.
Ed and Oliver walked to the other window and had a quiet conversation. That’s where I should have been, persuading Oliver that our work was done and we should go home now. But I hadn’t had any time alone with Horace since I’d found him miserable behind the village shop fronts, and before I left Castle Moon, I wanted to make sure he was all right.
I looked more closely at the book and saw that it was about American history.
“Nobody’s mad,” he said. “I just told you. I thought Uncle Oliver would be angry that I wanted to change my name, but he wasn’t. I told my Mom about it once, and she said I should never, ever tell any of our relatives or I’d be drummed out of the family or something. I think she said, ‘Cast out without a sou,’ but that’s just how she talks. But Uncle Oliver said the name Horace went out with the flappers, whatever that means. And he likes Daniel Boone, too. He already had this book, over in his bookcase by the table, and he got it out and we’ve been looking through it together. He says he has something to show me in the dungeon, too.”
“That sounds ominous,” I said, taking the book from Horace and looking at a picture of Daniel Boone leading a group of pioneers out of the wilderness. Or into it.
“He says he has some memorabilia from the 1950s to show me. Something about a TV show he used to watch when he was a kid.”
I let my head rise with the memories; I couldn’t help but smile. Boys running around the neighborhood in coonskin caps. Long, toy rifles and buckskin chaps with fringe down the side seams.
Remember the Alamo!
Or was that Davy Crockett?
Epilogue
Oliver actually did agree that we were done ghost hunting, and could go home early. He even said something about adding a little bonus to the second half of our fees. I think the moment the séance was over, he was satisfied, but the detective work we did on the murders put us over the top.
“What about the book?” I asked him as he was walking me out of the castle. “The last one that Fawn wrote. I know it has commercial value, but there are, um, obvious parallels to family members.”
“I had to give a lot of thought to that,” he said, turning to face me once we were outside. Sunshine washed over me, and I gloried in it. I felt like I’d been hidden in a cave for weeks. “I decided to leave it to young Horace. Daniel, as he may be named by then. He can decide whether or not to publish it. As you say, as the very last Maxine Moon novel, it’ll make a lot of money. The way this family is going, he may need it. And by that time, the family will be four generations removed from the great Horace Blandings Moon. In all probability, nobody will really care.”
* * * * *
That first night at home, I felt as if I’d been away for weeks. On another planet. Michael and I stretched out on the couch in the great room at sunset and watched the pink tones glowing over the river. The French doors onto the veranda stretched from wall to wall, giving us a panoramic view.
Bastet had missed Michael, and she nearly tripped him three times while he carried my bag in and helped me unpack. Always underfoot. Michael’s, not mine.
On the couch, she cuddled into my stomach, but only because I was blocking his. Then she stretched out and gazed deeply over my shoulder into Michael’s ice-blue eyes.
“She missed you.”
“She was hanging out with Jeralyn the whole time, huh?”
“You know Bastet. I think she sensed the purple passions flying all around Jeralyn, Ryan and Julie. I think Julie was ruthless. She might actually have been as dangerous as Maxine. They were two of a kind. Jeralyn was probably in real danger, at that.”
“You think Bastet was protecting her?”
I shrugged. “I like to think so.”
“What about that love note from Oliver? Is he after Jeralyn, too?”
“Oh, that.” I sank my head down, ashamed of myself and of Ed, too, but how were we to know? “I happened to see Ryan’s signature on a statement Marty Frane had him sign. You know, an official statement. Like, a legal document? With his full, legal name?”
Michael reached across my waist to stroke Bastet’s tummy. She purred. “I think I’m way ahead of you. Ryan’s grandfather’s name was Orion, right? Ryan was named for him, and he dropped the O a long time ago. He still signs his notes with an O, though. Maybe makes a smiley-face out of it, if he’s feeling silly.”
I had to rise up on my elbow and turn to look into his face, upsetting our comfortable man-woman-cat sandwich. “You really figured that out all by yourself?”
“You know, you’re not the only one around here who’s good with riddles.”
“Pretty clever, Mr. Utley, esquire. I’d never actually seen Ryan’s signature, formally or informally. And he is not the smiley-face type. It turns out that when he’s signing hand-written notes, he just uses a quick O. For anything less than a legal document, he spells his name R-i-o-n. Of course, if I’d known that –“
“Sure, sure. Still, you have to admit, I’m not bad. You ought to bring me in on one of your adventures some time.”
I gave his crystalline eyes one last look, then settled back down. “I probably should. After all, I think Bastet likes you better than she does me, and I only started solving mysteries after she showed up. She must be magic. But I’m going to try very hard not to have any more adventures from now on.”
He gave a little chuckle, tickling the back of my neck with warm breath. “Adventures seem to come to you, whether you want them or not. So Rion and Jeralyn are all right now?”
“More than all right. Engaged. But Ed and I didn’t have the nerve to admit we had that note. Ed is keeping it for his files. For the sake of completeness, as he always says.”
“And Oliver Moon is not a dirty old man?”
“Quite the contrary. Do you know, he only made the job offer to Jeralyn in the first place because he realized there was something between her and Rion that very first Christmas, and he wanted to play cupid? He knew that Julie was trying to get her hooks into Rion, and he didn’t like her. But Rion was at a vulnerable point in his life after his divorce, and Oliver was worried he might do something stupid on the rebound. Oliver figured all that out. I always wondered why he thought a CPA would want to take a job as a secretary. The old softie.”
“And that worked out. Did your romantic old heart good, didn’t it?”
“Yeah. For a while there, I was worried myself. When Charlotte told me Rion thought it was a good idea for Maxine to hire Julie, I forgot that it would mean she’d have to move here from New York. He wanted to get her out of his neighborhood, not keep her in the family.”
“I see. So now you’re home, and you never have to go down into the dungeon, the murder room, or look at the creepy bust of Ho
race Moon again.”
“It doesn’t creep me out anymore. Somehow, after Julie died . . . .”
“Is that what the haunted bust was all about? He didn’t want the family bloodline tainted by a common gold-digger?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. And I may be seeing old Horace again. It turns out nobody in the family has ever liked that bust, even old Horace himself, back in the day. Oliver managed to get rid of it.”
“How?”
“He donated it to the Tropical Breeze Historical Society’s museum. So if you ever want to see it –“
“Or if you ever start to miss him –“
“Not gonna happen.”
We resettled together and snuggled a bit.
It was a little while before Michael spoke again. “So now everybody’s happy except for Cousin Clarice, who’s locked up in a box in Ed’s back room, listening to revolting music.”
“I haven’t finished.”
“Oh. Sorry. Go on.”
“At the last moment, as Rion and Ed were loading the Sensitainer into Ed’s car, Oliver came striding out of the house. Not running. He’s too aware of his own dignity for that. But he came out and stood by the car, staring down at the Sensitainer until Ed asked him if he was all right. The way Ed tells it, nobody said anything for a full three minutes, and all the while you could just barely hear some drippy song playing inside the box.”
“Don’t tell me. Oliver just couldn’t do that to Cousin Clarice, no matter what kind of a pest she’d been.”
“He admitted he didn’t believe we could catch ghosts when he first hired us, but something changed around the second night. I think he believes now.”
“He really thinks Ed caught a ghost?”
“I think he believes there’s a chance. And the music was the last straw. He couldn’t even stand getting a hint of it, what little he could hear. He decided not to take a chance that Clarice was actually in there. He told Ed to bring the Sensitainer back inside and let her go. And then – get this – when Ed reversed the polarity, or whatever it is he does, Oliver made a point of looking up into the air and saying very loudly that if somebody started clinging to the back of his neck again, he was bringing Ed back and having him can her again, this time for good.”
“’Can her?’”
“His words exactly.”
“Well,” Michael said, settling his face into the nape of my neck and tickling me with a little kiss, “let’s hope Clarice goes back to her old tricks.”
“What?”
“You’ve already established your ghost-canning fee. Orphans could always use another $100,000.”
I snapped to attention (you know, sideways, on the couch), mouth open, eyes popped, not moving a muscle. “Absolutely! Let’s hope Cousin Clarice just can’t help herself.”
“Amen.”
THE END