by Mary Bowers
Marty Frane gave me the willies right away. His eyes were almost no color at all – a very light gray-green – and he had a way of looking at you appraisingly, as if he knew all about the Twinkies you ate back in 1960, after your mom told you not to.
I took the seat facing all of them and looked at Kyle for the first question, but Detective Frane took over, and I found myself staring into his pane-of-glass eyes and feeling unsettled.
“Mrs. Brown tells us you were running the event last night where her sister, Eden O’Sullivan, was the fortune teller?”
“Yes. Chrissie and I were talking about it this morning. I wanted to talk to her about something else, but when I found out that Eden hadn’t come home last night, I sort of forgot the other thing.”
“What was the other thing?”
I shrugged. “A friend is looking for somebody to hook up her Wi-Fi. Eden said she knew a guy. I wanted to ask Chrissie about him.”
He made a disinterested grunt and switched gears. “What time did you open the Halloween event?”
“Seven-thirty.”
“Everything was running smoothly?”
“Pretty much. Except I thought for a while there I was going to have to be the fortune teller. Eden was late.”
“Do you always have a fortune teller for Halloween? Have you always played the part in the past?”
“We never had a fortune teller before. We always have a meeting about a month before an event so we can plan, and this year I had nine volunteers. We met over at Don’s Diner and threw some ideas around. The Haunted House was already part of the plan, because Rita Garnett called me and offered her new house a couple of days before, when she heard we were going to have a Halloween thing. Other than that we didn’t have much in mind. It was too cold for a dunk tank, and I just don’t like carnival games in general. We were using the Whitby House grounds, so we didn’t have infinite space to work with. We always have ‘ghouls’ wandering around, and tables of easy-sell stuff, like jewelry. Mostly, it’s a Haunted House, though, and we make most of our money on admissions. And of course, we always sell the usual stuff from the four major food groups: popcorn, hot dogs, soda and ice cream.”
Not even a chuckle. “Was Ms. Garnett at the meeting?”
“No. I told her we were using a professional to prep the house, and she trusted us.”
“A professional?”
“Edson Darby-Deaver.”
“Oh, him,” he said dismissively. “Who else was there?”
Bill Weyer prepared to write, and I recited the names slowly. “Well, Ed was there – Edson Darby-Deaver – and Angie Kelly. She’s my receptionist at Orphans of the Storm, so technically, she’s an employee, not a volunteer. Ditto for Florence Purdy – she’s an employee. She runs the resale shop, Girlfriend’s, on Locust Street. Let me see . . . Bernie Horning was there. She was going to do a spread in The Beach Buzz, so I invited her. My friend Michael Utley was there. He’s a retired lawyer.”
“They live together, out at Cadbury House,” Kyle confided, leaning toward Detective Frane. Bill smiled, wrote, said nothing and kept his eyes on his notepad. Like a bunch of high school boys.
“Other than that, I think it was just Myrtle – my housekeeper – she’s Florence’s sister, and she always wants to get in on the act, but usually she’s not much help.” I caught Kyle’s eye and remembered this was an official interview about a missing person. “Barnabas Elgin; he was our creepy butler. And, of course, Eden. I think that’s everybody.”
Bill counted and said, “Eight.”
“And I made nine.”
“And whose idea was it to have a fortune teller?”
“It was Eden’s idea. She was all worked up about it. Brought the meeting to a standstill while she went on and on about how psychic she is, how she’s got the whole act worked out, how she’s always telling everybody’s fortune, and she always dresses up as a fortune teller for Halloween. Then she started giving us examples of how she’d read the futures of her friends and told them what celebrities were going to die soon, and she was always right. At least, that’s what she claimed. If the food hadn’t come right about then, she would have hijacked the whole meeting. Fortunately when she started eating, Ed began to work out the details of what he was going to do for the Haunted House, and if anybody can hijack a meeting, it’s Ed. Eden never got another word in until the end, when we decided what time we’d set up her tent, how Ed would do the lighting, and what time she’d open for business.”
“What time did she show up?”
“I’m not sure she actually did.”
They just looked at me.
“I mean, somebody showed up,” I continued. “It was around 7:20. We already had a line. I was hanging around waiting for her, getting ready to go in and tell fortunes myself if she didn’t show. I hadn’t seen her costume yet, and Eden tends to dress . . . uh, revealingly. She’s got a cute little figure, and she likes to show it off. I wanted to make sure her costume wasn’t X-rated. I had some gauzy material on hand to drape around her if she showed up nearly nude, and some of the tinkly bits from my old belly-dancing costume – don’t ask – it was a class I took about ten years ago. Just as I made up my mind to start getting dressed, here she came. As it turned out, her costume looked great. Everything covered up decently. Only now that I’ve had time to think it over, I’m not sure that was Eden.”
“Why not?”
“Well, she was wearing that get-up, but she had a veil pulled so it almost covered the sides of her face. You don’t wear a veil like that. At least I don’t think you do.” I stopped to think. The nuns back at Annunciata in Chicago had worn some sort of white hoods snugged around their faces, with the black veils draped over the top. In the face of authority, I suddenly became precise. “Actually, I don’t know how you wear a fortune teller’s veil, but it didn’t look right. She was all eyes and mascara and glittering jewelry. And then there was her voice.”
“What about her voice?”
“She was almost growling.”
“So you think she was trying to disguise her voice?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. At the time I thought she was doing it for effect.”
After a few seconds, Frane said, “Do you have any idea who it was?”
“Wait a minute,” I said, feeling chills start to creep up my spine. “You’re not surprised, are you? You already knew it wasn’t Eden, didn’t you? Did Chrissie tell you what I said?”
“No, she just called and said her sister was missing,” Frane said. “We like to interview people ourselves, instead of taking things second-hand. Can you remember anything else about the woman who showed up last night? Are you sure it was a woman?”
“Wait a minute,” I said, suddenly desperate to know, though I was already pretty sure. I couldn’t go on until he actually said it. “How did you know that wasn’t Eden last night? Because you already knew.”
“We know because a woman’s body was discovered along State Route 1 this morning. From the description Ms. Brown gave when she reported her sister missing, we determined it was Eden O’Sullivan. She had been dead for about 24 hours.”
“Oh.” It was all I could manage to say. Eden had been dead for hours before the event had even started. I stared at them. “What happened? I mean . . . you don’t think she was hit by a car, do you?”
“No. Now, Ms. Verone, would you answer the question, please? Are you sure it was a woman in the fortune teller’s costume last night?”
“No,” I said forlornly. Then I quickly said, “Yes. I think it was a woman.”
“Why? With a disguised voice and a costume and a lot of make-up, how would you know? A man might have pulled the veil tightly around his face to hide a beard.”
I was shaking my head as he talked. “I know because she took my hand. I looked down at her hand as she held mine. I think I would have known if it had been a man’s hand. And there’s something else. I think she had a tattoo or a birthmark on her hand. She was covering it with
make-up, but the more I think about it, I think it was a tattoo. It seemed to be a design of some kind.”
“The body didn’t have any hand tattoos. There was one on the upper back, and one on the right leg. Nothing on the hands.”
“Oh.”
“Can you describe the tattoo?”
“It was small. Blurry. Kind of rounded. Lots of people had their fortunes told after I saw her, and the make-up seemed to be rubbing off. Maybe the other customers were able to see it better.”
“We’ll check it out. Can you think of anything else?”
“Well . . . she chose the fortune teller’s name herself. I suppose that’s not important, really, but it seemed to mean something special to her. Madame Domani. Actually, she wanted it to be Madame Felice Domani, but we didn’t want a first name. I recognized right away that the name meant something in Italian. I happen to be Italian myself.”
“You don’t look Italian,” Frane said.
“My family was from Verona, in the north of Italy. I’m a green-eyed blond, like a lot of northerners. Anyway, that’s why I immediately recognized what the name meant. It’s Italian for ‘happy tomorrow.’ I didn’t point it out at the time, because she was already taking up too much time at the meeting, and I really didn’t care. I needed to keep things moving along, but I did wonder why she’d chosen that name. And she pronounced it the Italian way – Fay-lee-chuh Do-mon-ee, not the American way – Fil-ees Dom-inee, so she must have known what it meant. So, why Italian? With a name like Eden O’Sullivan, it doesn’t figure.”
“She’s probably been using it for years,” Frane said without much interest. “You said she liked to play fortune teller.”
The detectives got up to go, and I was relieved. After they were gone, Kyle asked me to stay a few minutes, and then sat back with his arms crossed and looked at me.
“So, Miz Taylor,” he began like a wiseguy, “whatcha going to do about this?”
I did a double-take. “What am I supposed to do about this, Kyle?” I shot back.
“You got a nose for trouble, don’t you? And this hits close to home, her being your volunteer and all.”
“And it being my Halloween event and all. What’s your point?”
“You planning on trying to get to the bottom of all this?”
“All this? Are you telling me she was murdered?”
“She was.”
“How?”
“Suffocated. And she was moved after she was killed . . . quite a few hours after she was killed. She was taken out to the highway in the middle of the night and dumped. A builder on his way to work found her. She didn’t have any identification on her, but with that blue hair . . . people are dyeing their hair a lot of weird colors these days, but we don’t find many bodies with bright blue hair. When Chrissie Brown called to report her sister missing, she told us about the hair color and described the tattoos. With that information, there wasn’t much doubt, but we had her view the body and she confirmed it’s her sister.”
“Oh, how horrible!” I stopped and looked at him. “It’s so creepy, knowing I was sitting right there in the fortune teller’s tent with somebody who might have been a killer.”
“We don’t know that yet. Eden might have decided she had better things to do and got a friend to sit in for her. In that case, the person she had better things to do with probably killed her. We’ll sort it all out.”
“Did Chrissie tell you about the fight Eden had Friday night?”
“She did. We’re following up on that, too. We actually know what we’re doing, Taylor.”
I hitched myself up and stared at him. “Are you telling me to stay out of it?”
“Not at all,” he said, surprising me. He stood up. “But you will tell me anything you happen to find out, right?”
“Of course. If I think it’s relevant.”
“You let me decide if it’s relevant. And don’t go getting yourself killed,” he added, ushering me to the door. “Bernie would never forgive me.”
As soon as I was back in my car, I tried to call Chrissie, but my call went straight to Voicemail. Somehow I couldn’t just go back to Cadbury House and take inventory, like nothing had happened. I was pretty badly shaken. I left a message for Chrissie to call me if I could do anything to help, then called Edson Darby-Deaver and told him what had happened. Why Ed, I didn’t know. I have friends I’m closer to. Maybe it was some kind of a knee-jerk reaction, because we’d been through traumatic events together before.
He offered to come to Cadbury House, and I said no, why don’t I just come over to your place. Somehow, I wanted to talk it over with him first, and I didn’t want anybody else listening in.
Ed lived in St. Augustine Beach, in a little gated enclave on Anastasia Island. From Tropical Breeze, it was a nice, wide-open, 30-minute drive up A1A across barrier islands and bridges. I hoped the drive would settle me down.
It didn’t, but by the time I pulled up in Ed’s driveway, I at least had my thoughts organized.
Chapter 5
Ed’s house was the first one on the left as you pulled into Santorini Drive. There were only eight houses in all, and the development had its own private walkover to the beach. They were imitation Greek villas, but had been beautifully done. The ones on the ocean end were downright palatial. Ed’s house, being at the roadside, was a tidy little ranch with a screened-in lanai at the back.
He was waiting for me in the doorway when I got out of my car, and he came forward solemnly and said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you, Ed. I didn’t really know her all that well, but she did seem like she enjoyed life. It’s just so sad.”
“And shocking. Please. Come inside.”
He ushered me into his office and I sat down and looked around. It had been a few months since I’d seen it. His office was painted a fresh, light blue, which he called Haint Blue. I loved the color, but naturally, since Ed had chosen it, it had some folklore behind it. It was the color of cool water, and was supposed to exclude ghosts, as a water barrier would. He had hung some spirit portraits around the walls. I don’t believe in that kind of thing, but still, they made me uneasy.
He saw me frowning at them and said, “I’ve grown rather fond of them, in spite of the way that investigation went.”
“Yeah,” I said, because I had been there. “Kinda went sideways.”
“You put things so colorfully. Still, the portraits have a certain sentimental value, I suppose. Like souvenirs.”
Most people collect tee shirts or coffee cups, but Ed wasn’t most people. His travel adventures usually involved running around abandoned insane asylums with a video crew, calling for the spirits of the deranged dead to come forth and be exorcized. Like they’d just come on out. The fact that he enjoyed having pictures of a ghost staring at him all day was typical. I had to make myself look away from the blackened eyes of the misty figure in the painting to my right, and when I looked at Ed, I could still feel those painted eyes staring at me.
“Bastet was upset last night, and she still wasn’t herself this morning,” I said. I didn’t go on. I didn’t need to.
“Indeed?” He came forward a bit, resting his forearms on the desk and clasping his hands together. “So you were already aware that something was wrong last night.”
I looked away to my left, but once again I found myself staring into the eyes of a spirit painting. In my agitation, I stood up and walked over to the window. As always, I was wearing the Egyptian cat amulet I had received at the same time my cat, Bastet had come into my life. It had become a good luck charm. No, more than that. I was putting it on automatically every morning when I got dressed, like my underwear and flip-flops. When I wore it, I felt . . . safe. Complete.
“It’s difficult for you, isn’t it?” Ed murmured behind me. He was genuinely sympathetic, and I knew it. “Your encounter with the paranormal came too late in your life for you to be able to accept it easily. And it has changed you, in a way that I think may well b
e permanent.”
I lifted my head but said nothing, and I continued to stare blindly out of his office window. I could hear him settling back in his chair behind me.
“We’ve explored this before, Taylor, but I think you’re still resisting the obvious. Your cat . . . you’ve suspected from the very beginning that she’s not simply a cat who came into your life at random. I suspect the same thing. In fact, I’m quite convinced she is a ‘familiar.’ Should I explain the concept of the ‘familiar?’”
I turned. He had removed his wire-rimmed glasses and was playing with them on the blotter. They were always his focal point when he was uneasy. Without the glasses, his eyes looked weak.
“I looked it up myself,” I said shortly. I came back and sat down. “The first word in the definition was ‘demon.’ Do you think my cat is a demon, Ed?”
He smiled, tapping his glasses a few more times, then putting them back on. “Of course not. The definitions vary, and you happened onto an unfortunate one. Other words you could have found are ‘companion,’ and ‘assistant,’ and even ‘pet.’ Do you think Bastet is a demon?”
“I think Bastet is a cat. And before you start talking about denial, take into account that sometimes we’re uneasy about things before they even take shape in our own minds, and maybe when I got home last night, I already suspected that something was wrong about our Madame Domani, and the cat picked up on it. I was tired. I was thinking about a thousand things, not just the fortune teller’s tent. I was even too tired to ask Michael how much money we’d made until this morning, and you know how I am about fundraisers for Orphans.”
He smiled. “Well, you know I’m the last one to call you crazy. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? When you could be home talking it over with Michael?”
He had me there, and I looked away, avoiding the eyes of the ghost this time.