Even more quickly than the first time, all the money was spent. Charles started borrowing from the banks against next year’s check.
Charlotte spent more and more time alone in her tower bedroom overlooking the black pool. She barricaded herself against her husband and wept as she complained to her doll. She wondered if her doll had lost its magic or if she had just imagined that it had special powers when she was a young girl.
One day a messenger came. It was a letter from her father written in a faltering hand. He was ill with a tropical fever and did not expect to survive. He was leaving her a great fortune, but he knew that by now she would not want her husband to get his hands on it. So it was up to Charlotte.
He told her that her inheritance was the treasure from the Spanish ship The Queen Isabella that had sailed the Spanish Main and had sunk in a hurricane off the Florida coast hundreds of years before. He and his crew had discovered it wrecked on the sandbars, had brought its treasure ashore, and had buried it in a secret place. He had drawn a treasure map to lead Charlotte to the riches. Captain Williams and his crew had buried it in a clever place right at Ocean House. Charlotte was sitting right on top of it.
Charlotte sat for a long while and stared at the map, which would be the last communication she would receive from her father. So that explained everything! The treasure of the Queen Isabella was why her father had so carefully guarded her while she was a young girl. That’s why he’d given her the magical doll. But then somehow Charles had heard about Captain Williams’s luck and had hunted her down as the sole heiress.
Charlotte calculated that it would take Charles only a year to go through the greatest fortune in America. When she thought of the happiness that could have been hers, she hated Charles as she had never hated him before. She decided to get revenge.
Just at that moment, Charlotte glanced over at her doll upon the shelf. The doll smiled back at her. Suddenly the idea popped into Charlotte’s head to conceal the treasure map inside the doll’s foot. The foot inside the shoe was made of rag and cloth and Charlotte had only to rip open the stitch and sew it up again.
When Charles heard that his father-in-law, Captain Williams, had died, he kissed his wife and said, “We’re rich!”
“You’re crazy, husband. Now my father will send us no more allowances.”
“What about the treasure?” Charles was not afraid to conceal his knowledge now. “I asked the messenger. He said he brought you the treasure map.”
Charlotte set her mouth in a stubborn line. “I’ll die before I let you find that.”
Charles took to beating his wife on a regular basis. The neighbors heard her wailing alone at night in her bedroom. They saw him drinking, breaking bottles, and cursing. They avoided the place.
The former artist became obsessed. He stripped the panelling off the walls. He pulled up the floorboards. He ripped apart the furniture. He even dug up the whole flower bed and uprooted trees. But the treasure of the Queen Isabella eluded him.
One night Charles broke into Charlotte’s room in a drunken rage. “If you don’t tell me where that treasure’s buried this very minute, I’m going to kill you!” His hair was mussed. His clothes were torn and wrinkled. His eye had a wild look. He seemed nothing like the gentleman dandy of a couple of years earlier.
“You can’t kill me. I’m leaving!” Charlotte said. She’d been preparing for this moment a long time.
He gaped after her in astonishment as she ran up the stairway to the turreted, octagonal tower. With a defiant last look, she hurled herself out the window down into the pool three stories below, crashing through a partially opened slat in the glass enclosure. She fell with such impact that she hit the bottom of the pool. She floated back to the surface as a corpse with wide-open eyes that stared accusingly straight up at her husband. In death her lips had curled upward in a smirk. She’d died with a secret on her lips.
Charles was soon to learn just what that smile meant.
During the long, dark hours of the night when he thought he was alone in the house, Charles heard a woman weeping. He got up out of bed to follow the sound. It led straight up to Charlotte’s old bedroom with the octagonal tower. When he opened the door, he saw nothing except his wife’s doll staring back at him.
At other times when he heard the crying woman in the night, he would find the cursed doll in his room. He flung it down the stairs and trampled on it. But the next day the doll was always back in Charlotte’s old room, as neat as you please, wearing one of her most elegant dresses, every one a perfect miniature of something Charlotte used to wear.
Charles went out of his mind living in the old house, which everyone said was haunted. One day, after he had chopped the house to pieces looking for gold, he was on the roof pulling off the roof tiles, thinking the gold might be hidden there. He happened to glance down at the black pool. The sun was shining down on it in just the right way. The brilliant gold letters CW glittered back at him.
He thought, Gold! He leaped off the roof into the pool. On the way down he suddenly realized that the pool was in the shape of a coffin! But it was too late. He died instantly. At the moment of impact, he saw the doll staring down from Charlotte’s window.
There was a curse on Ocean House. The ghost of Charlotte and her doll would get their revenge on whoever tried to steal her treasure.
“Who wrote this manuscript, anyway? Charles, Charlotte, and Captain Williams all died,” Sharon asked when she and Dan finished reading it.
Both Sharon and Dan looked uncomfortable as they stared at the doll with the long, curly blond hair. It was Charlotte’s. It had survived intact all these decades. But surely it wasn’t possible….
“Maybe Charlotte guessed what was going to happen and wrote it all down before she died,” Sharon said. But the explanation sounded ridiculous. The question went unanswered.
She changed the subject. “What happened to the treasure map?”
“Here it is, right with the other papers I found sewn up in the doll’s foot.”
“Is the treasure still buried at Ocean House?”
“You bet!” said Dan. “What’s more, the map tells us who killed Donna, Elaine, Marge, and Ruth.”
“But how would Charlotte, Charles, or Captain Williams have known a thing like that? They lived back at the beginning of the century!”
Sharon stopped short when she glanced at the doll. She noticed that the doll’s face wasn’t cracked anymore from the time she’d hit it against the wall. In fact, the doll was dressed, as neat as you please, in her long white gown with white lace trimmings, and her purple cape, and had pink and white flowers in her hair. Again the doll’s expression had changed. She was smirking.
Chapter 14
Sharon tore her eyes away from the doll. It was the only way to remain sane.
“I know how to catch the murderer now,” Dan boasted.
“The map tells you that, too?”
“It tells me all I need to know to figure it out.”
“How?”
“We’ll have a pool party!” said Dan.
“Another pool party! Nobody would come. The police would never allow it.”
“Not a pool party like that, silly. A private pool party just for us—and the murderer,” Dan said.
“I don’t understand. When? Where?”
“Right now. At the pool down there.” He nodded at the dark water shimmering beneath the window in the moonlight. Its inky surface was perfectly still. The jasmine blossoms, orchids, and other greenhouse plants gave off nighttime fragrances through the open slats.
Sharon would try anything to catch the murderer. She breathed a sigh of relief that at least her parents were gone for the night. She and Dan crept down to the kitchen and gathered whatever half-empty bags of potato chips, dips, and sodas they could find.
“Wait a minute. Maybe we should throw the Coke away. It was drugged. Remember?”
“That doesn’t matter.” Dan stuffed a Coke bottle under his arm. “We j
ust need props. We’re not actually going to drink anything.”
Sharon didn’t object. But this seemed like the weirdest party she’d ever heard of.
They lifted the battery-operated CD player from the parlor and stuffed it into a brown grocery bag because Dan insisted that they needed music. “Which CD’s do you want?” Sharon looked through the rack, picking up various country western, hard rock, and metal as well as some older Beatles and Elvis albums.
Dan shrugged. “The louder the better. After all, we do have to let the murderer know we’re having a party and he’s invited.”
Sharon remembered where her mother kept the keys to the pool enclosure. They stumbled out to the pool, dumped everything near the deep end, and went back for more.
“Where did your parents put the chairs and umbrellas?” Dan asked. Since the police had all but ordered the resort complex closed, Sharon’s parents had started to put items like chairs and umbrellas into storage.
“What do we need those for? There’s only gonna be three of us, remember?”
“We wanna attract the murderer’s attention, right?” Dan asked.
“I guess, but we don’t need umbrellas. The sun won’t be up for hours.”
“I dunno. I think things could get pretty hot tonight before it’s all over.”
Sharon led Dan to the storage building behind the pool complex. They dragged out the tables with umbrellas and a few chairs. Then they set up the refreshments and the CD player. Dan said, “No party would be complete without flashing lights to go with the music. I’ll have to go get them. See if you can get the video camera equipment. We want to make sure we have evidence. The police might find it very interesting.”
Sharon hurried back into the parlor and flung open the cabinets built into the walls above the TV set. Out fell a wig, a long dress, yellowed handkerchiefs with the initials CW sewn in gold thread, and even a jar of red paint that looked like fake blood. There stood a tape recorder. Sharon lost all track of time as she flicked it on and listened to the recording of a lady weeping. It was the one she’d so often heard at night time when she thought she was hearing things.
Ghosts! Yeah, right.
Sharon was so furious that she stuffed all the crap into a brown grocery bag to show Dan. Then she spotted a jar shoved all the way into the back corner of the cabinet. She forced open the lid. It contained a ground-up powder. Is this what somebody had put in her sodas?
Who else could have done this except Irene? Angel, Vicki, or Sue? Who else had access to the house at all times? She was about to scream for Dan when she heard footsteps rushing down the main staircase.
“Sharon, where are you?” came a girl’s voice.
No one was going to play these games on her anymore! She took off across the lobby toward the main door. People were chasing her, calling, “Sharon, wait a minute! We’ve gotta talk to you.” She looked over her shoulder and spotted Irene, Angel, Vicki, and Sue in their nightgowns in hot pursuit.
She’d show them! She slipped through a side door when they’d assumed she’d gone out the back. She heard them run outside into the garden looking for her—in the wrong direction. She didn’t care how much those creeps screamed for her. She wasn’t going to fall for any more tricks.
Sharon hurried back out to the pool. Dan was already stringing up the lights. “Dan! Look at all the stuff I found back in the house. It’s Irene, Angel, Vicki, and Sue. They’ve been the ones all along dressing up and pretending they were haunting me. I gave them the slip.”
“Good girl!” Dan stepped down off a ladder. “I’ve got something to show you, too.”
Everything at the pool was wired and turned on. The filter was working. She could hear the slosh of the water being sucked in and the splash of the jets as it came out again heated to a perfect eighty degrees. The water on the sliding board was once again trickling down into the silent pool, echoing through the soundless night.
“Ready?” Dan asked.
“Yeah, I guess.”
He flicked a switch and the letters CW glowed back at her from the bottom of the pool.
CW. Charlotte Williams. It was just like in the story they had been reading upstairs. “So it was a light all along!” she said. “It wasn’t my imagination. Why do you think Captain Williams put lights here? It must have been real expensive back in his day.”
“He had plenty of money.” Dan snapped a golden charm bracelet around her wrist. The charms looked elaborate and very, very old. One was a Spanish cross. Another looked like a king’s crown. Still another had something she couldn’t read engraved in Spanish. Sharon looked up at Dan. But he was busy setting up the CD player.
“What’s the bracelet for?”
“No party would be complete without a little costume jewelry,” he said, not looking at her.
She was about to ask him where he’d gotten it. But she bit her tongue. She was afraid to ask.
Loud music ripped across the silence of the night. The very air seemed to pulsate with sound. The camellia and gardenia leaves vibrated. Sharon clapped her hands over her ears.
Phil burst into the pool enclosure. “What’s going on around here?” He looked back and forth from Dan to Sharon.
Dan merely handed Phil a glass of Coke. “Join the party, pal. We’ve been expecting you.”
Phil hurled the Coke down onto the black marble tiles. He grabbed Sharon by the arm and pulled her toward the door. “I told you I didn’t want you hanging with him. You never know what he’s gonna do next.”
“We broke up. Remember?” Sharon freed her arm.
“I’m just lookin’ out for your welfare. You’re comin’ with me!”
“Oh yeah?” Dan pulled a gun on both of them.
Sharon was so shocked she couldn’t speak. She grabbed Phil by the T-shirt and clung to him. So it had been Dan all along! Phil had been right. The police had been right. She’d been crazy to follow his scheme for setting up this midnight pool party. Now she’d gotten Phil involved, too. He was going to get killed along with her.
“You fell for my little pool party bait, didn’t you, Phil?” Dan taunted. “You hurried over to investigate what all the music was about. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that you cruise up and down this street every night in your van. You want the house all to yourself, don’t you?”
“You’re crazy, man!” Phil screwed up his face.
“You tried so hard to scare everybody away so you could look for gold in peace and quiet.” Dan tightened his finger on the trigger. “But you know, buddy, even if you’d closed this place down to all except the mice, you still wouldn’t have found what you were looking for. You never found the treasure map.”
Dan slipped an old, crinkled, yellowed and brittle piece of paper out of his jeans pocket. He waved it in front of Phil’s face. It was so old it flaked away under his fingertips. But it clearly showed a map of the estate, the pool enclosure, and the garden. There was a star right over the pool area.
Phil lunged for it, ignoring Dan’s gun. But Dan quickly jumped away and hid the map behind his back.
Phil’s face had changed. He had become focused and intent. His eyes bulged from his head. He was even breathing harder. He was a completely different person, one she didn’t know.
“Where did you find that?” Phil reached for the map as if the gun didn’t mean anything. “I looked everywhere.”
“You forgot to look in the doll. That’s where I found Charlotte Worth’s last letter and the treasure map. You know, CW? She didn’t want anybody like you to find it.”
What was going on here? Had Dan just been taunting Phil to get him to give himself away?
Phil looked cornered. He stared first at Dan. Then he stared at Sharon. He was trying to find a safe place to flee.
“But you’ll never get the gold now, Phil, will you? No, because I’ve found it first!” Dan bragged. “I’m going to make sure you never get your hands on it. Look!” Dan flipped the switch and flashed the CW light at the bottom
of the pool on and off for Phil’s benefit. “The gold’s in the pool, you idiot!”
“I don’t believe it,” Phil said.
Dan stooped down and broke off a black tile that looked like it had been previously loosened. Gold shimmered out at them through the brilliantly lighted water of the pool, treasure that had been hidden for decades. The whole pool was lined with nothing else but solid bars of gold, jewelry, and other various treasures.
Phil clenched and unclenched his fists in pure frustration. He paced back and forth like a caged animal, glaring hungrily at the pool as if he would rip every black tile off with his bare hands.
“You really missed your boat!” Dan shouted over the pulsing music. “The pool’s worth millions of dollars. The treasure of The Queen Isabella is buried right here in Sharon’s backyard.”
Phil’s face was filled with hate. He lunged for Dan’s gun. But Dan sidestepped him. Phil slipped and plunged headfirst into the deep end of the pool.
“I’d get out of there if I were you.” Dan called to the sputtering and cursing Phil. He took a match and lighted a fuse. “You won’t touch even one bar of gold. I’ve wired the pool with dynamite. It’s gonna blow sky high in about five minutes. That’ll bring the police here in a jiffy. They’ll cart all that gold away—what’s left of it, that is.”
Sharon spotted the dynamite anchored over by the filter. The fuse was burning toward it.
“Dan, what are you doing?” She screamed. His preparations for this pool party had been much more extensive than she had ever imagined. She was beginning to fear that everyone had gone crazy.
Phil hoisted himself out of the pool with his strong arms, climbed up onto the deck, and shook the water off himself. He ran his hand back through his dripping wet, blond hair. Then, without waiting another minute, he sprang at Sharon. He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her against him.
Pool Party Page 11