Killing in C Sharp

by Alexia Gordon

  “That stuff’s just window dressing. The important part, the bits she’s putting inside the phones and recorders and cameras are based on devices the alchemists designed from copper and crystal, silver and gold. Things we still use to make lenses and sensors and data storage devices.”

  “What were these alchemists doing with their precious metals and stones?”

  “Building ghost catchers.”

  Gethsemane studied him. He shook less and he breathed better. “You’re pretty calm about seeing Eamon’s ghost, going on about the history of ghost hunting as if nothing more remarkable has happened than finding a penny on the street.” She recalled Venus’s hysterics and her own heavy-object-throwing reaction the first time she met Eamon.

  Hardy shrugged. “I’m used to it. I’ve been able to see ghosts since I was a kid. Ironically, I’m the only one of the entire Ghost Hunting Adventures team who can.”

  “Shouldn’t you be the one leading the stakeouts?”

  A mixture of sadness and resignation filled Hardy’s laugh. “Kent has something more important than second sight. He has on-screen personality and drop-dead good looks. And a controlling interest in the production company.” He waved away her sympathy. “I don’t care. Kent can have the fame. I do this for them.”

  “Them?”

  “The ghosts. So they know they’ve been heard. So they have a chance to tell their story. Most of the time, that’s the only thing keeping them from passing over peacefully. They want to tell their side of things. Once they share their version of events, they can go.”

  “And you’ve never told your colleagues that you can actually see what they only pretend to capture with their fancy toys?”

  “My ‘colleagues,’” he snorted, “do this for the glory. They don’t deserve to know. They’d find some way to exploit the spirits. Hell, look at Poe’s reaction to Maja. She’d set the woman up with her own social media accounts if she could. Instagrammable revenge killings, that kind of thing. That’s not what the ghosts want.” He pulled out his phone. “By the way, some of us—meaning me—aren’t pretending when we claim we caught something on tape or camera. At least not all the time. Remember this?”

  Gethsemane nodded recognition at the phone with the multi-modal spectral vision his engineer friend had given him.

  “The SD card was developed with her secret technology, too.” He tapped the screen and turned the phone so Gethsemane could see.

  She watched video of herself at the Athaneum, leaning over the rail of the orchestra pit, looking at something in its depths. The moment she discovered Bernard’s body. Or, more precisely, the moment the other entity in the video discovered Bernard’s body. The ghost of Eamon McCarthy, balancing on the pit rail, glowing in high-definition.

  Gethsemane lunged for the phone. Hardy snatched it out of reach. She earned nothing but a sore knee and banged elbow for the trouble.

  “What are you going to do with that? Broadcast it on Ghost Hunting Adventures? Sell it on the internet for the equivalent of the gross domestic product of Germany?” Guarantee Carraigfaire a never-ending stream of curiosity seekers and devotees? Ruin the peace of the village, Eamon’s afterlife, and untold numbers of people’s beliefs about life and death?

  “I could,” he said. “The coolest thing about this card is that it plays back on any device with an SD card slot. These images could be viewed on every webcam and streaming service on the planet in the time it takes to say boo. But whether or not that happens depends on you,” he said.

  “I don’t understand.” She rubbed her knee.

  “Aed didn’t kill Bernard. He couldn’t have done it because Maja killed him. Prove Maja did it. You’re good at clearing innocent people’s names. You’ve got a gift.”

  Gift, curse, same thing, right? “Hardy, I’m going to assume your illness is speaking. You know I can’t prove a ghost killed a man. You know as well as I do that most people don’t believe ghosts exist. They think ghosts are like imaginary friends. Imaginary friends can’t kill people. Or be arrested. Or put on trial. You see where I’m going with this.”

  “Fine, then just prove Aed didn’t kill him. Like you proved Eamon didn’t kill his wife.”

  Exonerate Aed. She and Venus had a head start on Hardy. A day spent tracking down motives for Bernard’s murder. A list of people, besides Aed, who wanted Bernard dead uncovered: Poe, Kent. Sylvie and Venus, if she was honest. Hardy himself. Is that why Hardy insisted she help Aed? Because he was a decent guy who couldn’t live with the thought of an innocent man doing life in prison for his crime? Is that why he agreed to settle for Aed’s exoneration instead of asking her to find Bernard’s killer? Because he’d done it himself? She chuckled.

  “A man’s life’s in jeopardy and you laugh?”

  “What? No. I wasn’t laughing at that. I just—never mind.” She’d keep Hardy in the dark about what she’d been up to, just in case the harmless, nonthreatening, never-hurt-a-fly routine was phony. No need to enlighten a killer. Asking a suspect questions, on the other hand…

  “Have you heard if the guards established Bernard’s exact time of death?” She tried to look coy but decided she probably only looked constipated so stopped.

  “No,” Hardy said. “Why does the exact time matter?”

  “If the time of death could be narrowed down to when Aed was nowhere near Bernard, that would prove he couldn’t have killed him. And there were a lot of people in the Athaneum when the murder occurred—the opera company and crew, spectators, theater employees. That expands the suspect list by dozens. An exact time of death could make it easier to figure out who was close enough to Bernard to shove a trowel in him. If the guards knew exactly when Bernard was killed and pinpointed everyone’s location, they could eliminate suspects by virtue of proximity. For instance, if they knew you were—where were you around the time of the murder?”

  “I just said I haven’t heard when the murder occurred. No one has. Or have you?”

  “Not me.” She hoped she was better at feigning surprise than coyness. “I meant, where were you when the body was discovered?”

  Hardy shrugged. “Here and there. The crew moved around a lot getting equipment set up, framing shots.” He shrugged again.

  She’d practically accused him of murder. Why did he seem so cool about it? Not even a hint of offense. He was pretty good at feigning nonchalant. If only she could take this to Niall. His eyes would darken to storm gray. He’d rant and rave about civilian interference. But he’d take her seriously and, most important, he’d act. She pictured him spinning his hat on his finger or buffing a scuff mark from his latest designer shoe acquisition. He’d let you think he was just another useless garda then home in for the kill. Colombo without the rain coat.

  But what if he didn’t get better? What if Frankie didn’t either? Who among the living would she aggravate, talk to, rope into schemes? She had Eamon but few others she called friends. How would she manage with two fewer?

  She shook her head. No despair allowed. Gloom and doom didn’t help. Self-pity accomplished nothing. Action achieved results. She narrowed her eyes at Hardy. “Tell me why you’re so certain Maja killed Bernard. Did you see her do it? I assume you can see her.”

  He nodded. “I can. I didn’t see her kill Bernard, though.”

  “Then how can you be sure she’s his murderer?”

  “Because she’s killing me.”

  A week ago, Gethsemane would have dismissed Hardy’s statement as delusional and paranoid. Now, of course, a sociopathic ghost really was trying to kill several men, present company included. However, Maja chose contagion as her weapon of choice. Cement trowels seemed out of character. And she only attacked the firstborns. Did anyone know Bernard’s birth order? Mental note to check.

  “Poe’s version of the Maja curse is colorful and embellished almost to the point of being unrecognizable, but it holds the
seeds of truth,” Hardy said. “A mysterious illness fell over firstborn sons. Doctors and scientists will scratch their heads and run their tests, and write it off as an unexplained plague that passed over some and cut others down, then vanished without a backward glance. Just like a hundred other epidemics relegated to an interesting epidemiological footnote in some virology class.” He broke off in a spasm of coughs.

  “Hardy, stop talking. You’re just making yourself worse. And we don’t need poetry right now, we need a plan. We’ve got to break this curse.”

  “The plan is to clear Aed—”

  “After we stop Maja. Aed’s not a firstborn son, and he’s a long way from convicted. He’s got time. You, and a lot of guys I care about, don’t, if your appearance is anything to judge by. First, we stop Maja from wiping out a large swath of the local population, including the only garda in Dunmullach who I might convince to listen to claims of Aed’s innocence, then prove Bernard’s death wasn’t Aed’s fault. Agreed?”

  “I’m not really in a condition to put up much argument,” Hardy said.

  “Then we do this my way. Now all we have to do is figure out how to break a six-hundred-year-old curse and send a vengeful ghost packing.”

  A third voice entered the conversation. “I can help with that.” Eamon materialized next to Hardy. “You look bate, fella. I’ve got more life in me, and I’ve been dead a quarter century.”

  “You can stop Maja?” Gethsemane asked.

  “Don’t sound so surprised, darlin’. Send a ghost to do a ghost’s work.”

  “You’re going to, what, politely ask her to go away and not come back again?”

  “I’m going to use my insider knowledge to beat her at her own game.”

  “Insider knowledge? You can’t figure out how to get out of this village.”

  His aura turned yellow. “Don’t be mean.”

  “That did sound mean. I apologize. But I’m trying to be realistic. No one in this room knows jack about ghost curses from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries.”

  Hardy barked a laugh. “Sounds like a college elective.”

  “Two of you in this room don’t know anything about curses. One of us,” Eamon jerked a thumb at his chest, “has been hanging out at the local library with his scholarly expert, reading through musty, dusty books.”

  Hardy rubbed his temples. “Has anyone ever told you two you sound like an old married couple?”

  Gethsemane and Eamon both rolled their eyes. Eamon continued. “I—well, he—found a seventeenth-century treatise hidden away in the basement stacks that explained the situation. Apparently, murdered daughters-in-law uttering dying curses then coming back from the dead to carry them out is a thing. Maja draws energy from the grief generated by this sickness she’s created. The worse the fellas get, the more despondent people who care about them get, and the stronger she gets. I discovered that if I can gather enough energy, I can blast her to hell before she grows too strong to stop.”

  “Too strong? That’s a possibility? That she becomes unstoppable?” Shite. She hadn’t considered Maja never going away.

  “There’s always a worst-case scenario when you’re dealing with curses.”

  “And where do you get this extra energy?” Hardy asked. “I assume not from a protein shake or sticking your finger in a socket.”

  “Leave the snark to Sissy.” Royal blue flickered around the edge of Eamon’s aura. “She’s better at it than you.”

  “Will you two shut up, and will you,” she pointed at Eamon, “tell us the plan?” Gethsemane apologized. She started to sound like Poe. Worry made her snarkier than usual.

  “I need another ghost,” Eamon said. “One plus one equals too much energy for Maja to absorb. If another ghost and I combine energy, we overload her circuits.”

  “Where am I supposed to find a second ghost?” Gethsemane asked. “It’s not like I can order you one online. And my track record with grimoires…” She waggled her hand back and forth in a comme çi, comme ça gesture.

  “Fortunately, one of us knows what he’s doing.” Eamon apologized. “You know what I mean.” The situation seemed to make him snarkier than usual, too. At least, she hoped it was only situational.

  “Okay, you and this second ghost activate your Wonder Twin powers and blast Maja into the outer reaches of the universe. That breaks the curse and everyone recovers?”

  “Yes,” Eamon said. “I think so. I hope so.”

  He hoped. Not the iron-clad assurance she wanted to hear, but if that was the best they had to go on, she’d take it. “All right, we go for it. Double up our ghost quotient and blast Maja to the back of beyond. First step, we, you, somebody finds a spell to phone a friend from beyond the veil. That gets us started. But finding the words is only half the answer. Riddle me this, how do we find out what notes this second ghost resonates to?”

  “Excuse me,” Hardy said. “I was tagging along for the ride, but you lost me at the last curve. Resonates?”

  “I learned the hard way,” Gethsemane said, “that reciting a spell isn’t sufficient to conjure a ghost. You need to combine it with notes or tones that set up a sympathetic vibration, the way Sylvie’s high notes made the glass at the theater shake. Sympathetic vibration’s like the key that unlocks the spell.”

  “Sylvie’s high notes during the aria built on the energy triggered by Aed’s overture and set up the resonance that brought Maja over. La Diva’s as French as a corn dog at the county fair but her singing’s legit. And powerful.”

  “But there was no spell,” Hardy said.

  “I’m not so sure about that. Father Keating, Tim, inherited an impressive collection of occult books, including grimoires, from his older brother, also Father Keating.” Gethsemane told him about Poe’s invasion of the occult collection. “Tim took the book back, but Poe had plenty of time to find a spell and photograph it, or write it down or memorize it.”

  Hardy closed his eyes. “That idiot.”

  “We need our own spell,” Eamon said. “And a resonance.”

  “Let’s start with the easy part. Which means a trip to the Father Keating memorial occult library. I can usually find a spell to fit the occasion somewhere on the bookshelves.”

  “Let’s get over there.” Hardy tried to stand but collapsed back onto the couch.

  Gethsemane propped him up. “No, Hardy, you can’t come with us.” She flashed an understanding smile at yellow-auraed Eamon. No church grounds for him. “With me.”

  “But I can help,” Hardy said. “You need me. I’m one of the only other people in this village who can see and hear ghosts.”

  She assisted him up from the couch. “You need to lie down before you fall down. You’re sick. Pushing yourself won’t help you, me, Aed, or anybody except Maja. Go back to the inn. Rest.”

  He stared at her for a long moment, apparently trying to come to a decision. He decided and pulled out his phone. He opened the back and pried out the microSD card. “Here.” He handed the card to Gethsemane. “You win. I’ll go back to the inn.”

  “Why are you giving me this?”

  “My half of our bargain. Before you convinced me to listen to reason and to trust you—I do trust you—I was going to offer you that in exchange for your promise to clear Aed. But I don’t want to expose Eamon, and I know you’ll do your best to save Aed. And me.”

  Gethsemane slipped the tiny card in her pocket. She’d put it with the pictures of Poe’s sister and Bernard’s letter later. After Hardy left. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t trust him completely. Not yet. “Thank you, Hardy. Now, please go take care of yourself.” She followed him to the door.

  It struck her as he reached for the door knob. Something about his profile. He reminded her of someone. Who? She caught her breath. “Hardy, whose first born are you?”

  He froze with one foot over the threshol
d. Several seconds passed, then he answered without turning around. “Aed’s.”

  Gethsemane put a hand on his arm. He continued speaking as she led him back inside. “I’ve never seen him that I can remember. He and mom met in Dublin. Mom’s from New York. She was backpacking around Europe, taking a year off before starting college. Aed was a musician with ambition to compose great works. When Mom met him, though, he earned a living by playing a fiddle on a street corner for change and doing odd jobs.” He swayed.

  “Sit here.” Gethsemane led him to the hall bench. “Let me get you some water.”

  He waved the offer away.

  Gethsemane sat next to him. “Will you tell me more?”

  “You can guess the rest. Fodder for countless soap operas and daytime talk shows. I came along, and Aed took off. A baby struck a wrong chord in his grand plan. Mom stayed in Dublin for years, hoping he’d come back.”

  “Which is why you have traces of a brogue.”

  “You noticed. Most don’t. Mom gave up waiting when I was six and moved me back to New York.”

  “You haven’t told Aed who you are.”

  “I keep waiting to find the right time. I don’t imagine he’ll list my sudden appearance in the good news column. He’s so wrapped up in this opera. And Venus James. And now the murder charge.”

  “Have you told anyone?”

  “A couple of people on the team know. I told them to convince them to let me come on this investigation.”

  “Why would they not?”

  “You saw how Poe treats me. Always making little remarks, taking jabs at me.”

  “Poe treats everyone like that.”

  “She didn’t used to treat me that way. Back when we were drinking and smoking buddies. I ran into some trouble, had some, um, difficulties, messed up on a stake out.” Who’d alluded to Hardy having trouble on the show? Kent? Ciara? “We were investigating a haunting in an abandoned hotel. A guest investigator’s night vision bodycam cut out as he walked down a hall. I was drunk and stepped—staggered—away from the operations center to go for a smoke. If I’d been sober enough to pay attention to the night vision still cam, I’d have seen the elevator shaft before the investigator stepped into it. Luckily, he only fell one floor, but he busted his arm and a kneecap.”