by Krista Davis
“Rose, that ship has sailed. You and Oma have to face it.” And so did I. “I have one quick thing to do and then I’ll come assist you now that I’ve stolen your helper.”
Thanks to the late nights that the ghost hunters kept, the housekeeper was working afternoons instead of mornings. I’d barely seen her since I’d been back and had never really talked with her.
Trixie followed along, sniffing the hallway on the second floor. The cleaning cart stood outside Grayson’s room.
I peeked inside. The petite housekeeper was tucking a fresh sheet under the mattress. Her long black ponytail swung as she worked. She wore a simple white T-shirt with the Sugar Maple Inn logo on it, a pair of white slacks, and running shoes.
“Hi! I’m Holly.” I extended my hand. “We’ve never been properly introduced.”
She smiled at me and shook my hand. “Marisol.”
I pitched in and helped her make the bed. “Are you happy to work afternoons for a change? No early mornings?”
She smiled. “It’s okay. I like getting up early.”
I was helping her turn back the sheet when a black tail whooshed by my legs. Twinkletoes?
“Your kitten likes to help me. She’s very, how do you say? Nosy!”
I watched as she knocked a tube of lip balm off the desk and spun it into the bathroom.
Mrs. Mewer slunk through the door, her body low to the ground like a wildcat on the hunt. She spotted the lip balm on the bathroom floor and knocked it back into the bedroom. I should have realized. Twinkletoes and Mrs. Mewer were our poltergeists. Silly kitties.
“So, Marisol, do the guests wash their clothes sometimes? Have you noticed any wet clothes when you’re cleaning?”
She blinked at me as though I had asked an odd question. I guessed I had. I could have phrased it more delicately.
“Mostly the ladies. Mrs. Lillian and Miss Eva. But sometimes men do, too.”
“Oh? Like who?”
Marisol gripped fresh towels in her hands. Her dark eyes rose to meet mine. “This is about the dead girl?”
I might as well tell her the truth. “Yes.”
“Mr. Felix is very tidy and hung some things in the shower to dry. Also Mr. Grayson and Mr. Brian.”
Felix! I never seriously suspected him.
We finished making the bed. I gazed around the room. Grayson’s clothes lay on a chair as though he had changed in a hurry. I peeked in the bathroom. Male toiletries cluttered the counter. It was a large, old-fashioned bathroom with a charming claw-foot tub.
“Thank you, Marisol,” I said. “If you need anything, let me know, okay?” I walked to the door.
“Holly?”
I turned to look at her.
“Zelda couldn’t kill anybody. She is much too kind.”
“I know, Marisol. Thanks for sticking up for her.”
* * *
An hour later, Dave marched through the front door. I knew trouble was brewing when Twinkletoes arched her back like a Halloween cat and hissed at him.
She dashed up the grand staircase and watched him. Mrs. Mewer followed her cue, eyeing Dave with wary suspicion. She let out a bloodcurdling yowl.
“Is Eva here?” Dave asked.
My breath caught in my throat. I nodded. “In her room, I think.”
Dave strode through the library. I could hear him knocking on her door.
Felix, Mark, Grayson, and Brian clustered around me.
“What’s going on?” asked Felix.
Before I could answer, Eva and Dave emerged and walked toward us.
Eva reached out to me. “Will you take care of Mrs. Mewer?”
“You’re arresting her?” asked Brian. A gleeful smile played across his face.
Dave was carrying a clear plastic bag in his hand. A chill shook me when I realized that Mallory’s lavender necklace nestled inside it. There wasn’t a reason in the world that I could think of for Eva to have the necklace in her possession.
“No!” Mark stepped forward. “No. She didn’t do it. I killed Mallory.”
“Aww,” moaned Felix. “Don’t do this, Mark.”
“Shh,” Mark hissed. In a gentle voice, he said, “I can’t let you take the blame for this, Eva.”
Oh no! Had they both been in on it?
From her spot on the stairs, Mrs. Mewer lived up to her name by emitting complaining meows.
“Mark, stop it!” Felix pushed his way next to Mark.
Mark held Eva’s hands and stared into her eyes. “Leave me alone, Felix.”
“But you didn’t . . .” Felix looked at Dave. “He didn’t kill Mallory.”
Dave drank it all in without a word.
“Okay,” said Felix, “if you killed Mallory, how did her necklace end up in Eva’s room?”
“I hid it there after I killed her.”
Oh no. That didn’t sound good at all. Poor Eva. She had been right about Mark all along.
“Mark,” Eva whispered. “Why?”
He squeezed her hands. “I won’t let you take the blame, Eva.” He looked into her eyes with love.
“You’re ready to confess?” asked Dave.
Mark nodded.
Dave escorted him out the door. Behind them, Felix protested, “Mark, don’t do this. Don’t believe him, Officer. Ask him for details! He won’t know the answers.”
Eva scooped up Mrs. Mewer and held her so tight that Mrs. Mewer complained. Eva released her grip but didn’t let go. She sat down on the sofa in the sitting room, still clutching Mrs. Mewer. The other ghost hunters clustered around her.
Grayson released a long breath and shook his head. “Lillian warned Mark about Mallory.”
“Warned Mark? What do you mean?” Seemed like it should have been the other way around.
“I came up a few days early,” said Grayson. “Lillian is friends with Mark’s parents, so we went out to dinner a couple of times. Mark didn’t want Mallory to come with us, but every time, she showed up at the restaurant uninvited, like she was following us. Lillian said Mark needed to be really careful, because that was obsessive behavior. ‘Unbalanced,’ I think Lillian called her. She was really worried about Mark letting Mallory stay at his place. Hey, where’s Ben? Mark needs a lawyer. Ben?” He raised his voice. “Ben? Felix, hand me your phone, I’ll call his room.”
“Bet you’ll be glad to get your new phone.” Felix glanced at me. “Can you believe it? Grayson dropped his in the tub.”
Had he? I squinted at Grayson. I had just been in his bathroom and the tub was nowhere near anything. Unless he was talking on the phone while bathing, which I doubted, I didn’t quite buy that story.
Felix sat on the sofa with his elbow on the armrest and his forehead in his hand. “He doesn’t need a lawyer anyway.” Felix glanced at his watch. “I bet he’s back here in less than two hours, and that includes driving time.”
Brian frowned at him. “Are you psychic now?”
“No. I don’t have to be psychic. Mark didn’t kill Mallory. He just said he did to protect Eva. When Dave starts questioning him, he’s going to get stuff wrong and the police will realize that he had nothing to do with Mallory’s death.”
“To protect me?” Eva wiped her face with her fingers. “What do you mean?”
“From the beginning, Mark was afraid you killed Mallory. She’s the reason that you broke off your engagement to Mark. He knew how much you hated her.”
“He thought I killed her? How could he imagine for even a second that I would do anything so heinous?”
Funny. She had suspected the same thing about Mark.
Felix groaned. “Are you kidding? He’s so crazy mad in love with you that he’s willing to take a murder rap for you.”
Eva gulped air and sniffled. “Why did Mallory have to show up and ruin everything? Felix, are you sure they’ll brin
g Mark back? Maybe Grayson is right, and we should send Ben to help him.”
Ben happened to be ambling down the stairs, and heard his name.
Felix made quick work of filling him in.
Seemingly in deep thought, Eva sat quietly, stroking Mrs. Mewer’s silky fur.
I liked Eva. If Mark had confessed to a murder he didn’t commit just to protect her, then her trip to Wagtail had turned out better than she initially thought. She had Mark in her life again. In a way, I envied her. Ben wouldn’t have protected me. He would have turned me in.
And that brought me to another horrifying thought. What if Mark made that huge sacrifice because Eva really did murder Mallory? She certainly had motive. We knew she had been outside of the inn that night, not only because Brian saw her but by her own admission. Her claims of the strange white light could have been nothing more than a story she invented. After all, she knew better than anyone what could and couldn’t be proven.
“Eva, did you ever see that orb in your room again?” I asked.
She gazed at me in surprise. Eva set Mrs. Mewer gently on the sofa and crooked her forefinger at me. I followed her to her room.
She walked over to a recorder. “Listen to this.”
She switched it on, and I heard the usual static of an EVP. I shrugged. But then I heard it. Little more than a whisper. “Eva. Evaaa!”
She played it again. “Eva. Evaaa!”
Maybe it was because of Halloween. Maybe it was because I had been immersed in ghost lore all week. But the disembodied voice creeped me out. If there were such a thing as a ghost, that soft breathy voice, almost like a wind whispering in the trees, was how a ghost would sound. Goose bumps perked up on my arms.
“You’re the only one I can talk with about this, because you don’t believe in ghosts,” she said.
The past few days had loosened my conviction that ghosts didn’t exist. I had learned about a lot of tricks, but the book on Aunt Birdie’s table had opened the door in my mind just a crack, even if there were low frequency vibrations that we couldn’t feel. I laughed aloud on purpose to break the tension. “You’re the expert.”
“Mark thinks it’s real.” Eva strode to the sliding glass doors and looked outside. “It’s as though everything I knew for certain, all that was so clear to me has suddenly been turned upside down. Do you think it was Mallory?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Of course you don’t. It couldn’t be, that’s ridiculous. Would you listen to me? I’m no better than anyone else, allowing emotions to cloud my judgment. It’s impossible that Mallory would have come to me as an orb when she died. Or that this could be her.”
“I did see her in the mirror.”
Eva turned around. “Mark thinks Mallory is haunting me.”
Twenty-nine
Haunting? The mere thought knocked the air right out of me. It was preposterous, of course. These people lived in a perpetual atmosphere of Halloween with notions of ghosts and goblins and otherworldly things in their heads. I responded carefully, though, so I wouldn’t offend her. “Do you think Mallory is haunting you?”
Eva rubbed her upper arms as though she was cold. “A few days ago, I would have laughed at the mere thought. But strange things have happened since Mallory’s death. The unexplained light in this room. Mallory’s spirit in the mirror. Believers think that mirrors are portals for ghosts. Now the EVP with my name. I don’t have an explanation for Mallory’s necklace being in my room, either.”
I couldn’t help wondering if guilt played a role. Could it be that Eva expected to be haunted by the woman she murdered? “Why would Mallory haunt you?”
“Because I have what she wanted. I have Mark. I have his undying love. I can’t believe he was willing to go to jail for me.”
I would have felt so much better if she had mentioned her innocence.
“I won,” said Eva. “In the end, I won.”
And Mallory had lost something much bigger than Mark or his love. She had lost her life. I was getting a little bit uncomfortable. “Oh, Eva! You’re the ghost debunker. You’re supposed to see through these things and explain them away.”
“That’s just it. There are too many things I can’t explain on this trip.”
There were a few things I couldn’t explain, either. Like who killed Mallory, and who attacked Clementine. But I wasn’t planning to blame ghosts. I planned to find out who the perpetrators were. Even if one of them turned out to be Eva.
I left her room perplexed. Had Mark tried to take the blame because he knew Eva had killed Mallory?
Back in the lobby, Ben was joking around with Felix, Grayson, and Brian. “Want to join us for dinner at Chowhound?”
“Sure. What about Mark? I thought you were off to help him.”
“I phoned,” said Grayson. “He’ll be back in about an hour.”
Oma and Rose breezed by us, unaware of what had transpired.
“Does everyone have a costume for tomorrow? It’s Howloween, you know!” said Rose. “We wear them all day in Wagtail.”
The ghost hunters joked about dressing like ghost hunters. But Ben pulled me aside. “Maybe I should buy a mask. To be in the spirit of things.”
It was a nice gesture. I wasn’t used to this side of Ben. Back in Washington he always turned down fun ideas.
“We’ll meet you at Chowhound,” I said. I dashed upstairs to retrieve my wallet. Ben, Trixie, and I strolled to All Dressed Pup, where I had seen costumes for people in the window.
While Ben looked around, it dawned on me that Clementine might not have costumes for the children. If I didn’t have any money, a costume was the last thing I would buy. “Hey, Ben. If you were a five-year-old boy, what kind of costume would you want to wear?”
I knew the answer before he said anything. The adult pirate costume he held in his hands was thoroughly boyish and loads of fun. He adjusted his glasses. “Can a guy wear glasses over an eye patch?”
“Absolutely. Try it out.” I hid my smile. Maybe Wagtail brought out the best in all of us.
A saleswoman hurried toward us to assist him. Meanwhile, I found two pirate costumes for five-year-olds. I wasn’t sure about Emily. Banking on the notion that most girls liked princess clothes, I picked out a tiara, a pink dress, matching shoes that sparkled, a wand, and a white veterinarian coat. There weren’t any rules that a princess couldn’t be a doctor, too.
Clementine said she had sold everything. I wondered if she had something fun to wear. I thought about a witch costume, not unlike the one I planned to wear, but when I saw the not-too-revealing I Dream of Jeannie costume, I dared to purchase it for her. With her hair pulled up in a ponytail, she would make a perfect Jeannie. Besides, she could use a little magic in her life. She could always exchange it if she hated it.
Armed with our purchases, I borrowed a Sugar Maple Inn golf cart. It was still daylight when I headed for Fireside Farms with Ben and Trixie.
Ben exclaimed as the long white fences came into view. “This is quite a place. Is that really a chandelier in the stable?”
“We call it a barn in these parts. And yes, it is a chandelier.”
Golf carts cluttered the driveway. The minute I stopped, Trixie jumped off and raced for the side door of the house. Ben and I followed her.
I knocked and tried the door handle. It was locked.
Parker let us in. Chaos reigned in the house. It looked and sounded like a huge party. Mr. Huckle offered us drinks.
“Thank you, but we’re not staying,” I said. “What’s going on here?”
“It seems that Holmes took your request to guard Clementine and the children quite seriously. Half of Wagtail is in the living room. They’re doling out shifts at the moment. Shall I tell Holmes or Clementine that you are here?”
“No, thank you. I’d rather you didn’t.” I handed the shopping bags to Mr. Huckle and whispered that they
contained costumes for Halloween.
He nodded. “Very kind of you, Holly. I’ll see they get them in the morning.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t tell her who brought them. Just say they were delivered.”
Mr. Huckle smiled. “By the Howloween fairy, perhaps?”
“Works for me.” I didn’t want Clementine to feel indebted.
We left in a hurry so she wouldn’t see us there.
We arrived at Chowhound just as Eva and Mark walked up. His arm circled her waist. Mrs. Mewer and Twinkletoes accompanied them on leashes.
I scooped up Twinkletoes for a big hug, but she was more interested in the faux crows that were staring at us.
Trixie didn’t mind the crows or the cobwebs and spiders that decorated the restaurant, but she jumped back in shock and yipped when the animated skeleton seated by the door spoke to her.
We joined the others at a large table.
The events of recent days had been wild and stressful, so when the waitress took drink orders, I dared to try a Voodoo Witch’s Brew. The names of the other drinks had us all laughing—Black Widow Martini, Once Bitten, Bewitched, and Hocus Pocus.
Small wonder that Ben’s staid request for a beer brought boos from our table. He sheepishly changed to a Killer Bloody Mary.
For dinner, I ordered the Vampire’s Curse, which was shrimp and pasta in a potent garlic sauce. No garlic for Trixie, though. Goblin eyeballs made of ground chicken and rice served on a bed of gold coin cooked carrots sounded better for her.
Twinkletoes insisted on sitting on my lap for a better view. She stretched her neck and gazed around with big alert eyes. I ordered Evil Pirate Booty for her from the feline menu. She would like the locally caught catfish.
Twinkletoes and Mrs. Mewer jumped into a bay window outfitted just for cats. It was decorated for the season, with skeletons resting among glowing pumpkins and mock tombstones. The cats explored and looked out at passersby.
Mark regaled us with the story of what he called his “arrest,” putting a humorous spin on what had undoubtedly been an unnerving experience.
“So, um, what did they ask you?” inquired Felix.