A Sweet Life-kindle

by Andre, Bella

  The men in the room looked around at one another in complete consternation.

  “There’s no one who doesn’t want a Queen of the May,” Conar said.

  “No one,” Mayor McPherson said and explained, “We draw a large share of our yearly economy from our May Day celebrations. We’re famous for them. We’re a draw to historians, tourists of all kinds, and especially those who, say, usually love a good Renaissance Faire or Cosplay. We are traditional—carrying on as we did hundreds of years ago. Our inns and restaurants and stores make their living for half the year through the festivities.”

  “But two young women are dead,” Jackson said.

  The room was silent. They could heard a pin drop.

  Mayor McPherson sighed deeply. “I will make an announcement that the events for this evening have been cancelled. Conar, dear God, please—you must discover the truth behind this before tomorrow!”

  Before tomorrow, Jackson thought. Murder cases such as this—especially if they did have a psychotic killer on their hands—could take days, weeks, years, or never be solved.

  “We have to be back up by tomorrow,” he said.

  “Or you’ll be out of office?” Angela asked Mayor McPherson.

  Jackson refrained from nudging her. They were guests here. He didn’t believe that the men were without emotion or caring; they were simply at a very bad place.

  But Angela went on. “This isn’t Jaws,” she said, “where the enemy is a giant shark that might come back—you have a murderer on the loose.”

  Brendan Malone stepped into the conversation. “We know that, ma’am. We’re horrified. We knew these lasses. Dr. McGregor cared for them. But everyone’s livelihood depends on May Day.” He turned back to Conar. “The security footage is in my office. Perhaps we should view that now. And we have the janitor who was working there to be interviewed as well.”

  “Conar,” McPherson said, “I will go to the green and announce that the events tonight have been cancelled; I will tell the truth, and I will let them know that you and every constable in the vicinity-along with American federal officers—are working on the case. I’ll ask them to please pay careful heed to the press releases we’ll have out daily.”

  Conar nodded. Angela stood silent. The mayor left.

  In the mayor’s office, the janitor who had been on duty was waiting as well, working a worn cap around and around in his fingers.

  Finley McConnaugh was a slim man who looked worn and tired for what might have been his forty or so years. His eyes were bleary and tear-stained and he looked like a man who had suddenly been caught in a tornado. He wore grease stained overalls and had apparently been pacing while he had waited in the office with an officer.

  “Finley!” Conar said, seeing him. “How did you not know, man? How did you not see the poor dead lasses?”

  “Sir!” the man said, distraught. “I wasn’t in the basement—nor did I note anything amiss when I went through the displays.”

  “Have you left doors open—forgotten the alarms?” Conar asked.

  “Sir, ask Mr. Malone here—I don’t do lock up. I came in this morning and went directly to the Queen Mary exhibit on the second floor. The lasses lock up—not me. I swear, I know nothing of this!”

  “If I’m not in, the girls do lock up,” Brendan Malone said.

  “How many keys are out? How many know how to set the alarms?” Jackson asked.

  “There is myself, Elysse, and one other—my day manager, Mr. Thornton. But he’s abroad—he has an aunt who is gravely ill in Paris. He’s been gone for days,” Brendan Malone told them. “So, myself, Elysse, and…a man who isn’t here.” He looked worried. “I have just realized I must prove my own innocence in this. But, my wife will tell you, I’ve been about with her the last days and home in my bed each night; May Day celebrations are her favorite.”

  Angela cleared her throat. “I suggest we see the footage.”

  “What about me?” Finley McCullough asked. “Do I—stay?”

  “Bring him to the station, please,” Conar said to one of his officers. “Finley, sorry, man, I may need more from you in the next hours. You’re not under arrest. Call it—protective custody.”

  Jackson thought that the janitor might argue; he didn’t. He scrunched his face with agony and then nodded.

  Brendan Malone brought up the security footage. The screen showed all the rooms in the place and the people who moved through it. “I’ve started with yesterday morning,” he said. “I can fast forward a bit until—“

  He broke off abruptly. A leering, bizarre face suddenly showed in each screen.

  “The Green Man!” he said with a gasp.

  Then, the footage on all screens showed nothing but black.

  “What the hell?” Conar demanded.

  “The Green Man,” Angela repeated slowly. “He’s associated with Beltane—May Day. In Arthurian legend, the Green Knight is sometimes at odd with the others. It’s believed that he symbolized the old British pagan ways with the coming of Christianity—something often fought at first, but eventually the old and new would come together. He’s not an evil demon or anything of the like. He’s symbolized with a man’s face and leaves and branches. He’s the earth coming back to life after the cold and decay of winter.”

  “So now,” Jackson said dryly, “we know exactly who did it—the Green Man.”

  Chapter 4

  Police officers and forensic techs stayed at the museum for hours. Angela and Jackson left with Conar; it was his duty to inform the family and friends of Cindy Sweeney and Sally Manning that they were gone.

  Brendan Malone, as the owner of the wax museum, would also go to the station and await Conar’s return for more questioning. He was indignant. It was one thing to think that a janitor might be involved—it was another to suspect a man of his caliber. He didn’t say so in so many words; his attitude, however was clear.

  Conar was sorry; he would clear him as soon as possible.

  Angela had assumed that Jackson would be pro-active and ready to question everyone in sight; he wanted, instead, to go back to Ravenscroft Castle.

  “Internet,” he told her. “Conar is too involved; we need to get out people on background checks for the mayor and the owner of the museum, Brendan Malone.”

  “If either is guilty, they’re both good at hiding it,” Angela said.

  “Yes, but, many killers are excellent at hiding the truth,” he reminded her. “Especially a true psychopath. He’d have no compunction caring nothing at all about the loss of life—if it would give him what he wanted. He’d see no wrong in it.”

  Angela knew that to be true.

  At Ravenscroft, they managed to get in an order to room service right before it closed down for the night. The young man who delivered their food didn’t know their part in the investigation and warned them direly—and with both excitement and sorrow—that two women had been murdered and they must take care.

  Angela thanked him.

  They both opened up their computers. Jackson, she knew, was busy waking someone up back home and getting them to hit all their connections in the United Kingdom for every piece of information they could possibly acquire.

  Angela started by looking up events in the local news. She found a picture of the May Queen court taken up on the tor by the May Pole. They were all so bright and beautiful. It really did seem to be a charming event; they all wanted to be Queen, of course, according to their interviews, but being part of it all was just fun. There was no grand prize—just the fun night with a flower crown in the village and the food and dancing and revelry that went on.

  She checked on the woman who managed the girls, Mrs. Althea Toddy. Mrs. Toddy had been a Queen of the May when she’d been younger. Now, she directed the Young Ladies Dance Academy and every year, on a volunteer basis, directed all the events associated with the Queen of the May.

  She messaged all the information to her phone; Mrs. Toddy would be someone to speak with come the morning.
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br />   She went on to read an interview by the woman. Mrs. Althea Toddy loved the pageantry of their May Day. It was exceptionally important to the area, she said, because the Village of Ravenscroft had, for centuries, seen it not just as the event of spring, but as the anniversary of good triumphing over evil; in 1591, a cruel witch-finder and magistrate, born in the village, had returned by order of King James to weed out the witchcraft in the village. Modern historians believed that Justin Stuart—a bastard and distant relation of the royal family—had most probably been a true homicidal sadist. His “calling” as a witch-finder had cost dozens their lives at Ravenscroft. The son of the laird had returned in time not to save the locals condemned, but to destroy Justin Stuart. While Laird Brian Montfort had escaped to the states and become lost to history, his heroic act had ended the persecution of witches forever—even though it had gone on to flourish in the sixteen hundreds elsewhere in the British Isles.

  “Jackson!” she said.

  He looked at her.

  She read Mrs. Toddy’s interview to him. When she was finished, she said, “When it’s light, Jackson, I’d like to walk up to the tor. To the May Pole. I saw—I know I saw darkness and shadows up there earlier—there may be something.”

  He nodded, distracted. “Logically, the killer is Brendan Malone.”

  “Logically?” she asked.

  “I’ve studied the building, Angela. I admit, the security is quite simple for such a place—but then they don’t have the crime here that you have in major cities and it is privately owned. But who else would know that if you covered the main camera with a cloth, you’d black out all of them? There are, according to him, only three people with keys. Now, of course, we know that keys can be copied, that alarms can be tricked…but, there’s a pad when you walk in the vestibule to key off the alarm; there’s another at the back door that is down from the employee hall. But I believe that the killer came in through the front door, disarmed the alarm and then put the Green Man mask or face in front of the camera before blacking it out. I think that Brendan Malone is the suspect with the ability to do that.”

  “But—why? Jackson, we have to know why,” Angela said. “He’s lived among these people all these years—and he suddenly goes crazy and starts killing girls?”

  “It has to be someone local—who else would know the museum? Who else would know that he could put Cindy Sweeney in that display—and that it would take a long time for anyone to notice?”

  “The janitor,” she suggested. “A small, sad, scraggly looking man, but he’d know the museum backwards and forwards.”

  Jackson pushed away from the suite’s desk where he’d been working. “I’ve given his name to Logan Raintree back at the offices; hopefully, they’ll have good information for us when we wake in the morning.”

  “Hopefully, there will be no more dead girls in the morning,” Jackson said. He rose and stretched—they’d been sitting too long.

  Angela found herself exceptionally glad that they’d had their morning together.

  Their long-delayed honeymoon, she knew, was over.

  And it was difficult here, not to feel the tragedy. Two beautiful young women dead, all hope and bright futures lost.

  “I’ve got the alarm set for seven,” he told her. “We’ll talk to Conar—and then we’ll start on our set of interviews. We should have info—right now, I’m so tired, I’m spinning wheels.”

  She felt the same. She still felt that they had to get to the tor—that the past did have everything to do with the present.

  “Come to bed, my love, he told her.

  “Best pick-up line you’ve had today,” she told him lightly.

  He was tense as they lay together; she knew that he was thinking, that in his mind’s eye he was going over everything that had happened since she’d realized she was staring at a real woman in the wax museum. The pictures remained fresh in her mind as well. This wasn’t their place; they weren’t a part of the law in the village.

  But what they did could never really be left behind.

  Held close by his side, she drifted to sleep. And when she did, she saw the tor. It was high and rugged; from the tor, the crash of the waves of the sea against the rocks created a mighty noise.

  There was a mist upon it; a darkness.

  And the darkness was smoke.

  She dreamed, and in her dreams, she heard cries and sobbing…screams and the clash of steel. She couldn’t see—couldn’t see what was happening. The smoke obscured all.

  “Angela.”

  She thought she heard a soft whisper. She opened her eyes; she was awake. She tensed, careful, afraid that if one of the dead had come to her she might frighten them away.

  There was a woman in the room.

  She was dressed like the woman who had been tied to the stake in the museum, in period clothing from the late 1500s. She was dressed similarly to the dead woman, Cindy Sweeney.

  Except that wasn’t the same woman—the spirit’s face was different from that of Cindy Sweeney.

  Angela lay still and started to move her lips to speak. Her words didn’t come.

  The woman smiled as she faded away. Her whisper lingered on the air.

  “Take care.”

  When she was gone, Angela lay silent, never sure, even after all the years she had known the dead and worked with the Krewe, that what she had seen was real.

  At her side, Jackson stirred. He pulled her close to him.

  A moment later, the alarm rang. He swung over quickly to turn it off. He whispered to her. “Bad not-really pick up line,” he told her. “I’m hurrying into the shower and I’ll be right off—no nudity, no teasing, my love…you’re far too seductive. You’ll sway me from my course of action.”

  Rather rude, she thought. He was pretty seductive himself, racing naked toward the bathroom.

  “Jackson,” she said.

  He paused, looking back at her.

  “We have to get up to that tor,” she told him.

  “I’ll get on the computer, talk to Conar, and we’ll head on up,” he promised.

  Jackson showered first and quickly; Angela hopped in after him, still disturbed by her dream—and by the woman she had seen standing over her.

  Burned for witchcraft? She wondered.

  When she walked out into the parlor area of their suite, she discovered that Jackson was on a video conference with Logan Raintree back at their offices.

  “I guess not much of a surprise,” Logan was saying. “Three charges and three convictions for assault. All bar fights—I didn’t find anything about attacks on women, but then files aren’t always that specific. Nor would I have fingered this guy for murder—and then displaying the bodies in such a manner. But, if he confessed…I guess he did it.” Logan had been speaking to Jackson; he saw Angela as she came to stand behind her husband. “Hey, Angela. You really don’t know how to just head out on vacation, do you?”

  “Hey, excuse me. We walked into a room—and there she was. Tragic, really,” Angela said.

  “Of course, and I’m sorry. But, I guess you two can move on now,” Logan said.

  “What’s he talking about?” Angela asked.

  “The janitor confessed,” Jackson told her. “Finley McConnaugh—he confessed late last night; Conar called me to let me know right away.”

  Angela wasn’t sure why it didn’t ring true to her in any way.

  “What?” she said. “They had to have fed him lies and lines. I don’t believe it.”

  “He had access; he was in the building when the bodies were found,” Logan said.

  “But, what else did you find out? Did you follow backgrounds for everyone involved here?” Angela asked.

  “Absolutely. I’ve sent you files. You’ll find them in your email. Conar Martin is a dedicated guy; law enforcement since he graduated. The owner of the wax museum—Brendan Malone—was born in the Village of Ravenscroft, went to school on the Continent, returned to London and opened a few attractions, worked at a wax
museum, and came back ten years ago to open the museum here. He was born into some fair money. He doesn’t have so much as a parking ticket. I’ve checked the backgrounds on the murdered girls—clean as can be. Squeaky clean. Mrs. Toddy--head of the pageant—her greatest crime has been her ego. She’s something of a prima donna. I looked into the medical examiner/doctor. Educated in Edinburgh, scores of patients who love him. He was offered a partnership practice in London for major money but he turned it down to serve his village.”

  “What about Mayor Ragnor McPherson?” Angela asked.

  “Local man, went to school in Glasgow. Came home because he loved Ravenscroft—according to his campaign handouts. He wanted to continue tradition and bring Ravenscroft up to date in all the best ways at the same time. Very popular fellow—Rugby College champ. Clean record too—except that he did receive one parking ticket on a trip to the USA which was paid right away. If there’s anything about a demented killer in him, I couldn’t find it. I’m not there so I can’t understand whatever intuitions you might be feeling, but…the only one I could find with access to the museum and any kind of a record—especially as far as violence goes—is the janitor, Finley McConnaugh.”

  “He just seems….” Angela began.

  “Too slow, too simple,” Jackson said quietly.

  “But strong enough to strangle a woman?” Logan asked.

  “I suppose; he’s very thin. But, wiry, I guess,” Angela said.

  “And he’s confessed; Conar has been on the news several times this morning; they’ll observe a period of mourning tonight, but the town will continue with its traditional events for the May Day holiday tomorrow,” Jackson told her.

  It didn’t sit well. It just didn’t fit. Angela didn’t know why exactly, but she couldn’t see the uneducated janitor being so meticulous in killing, dressing a victim, and posing her upon a stake.