by K. J. Emrick
This was the other reason I had come looking for information at Mabel’s place. She knew a lot about crystals and mysticism and such.
“I was looking for a certain book,” I explained to her. “Something on crystals? Gems, maybe. I’m looking to find out if kunzite has any practical uses.”
Mabel stepped forward, then paused with her hand up in the air, reaching toward the shelves in front of me.
She turned to me, her washed out blue eyes wide behind her lenses. “Kunzite? That’s kind’ve an odd thing to go looking for.”
“Well…” There was too much to explain. I didn’t feel like discussing my dead husband all over again, either. “You heard what happened to Richard, right?”
“Yes, I mean… yes.” She suddenly realized she still had her hand up, and dropped it to her side. “Poor man. Didn’t deserve to be all wrapped up in them tarps like that and stuffed into a wall.”
“No he didn’t. Thank you, Mabel.” Something itched in the back of my mind. I just couldn’t place it. Too distracted, I guess. “So…?”
“Right, right. Book on kunzite. Little bitty stone. Strange, a man having that in his hand. Not a very manly thing to die with, I s’pose.”
She turned back to the books. I watched her, feeling that itch again. Something was bothering me. Something about what Mabel had just said. The crystal, Richard dying…
I couldn’t remember it, whatever it was. At any rate Mabel was already pulling a couple books off the shelf to hand them to me. Crystals, Your Aura, and You was the title of the top one. It was going to be hard for me to take that seriously, but if it had the information I needed to get closer to Mick’s reason for killing my Richard, then I really didn’t care what it was called.
“Thank you, Mabel. Can you send a bill to the Inn for me?”
She waved a hand, holding the other over her heart. “No need, and I won’t hear of it. Go on with ya, now. The spirits have told me how important this is. I won’t charge ya one dime, I simply won’t. Too important to find out what happened to yer husband.”
“Well, we know what happened to him. Mick Pullman killed him.”
Her eyes widened at that, and then relaxed again. “Ah. Yes, I see. The spirits have told me this as well, they have. Too right. Killed poor Richard, wrapped him in those tarps, and stuffed him in that space. So sad. Tell me… did Mick tell why the crystal was in Richard’s hand?”
The itch at the back of my thoughts was becoming a slow burn. I stared at Mabel and tried to see what I was missing in those colorless eyes of hers. What was it she said? Richard, wrapped in tarps. Richard, found dead with a crystal in his hand. All of that was true.
But…
Oh.
Oh, snap.
I also remembered what James had told me. He wrote the story that told everything about my husband being found. The only story that had been in the papers so far. Those other reporters only got to town today. The only news anyone had about Richard’s death was what James had written and published and he’d told me Kevin asked him to leave out one specific detail.
The crystal in Richard’s hand.
That wasn’t in the news story. There was no way Mabel could know about the crystal.
Yet, she did.
Mabel blinked, and suddenly there was something in the eyes behind those glasses that I did not like.
It was time for me to leave.
“Well, thank you Mabel,” I said quickly, managing to hold onto my smile. “I have to get back to the Inn. Lots to do there, you know. Well. Yes. Thanks again.”
I grabbed the books from her, and headed right out the front door. Tears poured from my eyes as I ran up the street. I barely felt the wind slipping over my face. I barely felt the weight of the books in my hands.
It couldn’t be true.
Mick saying those awful things about my husband being with other women before his death. It could not be true.
Mabel. Mabel?
I refused to believe it. At the same time, I couldn’t shake my own dark thoughts.
If Mabel hadn’t been with Richard before his death, how could she know about the crystal? Did Mabel give it to him?
Using every curse word I knew and a few I’m pretty sure I made up, I stormed back into the Inn, glad to see that George wasn’t around working on the fireplace. I didn’t know if I could take that right now.
Actually, no one was around. The dining room was quiet. Rosie must have ushered the guests out and sent the staff home, since we wouldn’t be serving food until the power came back on. Jack Reese was nowhere to be seen, either. Off helping some of the guests, maybe.
I dropped Mabel’s books on the front desk, promising myself to look through them later. For now, I’d had enough of this mystery and all the ups and downs it was forcing me to ride.
My hand reached up to find the unicorn necklace laying there against my throat. The tiny wooden figurine was always a comforting presence, but now it only reminded me that the necklace had come from Jess, and my ghostly friend could have told me about my husband’s body being right here in the Inn at any time she chose, or told me that Richard’s ghost was trying to contact me, or that just maybe my husband had been seeing another woman before he got himself killed!
No. No, no, no, Dell... I told myself to calm down and only managed to make myself angrier. There was no way my Richard was running around on me with any woman. Let alone with that crazy crackpot Mabel with her crystals and her mantras and her constant claims of talking to spirits that weren’t there!
“Why, Richard?” I whispered to the polished surface of the registration counter. “Why wouldn’t you just tell me what was going on?”
What did Mick know about all this, I had to wonder. Obviously he knew something or else he couldn’t’ve let on that Richard was seeing another woman. Whether I chose to believe it or not, Mabel obviously was very close to Richard before his death. Somehow, she knew that he had that crystal. The look on her face when I mentioned kunzite was unmistakable. She wasn’t surprised that Richard had the little stone shard. She was just surprised that I was asking about it.
I gripped the edge of the counter now until my knuckles turned white. Mabel knew about the crystal. Mick knew about Mabel. Richard’s ghost knew everything but he wasn’t talking about it. In fact, when I’d asked him why Mick had killed him, all he said was he couldn’t answer the question.
Wait.
I stood up straighter, eyes staring at where the room key cabinet hung on the back wall. Staring through it, really, with my mind racing a mile a minute.
Couldn’t answer the question. That’s what Richard said. Not that he didn’t want to answer, but that he couldn’t.
So why couldn’t he answer the question?
Maybe…
I’d been looking at this backward. The problem wasn’t an answer that Richard wouldn’t give me. It wasn’t about the answer at all.
It was my question.
I kept asking why Mick Pullman had killed Richard, but he couldn’t answer that question.
Because it wasn’t Mick who killed him.
As that revelation dawned on me, I felt someone’s gaze on my back, boring into a spot between my shoulder blades with so much hatred that my blood chilled. I felt it as surely as if someone had reached out and poked me there.
Time seemed to slow down for me, and I turned around as if I was moving through molasses to find a figure standing in the open doorway of the Inn. A figure in an ankle-length, aquamarine dress. The sun sparked on crystal earrings of the same color.
“So,” Mabel said to me. “Figured it out, did you?”
“Mabel…”
She took two steps inside, and the sunlight from outside and the candlelight from in here conspired to throw her face into shadows. I wished I could look her in the eyes. The eyes of my husband’s killer.
“I knew you’d figure it out,” she told me. “Eventually. I’ve watched the great Dell Powers solve mystery after mystery in our little t
own, all the while knowing the biggest mystery was right under her nose. Right there, waiting to be discovered. So here we are.”
She pointed to the fireplace, and the gaping hole where my husband had been hastily buried.
I was still getting over the shock of understanding that had fallen over me like a cold, wet blanket. My mind was piecing information together and gathering details in. Like how Mabel’s thick accent was suddenly gone.
“What?” she said, pointing to herself, taking a few more measured steps. “My voice? Come on, Dell. You didn’t think that stupid accent was real, did you? Or the act with the spirits who reveal all to Mabel Quinn? Please. That was all just theater!”
“I don’t… I don’t understand,” I muttered, trying to ease my way around the registration desk to where I could grab the phone and dial 000. Kevin could be here in just a few minutes. Wouldn’t be the first time he’d saved his mother’s life right here at my Inn, either. “Mabel… you killed Richard.”
“Yes, well. I don’t want to talk about that.” Two more steps, and she was in a pool of light cast by three thick, round candles set on a side table usually reserved for potted plants. “I want to talk about me for a change.”
In her hand was a long, thin knife. Its serrated edge flashed.
“Mabel, no one else needs to get hurt here.”
She stopped, and blinked from behind her comical glasses. “You know what? That’s exactly what your husband said to me. Right here, in this room. No one needs to get hurt. Well, he didn’t seem to care that he was hurting me!”
I was at the side of the counter now. If I lunged for the phone I could easily make the call for help… but then Mabel would be on me with that knife. I was taller than she was, and younger by a few years, but I wasn’t Supergirl. A phone call wasn’t going to deflect a knife.
I thought about calling out for help, too, because Jack had to be somewhere nearby, or George, or Mister Brewster even, but I didn’t want anyone else getting in front of Mabel and that sharp blade.
So I took another step closer to the phone.
“Mabel, how could my Richard possibly have hurt you—?”
“He knew I loved him! He knew it!” She paced sideways, the knife bouncing in her palm. “I told that man everything about me. I even told him I was hiding from a warrant for my arrest in New Zealand. Can you believe that? You think I enjoy being Mabel Quinn, mousy little bookshop owner in this back of Bourke nothing of a town? I used to be somebody! I used to be rich, until the police seized all my assets. So here I am, on the run and hiding, and I find Richard Powers.”
For a moment, I forgot about getting to the phone. I forgot about calling for help. I think I forgot to breathe, either. She couldn’t be serious.
But she was.
“Oh, Richard was a spunk of a man,” she crowed. “Wasn’t he? My, my. I told him we could get away from here. I told him I had a way to get my money and we could be rich and happy and… and…”
She threw her hands in the air and made a strangled sound in her throat. “But, no! Not Richard. He was already in love. With you! Nothing I told him would change his mind. I even brought my best love crystal with me to convince him. He snatched it from me and told me to leave and then he turned his back on me. I only wanted to plead my case with him. I only wanted to beg him to reconsider. I swear that’s all I was going to do but when I grabbed him we fell and he hit his head against the bricks. Right there.”
Again, she pointed to the fireplace.
“That idiot Mick Pullman had left all that work undone while he went off to get drunk. Remember that, Dell? It’s Mick’s fault, really. Left them bricks out there and then poor Richard falls and smacks his head and he was dead. Just like that.”
As she talked, the scene played out in my head as if I’d been there. Richard, falling under the assault of a lovelorn Mabel Quinn. His skull cracking against the hard edge of a brick stack. His life, snuffed out in an instant for no reason at all. Mabel kept talking to me, telling me the whole thing as if we were the best of friends and she just needed to share, but she didn’t have to say another word. I knew what had happened next.
Richard’s body fell on the tarps. Mabel could see the hole behind the bricks Mick had already taken out. The space there would make the perfect hiding spot. Hastily, she wrapped him up tight in Mick’s construction tarps, using tape to seal up her handiwork. There would be no way for her to remove a body from this Inn. There wasn’t time for that. Somehow the Devil had smiled on her and given her enough time to drag and shove his body into that space between the walls. That’s what she did.
Then she walked away and left him there, leaving me to believe my husband had run out on me and our family.
I have never hated another human being so badly as I hated Mabel Quinn in that moment.
“That drunken idiot Mick never even checked the space,” Mabel wrapped up her story, coming closer to me still, shaking me out of the images of my husband’s dying moments. “If Mick had bothered to look, then it would have been him that found Richard. I mean, I shoved him in as far as I could but anyone paying any attention… you know what? That doesn’t matter. The deed was done.”
Furious, I looked over to the fireplace as my hand reached for the phone. My husband’s body, left to rot, left to be forgotten in that snug space behind the bricks…
My hand froze in its path to the dialpad.
Behind Mabel, from inside the fireplace, an arm extended into the gloom.
“As for that crystal,” she said to me, oblivious to what I was seeing, “I didn’t know what happened to it. Leastwise, not until today. When you came into my shop looking for information on kunzite, then I knew. I knew he still had it with him. Like he loved me from the grave.”
A body followed behind the arm, and a face that was hidden in shadows emerged from behind the bricks.
Mabel sighed. “Now that you know, I can’t let you live. You know that, right Dell?”
A man crawled out from the fireplace, crouched down low, impossible and yet… somehow there he was.
He looked up at me and put a finger to his lips, warning me to be quiet.
“I really did like you, Dell.” Mabel was close enough to lunge at me with the knife now. “I mean, at first. Before you kept Richard from being with me. So I want you to know this isn’t personal. I just will not go back to prison. You and me are done. No hard feelings?”
My hand finished reaching for the telephone.
“Oh, come on now.” Mabel’s smirk was outlined by dancing candlelight. “I’m going to kill you before you finish dialing. What good is that going to do? Be a big girl and just be happy that you’ll get to see your husband soon.”
“I’ve already seen him,” I told her through clenched teeth. “He told me he loves me.”
Mabel angrily snatched her glasses off her face and threw them away from her. “Then let’s see what he has to say about this.”
She raised the knife up in the air.
From behind her, my hero brandished a fireplace poker like a sword, cracking it against the back of Mabel’s head with a hollow clang that left the shaft of the poker bent at an angle.
At the same time I swept the phone at her, knocking off the darkened lamp from the registration desk, then making solid contact with the hand that held the knife, sending the weapon flying after her glasses.
Mabel crumbled to the floor, her dull blue eyes rolled back into her head.
“That,” George said as he dropped the poker to the floor, “is one messed up woman, and no doubt.”
I hugged him so hard I was sure his spine popped. “George! Oh, George, you wonderful, amazing man! How’d you manage that trick?”
“Well,” he gasped as I let go of him, “I promised to start work on the fireplace today. Said I’d figure out how to close up that space, didn’t I? Had to get in there and have a good look see. When I heard Mabel here going on… well. Figured it wasn’t anything good.”
In the dark
ened room, there hadn’t been enough light to see him in there, for me or Mabel either, thank God. He could’ve maybe been a bit quicker about it, but I wasn’t going to argue with the results.
“George, remind me to give you a raise. You’re my hero.”
If it hadn’t been so dark in here, I’m pretty sure I would’ve seen George blush.
Epilogue
“Try some of this vanilla fudge cake,” Jess said to me. “Divine.”
We were sitting on one of the benches down by the lake, out behind the Inn. The sun was setting, and the water was restless in the warm breezes, and we were both happy.
If only this wasn’t a dream.
I was eating my own cake, a chocolate masterpiece with six layers and thick icing. “Remember what Rosie said,” I reminded Jess. “Everything is fine, as long as there’s cake.”
Jess smiled around a forkful of dessert. “I always liked Rosie. Is she ever gonna forgive me for what I did at University?”
Setting my cake on the ground, I shrugged. “Does it matter anymore? I mean, you’re dead.”
She stuck her tongue out at me, and cut out another bite with her fork.
We were silent for a time, in the dream, holding our own thoughts in private. Things weren’t exactly back to normal at the Inn, but they were close enough to it so that I could relax and catch some sleep. The fireplace and the space behind it were filled in again, thanks to George. Rosie had told me she was going to take three days off every week as her due date came closer, as much as it killed her. She loved the idea for a delivery service and now she was spending her days off at home designing menus and prices to go with them.
All my mysteries had been all wrapped up.
Except one.
“Jess,” I said to her as the sun sank lower above the pines. “What did you mean?”
“Hmmm?”
“Come on, Jess. You told me to follow the clues. I know you weren’t talking about Mick Pullman. You weren’t talking about Jonas’s dog. Weren’t even talking about Jonas’s past life, and oh by the way there’s something else you could’ve mentioned to me. Ghost living in the church? Thanks for filling me in on that one!”