The Murder of Shakespeare's Ghost

by Anna Celeste Burke

  “I never got a glimpse of the one running down the hall, but Charly and Miriam saw someone with the visage of Shakespeare coming from the direction of this cottage. That must be the ghostly figure Robyn saw before she hid in her bedroom and started calling people for help.” She shrugged, rubbed her head again, and yawned setting off a chain reaction. The evening was catching up with Neely, even though the was the veteran night owl among us. I had no doubt the figure Charly and I had seen was the same one that had sent Robyn into a panic. If for no other reason than improbability that there could be more than one phantom Shakespeare on the loose in Seaview Cottages.

  “If anyone escaped from this end of the house, he must have used your sliders.” Devers stepped toward the patio doors as if he was going to check to see if they were open. Hank reached out an stopped him.

  “Let’s wait for the crime lab investigators to dust for prints first, Darnell. Do you have someplace you can stay tonight, Robyn?”

  “With me,” we all replied at once. Robyn smiled for the first time since she’d joined us.

  “I’ll stay with Neely. That way I can make sure she’s really okay after busting that guy’s nose with the back of her head.” Neely, Charly, and I all nodded. Having someone to check on her was a good idea since Neely had refused to go to the ER and get x-rays. She was lucky to end up with nothing worse than a bump on the head and a few aches and pains. So was the intruder if he got away from her with only a broken nose or a fat lip given her resourcefulness. He was even more fortunate not to have encountered Charly with her kubotan or me with my apparently wanton willingness to lay waste to suspected ne’er do wells with the flashlight of doom.

  “You know what? If Neely’s attacker exited via the front door, while Shakespeare’s ghost went out the back, they must have left at about the same time. Unless the guy in the windbreaker took a different escape route out on the street, he would have crossed our path just as his ghostly companion did.”

  “Good point! Maybe Carl and Joe spotted a person in a dark-colored windbreaker,” Neely suggested. “They were driving toward Shakespeare’s Cottage from the opposite end of the street when they spoke to Charly and Miriam, although I have no idea why they were out after midnight.”

  “Neighborhood ghost patrol,” Hank muttered. “They told us they didn’t see anyone until they spotted Shakespeare right before they nearly bumped into you two in the literal sense of the word. Even if someone had been on the street, I doubt they would have seen a figure in dark clothes while driving with their headlights off.”

  “Or maybe he vanished into thin air by then, too. Mercy me, all I need is two ghosts! Nasty, quarreling foul-mouthed ghosts. Immortal enemies maybe, but far from what I’d call ghostly companions, Miriam.”

  “Point taken,” Charly noted. “One thing’s for certain, though, Robyn. Ghosts don’t bleed. At least one of your unwelcome visitors does.” The grim tone in Charly’s voice chilled me to the bone.

  4 Wild Goose Chase

  “Nay, if our wits run the wild-goose chase, I am done.” – Romeo & Juliet

  ∞

  “We almost had him! If we hadn’t hit that tree as hard as we did, we could have gone after him on foot.”

  “How long did you expect your wild goose chase to last?” Midge asked. “You two would have been lucky to make it to the other side of the bridge before you collapsed, especially if you were hauling that pain ball gun and the tank with you.”

  “Midge is right. She was a nurse for a long time, and has seen plenty of young, healthy Army recruits overdo it. You ought to be grateful you hit that tree, or we might be at your bedside in a hospital—or worse.” Marty had that right. In fact, we were all fortunate no one ended up in the hospital with two intruders wreaking havoc at the Shakespeare Cottage.

  “What were you going to do with a paint ball gun if you did catch up with Shakespeare’s ghost?” I asked. Joe sat up abruptly and banged the coffee table in front of him with his knee. We all grabbed our drinks afraid they’d spill on the gleaming wood table or fluffy white Sherpa carpet beneath it.

  Marty, who’d worked for decades as a buyer for high end department stores, had decorated her Fitzgerald Cottage with beautiful, expensive items. The place was a showcase with hints of art deco design that screamed Gatsby as if readied for a magazine photo shoot. I couldn’t imagine her kitchen covered in flour and crumbs like mine often ends up after a baking binge.

  I’ve never made as big a mess as the one in Robyn’s kitchen. We’d asked her to join us for dinner, but she’d gone home late this afternoon to clean up. At least she wasn’t facing the cleanup alone. Her landlord, who’d been dismissive about previous complaints of intruders, had hired help.

  “Relax, you guys. I’m not living in a museum. Cats are amazingly agile, but Scheherazade knocks stuff over all the time. She can be a bad cat when she wants to be.” Marty laughed as if she was joking, but I could believe it. Domino and Emily were home alone, tonight, because Scheherazade doesn’t tolerate the presence of dogs. “Believe it or not, sometimes she even pushes my things off onto the floor on purpose.”

  I could believe that, too. Scheherazade was watching us from where she lounged on the back of Marty’s chair. When Marty spoke her name, her enormous fluffy white tail switched, batting Marty in the face. I’m normally as big a fan of cats as I am of dogs, but this one made me uneasy. When I’d arrived, her golden eyes had lingered disapprovingly on me, perhaps sniffing eau de Domino on my clothing. By the way she’d glared at Joe when he banged the table, I suspect she may not like people any better than dogs. Not even her owner all the time given what Marty said about the mischief the enormous Persian cat caused.

  “Since you didn’t answer, I’ll ask my question again in slightly different way. What were you going to do if you’d cornered the ghost?” Marty asked getting us back on topic.

  “We thought if we hit him with a paint ball and the paint stuck, we’d have proof he’s no ghost,” Carl replied.

  “It also might have been enough to slow him down so we could grab him and sit on him until security or the police got there. The neighborhood ghost patrol would have made its first citizens’ arrest, you know?”

  “Someone needs to stop the rat from impersonating one of the greatest writers of all time. Who does he think he is?” Midge huffed in a gruff ex-Army nurse way. I’m not sure why, but her outrage caught me by surprise.

  “I had no idea you were a fan of Shakespeare.” I still have so much to learn about my interesting new friends at Seaview Cottages. True friends who’d forgiven the little white lies I’d told. They’d helped me come up with a solution to the problems I faced as an underage resident in the fifty-five plus community.

  “It’s no secret I’m something of an anglophile which is obvious since I live in the Jane Austen Cottage. I toyed with the idea of taking to the stage before I found my calling as a nurse. Not to mention, I have an ordinary face and I’m built like a tank. In the theater that’s not the stuff as dreams are made on, to steal a line from The Bard. Who wouldn’t be a fan of a person who said it all so eloquently hundreds of years ago?” Midge paused and her entire demeanor changed to one I’d never seen before. Her voice changed, too as she spoke.

  “All the world’s a stage,

  And all the men and women merely players;

  They have their exits and their entrances,

  And one man in his time plays many parts.”

  It was as if she’d been transported and we were taken with her as she uttered those words with an ethereal quality in her tone. Then she snapped to—back into the no-nonsense, tough-as-nails nurse. Her flight of poetic fancy stood in stark contrast to her usual persona. The woman had spent a big chunk of her life in a profession that required stringent adherence to reason, logic, and rules vital to saving lives. I understand that part of her character very well since bookkeepers live by rules, too.

  “Women too, of course, not just men, play many parts. The soliloquy goes on
to describe the seven stages in life. There’s so much in these few phrases, though. Have you ever heard a truer or more succinct commentary on our existence?”

  “Well, I don’t speak Shakespeare—all the ‘tis, thou, whilst, and doth loses me every time.”

  “There wasn’t a bit of that in what Midge just shared with us,” Charly snapped. “Besides, we all speak Shakespeare almost every day without even realizing it. When Midge asked you about the wild goose chase you were on it obviously wasn’t the first time you’ve heard those words. You’ve probably used them many times, too. The phrase comes from a line in Romeo and Juliet.” Neely jumped in eagerly.

  “You know how much I love Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and so many other wonderful mystery writers and their characters. ‘The game is afoot’ is a line that first came from Shakespeare’s pen, not from one of my favorite author’s sleuths.” Neely was understating her devotion to stories of murder and mayhem in books and in movies. Every nook and cranny of her Christie Cottage is crammed with memorabilia and books, including some early additions that are valuable and probably ought to be behind lock and key. Shakespeare’s ghost would have made out like a bandit if he’d chosen to break in at Neely’s place, or here at Marty’s cottage. Which made me wonder aloud about the location of the latest incident.

  “Why break into the Shakespeare Cottage?”

  “By the destruction in the pantry, it’s obvious someone’s looking for something. I also believe Robyn’s claims that she’s had uninvited guests on earlier occasions who searched other areas of the cottage. That’s not the behavior of opportunistic thieves going house-to-house to pilfer silverware or jewelry.”

  “Assuming they’re not on a wild goose case, either, what could they be searching for?”

  “That’s what she’s hired G.O.L.D. to discover,” Charley replied. “I’ll get a copy of the police report and the crime lab results, too, as soon as they’re available. Maybe they’ll contain some hint of who was in there or what they were after.” Charly was the only one of us who had the connections to get that kind of information and who could do it quickly.

  “Whatever someone’s looking for can’t be too big if it could have been hidden in a tin of baking powder or a bag of flour,” Midge observed.

  “That’s probably true. The crime lab investigators will do their best to sift through the debris for fingerprints and other clues about the identity of the intruders. They took Neely’s blouse and collected samples of the blood left at the scene. If they can determine who’s been in there, maybe Hank can haul them in for questioning and ask why.”

  “It’s probably way too late to get DNA from Shakespeare, unless they can dig up his old bones. Do ghosts leave DNA?”

  “Stop it, Joe. The ghostbusters thing isn’t funny anymore,” Midge said.

  “You didn’t see what we saw,” Carl added. “Besides, there’s more than one way to bust a ghost. I told you we were out to get the guy—dead or alive!”

  “We did see him,” Charly responded. “From a distance, it sure looked like Shakespeare’s ghost—glowing one minute and gone the next. How much of that could have been done with makeup, Neely?”

  “A wig and a period costume wouldn’t be hard to find. As for the glow, you could add that to the skin using body paint or to the costume by mixing glow paint into fabric paint. If you expose phosphorescent paint to sunlight, it’ll glow for hours.”

  “What about the vanishing act?” I asked.

  “A cloak of invisibility,” Joe replied. “I mean, that’s if we’re not dealing with a real ghost that’s capable of materializing and dematerializing at will.” I paused, not sure if he was clowning around again or still seriously considering the prospect that we were dealing with a ghost. Neely looked at Joe and then me.

  “I’m sure Joe’s trying to be funny—sort of—but the cloak of invisibility angle isn’t completely dumb. A dark cloak, thrown over the costumed figure might make him appear to vanish. That might explain how he seemingly disappeared right in front of Robyn, too. It’s too bad she didn’t just turn on the overhead light in the hallway. That would have exposed his charade for what it was.”

  “We can ask Robyn about that, although I believe she tried that the first time he appeared, and the light didn’t come on.”

  “Spooky, huh?” Joe asked adding a few ghost hoots. “When that first incident occurred, she called 911, but by the time the police arrived, there was no sign of anyone in her cottage. No evidence of a break-in, and the light in the hallway worked fine, too.”

  “Monkeying with a circuit breaker is no big deal if someone was out to give Robyn a good scare,” Carl suggested. “It worked, too, since she pretty much just ran for it after that—especially once Devers called her the next day and ran his daffy dame number on her.”

  “The elaborate Shakespeare’s ghost getup took some doing and worked well to keep Robyn from reporting an intruder or being believed when she did. Why have your partner drop in wearing a plain old warmup suit or whatever it was the assailant you head-butted had on, Neely?”

  “They didn’t act like partners and Shakespeare’s ghost was always alone on his previous visits.”

  “So, partners or not, this visit was different. When she’d seen him before, it was always in the hallway and not in the kitchen where there was such a mess this time. The police report ought to tell us if the sliders were open and the intruder got out that way. Maybe one or both got in that way too.” Charly sipped her drink. “To me, the sliders in the kitchen appeared to be locked. I’m not expecting them to find anything.”

  “What about the door leading from the garage to the back yard?” I asked.

  “Let’s see what Hank says. I’ll also ask for the report filed the first time Robyn called 911. I doubt they reported anything suspicious or Devers wouldn’t have called her in such a snit.”

  “What if there’s an extra set of keys floating around? They could have come in the same way you did, Neely, without it looking like a break-in last night or in the past. Although, I’m not sure I understand where your attacker came from or why he didn’t run for it down the hallway, too.”

  “It was pitch black in there and my eyes aren’t so great anyway. I was still adjusting to the change from the brighter light outdoors near the streetlamps. He was wearing dark clothes, so maybe he was standing right in front of me. My eyesight is so poor, I might not have noticed him until he moved.”

  “I’d say hiding behind the door is more like it,” Joe offered. “Robyn may not have seen the ghost in the kitchen, but she’s noticed that things were moved around in the study and other parts of the house.”

  “That included the master suite, too,” Midge pointed out. “Shakespeare didn’t always sneak around in the middle of the night, either. Sometimes, after Robyn returned home from an outing or errand, she noticed items in the cottage had been rearranged.”

  “Do we have specific dates to go with the earlier incidents when she noticed items had been moved?”

  “I don’t know, Charly,” Joe replied. “Do you, Carl?”

  “No, but putting together a timeline is a great idea. Someone should ask her about dates once she’s had a chance to calm down and can think straight. She first called her landlord worried that someone had been in the cottage not long after she renewed her lease almost a year ago. That’s when he first brought up the possibility that it was a ghost. Robyn took him seriously, but I don’t know the guy so maybe he was kidding.”

  “Let’s ask him,” I suggested. “Are we sure the landlord hasn’t been snooping around in her cottage? He’d have the keys.”

  “He’d also have permission, with some advance notice, to inspect the premises, so no snooping required. If she renewed her lease, that must mean she was living there almost a year before trouble started,” Midge observed.

  “Or before she noticed it,” Marty added. “It’s easy to dismiss stuff at our age. I hide things from myself on occa
sion. Especially the first few months when she was moving in, it might not have occurred to her that an item wasn’t where she expected to find it.”

  “Talking to the landlord and getting his view on what’s occurred should be straightforward now that he can’t deny something’s going on in Shakespeare’s Cottage,” Charly said.

  “I hope you’re right. Joe and I weren’t out last night on a lark, no matter how it may seem. We need to figure this out sooner rather than later, because last’s night’s incident wasn’t just different, it was more desperate and deranged. Is Robyn going to be safe returning to the cottage?” Carl asked. That question landed in the room like a lead balloon.

  5 What’s in a Name?

  “What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” – Romeo and Juliet

  ∞

  “Robyn is staying with me again tonight. We weren’t sure that the cleanup would get done today. All the locks are being changed on her doors and the code’s being reset on the alarm system, so they’ll make the place as secure as anyone can.”

  “Even if they get the pantry, foyer, and porched cleaned, there must be touch ups and repainting that needs to be done. That’s going to stink the place up. Keep her out of there for a few days—at night, anyway.” Joe was so adamant, I knew he was up to something.

  “Are you hoping if Robyn leaves the cottage empty the ghost will return?” I asked.

  “It could happen. Why not give the old guy room to roam if that’s what he wants to do?”

  “You too, Carl? I thought you understood you’d wiggled out of legal trouble by agreeing to give up your ghost patrol.” Midge sounded gruff, but I could tell she didn’t completely disapprove.