“What was that? I didn’t quite catch what you said.”
“I said I came out to the house to volunteer my assistance with the All Hallows Festival. Surely you can use another pair of hands.”
Liss had to bite back a laugh. “Do you really expect me to believe that?” Jason Graye wasn’t altruistic enough to do anything for free. He always had an ulterior motive.
“Now, Liss, is that any way to treat a generous offer? It’s not as if I don’t already have a great many demands on my time.” He sent a thin-lipped, smarmy, completely insincere smile her way before taking another swallow of tea.
“Exactly what are you volunteering for?” Liss asked. “The role of resident ghoul?”
She couldn’t quite figure his angle but was sure he had one. Perhaps it was a ploy to get a look at the inside of the mansion. That possibility made her wonder if Graye might have been responsible for the lights Dolores Mayfield had seen. Maybe for those scratches on the kitchen door lock, too. Had he attempted to get inside the house that night, thinking no one would be around to see him?
“I’m suggesting that I join your little committee,” Graye said through clenched teeth.
“Well, thank you for the gracious offer, but my committee already has exactly the number of members it needs. Now, should you want a tour of the house, that can be arranged.”
“Oh, yes?” He couldn’t quite keep the eagerness out of his voice.
“But you’ll have to wait until Halloween and pay your admission fee like everybody else. Until then, the place is my responsibility and I don’t want any unauthorized personnel on the premises. That being the case, why don’t I just return that set of keys to the town office for you?” She held out a hand and waited.
To her surprise, he gave up the duplicates without an argument. Then he smirked at her. “I can borrow them again any time I like, you know. I have a legitimate reason for wanting to look at the house.” He stood, tossed a ten dollar bill on the table, and left her sitting there with her rapidly cooling coffee.
Patsy emerged from the kitchen, carafe in hand, and refilled Liss’s cup without being asked. “I’d hang on to that second set of keys until after the festival if I were you,” the pale, cadaverously thin baker advised.
Clearly, she’d heard every word Liss and Jason Graye had exchanged. Liss wasn’t surprised, and Patsy’s eavesdropping didn’t bother her in the least. “I was planning to ask the town clerk not to loan them out again,” she admitted. “To anybody.”
“That might not be enough. I wouldn’t put it past that sneaky snake in the grass to wait until Francine’s back is turned and swipe them.”
“He says he wants to buy the place.” Liss took a sip of the steaming brew and awaited Patsy’s response with interest. When it came to knowing what was going on in Moosetookalook, the coffee shop owner ran a close third after the librarian and the postmaster. Betsy Twining at the Clip and Curl came in a distant fourth. Most of the truly interesting people in town either went to Fallstown to have their hair done or didn’t bother with old-style beauty parlors at all. Then, too, since the shop was situated in the back half of the building that housed the post office, Betsy didn’t have much of a view.
“Maybe he does,” Patsy said, “but my money’s on the obvious. He thinks there’s buried treasure on the property, just like everybody else in town has thought for the last twenty-plus years.”
Chapter Five
The All Hallows Festival committee met at four that afternoon in the stockroom of Moosetookalook Scottish Emporium, where Liss had temporarily stored the skeleton, a half dozen manikins, and other assorted stage props. She already knew how she wanted to arrange them at the mansion, but a responsible committee chairperson listened to suggestions at every stage of a project.
“Hi, Mr. Bones!” Adam sang out as he entered by the side door.
Boxer, slouching through right behind him, eyed the skeleton suspended from the ceiling. “Calling him Mr. Bones isn’t classy enough for my man here.”
“What do you suggest we name him?” Liss asked.
“How about Napoleon Bony-parts?”
Liss was still chuckling when Beth and Samantha arrived.
Gloria came in a few minutes later. “I’ve been thinking,” she said even before the door swung shut behind her.
Liss suppressed a groan. So far, Gloria’s ideas had all been far too gory for a family-oriented festival. She had a lurid imagination . . . or else her Aunt Flo did.
“Instead of a dummy,” Gloria continued, “I think we should hang the skeleton in the stairwell. It would give visitors a huge scare if it swung down from the second floor just as they were starting to climb up.”
“First of all, no one’s going upstairs,” Liss reminded her.
“And the knife in the ribs won’t work with a skeleton,” Boxer pointed out. “Nothing to stick it into.”
“We wouldn’t be able to use the blood either,” Beth chimed in. “Skeletons can’t bleed.”
Adam nodded solemnly. “No blood.”
Samantha said nothing. She stood by the table where Liss packaged items from the Emporium for shipment, her arms rigid at her sides, as if she was trying to keep herself from touching anything.
Instead of the usual bubble wrap, cardboard boxes, and tape dispensers, the surface of the worktable was littered with an assortment of fake food. Liss had ordered a complete banquet from a theatrical supply company. They’d sent everything from a bowl of mashed potatoes to a pumpkin pie. The main course was a roast turkey with all the trimmings. Adam poked at the bird with his finger and laughed.
“What do you think, Samantha?” Liss asked.
“Nothing!” Samantha glanced sideways at Liss, then averted her gaze and wouldn’t meet her aunt’s eyes again. “I don’t have any ideas,” she mumbled.
Although Liss wondered what on earth was wrong with her niece, she didn’t hassle the girl. The last thing she wanted was to embarrass her. Besides, the other young people more than made up for her silence, coming up with ideas for tweaking the set pieces at the haunted house and sharing their thoughts about the costume parade.
It was some time before Gloria glanced at her watch and asked where Margaret and Stu were.
“Margaret can’t make it today. Something came up at the hotel.”
“She hasn’t attended any of our meetings so far,” Gloria complained.
Liss shrugged. “Her schedule isn’t as regular as ours. That doesn’t make her input any less valuable. But Stu should have been here by now.”
The ski shop was right next door to the Emporium. Like the rest of the town square shops, it was closed on Mondays, but Stu lived in the apartment above his store. Liss tried phoning, but there was no answer at either number. He was still a no show when the meeting broke up, making Liss wonder if he’d finally lived up to Dolores’s predictions and quit the team. If he had, she wished he’d at least had the courtesy to resign in person.
Irritated, Liss stopped at his place on her way home. No one answered her knock and there were no lights showing anywhere in the building. She tried to tell herself that he’d just forgotten about their meeting, but it wasn’t like Stu to miss an appointment. By the time she let herself into her own house, she was seriously worried. She dug out the address book she kept in the drawer of the phone stand and hunted up Stu’s cell phone number. It rang eight times before he answered.
“What?” He sounded grouchy and out of sorts.
“Uh, Stu, it’s Liss. I was just checking to—”
“This is all your fault!”
Liss held the phone away from her ear. Dan, who had just come in, raised his eyebrows in a question. He could hear Stu ranting from the far side of their living room.
The gist of the tirade was that Stu had gone out to the Chadwick mansion, thinking that the committee was meeting there, and had taken a fall. He’d injured his ankle and was not a happy camper. Neither was the emergency room nurse who came on the line to tell Liss
that cell phones had to be turned off inside the hospital. Then she disconnected the call.
“Do you think we should drive down there?” Liss asked.
Dan shook his head. “If he got himself to Fallstown to have that ankle looked at, he can get himself back.” Then he noticed the expression on Liss’s face. “What?”
“How did Stu get inside the house? I’m the only one who has keys.”
“The town office—”
She shook her head. “I have that set, too.” She explained how she’d confiscated them from Jason Graye earlier that day and why she’d kept them.
Dan drove her to the Chadwick mansion to make sure the house was locked. When they had assured themselves that it was, Liss insisted that they make the twenty minute trip to the hospital in Fallstown. Stu had some questions to answer. If he’d had a duplicate set made of the keys to the mansion, she meant to read him the riot act.
They arrived just in time to catch Stu hobbling through the parking lot on crutches. He’d almost reached his car when Liss hopped out of hers to confront him. He tried to ignore her, but she was persistent.
“I’m sorry you misunderstood about the meeting. And I’m sorry you got hurt. Is your ankle broken?”
“Just a sprain, but it’s a bad one.”
She winced in sympathy, but moved to block his driver’s side door with her body.
“You want to get out of my way, Liss? The only good thing about this fiasco is that it’s my left ankle. I can still drive. Right now all I want to do is go home, put my feet up, and take the pain pills the doctor gave me.”
“I’ll drive you home. Dan can bring your car. You have to fill a prescription for more pills, right? Dan can do that for you, too.”
Stu wavered, grumbling and looking sour. “You do owe me.” He handed over his car keys.
In less than five minutes, Stu had been settled in the passenger seat with his crutches in the back and they were on their way home. “So, do you want to tell me what happened?”
“Damned if I know. I was just taking a look around, waiting for the rest of you to show up, and I tripped over a duffle bag somebody left right in the middle of the hallway.”
Liss was so startled that she momentarily took her eyes off the road to stare at him. “A what?”
“A duffle bag. You know, one of those—”
“I know what a duffle bag is.” She forced her attention back to her driving. “What I don’t know is how one got inside the mansion. There was no such thing there earlier today.”
“It was there at four. I ought to know.”
“Don’t get surly on me, Stu Burroughs. And while we’re on the subject, how did you get inside that house in the first place?”
“What do you mean, how did I get inside? I opened the front door and walked through it.”
Her hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Are you telling me the Chadwick mansion was unlocked?”
“Well, yeah. That’s why I thought you were already there, even though I didn’t see your car. I called your name, then headed down the hall toward the kitchen. I figured you’d parked around back and came in that way. I was about halfway there when I tripped over the duffle bag. You know how dark it is in that place. I didn’t see the damned thing until I fell on top of it.” He frowned. “I guess I didn’t really see it then, either. I felt what it was when I was trying to get back to my feet.”
“Then what?”
“What do you mean, then what? I had to go back down all those stone steps in the terrace on my butt because I couldn’t put weight on my ankle. And then I had to drive myself to the emergency room.”
Liss supposed he had a right to be cranky, and she was sorry he’d been hurt. Trying to sound conciliatory, she said, “I appreciate your taking the time to throw the deadbolts before you left.”
His reply was as terse as it was startling. “I didn’t. Hell, I’m not even sure I closed the door behind me.”
“How can you not remem—”
“I have a low threshold for pain,” he defended himself.
They rode in silence for a few minutes before Liss ventured another question. “Did you hear anything before you tripped? Any sounds from upstairs? Or from the back of the house?”
“No.” Now he was sulking.
“Look, Stu, here’s the thing—no one should have been able to get inside that house. Somebody obviously did, and that person left a duffle bag lying around for you to trip over. We need to find out who he is, especially if he’s still there. Because somebody locked up after you left.” She wished that she and Dan had gone inside the mansion, but all they’d done was check to be sure the doors were locked. Then they’d headed for Fallstown in search of Stu.
“I’m certainly not going back out there tonight,” Stu muttered. “And if you’re smart, you won’t, either.”
“I won’t go alone,” Liss said. Beyond that, she made no promises.
As it turned out, she didn’t go at all. When Dan heard Stu’s story, he called the Moosetookalook Police Department for backup. Sherri wasn’t on duty, but the officer on the two-to-ten shift went with him to investigate. Liss was not invited to accompany them. She stayed home with the cats. To add injury to insult, Lumpkin bit her on the ankle.
“No sign of any duffle bag,” Dan reported when he returned home. “And thanks to the thorough floor-sweeping you gave the place the other day, there weren’t any footprints in the dust. Best guess is that a vagrant got in, planning to sleep there, and was scared off when Stu turned up.”
“And this mysterious homeless person considerately locked the doors when he left the house?” Liss, seated at the vanity in their bedroom while she brushed her hair, met Dan’s eyes in the mirror.
“Your guess is as good as mine.” He came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders, still holding her gaze. “Will you promise me something, Liss? Promise me you won’t go out to the Chadwick mansion alone, not even in broad daylight. It’s just too damned isolated out there.”
Remembering the scare Jason Graye had given her, Liss promised.
Dan looked relieved. He planted a kiss on the top of her head, then began efficiently stripping off clothes in preparation for turning in for the night.
“Just one question—how did an intruder get in? I know I locked all the doors before I left there earlier today. And I kept all the keys.” She abandoned her brushing to swivel around on the vanity stool.
“I wish I knew. We checked the doors and all the windows. Nothing was unlocked or open. I couldn’t find any signs that someone had broken in. Maybe our mysterious visitor had a set of cat burglar tools and knew how to use them.”
“As opposed to whoever had the light Dolores saw out there the other night?”
“Take your pick,” Dan said, straight-faced. “Homeless person with housebreaking skills . . . or vampire.”
In spite of herself, Liss smiled. She’d always been a fan of comic relief and they were badly in need of some. “Why vampire? I thought zombies were the paranormal soup de jour.”
“It’s vampires that can change themselves into bats, right?” He climbed into bed and patted the space next to him, an invitation in his eyes. “I figure a bat might just be small enough to find a way inside the house.”
“There’s only one thing wrong with your logic.” She turned off the bedside lamp, plunging the room into semidarkness. A streetlamp provided enough illumination to make out Dan’s familiar shape.
“Only one?”
She ignored his sarcastic tone of voice. “It was still daytime when Stu was at the mansion. Vampires don’t do well in daylight.” She crawled in next to him.
His arm came around her and he nuzzled her ear. “Okay, then, what’s your explanation?”
“Shape shifter,” she said promptly. “A creature who can change at will into a mouse, or a squirrel . . . or maybe a black fly.”
He laughed. “Shape shifter it is.”
His next suggestion had nothing whatsoeve
r to do with haunted houses.
Two days later, early in the morning before the Emporium was due to open at ten, Liss went back out to the mansion. True to her promise, she did not go alone. Margaret Boyd rode shotgun.
“I’ll only be a minute,” Liss said as she unlocked the kitchen door. “I just want to see if I left my jacket here the other day.” She had a vague memory of hanging it over the back of one of the kitchen chairs and then forgetting all about it when Jason Graye made his unexpected appearance.
Aunt Margaret came in right behind her. “An escort at all times,” Margaret reminded her. “That’s what you promised Dan.”
“And a royal pain it’s going to be, but I’ll keep my word.” Liss frowned, staring at the dinette set in the corner. The pale blue jacket wasn’t there. “Maybe I took it off in the dining room.”
There were no lanterns in the kitchen. Liss remembered leaving the one she’d used on Monday at the foot of the stairs. She still wasn’t sure where the other one had gotten to. But once Margaret turned on the flashlight she’d brought with her, Liss dismissed all thought of any other source of light from her mind.
Her jacket was not in the dining room either. “I could have sworn. . . .”
“Getting forgetful in your old age, Liss?” Margaret kidded her.
“I guess so. Oh, well, I imagine it will turn up somewhere. Maybe I left it at Patsy’s.”
“Anything else you need to do here?”
“Shine your light up and down the hallway, will you? Who knows? Maybe the mysterious duffle bag has reappeared.”
It hadn’t. Nor was the lantern where Liss remembered leaving it.
“I sure hope Dan moved it,” she told her aunt. “Otherwise I’m going to start worrying about short-term memory loss.”
Margaret laughed. “You’re too young. And I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical explanation for everything.”
“Like what? Ghosts?”
Margaret ignored the sarcasm. “Do you want to go through the entire house?”
“I suppose we’d better. I am responsible for it.”
She found one lantern in the parlor, but the other never did turn up. Neither did Liss’s jacket, convincing her that she must have left it at the coffee shop. They had returned to the kitchen and were about to leave when Margaret glanced through the small window in the back door and frowned.
Vampires, Bones and Treacle Scones (A Liss MacCrimmon Mystery) Page 6