“Committee business?” Sarcasm tinged Angie’s question.
“In a way. Okay. Yes, I want to ask her about Boxer Snipes. Unlike some people, I’m investigating before I leap to any conclusions about the boy.”
Angie stalked to the door that led to the stairwell, opened it, and yelled Beth’s name. “Get down here!” she added before she went back to her shelving.
The upstairs apartment door banged open a moment later. Liss heard the sound of canned TV laughter before Beth closed it behind her and pounded down the stairs. She burst into the bookstore, eyes wide with alarm. “What’s wrong?”
She checked when she saw Liss. The second glance she gave her mother was even more wary.
“Hi, Beth,” Liss said. “Got a minute?”
The girl nodded, but Liss sensed a certain reserve.
“I just want to ask you about a couple of things. To get them straight in my own mind. Okay?”
“I guess.”
“It’s about that Boxer Snipes,” Angie interrupted. “I didn’t realize he was such a good friend of yours, Beth.”
The angry look Beth sent Liss’s way before she answered her mother made Liss feel like the worst kind of traitor.
“He’s okay,” Beth said, feigning nonchalance, but not doing a very convincing job of it.
“He’s older than you are,” her mother said.
“So?”
“Don’t use that tone with me, young lady.”
“Sorry,” Beth mumbled.
Liss cleared her throat. “I’m not trying to cause trouble, Beth.”
Angie opened her mouth to say more, but Liss caught her eye and scowled at her until she subsided.
Liss leaned closer to Beth and put one hand on the girl’s thin shoulder. “Was Boxer the friend you had in mind when we first talked about the Halloween committee?”
Liss remembered that day well. She’d asked Beth to join the committee. Beth had been insulted. “I’m too old for Halloween,” she’d said. “Trick or treating is for babies.”
“And you don’t have to do any,” Liss had assured her.
She hadn’t anticipated that it would take more than a few minutes to get Beth to agree, especially since she’d already secured Angie’s approval. Beth, however, had hung her head, scraped one toe back and forth on the hardwood floor, and avoided Liss’s eyes.
Much as she was doing now.
“It might be fun,” Angie had said then.
Beth hadn’t been so sure. Liss could remember having exactly the same reaction when her mother wanted her to do something that she thought was stupid. She’d asked Beth if bribery would help.
Beth had considered the proposition, her expression solemn. She had her mother’s big brown eyes, but where Angie’s always looked a little sad, Beth had a naturally optimistic disposition. She’d tossed her head, making her dark, wavy hair bounce on her shoulders, and announced that she had conditions.
Liss had been prepared to negotiate.
Condition one was that Beth’s little brother not to be on the committee.
Condition number two was that she could ask someone else to join with her.
“I don’t see why not,” Liss had said. She could remember thinking if it will convince you to agree, I’m all for it!
Beth hadn’t given her a name. Instead, claiming she had homework to do, she’d taken off up the stairs to the apartment above the bookstore. Liss and Angie had agreed that she’d probably gone to send a text to whomever she had in mind.
I should have asked more questions up front, Liss thought. Hindsight was always 20/20.
Beth stopped waxing the floor with her toe and lifted her head to meet Liss’s eyes. “I wasn’t thinking of Boxer. I asked my friend Luanne, but she didn’t want to do it. I was trying to talk her into it at school and Boxer overheard.”
Caught by surprise, Liss blinked at her. “So . . . it was Boxer’s idea that he join the committee?”
Beth nodded and once more averted her gaze.
“Told you he was up to no good,” Angie mouthed, but she didn’t say the words out loud.
“Beth? Why did you agree? You could have told him you couldn’t invite him without my approval.”
The thin shoulders rose and fell in a shrug that told Liss absolutely nothing.
“Are you . . . friends with him?”
“He’s okay.”
“Beth, this is like pulling teeth. You must have had a reason for agreeing to bring Boxer to that first meeting.”
The crimson tide climbing Beth’s neck into her face was an answer in itself. Liss took it as proof that she’d guessed correctly at the start—Beth had a major-league crush on the boy.
“Sweetie, he’s not in any trouble and neither are you. I’m just trying to get a handle on things. Has Boxer said anything to you about the haunted house, other than talking about the plans we all made together?”
“He said his cousins used to hang out there. They broke in ’cuz they needed a place to smoke cigarettes and drink beer.”
“The cousins who are at the youth center now?”
Beth nodded. “Boxer doesn’t even like them. Honest. And he didn’t break in. Or steal stuff. Or anything.”
“Steal stuff? Is that what his cousins did?”
Beth nodded. “They took snowmobiles into closed-up camps off-season and broke in. They mostly took liquor. They’re both morons. And bullies. Nobody likes them.”
“And Boxer?”
“What about him?”
Again with the pulling teeth! “Is he a moron?”
“No!”
“A bully?” Like his Uncle Cracker?
“Of course not.”
“Honest?”
“Yes!”
“What do the other kids think of Boxer?”
Another shrug. “How would I know?”
“You’d know. Come on, Beth. Do they think he’s a troublemaker? Or is he cool?”
Beth gave her an incredulous look. “Cool? What century are you from?”
“Be glad I didn’t ask you if he was wicked good. Thumbs up or thumbs down from most of your classmates?” Liss made the appropriate gestures.
A smile made Beth’s lips twitch as she held her own thumb in the UP position.
“Ah. Well, I guess that means we can’t feed him to the lions.”
To her relief, Beth laughed out loud. Liss left the bookstore feeling much more optimistic about her team of young helpers.
On Wednesday, when Liss went out to the mansion with Sherri for company, they found the missing apple dookin tub sitting in the middle of the kitchen, right where it should have been in the first place. The manikin that had vanished was stuffed inside it.
Liss’s first thought was to wonder if Beth had warned Boxer that she was asking questions about him. Her second was to remind herself that even if the boy had been responsible for the pranks, they were still just that—pranks. No harm, no foul. Least said, soonest mended.
She amused herself coming up with other clichés while she restored the Death by Poison scene to its former state. When she was done, she solemnly crossed her fingers, hoping everything would still be where she’d put it the next time she checked.
She and Sherri were about to lock up and leave when Dan drove in. He hopped out of the truck, a grin splitting his face from ear to ear as he bounded up the back steps to meet them on the stoop.
“What are you so happy about?” Liss demanded.
“I found it!” He thrust a thick roll of paper at her.
“Found what?” Liss took it gingerly, seeing how old it was.
“An architect’s drawings of the house and grounds. Let’s go back inside so I can show you.”
The edges of the drawings flaked a bit when Dan unrolled them. There were four floor plans, labeled FIRST STORY, SECOND STORY, THIRD STORY OR ATTIC, and BASEMENT. It was the latter that he wanted them to examine closely.
“Huh,” Sherri said, studying the diagram. “The original kitchen
was in the cellar.”
“And look what else was.” Dan pointed to what at first glance seemed to be a long narrow room jutting out to the east of the main house.
Liss started to laugh. “Good grief. It’s a secret tunnel.”
“That’s what it looks like to me,” Dan said. “Let’s go see if we can find the entrance.” Instead of heading for the cellar steps, he went back outside to circle the mansion to the east. He stopped halfway along that side of the building and cocked his head toward the nearby woods. “Hear that?”
Sherri answered. “Running water. Ten Mile Stream, I’m guessing.”
They set off for the tree line, following the murmur of sound. Less than a hundred yards from the house, they came out into the open again at the top of a steep embankment. Directly below was a rocky shoreline. The stream was sluggish at this time of year, dotted with boulders and no more than twenty feet wide.
“I wonder how much the course has changed in the last hundred and fifty years,” Dan mused as he picked his way down the bank, blazing a trail for Liss and Sherri. At the bottom, he stared intently at the overgrown underbrush along the bottom of the embankment.
“What are you looking for?” Liss asked.
“Any anomaly. Ah! Look there.”
Liss had to squint to see what he had spotted. Branches had been carefully arranged to conceal a very old wooden door.
The latch was rusty and in places the wood had rotted away. Dan gave one good tug and, hinges groaning, the door flew open. A musty passageway yawned before them, black as pitch.
Sherri produced her police-issue Maglite.
“I liked it better dark,” Liss muttered when the beam revealed broken spider webs and evidence of a partial collapse.
“This was probably built as a way to unload supplies from a boat directly into the house,” Dan speculated. “I’m guessing the stream was wider and deeper back when this place was built.”
“And it may explain how the Chadwicks got so wealthy,” Sherri said. “Smuggling paid well back in the good old days.”
“Even before Blackie O’Hare came into the picture?” Liss asked.
“Didn’t you ever wonder how Alison Chadwick met him in the first place?”
“Food for thought,” Liss agreed.
Dan took charge of the flashlight, playing it over the support beams. “Looks like most of these are still intact. It’s probably safe enough to go inside.”
“Probably?” Liss didn’t think that was good enough, but before she could stop him, Dan had stepped over the door sill, ducking to avoid hitting his head on the lintel.
Liss tried to go after him, but Sherri caught her arm and pulled her back. “If the tunnel collapses, someone needs to be on the outside to mount a rescue.”
“Oh, that makes me feel so much better!” But she stayed put.
Five long minutes passed as Dan’s slow, cautious footsteps faded into the distance. Then they stopped altogether. A moment later, Liss heard a horrific screech. Her heart leaped into her throat even as she belatedly recognized the sound as another door with rusty hinges being opened.
“Meet me in the basement!” Dan’s voice was muffled by distance and dirt walls, but the words were clear enough to understand.
The door from the tunnel into the cellar was all but invisible so long as it was closed. Liss examined the area in front of it with considerable curiosity. At some point, it had served as a coal bin. By the time the Chadwicks installed an oil burner, they’d probably forgotten that any tunnel ever existed.
“I found footprints in there,” Dan said, gesturing back the way he’d come. “Going in both directions. This has to be how our ghost got into the house.”
“Can you board up the entrance?” Sherri asked. “That ought to put an end to the trespassing.”
Dan agreed that it should and spent the next hour making certain no one else could sneak into the Chadwick mansion from the entrance by the stream. He nailed sturdy two-by-fours into place across the cellar end to keep the old door closed and intruders out.
All was well at the mansion the following day. Liss hoped that meant their troubles were over, but when she and Dan went out again on Friday, the eve of Halloween, to make a final check before the big day, they discovered that the fuel tank for the generator was empty.
“Another prank?”
“Maybe,” Dan sounded disgruntled. “Or maybe just an opportunistic thief. We had to set up the generator outdoors for safety reasons. It’s easy to get at with a siphon.”
When Dan had refilled the generator with gas—the same kind used by cars—Liss ran a final test of the special effects she’d installed. This time she was the one responsible for the flickering lights and eerie sounds. Thumps, moans, and even a distant scream echoed through the deserted house. Lightning flashed. In the parlor, a sickly green glow surrounded the bones lying on the sofa.
“Pretty effective,” Dan said approvingly.
“Why, thank you kind sir. I do my best.” He’d been in the basement, checking on the door to the tunnel. “Everything okay?”
“Still safely sealed off.”
“Good.”
Liss shut everything down. Dan turned off the generator. Then they checked all the locks one last time, including the new one Dan had just installed on the gas cap.
Halloween dawned clear and crisp—a perfect fall day—at a little past six in the morning. Sunset would occur around four-thirty. Later there would be a full moon.
The corn maze was an immediate success, drawing patrons from towns within a hundred mile radius. Many of them made their way to the town square to watch the preparations for the bonfire, register for the costume contest, and visit the specialty shops for which Moosetookalook was becoming famous.
In addition to Moosetookalook Scottish Emporium, Stu’s Ski Shop, Angie’s Books, and Gloria Weir’s craft and hobby shop, there was also a jewelry store that specialized in original designs made with Maine gemstones. On the other side of the municipal building from the bookstore, Patsy’s Coffee House offered shoppers a break with gourmet coffee blends and homemade baked goods.
An hour before the haunted house was scheduled to open, Liss left the Emporium in the capable hands of a college student who sometimes worked part-time for her and headed out to the mansion to serve as one of the “guides.” She was already in costume, as she had been all day, tricked out as a gypsy fortuneteller in a long, colorful skirt, a peasant blouse, a flowered shawl, and a long, black wig.
Dan went with her. He’d put on his hard hat and called it good. If anyone asked, he was dressed as a construction worker. He powered up the generator while Liss unlocked the back door and stepped into the kitchen.
“I want to run one more check of the effects,” she called over her shoulder as she flicked the switches that would activate them.
Without waiting for Dan to join her, Liss headed for the parlor, which was designated as the first stop on the tour. The skeleton had worked perfectly the previous day, but the key to a successful performance was attention to detail. Check and double check—that had been the rule the stage manager of her former dance company had lived by. That simple philosophy had prevented theatrical disaster on more than one occasion.
“Showtime,” she whispered as she opened the door from the hall.
The eerie greenish illumination she’d installed came on as it was designed, to, but the skeleton failed to sit up. Napoleon Bony-Parts remained in an immobile heap.
Liss squinted in the murky glow, unable to make out much more than a vague shape lying on the sofa. She wondered why the plaster bones weren’t reflecting the green light. They weren’t fluorescent, but they ought to show up better than they were.
Glad she’d brought a flashlight with her, she switched it on and at once swung the beam upward to check on the pulley. One end of the wire hung down, unattached and useless. Liss swore under her breath. “Damn mice.”
She redirected the beam, aiming it at the sofa, and gaspe
d.
The skeleton was gone. In its place was one of the manikins. It lay sprawled in an ungainly pose on the sofa and someone had painted two bloody puncture marks on its neck, turning it into a “vampire victim.” Fake blood had even been dribbled down the side of the brocade cushions to puddle on the floor.
Annoyed that someone had messed with her set piece, Liss’s first thought was that she needed to search the room for the skeleton. The eerie, pulsing green lighting effect made it difficult for her to identify even the most common objects. The parlor organ looked positively sinister.
“Dan!” she shouted as she played her flashlight beam in a haphazard fashion over walls and furniture. Was that more fake blood? “The prankster got inside again!”
She had to find Bony-Parts. She had enough time to reset this scene and return the manikin to the dining room, but only just, and only if she could locate the skeleton quickly.
There! Behind the sofa. She hurried toward the spot, irritated by the way the bones had been so carelessly dumped.
It was only when Liss bent down to examine the skeleton for damage that she realized she’d gotten it all wrong. She caught a sickening whiff of an odor she’d hoped she’d never have to smell again. The reek of death was both unmistakable . . . and terrifying.
She jerked upright and, for the first time, her flashlight beam shone directly on the face of the manikin.
Bile rose in Liss’s throat. Her knees went weak, forcing her to grip the back of the sofa to keep from falling. What lay there was not a manikin. It was a man. A very dead man. The red marks on his neck weren’t fake blood. The gore was all too real.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
The worst of it was that she knew him.
Chapter Seven
“Ned Boyd? Son of a gun! I thought he was still in jail!”
Feeling oddly detached from reality, Liss listened to Chief of Police Jeff Thibodeau exclaim over the body she’d found. She sat at the kitchen table in the Chadwick mansion, her back to the doors that led to the rest of the house. She clutched the cap from a thermos in both hands. She didn’t know who had given it to her—the place seemed to be full of people, some of them in uniform and some not—but it contained hot coffee and she felt chilled to the bone. She gulped it down, grimacing only slightly at the strength of the brew. The taste lingered on her tongue, making her feel slightly ill.
Vampires, Bones and Treacle Scones (A Liss MacCrimmon Mystery) Page 8