Holding Court

by K. C. Held

  “I doubt very much that the things you say are pointless, Juliet. I like to think you have the gift of butterflies.”

  “What the hell does PTS have to do with butterflies?”

  “I think the things you say work a bit like the butterfly effect. You know, a butterfly flaps its wings somewhere in the rain forest and it causes a tornado in Iowa?”

  “You’ve totally lost me.”

  “You can’t see the changes that come about because they’re so small to begin with. I’ll give you an example. When you were six years old you were sitting in the bathtub and all of a sudden you shouted at me, ‘The weevils are going to ruin everything!’ and started crying. After I put you to bed I got to thinking. And I went into the kitchen and opened the flour and sure enough, there were weevils in it. I would have never noticed the damn things without my reading glasses on. And it just so happened I’d promised to make my famous caramel cake for the engagement party of one of my clients the next day.”

  “So I saved some people from weevily cake? Woo-hoo.”

  Gran holds up a hand to silence me. “So I ended up going to the store to buy flour at nine o’clock at night and I ran into Charlene Plimpton in the produce section and we got to talking, and we must have stood there for half an hour shooting the breeze. Well, Charlene called me the next day to tell me the old oak tree in front of her place fell down that night and landed in her living room. She said if she hadn’t run into me at the store she probably would have been sitting on her couch watching Survivor and the tree would have smashed her flatter than a flapjack. My point is, Juliet, your comments aren’t pointless. But there’s no way of knowing what might happen as a result of the things you say. It’s fascinating, really.”

  “Why can’t I just say, ‘Don’t be in your living room at nine fifteen or you’ll get squashed by a tree’?”

  “Would you really say that? I think you have Psychic Tourette’s Syndrome, as Cami so indelicately puts it, because it makes you say the things you need to say. I’ve always wondered if you were more willing to pay attention to your gift, instead of trying to quash it, whether you’d have more control. Haven’t you noticed that some of your premonitions are much more precise?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sometimes you’re aware of what you’re going to say before you say it, and you give very specific information. Like your prediction for Cami about the lead in My Fair Lady. I think it’s very interesting, don’t you?”

  “I try really hard not to think about my PTS, actually. Except to wish I didn’t say stuff that makes me feel like a freak.”

  “No one can make you feel like a freak without your permission, Juliet.”

  “Um, I’m pretty sure that’s not quite how Eleanor Roosevelt put it. But nice try.”

  “‘You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.’”

  “Yeah, well, when they do think of me, they think I’m a freak.”

  “Then you must ‘do what you feel in your heart to be right—for you’ll be criticized anyway.’”

  “Would you please stop quoting Eleanor Roosevelt?”

  “‘You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.” You must do the thing you think you cannot do.’”

  “Whatever, Eleanor. I’m going back to sleep.”

  Gran gets up. “‘A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it’s in hot water!’” she calls as her parting shot.

  Chapter Eleven

  You Really Are Psychic!

  I’m eating breakfast the next morning and trying not to think about dead bodies or Tudor Times or the butterfly effect when Cami knocks on the kitchen door, then pokes her head in.

  “Hey, Blurt. What’s up?”

  “Breakfast. Want some?” I gesture at the bacon and eggs Gran insisted on making for me before heading out in Rosie to run some errands.

  “Yum,” Cami says and goes to the cupboard to get a plate. “So, what time do you have to be at work?”

  “I’m still not sure I’m going back.”

  “What do you mean? You have to go back! You have to find the dead girl.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking—until I remembered that in order for there to be a dead girl, someone had to kill her.”

  “Are you sure it was a real live dead body? I mean, you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure. I’ve never seen a dead person before, but she wasn’t a mannequin or anything, if that’s what you mean. And there’s no way she was alive. Her eyes were all weird and she didn’t blink once. And I was staring at her for a while before I fully processed what I was seeing.”

  “And then she was just gone? I mean, by the time King Henry went into the passageway?”

  “I guess. I didn’t follow him in there or anything, but he said there was no body, and it wasn’t there when Grayson and I went back inside to check.”

  “You don’t think King Henry could’ve hidden the body, do you? I mean—no body, no crime, right?”

  “He definitely had enough time, but that would mean he was the one who strangled her, wouldn’t it? Why else would he hide the body?”

  “Someone had a reason.”

  “I know.”

  “You have to go back.”

  When I took the job at Tudor Times all I wanted was the chance to make some money, wear a fancy gown, and ogle gorgeous-but-taken Grayson Chandler from afar. The reality is so far from the scenario I imagined, it makes me want to cry. A disappearing dead body was definitely not part of the plan.

  “You have to, Jules.”

  “I know.”

  “It really is the perfect job for you.”

  “Minus the nun habit and the dead body.”

  “Duh. So, what’s your plan?”

  “I thought I’d put on a deerstalker cap and an Inverness cape and walk around with a pipe in my mouth.”

  “That ought to be effective.”

  “I think the word you’re looking for is ‘elementary,’ my dear Watson.”

  I’m feeling pretty good about my decision to return to Tudor Times and give the whole nun thing another shot, and then I talk to my mom. Not surprisingly, she’s hideously jet-lagged after having spent her entire red-eye flight worrying about me instead of sleeping.

  “I’m calling Hank,” she tells me after I give her my version of the whole disappearing dead body thing.

  “What? Why? What do you expect him to do?”

  “Well, people are dying inside his castle, surely he ought to do something?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. Gran gave me a stun gun.”

  “Oh God. Please tell me you’re joking.”

  “Nope. I’m all set.”

  “Juliet. I don’t want you going back there. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Oh, come on, Mom. It’s the only job I haven’t gotten fired from yet, and I’m pretty sure it’s the only one I’ll ever have where being a freak with a blurting disorder is considered a plus.”

  “Juliet Hope Verity, you are not a freak.”

  “I know, I know. No one can make me feel like a freak without my permission. Don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen to me. Everyone thinks I’m nuts, remember? Why would anyone want to kill me? I’m completely harmless. Unless your maple has tar spot and then, watch out!”

  “The problem with that theory is that you’re expecting a murderer to be rational. Let me talk to your grandmother.”

  I take the phone to Gran, who’s in the middle of planting more pink begonias in the front yard. “It’s Mom. Good luck,” I say and escape to my room.

  Gran knocks on my door half an hour later.

  “How’d it go?” I ask, pulling off my headphones.

  “The short version is, you can go to work today, but if anything happ
ens to you, your mother will defenestrate me. Or maybe it was eviscerate? Anyway, she’s calling Hank Bacon. The poor man.”

  “Great. As if he needs any more grief.”

  Gran smiles. “They’re both doomed. Auras never lie.” She winks and rubs her hands together like some nefarious cartoon villain.

  “Yeesh. Creepy much?”

  “Oh, and your mother also said to tell you she loves you very much.”

  “And to please not embarrass her any more than I already have?”

  “Good golly, you really are psychic!” Gran says.

  “Hardy har har.”

  Chapter Twelve

  We Found a Clue!

  “What the hell happened to you last night?” Angelique says when I report for duty in the Oratory. “You never came to the dining room, and rumor has it you had some kind of freak-out yesterday and Hank had to call the police.”

  “What? That’s ridiculous!”

  “Obviously. It’s not like you’d be at work today if Hank had called the police on you, right?”

  “Yeah, well, for the record, I did freak out, but there were no police involved, and I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Really? You’re not going to tell me?” Angelique sits down at the small table and rubs the sides of her belly.

  I try to imagine her strangling someone to death and can’t, so I peek into the hallway, then close the door. “I’ll make you a deal,” I tell Angelique. “I’ll tell you what happened if you help me figure out what it all means.”

  “Ooh, a mystery! I’m in.”

  “Last night, when I was on my way to the staff dining room, I accidentally triggered an opening to a secret passageway in the main hallway downstairs.”

  “You mean the one behind the suit of armor?”

  My mouth falls open. “Yeah, how’d you know?”

  “It’s the only entrance in the main hallway.”

  “How do you know that? Hank didn’t even know about it.”

  She shrugs like it’s no big deal. “A couple of days ago I saw someone coming out of the entrance behind the suit of armor and decided to investigate.”

  “Seriously? What did they look like? Was it a girl? Did she have brown hair?”

  “Whoa, sister. Why don’t you finish telling me what happened last night. You triggered the secret entrance and then what?”

  “And then I found a dead body in the passageway and freaked out.”

  Angelique’s eyebrows disappear underneath her wimple. “For real?”

  “For real.”

  “Who was it?”

  “That’s what I need you to help me with.”

  “Why? Didn’t Hank know who it was?”

  “That’s the problem. By the time Hank got there, the body was gone.”

  “No shit? Where’d it go? Weren’t you watching it?”

  “No, I wasn’t watching it! I wanted to get the hell out of the passageway. I’m not used to finding dead bodies. Plus, I think there was someone else in there with me. Someone alive.”

  “Whoa. Creepy. So what’d you do?”

  “I figured out how to open the entrance again, and then Grayson, he’s a guy from my high school who works here, and this knight named Drew were there, and Drew went to get Hank, and by the time Hank got there and checked out the passageway, the body was gone.”

  “Huh. What the hell?”

  “I know. And then Hank called my grandma, and she convinced him that it was probably a vision of something that had happened in the castle years ago. And since no one’s reported a missing person or anything, I’m pretty sure Hank has dismissed the whole thing as some sort of whacked-out hallucination.”

  “Have you ever had a hallucination like that before?”

  “No. It wasn’t a hallucination or a vision of the past or anything like that. She was real. And she was dead.”

  “What did she look like? Could you tell?”

  “Yeah. She had brown hair, and her eyes were bloodshot and kind of clouded over but I think they were brown, too.” I shudder, remembering her dead eyes staring up at me. “Her face was puffy, and she had this thick gold necklace wrapped around her throat that I think must have been used to strangle her. And I don’t think she’d been dead very long because she wasn’t, you know…”

  “Putrid?” Angelique suggests.

  “Yeah. That.”

  “What was she wearing?”

  I try to picture the girl lying on the floor of the passageway. “She had white sleeves and a dark green or black bodice and skirt. Except for the white, her clothes sort of blended into the shadows. I really only paid attention to her face and the necklace.”

  “But she was wearing a costume?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Brown hair, brown eyes. How old would you say she was?”

  “Early twenties, maybe?”

  “Hmm, I can think of like ten people that could be off the top of my head. What we need to do is find out who’s missing.”

  “Hank didn’t seem to think anyone was,” I remind her.

  “Well, just because no one knows she’s missing yet, doesn’t mean everyone is here and accounted for. We need to get a list of the people who work here.”

  “You think she was definitely a Tudor Times employee?”

  “What else would she be doing in the secret passageway? Plus, you said she was wearing a costume. I’ll ask around, see if anyone’s noticed anything. In the meantime, let’s check things out while we have the chance.” Angelique gets up and heads for the door.

  “Where are we going?” I ask as I follow her to the steep winding staircase that leads to the main floor.

  “The dungeon.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I’m supposed to give you a tour of the castle, remember? Plus, the dungeon isn’t open to the public, so we can go in there without anyone finding out.”

  “Why would we want to do that?”

  “Just hush and follow me.” She leads the way downstairs, past the main floor to a small basement storage room and then across a long hallway. “King Henry calls this floor the undercroft.” Angelique points to various doors as we pass. “Those are mostly storage rooms. The dungeon is on the lower level of the Prison Tower, which is the one opposite the Rose Tower where we work.” Angelique stops in front of a thick wooden door reinforced with iron bands. “This is it.” She pushes up the heavy wooden bar on the outside of the door and leads the way into a dim room filled with strange-looking instruments. The only light comes from barred windows high up on the walls.

  “No way. It’s totally the Pit of Despair.”

  “The what?”

  “Never mind. What’s all this stuff doing in here?” I ask. There’s a rusty iron cage hanging in one corner that looks big enough to hold an adult human, a chair with wicked-looking spikes on the seat and arms, a huge wooden frame set with rollers and ropes, and an entire wall hung with wood and iron instruments that look decidedly unfriendly.

  “They’re torture devices. Apparently the guy who built Lunewood Castle liked to collect them.”

  “Ew. This place is way creepy.” I reach into my nun pocket to make sure my lipstick stun gun is there, in case I need backup. “What is that thing?” I point to a huge contraption in the corner that looks like an eight-foot tall statue of a young woman with a wooden head and a studded iron dress. One half of the woman’s face appears to be rotting away, the wood obviously ancient and beginning to disintegrate. Her iron dress has a split down the middle with hinges on either side.

  “That’s the Virgin of Nuremberg, according to Floyd. You’ve met Floyd, haven’t you? Old guy? Red uniform? Likes to refer to himself in the third person as the Keeper? His grandfather helped build Lunewood Castle, so he knows everything there is to know about the place. He claims it’s a torture device from the fifteenth or sixteenth century. It originally had iron spikes on the inside th
at were designed to impale whoever was unlucky enough to get shut inside.”

  “Nice.” I wrinkle my nose.

  “Our King Henry doesn’t seem to be into the torture scene. Or at least he’s not into showing it off to the tourists.”

  “I can see why. I’d much rather eat a fancy dinner and watch hot guys sword-fight.”

  “Me, too. Okay, back to the dead body.” She makes a beeline for a huge wooden cabinet on the far wall and opens one of the doors. “Check it out.”

  I walk over and look inside, expecting another gruesome torture device. The cabinet is empty.

  Angelique reaches in and pushes something. The back panel slides open to reveal a dark space beyond. Angelique reaches into the front pocket of her habit and pulls out a flashlight. “I recommend you always carry a light. The wiring in this place is crap. Plus you never know when you might need to explore a secret passageway.” She grins and gestures toward the darkness. “Shall we?”

  “Oh, hell no.”

  “Come on, Jules, where’s your sense of adventure? Don’t you want to find out what happened to your girl?”

  “I already checked the passageway yesterday. There wasn’t anything in there.”

  “Yes, but you were looking for a body. We’re looking for clues.”

  “What exactly do you think we’re going to find?”

  “I don’t know. You can at least show me where you found the body.”

  “You do realize that if this was a movie you’d probably be the killer and I’d be a total moron for assuming you’re innocent? Do you promise this isn’t a ploy to lead me into the secret passageway so you can strangle me, too?”

  Angelique makes the sign of the cross. “I promise. Besides, I would have killed you by now if I was going to.”

  “Thanks, that’s so reassuring.” Reluctantly, I pull out my lipstick stun gun and follow Angelique through the opening in the back of the cabinet and into the passageway. We walk a short distance until we reach a place where the passageway splits into two directions.

  “The stairs to the main floor should be to the right,” Angelique says.

  “What’s to the left?”