The Clock Strikes Nun

by Alice Loweecey

Giulia started to speak, but he overrode her.

  “And if we accept that possibility, the next logical step is we accept your own power—”

  “I’m done listening to this.” Giulia unhooked the cord connecting the tablet and the PC.

  Zane’s hand went out to Giulia’s, but he stopped short of touching her. “Sidney may still be reacting to ghosts like she’s ten years old, but you aren’t, right? You’re not lying through your teeth to the client.”

  Giulia forced herself to remain seated. “Correct.”

  “Then, logically, the Catholic Church’s rules aren’t the only rules. We came to the castle today with the intention of helping the client. That’s a form of power. Your aura, for lack of a more precise term, covers me as your assistant. Thus whatever was in the fireplace recognized and reacted to it.” He raised his pale eyes to hers. “It’s syllogistic reasoning without a fallacy.”

  “Don’t throw big words at me, mister. I’m a teacher.” What Giulia really wanted was to run far and fast from this conversation. However, she also didn’t want to spook Zane.

  Ha, ha. Spook.

  “Let’s table this discussion for now, please.”

  Zane’s Adam’s apple jumped with the force of his swallow. So much for not spooking him. At least he didn’t revert to skittish rabbit mode. Giulia dreaded the thought of bringing him out into standard communication with fellow humans again. She spared a fleeting curse for the telemarketing hell he’d come to DI from.

  “How close are you to getting into Dahlia’s real numbers?”

  Zane popped out of the chair like his butt had hidden springs. “A nanometer away.”

  “Wait.” She opened her notes from the Dahlia interviews. “If you need more impetus, Ms. Sechrest gratuitously shared her opinion of MIT grads. According to her, they think only of how to take advantage of anyone not in their exclusive geek club.”

  A touch of evil infused Zane’s smile. “I’ll finish this now.”

  Alone in her office, Giulia called her husband. “I need an honest answer. Am I too intimidating?”

  Frank groaned and repeated the question to his partner over the sound of the police radio in their car. He must have held the phone to Nash VanHorne’s mouth, because she had to pull the receiver away from her ear.

  “Oh, dude, that’s almost as bad as ‘Does this dress make me look fat?’”

  Twenty-Eight

  The next morning Giulia stopped in the office before what promised to be a grueling day of driving and interviewing another round of suspects. The phone rang. Weird, on a Saturday. She decided to pick up rather than let the machine get it.

  “Ms. Driscoll?” A voice whispered. “It’s Mike Davenport from the castle.”

  “Could you speak up, Mike?”

  “I can’t. I don’t want anyone to hear me. I couldn’t tell you yesterday with everyone hanging all over you, but Elaine’s been in a bad way for more than a month.” He spoke faster and must have blocked the mouthpiece with one hand, because she had to plug one ear to understand him. “Two and three nights a week she’s gotten me out of bed in the middle of the night to make her this hot milk and Bailey’s concoction the cook when she was a kid used to brew for her. She’s not sleeping and she jumps at every noise. She takes Xanax, you know, and Bailey’s shouldn’t be mixed with meds. I worry she’s going to OD.”

  Click.

  Knock, knock-knock knock, knock.

  Giulia stared at the phone for a moment before her brain connected the “Shave and a haircut” raps with the office door. Did the entire world think private investigators kept office hours seven days a week? Curse you, Raymond Chandler.

  The frosted glass showed only a tall male figure on the other side. In theory, a thief wouldn’t knock first. In reality, she prepared to administer her never-yet-failed disabling technique as soon as she unlocked the door: Foot to instep, heel of hand to nose. Bam. Temporarily blinded assailant disabled.

  “Ms. Driscoll. I’m glad I caught you here on a Saturday. I took a calculated risk.” Pip stepped over the threshold and owned the room. His gray three-piece suit fitted him like it was hand-tailored. It probably was. A repeating pattern of white dahlias on his tie accented his pale green shirt. Giulia was again glad she wasn’t cursed with clothing envy.

  “Mr. Patrick, I’m about to head out to a full day of appointments.”

  “I’ll only keep you a minute. I’m headed to work myself.”

  “Let’s walk to my car together.”

  The Smile appeared. “An efficient vendor who bills by the hour? I thought the species was extinct.”

  Giulia searched her arsenal of Polite Smiles and produced Number Three. A much better choice than kicking him in his condescending yet charming shins. She led the way down the narrow stairs and into the parking lot.

  “How may I help you?” she said when they stood by her temporary vehicle.

  He may have picked up on her frost, since he didn’t comment on the Clown Car. “I wanted to let you know Elaine is back to her old self. She filled me in on yesterday’s adventure.” He winked. “About the official letter too. Nice put-up job to soothe the help.”

  Maybe she could pretend to trip over something and get in one good strike to his shins after all. “The letter is genuine. Driscoll Investigations is not in the habit of lying to our clients.” Giulia had always been a quiet supporter of opening the priesthood to women. This conversation might turn her into a sign-waving radical, if only to become a priest and a sanctioned exorcist.

  The charm never faltered. “I apologize. Sometimes Elaine is a little too trusting.” He leaned his six-foot-plus self over her and lowered his voice. “Did you sense anything in the house?”

  Giulia parried. “Why?”

  “I’ve heard things myself, you know. At first I thought we’d been invaded by those scrawny black squirrels. Do you have them here in Cottonwood?”

  Giulia knew those squirrels. Back in the day, she and her fellow Novices had spied on the oldest nuns to try and catch them painting the squirrels to match their habits.

  “We do. You heard noises in your attic?”

  “In the attic, between the walls, and in the basement. It’s an old house. At first I dismissed it all when an exterminator found one hole in the roof and took out a single squirrel nest. But the noises persisted. Elaine began to hear them too. Did she tell you about the knickknacks?”

  The Saturday coffee shop regulars began to appear in the parking lot.

  “Knickknacks?” The open door released the aromas of almonds, bacon, and vanilla bean coffee. Her caffeine gene poked her.

  “Elaine is into antique glass and china figurines.” A shrug conveying how men weren’t wired to understand the attraction. “At least they’re valuable and not only dust collectors. A few have disappeared. One of them vanished as soon as she turned her back to it. It reappeared three rooms away under a chair.”

  The Knitting Women exited their taxi, flowered bags in hand, all talking at once. When their leader opened the door, they chorused, “Bring us almond croissants or we’ll cover the chairs in granny squares!”

  Their traditional call to arms stopped Pip cold. Giulia spent the moment chasing the memory Pip’s story pinged in her brain, but it didn’t surface.

  He reoriented himself. “The Bible incident unnerved the entire household.”

  “I was informed if it yesterday.” Now she had it. From her research on ghostly phenomena, Joe Nickell’s The Science of Ghosts. Specifically the chapter on children palming small items from shelves or mantelpieces, drawing a parent’s attention to the gap, and the moment the parent wasn’t looking, tossing the purloined object. “Look,” the child would say, and the parent saw the object flying through the air. Instant haunting.

  “Do you know if any object teleportation occurred in the library?”

  �
�Yes, I believe something happened, but only once. I don’t recall which china dust collector was involved.” His brow contracted and a hint of crow’s feet appeared at the corners of his sky-blue eyes. “Cissy said you banished a demon. I think you may have saved Elaine’s life.”

  Giulia didn’t want a maudlin Prince Charming on her hands. “I assure you there will be no extra charges on the bill.”

  Score one for unexpected tactics. Pip remained speechless for three whole seconds.

  He managed a weak laugh. “Ha, ha. Good one.” He glanced at a Rolex peeping out from his sleeve. “I have an early appointment as well. Thank you for your time.”

  “One thing, Mr. Patrick—”

  “Pip, please. Everyone calls me Pip except the staff. My collection of different editions of Great Expectations takes up an entire bookshelf.”

  “Pip, has Elaine been able to tell you why she was unnerved at the sight of the hidden door?”

  His slight head bob indicated an apology for not doing his homework. “I didn’t want to push her. When she told me what happened in the library yesterday, she didn’t go beyond the laughing voice in the fireplace choking off and the strange thump or knock or whatever the concluding noise was.”

  Giulia checked her phone. “I have to get on the road myself. Thank you for your information.”

  He shook her hand with great heartiness. “You’re doing Elaine a lot of good. I was worried she might have been imagining the voices, and I admit I wasn’t thrilled when Cissy told me she’d hired you. I see now she was right. Keep at it.” He upped the dazzle of his smile to a thousand lumens, jumped into his Porsche Boxter, and roared away into the sunshine.

  She made a note into her phone to add Prince Charming to Zane’s list of Dahlia suspects.

  Twenty-Nine

  Elaine’s former guardians lived in a condo complex near the railroad. Servant’s quarters compared to the castle.

  Giulia’s probe into their past and present finances had revealed two credit cards a whisker away from being maxed out, but nothing extreme otherwise. Perhaps there had been catastrophic medical expenses and they were too proud to ask Elaine for a bailout.

  A border of pink impatiens drooped along the front of their condo. The brown siding needed a power wash. The door might once have been the color of parsley, but it had weathered to the seasick green of old hospital walls.

  The older man who answered the door liked beer more than push-ups. A friend needed to give him a heart-to-heart about his comb-over. His dentures needed refitting.

  To say Caroline and Thomas Emerson welcomed Giulia into their home would be stretching the definition of the word. Thomas offered her a cup of coffee from an old-fashioned percolator plugged into an outlet on the kitchen counter. When she declined he took up a dish towel and finished drying breakfast dishes for two. Caroline made big nodding motions with her head toward a kitchen chair as she continued giving advice over the phone.

  “Honey, black flies sting. You know that…Honey, are you sure you should wear your contact lenses? How clean are the bathrooms?…Please try to give us a call once a week. We want to know all about your summer…I love you too. Kisses from both of us…Bye, honey.”

  She set down her cell phone. “Our youngest daughter is starting her first session as a camp counselor up in the Adirondacks. Please have a seat, Ms. Driscoll.”

  With a smooth bit of sleight of hand, Thomas put juice glasses in a cupboard and withdrew a 750 ml bottle of bourbon. He added a generous splash to his coffee cup and whisked the bottle back into its niche.

  Caroline’s formal smile became stiffer. “How can we help you?”

  Giulia produced the same cover story she’d used in her Dahlia interviews. “We’ve been hired to look into Dahlia’s profitability management since Elaine assumed control.”

  “How terrible,” Caroline said. “After all Elaine’s done to make Dahlia a success. You’d never think someone as young and sweet as she is would succeed in business, but Elaine was always older than her years.”

  Thomas took a swig of his doctored coffee. “Yeah, if she didn’t wear those fancy clothes she designs, you’d think she wasn’t legal.”

  Giulia pretended to consult her notes. “I understand you were named her guardians in her mother’s will.”

  “My poor sister.” Caroline’s stilted expression didn’t alter. “We moved in with Elaine when she was released from the hospital. Have you met Elaine’s housekeeper? Oh, good. Then you know what a treasure she is. As soon as the police gave her permission, she brought in those people who clean up after fires and other disasters. We never would’ve been able to tell five murders had taken place in the house.”

  Thomas picked up the story. “Elaine wouldn’t go into the kitchen or dining room for weeks. Kid kept saying she couldn’t walk over her parents’ blood.”

  His wife interrupted. “Anyone would’ve had problems returning to the house after such a tragedy. We found her an excellent child psychologist.”

  Thomas made further inroads on the spiked coffee. “Yeah, but we had to drag her to the appointments sometimes. He told us the kid had regressed to about age four. She didn’t want to leave her room and refused to go to sleep unless all the upstairs lights were on.” An attempt at an indulgent chuckle. “She was a handful.”

  Their dog and pony show was wasting valuable time. Giulia tried her first poke. “Having cousins her own age in the house must have helped her recovery.”

  Caroline’s mouth stretched taut, like a thin rubber band. “Our children were older than Elaine by ten years and more. I often had to read nursery rhymes to get her to sleep. At age nine and ten. None of our children decided to return to infancy when bad things happened. On top of Elaine’s issues, we had to deal with Cissy Newton’s meddling, interview for a new cook and maid, manage the finances, everything. We found a combination governess and glorified babysitter to coddle Elaine through her childhood.”

  Giulia possessed one superpower: the ability to blend into any scenery. She used it now to become…

  Secretarial Pool Woman!

  See her eager naiveté! Marvel at her pathetic eagerness to please! Gaze in awe at her efficiency!

  Her pen touched the next line in her legal pad. “Your children are fortunate their parents are still living.” In those nine words, she conveyed the impression hers were not.

  Condescend to her misfortunes! Indulge in guiltless schadenfreude!

  Caroline’s demeanor shifted the least bit. “We taught them to rely on their skills and not to expect handouts.”

  Giulia wrote, “Elaine refused to set her cousins up in business? Caroline and Thomas mismanaged the money they received as Elaine’s guardians? Elaine is much more ruthless than she appears?”

  Thomas’ phone dinged. He checked out of the conversation and began texting.

  Caroline’s lips pinched.

  “Hey.” Thomas looked up. “There’s a horse called Hickory Dickory Dock at eleven to one odds. Want to go in on a bet with me, detective?”

  With a shy smile, Giulia refused.

  Caroline said in a brisk voice, “Is there anything else we can help you with?”

  Secretarial Pool Woman infused a smidgen of guilt into her posture as though she’d been caught wasting her employer’s time. “Yes, please.” She asked the same questions about Dahlia as now run by the Board of Directors plus Elaine.

  Thomas switched from texting to calling and disappeared into a room with a door to close.

  Caroline’s posture could only have gotten more rigid if she’d been strapped to a backboard. “To be honest, we weren’t involved in the business. I’m a nurse and my husband was in sales. We knew our most important job was being surrogate parents to Elaine.”

  “You mentioned hiring a governess.”

  “Oh, my, yes. We weren’t the homeschool types. We also f
ound her a more advanced tutor when she was ready for higher education. Did you need their names, dear?”

  Bravo! Secretarial Pool Woman’s mesmeric powers had accessed the hidden reservoir of condescension in her adversary. Super Saiyan Level activated: Wallpaper Woman!

  “Thank you, no. Ms. Newton was kind enough to let me have their names. She’s been extremely helpful.”

  “She didn’t ask you to call her by her first name?” Caroline’s spine abandoned the backboard. Giulia was now “the help.” “If you interact any further with Cissy, you’ll realize she takes her managerial duties to heart. Several times over the years she forced me to assert my authority when she and I disagreed about what was best for Elaine. She chose to forget we were Elaine’s legal guardians and she was merely the housekeeper.” A shake of the head. “Too many people liked to pamper Elaine when what she needed was a good, stiff dose of reality.”

  “Have you met Elaine’s husband? He treats her like a princess.” Wallpaper Woman sighed like a teenage girl reading a romance novel.

  “Certainly we know Pip. They met at a Christmas Ball we insisted Elaine attend.” Thomas returned to the room, but Caroline ignored him. “People in her position are expected to attend certain formal events. The ball in question was one of only two she agreed to leave the house for.”

  Giulia underscored the words. Any history about Pip would shorten Zane’s search.

  Caroline continued: “We had the family lawyer run a background check on him when his intentions became serious.”

  Thomas coughed one comment: “Gigolo.”

  Caroline’s voice trampled the cough. “Thomas, you don’t know that.”

  “He’s a fool if he doesn’t, and Pip’s no fool.”

  Caroline said with a return to stiffness, “Pip is a very well connected young man. His family traces its ancestry all the way back to the first colony in Jamestown.”

  “Detective, my wife thinks she’s too proper to say it, but he’s got women on the side. Look at his teeth.”