The Clock Strikes Nun

by Alice Loweecey

  She returned to the second floor via the back stairs and visited the library. It should’ve been a warm and inviting room. She should’ve wanted to spend the entire night browsing the shelves. Perhaps knowing about the concealed punishment hole soured the atmosphere. Perhaps it was the complete and utter weirdness of whatever happened in the fireplace during her inaugural “exorcism.”

  Giulia walked the room with the EMF app held at arms’ length. Both apps might be nothing more than party games, but the EVP’s penchant for picking up words spoken by any human voice within range inspired even less confidence.

  Between the chairs, around the tables, along the bookshelves, into the window seat: nothing. She thrust the phone into the fireplace and up the chimney as far as her arm could stretch. Not the ghost—ha, ha—of a wailing arpeggio came from the speaker.

  Last she felt for the catch to the hidden niche and eased open the concealed door.

  Odd. Not a creak of old wood or a groan from the hinges. She slid a finger along the top hinge and sniffed her fingertip. WD-40.

  She tiptoed to the door and closed it without a sound, a trick she’d learned in the convent. Back at the fireplace, she reached into the chimney and wiggled every brick within reach. They all remained intact, but she refused to give up.

  She sat on the hearthrug and stared into the recess. A speaker wouldn’t survive the heat. Never mind the summer weather now. This was a long game. Her fingers traced the designs on the rug. Puss in Boots, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella.

  Cinderella sitting at the fireplace.

  She flipped up the Cinderella corner. The edges of the floorboard below it were a shade lighter than the edges of the other boards. Two fingernails cracked prying it up but the sacrifice was worth it. A digital speaker nestled in wood shavings below the board, and when she held up the wood light shone through half a dozen pin-sized holes.

  Speaker number one located. Speakers two, three, four, however many needed to shatter Elaine into pieces, would be where Mike, Melina, Georgia, and Cissy had heard giggles and whispers and footsteps. The Power of DI Compels You, you miserable excuse for a human.

  Now to identify the miserable excuse. She chose a hardcover copy of Kate Greenaway’s The Language of Flowers and returned to her room.

  The house creaked and settled and created enough noises to populate multiple hauntings. Giulia kept herself awake learning which flowers signified romance, jealousy, and friendship, and a hundred other meanings of flowers she’d never heard of. She compiled a list of flower names if Zlatan turned out to be a girl.

  Close to eleven thirty she heard footsteps on the stairs. She cracked her door in time to see Cissy’s khaki pant leg disappear on her way to the opposite hall. She cracked it again when the back stairs door swung open just after midnight: Melina. Five minutes later, Georgia. Twenty-five minutes after Georgia, Mike.

  Zlatan, unused to mama being awake this late, sent insistent “Feed Me” messages. Fortunately, Giulia had remembered Sidney’s first trimester transformation into a bottomless pit and had packed trail mix and bottled water. Zlatan accepted the offering and the chocolate-protein hit kept her alert.

  She was considering another trip to the library when soft, steady footsteps passed her door. She dropped the book and eased open her door in time to see the back stairway door swing shut.

  Fifty-Seven

  Giulia crept downstairs out of sight of whoever she was following. Their game of dead-of-night tag ended in the cellar. Everything in regular use in the castle being kept in impeccable shape, the bare wooden treads didn’t make a single creak under either set of feet.

  A light flickered to the left. The wine cellar.

  Phone out and night vision camera recording, Giulia pasted herself against the archway at the foot of the stairs and peered around the edge.

  A tall figure stood before the doorway. One hand held a votive candle in a frosted glass container. The figure’s hooded cloak brushed the floor, concealing its feet. From the back Giulia knew only it wasn’t Cissy (too tall), Melina or Georgia (too short), or Mike (too thin).

  A woman’s hand reached out from the cloak and snapped the yellow tape. As it fluttered to the sides of the doorframe, the stranger in Elaine’s house paced between the wine racks to the back of the room.

  Giulia followed between the nearest two rows of wine. At the end of the rows she angled her phone to get the most from the side view her hidden location afforded.

  The woman stopped before the excavation and set the candle at her feet. Raising thin arms, she began to chant. The language sounded vaguely Celtic. Giulia had heard enough Irish from Frank’s family to be able to pick out several words, but she recognized nothing this woman recited.

  The chanting stopped. The woman cupped her hands beneath her mouth. With a final solemn phrase she blew a breath across her palms and opened her hands in a gesture of release. When she stooped to retrieve the candle, Giulia crouched and rose along with the woman as she stood, turned, and paced out.

  Giulia gave her a full ten minutes to escape. She didn’t need to capture her tonight. She had video evidence. The intruder appeared to be concerned only with the purloined skeleton and had committed neither violence nor theft unless a votive candle turned up missing tomorrow morning. This morning.

  She tiptoed up to her room and replayed the video.

  The woman looked like Elaine.

  Still barefoot, she tapped at Cissy’s door for a good five minutes before it opened. Cissy’s hair flew around her head in a static electricity halo.

  “What? What’s wrong?” Sleep fogged her voice.

  Giulia put a hand on the door, ready to force her way in. Cissy opened it wide enough to allow her to enter.

  Cissy in pajamas decorated with portraits of scrawny young Frank Sinatra would’ve amused Giulia any other time. Now she sat on the edge of Cissy’s bed and beckoned the housekeeper to join her.

  “Is Muriel Elaine’s only local cousin?”

  Between one breath and the next Cissy became wide awake. “Why?”

  “Someone broke into the house tonight.” She played the video. Even with the night vision camera’s green skin and glowing eyes, on a second viewing the intruder’s resemblance to Elaine was even more marked. “Do you recognize this person? Does she have a key? Who is she?”

  When Cissy didn’t answer, Giulia looked over at her. Cissy’s eyes were wide and round as latte cups. Her hands were pressed tight against her mouth. Her fingers made divots in her cheeks.

  Giulia paused the video at the best full-face capture of the stranger. Cissy’s flash-frozen posture was putting Springer Show ideas into Giulia’s head again.

  “There’s a very close resemblance between Elaine and this woman and Muriel. I can see it now. Muriel may be a little eccentric, but this woman leaves her in the dust. Does Muriel have a black sheep twin sister? I didn’t recognize her language, but she obviously adheres to an obscure religion. Which relative is she?”

  Even after all Giulia’s chatter, Cissy’s hands remained clamped over her mouth. Giulia was trying to come up with the magic words that would release Cissy from her spell of silence when the woman’s fingers began to unpeel themselves from her mashed face. Giulia waited, picturing Muriel at her steampunkiest throwing a chair across Springer’s stage at her moralizing long-lost twin while the audience egged them on.

  “It’s the High Priestess from the Tarot cards,” Cissy said in a shaken voice.

  Giulia rewound the video. “She does resemble the card. Muriel’s not the only cosplayer in the family, then.”

  Cissy rocked herself back and forth on the bed. “It’s because of the murders and Belinda locking her in the hole. The space between the library walls. She was only nine. She was always a fragile child.”

  Pregnant Giulia began to feel a touch seasick. She dragged over the chair from the dressing t
able and planted herself toe to toe with the housekeeper.

  Cissy was hugging herself as she rocked now. The grandfather clock struck the three-quarters and she muttered, “The extra Xanax should’ve kept her asleep until morning.”

  “Elaine’s probably built up a tolerance. What happened because of the murders?”

  Cissy jutted her head at Giulia like a weapon. “If you were locked in a lightless hole for three days without food or water, I guarantee you wouldn’t be able to walk out of there whistling ‘Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, It’s Off to Work I Go.’”

  “Most likely not. What is your point in relation to Elaine?” Although she’d figured it out, she wanted as much detail as she could squeeze from Cissy.

  “Elaine is Muriel.”

  She should’ve figured it out by Muriel’s second visit, but hindsight made it easy to see how the massive differences between Elaine and Muriel fooled her.

  Elaine was a Touch-me-not plant, her leaves flattening into invisibility at the slightest provocation. Muriel was a Bird of Paradise flower in every way: speech, dress, mannerisms. Her vivaciousness animated her face to the point where to Giulia’s eyes she appeared no closer to Elaine than a cousin. The Driscolls and the Falcones possessed the same type of family resemblances.

  Cissy shook a finger an inch from Giulia’s nose. “Don’t you even think about judging her.”

  Giulia’s tolerance snapped. She grabbed Cissy’s finger and held it. “Ms. Newton, kindly remember I am neither an erring child nor a member of your staff. Shall we resume this discussion as professionals or shall I take this video to Elaine right now?”

  Cissy snatched back her finger. “No! You can’t do that. Elaine doesn’t know about Muriel. I don’t know what would happen to her if she was confronted with evidence.”

  Giulia didn’t think she was tired enough to mishear proper names. “Muriel isn’t on this video. Someone dressed like a Tarot card is.”

  Cissy collapsed like a pricked balloon. “What are we going to do?”

  Giulia Driscoll, the non-violent, peace-loving ex-Franciscan experienced an overwhelming desire to shake Cissy until the Sinatra heads on her pajamas sang “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.” To avoid assaulting a client, she looked for and found pen and paper on the nightstand. She slipped her phone into her pocket in case Cissy’s tiger mommy instincts ran to destroying evidence. With pen in hand and paper on lap, Giulia began her never-fail brainstorming activity: a bullet list.

  “Let’s take this one step at a time. Elaine experienced a dissociative incident as a direct result of the events surrounding her parents’ murders, correct?”

  “Yes.” Cissy’s voice had deflated along with the rest of her. “The psychiatrist the doctors made her see described it in a similar way.”

  Thank you, Olivier. Giulia wrote it up in fewer words. “Elaine being a timid person, she created outgoing Muriel who always speaks her mind?”

  “Yes.” Misery crept into the deflation.

  “Why didn’t the psychiatrist prescribe medication for her condition?”

  “Muriel took over for the majority of the visits. She played the part of a shy but recovering Elaine well enough to convince the psychiatrist the—dissociation?—was a one-time crisis reaction.”

  Giulia’s hands experienced the shake-the-client desire again. “This Muriel personality told you all this at age nine?”

  Cissy’s head moved in a minute negative motion. “I didn’t know anything then. We all thought Elaine had survived with no worse effects than increasing agoraphobia. The day Elaine’s aunt and uncle got rid of her first tutor, the one who’d nursed her through months of nightmares, Elaine appeared in my room, asking me to order some bright material because all the clothes Elaine sewed for herself were too boring for words. I didn’t know what she meant at first.”

  Giulia wrote everything down, wishing she could Skype Olivier into this conversation.

  “Muriel gave me that teenager eyeroll—she was only fifteen at the time—and explained the situation to me as though I was a backwards child. She informed me she was making plans to enjoy and experience everything she’d missed all the years she’d been away.”

  “Does the rest of the staff know about Muriel? What about Pip?”

  “Oh, no. We kept Muriel a secret from everyone. We knew how bad it would be for Elaine if anyone else knew the truth about her. Muriel makes fun of Elaine sometimes, but she’s fierce in protecting her. If she appears before Pip leaves on business, she always acts exactly like Elaine until he’s out of the house.”

  Giulia rubbed her forehead. She needed a gallon of coffee and a Common Grounds Cinnamon Roll Special to make sense of this. Right now she focused on tangible things. “Cissy, who has access to the wine cellar?”

  The abrupt change of subject stopped Cissy’s rocking.

  “Myself, Mike, Pip, and Elaine. Not even deliverymen are allowed down there. We have some rare and expensive vintages.”

  “Do Elaine’s aunt and uncle still have keys to the house?”

  “No. We changed all the locks when they moved out.”

  Giulia tore off her bullet list. “I’ll be back.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get answers.” Giulia strode around the corner and down the opposite hall, Cissy at her heels. She opened Mike’s door without knocking and stood over his sleeping form. Now for her phone. She cranked the volume, scrolled to the “Old Car Horn” alarm sound, and pressed it.

  Mike’s arms and legs shot out in four different directions. Giulia played it again. Mike imitated a Jack-in-the-box.

  “What? Who? What?”

  Mike’s wild static-laden hair atop tuxedo-printed pajamas begged for laughter. Giulia said over her shoulder to Cissy, “You really ought to consider a whole house humidifier.”

  She leaned over Mike. “You let Caroline and Thomas into the house.”

  He blinked in slow motion. “What?”

  “You plotted with them to terrify Elaine into never leaving her rooms up here again.” She made her voice harsh and talked faster. “They promised you a cut of the money Dahlia’s Board of Directors offered them when those three regained sole control of the company.”

  Mike stared at her like she was speaking the same non-language as the Tarot cosplayer in the wine cellar.

  Giulia pushed harder. “You betrayed the family who took you in when you were broke and in debt, who treated you like more than a cousin, and you did it for money.” She made the final word drip with contempt.

  “No, no, I didn’t do anything.” His hoarse voice cleared as he spoke.

  Giulia said over his denial, “You stole that baby’s skeleton and planted it in the cellar to push Elaine over the edge.”

  “No!” Mike retreated until his back hit the headboard. “I had nothing to do with the skeleton. What kind of freak digs up a dead body? I haven’t talked to Tom and Caroline in months either. Check my cell phone history. Go ahead.” He fumbled on the nightstand for his phone and shoved it at her, charging cord and all.

  “We’ll see.” Giulia unplugged the phone and left. A moment later she heard Cissy’s footsteps but not the click of Mike’s door closing. Good.

  She barged into Georgia’s room even though neither Georgia nor Melina had ever been on her suspect list. Judging from her experience of their characters, Georgia would be startled into belligerence and a revealing outburst.

  Georgia wasn’t a heavy sleeper. At the noise of the opening door she sat up in bed.

  “What’s the matter? Is someone sick?”

  Giulia gave a passing thought to the difference between a person’s outward image and their inner one as revealed by choice of sleepwear. Cynical, efficient Georgia’s nightgown was a mass of pink and white frills worthy of an Edwardian princess.

  Giulia knocked her conscience on the back of i
ts hard head and stepped over its inert body.

  “Who paid you to hide that poor infant’s skeleton in the wall? How much money did it take to betray the employer who’s treated you like family all these years?”

  Georgia’s mouth opened and closed. An incoherent sound came out. She cleared her throat and then she was on her feet looming over Giulia.

  “I don’t know who’s trying to frame me for the nutso stuff that’s been happening, but they’re a lying sack of shit.”

  The ruffles made Georgia resemble a frilled lizard defying its enemy. Giulia dug her fingernails into her palm to maintain her appearance of righteous wrath.

  “You think someone in this house is stabbing Elaine in the back? You’re in the wrong bedroom, Ms. Detective. Go wake up that fat blob Mike and tell him you know he’s been sneaking his girlfriend up to his room on Ms. Newton’s days off.” She peered around Giulia’s head at Cissy. “You didn’t know that, did you?”

  Giulia wished she could high-five Georgia. She settled for a clipped “Thank you” and headed back to Mike’s room.

  Cissy scurried behind her. “Ms. Driscoll, I’ve worked very hard to create a pleasant and efficient house dynamic. What you’re doing—”

  “What I’m doing is finding out who’s behind the haunting and sabotage.” Giulia stormed through Mike’s open door and tossed his phone into the piled-up comforter. “Aren’t there house rules against sneaking your girlfriend up here for illicit sex?”

  Mike jumped out of bed. “I heard that cat Georgia. Never assume your friends have your back. Yes, I brought my girlfriend up here, but, honest, Ms. Newton, I only brought her to my room. This detective is trying to make me a scapegoat for somebody, but I swear on my unborn child I never took my girl into the wine cellar. It’s not a place you bring a woman for a romantic evening.”

  Cissy stepped around Giulia. “What do you mean, your unborn child? Is your girlfriend pregnant?”

  “Yes. She was late at the end of June and her test came back positive on July second.” He sat on the edge of his bed, tuxedo pajama pants hiking up over his calves. “That’s why I negotiated for a raise after the Fourth of July barbecue. I have to support them.”