The Clock Strikes Nun
Page 26
“I know you want me to tell you what happened, but hearsay isn’t acceptable evidence. Am I right?”
“You are, Ms. Lockwood.” His deep voice lent gravity to every word.
Muriel giggled. “No one calls me ‘Ms. Lockwood.’ It makes me sound as important as Elaine. Why don’t you call me Muriel like everyone else?”
“If you wish.”
She deepened her voice. “I do wish.” She leaned forward, clasping her fingers together. Her lace sleeves trailed on the tabletop. In her usual energetic voice, she said, “This is too important to mess up. You have to hear it from the horse’s mouth.” She cupped her hands around her cheeks. “Don’t tell her I called her a horse. If you want to know the truth, I’m a little scared of her.”
Muriel’s posture stiffened. She sat poker-straight in the hard chair and her mobile face became severe.
“I am the one who freed Elaine from that man’s machinations.”
Next to Giulia, Hansen started. “I’ll be damned. She looks and sounds like a completely different person.”
The psychiatrist was saying, “I am pleased to meet you. May I know your name?”
“I am The Priestess. Muriel informed me of a motion picture entitled Gaslight. You are familiar with this?”
“Yes.” The psychiatrist showed no indication of surprise.
“The principle is identical. Elaine’s husband created false hauntings and altered a recording intended to soothe Elaine to sleep. He wished to unsettle and terrify her.” The Priestess’ deep voice resembled Muriel’s recent imitation of the psychiatrist, but in the Priestess’ case it came out naturally. “After several months of escalation of this manipulation, one night I awoke from Elaine’s sleep to see him creeping from the room. I followed him. He did not see me. He removed a bundle from his garaged vehicle and brought it to the wine cellar. It was a purloined infant skeleton.” She looked down at him despite their equivalent heights. “You are aware of this?”
“I have the details of the case, ma’am.”
“Good. He secreted the bones in the wall and telephoned someone named Caroline. He was extremely pleased with himself as he described his plan to lure Elaine into the wine cellar and trick her into discovering it. Elaine might not have recovered from such terror. It was then I knew Muriel and I must act.” Her posture never altered. She could have been reciting the classified ads in the newspaper. “We waited for the proper moment, which occurred this morning. His perfidy culminated in an attempt to force her to swallow an overdose of her medication. Muriel the light-hearted prevented the attempted murder.”
The psychiatrist inclined his head. “And how did you help Elaine this morning?”
“Fear had incapacitated her when she at last understood her husband’s plot. She is not a strong person. When the female detective attempted to wrest Elaine from his grasp, I took control of our body. Elaine’s husband never suspected our existence. My appearance confused him. I took advantage of his confusion to prevent him from harming Elaine further.”
Her posture relaxed and Muriel’s jaunty face reappeared. “You see? She’s the smart one. She figured things out just in time for me to palm all those nasty pills. Poor Elaine wouldn’t have the gumption to defy Pip.” She winked. “We admit to attacking Pip, but we had provocation. He pretended to be Elaine’s Prince Charming, the stinker. I hope The Priestess killed him.”
Sixty-One
Giulia didn’t get clearance to drive Cissy home until five o’clock.
“Thomas told the police everything,” Giulia said as she navigated rush-hour traffic. “Pip bought up his gambling debts. He used them to force Thomas to attack me and to force Caroline to buy the haunting paraphernalia.”
“I see.” Cissy spoke in a monotone.
“They’re trying to track down who he got to record the alternate nursery rhyme.”
“The what?” The voice conveyed no real interest.
Giulia explained about “There was a lady” and the piercing scream at the end.
Still in the same toneless voice: “Why don’t they wait for Pip to wake up and ask him?”
Giulia turned onto the castle’s street. “The hospital called while I was talking to the detective. Pip died in the emergency room.”
The Nunmobile was parked and the ignition off before Giulia looked to see why Cissy hadn’t replied.
The housekeeper was staring through the windshield at the castle in the height of summer. Roses and dahlias surrounded it with a rainbow of color. The water feature’s dual falls sparkled in the late afternoon sun. The front porch spoke of cool, relaxing afternoons with iced tea and good books.
Cissy said at last, “It’s all gone.”
Giulia sat with her in silence. The sleepless night caught up with her after a few minutes of inaction and she yawned.
Cissy shook herself and unbuckled her seat belt. “Come inside with me, please.”
Melina opened the front door. Georgia and Mike stood in the kitchen doorway. Cissy waved them back and took Giulia to her office. A small key on her keyring unlocked a drawer in her desk, and a smaller key unlocked a metal cash box. She counted a stack of fifties and a larger stack of twenties and passed them across the desk to Giulia.
“Elaine is in jail. They’ll root around in her head and lock her up with insane criminals for the rest of her life. The stockholders will take over the company. It’s unlikely the Board of Directors will be allowed to remain. What would you do if you learned your bosses had been taking orders from a, a crazy killer for years?” Her red-rimmed, dry eyes stared at the wall. “We’ve lost our home. We’ve lost Elaine. We’ve lost everything.”
She swallowed. “Elaine’s personal and business accounts will be frozen tomorrow morning as soon as this breaks. This won’t cover your entire bill, but you don’t deserve to have to wait months to be paid. Send the final invoice to me and I’ll pass it on.”
She locked the box and returned it to its secure drawer. Her arms hung at her sides afterward. The position looked unnatural. “Tell me the truth: Are you certain there are no ghosts here? Not even the ghost belonging to the stolen skeleton?”
Cissy’s despair moved Giulia more than her ultra-competent guardian efficiency ever did. “Come with me.”
Melina, Mike, and Georgia leaped backward when Giulia opened the office door. Cissy didn’t scold them. Their astonishment was as comical as their synchronized jump.
“We’re going to the wine cellar,” Giulia said. “All of us.”
The EMF app didn’t make a squeak when she aimed it at the excavation. She showed it to them and pointed it every which way in the wine cellar with the same results.
“The Priestess must have laid it to rest,” Cissy said.
When she moved toward the stairs her staff crowded around her. They all began asking questions at once about Elaine, about Pip, and about Muriel and The Priestess.
Giulia switched to a different tab in the ghost hunting app and held the phone up to the wall. A faint pale blue shape appeared. No one in the cellar was that tiny. She snapped a photo in case the app was sophisticated enough to capture a thermal image.
The image resolved into the silhouette of a little girl. As Giulia watched it through the lens, it moved closer. She stood her ground and aimed the phone at her feet. Tiny bluish arms circled Giulia’s legs as though giving her a hug. Then both hands reached up and patted Giulia’s stomach.
Giulia moved the phone away and for an instant she saw the little hands against her white pants. Then the shape was gone.
When Giulia was safe inside the Nunmobile, she checked the photo. All it showed was a negative outline of a hole in the wall and the shovel on the floor. No, wait. She enlarged it. Was that a faint shadow against her legs?
Her hand shook the least bit as she dialed Rowan. Before she pressed the green phone icon she erased the number an
d dialed Frank.
“Honey? Zlatan and I are starving. Let’s go out for clams and salt potatoes. I have the wildest story to tell you.”
After she hung up she said to the photo on her screen, “We have officially opened a whole new division of our detecting business.”
About the Author
Baker of brownies and tormenter of characters, Alice Loweecey recently celebrated her thirtieth year outside the convent. She grew up watching Hammer horror films and Scooby-Doo mysteries, which explains a whole lot. When she’s not creating trouble for Giulia Driscoll, she can be found growing her own vegetables (in summer) and cooking with them (the rest of the year).
The Giulia Driscoll Mystery Series
by Alice Loweecey
Novels
NUN TOO SOON (#1)
SECOND TO NUN (#2)
NUN BUT THE BRAVE (#3)
THE CLOCK STRIKES NUN (#4)
Short Stories
CHANGING HABITS
(prequel to NUN TOO SOON)
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