Spooky Business (Jane Garbo Mysteries Book 1)

by Addison Creek

  Audrey didn’t usually help out at the haunted house except on nights like tonight, when refreshments were sold and served. She wouldn’t have time to cook a meal for the family, so it would be cold sandwiches for us.

  The three of us put up the last cobweb and headed after Cam, taking the stairs two at a time. Meg was waiting for us when we reached the kitchen.

  “Eat up,” she said.

  There was a massive pot of spaghetti on the stove, and we got in line to fill our plates. The kitchen was about twenty degrees hotter than the rest of the drafty old house, but all I cared about was that my stomach was rumbling and we weren’t anywhere near done with the prep work.

  Grant wasn’t there, and it wasn’t until we were all seated that I heard him enter the kitchen from behind where I was sitting. He came into my line of sight a moment later, walking quickly and looking serious. Rain was coming down harder now, lashing at the windows, and I’d heard several cracks of thunder.

  “Is everything okay?” my mom asked him, noting his expression.

  “Warlocks are coming tonight,” he said. “We need all the help we can get.”

  The table fell silent.

  Then a twitch drew my eyes to Lizzie. Her blond hair fell perfectly straight down her back and she was dressed all in black leather. I could just see her bouncing in her chair.

  Anticipation hung in the air.

  What now?

  “I hope you won’t be too angry that I called them,” he said to my mom. “Whatever is about to take place will surely take place tonight. The Trio ended up smashed for a reason, and I’m afraid that whatever that reason was, we need to get to the bottom of it and make sure this family is protected.”

  “Of course. No, I think it’s good,” said Mom, to the surprise of all of us. She noted our expressions and scoffed. “I’m not totally unreasonable, you know.”

  “Could have fooled me,” said Cookie, searching for the nearest bottle of wine.

  Mom grabbed it and snaked it away from the older woman.

  “See,” Cookie grumbled.

  Another moment stretched out before the silence was broken again.

  “Is His Majesty of Magic coming tonight?” said Lizzie.

  The boys perked up, while Grant continued to eat his spaghetti.

  “No, he’s not coming tonight,” said Grant. “The warlocks who are coming are very capable.”

  Lizzie slumped back in her chair, disappointment personified. Then she straightened and asked, “Did you know there’s a rumor that he has the most perfect warlock numbers and percentages?”

  “No one cares,” said Lark.

  “Are they as good as Pep’s?” Cam asked.

  “Better,” said Lizzie.

  “You’ll be pleased,” said Grant. After a beat I realized that he was speaking to me.

  “About what?” I asked.

  “That His Majesty isn’t coming,” he said. He was smiling, but I had no idea why.

  “I can’t say that I care one way or the other,” I said. “We don’t need him to solve this mystery.”

  “He would be SO helpful!” cried Lizzie. “How can you say that! Can you imagine? It would be great.”

  I took a big bite of spaghetti and regretted it the moment I realized that Grant was still watching me closely.

  “When will the warlocks arrive?” my mom asked.

  “Soon. The weather is slowing them down, but they’re on their way,” he explained.

  “I don’t suppose they want costumes?” said Meg. “We have a whole dressing room filled with them. So many trunks I’ve lost track.”

  Grant laughed. “Probably not.”

  “Worth a shot,” said Meg. “I suppose they’ll look pretty intimidating in their ordinary getup anyhow.”

  A large clap of thunder interrupted the conversation, and for a quiet moment we all stared out the window at the rain. It was now coming down in thick gray sheets, so heavily that the barn and the field behind us were invisible.

  “Think people will still come for the opening?” Meg worried.

  “Not as many. We’re going to have to set Cookie up in a boat,” said my mom.

  “I’ll get to work on it,” said Cookie.

  “You don’t want one of us to do it?” Lark asked.

  “Are you kidding me? You’d conjure a boat with holes in the bottom. I’d capsize,” said Cookie.

  “It’s not as if it has to be seaworthy,” said Lark.

  “With this weather you never know,” Cookie shot back.

  “Excuse me?” Steve had come into the kitchen, something I’d never seen him do before. “We’re all getting a little worried about the weather,” he explained, glancing at the windows where the water was pinging against the panes.

  “What about it?” said Mom.

  Steve hesitated. “The ghosts.”

  “They’ll be fine,” she said, her jaw tight.

  “Of course,” he said. “The skeletons are ready. We’re waiting in groups.” He said it as if to remind Mom that everyone was worried about what had happened to the Trio, plus the lack of progress in solving the mystery.

  “We’ve made progress,” Cam said as Steve let the kitchen door shut behind him. “We know the Trio was killed outside and we know that the murderer is at the mansion.”

  “All comforting facts,” I agreed.

  Mom cut the discussion short. “We need to get back to work. There’s a lot to do before tonight. Grant, if you wouldn’t mind informing me when your colleagues get here?”

  “Of course,” he agreed. “I’ll go look into where they are now.”

  Grant strode out of the room and the rest of us got back to work. As I was passing through the foyer I ran into Cookie, all decked out in yellow rain gear with, you guessed it, cookies all over it. Even her rain hat was in the shape of a witch’s hat.

  “Be careful,” I told her, passing the grandfather clock, which had been cleaned since the last time I’d see it.

  “Will do,” she said. “I’ve been in worse.”

  As she opened the door I saw how hard the rain was coming down and found myself wondering if there even was worse than this.

  Cookie was having none of the actual weather, though, and used an enchantment to create a canopy over her head, thus staying dry.

  “What was the point of the rain gear?” I yelled after her.

  “Makes me look cool,” she cried over her shoulder.

  I rolled my eyes and kept moving, heading for the gift shop. They needed extra merchandise ready to go because of the number of customers we expected tonight.

  “Can you deal with those boxes over there?” said Pep as I came in. The lights were on and she was blasting pop music while she worked. Lark was nowhere to be found, having come up with an excuse to help Audrey re-paint one of the haunted house rooms instead.

  I quickly started emptying boxes of trinkets for the display in the middle of the shop. From ghosts to vampires, all the supernaturals in the haunted house were represented.

  Of course, the witches won the prize for the most trinkets. You had to represent all types of witches, tall and short, young and old, blond and brunette, even a few redheads to make Lark happy.

  I was pulling trinkets out of boxes when I came across some miniature models of the whole haunted house. I held one up and examined the little black statue. Something was niggling at the back of my mind, but I couldn’t think what it was, so I pulled another one out of the box and compared the two.

  My breath caught. The grandfather clock had been dirty, now it was clean. Who had cleaned it? No one in the house dusted, ever. It wasn’t a thing. When my mom cleaned she used magic. Besides, the rest of the foyer was still covered in a layer of dust, but not the clock.

  Heart pounding, I leaped to my feet.

  “I’ll be right back,” I called to Pep, who looked up in confusion as I dashed out of the room.

  “Where are you going?” she yelled after me.

  I dashed to the foyer
, my heart racing. The grandfather clock stood there, shining.

  My cousin ran up behind me and I felt her brush my elbow. “What is it?”

  “It’s the clock,” I said, pointing. “I found the murder weapon.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  There was a buzzing in my ears. A perfect moment of clarity overtook me. It all had to do with the clock face . . . The grandfather clock was a fixture in the hallway. My mom loved it, and therefore we knew it would never go anywhere. Cookie hated it and thought it was an eyesore, but even she knew better than to cross my mom about it. All the kids knew that playing and maybe breaking something were all well and good, but the one thing we should never risk breaking was the clock.

  In short, it was my mother’s most important possession.

  “Wow,” said Pep, echoing my own feelings.

  I was stunned at the idea that the clock had been used as the weapon.

  “That’s why it was suddenly so dusty,” I murmured.

  Pep flinched a bit. “Gross.”

  “I just assumed everyone was too busy to clean it,” I said.

  “We were too busy. Running a house and a business ain’t easy,” said Pep.

  “Magic must have been used,” I replied. “There isn’t a scratch on the clock, so it’s not as if it was tipped over and went crashing to the floor.”

  “True, and I wonder why someone waited to clean it,” said Pep.

  “Probably because the family was always around,” I said, thinking hard.

  “Yeah, no matter how many times Meg asks her, Cookie refuses to move out,” Pep said.

  Ignoring Pep’s joke, I asked myself who would have done this. Who could have done this?

  Just then a figure passed outside the window, moving quickly. It wasn’t Cookie, because she was all decked out in yellow, and this shape was almost as dark as the darkness behind it.

  “Is that Grant?” I asked.

  “Where’s he going in such a hurry?” said Pep.

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’s coming this way. Do we tell him what you figured out?”

  “No way. He’ll kick us out of here and turn it into a crime scene.”

  I raced forward, determined to at least have a look at the clock before Grant got there and ruined everything.

  “Why do you think he’s out in this weather, anyway? It’s just crazy,” said Pep.

  “Cookie went out,” I said absently.

  “See what I mean? Crazy,” said Pep.

  The massive grandfather clock loomed over the foyer. I took a quick look behind it, but its back was flush against the wall; there was no space back there where anything could have been hidden.

  Bracing my hands on one side of the tall clock, I tried to push it sideways. It didn’t budge.

  Pep came to help me and we tried again, but the clock still didn’t move.

  Then, just above my head, I thought I saw something that looked an awful lot like skeleton dust. I was reaching up to get a better look when I was interrupted.

  The door burst open in a shower of wind and water. I leaped back from the clock, hoping my urgency would go unnoticed.

  Water cascading off him, Grant came into the foyer. His eyes met mine and then slid to Pep, who was standing where I had left her.

  “I know you miss me when I’m gone, but I really don’t need a welcoming committee,” he said.

  “We weren’t welcoming you,” I scoffed, realizing my mistake too late.

  The door shut behind Grant and he said, “Then what are you doing in the foyer?”

  “We were just on the way to the gift shop,” said Pep quickly.

  “What were you doing outside?” I said.

  “Checking the grounds,” said Grant.

  “In this weather?” I challenged him.

  “Especially in this weather,” he said.

  The three of us stood silently for several seconds.

  Then Grant pointed behind us, “Isn’t the gift shop that way?”

  “Yes.” Pep started marching back the way we had just come. As she passed me she linked her arm with mine, dragging me along. “Inventory to take and schedules to make!”

  Glancing back over my shoulder, I saw Grant watching us. I walked faster.

  Had he realized that I was examining the clock? What had he really been doing outside?

  Once we were safely inside Pep’s domain, she shut the door and closed her eyes.

  “Phew, that was close,” she said.

  “You can say that again. Do you think he knew what we were up to?” I asked.

  “No way,” she said. “We can’t go back, though.”

  “We’ll have to wait till tomorrow,” I said.

  I wasn’t happy about it, but there was nothing else to be done. The foyer wasn’t likely to be empty again tonight, not while the haunted house was open to the public.

  “It’s strange, don’t you think the other warlocks should have gotten here by now?” I asked.

  “Yes, I do,” said Pep grimly.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon in the gift shop. I tried to concentrate on the task at hand, because Pep would never forgive me if I didn’t record the inventory accurately. But at last it was dinnertime.

  There’d been no sign of anyone since we’d rushed back to the shop and shut the door. Cookie hadn’t come to chat, no one had come to say that the visiting warlocks had arrived, and I hadn’t heard a sound from the other side of the door except the occasional click-click of the skeletons’ feet.

  “This is the last box. I’m just going to leave it for now. Let’s go to dinner,” said Pep, putting the box of black cat stuffed animals behind the counter.

  “Where’s Mom?” I asked Audrey as we entered the kitchen. No one else was there. Even Audrey looked grim.

  “She didn’t have time to eat. Customers will be arriving in an hour. Grab something quickly and then come help me with the finishing touches on the haunted library.”

  The SpookyBooSpectacular was about to begin.

  My feeling of foreboding only grew after our slapdash dinner. Everyone in the family was dashing around doing last-minute prep; only Grant stayed motionless, setting up shop in the foyer and staring out the window. The rain got ever heavier until it became almost impossible to see anything outdoors. Whenever I went through the main entryway Grant was there, his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes forward.

  Finally, not long before the customers were due to start arriving, I passed through the foyer and he was gone. I stood, baffled, until Cam came tumbling in to say that the warlocks hadn’t made it to the mansion.

  Then Mom came in, frantic.

  Grant showed up, deeply concerned.

  Lizzie arrived, solicitous.

  In light of the weather, the missing warlocks, and the unsolved crime, Mom had finally panicked. She didn’t think opening night could go forward as planned, and now we were faced with the question of what to do next. With the wild weather, she didn’t think many customers would be coming anyhow, but for good measure she asked Cam and Lizzie to make some kind of sign to put up at the end of the driveway.

  Once Cam and Lizzie were on their way, I looked sharply at Mom and asked, “What now”?

  Mom, however, was staring grimly out the same window that Grant had been gazing out of earlier, and before she could answer my question Grant said, “I have to go find my colleagues.”

  “In this weather?” Mom asked worriedly.

  “They’re stuck on the road,” he said. “As of our last contact they were almost here, so they should have arrived long since. I have no way to communicate with them if I stay here, and if they’re in trouble, as seems likely, they’ll need my help. I’m sorry to leave the mansion, but I don’t have any choice.”

  My mom nodded agreement. “You should take helpers with you,” she decided.

  Amazed that Grant didn’t insist on going alone, I stepped forward and said, “I’ll get my coat.” I was relieved that I’d be able
to do something useful at last.

  “No, not you,” said Mom.

  My mom was stubbornly stubborn. Once she got an idea in her head, like the one that said her little girl couldn’t hunt, she was almost impossible to budge.

  I stopped dead. “I want to help,” I told her.

  “You can help by staying here,” she said. “We can’t leave the mansion deserted.”

  “Cookie and Uncle Taft are here,” I said, about to burst from frustration.

  “Exactly. Cookie can’t be left to her own devices. She’d do as much damage as if we handed the mansion over to the Root of All Evil on a platter,” said Mom.

  “Your mom has a point. Someone needs to stay here,” said Grant, looking intently at me. He was dressed all in black and his large-brimmed hat was tilted over his eyes. He looked dashing.

  “This isn’t any of your business,” I fumed.

  “Don’t talk to company like that,” Mom snapped.

  It took great effort not to roll my eyes.

  “Get Pep and Lark. You can all stay,” she said. “We’ll be back shortly.”

  “Even you’re leaving?” I was incredulous. Mom never left.

  “Like Grant said, they might need help. They were almost here when we last heard from them, so we won’t shouldn’t be gone long. And with customers warned that the SpookyBooSpectacular is postponed, there shouldn’t be any problems here.”

  As if putting me completely and instantly out of her thoughts, she turned to Grant and said, “Gather the others. If we’re going to help the warlocks we need to get to them as soon as possible.”

  Grant gave one curt nod. Without looking at me, he turned and left the foyer.

  I was furious. As Mom went to make final preparations for their departure, I went in search of Mirrorz.

  After looking for a long time, I found him dusting bookshelves in the library.

  He looked surprised to see me and said so. “Everyone else is leaving. The warlocks are in trouble. I’m to stay at the mansion.”

  Mirrorz black eyes softened. “Your mother only wants what is best for you. Her only daughter is very important to her.”

  “I want to do something exciting! The action is out there where the warlocks are, not in here,” I complained.