"Why didn't you say something? Why didn't you answer me?"
'Cause you didn't need me, that's why. Just like that lit-tle boy of yours, I figured it was time you took a test flight all on your own.
"I get it." I raised an eyebrow. "So how did I do?"
You passed, partner. With flying colors.
I smiled wide just then and Eddie caught it. "Gotta go, Pen," he said with a smile of his own. "I want to be in on April's interrogation." Then he pointed at the cardboard cut-out on the steps, the one dressed in Miss Todd's clothes, wig, and tiara. "You want that back?"
"The Zara Underwood standee? Why? You need that for evidence?"
"No. I'd like to have it."
"I don't think your wife would be too happy about that."
"She won't see it. I thought the guys at the station would get a kick out of it. Most of them are reading Bang, Bang Baby.
"I guess I'm in the clear now," Seymour said. "Hey, Eddie, thanks for your help."
"Don't mention it," Eddie said.
"Oh, and Bull!" Seymour called. "One more thing. Something I owe you."
"What is it now, Tarnish?"
I heard a smack, and saw Bull's wide butt hit the plush area rug. Seymour stood over him, shaking his just-used fist.
Stunned, Bull rubbed his chin.
Eddie glanced at Seymour, then glared at Bull. "What are you laying around for, Deputy?" he barked. "We've got work to do!"
EPILOGUE
Don't hurry away, old man. We like you around. We get so few private dicks in our house.
—The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler, 1953
"OKAY, MOM, THE dumps are stocked up. What do you want me to do next?"
Spencer's face was red, this time from exertion and not the mild sunburn he'd brought home from camp last week. He'd been busy since eight this morning, first hauling regular and recyclable garbage to their respective bins, then restocking the picked-over displays.
"A new standee arrived yesterday," I said. "You can put it together."
Spencer grinned and saluted. "Okey-dokey," he said before bounding off to the stockroom.
Sadie appeared at my shoulder. "Where'd he get 'okey-dokey?' That's not the sort of slang I've heard youngsters use. That's an old-fashioned phrase."
"Oh, he's probably just watching those classic black-and-white cop shows again on the Intrigue Channel."
"I see," Sadie said.
The front door buzzed before I could give it any more thought. I moved to the front of the store and saw Eddie Franzetti in a sharp blue suit, waving at me from the other side of the glass.
"You're out of uniform," I said, unlocking the door.
"Like it?" he adjusted the silver-and-blue silk tie. "I'm driving to Providence to give my final deposition on the Briggs-Wolfe mess. Lots of state officials and lawyer types." He smiled. "Just like Seymour, I'm blending in to my environment."
"Come on in." I led him to the counter, where Sadie greeted him and he helped himself to a warm, glazed pecan roll from the Cooper's bakery box.
"So what's the almost final verdict?" I asked, pouring him black coffee from our thermos.
"Plea deal all the way," he said between bites of buttery roll. "Jim Wolfe cooperated, so he'll do less time. But he'll do time, and that's what counts."
"And April?" I asked.
"She'll probably plea down to manslaughter on Miss Todd's murder. 'Frightened to death' is a tough count to prove. But her stepfather is a whole other ballgame. When she confessed to killing him on the boat, that put her away. There's a psychological evaluation pending, but I can't see the shrinks helping her."
I didn't, either. It seemed to me April's sickness came from an overdeveloped sense of entitlement and a whole lot of greed. The psychologists haven't identified those traits as pathologies. Not yet, anyway.
"So what exactly was the story on April and her stepfather?" I asked.
Eddie washed down another bite of roll with a gulp of coffee. "Arthur Fromsette got curious about what April was doing, taking that path from their house to Miss Todd's folly so often. One day, he followed her. The scheme to scare her aunt to death came out. April admitted that she expected her mother to inherit Todd Mansion. Mother Fromsette always had been generous to a fault with her daughter—loaning her money, paying off credit cards close to the point of personal bankruptcy. So April figured anything her mother inherited was as good as hers. But Arthur was appalled. He knew about her affair with Jim Wolfe, too, and probably the fact that April was cooking Wolfe's books with the tax man to keep his business going."
"Wolfe Construction was in financial trouble?"
Eddie nodded. "Jim Wolfe underbid on so many contracts around the region that he ended up in debt. The upshot is that Arthur Fromsette wanted to convince his stepdaughter to change her ways by threatening to go to the authorities. It didn't work. She killed him."
"Then it was April who attacked Rachel Delve at the seance?"
"According to April's confession, she believed Miss Delve was about to reveal the truth to her mother about her stepfather's murder." Eddie shook his head. "The act was good enough to convince April, even though it sounds like a lot of voodoo hooey to me. Talking to the dead! Can you imagine?"
Maybe I ought to send a little chill Eddie's way. "Shhh, Jack."
Eddie shrugged. "In any case, April was the one who doused the candle and struck Rachel in the nose with the heel of her palm. Rachel was lucky she survived—Mrs. Briggs learned the technique in a martial arts class. If that single blow had been a little stronger, it could have killed the woman."
Sadie cleared her throat. "Explain the timing to me again, Eddie. Those electronics were installed late last summer, weren't they?"
"Yeah," said Eddie. "Pen was right about that. Jim Wolfe set all the special effects up during the two weeks Miss Todd was in Newport."
"But they didn't use the devices to frighten Timothea for nine months," Sadie noted.
"With Arthur Fromsette's disappearance, there was a police investigation and Jim Wolfe got scared. But as the months passed, Wolfe got deeper in debt, and more and more desperate. Finally, when April moved back in with her mother for the summer, she convinced him to go forward with their original plan."
I glanced around to make sure Spencer was out of earshot. "And what about that other matter?" I asked quietly.
Eddie leaned close. "We buried Gideon Wexler in his real grave on the Old Farm early yesterday morning. Nobody noticed."
"What was in the original coffin?" Sadie asked.
"A bag of rocks," Eddie said. "God knows how Miss Todd pulled that one off."
I shivered, recalling the night I slept on that platform bed in Miss Todd's master bedroom. Who knew I was sleeping over a mummified corpse?
What's the matter, baby, lose your interest in dead guys?
"Funny, Jack."
How the heck did they even discover the body after all those years?
"Seymour decided to redecorate the master bedroom," I whispered to the ghost. "He had to move that four-poster platform bed into the other bedroom to paint. That was when he found Miss Todd's secret diary, hidden with Gideon Wexler's corpse."
Talk about ghoulish.
"I returned the diary to Seymour yesterday," Eddie told us. "I know Miss Todd wanted him to have it."
"She did," I said. "I believe that was the book she mentioned in her will. She must have known Seymour would eventually find Wexler's body along with her written confession."
"No offense to the authors on your shelves, ladies, but I think that diary was the most fascinating thing I've ever read."
"I'd have to agree," Sadie said, shaking her head.
So did I. Miss Todd's story was downright operatic. According to her diary, Timothea lived in thrall of Gideon Wexler since the day they met, despite the fact that the man was thirty years her senior. Wilomena also loved Wexler. But the romantic triangle was not the reason for the rift between the half-sisters.
&nbs
p; During their time together in Newport, Timothea learned of Gideon Wexler's guilt in engineering the 1947 Long Island fire that killed J. J. Conway's mother and seven other innocent people. Just like Todd Mansion, Wexler had rigged his Long Island manor with an elaborate setup to fool guests into believing the house was inhabited by spirits.
Ectoplasmic mists, ghostly apparitions, weird lights and sounds had been set up on the Long Island estate courtesy of Frankie Papps, who used his knowledge of stagecraft to create the effects. Frankie recruited Mabel Conway to act as a phony medium for Wexler, too. But their arrangement fell apart when Frankie and Mabel threatened to expose Wexler unless he gave them the big payoff he was continually holding out on them.
When the couple went out to his Long Island house to collect, Wexler drugged and imprisoned them until the time was right to stage the fire. I shuddered to think of the horror J. J.'s mother experienced as the flames roared around her.
Because Timothea was intimate with the man, she finally realized what kind of monster Wexler really was. She knew it was only a matter of time before he killed again. To prevent that from happening, she placed enough poison in her lover's tea to kill him on the spot. In those days, when a fifty-something man, who pushed the scale at three hundred pounds, keeled over dead, no one questioned it. No one but Timothea's half-sister, Wilomena Field. She knew what really happened and made a pact with her sister to never reveal the truth. The two never spoke again—about that or anything else.
In the end, Miss Todd's own guilty conscience made her a prisoner. She served a life sentence for murder in her own home. And after years of isolation, the fake haunting unhinged her completely. She really believed that she was battling the ghost of Gideon Wexler, who'd finally risen from the grave to exact revenge.
"Well, Eddie," I said. 'Truth is stranger than fiction, and Miss Todd's case is certainly strange. I can't believe you kept it out of the news."
"I had plenty of help, Pen. Councilman Lockhart. The chief. Doc Rubino. Even Bull McCoy. Nobody wants Quindicott to become a stomping ground for lunatic spiritualists or television spook hunters."
You can say that again, pal!
Eddie glanced at his watch. "Well, I'd better hit the road."
I walked Deputy Chief Franzetti to the door. "How's Zara Underwood these days?"
He laughed. "She's wearing a police uniform now, courtesy of the policewomen on staff. You should stop by the station and check her out."
"I will. Good luck in Providence, Eddie." I unlocked the door to let him out.
Admit the truth, baby. You couldn't wait to get rid of Miss Underpants.
I grinned, happy to hear Jack's voice again, happy he was with me still.
"Well, you know, Zara sold a lot of books for us, and she even helped solve a crime or two. And these days the public's pretty unforgiving: It's out with the old, in with the new."
Guess it's only a matter of time before you toss me aside for some blue-eyed Viking with a dimpled chin and an easy line.
"Never, Jack."
From across the floor, Spencer called to me. "The new standee's finished. Check it out!" Tikes! Who's thatAlvin?
"That's no Alvin, Jack. That's one of the biggest-selling authors in the country."
And that wasn't the only upside. The cardboard cutout of a distinguished author wearing a tailored suit wouldn't stir an ounce of controversy in this little town, unless maybe someone objected to the color of the man's tie.
Lucky for me, James Patterson wasn't going to be posing in lingerie anytime soon. -
"Nine thirty," Sadie announced. "Time to start a new day!"
THE APARTMENT WAS quiet again. But it was a good kind of quiet. Not empty or cold, just the kind of quiet that comes after the sun sets on a long day of work, a day of feeling useful and alive.
I'm glad you feel that way, baby. I wish I could have when it counted.
"You didn't?"
I was too busy, sweetheart.
"Doing what?"
Chasing phantoms.
"Phantoms?"
Today was never good enough. Tomorrow was always coming. And then one day it wasn 't.
I turned over beneath my bedcovers, stared into the silvery silence of the moonlit room. 'Tell me something, Jack," I said, "what happened with your case?"
You mean the kid?
"J. J. Conway. You had to tell him, didn't you? That you found his mother."
Yeah, baby. Not one of my happier memories.
"Sorry to remind you. But your memory was a huge help to me."
I know, doll. That's why we used it.
"So did the little boy go into a foster home?"
Heck, no. Mrs. Dellarusso adopted him. You remember? The woman on Second Avenue who'd lost her only son over there.
I smiled into my pillow. "J. J. said she was a swell cook." She was a swell mom. And, if you ask me, J. J. was better off with hen Not that the fat piece of scum who burned Mable Conway alive doesn't deserve to burn in hell, but J. J. was a good kid. He deserved better.
"Sounds like he got it."
Yeah, baby. I hope you got it, too.
"What does that mean?"
Your boy's lucky to have you.
"What are you talking about? I'm lucky to have him."
You have each other, that's all I'm saying. The kid'll grow up, move away, get a life. You won't be seeing him every day. He won't be seeing you. But maybe it's the things we can't see that matter. Maybe those are the best parts of who we are to each other.
I turned over again and thought hard about that. I decided I couldn't argue. So I didn't. I just yawned and closed my eyes.
"Thanks, Jack," I said.
Good night, baby, he whispered back. I'll see you in your dreams. Then the ghost's breezy presence receded again, into the fieldstone wall that had become his tomb.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alice Kimberly is the pen name for a multi-published author who regularly collaborates with her writer husband. In addition to the Haunted Bookshop Mysteries, she and her husband also write the bestselling Coffeehouse Mysteries under the pen name Cleo Coyle. To learn more about Alice Kimberly, the Haunted Bookshop Mysteries, or the Coffeehouse Mysteries, visit the author's virtual coffeehouse at www.CoffeehouseMystery.com
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