She mustered a smile. “I seem to be thanking you a lot.”
“There’ll be a pop quiz this evening on the first two books, including the one that explains the National Register of Historic Homes.”
“Right.” Her expression was wry as they walked out onto the front porch.
A late-model pale cream Cadillac edged up to the curb behind Jase’s truck. A slender man of average height and carefully styled sandy hair climbed out, and she grinned, recognizing him.
“Jordan!” He loped onto the porch and enveloped her in a bear hug. “I heard you’d hit town.”
When he would have held on a bit too long, Jordan stepped back, turning to include Jase. “I think you already know Ted Rawlins—”
“—of the Ted Rawlins Trio,” Jase finished, introducing himself and shaking Ted’s hand. “I’ve been expecting you.”
“Well, this is convenient,” Ted said. “I was on the way to your pub when I spied Jordan.”
“I booked the trio for this evening,” Jase told Jordan. His expression was curious. “I didn’t realize you were connected to the L.A. jazz scene.”
“I’m not, but I’ve heard the trio play a time or two.” She quickly explained her acquaintance with Ted, omitting any details. “Ultimately, Ted’s the reason I ended up in Port Chatham.” Jordan turned back to him with a smile. “But the festival is a month away. What’re you doing in town so early?”
“I told you I bought a summer home up here. The band’s been using it as a sound studio for the last month. And thanks to you, I landed a job teaching the seminars this year.” He was referring to the work she’d done with him to help him iron out personality conflicts he’d had with colleagues in the music business. “Jordan, here, literally saved my life,” he told Jase, who looked surprised.
“That’s an overstatement,” she protested.
“Not from where I sit,” Ted said firmly, then his expression turned sober. “So how are you holding up? Any news on who might’ve killed Ryland?”
She shook her head. “Nothing so far.”
“How about lunch tomorrow? You can bring me up-to-date.”
“Why don’t you drop by and I’ll give you a quick tour instead? The movers will be here and it will be a zoo, but you’ll enjoy seeing the house, I think.”
If he was disappointed, he had the grace not to show it. “It’s a date.”
“And I can’t wait to hear the trio play this evening,” she quickly added, knowing he was still somewhat insecure about his comeback, even though his career showed every sign of a meteoric recovery.
“The pub’s just around the corner,” Jase added. “Give me another minute to wrap up here, and I’ll be right behind you.”
“Sounds good.” Ted’s tone was jovial. “Well. Tomorrow, then.” With a casual wave, he returned to his car.
She could feel Jase’s gaze on her as Ted drove away, but his next question was innocuous enough. “What time do the movers show up?”
“Early, hopefully.” She needed to make a call and nail them down. “I haven’t figured out where they can put everything—most of the rooms need a thorough cleaning, stripping, and painting before I can even put furniture in them.”
“My advice? Pick a room that’s a low priority and have the movers stack most of your belongings in there. That way, you can unpack and arrange as you have time, and as rooms are finished. Tom and I are always available to help you move the furniture later.”
She nodded. “Good idea.”
Jase leaned down to rub the dog’s ears. “Have you picked out a name for him yet?”
“Worthless?” she said, only half joking. “He has a knack for abandoning me at key moments.”
The dog lowered his head and whined, and Jase chuckled. “You’ve hurt his feelings.”
She rolled her eyes and knelt to scratch the dog’s stomach. “I wouldn’t really name you Worthless,” she assured him. “How about Oscar, after Oscar Peterson?”
He gave her The Look, then rolled onto his back.
After properly atoning for her sins, she stood and noted the time. “Can we put off the meeting with Tom until tomorrow? The day is getting away from me.”
Jase nodded. “Why don’t you come by this evening? I’ll ask Tom to bring in his great-grandfather’s diaries, and I’m sure Darcy will want to hear all about your first day with the ghosts.”
She watched him walk to his truck, oddly reluctant to see him leave.
FPP.
Shaking her head, she went inside to see whether Hattie and Charlotte had managed to conjure up lunch.
* * *
BY midafternoon, Jordan had gotten hold of the movers—they would arrive first thing the next morning—and had accepted welcoming casseroles and desserts from several more neighbors who seemed definitely more pleased than worried about her arrival in town. Evidently, her ability to see and converse with ghosts rated higher than her homicidal tendencies. And at the rate the food was piling up, she’d have to throw a party just to clean out the pantry, though she was certain the dog was willing to consume more than his fair share.
The sight of that much food waiting to spoil, though, moved a functioning refrigerator to the top of her to-do list, so she scrubbed out the ancient Amana that had come with the house. Miraculously, when she plugged it in, it not only hummed enthusiastically but put out cold air. Though she had grim visions of the electric meter whirring faster than the speed of light, she had cold food storage and a way to make ice, so she wasn’t complaining.
While she arranged the food in the fridge, she mulled over the latest plan that had been formulating in her mind. After all, she needed to start researching the house renovation, right? So if she just ignored how she gained access to the research, she was getting through her day productively and functioning normally. And if she happened to run across some old newspaper articles on the murder while she researched the house, it wouldn’t hurt to read them, just to appease the ghosts. She could be productive and accommodating. Even proponents of Rational Therapy would be in awe of her ingenuity.
“Were you serious about getting me inside the Historical Society building?” she asked Hattie, who had been sitting at the kitchen table with Charlotte while Jordan worked on the fridge.
The ghosts glanced at each other.
“We’d have to break in!” Charlotte exclaimed. “It would give us an opportunity to test the strength of our telekinetic powers.”
“Whoa,” Jordan said, alarmed. “I can’t be a party to breaking and entering—I’m already on the cops’ radar.” She received blank looks and tried again. “They’re already paying attention to me because of my husband’s death.”
“Which is absurd,” Hattie said stoutly. “Why, anyone could tell you aren’t a murderess.”
“If they try to arrest you,” Charlotte added, her expression indignant, “we’ll show them!”
Jordan didn’t want to think about the ramifications of that remark. “But didn’t you bring me papers from the Historical Society archives? How did you get in? Do you have a key?”
“Well, we don’t have any trouble going through walls, though books and papers can’t be transported that way …” Hattie hesitated, looking guilty. “The truth is, the papers were here in the library. Before Charlotte and our housekeeper, Sara, were forced to give up the house, they collected every bit of news they could find about the trial.” At Jordan’s glower, she spread her hands. “We couldn’t count on you finding them on your own, at least not immediately. How long would it have taken you, given the state of disrepair the house is in, to focus on the books and papers in the library?”
Though she had a point, Jordan didn’t feel like conceding it. “So your diaries are still here in the house after all these years?”
“Well, of course.”
“Do you mind getting them for me?” Jordan asked through her teeth.
Hattie disappeared, then reappeared seconds later, just as several volumes landed with a dusty thud on
the table.
Jordan picked one up and thumbed through it curiously. She didn’t see any obvious entries about the house. Which, once she thought about it, made sense. Charles Longren had probably built the house in anticipation of traveling back East to find a bride. And that meant Hattie wouldn’t have been in Port Chatham during its construction. Jordan still needed access to the newspaper archives. “So you can’t get me inside the Historical Society without illegally breaking in?”
But she was talking to an empty room—the ghosts had disappeared.
Footsteps sounded in the hall, and Darcy walked into the kitchen, the dog at her heels. “You wanted me to unlock the Historical Society building for you?”
“How do you do that?” Jordan asked, spooked.
“Do what? I stopped by the pub for lunch, and Jase mentioned that you needed access to the archives.”
“Oh. Never mind.”
Darcy leaned against the kitchen counter, arms folded over the bulge of her shoulder holster. “You okay about last night? Jase thought you might still be a little shaken.”
“I’m finding that ‘okay’ is a relative term,” Jordan replied, and Darcy grinned. “Can’t you get into trouble for letting me inside the building?”
She shrugged. “We’re pretty loose around here, and the Hapleys would like the fact that I helped you out when they couldn’t be here.” She pushed away from the counter. “When do you want to head out there?”
“How about right now?”
* * *
AFTER clearing out the back of the Prius for the dog, Jordan folded down the backseats and made a bed out of a comforter she kept in the car for emergencies. But the dog didn’t fit standing up, and he also couldn’t jump in without banging his head on the ceiling. Since he outweighed her, she lifted his front paws in, then lifted and shoved his rear, then showed him how to scrunch down.
Once she had him settled, she dumped an armload of Hattie’s diaries on the passenger seat, then followed Darcy’s police cruiser out to the highway on the east side of town, to a location not far from the regional airport. Traffic was light in Jordan’s neighborhood, but when they turned onto the highway linking Port Chatham with the rest of the Olympic Peninsula, Jordan could see the impact tourists had in the summer months. Other than the ferry to Whidbey Island, the highway was Port Chatham’s only link to civilization. As such, it was crowded not only with tourists but with service and logging trucks.
The Historical Society’s building sat on a hillside with towering evergreens surrounding the parking lot. The architecture was plain—a one-story, cement block design. As a testament to the ongoing remodel, a large green construction waste bin sat not far from the front door, but there were no construction crews in sight. They parked their cars, Darcy waiting while Jordan cracked the windows for the dog, then they walked across the lot.
Darcy frowned at the sight of the piece of plywood that had evidently been nailed across the front door but now lay some distance away in the weeds on the edge of the parking lot. “I wonder how that happened.”
Jordan glimpsed a blue dress inside the building. “Maybe one of the crew took it off temporarily,” she prevaricated.
“That must be it.” Darcy produced a ring of keys and unlocked the door.
Inside, the space was dim, musty, and torn apart. Display cases stood empty and shoved to one side, and the carpet had been rolled up, exposing the subflooring. Walls had been ripped open, wiring hanging loose, and windows had been boarded over, presumably to protect the glass.
Jordan sneezed twice.
“The air in here is a little thick,” Darcy observed.
“So the archives are in the basement?” Jordan asked, waving a hand in front of her face and ignoring Hattie and Charlotte, who were lurking in the gloom on the far side of the room behind a display case.
“Yeah, the stairs to the basement are over there.” Darcy pointed. “I need to make my rounds—will you be okay here by yourself?”
“Sure,” Jordan said, relieved.
“Right. Back in a couple of hours, then?”
After Darcy let herself out, Jordan turned around. “I don’t even want to know about the plywood.”
Charlotte floated over the top of a display case, sniffing. “We were only trying to help.”
Jordan climbed down the stairs, followed by the ghosts. She pushed aside a curtain of heavy construction plastic that had been hung to protect the basement’s contents from the dust and dirt that accompanied any remodel. Charlotte stayed just long enough to retrieve a stack of historical fashion magazines and take them back upstairs.
“Which shelves hold the newspapers?” Jordan asked Hattie once they were standing in the midst of rows of metal stacks filled with boxes, books, and files. The construction of Longren House should have been a newsworthy event back then.
Hattie led her to the row next to the east wall. “Eleanor Canby’s newspaper—the Port Chatham Weekly Gazette—was the only one at the time.”
Jordan ran her fingers along spines of the neatly labeled file boxes. “A woman owned the newspaper?”
Hattie nodded. “Eleanor was editor-in-chief of the Gazette, and a very important person in town. She held strong views. You’ve seen the large house down the block from us? The one with the sign out front?”
Jordan had noticed the place. Situated on a block of more modest cottages, it was hard to ignore. It was huge—three stories including the attic—and very formal in design. A historic marker graced the front yard. She’d been meaning to check it out but hadn’t yet had the time.
“It’s called Canby Mansion,” Hattie said. “Eleanor’s husband had his ship’s carpenters handle all the finish work inside the house. It was considered a stunning accomplishment in its day. No one has ever figured out how they managed to disguise the support for the staircase. And the windows up above direct the sunlight onto friezes of different mythological figures, based on the month of the year—”
“Which dates should I be looking for?” Jordan interrupted, anxious to start reading.
“May 27, 1890. Charlotte used to love to go to Eleanor’s soirées,” Hattie continued. “They were the highlight of the Port Chatham social season.” Her smile faded, replaced by sadness. “That is, until … well.”
Jordan located several boxes for that year and pulled them off the shelf to stack them on a small desk next to the back wall. She blew dust off the desk and set down the materials. The only light came from a window high up on the wall, and since the lamp on the desk didn’t work, she surmised that the electricity was turned off. Hunting through her purse, she located the small penlight she kept for such occasions, praying the batteries were still good.
Opening the first box, she carefully pulled out the stack of yellowed papers and set them down, gingerly leafing through them. By the time she realized Hattie had pointed her to a date right after the fire she’d read about the day before—not the date Longren House had been built—she was so engrossed in an editorial written by Eleanor Canby that she forgot all about her original quest.
Fall from Grace
May 27, 1890
Fiery Conflagration Consumes Two Waterfront Blocks
It has been nearly six years since this community has been rocked by a deadly fire on the waterfront. Yet two nights ago we were once again confronted with the horrific consequences of the licentious behaviors of our waterfront denizens.
Certain residents of this town have suggested that this week’s fire was started by businessmen who were “encouraging” waterfront proprietors to pay promptly on accounts due, “or else.” Such residents would do well to get their facts straight before making these outlandish accusations against our upstanding businessmen. For it was revealed to this newspaper’s reporter late yesterday morning that the fire was indeed started as the result of the actions taken by a woman of the most degraded form of humanity.
It is now known that a young man from an honorable family had been frequently observed in the
company of the soiled dove and become completely besotted. Two nights ago, in a fit of lovesick delirium and insane with liquor no doubt supplied by her, the young man killed the fallen woman, then set fire to the bed on which she lay. One can only assume he was subsequently overcome with guilt for the shame his family would have to endure when the truth came out, for he then effectually killed himself by blowing his brains out. The resulting conflagration was responsible for the taking of seven other lives and untold losses to many of our businessmen.
Let this tragedy serve as a warning to residents who sympathize with the women who engage in such scarlet sins. Public sentiment should see to it that these women who entice our young men to the waterfront pay dearly for this recent, tragic turn of events.
Hattie set the editorial next to her coffee cup on the dining room table and rubbed her throbbing temples. Eleanor might as well have mentioned her by name. A number of their neighbors had witnessed her argument with Eleanor the night before last—they would have no trouble putting together that incident with Eleanor’s pointed editorial.
The housekeeper placed an eggcup before Hattie, then arranged plates of orange wedges and biscuits within easy reach.
“Thank you, Sara.” Though food held no appeal, she managed a smile. Since Charles’s death, Sara had made it her personal duty to look after Hattie and Charlotte.
The stout housekeeper frowned. “You’d best eat—it’s past your normal breakfast time, and you’re looking mighty peaked.”
“It’s just a slight headache. Perhaps you could bring me some of that new powder Eleanor smuggled in from Canada?”
Sara shook her head. “No, ma’am! My friend Alice who works for the Canbys? I set store by what she says, and she told me the smugglers sometimes substitute a much more dangerous drug, or even talcum powder. Why, just this last week, Mrs. Canby sickened from a bad batch. I’ll brew you a cup of willow bark tea, instead.”
Haunting Jordan Page 9