Rowan smacked the table with one multi-ringed hand. “See, Mac? Ms. Driscoll is already in charge. Go, go. Come back here afterward.”
Mac popped up. “Of course. Ms. Driscoll, I should warn you that I have a wall covered with framed sales awards, and I haven’t lost my touch.”
Giulia stood and smoothed her suit skirt. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Lady Rowan.”
In the outer room, Jasper was marking sale prices on essential oils. Three teenage girls entered the shop, giggling and whispering. Giulia led the way this time and Mac followed.
Three
Giulia closed the door to her private office.
“Mac, what exactly do you hope we can do for you?”
Mac settled in the client chair, a whole head taller than Giulia, even sitting down. “I think my family ghost is trying to evict me.”
Giulia groped for words.
Mac smiled. “You think I’m batty. I know that look. Is it the Tarot or the ghost or both?”
Giulia put an answering smile on her face. “Not at all. I know several people who are skilled in Tarot reading. I was thinking that removing a ghost requires a different type of investigator.”
“Nope.” Mac shook her head with decision. “Rowan and I have been friends since we were seventeen years old. Her skills are the real thing. If she says I need you, I’m not arguing.”
A client referred by Tarot was a first for DI. Giulia wanted to take her on, if only to watch Sidney’s practical head explode. But ghost-hunting?
“Mac, in all seriousness, our usual caseload involves insurance fraud, background checks, and deadbeat parents. Tangible things.”
Mac snorted. “Please. Who should I contact? That ghost chaser who buys infomercial space on late-night TV? The husband and wife team who advertise on Craigslist? No. I need a real private investigator and I want you. Give me ten more minutes of your time to convince you.”
Giulia liked her enough to give her the chance. “Go ahead.”
Mac leaned forward.
“My great-grandfather built Stone’s Throw on Conneaut Lake as his family’s home when he married my great-grandmother. He always wanted to live in a lighthouse. It was never a working one because the lake isn’t deep enough or long enough for real shipping, but that didn’t bother him. He and his wife had eleven children and twenty-seven grandchildren. They scattered all over North America and none of them wanted to take over the old place. It sat empty for two decades before I bought it.”
She brought out an Android phone. “When I retired, I’d been regional manager for a hotel chain for thirty years. I knew I could turn Great-Grandpa’s white elephant into a working bed and breakfast. I had plenty of real-world experience, enough money saved, and excellent credit. I sank everything into the renovations. I’ve been breaking even for seven years, but something’s changed. Please look at these pictures.”
Giulia came around the desk.
Mac held up the phone. “This is the inside of the lighthouse. See the scratches on the stairwell walls? They’re higher than anyone can reach. I’m six foot one and they’re a foot above my fingertips.” She swiped to the next picture and enlarged it. “This is the living room. See behind the drapes? Those aren’t my sheer white curtains.” She swiped again. “This is the attic. I keep all my decorating supplies up here. I have the only key to the attic door. Now look at those cracks in the window facing the lake. Do you see anything?”
Giulia studied the random damage to the glass. All at once a pattern emerged. “It says ‘Mine.’”
“Oh, good. You do see it.” She returned the phone to her straw purse. “I bet you’re going to tell me there are simple, logical explanations for everything I just showed you. Perhaps the scratches are cracks in the old plaster or bird claw marks. Maybe the white curtain is really fog or sea mist. By chance an unseen flaw in manufacture appeared in the glass as it got old. Am I right?”
“I’d want to see everything in person before making that call.”
Mac’s wrinkles all scrunched together from her huge grin. “I was hoping you’d say that. Okay, look. There’s a lot more to this: We have a family tradition of a lost hoard of gold coins that might be involved, plus a psychic I’ve hired to do weekly séances and who’s convinced one of my ancestors has turned into a Woman in White.”
Giulia took a legal pad and a pen out of her center drawer. “We need to start at the beginning.”
“Not here. On the premises is best. I want you to stay at Stone’s Throw. Are you married?”
“Yes.”
“Good. That wasn’t meant to be rude. Stone’s Throw is all about the romantic getaway. If the Veiled Woman comes to me, I know you’ll fix my ghost problem.” She reached into her purse, but came up empty.
Giulia buzzed Zane. “Would you bring Ms. Stone her checkbook, please?”
After Zane closed them in again, Mac gestured for Giulia’s pen. “What are your rates?”
Giulia told her the usual retainer amount and the per-diem fees while Mac wrote a check.
“Here you go, plus your time today. Now.” She pulled Giulia’s legal pad toward her, wrote a dollar figure, and reversed the pad. “This is my offer for you and your husband to evict whoever or whatever is trying to ruin my business.”
Frank would’ve whistled. Giulia restrained herself. “That’s serious money.”
“Nobody alive or dead is going to force me into a retirement home to crochet afghans until my brain atrophies. Today’s Thursday. I have a free room starting tomorrow night. I’ll keep it open for you and your husband. I don’t want my obituary to read ‘Death by Ghost.’”
Four
Giulia went straight to the window after her new client left. Mac crossed the street and headed directly for the Tarot shop.
“Giulia.” Sidney’s plaintive voice reached out to her. “You are a cruel boss to leave us in suspense. You have to tell us what the Tarot client said.”
Giulia turned to face the room. Zane and Sidney weren’t even pretending to work. They turned their chairs to her and leaned forward in tandem.
“She thinks her house is haunted.”
Sidney snorted. “You’re kidding. There’s no such things as ghosts.”
“She’s quite serious.”
Sidney’s suspicion eyebrow went up. “She looked pretty happy when she left. Did she hire us?”
“She did. I will be heading to Stone’s Throw Bed and Breakfast, possibly tomorrow, to thwart either a cranky ghost or a phony psychic.”
For half a second Giulia thought Sidney’s head really was going to explode.
“Zane, tell her there’s no such things as ghosts. You’re the computer brain in a human shell.”
Zane didn’t answer for a moment. “I’m not prepared to give a definitive answer on the subject.”
Giulia cut off Sidney’s reply. “Why not?”
“I’ve never experienced anything supernatural, but my grandmother told us a lot of stories. Half of them could’ve been made up to scare us on a summer night. But if the others were even partially true, there’s some weird shit out there. I beg your pardon.”
“That’s okay. Mac mentioned something called a Woman in White.”
Zane nodded. “La Llorona.”
“Who?” Sidney said.
“It’s a spirit legend in dozens of countries. Sometimes it’s considered an omen of death.”
“If she hired the psychic to conjure up this death omen once a week to entertain the guests, it was an extra good marketing choice on her part,” Giulia said. “Anyway, now she’s found what she thinks are evidences of an actual haunting.”
Zane frowned. “If she has a poltergeist, why is she talking to us? Oh, right. The Tarot reader across the street told her to. Do you know her? Him?”
&
nbsp; “No, but our reputation preceded us. When the Tarot reader told Mac to do nothing until she consulted the veiled woman, the reader’s nephew pointed her over here.” Giulia snagged one of Zane’s retro pink “While You Were Out” notepads and wrote two names. “Can you check Rowan Fortin for fraud and otherwise bilking the gullible, and can you find out if Jasper has a war record? He has a prosthetic hand and dropped a casual remark about explosions, but that means nothing.”
Sidney dragged a hand over her face. “We don’t hunt ghosts. Right? Please say I’m right.”
Giulia tried not to enjoy Sidney’s theatrics, without success. “Correct. But we do hunt humans who commit clever acts of vandalism with the goal of perhaps getting their hands on prime waterfront property. Mac’s place is on Conneaut Lake.”
As he typed, Zane said, “I’ve been there. It’s a typical quaint tourist trap, but all the hotels and bars were packed every night.”
“I suppose the psychic is her drawing card. Movie night isn’t enough entertainment for the price of a bed and breakfast.”
A strangled squeak from Sidney. “What are we going to do out there? Get an EMF meter to whirr and beep as we wave it at dark corners in the basement?”
“Wait a minute, Ms. Skeptic,” Giulia said. “How do you know about EMF detectors?”
“Olivier watches those ghost hunter shows. He says it relaxes him.” She made a gagging face.
“We are not going to do this. I am,” Giulia said. “You know I don’t take on extra work only to dump it in your laps. I’ll go up to Conneaut Lake tomorrow. Hopefully Frank will be able to get the next few days off and join me. Stone’s Throw is a non-working lighthouse. Our new client carried out massive renovations when she bought the place. I’m confident I’ll find a bunch of creaking boards and settling foundations as the cause of her haunting.”
“Why the overnight stay, then?” Zane’s voice was distant as he read his screen.
“It’s not the ghost I’m concerned about; it’s the psychic. Mac might be cutthroat in sales, but her weakness for psychics is like a bright red target painted on her back.”
More typing from Zane. “Speaking as one with a mortgage and utility bills every month, a steady gig is a good thing. Why would her psychic mess with it?”
“Mac also mentioned a family legend of buried gold.”
Sidney said, “Greed. People suck. Now that I’m running my own house I’m suspicious of anything that remotely smells like a scam. You remember that driveway repair guy who tried to fast-talk Mom and Dad into putting gunk all over the store’s parking lot?”
“Didn’t he just get arrested?” Zane said.
“You bet, and I was one of the ones who blew him in. It cost the old folks at the next farm four thousand dollars to repair the damage he did to their place.” She sat up straighter. “So, my lesson for the day is: Don’t trust anybody.”
“It’s getting so I can’t argue with that advice,” Giulia said.
“Ms. D., preliminary sleuthing results in good news and bad news,” Zane said. “The bad news is Rowan Fortin, born Matilda Jane but changed her name legally on her eighteenth birthday, has never been indicted for fraud. Her last business tanked in 2002 and she filed for bankruptcy. She fell off the radar until 2010, when she opened a Tarot reading shop in Wilkes-Barre. The local newspaper ran a series of articles in 2013 on a mall developer’s land grab in which many small businesses were forced to relocate because of massive rent hikes. She moved to Cottonwood last summer and opened up the place across the street. Nothing since.”
Giulia frowned. “My hunches can’t be right all the time. What’s the good news?”
“Jasper Fortin is a decorated war veteran who saved the lives of five fellow soldiers when he lost his hand. Uh…much technical jargon and…summarizing it with war hero, great guy, women everywhere want to marry him. Worst thing I can find? Facebook pics of a tattoo on an R-rated body part.”
Giulia made an “eh” gesture. “Just once I’d like an easy suspect. At least my hunches are redeemed. I got a good vibe from him.”
Sidney spoke through her cupped hands, creating a hollow voice. “Maybe he hypnotized you.”
“Or his prosthetic hand implanted a control chip in mine when we shook hands.” She shook her head. “I have to stop watching so many late-night sci-fi movies.”
Five
Giulia walked the few steps into her office and came back with a fresh legal pad out of the filing cabinet.
“Zane, you’re my expert today. What do you know about the type of ghost called the Woman in White?”
Zane got a faraway look for several seconds before he refocused on Giulia and Sidney.
“A friend of my grandmother married a widower whose first wife died in childbirth and who lost the baby as well. My grandmother’s friend had four children with her new husband. Soon after each birth, she woke up in the night to see a ghostly woman hovering over the crib and heard a faint voice singing a lullaby.”
Giulia said, “Did the ghost ever harm the mother or the children?”
“Giulia,” Sidney said.
“No,” Zane said.
“That makes the Stone’s Throw ghost a different type,” Giulia said. “Sidney, don’t wail at me again. It’s unprofessional to rule out any possibility before examining the evidence.”
“At least something today makes logical sense,” Sidney said.
Giulia pretended not to hear. “Zane, do you have any stories of angry ghosts?”
“One, but it’s way out there. My grandmother also told us about her oldest son, one of my uncles. He was a party animal in college. Liked to get drunk four nights out of seven. His grades tanked and he was about to get kicked out of school. One night he stumbled up the stairs to his frat house and the door wouldn’t open. He fished out his key and scraped it on the door until he found the lock, and it still wouldn’t budge. He banged and shouted and suddenly, bam! The door flew wide open, knocking him flat on his back. He looked up and saw his dead father looming over him. His father’s hair was undulating in all directions, his face was chalk-white, and his eyes were sunken, but my uncle could see pupils burning with red flames. The ghost didn’t say anything out loud, but my uncle swore he heard its voice in his head, threatening to make his life a living hell if he didn’t shape up.”
He took a breath. Sidney stirred in her chair, restlessness in every movement.
Zane spoke more to Giulia now. “Here’s the thing: Our family moved to America twenty years before this story happened and worked hard to assimilate. My uncle knew maybe a dozen words in Estonian, most of them scatological. He taught them to us when our grandmother wasn’t around. He told us this story when my brothers and sisters and I were between eight and twelve. He swore up and down that his father’s ghost spoke right inside his head in Estonian and he understood every word. He said as soon as the ghost vanished he crawled to the edge of the porch and puked all over the bushes. Later on, when it was just the boys of the family, he confided that he also ruined his boxers, if you get me.”
“Zane, no offense,” Sidney said, “but that story sounds like something deliberately manufactured to make you kids stay away from alcohol.”
“We thought so at first. We were cynical little brats. My oldest sister and I researched ghost legends and cornered our uncle a week later with our findings. He vowed on the heads of the gods the story was true. He went through the legends we showed him and described the ways his experience differed.” Zane shrugged. “He didn’t change from a party guy into a monk or anything extreme like that, but he did graduate with a 3.1 GPA and two job offers.”
“Speaking as devil’s advocate,” Giulia said, “perhaps your grandmother planned it to get her son back on track and convinced one of her other sons to play ghost?”
“We thought of that too. My uncle
said his father’s ghost hovered over him like that angry mom ghost in Ju-On. Have you seen that movie?”
“No way,” Sidney said. “I like to sleep at night.”
“Wuss,” Giulia said. “I saw it in a double feature with Ringu. Zane, your uncle’s ghost story occurred before those movies came out, right?”
“Decades before. He said that hovering ghost in Ju-On scared him almost as much as the actual ghost that night on the porch.” Zane spread his hands. “That’s all I got.”
Giulia stood. “So despite my personal lack of experience, ghosts possibly exist. In the opposite corner, because of Sidney’s lack of personal experience, ghosts do not exist. Neither choice negates the possibility that a live human could be playing poltergeist in that lighthouse. I’m still going in with a hypothesis of greedy psychic is greedy. Thanks for the crash course in hauntings. Can you carve out an hour to dig a little deeper into those two?”
Zane checked his onscreen schedule. “I can between four and five. I think tonight’s group game night will include Call of Duty: Ghosts. For some reason, I’m in the mood.”
Sidney shivered. “I’m going home and playing with Jessamine for two hours straight as soon as Jane gets here.”
Giulia snapped her fingers. “Jane. I knew there was something else on my to-do list. If she shows up, don’t let her into my office until I open the door.”
She sat in her desk chair and soaked in the atmosphere of the room. The linen-lookalike curtains rippled in the breeze. The soft lemon walls evoked morning sunshine. She loved the design of this space, a combination of restful colors and business efficiency. Her focus shifted away from ghosts and psychics and Tarot cards. Now that Sidney was back part-time from maternity leave, Jane’s temporary employment as Sidney’s replacement would end in two weeks. Giulia knew an excellent full-time job fit for Jane, and had the power to all but make it happen.
Second To Nun (A Giulia Driscoll Mystery Book 2) Page 2