Second To Nun (A Giulia Driscoll Mystery Book 2)

by Alice Loweecey

  “Oh, really,” he said, and maneuvered both of them onto the bed.

  Giulia opened her eyes. The pale moon shone into the room. What was wrong with its light? What was wrong with her eyes? Some type of weblike pattern interfered with her vision. She reached out to wave whatever it was out of her face. Her hand wouldn’t move. She twisted and blinked and tried to sit up. The canopy covered her face. She opened her mouth and sucked in a clump of lace. She arched her back and jerked her head from side to side.

  “Frank,” she tried to say, but a different name came out of her mouth.

  Her eyes opened. The bright moon lit the room like a neon sign. The canopy hung in its proper place over the bed. Frank lay beside her, snoring.

  Thirty

  At eleven thirty-five Monday morning, Giulia pulled into the parking lot behind Driscoll Investigations’ building in Cottonwood. She blamed her late arrival on lingering over another superb breakfast and the poor driving conditions from a persistent drizzle covering most of Pennsylvania. Luck or someone taking an early lunch got her an open spot in the corner. She climbed the stairs, hearing Zane’s voice on the phone muffled by the door.

  Sidney fumbled with her computer the moment Giulia entered the office. Solana’s voice as she discovered the ethereal veil around Giulia’s head blared from her speakers. Zane shot her a dirty look and she cut the voice off.

  Giulia facepalmed.

  Zane finished his phone call. “Your staff respectfully requests an explanation of that upload before any other news or work assignments.”

  “How did you find it?”

  Sidney’s face radiated delight. “Olivier’s younger brothers. Their latest hobby is recreating every experiment from this one-hundred-year-old boy’s adventure book they found at the back of their grandfather’s bookshelf. I subscribe to their YouTube channel. They put out a call for ghost pranks to stage a haunting and when I ran a search, up popped The Veiled Woman.”

  Giulia knew her face registered an emotion in a whole different zip code from “delight.”

  “Solana, the woman who used me as her stage prop in that video, is Mac’s hired entertainment.”

  “You’re slipping to the bottom of the first page of results,” Zane said.

  “Thank God. More important than my lack of Net notoriety is the discovery that Solana and Lady Rowan know each other.” She pointed kitty-corner across the street.

  Zane said, “To be impartial, each of them could be keeping up with the competition rather than working a mark together.

  Giulia made a wry face. “The latter was my initial thought.”

  Sidney said, “Mine too. This job is corrupting us.”

  “True. Speaking of the job, I’m here to use our excellent internet connection for research. Have there been any emergencies?”

  “Not one. Life is boring and routine,” Sidney said. “You picked a good time to ghost hunt.”

  “That’s right,” Zane said. “Is there a lighthouse ghost?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Giu-lia.”

  “Sidney, don’t let your head explode,” Giulia said. “Mac created an elaborate ancestral ghost complete with ancillary newspaper interview to pique local interest. We’ve had a few incidents so far.” She summarized the arson, shower glop, and shattered brick missile in a few sentences.

  Sidney’s head still looked in danger of imminent detonation. “You’ve found rational explanations for all of it, right?”

  “Well, not yet.” Giulia didn’t let the hint of a smile touch her mouth. “We did find one hidden switch in the living room after the séance and ghostly possession.”

  “The what?” her assistants said.

  Giulia stood between their desks and described last night’s entertainment in much more detail than the humdrum arson and robbery. She kept having to stop and laugh at their reactions.

  Sidney’s fingers drummed on her desk with more and more force throughout the story. At the end, she burst out with: “Pardon my language, but that is a big, stinking pile of crap. These types are nothing more than internet scams in human form.”

  “I don’t disagree with you,” Giulia said. “This is one reason I’m closing myself in my office for a few hours. Pretend I’m not here.”

  Giulia fired up her computer and dealt with email first. She forwarded another possible client on to Sidney and a Diocesan request for information to Zane. Then took the printouts from their envelope and opened up a new spreadsheet plus a search window.

  Page one, Marion and Anthony. Page two, Joel and Gino. Page three, CeCe and Roy. Page four, Solana and Cedar. Page five, Lucy. Page six, Walter. Page seven, Mac.

  She didn’t create a sheet for Matthew the handyman. She typed out M-A-T-T, but erased it a moment later. He didn’t have the right feel for the mastermind of fires and brick bombs and theft and hauntings. Thoroughness demanded his own sheet, though. She retyped his name and left that page to be filled in later.

  First she plugged in Marion and Anthony’s address. Two point three seconds later Google returned several hundred hits.

  “How nice of you two to be so involved in photo-op projects.” She mentally slapped herself. “Stop pegging them as Suspects Numbers One and Two. Impartial research begins right now.”

  On his own, Anthony Haswell chaired three different trusts and ran his city’s school board. His condo development business profits had dipped in the early 2000s, but rebounded late in the decade.

  Marion started an au pair business thirty years earlier. Today it was a thriving home-based company that placed hundreds of young women and men around the country each year.

  Giulia copied and pasted several paragraphs for closer study tonight at Stone’s Throw.

  At the end of the third page of results she found a Forbes magazine article. The successful couple’s “How We Did It” story and their bucket list.

  His list included building condos adjacent to pro football stadiums, in the same way exclusive housing developments sprang up next to golf courses. Hers was simpler: She designed her own hats as a hobby and wanted to grow that into a boutique business.

  Their shared goal: Invest in the bed and breakfast business. To that end, they were making the rounds of all B&Bs with historical significance. A charming way to spend their semi-retirement.

  The undercurrent in the news articles stank of ruthlessness. Miss Manners might approve their clothing, their upbringing, their business sense, and their place settings at dinner parties, but under all that perfection they clawed and scratched and stabbed with the worst.

  “Nice to know my instincts are sound. Okay, you two, just because you have big red ‘suspect’ signs glowing over your heads doesn’t mean you’re actually trying to force Mac out of business. Onward.”

  If the internet could be relied on, Joel and Gino had been joined at the hip since the dawn of Google. Of course it could. If it was on the web, it must be true. Right.

  They were in theater and soccer at the same high school. Theater and soccer at the same college. Business degrees. Opened their own coffee shop right after graduation. Expanded it to a bar with live music weekly and soccer on several TVs. Made their local TV news as the second couple in town married as soon as Pennsylvania legalized gay marriage.

  If ever two people looked to be exactly the way they appeared, those two were exhibit A. Giulia read through their Facebook and Twitter feeds but nothing pinged. Still, a clean record wasn’t a guarantee that they had no sinister plots in mind. If they wanted a ready-made bed and breakfast as a change from booze and sports, who would suspect Mac’s “truant nephews?” Certainly not Mac.

  Cedar’s internet footprint was half as big as the Joel-Gino entity and one-quarter the size of Anthony’s. Not even a Facebook page.

  A photo with professional qualifi
cations on the site of the accounting firm he worked for; a few mentions in the business section of the local paper. In his professional photographs he dressed like every other employee. Giulia wondered how far he took dress-down Fridays.

  Solana made up for her husband’s lack. Giulia found her credit counseling advertisements in local weeklies; she conducted regular seminars at the library and YMCA. Halfway down the first page of hits, Giulia clicked a link that looked out of place.

  She got a website with soothing blues and pale greens undulating like fog around plain black type. “Lady Solana” glowed beneath the colored fog. The About tab started with “Lady Solana Bridges the Gap Between Worlds.” The News tab: “Lady Solana Erases the Stigma of Ouija Boards.” The Testimonials tab wept with love and ecstasy. Well, almost all the testimonials. The bottom third of the page sported this: “While we have no doubt Lady Solana contacted my grandfather, the Other Side has not lived up to my expectations. I had hoped that crossing over would have changed Granddad for the better. Even with Lady Solana channeling him, I recognized the miserable bastard’s attitude immediately. I apologized to Lady Solana and she was most gracious.”

  She also sold Ouija boards of her own design. Smart of her not to alert Hasbro’s legal team.

  Giulia again took screenshots of all the elements on the page and pasted them into Solana’s Excel sheet. What a draw Mac had discovered. Or Lady Rowan had recommended to Mac, knowing the deep trust Mac had in her. Why the title of “Lady” so often? Did it add a regal cachet for the desperate? She wondered if Mac’s “Time to book your new vacation” emails were all about the family legend: A genuine psychic will attempt to contact the Stone’s Throw ghost! Will it manifest? Will it speak? Special pricing for that week only!

  The scenario fell into place with ease: Rowan sees the news article. Even though Mac was sure to have told her all about the family legends, perhaps Rowan never really believed the gold didn’t exist. Rowan worries that a new crop of treasure hunters will claim jump. Enter Solana, Rowan’s professional contact, or professional rival, and they declare a truce. Rowan offers to plant the idea in Mac’s head about Solana as a surefire summer attraction, and bargains with Solana for a fifty-fifty split of the family fortune if Solana contacts the ghost who knows its location. Finders keepers and too bad for Mac losing her family fortune.

  Once upon a time, Sister Mary Regina Coelis believed all people were good at heart. Giulia Driscoll, Private Investigator, stopped believing that right about the time a crazy Christian cult kidnapped her friends’ baby.

  She shoved it out of her head, typed up her theories, and moved on to Lucy the housekeeper. Thank you, social media. Lucy posted college photos with booze. With friends. With booze and friends. With a theater troupe of some kind. Puppets. No, not puppets…marionettes. That might have been why she wanted the marionette song Friday night. Reliving happy college days, perhaps.

  Theater degrees were hard to translate into a job that paid the rent. Giulia knew that from Laurel and Anya. So Lucy had a BA or MFA and was cleaning toilets and serving food to make ends meet. Giulia also knew what that was like, after ten years teaching while a nun, yet with no official teaching degree to use in the outside world.

  Lucy probably had massive student loan debt, thus her snatch at any job she could find. Would a theater major see the romance in a legendary gold cache, or just the halcyon prospect of a debt-free life? Possibly both.

  Unfortunately, she had no criminal record, not even for weed possession or a DUI.

  Unfortunately part two: All Giulia’s current theories presumed the reality of a cache of stolen gold coins.

  Fortunately part one: Mac’s profitable B&B was real, and a couple or a hardworking solo entrepreneur could make Mac’s profit their own.

  That was the next research line to take. A plot to scare Mac into selling her business cheap, then flipping the property and retiring on the proceeds.

  She searched for lakefront property values and then for B&B values. The traffic noises and Zane and Sidney’s conversation faded as she dived deeper into the numbers.

  The main office door slammed against the outer wall.

  “Where are you, homewrecker?”

  Thirty-One

  Giulia leaped out of her chair, knocking it against the wall.

  “I hear you in there!”

  Zane’s voice: “Don’t go any farther.”

  A string of f-bombs. The printer or the coat rack crashed to the floor. Giulia opened her office door. She wasn’t about to cower in here while her admin dealt with a drunken idiot.

  Zane stood between her and Flynt the scumbag. Flynt reeked of beer and cigarettes. His smarmy good looks had deserted him: His jowls sagged, his eyes were bloodshot, and graying stubble covered his chin.

  He spotted Giulia and charged. Zane put up both hands and exerted a gentle-looking shove.

  Flynt stumbled backwards into the opposite wall. A few seconds later he lurched forward, his lips spraying spit and curses, and launched himself at Giulia again.

  Zane slammed a fist into Flynt’s gut. Flynt folded in half. Giulia stepped up next to Zane and landed a clean uppercut to Flynt’s jaw. Flynt crashed to the floor.

  Sidney’s voice talking to the 911 operator got through to Giulia’s ears.

  Giulia and Zane grinned at each other. Giulia shook out her hand. “Idiot gave me brush burn.”

  Flynt moaned and writhed at their feet.

  “Dude,” Zane said, “don’t blow chunks on our floor.”

  Sidney hung up. “Ew. I can handle Jessamine spitting up, but an adult full of beer? Double ew.”

  Flynt started to unknot. Giulia sat on the backs of his knees. Zane knelt and twisted his arms up under his lank hair. Flynt told Giulia what he was going to do to her to make her pay. Zane twisted his arms at a more extreme angle and Flynt shut up. The lovely wail of sirens came nearer and nearer.

  “Four minutes flat,” Sidney said. “Thanks for marrying a cop, Giulia.”

  Heavy feet pounded up the wooden stairs. Two uniformed officers Giulia didn’t recognize ran in and stopped, each with a hand on his holstered gun. Seeing the Flynt-Zane-Giulia tableau. They kept coming.

  “Whoa,” the linebacker-sized one said. “He’s been at the cheap beer.”

  Muffled profanity from Flynt.

  “Oh, no, he’s drooling on my hand-buffed floor,” Giulia said.

  The linebacker moved in. “We’ll take over for you. What did he do?”

  Zane and Giulia alternated the story as both cops hauled Flynt vertical. In the middle of Giulia’s explanation of why Flynt disliked her, Flynt twisted out of one officer’s grip and swung a fist wide in Giulia’s direction. Both officers tackled him. While one cuffed him, the other read him his rights. Flynt kept shoving his sneakers against the floor, trying to get leverage, still threatening Giulia.

  “If his language blisters our paint, we’ll sue,” Giulia said.

  The cops laughed as well as they could while hustling Flynt out the door and down the stairs. The entire staff of Driscoll Investigations followed them.

  All the building’s tenants huddled on the sidewalk. The Common Grounds baristas and customers all squeezed against the large windows like puppies in a pet store.

  The Scoop arrived.

  The cameraman jumped out of their creeper van before the driver put it in park. Flynt was still shouting accusations and threats against Giulia, all flip-flopping between “You wrecked everything” and the unprintable things he was going to do to her before he wrung her expletive-laced neck. The camera caught it all.

  Ken Kanning, the face of The Scoop, exited the van’s driver’s side with his mouth moving triple-time.

  Giulia said to Sidney, “I’m so pleased at the cheap technology that allows anyone to afford a police scanner.”

&nb
sp; The police crammed Flynt into the back of their car. His mouth hadn’t stopped moving, but the closed windows muffled his shouts.

  No such impediment blocked Kanning’s voice.

  “Be glad you can’t hear him, Scoopers! We’ll have to edit the soundtrack or the FCC will be all over us. The language! The threats! If I were the owner of Driscoll Investigations, I’d be relieved to see this lowlife locked up.”

  The camera’s spotlight hit Giulia directly in the eyes. Giulia pushed aside Kanning’s foam-covered microphone and walked up to the linebacker. She did need to speak to him. Her movement wasn’t only because she knew Kanning avoided police interaction at all costs.

  Kanning shifted his microphone to Zane.

  Giulia looked over her shoulder, caught Zane’s eye, and nodded. They’d planned for future Scoop encounters with a stock of non-answers. In cases where Kanning could get details from the police or any number of bystanders eager for their moment on TV, Zane and Sidney had blanket authority to spin the incident any way they chose, as long as the spin didn’t compromise a client or an open case.

  Zane gave Kanning an anime-worthy account of the upstairs fight.

  Giulia said to the linebacker, “I’ll be asking for an Order of Protection against Flynt for myself and my staff.”

  “Good idea, Ms. D. Captain Reilly’ll take care of you as soon as you’re ready.”

  “Have we met before today?”

  “Not in person, but your Sicilian pizza is the best I’ve ever eaten. Did the Captain talk you into cooking for this year’s Fourth of July picnic too?”

  “Oh, now I see. No. Sorry.”

  “Damn. Excuse me.”

  “No worries. Thank you for arriving so quickly.”

  “We were the closest. Just doing our job.”