Still, it was really nice when she’d clung to him!
He shook off the thought. Sean had nearly completed their setup of a video monitoring system. And a place where they could all talk had now been arranged. The sofa Allison had slept on was part of the circle, along with a few of the chairs brought in from the dining room and a big wingback that stood near the stairway. Julian Mitchell had chosen that chair. He was either being courteous or playing his part as a colonist; he waited until the women were seated to take his own chair.
Logan nodded toward Tyler, since he was the lead investigator here.
“Julian, what exactly happened? I went to check out the painting. It’s a strange portrait, done by Tobias Dandridge. He must have been an accomplished artist, and he also hated Beast Bradley, that’s for certain. But I didn’t find anything about the painting that would make you think it was alive or that it had moved,” Tyler said.
“I’m telling you, the eyes were looking at me. Of course, the way the damned thing is painted, it always seems to be looking at you. But that afternoon when I sat down, it was…more than that. He was staring at me. And then I heard him speaking,” Julian said.
“Where the hell had you been all day?” Allison asked.
He shrugged apologetically. “Okay, so there was an audition to open for a major concert coming to Philadelphia. They wanted a local band, and we’d made it past the first auditions. I didn’t know until that morning, I swear!” he told Allison. “So I snuck out after lunch. I came back in at the tail end of your last tour, and while you were with one of the kids, I went up to the attic to wait until it was over. I heard everyone leaving and I knew you were locking up, so I slipped down to Angus’s study to talk to you and apologize and suck up. If I could get you to forgive me, the others would, too.”
Tyler saw that Julian gazed at Allison with yearning and hope, praying she’d forgive him, even now. Apparently, she was always the “nice guy,” the one the others turned to, the responsible one.
“Everyone’s forgiven you every single time, Julian,” she said quietly. “This time, of course…well, everyone wants to tell you how sorry they are.”
Julian let out a little sound that was like a sob.
Allison reached over to touch him, but she wasn’t accustomed to ghosts and her hand fell—heavily—through the air. She flushed and said, “We do love you, Julian, no matter what. And remember, none of us is meant to stay on this earth forever.”
“What then, Julian?” Tyler asked.
“I was sitting back in old Angus’s chair, just waiting, and I saw something in the painting. The eyes were alive, and then the painting spoke…. That was when I felt my chin go over the bayonet and I felt this raw agony. My head felt like it had been hit by a hammer. I remember trying to scream but it was impossible. I was cold and then I realized that I was staring at myself and that I wasn’t actually in myself anymore… The room was silent and I looked at the blood on the floor and I knew it was mine. Then everything went black.” He paused for a minute, inhaling on a deep breath. “I heard Ally scream. And I watched as she sank against the door. Then she fumbled in her pockets for her phone and called 9-1-1 and just sat there, crying.”
“Did you see anyone else?” Tyler asked. “After your chin fell on the bayonet and you started bleeding to dea—” He stopped abruptly. “Was there anyone else in the room with you?”
Julian was thoughtful. “Bleeding to death. I’m dead. No way out of it. No, I didn’t see anyone. It was as if I couldn’t look away from the painting.” He frowned. “Wait! I think—I could be wrong—I think I sensed some kind of movement. Someone…skirting around the desk to the door into the music room. There was someone with me!”
“Any idea who it was?” Logan asked him.
Julian nodded. “Well, I guess it had to be Beast Bradley, right? I was looking at his picture.”
“Pictures don’t kill,” Allison insisted.
“Nor do the spirits of those who haunt a house,” Tyler said. “They can create ill will, they can make a place uncomfortable, but they can’t come out of a painting and force your head down on a bayonet. Not that I know of.”
“In our experience,” Logan explained to Julian, “it’s human beings using ghost stories who do the killing.”
“There was something about that painting,” Julian said stubbornly.
“Let’s get the painting,” Allison suggested.
Tyler looked at her, surprised that she was going to condone taking down a historic piece of art.
Then again, sitting next to a ghost could change a person’s mind on what was the right thing to do.
“I’ll go get it,” Sean said. “Carefully,” he added, smiling at Allison.
He disappeared into Angus Tarleton’s study and quickly reappeared, holding the painting gingerly. He set it against the sofa and hunkered down to look at it.
“Good piece,” he said.
“But there’s nothing unusual about the painting, is there?” Tyler asked. He stood beside Sean, studying the work. He knew he was the best shot in their crowd, that he could bail them out in a melee and that, thanks to his college years, he also comprehended a fair amount of science and the preservation of evidence.
But Sean was their expert on visual tricks, film and computers.
Sean shook his head. “It’s excellently done. The artist was a master at capturing expression and especially at painting eyes. But…it’s a painting.”
“I’m telling you, it moved—and it talked,” Julian said. “Or Beast Bradley did.” He turned to Allison. “I’m irresponsible and I’ve been an idiot lots of times, but you know I don’t lie or make things up. The man in this painting moved.”
“Could the painting have been switched?” Tyler mused.
“I don’t know how,” Allison said. “The board was here most of the day. They left when I was doing the last tour.”
“Yes, I was back in the house when they were leaving,” Julian said. He laughed dryly. “I didn’t even have my musket and bayonet when I listened to them leave. I went to the closet to get it. I wanted to be in full character when I tried to cajole you into forgiving me,” he told Allison. “I thought you’d find that charming,” he said sheepishly. “Or proof of my sincerity. Or…something.”
“All right, so the board was here—the four of them—in the attic office. They left. You were on the second level?” Logan asked.
“I was on the second level, yes, dodging between the two tours. I followed Jason’s tour into the house and went upstairs while he was in the grand salon. I was in Lucy Tarleton’s bedroom while I waited for the board members to go downstairs. After that I was up in the attic for a while. By the way, that’s great stuff you’re doing on Lucy and her movements during the war, Allison. Anyhow, when the last tour went out and Jason and Allison were over in the pantry area behind the dining room, I snuck into Angus Tarleton’s study.” He paused, eyes widening. “Weird! I felt like someone had gone up to the attic after me, kind of like I was being followed.”
Allison shook her head. “There aren’t any secret panels, hidden rooms or anything like that here,” she said.
“Yes, but I was running around the house with a couple of dozen people in it, and you didn’t find me,” Julian reminded her.
“That’s true,” Allison murmured. Then she looked up at them and said, “There is one other way to get from the ground floor to the second—through a servants’ stairway beyond a door in the pantry. I don’t know if anyone’s ever taken it or not. We never used it. You can only access it through the pantry, which is our employee area, and guests aren’t allowed in there. The door on the second floor opens just beside the master bedroom.”
“Shall we take a look?” Tyler suggested.
“We can do that now,” Logan said, glancing at his watch. “Then we should finish unloading and setting up, have something to eat and let Allison go home and get some rest.”
They rose, but Julian sat stubbornly.
<
br /> “You’re not going to let this slide, are you? Decide that I was stoned or something and tell everyone it was an accident? I was murdered. I’m not lying. My head was pushed down on that bayonet. It happened while I was staring at the painting. I was murdered.”
“We have a long way to go here,” Logan said.
“Were you stoned?” Kat asked him. “I’m sorry, but I’m a medical examiner, and I’ll be checking out your autopsy report tomorrow. And your remains.”
Julian stood, looking at Kat. “I had a few tokes of pot. Hey, I was at an audition! I wasn’t drinking or anything.” He frowned. “You’re an M.E.?”
She nodded.
Julian shrugged. “Well, I guess if someone’s going to be playing around with my body, I won’t mind so much if it’s you.”
“Julian!” Allison chastised. She turned back to the others. “I’ll show you the back stairway.”
She told them that once a week a cleaning crew came in—a carefully selected cleaning crew—to dust the fragile historic pieces.
But when they followed her through the pantry, which was a tight squeeze with the seven of them and the spiritual remains of Julian Mitchell, they discovered that the servants’ stairway was extremely dusty.
“They haven’t been in here for a while,” Allison said. “We’ll have to go one at a time. It’s narrow and has a sharp angle.”
Tyler brought up the rear as they climbed up. The servants’ stairway led to a very small landing by a door, which opened into the hallway next to the master bedroom.
“This hasn’t been disturbed,” Logan said. “Well, we’re on the second floor. We might as well decide on bedrooms.”
“I’ve been in the master,” Tyler said. “But I’ll get my stuff out. There’s more room in there for you and Kelsey. In fact, if no one has a problem with it, I’ll move into Lucy’s room.”
Allison seemed tense as she watched them choose their rooms. Sean said he thought maybe he’d just take his sleeping bag up to the attic. Jane and Kat opted to stay together in Sophia Tarleton-Dandridge’s bedroom.
“How are you?” Tyler asked.
“Fine.”
“She’s scared.” Julian was standing behind Allison as if protecting her in a brotherly fashion.
“I was scared of you!”
“I don’t think you should be alone,” Julian said.
“Why? I just told you—you were the one scaring me. Now that I know you’re real—well, not real, but real in terms of being a ghost—I’m not scared anymore.”
Julian placed his hands on her shoulders. Tyler saw her jump slightly, feeling the strange physical sensation of being “touched” by a ghost. “They’ll let you stay here. There are two bedrooms left on this floor. Allison, whoever killed me might be after you.”
“Why would anyone be after me?”
“Why would anyone have killed me?” Julian demanded. “Well, sure, you probably all said at one time or another that you wanted to kill me, but you didn’t mean it. Think about it, Ally—why would anyone kill me? It wasn’t my voice or my guitar playing, I swear!”
Tyler was glad to see her smile at that.
“This is a historic property, Julian. In two of the bedrooms, the mattresses can’t even be used. They’re kept so visitors can see what the rope beds were like and how people had to tighten the ropes now and then. The mattresses on them are made of straw.”
“We carry bedrolls wherever we go,” Tyler said. “Are the ropes on the beds original?”
Allison shook her head. “No, they’ve been replaced dozens of times through the decades—centuries. The rooms themselves went through a number of changes over the years, but when the house became the property of Old Philly History, the decor was brought back to what it had been during the Colonial era. The bed frames are original, but nothing else. Except that some of the quilts are from the eighteenth century.”
“We’ll carefully fold up the quilts,” Kat promised her.
“There’s one dingy little shower down in the pantry,” Allison said. “I can’t stay here. I don’t want to take room away from all of you.”
“Your life—or a shower?” Julian muttered.
“Hey, may I remind you that you were killed here?” Allison said to him.
“You shouldn’t be alone,” Julian repeated stubbornly.
“And,” Tyler added, “here’s what we know so far. Julian was up in the attic reading research papers. He felt that someone was watching him. He came downstairs. The attic—where he’d just been—was trashed. And when he went into the study, he was killed.”
“Ms. Leigh,” Logan said, joining the group, “or Allison if I may call you that. I don’t have the authority to tell you what to do. But if Julian was killed because of something he knew about this house, or something another person believed he knew, you might be in danger, as well. It would be smart to stay in a house with six trained agents.”
Allison looked helplessly from one to the other.
“You don’t have anywhere else you have to be,” Julian said. “You could sit right here and work on your paper with all your precious Tarleton-Dandridge pieces surrounding you. And be safe.”
“You’re the one who’s going to be helping us, Allison,” Kat pointed out. “It would be wonderful to have you here.”
For a moment, Tyler didn’t think she’d be persuaded.
“Better safe than dead, and trust me, I know,” Julian said. “Please, Ally. I was a jerk to you, and you were my friend. Let me be your friend now. Please, do what I say?”
She threw up her hands. “All right.”
“I’ll walk Allison over to her place so she can pack a bag,” Tyler said. “We’ll be back soon.”
* * *
It was easier to accept the strange invitation from the Krewe than Allison had expected.
That was because she was scared.
She didn’t want to be scared; she wanted to be a rational and independent adult. She liked her home. It had been her home all her life. She’d been excited to leave for college, but when her parents had talked about selling their house, she knew she wanted it. And they hadn’t really wanted to sell, so her slowly buying the house from them had made sense. She loved living there.
She told herself that she was going to be staying just down the street…and just for a little while.
It was unnerving that someone might want to kill her. She still couldn’t grasp that fact—and it might not be a fact at all. Julian might’ve been killed for an entirely different reason. Or he might have imagined that the painting had talked to him, and he might have imagined that he heard things—old houses creaked all the time. He might even have imagined that someone had pressed his head down.
As they walked to her house from the Tarleton-Dandridge property, she asked Tyler if that might be the case.
“Just because Julian’s a ghost doesn’t mean he knows everything, right?”
“No, of course not. He only knows now what he knew when he was living,” Tyler said.
“I can’t believe I’m asking you about ghosts.”
“No one does,” he said lightly.
“Do you always see ghosts? When you’re in the historic district, say, do you see our founding fathers walking around the Liberty Bell?”
He laughed. “A ghost can only be in one place at one time, and not all souls stay grounded to this earth. Of those who do stay, some are here to help others and some for justice. Some appear to many people, and some just to a certain few. Some remain shadowy figures for the time they stay—too shy or locked in their own worlds to make contact with anyone.”
“If there were other ghosts in this house, would Julian see them?”
“If they chose to be seen.”
“Do you think there are other…entities at the house?”
“Possibly,” he told her.
She shivered. “And if there are…could they move around, too?”
“Most likely.”
She felt anothe
r shiver rip through her. “I don’t know how you do this,” she said.
He shrugged. “I didn’t really choose it. It chose me. I could have decided to become a roaring alcoholic—which did occur to me at the time—or accept that I was seeing things and hearing things that others didn’t.” He paused, reflective. “But I worked with Logan, and we eventually realized that we shared certain…abilities? And we were thrown into working with Kat often enough, and Jane—and even Sean. That’s when we were in Texas.”
“And Kelsey?”
“Kelsey was a U.S. Marshal, as you know, and she was transferred to Texas specifically to meet Jackson Crow, the head of the first unit.”
“And she’s—wow, this is nosy. She’s with Logan now?”
“They’re engaged. They’re just waiting for a break between cases to tie the knot.”
“Oh! They met on a case?”
“Yep.”
“Julian might still have imagined what happened,” Allison said, returning to the previous subject.
“Hey!”
She nearly jumped a mile high when the voice came from behind them.
She swung around. She could see Julian walking a few feet to her side.
“Don’t do that!” she scolded.
“Don’t do what? You know I’m here,” he told her.
“You don’t need to follow me like a shadow.”
“I’m worried about you.”
“Julian, I’m with a federal agent. He carries a gun. He’s a big Texan. You should be at the house in case they need your help.”
“I’m here now. And it shouldn’t take you long to get a few things together.”
Allison sighed with aggravation.
Tyler grinned. “I can’t beat him up and tell him not to hang around.”
“I’m not intruding!” Julian protested. “I don’t follow people into the shower or anything. Hmm, that’s a thought.”
“Julian!” Allison said.
“Just kidding. I was a jerk, not a peeping Tom!”
When they reached her house, Allison left Julian and Tyler in her parlor and hurried up the stairs to pack her bag. Luckily, it was a short walk between her house and the Tarleton-Dandridge. It would be easy to come back and forth for what she needed or wanted—like a long hot bath now and then. Of course, Julian had been teasing, but she found it uncomfortable to think that a ghost could follow her anywhere she went.
Krewe of Hunters, Volume 2: The Unseen ; The Unholy ; The Unspoken ; The Uninvited Page 96