by Sharon Pape
As they say in those hammy old B movies, “If you’re reading this letter, I guess I’m dead.” That was the easy part. I’m not exactly sure how to tell you this next part, which is probably why I didn’t tell you up until now. I kept meaning to, but I was afraid it might change our relationship, that you might think differently of me. Hell, I even think differently of me. So hold on, here goes:
I don’t know how much you remember about the early years of my detective agency. Suffice it to say that it paid my bills, most of the time anyway. When I bought the house, I could barely hang on to it. In fact your folks bailed me out a few times when I couldn’t manage the mortgage payments. But then pretty suddenly the business turned around. Everyone said that I’d finally found my groove, my inspiration, my sixth sense. They all had different names for it, but technically none of them were right. And I never tried to correct their misconceptions. I couldn’t. By the time you’ve finished reading this letter, I hope you’ll understand. And I hope that you’ll forgive me for having been less than honest in this one regard.
Anyway, as I got better and faster at closing each case, word of mouth spread and it wasn’t too long before I had the luxury of choosing the ones I wanted to pursue. My clients were happy, and the money was finally rolling in. Which brings us to the big “reveal,” as they say on those reality shows. I didn’t do it alone; I had help. A federal marshal by the name of Ezekiel Drummond. This guy can out think Colombo. He’s the one who’s inspired, intuitive, in the groove, whatever you want to call it. But that’s not the whole story. Zeke came east from Arizona on the trail of the man who’d kidnapped and strangled several young girls. Even after their files had been relegated to cold case limbo, Zeke refused to give up, made it his life’s work to find the son of a bitch right up until the day he was shot in the back in the living room of what is now your house. That was on October 16 in 1878 and he’s been there ever since.
Okay, L’il Mac, about now I imagine that you need to take a deep breath. Maybe a couple of them. Don’t worry, your uncle has not come unhinged, though I imagine that explanation might be easier for you to live with.
Now you have every right to choose never to enter the house again. You can put it on the market today and never have to deal with Marshal Drummond. I would never hold it against you. But I’ve known you all your life and I’ve never seen you run away from anything. I’m betting that given a little time to process what I’ve just dumped on you, you won’t run from this either. There’s a lot you can learn from my friend Zeke.
As always, you have my love, sweet girl. I’m not quite sure how things work where I’m headed, but if I can pull some strings, I’m determined to spend the first part of eternity watching over you.
The letter was signed: With love, Your Big Mac.
Rory put the letter down on the cocktail table, away from where the spilled tea had dried to a pale brown circle. Tears had risen in her eyes as she came to the end of the letter, but her mind was in chaos. All she could think to do was grab her gun, get her purse from the kitchen and leave the house as fast as possible.
The sun had just scaled the horizon when she jumped into Mac’s Volvo. She started driving with no destination in mind, because her mind was too preoccupied to come up with one. She stopped at traffic lights and stop signs. She signaled before turning. She maintained something close to the speed limit. Yet when she finally bothered to look around, she found herself on Jericho Turnpike two towns away in Syosset, with no real sense of how she’d gotten there. She needed someplace where she could stop and think before she found herself in Ohio.
It was too early to go back to her parents’ home, especially if she didn’t want to explain why she was, quite literally, up at the crack of dawn. Then she spotted one of the ubiquitous Starbucks signs up ahead. Low on options and craving caffeine, she pulled into the lot.
Given that it was a Sunday and most decent folks hadn’t even awakened to go to church yet, she was the only patron in the coffee shop. The middle-aged man behind the counter gave her a broad grin, pleased to have a customer to wait on. She ordered a mocha frappachino with extra whipped cream. If he thought it was a strange beverage for that time of day, he didn’t say so.
Rory settled herself at a table in a back corner. She sipped the creamy confection that was only loosely related to plain old coffee, and tried to bring some order to the anarchy raging in her head.
She wondered if her reaction would have been different if she’d read the letter immediately, as Mac had asked her to do. She decided that under the circumstances, it wouldn’t have mattered very much, except that she might have questioned her uncle’s state of mind as she now questioned her own. In the absence of a family gene for a highly specific hallucination, she would have to accept that Ezekiel Drummond was real, or at least that he had been. Since Mac had never mentioned a belief in ghosts during any of their long talks over the years, he must have gone through a hectic period of adjustment himself before he was able to accept his unexpected housemate. On the plus side, if Mac’s letter were to be believed in its entirety, Drummond had been a good man, the best kind of man, one who went to his grave trying to find justice for those young girls and their families. Of course, the downside was that if she wanted to keep the house, she was going to have to learn to live with a ghost.
Rory sighed and took a big, icy swallow of her frappachino. How she would love to crawl beneath the covers of her childhood bed where she had once dreamt of things fearful and fantastic but had been able to leave them all behind her when she awoke.
She had long since finished her drink when the tables around her started to fill up with the usual complement of drowsy, caffeine-starved Sunday patrons. She tossed her empty cup away and went back to her car. She’d had no epiphanies and the only conclusion she had reached was that it was going to take more than a couple of hours and a sugar-caffeine high to come to terms with this new world order. Although it might prove to be impossible, she needed to put it on a back burner of her mind and try to go on about the normal business of her life. With any luck, her mind would acclimate in its own good time. Any decision she made regarding the house would have to wait until then.
Since the normal business of her life now included Jeremy Logan’s case, she’d planned to drive out to Mount Sinai for a firsthand look at the house where his sister died. According to Jeremy, the place was up for sale again and there was an open house scheduled for today. The owners had apparently decided that they didn’t want to live in a house where someone had died. After the past twenty-four hours, Rory couldn’t say that she blamed them. In any case, their decision came at a fortuitous time, since she’d had no idea how she would have gotten inside to look around if the owners had been living there. She couldn’t very well have told them that she’d taken it upon herself to reopen the investigation into the death of their interior decorator, at least not if she wanted to keep her day job. Now she could just say that she was house hunting.
But before that, she needed a shower and a change of clothing. It was seven thirty by the clock on the dashboard, which would put her at her parents’ house a little before eight. She hoped that was a reasonable enough hour to deflect any suspicions about how her first night in Mac’s house had gone.
When she arrived she found her parents in the kitchen drinking coffee. Since they seemed a bit surprised to see her there so early, she admitted that it had been a little weird to spend the night alone in Mac’s house. There, close enough to the truth that it didn’t feel like lying. Her father gave her a hug and said that it had been a little weird to spend the night without her, too, and her mother was so pleased to see her that she whipped up a batch of pancakes.
Rory found The Woodlands of Mount Sinai without a problem. Construction had almost been completed on the thirty-acre subdivision. She passed streets aptly named for woodland creatures, where families were already settled in their new homes, busily pursuing the American dream. Children rode bicycles and skateboards, pla
yed catch and threw Frisbees. Fathers mowed their lawns and washed their cars. Mothers pushed baby carriages or stood in small groups chatting. Dogs barked from behind fences. The scene was so idyllic that it was hard to believe that just around the corner Gail Oberlin had either fallen or been pushed to her death.
Rory made a right turn onto Pheasant Lane where some of the houses were occupied, while others still awaited roofs and landscaping. According to Jeremy, the owners of 16 Pheasant Lane had been waiting for his sister to finish decorating the interior of their new home before they moved in. Gail had been out at the house almost daily during the previous month, supervising all the details. When the carpenter arrived on May 10 to finish the crown molding, he’d found her sprawled at the base of the circular staircase, a dark halo of blood around her head and her legs bent in ways that human limbs were never meant to bend.
Rory found number 16 in the middle of the block. It was a stately brick colonial with oversized windows and double doors of highly polished mahogany. There was a “For Sale” sign hanging from a post near the curb with the listing agent’s name. A placard announcing the open house from noon until three was suspended on hooks beneath it. There was a white Mercedes sports car in the driveway and an old Chevy parked at the curb. Rory tucked the Volvo behind the Chevy, walked up to the front door and rang the bell. When no one responded, she tried the door and found it unlocked. Having gone to a number of open houses with Mac, she knew that open-house etiquette allowed for visitors to let themselves in, since the agent was often busy showing the house to another party.
Rory walked into a large entry with a breathtaking cathedral ceiling that would have done any church proud. To the left, a wide stairway with a hand-turned oak banister led to the second story where a balcony with matching railing overlooked the entry below. The formal dining room was to her right and the living room to her left, past the stairway. Neither of the rooms was furnished. The hallway that stretched in front of her presumably led to the kitchen, family room and any other rooms that might be in the rear.
The house was very still. “Hello,” Rory called out, her voice echoing through the empty rooms without answer. She stood there for another minute before deciding to show herself around. Since she was unaccompanied and didn’t need to feign an interest in the whole house, she went straight to the staircase.
There was no evidence of Gail’s blood on the beige and white marble floor. Not that Rory had expected to find any. The kind of people who could afford a house like this would have replaced the entire floor if so much as a speck of a stain had remained.
She started up the stairs, her shoes sinking into plush beige carpeting. Even though the scene had been processed by the CSI team, she’d promised Jeremy that she would go over everything herself, so she stopped on each step to check the wall for blood residue or other evidence that a life had ended there, but the ecru silk wallpaper was pristine. She checked the banister and the railings as well, with the same results.
As she made her way up the steps in this halting fashion, she saw a young man coming toward her along the upper hallway. His head was down, and he had a knapsack slung over his arm. He was moving fast, as if he wanted to get out of there and the sooner the better. He didn’t even seem to notice her until he was brushing by her on the stairs. Then his head came up, and for an instant his eyes met hers. There was something troubling about his expression. The furtiveness of guilt? She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She wondered what he was doing at the open house. Unless he was a successful rock star or one of the new dot-com millionaires, he wasn’t likely to be a prospective buyer. In fact, the odds were that he was the owner of the old Chevy parked outside.
By the time she reached the upper hallway and turned to look back down the staircase, the young man was out of sight. She made a mental note to talk to the real estate agent about him, just in case anything went missing. Then she turned her thoughts back to Gail and the ME’s report. She’d more or less memorized it after the third reading. In the absence of any evidence that Gail had been struck with a heavy object, and given the cushioning effect of the carpeting, he’d concluded that the injury to Gail’s head had come from landing on the unforgiving stone floor. So far Rory agreed with his assessment. She was still standing there, thinking that this view from the top of the stairway was the last thing Gail Oberlin ever saw, when someone grabbed her shoulder.
Chapter 6
When Rory felt the hand closing on her shoulder, she instinctively jerked away. She realized too late that she’d compromised her balance. Her left foot skimmed the edge of the top step without finding purchase. Panicked, she grabbed for the banister but only chase. Panicked, she grabbed for the banister but only managed to rake her nails across the polished wood before losing contact with it completely. An image of herself, like Gail, lying broken on the marble floor below, shot through her mind in the frantic moment before she was pulled back from the edge.
“Hey, honey, take it easy; you looking to break your neck?”
Rory couldn’t manage a reply. The adrenalin that had surged through her body at the prospect of death was now sluicing out of her; she was left gasping for air as if she’d just been rescued from drowning. Her legs were wobbly and making no promises to keep her upright. She leaned back against the wall, thankful for the solid feel of it.
“Are you all right?” her rescuer asked, eyeing her warily, as if she might have suicide on her mind.
He was only a few inches taller than she was, but broad shouldered and lean muscled, with intense blue eyes and the sun-streaked hair of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. He was wearing a gray polo shirt tucked into faded jeans and Docksiders without socks. He looked more like a surfer than a real estate agent, Rory thought, taking stock of him. She didn’t know whether she should be angry with him for sneaking up behind her or grateful to him for saving her life. Anger won out.
“What the hell were you thinking?” she demanded once her heart had stopped pounding in her ears. “You should never sneak up on someone like that, especially at the top of a staircase.”
“I wasn’t trying to sneak up on you at all,” he replied, clearly bewildered by her rage.
“But you did a remarkably good job of it anyway,” she snapped. He could have at least said “hi there” or “hello” as he approached her. Even a polite cough or throat clearing would have helped.
“I was on the phone in the study down the hall when you got here. As soon as the conversation was over, I came out to welcome you. To be honest, when I saw you there at the edge of the stairs, you looked like you were going to do a half gainer. I was afraid to speak or do anything that might startle you.”
“Yeah, well that worked out well,” she said dryly.
“Point taken. I apologize.”
“Apology accepted.” Rory took a few tentative steps away from the wall. Okay, her legs were under her control again. She held out her hand to him. “Rory McCain.”
“Vince Conti,” he said, covering her hand in his larger one.
“I take it you’re the real estate agent?”
“For today I am. Are you a prospective buyer?”
“I suppose I am,” she said, since she didn’t want to say she was investigating Gail’s death.
Conti nodded, and Rory saw him glance at her left hand. “As you can see, it’s a magnificent house, but maybe too much house for a single woman?”
“You shouldn’t make assumptions, Mr. Conti. For all you know, I’m married with four kids, a mother-in-law and two dogs.”
“Okay then,” he said, laughing, “let me show you around.”
It was a charming laugh that was easy on the ears, and Rory couldn’t help but smile back at him. She wasn’t sure that he was buying her story, but he seemed willing enough to play along for now.
“So, Mr. Conti, what are you when you’re not a real estate agent?” she asked as they walked down the hall.
“It’s Vince, please. And to answer your question, I
’m the builder of the development. This is the last house for sale here. Tomorrow I start work on a new subdivision. So when my real estate agent had an emergency, I decided to run the open house myself. I like to have things tied up before I move on, if possible.”
He showed her into the first bedroom. It was elegant but understated, in navy and ecru; silk draperies framed the windows and puddled richly on the floor.
“There are five bedrooms total,” he said as Rory walked around the room, “including a maid’s quarters off the kitchen. Each bedroom has its own bath, and there’s also a powder room on the main floor.”
“It’s beautifully decorated,” Rory murmured, admiring the way the different patterns worked so well together. If she had tried to pull that off, the room would have looked like a huge patchwork quilt. She was beginning to understand why Gail was so sought after.
“The owners were planning to use this as a guest room,” Vince said.
“Owners? But I thought you said that it hadn’t been sold.” Rory waited to see if he was going to be upfront about what had happened here.
He shrugged. “The people who bought it changed their minds before they even moved in. You know the type, so much money that losing a hundred grand is like losing cab fare to them. So I bought it back, made a little profit and got some furniture in the bargain.”
They walked down the hallway to the next bedroom, which had clearly been decorated for a little girl. It was all lilac and white with French provincial furniture, yards of sheer, billowy curtains, and an elaborate dolls’ tea party set up in one corner.
“So you don’t think their decision to sell had anything to do with that woman who died here?” Rory had seen her colleagues conduct enough interviews to know that sometimes taking the direct approach worked best at catching people off guard.