Deadly Curiosities

by Gail Z. Martin

  “The shadows Valerie saw seemed to glide rather than walk,” Drea added. “And they vanished in plain sight.” She met my gaze. “And you know how hot it was last night? Valerie said that the street felt colder than a winter night.”

  Valerie, like many Charlestonians, felt rather possessive about our neighborhood ghosts. After all, they were part of the lore that brought crowds of tourists to the Holy City season after season. But more than that, Charleston’s many ghosts were the warp and the woof of the city’s history, and their tragic stories felt like family heirlooms, handed down from generation to generation. I had never known her to make up a story about a sighting.

  “How did the guest react?” I asked.

  Drea chuckled. “She felt like she got a bonus, and left a big tip.”

  “How’s Valerie?”

  “Once she got over the jitters, she called that spook hunting group she goes out with and told them all about it. They were all excited, so she’s right as rain.” Drea glanced at her cell phone. “Oops! I need to get back to the office.”

  We said goodbye, after promising to get together for lunch later in the week. I was about to go back to my workroom when the sleigh bells rang and Trinket Ellison walked in. She looked a little nervous, and glanced around for Teag. “Did someone from the shop call my house this morning?”

  “I did,” Teag said, turning from where he was dusting the shelves. “Thanks for dropping by.”

  “Your opera glasses are lovely,” I said. “We were hoping you might share a few more details about the family member who first owned them.” I paused. “Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?”

  Trinket looked like she wanted to turn around and leave, but after a few seconds, she took a deep breath and seemed to gather her resolve. “Tea would be lovely. Thank you.”

  Teag showed her to the small table and chairs in the back.

  “You took the opera glasses to the play on Saturday.”

  I was busted. I felt my cheeks flush.

  “If it’s any consolation,” Trinket went on, “I discovered their ability at a Broadway play.” Her face reddened at the memory.

  “Oops,” I said, realizing that her experience was probably even worse than mine. I leaned forward, hoping to inspire her to confide. “I’d really like to know what you saw. To make sure we got the same impressions.”

  A range of emotions flickered across Trinket’s features: fear, sadness, and regret. Teag and I listened in silence as she told us what she had seen and how she had reacted. When she finished, I told my tale, and we compared details. The stories were remarkably similar.

  “Teag thinks what we saw was the Iroquois Theater fire from 1903 in Chicago,” I said. “Do you know if your great-grandmother was a survivor of that event?”

  Trinket took a sip of her tea, and nodded. “It wasn’t something she liked to talk about, for obvious reasons, but the stories that have been handed down through the family have enough details to confirm that somehow, what we saw through those damned glasses was what she experienced when she and her son almost died.”

  “What do the family stories say?” I asked.

  Trinket sat back in her chair, staring down into the tea. “Great-granny Eugenia came from a very wealthy Chicago family. She met my great grandpa Daniel when he went north to college.” She sighed. “I know there was a lot of bitterness between the north and south in those years not long after the War, but not everyone down here thought the War was a good idea, even if they didn’t say it out loud, and that included Daniel and his family. Afterwards, they saw that there was money to be made serving a reunited country, and so Daniel went to Chicago to school.”

  She paused. “They moved back to Charleston when Daniel finished school and they married. Daniel’s parents were so much a force in the city at that time, no one dared say anything about Daniel’s Yankee bride, at least not to their faces. Everyone ‘made nice’ and life went on.”

  “Until 1903,” Teag added.

  “Eugenia and Daniel took their three children up to visit her parents during the holidays. The children wanted to see real snow,” Trinket said, with a faint smile. “But the younger two caught cold. Eugenia had already bought tickets to a show at the Iroquois Theater for the whole family as a holiday treat. It has just opened, and it was supposed to be quite the place. Daniel stayed home with the younger children, while Eugenia took Todd to the play.”

  She paused, remembering the story. “At the time, Eugenia was a bit put out that they couldn’t be in the Grand Tier for the view, but they bought the only tickets they could get – in the very back of the Orchestra section, on the first floor.” She gave a sad smile. “Ironically, those bad seats saved their lives.”

  This time, she paused again, so Teag jumped in.

  “There were over two-thousand people in the audience that day,” Teag supplied from his research. “Most of the ones who survived were on the main floor.”

  “That’s awful,” I murmured.

  “It was awful,” Teag agreed. “Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. And when someone in the backstage area opened the big loading doors to get the actors and crew out, the gust of wind sent a fireball out over the heads of the people in the Orchestra section and incinerated the folks in the upper balconies.” He made a face. “There was so much outrage about the fire that it changed safety regulations for public buildings to this very day.”

  “Yikes.”

  “Eugenia and Todd were lucky. They got out. In the chaos, they wandered around in the cold, until a policeman found them,” Trinket said quietly. “You can imagine, they were both in shock although they weren’t injured. Eugenia was never quite right afterwards – they called it ‘nerves’ back then. Todd was young enough that he outgrew the nightmares and seemed to be fine. Oddly enough, the opera glasses were passed down through the family as a lucky charm, since they had been a Christmas gift from Daniel to Eugenia that year.”

  “Were the glasses always haunted?” I asked, leaning forward.

  Trinket frowned. “No. That’s what’s so odd. Eugenia left them to Todd, and they came down through his family along with the story. I remember seeing them at my grandmother’s house, and when she died, she left them to my mom. Mom kept them on a shelf for years, until we had to box up her stuff when she went into the nursing home.”

  “Last year, I moved mom’s boxes out of storage and into my garage, so I could go through them more easily. I found the opera glasses and thought it would be cool to take them on a trip to New York City when my husband and I went a few months ago.” Trinket sighed. “That was a mistake.”

  “Do you know if anyone else tried to use the glasses at a play since the tragedy?” Teag asked.

  Trinket nodded. “That’s what makes this so strange. Eugenia was a strong woman. Even though she never completely got over the tragedy, she refused to let it take away her love of the theater. She willed herself to go back to plays after a year or two, and was a patron of the theater for the rest of her life.”

  Trinket’s expression showed that she was just as baffled as we were. “Todd kept up the patronage, and down through the years, it’s been a family tradition to support local theater groups. My mother and grandmother used to dress up to go out to the theater, and I remember seeing them take the opera glasses with them.

  “I always thought they were so beautiful. That’s why I wanted to take them to New York, once I found them again in Mom’s things.”

  Teag and I shared a look. “Did anything happen to the glasses between when your mother used them and when you inherited them?”

  Trinket shook her head. “There was no chance for anything to happen. We boxed everything up when we sold her house, and I’m just unboxing things now.”

  I wasn’t any closer to figuring out why the glasses had suddenly become a menace, but I felt a little better about what had happened to me at the play. I managed a smile. “Thanks for telling us, Trinket.

  We’ll make sure no one else
has a bad experience with the glasses.”

  After Trinket left, I stayed at the table for a few moments, finishing my coffee and going back over the tale Trinket had told. What would make the opera glasses suddenly get haunted? I wondered.

  Something had changed them. Maybe, because of the tragedy, they had always been imprinted with strong emotions, but it wasn’t powerful enough to manifest. What could have possibly happened to juice them up? I didn’t know, but I figured Sorren might.

  The shop door opened, and a bike messenger leaned into the shop. Teag signed for a package, and he brought the small box over as I finished my coffee.

  I frowned. “I wasn’t expecting anything. Who’s it from?”

  Teag looked at the return address. The handwriting was barely legible and the ink had smudged. “I can’t read the name, and I don’t recognize the address.”

  That wasn’t unusual. Trifles and Folly had a whispered reputation as the place that would take haunted heirlooms off your hands. Once or twice a month, we would get unexpected packages in the mail or find boxes dropped off by the front door, and most of them contained items their owners no longer wanted to deal with.

  “Let me open it – just in case,” Teag said. He cut open the packaging to reveal a plain cardboard box.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about this one Cassidy. You getting anything?”

  I nodded, holding my hand several inches above the box. “Definitely a spooky – maybe more. Be careful.”

  Teag used a pencil to flip up the lid of the box. Inside was a man’s plain silver wedding ring.

  Reflexively, I backed up a step.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “If you could smell magic, that thing would be a tuna sandwich that had been locked in the trunk of a car during a heat wave,” I said. I swallowed hard. “There is no way I’m touching that – not without Sorren.” But I did let my hand hover over the open box. Even at a distance, the images were so powerful they threatened to overwhelm me.

  Whoever wore the ring had been terrified, running for his life. Only he couldn’t outrun the shadows, and something in the shadows was bad. Very bad. Even though he wasn’t completely sober, he could feel the evil. It let him run, for a while. Like a cat with a mouse, it toyed with him, enjoying his fear. And when it moved in for the kill, there was nothing he could do about it. It started tearing his skin off his body, then pulling off limbs, knowing all the while just what to do so that he didn’t die too quickly. It liked his screams.

  “Cassidy!” Teag’s voice wrested me away from the vision. I realized that he had physically moved me away from the box, putting himself between me and the table.

  My breath was ragged and I wanted to throw up. “That’s got to be from one of the murdered men,” I said, trying to stop my stomach from lurching. Teag guided me to a chair. “Why would anyone send us something like that?”

  Teag brought me a fresh cup of coffee and then typed the return address from the package into his cell phone. “Nothing,” he reported. “Probably an empty lot.” He paused. “I can talk with the messenger service. Someone ordered that delivery, and it must have been paid for. I’ll see what I can find out.”

  I drank the last swallow of coffee, just as the phone rang. Teag went to answer it, and held up the receiver. “It’s for you.”

  I drew a deep breath, set aside my mug and took the receiver. “Cassidy?” the caller asked, so breathlessly I couldn’t quite place the voice.

  “It’s Debra Kelly” the caller said. Debra was one of several interior designers who sourced unusual items from Trifles and Folly for their clients. She sounded flustered. “Cassidy, you’ve got to help me. I’m in a heap of trouble.”

  Chapter Four

  MY SURPRISE MUST have shown in my face, because Teag looked at me questioningly, and all I could do was shrug.

  “What kind of trouble, Debra?” I asked.

  “Rebecca’s blaming me for making her B&B haunted. I sold her a number of items that I bought from your store, and now she swears she’s being overrun with ghosts.” She rattled off a list of items. I remembered all of them and none were even sparklers, let alone spookies.

  I frowned. “What makes Rebecca think the inn is haunted?” Drea’s story about the shadow men came to mind immediately.

  “I swore I wouldn’t tell you, because she wants you to come and see for yourself.”

  “Okay. Give me that list again.” Teag shoved paper and pen in front of me while I wrote down the items.

  “I’m sorry, Cassidy,” Debra said. “Some B&B owners would love to be able to claim that they’re haunted. In fact, I thought Rebecca would actually have liked to have a resident ghost from some of the things she said.” She paused. “I think something scared her enough to change her mind.”

  “Sounds like it.” Teag was looking at me with his head turned to one side like a confused puppy. “What does she think I’ll be able to do by coming out there?”

  “I don’t know. But I think she’s hoping you can make her problem stop.”

  “Why not just return all the items?” I said, cringing as I spoke. That would be a big hit to this month’s revenue. Bye-bye eating out; hello macaroni and cheese for supper. Every night.

  “She likes the items,” Debra replied. “She would just like the bad ghosts that came with them to leave her alone.”

  “I promised her that I would come, and I’ll be there,” I said. “But I’m not sure what I can do other than remove the items. We could offer her store credit.” At least store credit wouldn’t take money out of my bank account.

  “Keep that as Plan B.” Debra was beginning to sound perkier. “I’m glad you’re taking this seriously.

  Good luck going out there.”

  I didn’t doubt that the ghosts were real. I figured I’d need all the good luck I could get. “Thanks. I’ll let you know what we come up with.”

  I hung up the phone and stared into space for a moment, trying to figure out how the shipment for Rebecca had gone so wrong. Then I realized that Teag was standing in front of me, snapping his fingers, waiting for me to come back to myself. “Cassidy? Are you in there? Yoo-hoo, Cassidy?” He was grinning, but I could see the concern in his eyes.

  “Rebecca must really be freaked out to have gotten Debra that upset.” I pushed the list of items toward Teag, and he frowned as he examined them.

  “None of these were spookies,” he said, glancing down the list. “I remember selling these to Debra. I packed them myself. You and Sorren had already been through them and cleared them.”

  I chewed on my lip as I thought. “Do you remember where any of the pieces came from? Did they all come from the same seller?”

  “I’ll check the records, but I don’t think so. I know that the vase came from an estate sale, and the lamp was from a nice couple who downsized to a smaller house. I’ll see what I can find out about the others.” He headed off like a man on a mission.

  I went to the back and poured myself another cup of coffee, thinking as I added the creamer and stirred it into the dark liquid. Somehow, perfectly normal items were turning into ghost-attracting menaces. Someone had mailed us a ring from a man who had been gruesomely murdered. Shadow men were turning up outside old houses. This sort of thing just wasn’t normal, even for us, and we stretched the definition of normal way beyond the limits of the dictionary.

  It’s just like with the opera glasses, I thought. Almost as if something activated their spookiness like turning on a light switch. But how? I went back through the list Debra had shared with me, wondering how such normal pieces could possibly generate a dangerous supernatural vibe.

  A tea set? Well maybe, if the previous owner had choked to death on a scone. I remembered at least one of the vases Debra had bought. If someone had used the vase as a murder weapon, it would have shattered, so that was out. I came up with even fewer ideas for the lamp, and none at all for the picture frame.

  One of the items on the list was a mirror. I’d heard o
f haunted mirrors, and they seemed to have a reputation for being especially nasty. By the time I considered the linens I was getting a little punchy from the stress and the caffeine. We didn’t sell blood-stained sheets, so I pictured a particularly hideous tablecloth my grandmother had always used for holiday gatherings. Remembering its ugly awesomeness made me chuckle. Memorable, but hardly haunted.

  “Glad to see you haven’t lost your sense of humor,” Teag said from the doorway. “Something you want to share?”

  I giggled. After all the stress, laughter felt good. “Just trying to figure out the mystery of the terrible tablecloth,” I said. I told him about my grandmother’s grapevine monstrosity.

  Teag just shook his head. “I guess you had to be there.”

  “Oh, come on! Don’t tell me your family didn’t have any strange holiday customs when you were a kid.”

  “My family was strange enough without needing odd holiday customs,” he chuckled. He sobered. “I’m working on a list of original owners for the items at the B&B. None of my notes indicate any interesting stories about the pieces at all. They were all normal purchases: estate sale, auction, family member, even a couple of yard sale finds.”

  I sipped my coffee. “There’s got to be something that ties everything together. The people who sold us the pieces could have lied about them being haunted, but I would have picked up on it when I handled them. We wouldn’t have resold them if they had bad mojo.”

  “Maybe it’s like the opera glasses,” Teag said, leaning against the door frame. “Maybe they have to be in a certain setting to be affected, or be used in a particular way.”

  “We’d better figure this out quickly, before the whole store gets freaky.”

  “That would be bad,” he said, glancing around at the multitude of items on our shelves.

  I repressed a shiver. “That would be very bad.”

  AFTER WORK, I headed home with my thoughts still focused on the bed and breakfast dilemma. When my key turned in the lock, sharp, high-pitched barks welcomed me home.