Bells, Spells, and Murders

by Carol J. Perry

  He paused, looked to his right, then made a beckoning motion. I was surprised to see Conrad Gillette approach the microphone. Unlike the chief, Mr. Gillette looked totally relaxed. Tom Whaley continued. “I’ll turn this over now to Mr. Eldridge’s business partner, Conrad Gillette, who will bring you up to date on the many charitable programs that have been impacted by Mr. Eldridge’s passing.”

  “Thank you, Chief Whaley. I just want to assure the citizens of Salem, and the many visitors who come to the city specifically for our outstanding Christmas celebration, that every event scheduled for ‘Ring in the Holidays’ will take place exactly as scheduled.” His tone grew somber. “My dear friend Albert Eldridge would have wanted it that way and the dedicated staff and volunteers of Historical Charities of Salem are working day and night to make this Christmas the best one ever. Any questions?”

  “Well, that was brief,” Aunt Ibby said. “An unidentified weapon, hmmm?”

  “Apparently,” I said. “Let’s see if anyone asks any good questions.”

  The usual shouted questions from reporters started. I recognized Scott Palmer’s voice immediately. The chief pointed to him. “Yes. You, Palmer.”

  “Did the ME’s report indicate what kind of weapon was used?”

  “Blunt instrument.”

  The WBZ guy piped up. “Like what? Like a baseball bat?”

  The chief shook his head. “We don’t know yet. It’s early in the investigation.”

  I scribbled “Blunt instrument” on an index card and thought about the blunt objects I’d seen in the room, like the stacked logs in a basket next to the hearth. That would have left splinters in the Santa Claus hat. I’d seen fireplace tools in a brass rack. Too pointy. There was a tall trophy on a side table. It was big and heavy-looking with a marble base supporting a glass globe. Maybe? I hoped Pete would come here instead of going home. He didn’t discuss cases with me as a rule, but sometimes he’d let some little tidbit of information slip out.

  A woman from the local radio station, WESX, shouted her question. “The police radio said the 911 call came in at around eleven. How come you’re looking for activity between midnight and six a.m.?”

  Good question. But if anyone had looked into his office this morning, they would have seen what I saw. An old man dozing over his book. If I hadn’t shaken his shoulder, he might still be there! It was a chilling thought.

  The chief explained that the ME had established the time of death between those hours. After a few more questions—mostly about the existence of enemies, possible motives, and illegal entry into the building—the chief further explained that there were no known enemies or motive, no evidence of forced entry. Chief Whaley, with an appearance of relief, turned the podium over to Gillette for questions about the Holiday Walk, the Christmas Belles concert, the merchant’s division coloring contest, the food donations for the needy and homeless citizens of the city. He gave a special plug to the Veteran Santas, encouraging everyone to toss a “little extra something” into the kettles of “the bell-ringing volunteers who’ve served their country and now serve their city and their fellow veterans.”

  Scott Palmer tossed the programming back to the studio anchor, Buck Covington, who resumed the regular news report. Buck was the newest of WICH-TVs anchors. Devastatingly handsome with a great voice and the ability to read a teleprompter with amazing accuracy, Buck was dating River North.

  “Want to watch the rest of the news?” Aunt Ibby asked. “Seems to be a repeat of the noon edition.”

  “I’d like to see what Wanda says about this snow. I may take a cab to work tomorrow if it keeps up.”

  O’Ryan chose that moment to perk up his ears and, abandoning his bowl of milk, raced to the cat door, making a quick exit into the back hall. “That’ll be Pete,” I said. One of our cat’s many surprising talents is his unfailing ability to know when someone is approaching the house and which door that person will use. I followed his lead and pulled the kitchen door open. We were right. Hatless, Pete stepped into the hall, stamping his feet on the braided jute rug, brushing snowflakes from dark hair and leaning forward for a quick kiss. “Sorry I didn’t have a chance to call first, babe,” he said, bending to pick up a purring O’Ryan. “I just finished up with Ms. Jeffry and Gillette and drove them back to their cars. Practically right around the corner. So I thought I’d come over and see if you’d like a little company.”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Come on in and say hi to Aunt Ibby. We watched the chief’s presser and we’re just waiting to see what Wanda has to say about the weather.”

  “Yeah.” He followed me into the kitchen. “I heard the chief on the radio. Nothing new there yet. Hi, Ms. Russell.”

  “Hello Pete. Come on in. Wine or coffee? Help yourself. Any idea what the weapon was? I guess Chief Whaley isn’t buying the baseball bat idea.” My aunt is much bolder than I am about asking Pete questions relating to police business.

  “Coffee sounds good.” He deposited the cat next to the red bowl of milk. I handed him a white ironstone mug, took one for myself, and he filled both from the Mr. Coffee. “Something pretty heavy. Back of the poor guy’s skull was pretty much crushed.”

  My aunt nodded. “You think he died right away?”

  “Doc says ‘trauma to the brain tissue.’ Never knew what hit him.” He handed me the cream pitcher. He drinks his black. I wanted to write trauma to brain tissue on an index card, but decided it would be best to wait until later.

  “I’ve been thinking about murder weapons,” I said.

  Pete smiled, lifting his mug in a sort of toast. “Of course you have, Nancy Drew.”

  Pete likes to tease me about that famous girl detective, especially since I’ve been taking an online course in criminology. Pete’s the one who encouraged me to take it. I’m in my second year, and doing well. As and Bs. I ignored the Nancy reference. “Really. The only things that popped out at me were the fireplace logs and that trophy with the glass ball on top.”

  Serious cop face. “Yeah. We’ve checked them both for prints, blood, damage, you know. The works. Nothing so far.”

  “What about blood spatter patterns, Pete?” Aunt Ibby asked. My aunt hasn’t taken any criminology courses, but she’s read about a million mysteries and watched TV a lot too.

  “TV detectives depend on them,” he said, “and they can be a useful tool. But in real life, they’re not very accurate.”

  “Really?” My aunt’s green eyes widened. “I’m so disappointed.”

  I thought about that blood-soaked Santa hat. “The hat,” I said aloud. “Blood didn’t spatter much, did it?”

  Pete nodded. “Right. Good observation, babe. Did I ever tell you you’d make a good cop?”

  “About a million times thanks, but no thanks. I like my new job too much.” I raised my mug in his direction. “Even though I have a lot to learn.”

  “How’d today go?” Pete asked. “I wanted to watch, but . . .” He spread his hands apart. “I got kind of busy.”

  “I know,” I said. “I was there.”

  “Kind of interrupted you a couple of times, didn’t I? Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It turned out all right. Got a fairly decent interview with Conrad Gillette. What do you think about him, anyway?”

  Cop face back. You know I can’t discuss people involved in a case.”

  “Involved?” My aunt leaned forward. “You mean Conrad is a suspect?”

  Pete folded his arms and looked back and forth between my aunt and me. “Ms. Russell, you’re as bad as she is.” He smiled. “Stop the fishing expedition. Both of you.” He pointed to the TV. “There’s Wanda. Let’s see what’s up with the snowstorm.”

  Wanda the Weather Girl is one of WICH-TVs most popular on-air personalities. That’s partly because she’s a darn good weather reporter—she has a degree in meteorology—and partly because the males in the audience just plain enjoy watching Wanda. Tonight she wore an all-white mini trimmed with fake bunny fur around
the hem and accenting the extremely low—even for Wanda—neckline. According to the weather map, the doppler radar, and the NOAA forecast, the snow would be over by morning and tomorrow would be clear, crisp, and pretty. Wanda gave her trademark low, low bow, blew a kiss to her audience, and turned the five o’clock newscast back to Buck Covington.

  Buck, with his usual perfect diction, read the next item from the teleprompter. “Stay tuned, folks,” he said. “After a brief commercial break, you’ll learn why you should always look into the toilet bowl before you sit down.”

  Aunt Ibby shrugged, I stared at the TV, and Pete stood up. Our cue to go upstairs. I invited Aunt Ibby to join us for frozen pizza but she declined in favor of her own leftover pea soup and johnny cake. O’Ryan, making a quick decision to join Pete and me, was out the cat door and halfway up the first flight of stairs before we’d even entered the hall.

  In New England, five o’clock on a December evening looks like the dead of night. When we entered my apartment I switched on lights in every room, dispelling the gloom, then turned on the oven, while Pete started the preloaded Mr. Coffee. I pulled plates and cups from the cabinet. Pete, who knows his way around the kitchen, put two red place mats on the Lucite table and picked up my stack of index cards. “Where do these go?” he asked.

  “Would you just stick them on top of the bureau in the bedroom? I’ll put them away later. I’m using them for my notes about the Eldridge case.” I waited for the expected smile at my use of the term “case.” He thinks it sounds “Nancy Drewish” when I refer to a “case.” I wasn’t disappointed. Sometimes he even makes up an appropriate book title to go with it. I halfway expected him to say something like The Case of the Holiday Homicide. He didn’t. Just smiled.

  “What about this book?” he asked, holding the Agatha Christie paperback O’Ryan had chosen earlier.

  “O’Ryan picked it out,” I said. “I guess he thinks I should read it. Maybe it should go on the bedside table.”

  Puzzled expression. “O’Ryan picked it out?”

  “Yep. He was in the study by himself and when we went in there to look for him, he was sound asleep with his head on the open book.” I laughed. “Just as though he’d dozed off while he was reading. Cute.”

  I realized what I’d just said. As though he’d dozed off while he was reading.

  “Just like Mr. Eldridge,” I said aloud. “That’s how Mr. Eldridge looked to me.”

  Pete turned the book over. “Hickory Dickory Dock,” he said. “Like the old nursery rhyme about the mouse who ran up the clock?”

  “No. Like the mystery,” I said. But my mind had gone back in time to a childhood book for the second time that day. This time I recalled an illustration of the little mouse running up the side of a clock. It was a grandfather’s clock very much like the one in Lillian Jeffry’s office.

  CHAPTER 8

  By the time the oven buzzer signaled that our pizza was ready, I’d dug half a head of lettuce, a tomato, and a red onion from the crisper. With the addition of some sliced black olives and a bottle of Thousand Island dressing I’d produced a reasonable facsimile of a salad.

  “You’re quiet,” Pete said as he divided the pizza into eight perfect slices. “Are you okay?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Yes, I’m okay. I’m was just thinking about some illustrations from books I had when I was a little kid. Like the mouse running up the clock and Scrooge in his big bed.”

  “You’ve lost me.” He placed two slices on my plate, making sure a round peperoni was centered on each one. “I kind of get the mouse part, because of that book. But Scrooge? Care to explain?”

  “I guess I didn’t mention that I had a vision today. In one of the Santa Claus collection kettles. A shiny brass one.”

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  Pete’s not comfortable with the things I see on shiny surfaces. Why would he be? I’m pretty uncomfortable about them myself. But he encourages me to tell him about them anyway and sometimes he helps me make sense of the damned things.

  I told him about the picture from my old Children’s Classics book, and about how it had frightened me as a child. “Then when you recited the ‘mouse ran up the clock’ part of that nursery rhyme, I could see the picture of that little guy running up the side of a tall grandfather’s clock. That reminded me of the clock in Ms. Jeffry’s office. But what does all that mean?”

  “Beats me, Babe,” he said. “I think every picture book about that mouse shows a grandfather’s clock though. That’s the only kind he could run up, isn’t it? But the mean old miser in bed doesn’t ring any bells.”

  “Ring any bells,” I echoed. “Scrooge is in a Christmas story and there are bells ringing all over Salem. Maybe that means something.”

  “Not to me,” he said, taking a second helping of salad. “But here’s a question I’ve been wondering about ever since we left your aunt’s.”

  “What is it?”

  He frowned. “Why should I look into the toilet before I sit down?”

  I laughed. “Snake,” I said. “Some lady in Australia found a poisonous brown tree snake in her toilet. I saw it on Rhonda’s monitor at the station this morning.”

  That broke the somber mood. There was no more talk of scary picture books or undecipherable visions. I served vanilla ice cream. His with chocolate syrup, mine with Aunt Ibby’s strawberry preserves. Alexa shuffled Christmas Carols. Pete poured the coffee and I shut off the overhead lights so that we could watch from the kitchen window as the snowflakes danced past. O’Ryan sprawled his long body along the windowsill and watched with us.

  I was the one who broke the companionable silence. “I wonder about the footprints,” I said.

  “What made you think of footprints? More kiddie books? Puss in Boots maybe?”

  O’Ryan looked up. “Puss in Boots is one of O’Ryan’s favorites, isn’t it boy?” I reached over and patted his big fuzzy head.

  Pete raised an eyebrow. “You’re pretty sure the cat can read?”

  “Quite sure,” I said. “Remember, he’s a witch’s cat. But anyway, he prefers being read to. Aunt Ibby bought him the audios of all Lillian Jackson Braun’s Cat Who series.”

  “Uh-huh,” Pete knows O’Ryan is special. He just doesn’t like to talk about it.

  “Actually, I was asking about the footprints at the Eldridge house. The ones in the snow. Do you think the Santas made all of them?”

  “I think so.” He pulled his chair closer to mine. “Hard to tell with all the people going in and out of the place. It’s not as though we could make a plaster cast of snow prints. They were almost all filled in when we took the photos”

  “It was surprising wasn’t it? How fast Conrad Gillette solved the problem of where they should drop the money when you put the whole house off limits.”

  He agreed. “The guy seems to have connections. He got that bank drop-off fixed with a two-minute phone call.”

  I pushed my luck with another question. “Do you like him?”

  Instant cop voice. “Not my job to like him.” He stood and switched the kitchen light on. “Looks like the snow is letting up. Want some more coffee?”

  “Okay. And there are some peanut butter cookies in the cookie jar.”

  Pete and I don’t ever have any problem finding things to talk about. I understand that he can’t discuss police business with me, especially now that I’m a reporter. He understands that I’m going to try to get him to talk about it anyway. I know when to stop though, and the cop voice is usually a good signal that it’s time to change the subject.

  We nibbled on cookies, finished off the coffee, and chatted about this and that, avoiding any mention of the dead Mr. Eldridge, the Holiday Walk, or patriotic Santa Clauses. O’Ryan apparently found us boring and left via the cat door for greener pastures, or maybe a new chapter from Sofie Ryan’s Cat Mystery series downstairs at Aunt Ibby’s. Together, we cleaned up the kitchen, washed and put away the dishes.

  We turned on the t
en o’clock news, hoping to get the Celtics’ score. The station was rebroadcasting the chief’s brief press conference, followed by a replay of my Santa interview. The Celts won, Pete liked the way I wore my knit hat, Wanda had changed into a form-fitting red V-necked angora sweater, and it looked as though tomorrow would be a nice winter day, clear and cold.

  “Shall we turn in?” Pete asked. “I’m on early again tomorrow.”

  “Me too,” I said. There’s only one bathroom in my apartment, so when Pete stays over, he uses that one and I go downstairs to my second-floor childhood bedroom and use the bathroom there. Grabbing pjs and slipper socks, I headed out the kitchen door to the stairs while Pete started down the hall to the john.

  “Pete!”

  “What?”

  “Don’t forget to check for snakes.”

  I giggled at my own little joke all the way downstairs. I enjoy coming into my old bedroom once in a while. It’s like a mini time capsule of the me that used to be. French Provincial furniture, canopy bed with starched white dust ruffle, dressing table with a round mirror with little lightbulbs all around. One of the best features is the pair of dormer windows overlooking Winter Street with wide, wide window seats and cushy pillows perfect for snuggling up with a book or just day dreaming. There’s a rarely ever used fireplace too. I smoothed the rose-sprigged quilted bedspread and headed for the tiny windowless bathroom which I think had once been a closet. It served its purpose nicely with lavender walls, a narrow shower stall, tiny lavender shell-shaped pedestal sink, and a normal-size commode. (Snakeless. Of course I looked.)

  I showered, tossed jeans, blouse, socks, and undies down the laundry chute which routes them to a wicker basket between the washer and dryer in the first-floor laundry room, and pulled on flannel pjs. Padding up the stairs to my apartment, a soft “mrrow” behind me let me know that O’Ryan intended to join us for the night.