1 Death Pays the Rose Rent (19 page)

“I’d tell you what could happen, but you don’t want to hear it.”

She locked the door.

Papers were strewn all over the living-room and dining-room floors.

“I couldn’t find anything down here,” she said. “I’ll check upstairs after I get home. It’s about time to leave for town.”

I held up the plastic bag containing the nailer. “I

think this is what killed the judge. I want to get it to Garnet right away.” I dropped it into my purse. What was another eight or nine pounds?

After making sure every door was locked, the three of us got into the VW and left for town.

We parked behind the courthouse and walked to the square. All around us, preparations were going on for the festival. In the center of the square, just in front of the fountain, a small, wooden platform, not much larger than a picnic table, had been temporarily erected. On it was a single metal folding chair.

His highness, the mayor, waved at me and resumed drawing chalk marks down the center of the street. From the church on the opposite side of the square, came the greasy odor of doughnuts frying.

A few people, all holding notebooks, were standing in a semicircle around Mrs. Seligman, who was giving them instructions for their groups. “Skateboard competition will be in the bank parking lot, please. We don’t need another spectator accident like last year. Mr. Hartzell is still using a walker.

“The Glockenspiel Gymnastic Marching Band will follow the Civil War reenactors, and I don’t want to hear any complaints about the horses, Nedra. You’ll just have to watch where you step. And be extra-carefiil with those cartwheels.

“We’ll space the youth bands out in the parade, so they won’t all be playing different songs at once. I’ve prepared copies of a list that give the order you will appear in the parade. You’ll gather at the corner of Second and Hemlock at nine
A
.
M
., sharp. Does everyone understand what’s going on?”

Of course, at least half the people there didn’t and asked questions about what they’d already been told.

Mrs. Seligman finally broke free and came over to where we stood. She looked about ten years older than the last time I had seen her.

“Thanks to Sylvia,” she said, “I’m up to my neck in gymnasts, ladies’ poetry societies, marching bands, magicians, jugglers, Civil War nuts, and even some weirdos in suits of armor, who showed up this morning and wanted to participate …although what that’s got to do with the founding of Lickin Creek, I certainly don’t know.”

Some people passed us, pushing a brass bed on wheels. “Over there, by the bank,” Mrs. Seligman said, gesturing across the square.

“Bed race,” she explained to me. “Teams race down Main Street, pushing people on beds. The first group to make it to the fountain without a serious injury is the winner.

“Hey, watch it, Mr. Koontz, you can’t set up the model railroad display there …that’s where the food tables go. Excuse me,” she said as she took off at a trot across the square.

While we waited for her to come back and tell Mark what to do, I heard Maggie’s cheerful call from the library door. She came down the steps and over to us.

“Tori, that information you wanted, about Edison’s invention to talk to the dead? I called the Penn State University library, and the librarian found several references to it. If you have a car, I suggest driving over there. It would be a lot faster than waiting for inter-

library loan, and you’d be able to pick out what particularly interests you.”

“Penn State University? Isn’t that somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania?”

“Sure, main campus is, but there are Penn State campuses all over the state. The idea is to make higher education available to everybody, even Appalachians like us.”

“Funny, I never thought of Lickin Creek as being part of Appalachia.”

“We’re sitting smack-dab in the central Appalachians. You’ve read about the Pennsylvania coal mines. They’re just to the west of us, what’s left of them.”

“How far is it to the nearest campus?” I asked, envisioning a two-hour drive.

“Merely a day’s stagecoach drive away. Twelve miles. Just go out of town, past Silverthorne, and make the first left after the Windmill Fried Chicken House. It’ll take you right onto the campus.”

Alice-Ann handed me the VW keys. “Don’t worry about us. We’ll catch a ride home with someone.”

“I need to find Garnet first,” I told Maggie. “Do you know where his office is?”

She pointed. “Two blocks west, turn left after you cross the creek. It’s on the right, behind Hoopen-gartner’s Garage.

“Too bad about Judge Parker,” she added. “What a way to go.”

I was tempted to show her the actual weapon right there in my purse, but I liked her too much to scare her like that!

CHAPTER 18 

I parked in front of Hoopengartner’s, and since I didn’t see a police department sign, I went inside the garage. A teenager in red shorts and a blue tank top had her bare feet propped on a desk and was concentrating on polishing her toenails.

“Hi,” I said.

“Shit. You scared me. Now I’ll have to start all over again.” She wiped a bloodred smear off her little toe.

“I’m looking for the police department.”

“Back there.” She aimed her right elbow at a door in the back of the room.

“Thanks for your help.”

“Don’t mention it.”

I knocked on the door. No answer, so I pushed it open. Garnet was speaking to someone on the telephone and motioned for me to sit down.

While I waited, I studied the office of the Lickin Creek Police Department. The two chairs looked like rejects from the Goodwill store. Both desks were gray metal, army surplus, and the dusty curtains on the only window were an indeterminate color and didn’t close all the way. On the wall were some framed diplomas, a citation from the mayor, and a school photograph of a young boy, all in cheap, black wood frames.

He hung up and groaned. “Shooting out on Four Horses Road. Mabel Stine’s husband beat her up one too many times, so she blew him apart with his deer rifle.”

“How horrible!”

“Real mess, according to Luscious. She’s waiting at the trailer with her six kids for me to come and arrest her.”

He stood up and strapped on his gun. “Is this a social visit, I hope?”

I handed him the plastic bag containing the power nailer.

“Where’d you get this?”

“At the castle. Exactly where it wasn’t when we searched for it last night.”

“You should have left it there and called me.”

“Michael tried to call you. You weren’t in. And I wasn’t about to leave it there and have it disappear permanently like LaVonna’s purse.”

“I’ll get it checked out. Thanks, Tori. Now, will you please, please, please stop trying to play detective?”

“Garnet, have you checked out Richard’s office? Alice-Ann and I are trying to find his research notes for the Historical Society.”

“It’s been thoroughly searched. If the notes were there, I’d have found them. Why do you want them?”

“Idle curiosity,” I said, trying to sound casual.

He walked me to the door and planted a light kiss on my lips. We seemed to have mastered zigzagging.

“I was going to call you later. Wondered if you’d be my date tomorrow at the Mystery Dinner?”

“I’d like that.”

“Good. In the meantime, if anything happens, call me. Anytime. The advantage of renting this office from Hoopengartner is it’s a twenty-four-hour garage so they answer my phone when I’m not here. The Borough Council decided that was cheaper than hiring a dispatcher.”

He kissed me again. “Where are you off to?”

“I just thought I’d take a ride. See some of the valley. Maybe visit the university.”

“Good. I don’t think you can get into any trouble doing that.”

As I left, the girl at the desk wiggled good-bye with her fingers. Or maybe she was just drying the polish.

The drive to the university was twelve miles all right. Straight up and down on a narrow, two-lane road. I clutched the wheel so tightly that I could barely pry my hands from it when I finally reached the campus.

The campus was perched on the side of a rocky, wooded mountain. A perfect location if you were a mountain goat. A flight of about a zillion concrete steps was built into the side of the incline. The buildings on the lowest level, nearest the parking lot, were of stone and brick. Above them were three or four Victorian buildings with all the requisite towers and gingerbread. At the very top of the steps, almost lost in the summer mists, were several of those ubiquitons creations of cement and glass that have sprung up on every campus over the last several decades. The library was one of these. I had to stop and rest three times on my way up to it.

A drinking fountain stood just inside the door. Sticky with perspiration, I sucked up a gallon or so of water to replace my lost body fluids.

The librarian had the girth of Pavarotti and the vocal volume to match. His booming voice filled every corner of the building as he introduced himself as Bob Johnson and pointed out that a parking lot was directly behind the building. When he laughed, it seemed the walls shook with him. The few summer students there must have been used to him because they didn’t even look up.

“So you’re the famous author.” He smiled, holding up my book. “Would you mind autographing it?”

“Would I mind? Hand it over before you change your mind!”

That taken care of, he took me into the reference section where a stack of magazines, books, and papers lay on a table.

“I had main campus fax a few articles, since we don’t have their periodical resources. I’ll leave you to it. Holler if you need any help.”

I started with the books, the most recent ones first. The dear man had even marked certain pages with slips of scratch paper, so I didn’t have to waste time looking in the indexes. I was surprised to learn that Edison had been a follower of the notorious Madame Helena Blavatsky, who had founded the Theo-sophical Society, based on the belief in reincarnation.

One book mentioned that Edison had made secret attempts to communicate with spirits, and that others had experimented with the same type of research as recently as 1974.

When Edison was in his eighties, he claimed that a life was made up of highly charged entities that lived in the cells of the body. When a person died, he believed the entities went into space and then entered another body and were therefore immortal.

Entities. There was that word again that Sylvia had used.

I moved on to the collection of articles that had been faxed from Main Campus. As early as 1920, Edison claimed to be working on an apparatus to communicate with the departed by scientific means. He concentrated on using certain sound waves, which he had discovered in 1875 and called Etheric Force. These waves were described as lying somewhere between the low acoustic frequencies heard by the human ear and higher frequencies associated with X rays and so on.

Although in 1887, Heinrich Hertz, the physicist, identified Etheric Force as electromagnetic waves, which became the basis for modern radio, Edison still believed Etheric Force could also be used for contacting the entities he was sure existed.

Before he died, Edison told people it was logical to assume that if personality survived death, it would retain intellect and memory. The scientific part of it was way beyond my high-school physics background, but I already had enough material to be sure that Edison had really been working on some sort of apparatus to communicate with the spirit world.

But all of the information, fascinating as it was, wasn’t going to do me any good unless I could prove he had brought his invention to Lickin Creek. What I needed was a witness—someone who had seen it. But it had been more than seventy years since his visit. Impossible!

An image of a little old lady with daisies sprouting from her head floated before me. Miss Effie at the Historical Society building. How old was she? I wondered.

I found Bob Johnson behind the circulation desk and asked him if a call to the Lickin Creek Historical Society would be local or long distance.

“It’s local, but if you’re trying to reach Miss Effie, you’d better let me make the call. She thinks there’re deadly X rays coming out of the telephone receiver, so she won’t hold it close to her ear. I doubt she’d be able to hear you.”

I explained that I wanted to visit her in about half an hour to ask a few questions. Bob dialed and bellowed at Miss Effie for about five minutes. It surprised me that he even needed the phone to be heard in Lickin Creek. He hung up.

“She’s waiting for you.”

I thanked him and descended Everest to where I had left the car.

Up and down, across the mountain, and twenty-five minutes later, I was standing in the Historical Society building speaking with Miss Effie, who was growing daffodils on her head today.

She was quite miffed when I asked her if she had been working for the Historical Society in 1920.

“How old do you think I am, anyway? You young people think anyone with gray hair is at least a hundred. I most certainly am not old enough to have been working here in 1920!”

I sighed with disappointment. “Do you know anyone who might have been here when Thomas Edison visited the building with his cousin that year?”

“Well, certainly, dear. I was here.”

“But you just said …”

“I said I wasn’t old enough to be working here. But my mother did, and she brought me to work with her that day so I could meet the famous man.”

“How old were you?” If she’d been two or three, I was probably out of luck.

She trilled a girlish giggle. “I’m telling my age, I guess, but I was eleven years old, and Mr. Edison was my hero.”

“Miss Effie. This is very important. Do you remember him bringing anything with him? Like maybe a black box?”

“Why, yes. How did you know that? It looked a lot like a suitcase.”

“And what did they do here? Do you remember?”

She sniffed. “I remember everything. They asked Mother some questions about the room where the slaves died. Then they requested permission to visit it. Mother took them down and came back alone a few minutes later. While we waited, we heard a strange humming noise coming from the basement. It grew so loud that we had to cover our ears. I was afraid, but Mother said they were trying out a new invention and Mr. Edison said we were not to worry if we heard anything odd.

“After about half an hour, the two men came back upstairs. Mr. Edison’s face was as white as his hair. His cousin, Marlin, didn’t look too good either. They said good-bye and left very quickly. That was it.”

“And Mr. Edison was carrying his black suitcase with him when he left?”

“Of course.”

I hugged her, gently so as not to break anything. Now I was sure the machine had been in Lickin Creek. “You’re wonderful, Miss Effie. Thank you …thank you.”

“My pleasure, I’m sure, even though I don’t know what I did. “

I left the building and practically pranced down the sidewalk to the drugstore since I hadn’t had anything to eat since early morning. Over a diet cherry cola and a chicken-salad sandwich, I thought about what I had learned so far.

There was no doubt in my mind that Edison’s machine was the spectacular discovery that was going to make Richard world famous and, even more importantly, get him into the Lickin Creek Historical Society. I couldn’t figure Sylvia’s interest in it, though. Since the seance had been planned before Richard’s murder, it seemed reasonable that the two had planned to test the machine together. Even if it was a fascinating discovery, I could see no need for her to go through all the research and secrecy nonsense—her position as local society leader was un-

contested. And the preparations going on outside for the Rose Rent Festival, which she had reestablished single-handedly, testified to the importance of her contributions to local historical research.

So, again it came back to who would benefit the most from the discovery. One person. Praxythea. It would make her the most famous of them all in the wacky world of psychic research. Even legitimate scientists would be excited by this …especially if it worked!

Good God, what was I thinking of? Of course it couldn’t work!

The one part of the puzzle I couldn’t figure out was who killed the judge? And why?

If I took the Edison factor out of my equation, Praxythea really had no motive for killing Richard, and certainly no reason for doing in the judge. I was back to the one person who had the opportunity and motives for killing both victims: Rose Thorne.

I knew she had traveled to the judge’s house by the local taxi. I wondered if there was anything I could learn from the driver. A public telephone was near the cash register, and on an impulse, I looked up the Uriah’s Heap number in the attached directory and called.

I explained where I was and that I needed a ride to Silverthorne. He said he’d check his appointment calendar. Lucky for me, he had a half-hour opening. He’d be right there.

He meant it. In about two minutes, a 1977 Dodge station wagon, trimmed with phony wood, pulled to a stop before me.

I’d half-expected a tall, thin, hand-wringing Dick-ensian character. I was mistaken. The driver was a little younger than Miss Effie, powerfully built, with a Captain Grizzly beard and faded blue eyes. He wore a blue, Greek fisherman’s cap in addition to the ever-present plaid shirt. We exchanged a few pleasantries like “Hot enough for ya?” and “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity” before I got down to serious business.