Engaged in Death (A Wedding Planner Mystery) (4 page)

“Chemicals?” Rachel wrinkled her nose. “That doesn’t exactly sound safe.”

“Maybe that’s why Sylvia wouldn’t allow it on her property. I wouldn’t. But it’s a much-needed source of income, especially in places like Port Quincy.” We were about to miss our turn. “Take this left. Sycamore Street.”

“You know where it is already?” Rachel accelerated the teeny Mini Cooper through a hard left turn.

My stomach swooped.

“Would it kill you to slow down? The house has been there for over a hundred years. It’ll still be there when we arrive.” I closed my eyes against her glare and counted to ten. “Back when Keith and I first got engaged, Sylvia offered us the house as a place to hold the wedding. We drove past it. You could barely see it from the street, the yard was so overgrown. Even from there, we could tell it was too far gone. We stayed in the car, and I didn’t have the heart to tell Sylvia. We thought it would upset her too much. That was over a year ago.” I shuddered, wondering how much further the house had deteriorated.

“I’m sure we can spruce it up. A little paint, polish the floors . . .”

“What do you mean by ‘we,’ Rachel? How long are you planning on staying?” I narrowed my eyes at my baby sister and thought of the copious luggage she’d brought with her. My heart plummeted.

“Before you called off the wedding, I thought I could apartment-sit for you and Keith while you were on your honeymoon. Then I’d try to get a job in Pittsburgh.”

I chuckled. “Keith would never have gone for that.” My laughter died in my throat. Why didn’t she need to go back to her job at the bakery and her classes at Pensacola State?

“What about school? Aren’t you enrolled this summer, to catch up? And what about your job?” A heavy feeling settled in my stomach, not helped by her erratic driving.

Rachel was suddenly very interested in the road and wouldn’t glance over at me. She reached into her voluminous turquoise bag and donned her sunglasses.

“Promise you won’t tell Mom and Doug. I dropped out. And gave the bakery my notice. It’s nice living with them, but I think I need my freedom. It’s time for a change.”

“You didn’t even finish the summer semester! After Mom and Doug paid your tuition.” I shook my head.

At twenty-two, Rachel was still finding herself. Which would be fine if Mom and Doug didn’t need to bail her out time and time again, sometimes literally. My parents adored Rachel, but they hadn’t expected my sister to move back in once they retired. I often wondered if I played the part of the goody-good to Rachel’s role as the wild child as an attempt to distinguish myself from her.

Before I could scold her further, the house loomed into view.

“There it is,” I whispered, my voice softened in awe.

“Holy crap.” Rachel slammed on the brakes.

“I’ll say.” I was momentarily distracted from my sister’s job and school situation.

Sycamore dead-ended in front of Sylvia’s house. Ah, here was where all of the dandelions were. They were chemically suppressed from the other well-maintained lawns, but here they bloomed in sunny profusion. The house was partly occluded by a stand of pine trees, thank goodness. A once-grand lawn flanked the house and stretched for acres behind it.

I got out of the car and treaded lightly up the path of herringbone bricks, crushing the stems poking through. Weeds reached through the path to tickle my ankles and calves. Rachel caught up with me, trailing her long nails in the thigh-high meadow that had overtaken the grass.

There it stood. The brick walls had once been white but were now a blistering gray, faded and flaking from years of neglect. It was three stories high, with a shingled mansard roof, a central brick tower, and a front porch composed of a series of arches. A porte cochere sagged off to the right, the roof threatening to cave in. The whole thing was decked out in crumbling trim ornate enough for Liberace’s jumpsuit.

“What are those, pineapples?” Rachel pointed at the gingerbread roofline, where each corner of the house was adorned with a cone-shaped object, anchoring the house to the sky.

“I think they’re thistles. That’s the name of this place, right? Thistle Park.”

Rachel started to laugh. “Isn’t that fancy.” She adopted her best British accent. “We can be the duchesses of Thistle Park.”

I didn’t laugh. I was closer to tears.
Sylvia, I can’t take this on
.
Did you really mean for me to have this house?

We pressed on until we were directly in front of the beast. A straggly clump of lilac bushes threatened to climb onto the porch, and fat bumblebees, the size of baby hummingbirds, buzzed around the bushes, then my neck and ears, making me dizzy. The place had decayed even more in the year since I’d seen it from the street. It was a beautiful, moldering pile of rubble.

“This place is way past dumpy.” All of Rachel’s former excitement had subsided.

“It’s bordering on condemnation, more like it. Although, Garrett did say it’s structurally sound.”

“And it’s ginormous.” Rachel pushed up her sunglasses and took a step back, then another, and craned her head. “This place has so much potential.” Her keen green eyes gleamed with schemes and plans, and just like that, she was excited again.

“You can tell it was amazing once. But it’s so far gone. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves until we’ve seen the inside.” Even Rachel’s enthusiasm couldn’t surmount my growing sense of dread.

“After you.” Rachel solemnly gestured me forward.

I gingerly climbed the front stairs. The three front steps were stone, but they had bowed gently with the passage of many feet, approximating a crooked kind of smile. Forest-green paint peeled away from the wooden porch floor in narrow curly sheets. The wood felt pliant and rotten beneath me, and petunias grew out of a hole in the porch’s corner. I removed the colossal key ring from my purse, the different metals jingling like a discordant wind chime. I selected the simple key that would open the house, according to Garrett. The door swung open with no resistance, and we stepped in, holding our breaths. Turned out that was a good thing, as the place reeked of ammonia.

We were greeted with hushed darkness in the entrance hall, and I trailed my fingers over the walls with my fingertips until I connected with a light switch. The hallway chandelier sprang to life, the old wiring emitting a perceptible whine.

“Whoa!” This time, I was the one exclaiming and, for once, Rachel was silent. The inside was as ornate and in as bad a state as the outside. We were surrounded by dark paneled wood, the varnish blackened and crusted over. The scuffed floors were covered with threadbare rugs and led to a grand staircase, probably once flanked by two thistle finials as big as my head. Only one of the two thistles remained. The house seemed to let out a sigh. I shivered.

“Kind of creepy.” I rubbed the goose bumps sprouting on my forearms.

We combed each room, pulling back heavy drapes, stirring up dust and letting in sunlight through streaky windows.

“Was that a bird?” A small, black winged creature fluttered out from the dusty brocade, narrowly missing my sister.

“I think it’s a bat!” I ducked as it escaped out an open transom window. “Great, we need rabies shots just to live here.”

Pictures in sepia stared at us from the walls. They featured women under parasols, shielding their delicate skin, attended by men with comical mustaches and little bow ties. Few smiled. The faded, busy botanical wallpaper was interrupted by ghostly, vibrant rectangles where paintings had once hung. Heavy brass sconces hung from the walls, crooked and candle-less. Silverfish scuttled across the floor in the lone bathroom, and the air was heavy and humid. Every nook, cranny, and shelf was filled with decorative glass, now dusty and dull.

We pushed and jimmied swollen pocket doors that resisted our meddling and felt as if they hadn’t been cajoled out of their tracks for years. From the second-floor landing, I could see a carriage house, a greenhouse with nearly every pane of glass shattered, a weedy tennis court, and a large shed, listing to the right. Two statues of angels in flight, one of them missing a wing, the other her arm, presided over an overrun garden, choked with hydrangeas, irises, and day lilies. The garden took over a large swath of the backyard, which stretched far back to a copse of trees and a gazebo. The seven bedrooms on the second floor were as old-fashioned and lavish as the downstairs and also as neglected. We couldn’t even open the door sealing off the third floor. None of the keys on the key ring worked.

“Good. That’ll give you an excuse to see Garrett Davies again,” Rachel said coyly. “Maybe he has the key.”

“I don’t think we need to see him again.” I kicked up little piles of dust as we descended from the third-floor landing. “Although it might be worth it to pick his brain.”

Rachel and I marveled at the contents of the house. It was a control freak’s nightmare.

“Are you okay?”

“Mm-hm.” I sank into one of the parlor’s lumpy couches, suppressing thoughts of the dust that would coat the backside of my black suit. “Just overwhelmed. I’m screwed, Rach. No one will want to buy this place.”

My sister hitched up her shoulders in response.

That bad, huh.
I picked at some thread unraveling from the couch and shut my eyes against my new reality. I thought of the apartment I’d so recently shared with Keith, where things were sparse and neat, everything in its proper place. Then I pictured the man who lived there and ground the heels of my hands into my eyes to burn out the vision of him. When I opened them, I was still at Thistle Park, surrounded by the ruined splendor of times past.

And all of this moldy decadence was overpowered by a sour stench. By now, our eyes and noses were running freely.

“This smell is intense.” Rachel was breathing through a tissue held over her nose and mouth.

My eyes were tearing and I spoke with my nose pinched shut. “Cat pee,” I announced in a nasal voice.

“Geez!” Rachel stood up. “What was that?”

It was the likely source of the smell, a streak of black, white, and orange. A slim calico hissed at us, darting down the hall to the back of the house. I ran after the small cat in time to see it jump onto the kitchen sink and out the open window to the back porch.

“More windows left open.” I followed the cat out to the back porch. The calico was guarding a cardboard box, and from the mewling emanating from it, I guessed what was in it.

“A kitten.” Bowls of fresh water and kibble stood nearby.

“Looks like someone is feeding them.” Rachel shied back as the calico headed toward her. “Do you think it’s safe to pet it? The cat could have rabies.”

I laughed. “You sound like Mom.” I bent down to let the cat smell my hand in a gesture of good faith.

The little calico shied away at first, then came back to sniff me.

“She’s friendly, at least.” I reached out to pet her.

The calico erupted into an outsized purr, surprisingly loud since she was so tiny. Her kitten sat up curiously. It looked like a fluffy little apricot.

“I don’t think they should stay outside. Even if someone’s been feeding them.”

“I guess not,” Rachel agreed reluctantly.

The calico looked at my sister hopefully as she rammed her head against my hand, rubbing and purring.

“We can air this place out and get them some litter boxes, and you can move out of that motel. You can’t stay there forever.”

I muttered a noncommittal reply as we moved the mama cat and her kitten inside. The calico looked at me uncertainly when I picked her up, but she seemed fine when Rachel moved the box with her kitten.

Just then, a horrible noise like a dying bagpipe clanged through the house.

“What was that?” Rachel looked down as if the sound had come from our new furry friends.

“The doorbell?” We settled the cats with their provisions in the kitchen and trooped down the long hallway to open the front door.

“Howdy, ladies.” Our visitor grabbed my hand before I had a chance to properly take him in. He kissed it with a flourish.

I retracted my hand from his sweaty octopus grip. He repeated the performance with Rachel. My sister giggled and gave me the side eye, as if to say,
This should be good.

“I’m Shane Hartley of Lonestar Energy. Which one of you lovelies is Miss Mallory Shepard?”

“I am.” I didn’t want to admit my identity to this joker.

“I saw your car out yonder.” He jerked his chin toward our rental. “I wanted to introduce myself and set up a meeting with you.” He extracted a business card from the back pocket of his jeans and handed it over.

I reluctantly accepted the moist card and noted its star and Texas insignia.

I narrowed my eyes and gave him a thorough once-over. He was short, about five six. He was aided in the height department by a pair of heeled cowboy boots, and he wore tight, faded jeans and a red plaid shirt. A round belly hung over a big belt buckle, standing out from the rest of his slight frame. His jolly face was lined and heavily tanned beneath his ten-gallon hat. The years of sunshine made him look older, but I guessed he was about forty. His drawl definitely placed him from the heart of Texas, yet he seemed to be overdoing it for a folksy affect. My sophomore roommate had been from Dallas, and she hadn’t laid it on this thick. I glanced at his card again. It had numbers for offices in Houston, Texas, and Port Quincy, Pennsylvania.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Hartley. What can I do for you?” There was a black pickup truck in the driveway, with a man in the passenger seat and another squeezed in the backseat. The truck bed was loaded with yellow instruments and tripods.

“I see you’re a woman who doesn’t beat around the bush.” He looked past my shoulder, as if expecting to be invited in. No way was I showing this house of horrors to any callers.

“I just heard you’re the new owner of this here piece of property, and I wanted to tell you about all of the exciting opportunities Lonestar Energy can offer you. If you can spare an hour sometime this week and mosey on down to my office, we’re prepared to make you an offer for a gas lease beyond your wildest dreams.”