Phantoms Can Be Murder: Charlie Parker Mystery #13 (11 page)

“Think about it tonight—or I
guess that’s today where you are,” he said. “I’ll call you when I have more
details. I need to get some sleep now. There’s a quick photo shoot on schedule
for tomorrow morning and I’ll need to spend a full day getting ready to head
north.”

I sent him a kiss over the line
and hung up the phone, a little dazed with the rapidity with which the plans
had changed. It wasn’t so much that we couldn’t handle time apart—his work
often required him to be away for days or even weeks. It was just that this
felt so
far
away.

Chapter
12

I was standing next to the phone
when Louisa came into the room, her hair still a little damp from her shower.

“I thought I heard you talking,”
she said, with a glance toward the phone.

“Drake called,” I said a little
absentmindedly.

“All is well at home?” Then she
spotted the bag and cups from the coffee shop. “Ooh—you brought breakfast!”

No sense in letting the coffee go
cold. I handed one to her and picked up the other. Between bites of the
strawberry pastry, she chattered about the night we’d just spent in the Trahorn
Building. I could tell she was operating on that particular kind of adrenaline
rush that comes with sleep deprivation. She was probably going to crash, right
in the middle of her workday.

I envisioned going to bed after
she left, hoping for a couple hours of catch-up sleep, but it was not to be.
I’d just finished throwing the cups from our quick coffee into the trash when
the phone rang. Hoping that Drake had decided to call back, I dashed for it.

It was Dolly.

“Hi,” I said. “Sorry I ran out so
quickly this morning. It didn’t seem like the right time to hang around.”

She cleared her throat. “No
problem. Archie and I discussed everything. It’s straight now.”

I got the impression he was not
in the room with her.

“I don’t want to cause any problems
for you,” I said. “I’ll just drop—”

“Oh, no. That’s not at all why I
called. I absolutely want you to keep investigating. I can pay whatever your
normal fee is.”

“No. I wouldn’t want you to do
that.” Not to mention that I had no idea what complications I could get into by
accepting paid work in another country. Better to keep the whole arrangement
informal and off the books.

“Would it be convenient for you
to drop by sometime this morning? Before eleven, if possible? I’d like to hear
how the night went.”

I could probably tell her the sum
total of it in two words: Nothing happened. But maybe it would be better if I
saw her in person. A real conversation might help me sort out the various
information I’d found over the past couple of days, as well as getting a better
read on Dolly herself.

“I’ll try to get there around
ten, if that works for you,” I said. Before I did anything else at all, I must
have a shower.

Later, as I aimed the dryer at my
hair, I wondered at Dolly’s insistence that I come before eleven o’clock. Were
things with Archie really smoothed over, or was she just hiding the fact that
she still wanted me around? I found myself alternating between thoughts of her
situation and what was going on back at home with Drake’s new job. I should probably
be booking a flight home rather than poking around in old buildings here. If
only I’d figured out how to have myself cloned so I could be in two places at
once.

Dolly was alone in the store when
I arrived and she had heated the kettle just minutes earlier, so she poured
Earl Grey for me in a delicate china cup.

“I feel like I’ve hit one
roadblock after another,” I told her after filling her in on the basics of last
night’s vigil. “Are you sure you want to keep me on the job? I got the
impression this morning . . .”

“I do. Even though Archie and I
had some words over it.” She took a sip from her tea. “I need to know.”

“Dolly, there’s no physical
evidence that someone has been trying to find something hidden in the shop. And
I have to admit that the local lore on the history of the place is rather
mixed. One person told me the old bike shop had a history, but none of the
written accounts back that up. I don’t really know where to turn next.”

She looked discouraged. “I
suppose until something else happens . . . It’s just that it never seems to
happen when anyone else is around. I feel like I’m the sole target of the
incidents.”

She pushed her teacup aside.
“Charlie, it’s not normal for me, feeling so vulnerable.”

I remembered my first impression
of Dolly, the day we’d met. From the precise cut of her hair to her sometimes
abrupt manner of speaking, there’d been nothing fragile or weak about her. Now,
after several of these scares, she was looking almost timid. Whatever the
explanation, the strain of it was wearing her down.

I took the final sip from my cup
and handed it to her.

While she carried the cups to the
stock room I glanced again around the shop. After staring at it half the night
I didn’t expect to see anything different. Only one thing caught my eye this
morning. A display rack of cashmere scarves near the door had fallen over, and
the scarves were lying in a heap.

“I’ve still got to put those
back,” Dolly said, coming up beside me. “I swear, sometimes that man makes me
absolutely livid.”

She bent down and pulled the
wooden rack to its upright position then shook out one of the scarves and
draped it attractively over a wooden peg, humming as she worked.

I reached for the doorknob. “I’ll
keep checking. See if I can learn something new.”

But how? I had no experience as a
ghost tracker and had certainly found no evidence so far that would tell me how
to solve this.

I walked aimlessly to the end of
the block and turned right, opposite the way I normally traveled. Maybe I would
circle through the old section of town, perhaps even stop in at Louisa’s office
and brainstorm some ideas if she weren’t tied up right then. But before I’d
gone three blocks I spotted a police station. Hmm . . . On a whim I entered.

“Is it possible to find records
of police reports by address?” I asked the female clerk behind the first desk I
came to. Her brass name tag said C. Smith.

Her eyebrows crinkled in a
puzzled expression.

I decided to tell almost the
whole truth. “A friend owns a shop where there’ve been some recent small incidents.”
I didn’t dare bring up the paranormal nature of those events. “I’m trying to
learn whether anyone filed a police report relating to them.”

Anticipating a host of questions,
starting with ‘Why is this any of your business’ I braced myself. But the clerk
didn’t seem to care. She turned a computer monitor to get a more straight-on
view of it.

“How long ago did this happen?”
she asked.

“I’m not exactly sure when they
began—”

“Within the past twenty-five
years?”

I tended to forget that anything
within a hundred years around here was considered new history.

“Probably within the last few
months,” I said.

“Address?”

I’d seen it printed on Dolly’s
sales receipts and recited the information to her. She clicked a few keys.

“The Trahorn Building. Nothing
that recent,” Ms Smith said, reading from the monitor. “There was a break-in in
1997 where the tenant reported some merchandise missing. But the investigation
revealed that his partner had merely taken the things home for personal use.”

“Is that the most recent incident?”

She nodded. “A shoplifting report
in 1989 . . . Before that, we’d have to go to the old records section. It’s a
large, dusty room in the basement.”

I couldn’t see where anything
that old would be relevant to Dolly’s current problems, plus I got the distinct
idea that the clerk was no more eager to go into the dusty archives than I was.

“No, that’s okay,” I said. A
thought came to me. “What about personal complaints? Anything under the name of
Dolly Jones?”

“The lady with the knit shop?”
she asked. “I know of her.”

“Really? Personally?”

“Just heard the name, round
about, you know.” She typed a few more words as she said it. “Um-hmm. All right
. . .” A couple more keystrokes. “Here in the telephone logs.”

She turned the screen so that I
could see it.

“We have to log every call,
whether or not there’s basis for police action.”

I scanned the white letters on
their blue background, not making immediate sense of what I was seeing.

“This is the date,” Ms Smith
explained, pointing to the left-most column of numbers. “Followed by time of
day, caller’s name, caller’s phone number, summary of the complaint. To get the
entire text of the complaint, you just hit F1.”

I noticed Dolly’s name at the top
of the page. There were at least ten complaints.

“Mrs. Jones certainly complained
quite a few times,” I said.

“Oh no,” she answered. “These are
complaints
against
Mrs. Jones. Notice that the calls all came from
others.”

Oh boy. I started to read across
the lines.

Sally Darcy, clothing store
manager. Complaint: Dolly Jones tried to return obviously used merchandise for
refund. Caused a scene upon being denied the refund.

James Gilcrist, restaurant owner.
Complaint: Mrs. Jones entered his restaurant, carrying a dog. Refused to
acknowledge signage warning that no pets were allowed and refused to place the
dog on a leash. Set the pet on the floor where it proceeded to do its business
in front of other customers. Jones caused a scene when Gilcrist threatened to
call police.

Joshua Raintree, plumber.
Complaint: Performed work for Mrs. Jones for which she refused to pay, saying
the bill was too high despite the fact that he had quoted her the same amount
before doing the job.

And on and on.

“Did the police act upon any of
these?” I asked.

“Let’s see.” She turned the
monitor a bit and opened another page. “The plumbing contractor was advised to
try the small claims court. Most of these charges don’t actually violate an
ordinance. We usually advise a business owner to try to make private
arrangements for reimbursement, if that seems warranted. Most of them
won’t—they are usually more worried about adverse publicity for their
establishments. Unless the subject actually strikes someone or causes physical
damage . . .”

“There’s nothing you can really
do.”

“Exactly.”

I thanked her and walked back out
to the street. This certainly put a whole new spin on things. I’d never quite
put two and two together, but when I thought about it I’d not seen many
customers in her shop. Maybe Dolly really had few friends and word of her
reputation had spread. And maybe one of those who went far enough to make a
call to the police had gone even further.

I realized I’d come back to
Abbeygate Street and decided that another of those Cornish pasty lunches would
be in order. I would have to decide how to proceed, whether I could actually
offer any help to Dolly at all, or if it would be best to steer completely
clear of her.

An hour later, appetite sated, I
gave myself over to a leisurely stroll through the Abbey Gardens. Deep blue
skies and sunshine had returned during the morning and I enjoyed walking among
the older ruins which dated back to the Middle Ages and reading the placards
that showed the old abbey as it would have once stood. It felt like I’d covered
miles and a seat on one of the benches beckoned me.

“Poor chap, you have to feel for
him,” a male voice said, from the next bench over.

“Can’t be easy, that’s sure,
losing the job at his age, being stuck home with the woman all day.”

I sent a glance to my right and
saw two men in business suits, late forties or early fifties in age, obviously
on an afternoon break from work, both spooning ice cream from cups that must
have come from the vendor I’d seen outside the gate.

“Ha, especially that one. I’d go
packing in a trice.”

The other man sighed. “Yeah, poor
Arch.”

I would have filed the whole
conversation away as nothing until he said the name. Archie Jones? The
circumstances certainly fit. I realized that I’d turned toward the men and that
they’d noticed my unabashed eavesdropping. I covered by noticing a scrap of
litter on the ground beside the bench, picking it up and heading for a trash
bin with it.

My impressions of Archie had been
of a man solicitous of his wife, caring and right there at her side. Was the
other side of it perhaps that Dolly tended to push him around, to be a bit too
controlling? Why not? It certainly seemed to fit with the way she treated other
people in this town.

I climbed three steps built of
rocks and ducked through a narrow opening in a hedge, coming to another section
of the garden, this one much closer to the towering Gothic Abbey. Maybe a dose
of peace and brotherly love would help settle my mind.

The cloisters, where I found
myself entirely alone, provided a little haven. The Gothic arches rose on my
right, while a walled rose garden to my left gave the sense of seclusion. I
paused to contemplate a stone mandala set in the walkway.

“It’s not exactly a work of art,
is it?” a male voice said.

I must have jumped three feet. He
stood a few yards away, dressed in khaki pants and a checked shirt with a
soft-brimmed hat sitting a little crooked on his head. I guessed him to be in
his late 70s. Beside him a wheelbarrow held clippings from the bushes. He’d
certainly arrived quietly.

“That emblem,” he said, nodding
toward the object of my attention. “It’s not really of high quality.”

“I’m not exactly an expert on
that type of thing,” I said. “Mainly, enjoying a stroll through the gardens.”

“It probably dates back to only
the seventeenth century or so.”

And people are allowed to walk on
it? I thought of the ancient abbey ruins in other parts of the garden, where
I’d seen children climbing. Aside from one discreet sign advising that defacing
the ruins was illegal, apparently the townsfolk believed in accessibility to
their history.

He set his shears down in the
wheelbarrow and tipped his hat back to wipe his very high forehead.

“You’re American, right?”

I laughed. It was pretty obvious,
I supposed.

“Enjoying Bury, are you? Have you
met any of the town ghosts?”