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

Chapter
15

The ten of us stood in nearly
complete darkness under the massive arch of the Abbey Gate, that entry which
had felt benignly historic in daylight. Louisa turned to the group and issued a
few basic rules.

“We are allowed to enter the
Abbey grounds after sunset only with special permission,” she began.
“Therefore, everyone must stay with me at all times. No exploration on one’s
own, please, and no walking off the prescribed pathways.”

She gave the teens a pointed
look, which made me believe this had been an issue in the past.

“I’m handing out small
torches—flashlights—to each of you. The paths can be uneven in a few places and
parts of the grounds are not well lit.”

Again, a stern look at the boys.
I pictured them making scary faces with the lights under their chins or other
goofy antics, but since Louisa had the power to kick them off the tour and to
tell their mothers, I doubted there would be any problems.

She went into her tour-guide
voice. “You probably know some basic history of Bury St. Edmunds and the
township. Contrary to popular opinion the name Bury was not meant to convey the
fact that St Edmund was buried here, although he was for a time. The place was
originally called Beodericsworth More likely, the etymology of this use of the
word ‘bury’ stems from similar words like borough, burg, or borg, which simply
mean ‘city.’ Around the year 906, the king’s remains were sent here for burial,
later removed to London during the Danish invasion, and later returned once
more. Because of the Danish treatment of the monks here at the Abbey, several
of them are known to haunt the grounds. It is said that King Edmund’s ghost
exacted revenge on the Dane, Sweyn Forkbeard, by striking him dead of a heart
attack. There are also legends of a missing treasure—a precious gold statue of
the archangel Michael—which has never been found.”

Tim’s and Sean’s eyes sparkled at
this, although since they’d often been on Louisa’s tours, it could have hardly
been news to them.

Louisa continued, “Naturally,
there have been frequent sightings of the famous Brown Monk right here under
this
very gate
.” She paused for effect. “Additionally, during the turbulent
1600s, Bury St. Edmunds was the site of the infamous witch trials and you can
imagine how many restless souls remain among us. But tonight we are not here to
speak specifically of dead kings and ancient history, except as it might relate
to those inhabitants who have
never quite
left this earth.”

Again, her tone dropped and she
paused between the words to convey the mysterious. I had to give my aunt credit
for her delivery skills. She led us from the oppressive overhang of the stone
gate onto the central garden pathway where occasional lamp posts cast minimal lighting,
throwing the whole scene into a montage of black, gray and dim green. The teens
dropped to the back of the group, but I noticed that the four Americans kept
close pace with Louisa.

She purposely took the narrowest
pathways, leading us between the black hulking shapes of the ancient stone
ruins, up a short flight of uneven steps, across lawns that were rapidly
becoming thick with dew. I had walked most of this ground during daylight hours
but had to admit that the nighttime visit was far more eerie. Every dozen yards
or so she would pause to talk about the monks who lived here in ancient times
and to let the group catch up with her.

“Watch for the Brown Monk,” she
cautioned. “He is often seen in and around the grounds of the Abbey.”

Before anyone could spend much
time in finding him, she’d headed toward the huge building of the cathedral
itself. On our right appeared a row of doors set into a massively proportioned
three story stone building that seemed part ancient, part relatively new—as new
as anything in this town. I guessed only four or five hundred years old.

“These are the Cathedral
Cottages,” Louisa said quietly, lowering her voice. “They have been converted
to modern residences, so we must be considerate of the current occupants.”

I noticed that only a few lights
shone at windows.

“A monk—many believe him to be
the Brown Monk—often pays visits to these homes. Women have reported awakening
in the night to find him sitting at the end of their beds. He never makes a
move, never says a word. Then he vanishes.”

Okay, I have to admit that a
little chill went through me at that point. When the German couple moved closer
I didn’t object to the company.

The group tightened a bit more
when Louisa led us into the graveyard. Again, even though I’d been there in
daylight, the black mounds of earth seemed larger now. And did that one beyond
the big tree actually move a little?

“Here on our left, Saint Mary’s
Church is the burial place of Queen Mary Tudor, daughter of King Henry the
Eighth,” she told us. She went into some of the history, and it seemed to me
that she lingered a bit long over the queen’s famous nickname, Bloody Mary. As
we strolled past, she went on with a tale of a clergyman in the 1930s who
believed he could contact his long-lost twin through séances. The leap in time
was pretty far, and I realized that my mind must have wandered. I found myself
thinking of Dolly Jones and how she’d become convinced that something
supernatural was happening in her shop.

“. . . of course the entire story
of the Grey Lady was later revealed to be pure fiction, a story written as an
historical novella in the 1800s. Even so, there are still people who see things
that cannot entirely be explained away.”

By this time we had traversed the
graveyard, on the path under the heavy overhang of trees, and
emerged—thankfully—onto the street. A passing car provided a dose of modern
reality and one of the women giggled in nervous reaction to it. Louisa caught
my eye, behind the backs of the others and gave me a wink.

“All right, folks. You shouldn’t
need your torches anymore,” Louisa said. “We will be on lighted streets from
this point onward.”

Those who had been using them
switched them off and Louisa stowed them in her tote bag.

“We next take a look at two
well-known landmarks here in Bury. The Dog & Partridge Pub, and then in a
few minutes, the Theatre Royal.”

Once more, since I’d already been
to the pub and walked past the theater on a number of occasions, I found my
thoughts focusing on Dolly. I ticked through the incidents in the shop—the
mysterious footprints, the admittedly unexplainable fact that tea had gone hot
and cold, and the ruined lit candles—which may have been the proverbial straw
that sent Dolly beyond sanity.

“Several of these shops on
Whiting Street experience regular visitations from the spirit world,” Louisa
was saying. “Knocking and tapping sounds . . .”

I thought of the night we’d spent
in the cellar at Dolly’s. How easy it might have been for anyone else in the
building to construe our small attempt at digging up what we thought was
treasure to be something caused by ghosts. I sent sidelong glances toward my
fellow tour-goers, feeling a shot of disdain for their rapt attention and utter
belief in things that were so easily explained away. If I could make noise in
the cellar of a building, surely anyone could.

“At this next intersection we’ll
see The Nutshell Pub, Britain’s smallest pub and home to a particularly sad
ghost, that of a little boy. He has been seen several times in a tiny upstairs
room, sitting alone at the table as if waiting for his parents to return for
him.”

The women looked stricken, and I
have to admit that the way Louisa told it, anyone with a heart would have felt
sorry for the child. I looked toward the curved glass corner window. The place
was quiet, with only a small nightlight illuminating the rich wooden bar and
walls.

“Whether or not you are fortunate
enough to see the ghost, simply stopping in for a drink and to see the
artifacts is well worth your time. Tim and Sean, your drinks will have to be
sodas, I’m afraid.”

That comment drew a titter from
the crowd, but it helped to disperse the gloomy mood over the sad child-ghost.

“Come forward for a moment,”
Louisa said, leading us up to the glass-fronted building. “It’s hard to get
full detail in the dim light, but do note the mummified cat hanging from the
ceiling. In times past, it was considered prudent to bury a cat within the
walls of a building as it was constructed. Cats kept vermin away and acted as a
good-luck symbol. No one knows exactly where this particular cat was found or
how long it has been hanging here.”

I glanced in the window. The
walls were papered with currency from many countries in many denominations and
there were so many other oddities hanging on the walls that at first I had a
hard time spotting the rigid figure or recognizing it as feline. I figured this
was one tradition that I could skip if I were ever to build.

“In the next block, the Suffolk
Hotel was quite nice in its day. Its history goes back as part of the Abbey
property as far as the year 1295, and it was licensed as an inn in 1539.” She
gave us North Americans a moment to absorb those dates. “But the reports of
haunted happenings are much more recent, clear up to the time the hotel was
closed in 1996 and converted to shops.

She stopped on the sidewalk and
motioned to the large white building on the opposite side of the street, where
I recognized the bookshop and clothing store where I had shopped earlier in the
week.

“Couples who met at the hotel for
extra-marital trysts were often vulnerable to the pranks of the ghosts. Noises
in the rooms were common as soon as the lights went out, but when the light was
turned back on again, the rattling would stop. One guest complained to a porter
that his lover refused to stay the night. She apparently leaped from the bed,
dressed, and fled the property before he was quite . . . um, finished.”

A picture of Archie Jones’s face
came to me. Not the shell-shocked Archie of two days ago, but another version.
I shook my head. It didn’t make sense. I turned my attention back to Louisa who
was on the move once more. We were back on Abbeygate Street in a couple of
minutes, the shopping district that I recognized from my explorations around
town.

The German couple was speaking
quietly with Louisa, most likely asking her to clarify a question, and the
Americans were looking ready to get out of the chilly night and find themselves
either a drink or a cup of something warm. I’d noticed that the teen boys had
hung toward the back of the group ever since Louisa pointed out the mummified
cat—did they want a crack at getting in there to take it? But I stuck with them
and they never found their opportunity to break away.

“Our final stop on the tour puts
us back here at the Angel Hotel, where I know several of you are staying. You
might be interested to know a couple of legends associated with the hotel.”

She gave them the same
information she’d told me about the tunnel system under the town and the fact
that one of the tunnels was known to have originated in the cellars of the
Angel. She ended the tale with the story of the fiddler who went into the
tunnels to determine where they went, only to disappear forever.

“So, sleep well tonight,” she
said, “but be sure to let someone know if you hear fiddle music in the quiet
hours before dawn.”

She dismissed the group, and the
Americans from Indiana quickly climbed the front steps of the hotel, no doubt
hoping that the hotel bar would still be open. While Louisa conversed easily
with the Germans, I noticed that she kept an eye on the teens until a car
arrived and a man tapped the horn.

“Your dad, Tim!” she called out
to him, giving the man a wave as the boys got into the vehicle.

I took a spot on one of the
concrete benches in front of the hotel, hands in pockets for warmth, my mind
swirling as I thought about the fact that we would soon be attending Dolly’s
funeral.

Chapter
16

Monday morning dawned—barely—a
day of heavy gray clouds and mist hanging in the air. It seemed fitting for the
small gathering at St. Mary’s. Although Archie said that Dolly wished to be
cremated and have her ashes scattered over the Dover coastline where they had
once vacationed, he thought it appropriate to have a little service at the
church and for the vicar to say a few words out in the ancient graveyard. We
huddled under our umbrellas and, mercifully, the man really did keep it to a
very few words.

The gathering could hardly be
called a crowd—Archie, Gabrielle, Louisa and myself plus two other women that I
guessed might be customers of the knit shop. Both wore handmade sweaters and
scarves. As he had on Friday, Archie stared vacantly through the mist, a
hollow-looking man.

When Gabrielle extended an open
invitation to come by the shop for coffee and cake everyone accepted in
sympathy for the widower. Rumor was that Archie planned to close the shop as
soon as possible and that he would soon be moving out of the apartment. I
wondered if the two shop patrons were simply eager to see if there might be
bargain prices offered on the yarns.

For myself, I had two motives for
stopping by. One was to learn the official cause of death. The coincidence
between all the events that had so badly upset Dolly, and her death just hours
after the last one . . . well, I couldn’t let that go without at least asking.
My other motive was simply to get out of the rain.

Gabrielle assumed the role of
hostess. The table holding the partially burned candles had been cleared and
converted to a spot for a variety of bakery-made cakes, plus an urn of coffee
and a pot of tea. She sliced the cakes and served them up on paper plates. The
other women began openly browsing the yarn bins and when Archie let them know
they could have anything for half price even Louisa joined in.

I nibbled at a slice of Battenberg
cake, described on the wrapper that I spotted nearby as “a chequerboard of
moist sponge wrapped in almond flavoured paste.” All I knew was that the cute
little pink and yellow squares tasted delicious. I debated sneaking another one
but I saw my chance to speak to Archie, who was standing alone near the sales
counter at the moment. I expressed my condolences once again, then posed my
real question about the cause of Dolly’s death.

“The coroner’s inquest ruled that
it was an overdose of her sleeping medication,” he said. He looked stricken. “I
just can’t believe she would do it.”

“Did she often—?”

“Take a sleep aid?” he jumped in,
knowing where I was going with this. “Often enough. My wife sometimes had
trouble sleeping.” His face seemed to go slack. “If only I’d watched more
carefully.”

Dolly had once told me she was a
light sleeper.

I opened my mouth to ask whether
the coroner thought it was a suicide, but Archie turned away and greeted one of
the women who’d walked over with her arms full of yarn balls.

There really wasn’t a delicate
way to quiz the new widower about his wife’s drug habits so I backed away. All
right, I’ll admit that I backed right over to the cake again and took another
slice of that Battenberg, asking Gabrielle where she’d bought it while I
watched Louisa and her cronies plundering the yarns.

By the time my aunt had paid for
a rather large bag of new needlework projects I’d exhausted any possible
conversation with Gabrielle and I’d found the spot where they’d stacked the
damaged candles and marked them at eighty-percent off. I mentally ran through
the list of things that had happened to upset Dolly—the hot and cold tea, the
mysterious muddy footprints in the shop, the mixed up coins in her register and
scrambled yarns on display. Those things seemed real and tangible and yet we’d
found no cause. And then there were the ethereal things—the unexplained noises,
shadows and ghostly images, the cold drafts through the store. Although Dolly
seemed like a pretty indomitable force, maybe she’d simply reached her limit.

Out on the street, the rain had
stopped and the clouds seemed to be thinning. We walked toward Louisa’s home,
avoiding the larger puddles, and I told her what I’d learned from Archie—that
Dolly had died from her own sleeping medication.

“I couldn’t bring myself to ask
Archie any more detailed questions. Such as, I wonder if the police would
investigate this as a suicide.”

“An inquest would be a matter of
public record,” Louisa said.

“Mind if we duck in and ask?”

She helped talk our way into the
coroner’s office where I asked to see a copy of the record on Dolly’s death. A
straight-spined doctor in a stiff white lab coat handed me the death
certificate. It pretty much said just what Archie had told me.

“Is there any way to tell if she accidentally
took this much or if it might have been a suicide?” I asked the doctor who’d
handed me the report.

“No way to know ma’am. There was
no note, no other obvious signs of suicidal thoughts. Her husband said she’d
suffered several upsets in recent weeks but everything was just fine that night
when they went to bed.”

Fine, as in throwing a fit
because her entire stock of candles was ruined.

But I didn’t say it.

“So, the police aren’t looking at
this as a crime?” I wasn’t really sure how else to phrase the question. She
wasn’t attacked by a ghost? She wasn’t snuffed out by a phantom presence in the
room?

“No, ma’am. You’ll notice that
it’s been called an accidental death.”

And that was that.

We left the office, and started
toward Louisa’s house.

“That’s complete poppycock,” she
said.

“What? Why do you think so?”

“I might not have known her a
long time but I knew Dolly well enough to know that she didn’t kill herself.
And she certainly didn’t take that many pills accidentally. One time we were
the only two who showed up for knitting group, so we talked about things a
little more personal. She had a sister who died of an accidental overdose when
she was just in her twenties. Dolly never got over it. Said she was very
careful about every medication she ever took.”

“Archie indicated that she took
them pretty regularly. Maybe she’d taken a dose while they were watching TV,
then there was the incident with the candles and she was so upset that she
either forgot she’d already taken them or she figured she’d never get to sleep
unless she took more.”

Her eyes flashed. “This is one
thing I know. Charlie, I’m sure of it.”

“But the inquest—”

“I’m just saying. Something got
those pills into Dolly, but she didn’t do it herself.”

“I don’t know . . . She was
pretty rattled over the things that happened to her in the store . . .”

“Can you look into it, Charlie?
Please? Just ask around and see if anyone knows anything? She didn’t have many
friends. I just feel—” Her voice cracked.

That much was true. The pitiful
turnout at the service, the number of complaints on record at the police
department. Was this a case of a disagreeable person’s karma catching up with
her, or was there truly a more sinister set of events that had turned against
Dolly Jones?