The Ghost and The Haunted Mansion (16 page)

“The door wasn’t damaged. The burglar had a key.”

“Or he was an expert at picking locks.”

“But why that lock? Why not any other apartment?”

“Let’s go.”

Jack led me back to the basement where we found J. J. on his hands and knees in the hallway, stuffing items back into the pillowcase. We brought the case and J. J. back into the apartment and spread the almost-stolen booty on the scuffed wooden table.

I expected to see cheap things that could be pawned—clothes, hats, shoes. What I saw instead left me gaping in confusion: tarot cards, a Ouija board, a large purple fur-lined cape, books about fortune-telling and séances, a cheap crystal ball, a costume jewelry tiara, and one more thing—

“Oh, my God. I don’t believe it.” I picked up the polished steel dagger. On the hilt was a familiar embossed design—the same design I’d seen on the wrought-iron gate of the late Miss Timothea Todd’s Larchmont Avenue mansion.

I ran my hand along the raised lines of the five-pointed star with the fleur-de-lis at its center. “It’s exactly like the one Leo Rollins handed me beside the highway. Except this one’s brand-new. It isn’t an antique.”

“Not yet,” Jack said.

“Who’s Leo Rollins?” J. J. asked.

I glanced up at Jack.

“Nobody, kid,” he replied. “Did you get a look at the bag man?”

J. J. nodded.

“Did you know him?”

“Nope. Never saw him before. Did you shoot him, Mr. Shepard?”

“Naw,” Jack said. “Too many bystanders.”

“Awww, too bad!”

Jack pointed at the occult items spread out on the table. “So what’s with all the fortune-telling gewgaws?”

“You said exactly what I was thinking,” I murmured.

Jack smirked. “Ain’t that a switch.”

“This is my mom’s stuff,” J. J. said.

I frowned. “I thought you said your mother was a schoolteacher.”

“She is,” J. J. said. “But about a month ago, she said she hit her head and now she can see weird stuff, like promotions of the future.”

“Don’t you mean
premonitions
of the future?”

J. J. rolled his eyes. “That’s what I said, didn’t I? Mom told me she can talk to dead people now. You know, ghosts and stuff.”

I exchanged a glance with Jack (sounds familiar, huh?), then picked up one of the occult books on séances, which included illustrations, case histories, and step-by-step instructions on conducting them.

“My mom said the books were going to help her learn more about her new abilities and help her get better at using them. Some other people were helping her get better at it, too.”

“People?” I shut the book. “What people?”

J. J. shrugged. “She never told me. But she did practice an awful lot with the crystal ball and the Ouija board.”

I examined the items, one by one, but there were no clues to where they came from—no names or addresses. I pulled Jack aside. “The best lead is still the boyfriend.”

Jack nodded. “So how are you going to find him?”

“I’ll bet I can find a clue in here somewhere . . .” I paused and tried to think like a woman—not a stretch since I was one. “J. J., where do you and your mom sleep in this apartment?”

“I use this sofa.” He pointed. “And Mom uses the bedroom.”

I went into the small room and began to search it. The burglar had already tossed the drawers; the contents were scattered on the bed and floor. I looked for an address book or letters or a diary—and came up with nothing. I searched a worn handbag but found only white gloves, tissues, and an old lipstick.

Finally I located what would have been the contents of the woman’s lingerie drawer and started pawing through her underthings. “Got something!”

“What, baby?” Jack moved in.

I held up a small gift box. I opened it and found a business card and a velvet-lined jewelry box with nothing inside. Jack watched me closely. “Now what, baby?”

I went to J. J. “What was in this jewelry box?”

“Pearl earrings,” the boy said. “I pawned them for twenty dollars, to pay Mr. Shepard.”

I fingered the small cream-colored card. “BROADWAY’S BEST JEWELRY,” I read. The address was near Times Square and the Theater District. “Happy Birthday! Love, Frankie.”

I waved the card at J. J. “The earrings were a gift from your mom’s boyfriend? Frankie Papps, right?”

J. J. nodded. “My mom’s had a lot of them. Boyfriends, I mean, but she’s been with Frankie the longest—almost six months now.”

I exchanged glances with Jack and waved the card again. “I think we should talk to this jeweler.”

Jack gave me a nod of approval. We finished up with the apartment search and then Jack told J. J. to pack a bag with his clothes and underwear and anything else he might need for a little trip.

“Where am I going?” he asked.

“Don’t give me any lip, kid. If you want me on your case, then just do as I say.”

Jack took us back up on the street, hailed a cab, and had the driver take us to a building on Second Avenue. He left us on the stone stoop for a few minutes while he walked upstairs to have a word with somebody. When he came back down, his previously grim expression appeared a little lighter.

“Come on up,” he said.

We walked up three flights and paused by the open front door of a plump, middle-aged woman wearing a housedress and glasses. She had a kind face with a gently creased olive complexion and black curls threaded with gray.

“This is Mrs. Dellarusso,” Jack told J. J. “She says she’d be very pleased to look after you.”

“That’s nice, but I don’t need lookin’ after,” J. J. whispered.

Mrs. Dellarusso smiled and bent down closer to J. J. “You don’t want to taste my spaghetti and meatballs? Or my fresh blueberry pie?”

J. J.’s eyes went wide. “Blueberry pie?”

“Sure. And with ice cream, too. And you can listen to any show you like on my radio.”

“You have a radio?”

Mrs. Dellarusso stepped back from the doorway. “Come on in and look.”

J. J. glanced at Jack. “Just for a minute . . .”

A minute later, J. J. was shoveling blueberry pie and ice cream into his mouth. Then he checked out the big bedroom Mrs. Dellarusso said could be all his for as long as he wanted—the one with a large window looking out on Second Avenue.

“Jiminy crickets, what a view! You can see all the way down the block!”

When it was finally decided that J. J. was going to stay with Mrs. Dellarusso until Jack could find his mother, we headed for the door. I noticed Jack handing the woman something and realized it was the twenty dollars J. J. had paid him for his PI services.

“That should help with the food and the rent for the boy,” Jack said quietly.

“You don’t need to give me anything, Mr. Shepard,” Mrs. Dellarusso insisted. “Not after what you did for my son.”

But Jack pressed the money into her hand.

“Who’s the woman’s son?” I asked as we descended the stairs.

“A young sergeant I knew over there. I just made sure she got his last letters and personals, that’s all.”

“
Was
her only son? You mean he—”

“Caught a round in the guts. Bled to death in the field.”

I thought of my own son and felt the air go out of my lungs. In almost the next second, I reconsidered the bright look in the woman’s lined face when she first laid eyes on the scruffy, smudged-face J. J. Conway.

“You did a nice thing there,” I told Jack when we reached the building’s small, tiled lobby.

He shrugged it off. “Had to stash the kid somewhere. I knew somebody sent that burglar. I figured whoever wanted that junk was going to come back for it again.”

“Do you think that burglar had the mother’s key, Jack?”

He nodded.

“Well, I’d like to know where J. J.’s mother got that dagger with the Todd Mansion design on its hilt. Is it just some random purchase? Or did someone give it to her? And who are these ‘people’ that J. J. mentioned, the ones supposedly helping his mom with her new occult powers? Did they give her the dagger? The boyfriend is bound to know more.”

Jack folded his arms and gazed down at me. “So what’s your next step?”

“We go to the Broadway jewelry store and find out if anyone knows Frankie Papps.”

With a single finger Jack pushed back the brim of his fedora. Then he rested an arm on the wall near my head. “It’s pretty late, honey. Store’s probably closing up by now. How about you and I go back to my place and”—he winked—“wait till morning.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Is that what your big plans were with that well-endowed luncheonette girl?”

“Aw, baby, that was a long time ago . . .
before
I met you.”

“Aw, Jack. Are you going soft on me?”

“Naw, sweetheart.” He smiled. “Must be your imagination.”

Maybe this was just a dream, but Jack sure felt real, standing close, leaning closer, until I felt a hard tug on my arm.

Another tug.

“Mom!”

A child’s voice. A boy was calling for his mother. Was it J. J. calling?

“Mooooom!”

I opened my eyes. My son was standing next to my bed.

“Get up, Mom!”

“Spencer?”

“You have to drive me to the bus by nine, remember? I’m going to camp today!”

CHAPTER 12

After that nothing happened for three days. Nobody slugged me or shot at me or called me up on the phone and warned me to keep my nose clean. Nobody hired me to find the wandering daughter, the erring wife, the lost pearl necklace, or the missing will. I just sat there and looked at the wall.

—Philip Marlow in
The Long Goodbye
, Raymond Chandler, 1953

 

 

 

THAT MORNING’S EVENTS blew me around like an Atlantic gale. After getting Spencer packed off to camp, I drove back to the store to find a waiting sales rep from a new regional publisher. I’d no sooner said goodbye to him than a female customer—one I hadn’t seen in months—began loudly complaining about the Zara Underwood display. After finally calming her down, a bestselling author dropped in unexpectedly to sign all of her stock and I had to run to Cooper Family Bakery to pick up refreshments for the Tea and Sympathy book club—a local group of working women who met during lunch breaks to discuss British mysteries. Next a cluster of touring seniors descended on me with dozens of questions about our events schedule while a rather large group of men I’d never seen before lined up to buy
Bang, Bang Baby.

All of that took place amid the typical increased traffic Sadie and I handled this time of year of young people in search of beach books, and loyal customers wanting advice for vacation reading.

My few minutes of free time I used to search the Internet for any image matches on the Todd Mansion pentagram. Unfortunately, I could find nothing that even came close to matching the unique design.

By seven o’clock, Sadie was more than ready for her dinner date with Bud and I was holding the literary fort with Bonnie Franzetti and our new part-timer, Dilbert Randall, a St. Francis history major with brown wavy hair, an easygoing smile, and glasses of the small, round, Harry Potter variety.

As far as I could tell, Dilbert’s entire wardrobe consisted of worn blue jeans, Hush Puppies, and pastel-colored Izod shirts. His passion for historical mysteries, on the other hand, ranged from Lynda S. Robinson’s lively Egyptian mysteries—set in the time of Tutankhamun—to Ellis Peters’s twelfth-century Brother Cadfael chronicles and the Victorian cases of Anne Perry’s Inspector Thomas Pitt.

More than once during my crazy-busy workday it occurred to me that Jack Shepard hadn’t said
boo
to me. But then I remembered what the ghost had told me the day before in my car—that I’d been moving too fast to hear him—and I began to think the communication problem was mine.

I was just about ready to take a short break and
finally
slow down enough to maybe hear my ghost’s voice when a hip, young, bohemian crowd descended on us. They’d just exited a showing of
Mulholland Drive
at the Movie Town Theater’s David Lynch retrospective and flooded the aisles to check out the stock. Even after viewing the surreal Lynch film, however, the sight of an overexcited Fiona Finch rushing through the front door in an atomic yellow pantsuit managed to attract a few stares.

Fiona’s eyes flashed wildly as she began to shout, “Pen! Pen!” while waving her arm so frantically she scattered the pack of teenage boys that had gathered around the Zara Underwood dump.

“Where’s Sadie?!” she asked breathlessly after finding me behind the check-out counter.

“Sorry, Fiona,” I said, ringing up the next customer. “Sadie’s at the Seafood Shack having dinner with Bud. What’s got you so excited?”

“I just heard about Miss Todd’s legacy! She left you mystery and true-crime first editions dating back to the 1950s?!”

Frankly, I was surprised it took Fiona twenty-four whole hours to uncover what was supposed to be completely confidential information.

“I simply must see that list!” Fiona gestured so suddenly that the crested cockatoo brooch pinned to her lapel nearly took flight.

“It’s upstairs, Fiona. Sadie’s still going over it. I’m sure she’ll share it with you when she’s ready.”

“So is it true what else I heard? Has Seymour Tarnish actually inherited the Todd place?”

I handed the change back to my customer, bagged up her purchases, and turned to Fiona. “Miss Todd left him her house, everything inside it, the land around it, and the two outbuildings.”

“That place is a wholly unique Second Empire. I’m dying to see the interior. You’ve been there. Do think the furniture is authentic Victorian?”

“Looks like it to me, but I’m no antiques expert. I’m sure Seymour will be happy to show you around once he takes over.”