The Ghost and The Haunted Mansion (17 page)

Fiona turned her eyes to the ceiling. “Now what is that silly mailman going to do with a fine old Victorian treasure, I wonder? Sell it?”

I leaned closer. “It’s better for you if Seymour keeps the place.”

She blinked. “What have you heard, Pen? Tell me.”

I called Bonnie over and asked her to handle the check-out line. Then I spoke to Dilbert, who was assisting customers on the floor. “I’m going to set up the events room for the Feline Friends reading group. Keep an eye on the counter and help Bonnie if she gets jammed up.”

“No problem, Mrs. McClure.”

I turned to Fiona. “Okay, follow me.”

I led her through the archway to our events space, turned up the lights on the darkened area, and took down two folding chairs from the stack.

We sat down face to face, and I began to tell Fiona all about the Lindsey-Tilton group’s offer to purchase the Todd place, with an eye toward transforming it into our town’s second bed-and-breakfast—in direct competition to Fiona’s already established inn.

“That’s the trouble with being a pioneer,” Fiona said. “You end up getting scalped! It took Barney and me fifteen hard years to establish Finch Inn, and now some international bunch with a big war chest is going to try squeezing us out!”

“Take it easy. Seymour probably won’t sell. Or at least that’s what he told Mr. Stoddard.”

That did little to reassure Fiona. “A million bucks is a lot of money to a mailman who thinks a wise investment for thirty thousand in
Jeopardy!
winnings is an ice cream truck. Do you think he’ll hold out?”

I took a deep breath. “Well . . . there’s another reason Seymour might sell. One that’s got nothing to do with money.”

“What?” Fiona snorted. “Is the place supposed to be haunted?”

I let her quip hover in the air for a moment, and then I said, “Yes.”

Fiona’s eyes widened and (no surprise) the true-crime reader in her instantly came out. “Do you think Miss Todd’s death is connected to the haunted house rumor?! Did you know that some in town are wondering if Seymour had a hand in scaring her to death?”

“Let me guess: The rumor came out of Chief Ciders’s office?”

“Of course! I ran into Debra Lane in Leo Rollins’s electronics shop. She talked to her cousin Joyce, who’s Chief Ciders’s secretary. Joyce told her the chief nearly arrested the mailman for murder, and Ciders hasn’t given up yet! He’s waiting for the state forensics and the medical examiner’s final report.”

“Well, that’s no surprise, but I already know what the town’s M.E. is going to say. Dr. Rubino is ruling that Miss Todd died of natural causes. I doubt the autopsy will alter his opinion. And even if the state comes back with evidence that Seymour was in the house, it doesn’t prove any guilt. He already admitted that Miss Todd permitted him to step inside to leave the mail on the foyer table.”

Fiona smirked. “But you think something’s wrong with the way Miss Todd died, don’t you?”

“I’m no doctor, but . . .” I told Fiona about the state of Miss Todd’s corpse when I found it, the expression of horror on her face, and about the weird cold spot that seemed to hover near the body.

“Goodness,” she whispered.

“I’m sure ‘goodness’ had nothing to do with it. I know Seymour and I’m positive he had nothing to do with it, either.”

“How does Seymour feel about all this?”

“As far as I can tell, he’s stunned that Miss Todd remembered him in her will. And he can’t wait to become a resident of Larchmont Avenue.”

Fiona met my eyes. “That’s good. Then he probably won’t sell the estate.”

“I know, and that’s what worries me. I think maybe whoever had a hand in killing Miss Todd might have been trying to get possession of her place. Seymour’s a wild card. Now that he has possession of it, I’m worried his life might be in danger.”

“That’s an awfully big leap, Pen. I mean, you said it yourself, the medical examiner doesn’t even think there was foul play surrounding Miss Todd’s death.”

“Well, something else happened. Something you don’t know about. Last night, while Sadie and I were driving home . . .”

I told Fiona about the VW breadloaf bus losing its brakes. I mentioned the mysterious phantom car behind us, and Leo Rollins showing up right after the accident with an elaborate dagger that had the exact same markings as Todd Mansion’s wrought-iron fence.

Fiona frowned and shook her head. “I don’t know what to make of all that. I mean . . . are you saying Leo had something to do with those brakes failing?”

“No. I mean, I don’t want to accuse the man . . . I don’t have any evidence, and even Seymour thinks it’s his mechanic’s fault. He’s waiting to hear from the garage on what went wrong.”

“You mean, you’re waiting to hear whether or not the brakes were sabotaged?”

I nodded. “If they were, then it’s just too much of a coincidence, don’t you think? I mean, it happened right after he inherited the mansion.”

“And right after he was accused of murdering Miss Todd. Don’t forget that!”

“What are you saying?”

“That someone may be trying to exact revenge.”

“Revenge?” I hadn’t thought of that. “Who would want to avenge Miss Todd’s murder—if she even
was
murdered?”

I thought back to our meeting with Mr. Stoddard. He’d mentioned Miss Todd having a sister, who insisted on remaining anonymous. I asked Fiona what she knew about that—after all, the innkeeper had dug up enough town dirt over the years to fill Quindicott Pond—but Fiona shook her head (which was obviously still focused on one thing).

“I didn’t know the old lady except by reputation; and of course her property is well known. That Larchmont Victorian’s a real jewel. And if Seymour Tarnish sells to the Lindsey-Tilton group, they’ll turn it into our competition! When is he moving in?”

“He signed papers last night, and he plans to have a wake for Miss Todd on Saturday night.”

Fiona bit her thumbnail. “That doesn’t give me much time.”

“Time to do what?”

“To bribe that stubborn mailman into staying at Todd Mansion, and
not
selling out to my competition!”

 

“DO YOU REALLY think that . . . that
thing
”—the woman punched her index finger at the Zara Underwood display—“is appropriate for our town’s bookstore?”

It was now Friday afternoon; I
still
hadn’t heard from Jack, but at least I’d made it to three P.M. before I received the first complaint of the day. This time it came from Binky Stuckey, wife of Quindicott’s premier car dealer, Scott Stuckey of Stuckey Motors. Binky had just caught her eight-year-old twins ogling the provocative standee. After sending the boys scampering to the children’s section, the angry mother called me to the front of the store to voice her protest.

Smiling politely, I shrugged. “I admit it’s not wholesome, but it’s not really offensive, either. Miss Underwood
is
wearing clothes, and we’ve both seen more exposed flesh at the beach.”

“A
nude
beach, perhaps,” Mrs. Stuckey countered. “Can’t you get rid of that? Cover it up.”

Dilbert Randall’s head popped up from behind a stack of Stuart Woods’s latest. “It wouldn’t matter anyway, Mrs. Stuckey. The same author picture is on the book’s cover.”

Mrs. Stuckey glanced at the standee. “But she’s so . . . so
big
.”

I exchanged a glance with Dilbert. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Stuckey,” I said. “At the speed
Bang, Bang Baby
is selling, by next week we won’t have enough copies to stock the display, and down it will come.”

“That woman’s book is pure rubbish,” she huffed. “Neither the
New York Times
nor the
Boston Globe
chose to review it; therefore, it must not have
any
literary merit.”

Dilbert raised an eyebrow. “Clearly you haven’t read B. R. Myers.”

“Who?”

“B. R. Myers, author of
A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose
.”

“Excuse me?”

I took a deep breath and did my best to channel my battle-hardened aunt. “You know what, Mrs. Stuckey? I’m not a book critic. I’m a bookseller.”

“Fine, Mrs. McClure! I won’t come back until next week, then.” The woman gathered her boys and pushed them toward the exit. “Or perhaps I won’t come back at all!”

As her boys stumbled through the front door, I heard one of them declare, “But I
like
the big girl’s picture, Mommy!”

Dilbert turned to me. “She seemed pretty upset.”

“We’ll see Mrs. Stuckey again. I guarantee it.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I sold a copy of
Bang, Bang Baby
to
Mr.
Stuckey two hours ago.”

Dilbert laughed and I automatically braced for a quip from my resident ghost, but none came. Jack had disappeared on me.
Completely
disappeared. On Wednesday I’d practically passed out the moment I hit the mattress. I didn’t dream that night, but I wasn’t all that surprised, given my level of exhaustion. Thursday night, however, was another matter.

Sadie and I had gone to the funeral home, where Miss Todd’s remains were on view. I could have used Jack’s opinion on what I’d observed there. But he hadn’t made contact. He hadn’t shown in my bedroom hours later, either, even though I lay there wide awake, just waiting to feel his cool breeze across my cheek.

This abrupt disappearance of my ghost had happened many times before, especially after an intense trip into his memories, but it had never been this long a lag.

I began to worry—
seriously
worry—that Seymour had contacted those Spirit Zappers people. He’d mentioned something about de-ghosting all of Quindicott. Maybe the Zappers had visited Miss Todd’s mansion in the dead of night, performed some exorcism ritual, and then moved on to zap all of Cranberry Street. Could they have turned on some sort of anti-haunting equipment and scared Jack into limbo for good?

I couldn’t help choking up at the thought. The dead PI may have started out as an annoyance in my life but he’d become a comforting, cheering . . . okay, even an exciting presence. With my son off to camp, I was starting to feel abandoned. I even began to wonder whether Spencer had swiped that old buffalo nickel of Jack’s, the one I carried with me outside the store to give his spirit passage beyond these walls. But when I checked the little pillbox on my dresser, I found the nickel still safely tucked inside.

The worst part about Jack’s absence, I realized, was that I couldn’t even tell anyone about missing him; and as I fretted in private, I began to open up the roadblocks on some old mental avenues:
Maybe the ghost isn’t gone. Maybe he was never here. Maybe Jack Shepard was—and always has been—nothing but a construct of my imagination . . .

The phone rang behind the checkout counter and Sadie called me off the selling floor. “It’s Bud,” she said, frowning as she passed me the receiver. “He wants to speak with you.”

I nodded, happy at least to speak with a living man. “Hi, Bud.”

“Pen, the city council just refused to rescind the parking permit they granted to Jim Wolfe’s construction company. That damn equipment of his will block my business all summer unless we can do something about it!”

“Good news on that front. I’ve already spoken with the coordinator of the Seekers reading group and they’re willing to leave the events space by nine. We can start the meeting then.”

“Great!” I could hear the relief in Bud’s voice. “Most everyone has agreed to show up. If the Business Owners Association presents a united front, we can push back against the council’s move. Otherwise I’m bankrupt by the end of summer.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my aunt’s worried expression.

“We’ll fix this,” I said into the receiver, loud enough for Sadie to hear. “I promise.”

On the other end of the line, Bud sighed heavily. “I could end this mess tomorrow if I pulled out of the election and let Marjorie Binder-Smith run unopposed.”

“But you’re not going to do that, are you?”

“Damn right I’m not.” His tone was steely. “Pass the word to any holdouts. The Quibblers meet Monday at nine.”

I set the receiver on its cradle, and looked up to find J. Brainert Parker leaning against the counter, a frown on his fine-boned, patrician face.

“You heard?”

He nodded. “Bud told me all about it. He can count on me to help any way I can.”

A professor of literature at St. Francis, J. Brainert Parker had been a friend of mine since childhood. Although he’d been involved with the Quindicott Business Owners Association (a.k.a. The Quibblers) since the organization’s inception, Brainert felt himself above such petty concerns as zoning laws, parking restrictions, and littering fines. Or he
did,
until he and his business partner, Dr. Wendell Pepper, dean of St. Francis’s School of Communications, refurbished and reopened the town’s previously broken-down Art Deco movie theater.

Now, with one tenuous foot in the world of capitalism, Brainert (a proud member of the “ivory tower” set, as Seymour referred to the academic class) suddenly found common ground with the rest of us poor working stiffs who plied our trades on Cranberry Street. And it was just like my old friend to jump into the fray with both feet and arms swinging. In fact, Brainert was now the most vocal backer of Bud Napp’s campaign for Marjorie’s council seat.

“This will all be over when Bud triumphs in November,” he crowed. “Now, on a stranger note, the reason for my visit. I found this bizarre missive in my mailbox this morning.”

Brainert reached a slender, long-fingered hand into the pocket of his tweed jacket. I glanced at the letter he produced. It was an official invitation to Seymour’s party on Saturday—“to honor the esteemed Miss Timothea Todd.”

“Seymour certainly isn’t wasting any time moving in on the new domicile, is he?” Brainert said.