The Ghost and The Haunted Mansion (33 page)

“What are you planning to do?”

“Find the damn ghost and record it,” he declared. “I’m going to
prove
that it wasn’t
me
who made those noises and scared Timothea to death. It’ll get Ciders off my back for good and he can stop arresting me for trumped-up reasons. My only problem is this old house. I’m not sure it can handle the voltage I need.”

That was when I heard an engine. With a sick twist of my guts, I realized it was the familiar high-low rumble of a customized Harley.

“Oh, my God,” I rasped. “Leo Rollins is here.”

Seymour peered through the window. “You’re right!
He’ll
be able to fix my electrical problems!”

“Seymour, no! Leo’s dangerous! Stay away from him!” I grabbed a handful of his polo shirt.

“Are you kidding, Pen? I need all the help I can get!” Seymour broke away and hurried to admit the electrician.

I dug out my cell, called Eddie, and (thank goodness) got him on the second ring. “Come to Todd Mansion with your gun,” I pleaded. “Can’t explain. I think Seymour’s life is in danger.”

I didn’t know how long it would take Eddie to get here, but I was determined to protect my friend. I glanced around and noticed a Maglite on the counter. My fingers closed around the heavy black flashlight like a cop gripping his nightstick. Then I moved through the darkened house to the front door.

“Thanks for coming, Leo,” Seymour said.

“No problem,” Leo’s deep voice grunted in the foyer. “It’s a short drive from the bar on the highway.”

I cleared my throat. “You were drinking?”

“I was working. Been moonlighting for a couple of months at Gentlemen’s Oasis. I operate the stage lights, play the music, talk to the ladies.” He shrugged. “It’s a pretty nice part-time gig.”

Seymour nodded. “Glad you’re here. I got a problem.”

“Yeah, Bud collared me at the bar. Told me you blew a fuse,” Rollins said, smirking.

“I’m not a moron, Leo. I could fix it if I knew where the damn fuse box was,” Seymour said.

“It’s most likely in the basement, probably along the south wall, because that’s where the main comes in off Larchmont. Show me how to get downstairs and I’ll get your juice back.”

Holding my breath, I decided that Leo had changed his plans to hurt Seymour. Seeing me here must have made the difference—after all, I’d be a
witness
.

I followed the pair to the kitchen, still gripping the Maglite tightly. We walked through a narrow door and down a rickety wooden staircase. The musty basement had a low ceiling and an uneven dirt floor. It was damp and cool, too, like a root cellar.

Leo produced a high-powered flashlight of his own and beamed it around the tight space. He smiled behind his trimmed blond beard when his light centered on a wooden cabinet mounted on the south wall. Inside, Leo found two large fuse boxes and the glass-domed electric meter.

“You blew a fuse all right, but the dial on the meter is still moving.”

Seymour shrugged. “So?”

“So juice is still flowing. Somewhere in this house anyway.”

“But nothing works, upstairs or down,” Seymour insisted.

Leo shined his beam on three silver pipes bolted to the fieldstone wall above the fuse boxes. “The electrical lines are inside those aluminum conduits. Two of them run upstairs to power the house, but the third one goes sideways.” Leo shifted the beam until we saw the point where the silver pipe seemed to vanish into a blank wall. “What’s on that side of the house?”

Seymour rubbed his chin. “The folly.”

Leo blinked. “The what?”

“The fake ruins in the garden,” he explained.

“That’s a pair of two 240-volt lines in there. That’s
a lot
of juice. This folly must have some pretty powerful floodlights.”

“That doesn’t sound right,” Seymour said.

Leo frowned. “If you don’t have floodlights out there, then your neighbor could be leeching power. Let me fix the fuse. Then we’ll check out this folly thing.”

 

“SEE, NO FLOODLIGHTS,” Seymour said.

Even with Todd Mansion’s lights now blazing away, things were pretty gloomy out here among the overgrown lawn and tall weeds. I watched Leo carefully as he inspected the faux gothic archway and the artfully tumbled-down walls.

“What’s the point of this place?” Leo said. “It doesn’t even have a roof.”

“It’s decorative,” Seymour replied.

Leo grunted and pushed his way through the brush, to the opposite side of the structure. Seymour followed in his wake—and so did I, still tightly gripping the Maglite.

My handbag and cell were with me, too, and I glanced toward the road far away, anticipating Eddie’s wailing siren, but I didn’t hear a thing, just quiet night sounds, crickets chirping, and a dark sedan driving by—and then I realized, it wasn’t driving by; it was slowing down and stopping.

A figure climbed out. I couldn’t tell who he was from his dark silhouette, just that it was a leanly built man in street clothes. This was no cop in uniform. He stood there staring in our direction, but then, it would have been easy to notice us with our flashlights.

Meanwhile, Leo Rollins was gazing at Seymour’s nearest neighbor. The house was half the size of Todd Mansion. It sat at the bottom of the low hill, at least a quarter mile away and separated by a stretch of overgrown grounds.

“Your neighbor’s pretty darn far away to steal power,” Leo concluded.

“Mrs. Fromsette lives there,” Seymour replied. “She’s too nice to steal electricity.”

“Mrs. Fromsette lives
next door
to you?” I said.

“Yeah,” Seymour said.

“I can see a clear trail here,” Leo said, pointing. “Leads from the Fromsette place right up to this folly thing. Come on, Seymour, let’s have a look inside, get to the bottom of this power mystery.”

Leo moved through the shattered arch to the folly’s interior. Seymour started to follow.

“No, Seymour!” I hissed. “Don’t follow him in there!”

Just then I noticed the dark figure that climbed out of the parked sedan wasn’t standing by the side of the road any longer. He was moving across the mansion’s grounds, heading right for us.

“Seymour!” I whispered. “Listen to me!”

“Pen, what the heck’s the matter?”

“Look!” I pointed at the figure of the man now running full speed toward us.

At last, Seymour appeared alarmed. “Stop!” he shouted. “Who are you?!”

The man shined a flashlight on us. The bright light blinded me. I screamed.

“Freeze! Everyone freeze!” shouted the man. “Hands where I can see them!”

“
Eddie
?” I called, holding my hand against the bright light beam. “Is that you?”

“Of course, Pen. You called me, said Seymour was in danger!”

“I thought you’d be in uniform! I thought you were coming in a patrol car with a siren!”

“You caught me off-duty. And from the sound of your call I figured a siren might put you and Seymour in jeopardy.”

“What the hell’s going on?” Leo demanded, finally coming back out of the folly.

“You tell us,” Eddie said. His gun was now trained on Leo.

I closed my eyes, took a breath, and began to explain. When I finished, Eddie lowered his weapon and said—

“Leo didn’t sabotage Seymour’s brakes, Pen. I know that for a fact.”

“I know something else for a fact,” Leo said before I could ask how Eddie knew. “Something that looks criminal. You want to see?”

Eddie nodded. “Show me.”

The grounds were a mess inside the tumbled-down walls of the folly. Leaves, debris, dirt, and dried vegetation lay in heaps and gathered in corners. Then Leo’s heavy boots clunked hollowly and he played his beam on the ground at his feet.

“There’s a trapdoor here,” he said and pulled the metal handle. The door opened easily on well-oiled hinges. Behind it was a flight of worn stone steps, which led to an underground tunnel.

“Holy hidden cave!” Seymour cried.

We followed Leo down the steps and into the underground tunnel, which led to a secret room under the mansion. It was a cramped space, no bigger than a walk-in closet, and it was filled with state-of-the-art electronics devices including three surveillance screens, a sound system, CD and DVD players, all operated by a complex control panel.

“What the hell is this?” Seymour demanded.

Leo touched the control panel and the television screens sprang to life with black-and-white images of the mansion’s interior. “Hey, that’s my living room!” Seymour said. “And there’s the bedroom and the hall.”

I touched another button and the secret room echoed with the same sobbing and rushing sounds Seymour and I heard inside the mansion the other night. I quickly switched the CD player off.

Seymour pushed a button labeled VAPOR and we watched the den inside Todd Mansion fill with fog. I toggled the switch beside it, and the flickering image of Gideon Wexler appeared on the surveillance screen. We watched the ghost float across the room and then vanish.

“A projector’s hidden somewhere in the den,” Leo explained. “That’s just an old newsreel image of some guy projected onto the mist to make it look like a ghost.”

“Where did this stuff come from?” I wondered aloud.

“From
my
store,” Leo said, frowning. “I special ordered this equipment last year for one of my best customers.”

“You mean Mrs. Fromsette?” I asked.

Leo shook his head. “It was Jim Wolfe.”

Eddie laughed.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Leo just blew my big reveal.”

“What are you talking about?” I demanded.

“Remember those prints I lifted from the undercarriage of Seymour’s VW? Well, I got a beauty of a thumbprint off the brake cylinder that was punctured and the state just confirmed the match. Apparently Mr. Wolfe has a prior arrest and his prints were on file. I was going to take him in anyway.”

 

TEN MINUTES LATER, we were back inside the mansion. Once Leo knew what to look for, the electronics hidden throughout the house were easy to locate.

The smoke machine was tucked away in the attic, the mist pumped into the den through a pipe in the chandelier. The projector was in the light fixture, too. The cold spot was created by a hidden air-conditioning unit, and dozens of tiny speakers were secreted in the house, four of them inside the columns of the four-poster bed.

“That’s why you heard the noise before I did, Pen,” Seymour said. The four of us were standing in the master bedroom. “Those speakers directed the noise right to your ears.”

“This is so twisted,” I said. “All these devices just to drive poor Miss Todd crazy.”

“It takes days of work to set this stuff up,” Leo said. “And you can’t do it in secret.”

“Jim Wolfe had almost two weeks to do it!” I recalled the story Mr. Stoddard had told me in his Millstone office. “After his backhoe ‘accidentally’ ruptured the gas main on Larchmont late last summer, Miss Todd was evacuated. While she was suffering a mini-breakdown in a Newport hotel, Wolfe was installing the equipment to push her over the edge.”

Leo shook his head. “Two weeks isn’t enough time to dig that tunnel or build a secret room.”

“I think the house’s previous owner, Gideon Wexler, built all of that back in the 1940s,” I said, remembering Jack’s case and Fiona’s research. “I’m betting he tricked his followers using the same basic ploys, just with older equipment.”

Seymour scratched his head. “What did Jim Wolfe expect to gain from this stunt?”

“Wolfe had to be working
with
someone or
for
someone,” I said. “Most likely Mrs. Fromsette.”

“Why not the Lindsey-Tilton group?” Seymour asked.

“The haunting was too personal,” I said. “The newsreel footage of Wexler tells me someone who knew Miss Todd intimately was involved. It
has
to be Mrs. Fromsette. Remember that trail leading to her house? It wasn’t overgrown. Someone’s been using it.”

Eddie frowned and folded his arms. “And how are we going to
prove
that she paid off Wolfe?”

I thought about the vicious tricks Mrs. Fromsette pulled on her sister and decided the woman needed a taste of her own medicine.

“I have an idea, but I’m going to need help to pull it off.”

“What are you thinking, Pen?” Eddie asked.

“I’m thinking that turnabout is fair play.”

 

IT WAS NEARLY three A.M. when we finally made the call using Buy the Book’s telephone. Mrs. Fromsette’s phone rang once, twice, three times.

“You’re sure this is the right number?” I whispered.

Seymour nodded. “April told me that she and her mother have separate lines. This is Mrs. F’s private line.”

The phone clicked. “Hello?” said Mrs. Fromsette’s sleepy voice.

I hit the switch on Sadie’s recorder and the tape Leo hastily edited worked like a charm. “Why are you tormenting me?” the voice of Miss Todd asked, seemingly from beyond the grave.

“Who—who is this?” Mrs. Fromsette demanded. She sounded wide awake now.

I lifted the Pause button and let the tape continue to play.

“Why are you tormenting me?” Miss Todd’s voice repeated.

“Timothea? Is that you? But how can it be?” Mrs. Fromsette’s voice was tight with fear.

Once again, I lifted the Pause button.

“Why can’t you leave me in peace?” Miss Todd’s recorded voice demanded.

Leo did his best to eliminate background noise. He wasn’t entirely successful, but the rushing sounds that remained were eerie and added to the overall effect.

Now I turned up the volume. “WHY ARE YOU TORMENTING ME?” Timothea’s voice boomed.

“It wasn’t me!” Mrs. Fromsette shouted. “It was April!”

April
, I thought.
April Briggs?!

“It was my daughter and that man—”