The Ghost and The Haunted Mansion (35 page)

“Wolfe Construction was in financial trouble?”

Eddie nodded. “Jim Wolfe underbid on so many contracts around the region that he ended up in debt. The upshot is that Arthur Fromsette wanted to convince his stepdaughter to change her ways by threatening to go to the authorities. It didn’t work. She killed him.”

“Then it was April who attacked Rachel Delve at the séance?”

“According to April’s confession, she believed Miss Delve was about to reveal the truth to her mother about her stepfather’s murder.” Eddie shook his head. “The act was good enough to convince April, even though it sounds like a lot of voodoo hooey to me. Talking to the dead! Can you imagine?”

“Shhh, Jack.”

Eddie shrugged. “In any case, April was the one who doused the candle and struck Rachel in the nose with the heel of her palm. Rachel was lucky she survived—Mrs. Briggs learned the technique in a martial arts class. If that single blow had been a little stronger, it could have killed the woman.”

Sadie cleared her throat. “Explain the timing to me again, Eddie. Those electronics were installed late last summer, weren’t they?”

“Yeah,” said Eddie. “Pen was right about that. Jim Wolfe set all the special effects up during the two weeks Miss Todd was in Newport.”

“But they didn’t use the devices to frighten Timothea for nine months,” Sadie noted.

“With Arthur Fromsette’s disappearance, there was a police investigation and Jim Wolfe got scared. But as the months passed, Wolfe got deeper in debt, and more and more desperate. Finally, when April moved back in with her mother for the summer, she convinced him to go forward with their original plan.”

I glanced around to make sure Spencer was out of earshot. “And what about that other matter?” I asked quietly.

Eddie leaned close. “We buried Gideon Wexler in his real grave on the Old Farm early yesterday morning. Nobody noticed.”

“What was in the original coffin?” Sadie asked.

“A bag of rocks,” Eddie said. “God knows how Miss Todd pulled that one off.”

I shivered, recalling the night I slept on that platform bed in Miss Todd’s master bedroom. Who knew I was sleeping over a mummified corpse?

“Funny, Jack.”

“Seymour decided to redecorate the master bedroom,” I whispered to the ghost. “He had to move that four-poster platform bed into the other bedroom to paint. That was when he found Miss Todd’s secret diary, hidden with Gideon Wexler’s corpse.”

“I returned the diary to Seymour yesterday,” Eddie told us. “I know Miss Todd wanted him to have it.”

“She did,” I said. “I believe
that
was the book she mentioned in her will. She must have known Seymour would eventually find Wexler’s body along with her written confession.”

“No offense to the authors on your shelves, ladies, but I think that diary was the most fascinating thing I’ve ever read.”

“I’d have to agree,” Sadie said, shaking her head.

So did I. Miss Todd’s story was downright operatic. According to her diary, Timothea lived in thrall of Gideon Wexler since the day they met, despite the fact that the man was thirty years her senior. Wilomena also loved Wexler. But the romantic triangle was not the reason for the rift between the half-sisters.

During their time together in Newport, Timothea learned of Gideon Wexler’s guilt in engineering the 1947 Long Island fire that killed J. J. Conway’s mother and seven other innocent people. Just like Todd Mansion, Wexler had rigged his Long Island manor with an elaborate setup to fool guests into believing the house was inhabited by spirits.

Ectoplasmic mists, ghostly apparitions, weird lights and sounds had been set up on the Long Island estate courtesy of Frankie Papps, who used his knowledge of stagecraft to create the effects. Frankie recruited Mabel Conway to act as a phony medium for Wexler, too. But their arrangement fell apart when Frankie and Mabel threatened to expose Wexler unless he gave them the big payoff he was continually holding out on them.

When the couple went out to his Long Island house to collect, Wexler drugged and imprisoned them until the time was right to stage the fire. I shuddered to think of the horror J. J.’s mother experienced as the flames roared around her.

Because Timothea was intimate with the man, she finally realized what kind of monster Wexler really was. She knew it was only a matter of time before he killed again. To prevent that from happening, she placed enough poison in her lover’s tea to kill him on the spot. In those days, when a fiftysomething man, who pushed the scale at three hundred pounds, keeled over dead, no one questioned it. No one but Timothea’s half-sister, Wilomena Field. She knew what really happened and made a pact with her sister to never reveal the truth. The two never spoke again—about that or anything else.

In the end, Miss Todd’s own guilty conscience made her a prisoner. She served a life sentence for murder in her own home. And after years of isolation, the fake haunting unhinged her completely. She really believed that she was battling the ghost of Gideon Wexler, who’d finally risen from the grave to exact revenge.

“Well, Eddie,” I said. “Truth is stranger than fiction, and Miss Todd’s case is certainly strange. I can’t believe you kept it out of the news.”

“I had plenty of help, Pen. Councilman Lockhart. The chief. Doc Rubino. Even Bull McCoy. Nobody wants Quindicott to become a stomping ground for lunatic spiritualists or television spook hunters.”

Eddie glanced at his watch. “Well, I’d better hit the road.”

I walked Deputy Chief Franzetti to the door. “How’s Zara Underwood these days?”

He laughed. “She’s wearing a police uniform now, courtesy of the policewomen on staff. You should stop by the station and check her out.”

“I will. Good luck in Providence, Eddie.” I unlocked the door to let him out.

I grinned, happy to hear Jack’s voice again, happy he was with me still.

“Well, you know, Zara sold a lot of books for us, and she even helped solve a crime or two. And these days the public’s pretty unforgiving: It’s out with the old, in with the new.”

“Never, Jack.”

From across the floor, Spencer called to me. “The new standee’s finished. Check it out!”

“That’s no Alvin, Jack. That’s one of the biggest-selling authors in the country.”

And that wasn’t the only upside. The cardboard cutout of a distinguished author wearing a tailored suit wouldn’t stir an ounce of controversy in this little town, unless maybe someone objected to the color of the man’s tie. Lucky for me, James Patterson wasn’t going to be posing in lingerie anytime soon.

“Nine thirty,” Sadie announced. “Time to start a new day!”

 

THE APARTMENT WAS quiet again. But it was a good kind of quiet. Not empty or cold, just the kind of quiet that comes after the sun sets on a long day of work, a day of feeling useful and alive.

“You didn’t?”

“Doing what?”

“Phantoms?”

I turned over beneath my bedcovers, stared into the silvery silence of the moonlit room. “Tell me something, Jack,” I said, “what happened with your case?”

“J. J. Conway. You had to tell him, didn’t you? That you found his mother.”

“Sorry to remind you. But your memory was a huge help to me.”

“So did the little boy go into a foster home?”

I smiled into my pillow. “J. J. said she was a swell cook.”

“Sounds like he got it.”

“What does that mean?”

“What are you talking about? I’m lucky to have him.”

I turned over again and thought hard about that. I decided I couldn’t argue. So I didn’t. I just yawned and closed my eyes.

“Thanks, Jack,” I said.

Good night, baby,
he whispered back.
I’ll see you in your dreams.
Then the ghost’s breezy presence receded again, into the fieldstone wall that had become his tomb.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alice Kimberly
is the pen name for a multi-published author who regularly collaborates with her writer husband. In addition to the Haunted Bookshop Mysteries, she and her husband also write the bestselling Coffeehouse Mysteries under the pen name Cleo Coyle. To learn more about Alice Kimberly, the Haunted Bookshop Mysteries, or the Coffeehouse Mysteries, visit the author’s virtual coffeehouse at
www.CoffeehouseMystery.com
.

Join Penelope and her ghostly Pl as they
team up for an all-new spirited mystery. To
learn more about Pen and Jack’s upcoming
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