The Ghost and The Haunted Mansion (5 page)

“Right.” I began fishing around my shoulder bag’s less-than-organized interior.

I shook my head at the sight of the poor woman, my eyes lingering on the blood, the horrible expression of dread frozen on her face.

“I can’t imagine what Miss Todd experienced that terrified her so much . . .”

“Right, Jack. Sorry.”

That was when it happened. As my fingers closed around the cell phone in my bag, a chill enveloped me. It was a sudden, disturbing sensation, and I knew one thing instantly: This was
not
my ghost. No way. No how.

Jack Shepard’s spirit, or aura, or whatever you wanted to call his existence, fluctuated around me like a kind of energy field. His typical “presence,” for lack of a better word, felt something like a pleasant spring breeze on a warm summer day. It was always moving, swirling, or pulsing like a beating heart. Jack felt like a field of
living
energy.

Sure, he occasionally blasted me with an arctic chill, but it was always accompanied by an almost unconscious understanding of his mood. The cold I was experiencing now felt totally dead, without sensation or communication, like the lifeless chill of a coroner’s morgue slab.

Whatever this was, it was disturbing. As soon as I felt the anomaly, I cried out. My breath formed a little steamy cloud, as if a New England winter had just descended inside the Second Empire’s front parlor. I quickly moved backward, toward the room’s exit; and within a few yards, the stifling heat of the June afternoon immediately returned. Tentatively, I moved forward again and stretched out my hand. Again I felt the cold air, as if I’d breached an invisible curtain.

“Oh, my God, Jack. I don’t know
what
or
who
this is—”

Jack didn’t have to tell me twice.

More than a little unnerved by the bizarre phenomenon—not to mention poor Miss Todd’s corpse—I waited until I was outside before I made the call. But I didn’t dial 911, or put a call through directly to Chief Ciders office. Instead I called my friend Eddie Franzetti,
Deputy
Chief of the QPD.

Since I’d moved back to my hometown, Chief Ciders and I had clashed numerous times. At first, I thought the chief was nothing more than a tool of the small-minded town council, a body ruled by the manicured fist of Marjorie Binder-Smith, who had no love for me, my aunt, or our bookshop. But I’d since revised that opinion. Ciders’s more recent animosity, I decided, was simply the result of my tendency to show up his police force.

Fortunately, Eddie Franzetti was different. Married with children, Eddie had escaped working in the family’s pizza restaurant by joining Quindicott’s finest instead. After a rocky start on the force, Eddie had helped me close a case or two. Consequently, when the Staties made him an offer, Ciders was forced to recognize his value and promote him to second-in-command.

Eddie was more than just deputy chief, however, he was also my late older brother’s best friend. I was happy to call him my friend, too; and that was why, whenever I needed a cop, I called Eddie.

He answered on my second ring. “Pen! I know what you’re calling about. I’ve been meaning to get to the store and pick up those Narnia books you’re holding for my kids. I just haven’t had the time—”

“This isn’t about
my
business, Eddie. It’s about yours,” I interrupted. “There’s trouble at Miss Timothea Todd’s house. The address is 169 Larchmont—”

“I know where Miss Todd lives,” he said, a note of irritation in his voice. “What’s the problem this time?”

This time?
Jack echoed in my head.

“She’s dead,” I told Eddie, ignoring Jack.

“Aww, no,” Eddie said. “When?”

“When? I don’t know. I just found her—”

I did. “But, like I said, Eddie,” I added, “I just found her. Listen . . . I think she was murdered.”

“Are you there now?”

“Yes . . . I’m outside her house, in front of my car.”

“Stay there, I’m on the way. And
do not
touch anything.”

“I know! I’m not a rookie anymore, you know—”

Eddie hung up before I had a chance to ask about his previous encounters with Miss Todd. I closed the phone, shoved it into my shoulder bag, and thought again about that freezing curtain of air in Miss Todd’s living room.

“There was definitely a cold spot in there,” I told Jack. “In Miss Todd’s house, I mean.”

“And nothing. That’s just what the phenomenon is called. I mean, according to those occult books in my store.”

“You sure are changing your tune from a minute ago, when you ordered me to scram. Weren’t you picking up anything? You know, like a psychic vibration of a fellow spirit?”

“Well, listen, okay. Unexplained cold spots are found in haunted places.
You’re
a cold spot, for goodness’ sake.”

Jack’s irritation was easy to hear,
and
he got a whole lot colder. “You know, you have an awful lot of attitude for a ghost.”

Wailing sirens cut off any reply from Jack. A few moments later, a Quindicott police cruiser was bouncing up the mansion’s cobblestone drive, trailed by the volunteer fire department’s ambulance. Jack noticed the ambulance the same moment I did.

“Second?”

“Oh, yes.” I closed my eyes, remembering the electrocuted electrician, and took a breath. Death, death, and more death, I thought, then exhaled. “I’m really glad Eddie’s here.”

But when the cruiser stopped behind my compact, it was Chief Wade Ciders’s bulky body that emerged from the passenger seat. His even bigger nephew, Deputy Bull McCoy, climbed out the driver’s side.

“Where’s Eddie Franzetti?!” I blurted out, rather undiplomatically.

Ciders’s black boots clomped across the cobblestones until his giant shadow fell over me. He wasn’t fat so much as large, with a broad nose, a jowly face, and a barrel chest that strained the shirt of his blue uniform.

The chief had been on the QPD going on thirty years now. He’d been happily married to the same bride for even longer. He had grown children and small grandchildren. But the pettiness of small-town law enforcement had taken its toll on the man (or at least that was my theory).

Decades of dealing with routine drunk and disorderlies, traffic accidents, and teen vandalism would have been enough to dull the edge of any gung-ho rookie. But Ciders’s job as chief of police included years of butting heads with loud-mouthed City Hall bureaucrats, every one of whom had an opinion on how he should enforce the town’s ordinances. By now, I could
almost
understand Ciders’s knee-jerk reaction to any crime scene, serious or trivial: For him, it seemed to come down to how much time the confounded case was going to take away from his fishing trips and card games.

“I thought Eddie was coming,” I said in a less hysterical tone.

Adjusting his ten-gallon chief’s hat (the rest of the force had the regular flat-topped kind), Ciders regarded me. “I sent my deputy chief to fetch the
medicl ’xaminah
. Not that the management of my police
pahsonnel
is any of
yowah
business, Mrs.
McClu
-
wah
.”

I winced. Here we go . . .

“Yeah, Jack,” I silently told him. Bull McCoy was essentially Chief Ciders’s 2.0: a much bigger, much younger, much dumber version of the original model.

Ciders moved closer, until we were literally standing toe to toe. His grizzly-bear frame seemed to blot out the sun. “You said there was a body?”

“Inside.” I pointed. “In the living room.”

A pair of paramedics hurried past us, up the steps and across the entryway. They were followed by the stomping black boots of Bull McCoy, who entered Miss Todd’s house with one fist closed on his gun butt. I felt like warning McCoy not to touch anything, but I bit my tongue, deciding that was Chief Ciders’s job.

I looked up at the tower looming over me, and saw Ciders’s suspicious frown. “You’re pretty far away from your bookstore, Mrs. McClure. What were you doing at Miss Todd’s residence?”

I told him about the book order and pointed to the box in the backseat. I explained that Miss Todd’s front doors were wide open when I arrived and no one answered the door, even after I rang.

“That’s when I went inside and found Miss Todd on the floor in the living room.”

“Did you go upstairs?”

I shook my head.

“Did you see anything unusual on Larchmont?”

“Nothing,” I said immediately.

“Nothing? Not one thing? Not one
person
. Think, Mrs. McClure. You’re usually pretty observant,” he said, “if not overly so.”

Those last few words were muttered with naked condescension. I bristled, and Jack warned:
Steady, baby. Just answer the man’s questions.

“There was
one
thing,” I told the chief. “Uh, I mean, person. I saw one person on the street.”

The chief’s bushy gray brows drew together over eyes the color of acid-washed denim. “Who?” he asked.

“Seymour Tarnish. He sort of ran across the street, right in front of my car. The sun blinded me for a few seconds, and I nearly hit him.”

“But you didn’t hit him?”

“No. I stopped just in time.”

“So you saw Seymour, eh? And he was in some big hurry for no particular reason? Is that what he told you?”

I frowned. “Seymour didn’t tell me anything. He didn’t stop to talk.”

“Sounds to me like he was fleeing the scene.”

“Scene? What are you taking about? I didn’t say he came from this crime scene. He was just in a hurry to cross the street for some reason. He
must
have been in a hurry, because he didn’t stop.”

“Uh-huh. Describe his appearance for me, Mrs. McClure. Tell me exactly what you saw. You claim you’re observant. Prove it.”

“I just caught a glimpse of him, really. He was wearing his blue postal uniform.”

“Slacks or shorts?”

“Shorts.”

“What kind of socks?”

“White tube.”

“Anything else you can remember? Think.”

I shook my head. “Just the stain . . .”

“What stain?”

“A red stain on the back of Seymour’s uniform. I was worried for a minute that I’d hit him with my car. But then I realized he wasn’t hurt, because if he was really that badly hurt he wouldn’t have been able to rush off the way he did.”

Ciders shook his head. “Let me get this straight. You saw a bloodstained man fleeing the scene of a crime, and you don’t think there’s anything to report?” The chief almost laughed in my face. “That’s the best you can do, Mrs. McClure?
You
, with your bookshop full of fantasy detectives!”

“But Chief!”

“What?”

“Seymour Tarnish would
never
murder a poor, defense-less, little old lady! Seymour Tarnish wouldn’t hurt a fly!”

A grunt sounded behind me. Without looking, I instantly knew Bull McCoy had come back outside.

“You lookin’ at Tarnish for this, Uncle Wade—I mean,
Chief
?”

There was boisterous anticipation in Bull’s tone, if not outright glee. Sure enough, I turned to find the giant in a uniform smiling. Bull never could stand Seymour, and the feeling was mutual.

“Pick him up, Bull,” Ciders said.
“Now.”

“Chief Ciders, please don’t do that!” I begged. “I’m sure you’re jumping to the wrong—”

Stop, baby!
Jack boomed in my head.
Take a breath.

My fists clenched. “Why?!” I asked the ghost.

I exhaled, inhaled, exhaled. “No,” I silently told Jack. “I guess a few simple questions can’t hurt.”

“About Seymour?”

“Maybe,” I told the ghost. “But there’s a much bigger part of me that’s afraid of hearing his answer.”

CHAPTER 4

You stand for your side of it and I’ll stand for mine.
I didn’t do it, and that’s all I stand for.

—Frank Chambers, lying to the DA in
The Postman Always Rings Twice
,
James M. Cain, 1934

 

 

 

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Bull delivered my mailman to the Todd mansion. Chief Ciders escorted Seymour inside, sat him down, and started asking him those “few simple questions.”

“Why’d you do it, Tarnish? Why’d you murder the old lady?”