The Ghost and The Haunted Mansion (7 page)

“No,” the chief said. “They’re still going to the state’s forensics people. If there’s any blood, fibers, or anything whatsoever incriminating on here, they’ll pick it up, and I’ll want to know about it.”

Ciders shoved the shirt back at Eddie, who shrugged and stuffed it into a plastic evidence bag.

“Damn pizza stains,” Seymour muttered, folding his arms. “That uniform’s ruined anyway.”

“Wash them in white vinegar and cold water,” Eddie suggested. “Works every time.”

Ciders shot his second-in-command a nasty look. “You a law enforcement officer or a spaghetti bender?”

“Family traditions die hard. Here, Seymour, I had these in my trunk.” Eddie tossed the mailman a pair of navy running shorts and an extra-large white T-shirt with HOT PIZZA! emblazoned on the front and WE DELIVER! on the back along with the phone number of his family’s restaurant.

Seymour stuffed his chicken legs into the running shorts. They looked pretty tight over his boxers, even with the elastic band, but he didn’t have much choice in attire at the moment. He pulled the T-shirt on next. Then he pointed to Ciders.

“Listen up, Chief. I don’t have a lawyer yet, but I’m going to hire one. A
civil rights
attorney who’s gonna sue you and this whole stinking town for false arrest!”

Seymour started for the door. Ciders blocked his exit.

“Where do you think you’re going, Tarnish?”

“Leaving!”

“You’re not going anywhere,” the chief said. “You’re not out of hot water yet.”

“Oh, yes, I am.”

Seymour stepped to the right. So did the chief. He stepped to his left. The chief followed. I knew this dance wasn’t going to go on much longer. For one thing, Bull’s fingers were moving toward his nightstick.

“Crap,” I muttered, feeling guilty for getting Seymour into this mess. Then I launched myself between the two angry men.

“Stop it right now!” I cried.

“You’re both acting like children!” I added, ignoring the ghost.

I pushed at Ciders, but it was my flat leather sandals that went skidding across the polished hardwood. Then Seymour charged and I was shoved in the opposite direction. Before I knew it, I was pressed against Chief Ciders’s chest, his cold badge digging into my cheek. Somewhere in my head, I heard the ghost cursing.

“That’s enough, guys! Break it up!” I yelled.

The men finally broke their clinch so suddenly I nearly dropped to the hardwood. Ciders reached out to steady me. Meanwhile, to my surprise, Seymour turned his rage on me.

“Don’t think I’m going to forgive you, either, Pen! You’re the rat fink who fingered me! Bull told me. Making up a crazy story about how I was covered in blood. You should be ashamed of yourself!”

“How could I know what you were covered in, Seymour! You didn’t even stop after I almost ran you down. You just took off! Why did you run away?”

Seymour blinked at my question. “It . . . It was that darn pizza,” he said, the bluster going out of him. “I brought four slices up to the mansion today. Two for me, two for Miss Todd.”

“You brought lunch for her?” I locked eyes with Seymour. “Just how well did you know Miss Todd?”

He shrugged. “Pretty well now. I’ve been delivering her mail for a decade. At first I never saw her. Then one day, a few years back, I delivered something she had to sign for. Miss Todd answered the door with a book in her hand, and we got to talking about it.”

“What book?” Ciders demanded.

Seymour swallowed hard. “
The Boston Strangler
.”

Ciders narrowed his eyes on Seymour. “Didn’t the Boston Strangler break into homes and
kill
old women?”

“Yeah,” Bull said. “The Boston Strangler killed a whole
bunch
of women, Chief. Tony Curtis didn’t even know he was the strangler until Henry Fonda hypnotized him. I saw it in the movie. He was like some kind of split personality.” Bull lowered his voice and sidled up to his uncle. “Maybe Tarnish here’s got a split personality, too. Did you think of that? Maybe that’s why he can’t remember killing the old lady!”

Oh, brother,
Jack said.

“Oh, jeez,” Eddie muttered.

Ciders rolled his eyes. “That’s enough, Bull.”

I stepped closer to Seymour. “Tell us more.”

“Tell you more about what?” Seymour said. “I don’t understand.”

“You were saying that Miss Todd talked about books with you,” I said. “How often did you two chat?”

He shrugged. “Two or three times a week. Sometimes we’d have lunch together. We traded books, too. She was a very nice person.” Seymour shook his head. “I’m really sorry to see her gone. I’m going to miss her.”

“But what happened today?” I pressed.

Seymour sighed. “When Miss Todd didn’t answer the door, I let myself in and put the mail on the table in the foyer and left. I figured she was sleeping late or something. She did that sometimes when she stayed up late to see an old movie on cable.”

“You said you let yourself in?” I pressed. “So she left the door unlocked?”

Seymour nodded. “She has a mailbox by the front gate, but she doesn’t like to walk down the drive. So as a favor, I always take the mail to her door. She’s usually there to answer, but she told me that if she ever doesn’t answer, I was supposed to just set the mail on the foyer table for her. Frankly, I never bought the reason she gave me for not answering the door.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she told me that she couldn’t always hear the doorbell and that’s why I was supposed to leave the mail without seeing her, but . . .” Seymour shrugged. “I just think that some days Miss Todd wanted company and some days she didn’t. On the days she didn’t, she’d just leave the door open and ignore the bell. No big deal.”

“When you opened the door and stepped inside, did you hear anything in the house?” I asked. “Did you see anyone at all in the vicinity?”

Seymour shook his head. “No. And that’s nothing new. Larchmont’s like a ghost town when I deliver the mail in the late morning. The hotshots are already at work, their kids are either in school or at some exclusive horsey summer camp, and the ladies who lunch don’t exactly do their own yard work. Sometimes I’ll see a maid or a gardener, but there wasn’t anyone on the street during my rounds today.”

“So what happened after you left Miss Todd’s house?”

Seymour scratched his head. “Well, I didn’t leave right away. I was really hungry by then, and that delicious pizza smell was driving me nuts, so I sat down under that big oak tree in her front yard and ate my lunch. And then I ate the cheese off of one of Miss Todd’s slices—waste not, want not, right?”

“You said you were really hungry?”

“Starving.”

“Then you must have been in a hurry to eat, right?”

“Right.”

“Were you in enough of a hurry to neglect latching Miss Todd’s door properly?”

Seymour closed his eyes. “Oh, damn. I did that once before.”

“Okay, so that’s why the doors were opened. The wind must have blown them in and knocked down the mail and overturned the little table.”

“That’s a stretch, Mrs. McClure,” Ciders said.

“There wasn’t any blood in the foyer—not on the mail or the floor leading up to the corpse. So the ‘signs’ of a struggle are suspect if there’s another explanation, right? Wouldn’t a defense attorney argue that?”

Ciders scowled. “You’re reaching.”

I turned back to Seymour. “What happened after you ate your lunch?”

“I was full and it was a hot day,” Seymour said. “I kind of nodded off. When a squirrel ran across my chest, I finally woke up.”

“And that sauce on your uniform?” Eddie prompted.

“The squirrel spooked me, and I rolled over Miss Todd’s two slices. Got the sauce all over me. But that isn’t why I was running—”

Bull McCoy snorted. “What? You’re afraid of squirrels?”

“When I woke up, I realized I was late making the rest of my deliveries. Real late. Last month, I got slapped with a reprimand, and I didn’t need another one on my record.”

Seymour looked at his Wonder Woman watch, then openly glared at Bull McCoy. “I’m
still
not done with my deliveries, thanks to Deputy Dawg here.”

Bull’s face flushed. “Watch your mouth—”

Seymour smirked. “Bite me, Bull!”

Bull stepped forward—and suddenly there I was again, mashed between two angry men. This time the ghost wasn’t cursing. He was laughing.

“You’re not helping, Jack!”

A brisk, cold breeze suddenly banged the dining room window so hard the two men started. I heard another bang and realized Jack had blown in the front doors, too. (Nothing like making your point!)

“Calm down!” I shouted, taking advantage of the momentary surprise. I pushed against them until I held the two at arm’s length. “You have to get a grip, Seymour.” Then I shifted my gaze to Bull McCoy and Chief Ciders. “And you both know Seymour’s innocent. Why don’t you let him go?”

Chief Ciders shook his head. “Pizza sauce or no pizza sauce, he’s still my prime suspect in this murder—”

“Sorry, Chief, but I don’t think so.”

The deep voice that interrupted was new to the gathering. All eyes shifted to the doorway, where Dr. Randall Rubino was now standing.

A divorced Bostonian, Rubino had moved to Newport to start his life over. A few months back, he’d agreed to remain on-call for Ciders whenever the town of Quindicott needed an official medical ruling on a death. Then just a few weeks ago, Rubino decided to make another move—to Quindicott itself. Now he lived on the other end of Larchmont Avenue, where he was preparing to take over the practice of our local GP, who was retiring to the Florida Keys in another month.

Rubino wasn’t anything like the town’s longtime physician, a short, lean, balding sixty-eight-year-old. The young doctor was more like one of those physicians you saw on the daytime soaps—tall, fortyish, with darkly handsome features and a toothpaste-commercial smile. Between his good looks and impressive profession, he’d become a pretty popular guy with some of the locals (most of them female).

Today Dr. Rubino was dressed in wrinkled, salt-stained khakis and scuffed deck shoes. The man had a private boat and a passion for fishing, so I wasn’t surprised when Eddie mentioned picking him up at Mullet Point, which had some of the best ocean fishing in the state. Rubino’s tanned face had just the right amount of weathering, and his wavy brown hair had been raked by the wind.

Whoa
, I thought,
the man even smells like the sea.

“Easy, Jack. Don’t go getting jealous on me.”

Jack grunted—and got a whole lot colder. With a little shiver, I rubbed my bare arms.

The chief turned to Rubino. “Okay, Doctor, I’m listening. Explain what you mean.”

“I mean Miss Todd wasn’t murdered.”

“Go on,” Ciders said.

“It’s simple,” Rubino said. “Miss Todd died of natural causes, not foul play. In my opinion she suffered a massive and instantly fatal cerebral hemorrhage. I can’t be certain, of course, until I conduct an autopsy, but—”

“What about the blood?” Ciders broke in. “The victim was covered with it. Blood was all over the place.”

“Well, it was a
hemorrhage
, Chief, and that means there’s bound to be some blood. When the vein in her neck ruptured, Miss Todd started to bleed from her nose and ears. This is not an uncommon occurrence.”

“You’re right!” I told Jack—but it was Rubino who answered.

“What’s that, Mrs. McClure? You agree?”

“Uh . . .” I stared at the man. “Did I say that out loud?”

Dr. Rubino frowned. “Say what?”

Now everyone turned to stare at me. “Actually, Doctor, I have a few questions.”

“What questions do you have, Mrs. McClure?” The tone was mildly patronizing. I pressed on.

“The expression on Miss Todd’s face,” I said. “She appeared to be positively
terrified
.”

“You would be, too, if you felt a twinge in your neck and blood began to pour from your nose and mouth. You must understand that Miss Todd suffered a sudden, terrible trauma before she died.”

I thought of that cold spot and the strange noises she’d reported. “But there could have been something else that may have frightened her, right?”

The doctor folded his arms. “The only explanation I can offer for her frightful expression is medical.”

“I have a question,” Ciders said, glancing at me, then back to the doctor. “We’ve had several complaints from the deceased in recent weeks. Miss Todd claimed she heard noises inside and outside her home.”

Thank you, Chief!
I thought.

“I see,” Rubino said. “And did you find the source of these noises?”

Ciders shook his head.

“Well then, Miss Todd was probably suffering from some form of mild dementia,” Rubino replied. “She was quite old and very reclusive. On top of that, I doubt she’d had a medical checkup or a psychological evaluation in decades.”

“Not everyone gets a psychological evaluation as a matter of course,” I noted.

Rubino nodded. “True, but living alone like this . . . her physician probably would have ordered one. She could have been experiencing paranoia. Delusions. The onset of audio hallucinations—”

Audio hallucinations!
Jack laughed.
Hear that, doll? That’s what you thought I was!