Wishbones (29 page)

And probably should have feared.

We entered and went straight to the kitchen, where Tinkie examined Chablis and found her to be coming along satisfactorily. Chablis would be able to fly tomorrow without any ill repercussions.

Per the vet's directions, we gave the dustmop a tiny tablet for pain and let her snooze on a plump pillow in a corner of the kitchen. Sweetie settled in beside her, friend and guard. With Sweetie on call, Chablis was safe and we could go and collect our things.

We were halfway up the staircase when we both heard it. Tinkie grabbed my arm. It sounded like a child running, and every movie with an evil child popped into my head. If a little blond child peeped around the corner--

"We're getting our things to leave, Estelle!" Tinkie yelled the words. "You can stop this foolishness. We're leaving. The house is yours."

Somewhere on the upstairs hallway, a table crashed. I remembered the beautiful Chinese vase and knew what had happened.

"Damn it!" Tinkie started up the steps. She was angry. "I have had enough of this. Stop being a spoiled child."

Just as she got to the top, the lights went out. Even though it was still daylight outside, the hallway was plenty dark.

"What the hell?" she asked. "She's acting like she doesn't want us to go."

"Well, we're leaving anyway." I'd had it with the flying glassware and the tables that went thump in the night. The things that were wrong with Estelle couldn't be fixed by me or Tinkie. Or even Daniel's love.

"Could we just take a look through the east wing?" Tinkie asked. "We didn't really search there."

I checked my watch. "We'll try for two hours. Then we're leaving. I don't want to be here after dark. Why risk getting hurt?"

"It's a deal."

I gathered the high-powered flashlights Graf had bought and we took off down the second-floor hallway. Tinkie had purchased a stethoscope from a drugstore so we could listen to the walls. My plan was to find any additional secret passageways, check them and leave. Estelle was too clever for us. We'd never catch her. But if we did manage to hem her up, we were going to drag her out and turn her over to the authorities--either legal or mental health. She was going to pay for kicking Chablis.

The house was L-shaped, with the main wing extending north to south and the east wing jutting off. And then there were the stables and other outbuildings. I'd begun to wonder if there might not be tunnels that linked the buildings together underground. Hell, anything was possible where Estoban Gonzalez was concerned.

Because we hadn't spent any time to speak of in the east wing, it was creepy and unfamiliar, even in broad daylight. I kept having images of Jitty as Mrs. Danvers standing at a window saying, "It's a lovely view. Why don't you jump, Sarah Booth? Just jump and put an end to all of it."

"Sarah Booth, is something wrong?" Tinkie asked.

I shook my head. "Just thinking of an old movie,
Rebecca.
"

"I've thought of that film more than once," she said as we
moved down the hallway, tapping the plaster, moving portraits and tables, as we tried to find some place that sounded hollow. "The parallels are a bit uncomfortable."

We searched several bedrooms and finally ended up at the small study. The painting I'd admired was there, and Tinkie knew the artist. While she talked about the composition and use of color, I remembered something else.

"Tinkie, I was thinking about being tied to that rock in the ocean."

"Not a good thing to think about." She removed a shelf of books and began pressing on the built-in mahogany bookcase.

"When I was tied to the rock, Cece told me Sweetie and Chablis had been locked up in a third-floor bedroom."

Tinkie turned slowly and looked at me. "So someone in the house knew you were going to see that ghost and chase it. And that someone didn't want the dogs to mess things up, so they confined them."

I nodded. "Because the dogs can run so much faster than I can. The dogs might have caught the person I was chasing."

She nodded. "So there have to be at least two of them. Our ghost has an accomplice."

"So it would seem."

"Why didn't you tell me this before?" she asked.

"I thought you were going home. I didn't want to worry you. Then so many other things happened, it slipped my mind. If Estelle was the person I was chasing, who was the person who locked up the dogs? Even if Estelle is a sprinter, she couldn't be in two places at once."

"Who else was here? Never mind, because if someone was hiding in the house, in the passageways, we'd never know." She turned back to her shelf. I moved to help her, and we worked our way toward a lovely fireplace that held Indian pottery.

I moved the pottery. "This is the whole problem. With these hidey-holes all over the house, a battalion of miscreants could be involved."

"Press the stones around the edge of the fireplace. There has to be a trigger." Tinkie was taking books from another shelf. She had one wall denuded.

"Why the fireplace?"

"It's always the fireplace," she said. "Don't you watch any detective shows?"

The soft sound of thumping froze me on the spot. It was the same sound I'd heard for the past few days, but fainter, maybe weaker.

"Doesn't that sound like someone kicking the floor or a wall?" Tinkie asked. She rubbed at the chill bumps that had sprung to her arms.

"It does. Or a head rolling down stairs, a la
Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte
."

Tinkie got out her stethoscope and put it against the wall behind the empty shelf. Her face told me everything. She handed the listening device to me.

Someone, or something, was definitely thumping in another part of the house. The sound was traveling through the walls. I swallowed and strained to hear.

A heartrending sob trembled down the dead space of the wall and straight into my heart. In the past, I'd felt the strange noises were designed to frighten me. This was different. "Someone's in trouble," I said.

Tinkie touched my shoulder. "Or else it's a trap."

My chest constricted painfully. "Or it could be the ghost."

Tinkie's eyes widened. "Or it could be both--the ghost
and
a trap." She picked up a heavy candlestick. "What should we do?"

We had three choices. We could continue on the search, or we could get Daniel to help us, or we could run like hell. Tinkie was moving from skeptic to believer in wraiths of the supernatural realm, but I was way ahead of her there. I had the sense that the ghost who haunted the Marquez mansion was bitter and angry and filled with enough negative energy to truly harm us. But I wasn't certain what we were hearing was made by a noncorporeal being. This sounded like someone in distress.

But someone in distress wouldn't likely be shutting the power on and off and breaking things. Were both partners in this deadly game of destruction in the house?

"It sounds like it's coming from inside the wall." She held the candlestick in one hand and her flashlight in the other.

"I--" Before I could finish, both of our cell phones began to ring.

We answered simultaneously, looking each other in the eye.

"It's Daniel Martinez," Tinkie mouthed before she turned away so she could hear him.

"Hey, Millie," I said, delighted to hear her voice. "What's going on?" Now wasn't the optimum time for a call, but Millie
wasn't someone who chatted. If she was calling, she had something to tell.

"I've been doing some research," she said, "and I thought you should know that Vincent Day has a criminal record. An old one
and
a recent one."

I could hear Tinkie making soothing noises, and I wondered what in the hell Daniel was telling her. Millie was my priority now, though.

"How recent?"

"As in less than a year ago."

"What happened?" I asked.

"The reason the media didn't pick it up was because it happened on location in Canada. Both Federico and Vincent were directing films in the same province. You know, the production costs are cheaper in Canada, and it's so beautiful there."

Millie could work for the Canadian government as a PR person. "Okay, so they were working on different films on the same continent. And?"

She ignored my sarcasm and continued. "They both ended up in this trendy restaurant. From the account in the Canadian newspaper I found, Vincent walked over to Federico's table and said something. Federico stood up and responded. Then Vincent said, 'You righteous bastard, you ruined my life.' That was a direct quote, and then Federico said, 'Everything you lost, you lost by your own hand.' And he sat down. Vincent then attacked him, turning him over in the chair and trying to stomp him."

The scene Millie was describing sounded like utter chaos, and also the behavior of teenagers rather than grown men, and they were fighting about a woman who'd been dead for a long time. What really troubled me was that Federico had lied. He'd told me he hadn't seen Vincent Day in a long time.

"So Vincent Day was arrested?"

"That's right. He had a list of charges against him, and Federico gave the police a damning statement about the encounter."

"How did you find all this out?" Millie had tactics and sources that I needed to learn. When it came to digging up dirt on celebrities, she was incredible.

"There's this photographer, or he would be called paparazzi now. Long ago, when I was young and pretty enough to think about going to Hollywood, I contacted him. He was hungry and shooting wannabe star portfolios. Funny thing, he's from Elba, Alabama, so he was down-home folks."

"And you've stayed in touch with this guy all these years?" Millie was the kind of woman that men didn't forget.

"Not really in touch, but I knew how to find his e-mail. His name is Tor, or that's his professional name. Like Cher. Speaking of which, Tor did an exquisite spread on her. He sent me some photos that she autographed to me."

I hated to halt her trip down her star-studded memory lane, but Tinkie was talking low and intensely to Daniel. It sounded like something was seriously wrong. I needed to know Vincent Day's criminal history. What if he'd snatched Estelle to get even with Federico?

"So you called Tor, and he told you about the Vincent-Federico ruckus in Canada?" I interjected.

"Right. He was on the set of Vincent's movie doing some still work. The whole crew was upset about the fight. They lost a couple of days' work because Vincent was in jail. And Tor overheard Vincent say that he was going to get even with Federico one way or the other."

"What was the old charge about?"

"Apparently Vincent has a terrible temper. He was charged with domestic abuse by his wife, Ivana Day, back in the eighties. He was booked, but she later dropped the charges. Tor said she looked bad. Black eye, swollen face, bruises, that kind of thing. He took photographs when she came out of the
hospital emergency room, and yes, I did check the hospital records. It took some help from Coleman, but I found out that Mrs. Day was seen at a Los Angeles hospital."

I heard everything she said, but she had also invoked the name of Coleman. Tinkie was busy with her call and Graf was gone; I could ask the question that immediately sprang to my lips. But I didn't.

"Are you going to ask about Coleman?" Millie asked, saving me the bother of trying to decide if asking was a betrayal of Graf.

"I was and then I wasn't."

"Caught on the horns of a dilemma, huh?"

"That would describe it."

"Coleman is okay. He's lost a bunch of weight. In fact, he's downright thin. Looks like a high school kid again. He's living in the old Marston place."

I swallowed. He'd left his home and rented a place. That implied that he was no longer living with Connie.

"And because you're so concerned and asking and all, Connie is out of the hospital and in Jackson with her sister. Coleman didn't say, but the brain tumor was apparently another invention." Millie was going to tell me whether I wanted to hear it or not.

"It doesn't matter now." I wasn't being dramatic. I'd given Coleman plenty of chances to make this move and he hadn't. He'd held back and withheld and postponed. Now that I was gone, he'd taken action. "Did it ever occur to you that Coleman may have used Connie as an excuse so he didn't have to commit to me?"

"In fact, it did, so I asked him that," Millie said. "He was in for lunch the other day, and I just sat down and asked."

My mouth was terribly dry. "What did he say?" I couldn't help myself. All of my good intentions not to play into this conversation had fled.

"He said he'd made some bad mistakes, and he didn't
know if he could ever correct them. But the one thing he'd learned was that opportunities of a lifetime didn't come at moments of convenience, and that the next time something he wanted was put in front of him, he was going to take it, no matter the consequences." She cleared her throat. "He said that's what you'd done, and he admired you for it."

That last statement made me want to weep. Why couldn't he say that he was a fool, that he'd let me and himself down, that he saw now what he hadn't seen before. But it was his damn nobility in seeing how I'd done the best thing that made it impossible to allow myself to care for him in any way other than as a friend. Coleman would always put others ahead of himself--and therefore me. Love requires a certain degree of selfishness, and Coleman could never truly love me as I needed to be loved.