by Mary Bowers
“Demon?” Lily repeated, pop-eyed.
“If she wanted an icon of an angel she could go to any gift shop,” I said dryly.
There was a gentle knock at the door and it opened a crack. It was Michael. “I heard your voices in here . . . oh, hello, Dobbs.”
“Hi, Michael.”
No explanations were made, but I suddenly realized there was activity in the B&B and it was now broad daylight. I stood up and said something about getting breakfast into the oven.
“I’ll come along and help you,” Lily said.
“Thanks,” I said, “and by the way, stay away from that guy.”
I meant it, but of course they all laughed. The Marvelous Dobbs even blushed.
Chapter 23
Breakfast went off without a hitch, with Arielle having hers in bed.
I knew there were good old-fashioned bed trays in the kitchen somewhere. I remembered Michael bringing me breakfast in bed on one the first morning we were there. I finally found them in a cabinet over the refrigerator. I let Teddy take the tray in to her, after arranging a light breakfast and juice on it. The flowers were Teddy’s idea. He went out to Arielle’s garden next to the patio and picked a little bunch of periwinkle, a perfect little posy, and put it in one of the highball glasses in water while Lily and I watched without comment.
I opened the door for him to go into the bedroom and tried not to listen while she burbled at him over the flowers and the service and all, and you didn’t have to do this, I should be serving you, darlin’.
I shut the door.
The rest of us assembled on the patio with our breakfasts and grouped the tables so we were all sitting together. Play time was over.
The cast and crew got to work, devising a plan of attack, making notes, roughing out a storyline, while Michael and I quietly listened. They were an impressive team, I realized. Occasionally I was asked a question, but basically this was an efficient machine at work, and once Teddy came out and joined us, it was all business.
“Wyatt, you can take all day today arranging the lighting,” Teddy told him. “We’re starting after dark, so darken the rooms before you start testing.”
“Are we moving around the B&B?” Wyatt asked.
Teddy considered. “No. It’s a small object, and it won’t be picking itself up and running around – at least I hope not. There’s more room for you to work around us in the parlor. We’ll do it there.”
“It’s also a fragile object,” Lily pointed out. “We don’t want to cleanse it only to break it.”
“I’m not going to break it,” Teddy said testily.
Dobbs was sitting next to me, remaining rigidly silent, as if trying not to attract Teddy’s attention. Teddy, for his part, rigidly avoided looking at or talking to Dobbs. There seemed to be a wall of ice between them, and everyone was aware of it except for Ed. Lily had the good sense to pay no attention to Dobbs in front of Teddy.
“You’re all missing the point,” Ed said, and he went off on a dissertation of the perils of an entity freed from its physical containment.
While that went on, I leaned in to Michael and whispered, “Looks like we might have one more day to ourselves today. They couldn’t possibly need me before tonight. Want to do some more sightseeing?”
“Yeah, why don’t you two go enjoy yourselves today,” Teddy said, surprising us. I hadn’t realized we could be overheard. “We’ll be doing technical stuff. Wouldn’t interest you.”
“Thank you, Teddy,” I said, genuinely touched. Teddy could be a very nice guy, sometimes, but for some reason it always surprised me. Only when I learned later on exactly why he was so happy to have us out of the B&B that day did I realize that this wasn’t one of those times when he was being nice.
* * * * *
On the tourist tram, we’d been driven along Eaton Street, where the strange artist who had once owned Robert the doll had lived. After hearing that Darrien lived in a mansion on Eaton Street, I was curious to know which one was his. As if we could figure it out on our own, we walked over that way and slowly took in the street again, this time on our feet.
The homes certainly were beautiful, and most of them were impractically large. Impractical, that is, except for being bed-and-breakfasts, which some of them now were. Darrien had left us at around 11:00 the night before, so I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be up and looking out his windows yet. For that reason, we felt free to rubberneck at the houses, point things out and generally act like tourists.
We hadn’t sat through the whole breakfast with the crew. As soon as we were finished, we went to our room and I got showered and dressed. When we came out again, Arielle was up and sitting in the kitchen, so after a quick Good Morning to her, with mumbles about being glad she was feeling better, we left.
So we got out earlier than we intended, and like I said, we figured Darrien would be sleeping late. We were making jokes about him having his own breakfast in bed, ignoring a hovering butler and speaking sharply to a mousey little maid who only wanted to draw the draperies, m’lord, when we saw him not fifteen feet away from us. We stopped guiltily, hoping he hadn’t heard us. Arielle had painted such a vivid a picture of him living in aristocratic splendor that we were shocked to see him digging around in his own flower garden in front of a ballroom-sized veranda. It surrounded the front of the house like a practice track for the roller derby, and there the master of the house was, up to his elbows in the butterfly garden.
We greeted him with guilty surprise and he sat back on his heels and wiped his face with a gesture reminiscent of his Uncle Oswald.
“How’s everything at The Sailor’s Rest this morning?” he asked, not expecting any bombshells.
We had lot to tell him. We walked up his paver pathway to get closer to him while he sat on the ground, and when we finally got to the part about me staying with Arielle to defend her from further attacks from flying décor, he looked around as if he didn’t want the neighbors to hear this and invited us inside.
“I was about to take a break anyway,” he said unconvincingly. “I had to fire my gardener. He was planting dune daisies,” he added darkly.
I kind of like them, myself, but Darrien’s mansion was bigger than mine, and he wasn’t renting, like me.
Inside, the house it was dim, cool and mausoleum-like, with a marble foyer full of dark, thick woodwork and wrought iron. A staircase fit for Scarlett O’Hara swept up to the heavens above, it seemed, and a skylight three floors up let feeble sunlight down upon us, though the sun was blazing outside. Even Helios hesitated to enter this frigid atmosphere.
Briefly trying to picture it as Arielle’s dream B&B, I decided I preferred the relaxed atmosphere of The Sailor’s Rest.
“So is my cousin all right?” he asked us in the foyer. “Was she hurt?”
“She looked fine to me this morning,” I told him. “She had breakfast in bed, but she was sitting up in the kitchen supervising the clean-up after breakfast when we left.”
“Sounds just like her,” he said irritably, “getting served by her own guests.”
Seeing our faces, he looked at me more closely. “Did you buy her story about the flying lamp? Or did you think she faked it?”
I could only look back at him. After a moment of staring, I said, “I don’t know.”
He considered me a while longer, gave Michael an unsatisfied glance, then said, “Come into the kitchen and have some coffee.”
His kitchen was something grand. The best appliances and tilework had been grafted onto the old framework without spoiling it, and a backdoor entry to a servant’s corridor gave the room an interesting C-shape, with windows on three sides. The cooking island was a block-glass masterpiece topped with icy quartz. He sat us down there and made k-cups of coffee for us while getting a glass of ice water for himself.
“Now what the hell happened?” he asked once we were all sitting down. “Not what Arielle said. What you saw for yourselves.”
* * * * *
I’ve
never been on trial for murder, or even any lesser charge, but I’ve done jury duty. By the time both attorneys get done inquiring into your life experience, prejudices and what you might already know about the case, you’re ready to confess to anything. You might even think you’d actually done it, whatever it was. The point is, Darrien was a better interrogator than either the defense or the prosecution.
I hadn’t meant to tell him what I’d been thinking as Arielle lay there in her satin teddy, but in the end, I did. And then he shocked me again, muttering, “She always was a tramp.”
Michael and I looked at one another as Darrien stared morosely at the melting ice in his glass. Then his shoulders dropped and he gave us a harried look.
“Look, don’t get me wrong. She’s my cousin, and I love her, but she’s always been . . . exasperating.”
“So you think it was all a set-up,” Michael said. “She threw the lamp herself, gave a loud scream, arranged herself on the floor and waited.”
“I don’t want to do her an injustice, but God help me, it’d be just like her. She always was a drama queen, and when she makes a play, it’s never subtle. Is she after that Teddy guy? The star of that show?”
He looked to each of us with a kind of pleading.
“Maybe,” I said with a few uncomfortable shrugs. “Maybe she just wants to get on the show. If that’s it, her plan worked, because she is. Teddy wants her for the shoot tonight.”
“She’s gonna be on TV now?” He sagged hopelessly. Then he drank some of the melted ice from the bottom of his glass. Setting the glass down again carefully, he looked at Michael and said, “If she tries to get Uncle Oswald in on this, you call me right away. He’s too old for this foolishness. One of these days, Arielle is going to be the death of him, I know it. Give me your cellphone.”
“Right now I don’t have one,” Michael told him. “I had it in my pocket when I jumped into the Gulf last night. It wasn’t waterproof, and it’s on the seafloor now.”
He turned to me. “Okay, give me yours.”
Startled, I did as he asked. He entered his phone number into my Contacts by himself, then asked me for my number. I gave it to him.
Then, after a moment of settling down, he said, “Thanks. I’m glad you two came by. Thanks for letting me know about all this. Should I come to the shoot tonight?”
“I don’t know if Teddy will let you in,” I said. “In fact, if he thinks you’ll interfere, I’m sure he won’t.”
He looked like he was prepared to argue about it, but finally he backed down. He zeroed in on me and said, “If things look like they’re getting out of hand, if it looks like she’s going to get hurt or is in danger, you call me.”
I nodded dumbly.
“And don’t tell my uncle about this.”
“I’m pretty sure he already knows.”
He swore. “Well, no matter what this Teddy of yours says, if my uncle gets mixed up in this, I’m coming over and putting a stop to it. You make sure Arielle understands that.”
“Shouldn’t you tell her yourself?”
“I don’t trust myself to speak to my cousin just now,” he said. “And I sure don’t trust myself to be in the same room with her. I’d probably knock her stupid block off.”
He silently wallowed in his troubles for a few minutes more, and sharing uneasy glances, Michael and I thanked him for the coffee, complimented him on his beautiful house, and took our leave.
He let us go without saying anything, staying at the cooking island while we let ourselves out.
Chapter 24
The reality show shoots were beginning to depress me. I never wanted to be in any of them, and this was going to make two in a row.
When I got back to The Sailor’s Rest, the teacup had been enshrined on a kind of séance table which had been draped with a plain white bedsheet, sitting smack in the middle of the parlor. A large, blank storyboard had been added to the back of the table, giving it a plain white backdrop. On the walls behind the set-up, large black photography drapes had been taped near the ceiling to give a matte black background to the set-up, with room for the crew to move around behind the table. When the lights went out and the cup was spotlighted, it was going to look eerily disconnected from the world.
I walked around the table, admiring how the object had been absolutely isolated; even the back of the storyboard had been painted black, to avoid light reflection. The teacup and saucer seemed to be sitting in the middle of a dead zone. Their perky prettiness made them look blissfully unaware, somehow. You were almost afraid for them. I admired the theatricality of it all, but I still had a hard time visualizing one of Teddy’s swash-and-buckle productions around this small, static focal point. This episode was going to be very different from the others, I decided.
Boy, was I right about that.
* * * * *
As zero hour approached, there was the usual penultimate activity, with the behind-the-scenes crew making their final tweaks, Teddy getting into character, Lily going over the sequencing and talking to herself a lot, and Ed driving everybody crazy. But then, oddly, about an hour before go-time, Ed disappeared.
For a little while, it was a relief. Then people began to wonder.
“Ed’s a pro,” Lily said. “He’ll be in his jumpsuit and on his mark when we begin.”
But she sounded a touch worried. The only one who seemed to think it didn’t matter was Teddy, and I suspected that had more to do with the fact that wherever Ed was, he’d taken Dobbs with him. Teddy was definitely not happy to have fresh, juicy talent hanging around. So he wasn’t worried at all, Lily was only a little worried, and nobody else seemed to care, except for Porter, who was oddly agitated.
I have to admit, I didn’t think much about it either. Never in a million years would I have suspected that it involved something underhanded.
Just about the time Lily started getting a wild look in her eyes, Ed and Dobbs showed up again, and Ed slipped into his room and got into his Haunt or Hoax? jumpsuit. Teddy had been pacing around in his for quite some time by then, looking larger than life and ready for battle. The only one who paid much attention to him was Arielle, who got the vapors every time he went striding by.
When Ed came out of his room dressed for the shoot, nobody asked him where he’d been; they were all so relieved that he was back they didn’t comment on the fact that he looked a little grim. He hated that jumpsuit, with its useless S&M studs and zippers and the show’s logo plastered across the back shoulders in spooky letters, so everybody probably chalked up his smoldering silence to that.
Teddy gave Dobbs a searing look, and Dobbs scuttled off, saying he’d wait in Ed’s room and keep himself out of the way. Just before he disappeared behind Ed’s door, he yelled, “Break a leg, everybody.”
Then we all assembled in the kitchen to go over Lily’s final plan, since Wyatt and Elliott had everything perfect in the parlor and didn’t want anything touched. Michael and I hung around behind everybody else, leaning against the back counter. I had been written into the shoot, but I’d gotten the idea that my role had diminished as Arielle’s had blossomed. I was supposed to do my thing, but I managed to catch the hint that I wasn’t going to be successful this time and Arielle would have to come in and offer herself up somehow. Nothing was explicitly said, of course, but I caught the drift.
Michael would be strictly out of camera range. He’d been around their shoots before. They knew they could trust him not to knock anything over or sneeze at a critical moment.
Porter was excited, but that wasn’t unusual. Like all dogs, he’s sensitive to the humans around him and knows when they’re getting ready to play. Haunt or Hoax? shoots, in Porter’s mind, are the world’s most excellent kind of playtime, like hide-and-seek but with even stranger behavior on the part of his humans.
Arielle was front and center, right next to Lily, since she was going to be the bait. It amounted to being a guest star, and she looked radiant. She’d worn a clingy, drifty dress that su
ggested an absence of foundation garments and would glow eerily in the low light. The men were tacitly impressed. Even Bella seemed to approve; she was cozying up to Arielle again and getting under her feet, not mine, for a change.
“I considered having Taylor do some kind of spell,” Lily said, after I thought she’d wrapped it up.
“Absolutely not,” I said from behind her. “That would just be cheesy – I’m no actress and I don’t know any spells. In fact, since you already have one guest star, I’m not sure I should be part of this episode at all.”
Everybody waited for Ed to protest, since I was his paranormal pet, but at that moment there was a distraction. Porter’s excitement had been visibly distracting Ed, and when the dog broke for the parlor, Ed was right after him.
“I knew it!” he yelled as he ran. “Before we can even begin, he’s going to smash the teacup.”
“Keep him away from my lighting equipment!” Wyatt yelled, and he, along with Elliott and Teddy, charged after Ed.
Lily managed to hold the rest of us back, but we were all listening for the dreaded sound of smashing china. It didn’t come. When Ed duck-walked back into the kitchen with his fingers hooked under Porter’s collar, everybody gave a sigh of relief.
Still controlling the dog, Ed said, “Perhaps for this particular shoot we should do without the dog, at least at the beginning.”
“We should probably do without him altogether,” Lily said. “This just isn’t his kind of a gig, you know, Teddy?”
Teddy looked very unhappy. He thought Porter was psychic and had been sent to be his guardian angel. He actually believed that Porter could warn him when he was in danger and had even saved his life. He was obviously trying to work up an argument, but even he had to admit that it wasn’t smart to have a bulldog in a china shop, or at least a place where there was chinaware sitting on a table.
Lifting Porter’s 60 lbs. easily, Teddy took him down the hall, murmuring into the back of the dog’s neck the whole way. Once he had him locked up, Teddy came back looking unhappy. He stood glaring at all of us as Porter scratched and beat at the door and sent up high-pitched cries of treason.
