by Howe, A. E.
TENTACLES
The Baron Blasko Mysteries–Book 4
By
A. E. Howe
Josephine Nicolson and the vampire in her basement set out on a quest to discover what caused her uncle’s death twenty years ago.
Josephine and Baron Dragomir Blasko arrive on Florida’s Cedar Island to find an eccentric group of guests assembled at the local hotel… and a host of unwelcoming islanders with a frightening secret.
A letter from her Uncle Petey points Josephine toward a cache of unusual treasure hidden somewhere near the island, but it’s soon apparent that both the newcomers and the locals will do anything to find it, including commit murder. Blasko and Josephine soon find themselves caught in the middle, up to their necks in danger.
Books in the Baron Blasko Mysteries Series:
FANGS (Book 1)
KNIVES (Book 2)
CLAWS (Book 3)
TENTACLES (Book 4)
SCALES (Book 5 - Coming 2021)
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Copyright © 2020 by A. E. Howe
All rights reserved.
www.aehowe.com
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Other Books by this Author
About the Author
Prologue
Peter Nicolson’s lifeless body drifted slowly over the sandy bottom of a small tidal pool on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. His pallid, water-logged limbs never flinched as the occasional crab scuttled across his chest, nor did he hear the screech of horror from the young woman who found him.
Soon others came and dragged the body higher onto the beach. One person recognized him as the stranger who’d come to Cedar Island a month earlier. The sheriff arrived within the hour and quickly realized that the marks on the back of Peter’s head were the result of an attack. But he also accepted that this was going to be one more in a long line of events on Cedar Island that he would have to gloss over. He’d vowed years ago to come out to the island only when he absolutely had to, and to get back on the mainland as soon as he could.
The body was loaded into the back of a truck and covered with a tarp. The sheriff then hauled it back to the mainland, where he made sure the coroner certified the cause of death as drowning before the man’s body was shipped back to his family in Alabama.
Chapter One
Twenty years later…
“This heat is unbearable!” Baron Dragomir Blasko growled.
“It’s southern Alabama in June. What do you expect?” Josephine Nicolson responded without looking up from the book she was reading.
“I didn’t even close the lid of my coffin this morning. Do you know how vulnerable that makes me feel?”
“We’re just having a little heat wave. It will pass soon enough.” Josephine wiped a drop of sweat from the end of her nose. “You know what I’ve found? The heat isn’t as bad if you don’t talk about it all the time.”
“Bah!”
“It couldn’t be no hotter if we were on the sun itself,” Grace Dunn said, bringing in a tray of iced tea. “Dinner is ready whenever you want to eat,” the maid told Josephine.
Josephine had asked Anna Durand, her cook, to stick to cold dinners until the weather cooled off a little. Though, in an Alabama summer, cooler only meant highs in the low nineties instead of the hundred-degree temperatures they’d lived with for the last few days.
“I’ll come eat in the kitchen. No sense in you setting the table for sandwiches.”
“I thank you for that small mercy,” Grace said with sincerity as she wiped the sweat from her dark brown cheeks.
Josephine stood up and her eyes fell on a book lying on an end table: The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. It wasn’t the book that caught her attention, but the memory of a letter she’d found inside of it when a supposed spiritualist had channeled her late uncle.
Josephine turned to Blasko. “I want to know what happened to Uncle Petey.”
“Ah, the letter.” Blasko knew that it had been on her mind for months. “Your uncle is buried in the cemetery here in Sumter, yes?”
“He’s there next to my mother and father. I was sixteen when he died in 1914 and I’m afraid I was a bit self-absorbed at the time. I can only vaguely remember the funeral. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about Uncle Petey, but before his death he wasn’t around much. He’d come to town whenever the whim took him, or when he needed money. It’s funny, though. I have such clear memories of him. He’d do crazy things to make me laugh, like somersaulting across the back yard. One time when I was very young, he challenged me to a tree-climbing contest in the big ol’ oak out back. My mother yelled at him good for that one.”
“He died in Florida?”
“That’s right, on Cedar Island.”
Blasko walked over to her and took her hand. “I know that letter stirred something in you which you need to put to rest.”
“Maybe it’s guilt. I don’t think I grieved much when he died. Not like I should have. He was always kind to me, and there was a gentleness in him. He cared too much and was too hard on himself.”
“You did make it sound like he took advantage of your father.”
“Papa groused about it, but he didn’t mind. Uncle Petey was a decade younger and, besides, he meant well and he never took much. Just enough to get started on his next adventure. I think the letter shows how much he disliked begging from the family.”
“So how are you going to investigate his death?” Blasko asked, putting a light emphasis on the word “investigate.” He had come to embrace his role as a singularly unconventional sleuth.
“I think I need to find someone who remembers the funeral better than I do. Tomorrow I’ll go down to the newspaper. Maybe there will be an article about his death or, if not, the obituary might tell me something,” Josephine said as she and Blasko went into the kitchen.
“Who else could you talk to?”
Josephine put off his question until she was sitting at the table with a plate of ham sandwiches and coleslaw. A metal fan whirred in the corner of the kitchen, pushing the humid air around. Blasko leaned back against the counter and watched her. He could eat, but he derived no value from the food so he only participated in the ritual when it suited him.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Josephine finally said. “Colonel Etheridge was my father’s best friend. Papa might have said something to him.”
Grace joined Josephine at the table. Since she had become Josephine’s co-conspirator in hiding the baron’s true nature, their relationship had changed to be more than that of mistress and maid. After casting a quick glance at Blasko, Grace turned her gaze on Josephine, who quickly lowered her head. Grace nodded and bowed her own.
; “Lord, thank you for this meal, but please could you make it a little cooler tomorrow? Amen.” Grace spent a good part of her time at church and now, whenever she felt that Blasko brought a whiff of brimstone into the house, she’d been putting a little pressure on her employer. Josephine held a neutral stance where the church was concerned, but she was willing to be more observant if it kept the peace in the house.
“Who else might remember the funeral?” Blasko asked after the women raised their heads and began to eat.
“I’m not sure. I can’t even remember if my father went down to Florida to bring the body back.”
“Maybe they sent it back on the train,” Grace said before taking another bite of her sandwich. “I remember my uncle’s body being sent back from the war on the train.”
“That’s possible.”
“Wouldn’t there be a record of it if the body was shipped up here?” Blasko asked.
“Probably, and my father kept meticulous records.” Josephine stood up.
“You need to finish your dinner,” Grace said sternly.
“It’s too hot to eat anyway.” Josephine ignored Grace and headed for the library. “Why didn’t I do this months ago? That letter’s been under my skin since I found it,” she muttered to herself as she walked.
Blasko followed her into the library and watched her sort through shelves of account ledgers before taking one down.
“The date on his gravestone is June 28, 1914.”
Josephine had taken note of the date the last time she’d visited her parents’ graves. She opened the ledger and flipped through it with an ease that came from years of working with the accounts at her father’s bank.
“Here’s the purchase of the gravestone. Also a donation to the church, care of Father O’Hanlon, who passed away just after the war.”
Blasko was looking over her shoulder and she pointed to an entry. “This is probably it. Paid to the freight office in Montgomery four days before he paid the church. Papa must have driven over there to collect the body.”
“What is that notation?” Blasko pointed to another line in the ledger.
“A payment to Utley’s Ice House. That would have been for storing the body for a few days. Utley has a room toward the back where bodies can be kept in the summer.”
Blasko nodded, thinking of the many differences between Alabama and his home in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. There they’d had the opposite problem. Bodies would sometimes have to be stored for months in the winter when a family was too poor to afford a crypt and the ground was frozen too hard to dig a grave.
“Do you think the colonel knows anything about your uncle’s funeral?”
“Maybe, though he was often out of the country during the war.” She closed the ledger thoughtfully. “But it won’t hurt to ask him.”
“No time like the present,” Blasko said, then shouted, “Anton!”
Anton Lacob stepped into the room as though he had been standing just around the corner, waiting to be summoned. The grey-haired gnome of a man with a shaggy beard and deep-set eyes had arrived that spring, along with two crates that Blasko had sent for from Romania. Ever since, he had acted as a kind of butler-slash-henchman for Blasko.
“You are going out, Baron?” Anton asked with a slight bow.
“Yes. My hat and coat, please,” Blasko told him.
Before Josephine and Blasko got to the back door, Anton had returned from the baron’s basement apartment with the requested items
Once outside, Josephine climbed into the driver’s seat of her car. It was understood that she drove whenever possible, though the baron had his own car. She wasn’t sure if it was because of Blasko’s near immortality or just a general recklessness, but his driving always left her feeling like she’d had a near-death experience… or two.
“We really should have called before coming over,” Josephine said.
“He is still the acting sheriff. I’m sure he is used to being interrupted of an evening by now,” Blasko said, waving away her concerns.
The colonel’s house wasn’t that far from Josephine’s. If the weather hadn’t been so stifling, she would have suggested that they walk. As it was, she went several blocks out of her way just so she could enjoy the air coming through the car windows. But soon enough she was pulling up in front of the little brick cottage with its turret and bay windows that had always reminded her of something out of a fairytale.
Colonel Samuel Etheridge answered her knock wearing a large smile.
“Well! To what do I owe the honor of this call?” he said, brushing back his unruly grey hair. The portly man wore only a shirt and pants held up by suspenders. Sweat dripped off his lavish mustache. “I hope you’ll excuse my state of undress. Damnable heat. Come on in.”
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Josephine said as she and Blasko walked through the door.
“Baron,” the colonel said, shaking Blasko’s hand. “It’s no bother at all, Josie. I just got back from the office. Fine mess you’ve gotten me into,” he said good-naturedly. Josephine had talked him into accepting the governor’s appointment as interim sheriff of Semmes County after Sheriff Logan had suffered a stroke.
“I want to ask you some questions about my uncle,” Josephine told him when they were all seated in the colonel’s study.
“Your uncle? As you know, I was good friends with your father, but I’m not sure I ever met your uncle. What was his name?”
“Peter, but everyone in the family called him Petey. He died in June of 1914.”
“1914? I was in the Belgian Congo in ’14. Diplomatic work,” he said, making it sound like it was anything but diplomatic work.
“Did Papa ever mention Uncle Petey or how he died?”
“No, I can’t say that he did.”
“He died in Florida, but he’s buried in our family plot in Pine Grove Cemetery.”
“I remember seeing his gravestone not far from your father and mother.”
“I’m just curious about the circumstances of his death.”
“Did you check the paper’s archives?’
“I’m going there tomorrow.”
“Old Man Connelly would have been the mortician back then,” the colonel said thoughtfully. “He passed away during the Spanish flu epidemic after the war, but his son Jerry should remember. He’s worked at the funeral home from the time he was old enough to see into a coffin.”
“That’s a good idea.”
“Why are you so interested in this now?” Etheridge asked, taking out a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his brow.
Josephine explained about the letter she had found.
“Do you think you can trust the letter? After all, the man who told you where to find it was a monster.”
“I’ve thought about that, but I believe that the letter truly was written by Uncle Petey and that he hid it in the book where I found it. I don’t know if the séance was real or just some trick of LeSauvage’s, but that doesn’t matter to me because I’m sure the letter is real.”
“Be careful. I don’t trust anything connected to LeSauvage,” the colonel told her.
“That’s why I want to find out everything I can.”
“Failing to look into the letter could be dangerous too. Inaction has its own risks,” Blasko said. With everyone drowsing in the summer heat, Sumter had been a quiet little town and he’d been bored for weeks. He was seeing this as an interesting puzzle to solve.
“Ha! As a military man, I’d have to agree,” Etheridge said, nodding.
“I don’t want to go home,” Josephine said as she drove down the brick street away from the colonel’s house. The thought of going back to the warm, stale air of her own house wasn’t appealing in the least.
“Drive down to the river,” Blasko suggested and Josephine smiled.
Once they left the town behind, the air seemed fresher and perhaps a little cooler. Here and there they passed farmhouses with windows wide open, soft yellow light spilling out into the ni
ght. Though the throaty roar of the car made it impossible to hear them, Josephine imagined the sounds of radio programs drifting out into the night.
As they got closer to the small community of Cotton Dock, they could hear the sound of rhythm and blues coming from The Dock, a small juke joint on the banks of the river. Josephine parked down by an old cotton warehouse and they got out of the car.
“It’s so peaceful here,” Josephine said as they walked toward the river. “I can’t believe that it’s been less than a year since someone tried to kill both of us on this very spot.”
“We’ve had some… interesting times.” Blasko took her hand and they strolled out onto the dock. A light breeze sent the water lapping against the rough wooden pilings.
“The river is beautiful in the moonlight.” Josephine followed the baron’s gaze across the water. “What’s it like?”
“What?” He turned to look at her.
“Having enhanced senses, or whatever you call them?”
Blasko was quiet for a long while. Then he squeezed her hand and led her to an old bench on the edge of the dock.
“Sit with me. It’s time that I told you a story.”
Chapter Two
When I first turned, it might have been considered a great gift. It was at a time when we were besieged by enemies. Every year we would find ourselves fighting invading armies or neighboring warlords. My family was exhausted. I’d lost a brother, several uncles and dozens of cousins. Our knights were worn out and the peasants were starving.
I was sent to what is now Budapest to gather arms and hire mercenaries. The journey was long and arduous, the roads little more than opportunities for highwaymen. Eventually I made it to a small village about one hundred miles from the Danube. I spent the night and was assured that the rest of my journey would be safe from bandits. The innkeeper told me that hardly a man had been held up in the last ten years. Incredulous, I pressed him on the matter. His explanation was that the local magistrate had done an excellent job ridding the woods of bandits. Several patrons of the inn told me it was far more likely that the night riders had simply found better hunting grounds.
