“It’s a long ten miles,” I offered.
Ian nodded across the table at me. “It is if you drive slow.”
“You can’t drive fast on that road,” Roman said. “And especially not in weather like this.”
“Speaking of driving,” Beryl said, “where will you travel to next, Yumi?”
Beryl smiled at the girl. I got the impression she liked Yumi because she was always polite to her. Even when Beryl was being awful.
“Roman and I want to visit Thailand.”
“And I want her to show me Japan.”
Beryl gave her head a little shake. “Don’t you remember what I told you yesterday? Travel alone!” She banged the end of her fork on the table. “Travel alone, travel alone, travel alone. That’s what I say. And I should know. I’ve traveled more than anyone.”
Roman’s hands clenched the edge of the table and his body shot forward. Just as he was about to say something which I suspected was going to be rude, Uncle Joe beat him to it.
“And it made her into the charming creature you see before you today,” Joe said loudly, earning laughs around the table.
Beryl glared at him. “I’m ninety years old on Sunday. With age comes wisdom. It’s folly not to listen to me.”
“You’ve told us ninety times already,” Joe said. “Get over yourself. Your years just made you meaner. If you’re wise, I’m a donkey.”
“You bray enough to be one,” Beryl said sullenly.
“Yumi and I want to take a year off,” Roman said. “Really travel. See the world. Not just Thailand and Japan. All of it.”
“A year? That’s not enough.”
“That sounds like a fine idea,” I said to them. “I bet you could see a lot in a year.”
“We think so.”
“You know, Roman, you think too small.” Beryl was leaning toward him with a wicked glint in her eye.
“What?”
Beryl licked her lips. What new words of torture did she have planned? It looked like she’d been saving something up to unleash on him.
“You think too small. Like your mother.”
“My… mother?” Roman’s eyes went wide. “What on Earth do you mean?”
“You heard me. Like. Your. Mother.”
“But you don’t know my mother!”
“Oh? Don’t I?”
The shock and disbelief on Roman’s face were met with delight on the face of the demented old torturer sitting at the head of our table. I had no doubt the conversation was about to turn very awkward when we were interrupted.
With a pitter-patter, Angel flew into the room.
“Ghost!”
Amber came in right behind her. “There’s someone in the driveway. At least we think there is. It’s hard to see through the snow. They look hurt!”
Roman’s mother forgotten, all of us except Beryl hurried to investigate. The last I saw of her, she was holding a piece of bread and chewing it, a happy little smirk on her pink-dusted face.
Marcus reached the front door first and flung it open. He held up a hand over his brow as the first flurry of snowflakes whipped into his face.
The rest of us crowded around him, staring outside. There were two large floodlights on the front of the house, but they did not penetrate far in this weather.
“Out of the way!”
Ian pushed through and ran out the door. Joe followed behind him.
“Here!” Ian shouted a moment later. Already he was lost to our view. “It’s—”
His voice was cut off by a sudden gust of wind that snatched his words and delivered them right back up the mountain.
“—got him!” The voice was Joe’s. At least I think it was.
A shambling trio, leaning forward against the wind and snow, stumbled toward us.
“Make some room.” I began to gently push everyone aside.
Ian and Joe were flecked with white snow when they made it back. Between them, blood pouring down from his forehead, was Norman Langan, Beryl’s lawyer.
His Mercedes Benz had not been as unstoppable as he thought.
“Let me see,” Maeve said, pushing to the front. “I used to be a nurse.”
Although I knew some first aid and was prepared to help, I was glad there was someone else to take the lead. I was supposed to be on vacation, after all. I stepped aside for her.
“What should we do?” I asked her.
Maeve didn’t answer immediately and instead began conducting a diagnosis. She looked at the wound on his head, from which a considerable amount of blood was pouring, and then proceeded to hold a finger in front of his eyes and move it back and forth.
“Norman? Norm? Can you hear us? Do you know where we are?”
His mouth opened, but no words came out. He closed it again. Maeve was instantly all business, her earlier sourness forgotten.
“He’s concussed. There’s a first aid kit in the kitchen. Cupboard above the dishwashing sink. Olive bag with a red cross. Someone fetch it. I’ll take him upstairs. Young man,” she said to Ian, “you help me with him up the stairs.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
Marcus and Jini went to the kitchen to grab the first aid kit. Slowly, Maeve and Ian made their way up the stairs with Norman.
“Am I home?” Norman said slowly, his words slurred. “No. Hotel. It’s hot. Too hot. Where’s the thermostat? Beach in the morning.”
The three of them rounded the landing at the stairs and disappeared from view. The last I heard was Maeve telling Norman to stop talking and focus on his walking.
Marcus and Jini reappeared with the first aid kit hanging from Jini’s shoulder. It was larger than I expected, a drab satchel that looked like a relic from a long gone war. It looked substantial enough to contain more than enough supplies to deal with Norman’s injuries, assuming the bag’s contents weren’t as ancient as the bag they were contained in.
The young couple rushed up the stairs. Amber, Angel, Yumi, Roman, Uncle Joe, and I were left in the hallway. With several thumps of her cane, Beryl reappeared.
“What’s the fuss? Where’s Maeve? Your food’s getting cold.”
“It’s Norman. He had an accident. He was wandering around in the snow.”
That stopped Beryl in her tracks.
“Norman? But he left. Didn’t he?”
“He did. But he didn’t make it. Now he’s back, and he’s hurt.”
Beryl’s head swung back and forth. “Whose fault is it? It must be one of yours.” She fixed her gaze on her ex-husband. “Joe! It was you. Your jibber jabber about the roads being dangerous must have distracted him!”
“My fault? Sure. If you say so, Beryl.”
She nodded with some satisfaction.
“Nothing changes with you, does it, Beryl? It’s always someone else’s fault.”
“What? What is?”
“Anything. Everything.”
The lights flickered. We all looked up.
“That doesn’t look very promising,” Roman said.
The lights flickered again.
In preparation for the inevitable, I pulled out my phone and switched on its flashlight. Just in time too.
Yumi sucked in a sharp breath as the lights flickered a final time before shutting off and plunging us into darkness. I swung my phone flashlight around.
“Do you have lanterns, Beryl?”
“Of course I’ve got lanterns. In the kitchen, same cupboard as the first aid kit. Hurry up. It’s dark in here.”
“We’ll go,” Roman said. His own phone was now also lit up with its flashlight.
“Whee!” Something thumped into my leg. Or someone, rather. A little someone. “Now it’s a real ghost house!”
“This is not a ghost house,” Beryl said in the dark.
I didn’t really believe in ghosts.
But right then, I thought that Angel might have been closer to the truth than Beryl.
It was very dark indeed.
Outside, the wind howled.
Co
ld drafts whipped around through cracks in the doors and windows.
And distant footsteps thumped upstairs and down.
I shivered and held my arms against me.
It was going to be a long night.
Chapter Six
My room felt a whole lot less cozy that night. After dressing Norman’s wounds and putting him into bed in one of the unoccupied bedrooms, Maeve had ventured into the basement to fire up the house’s furnace and its ancient central heating system.
My room had a single old-fashioned radiator under the window. I was convinced most of its heat was sucked straight out into the snowstorm outside through the cracks around the frame.
The house was well equipped with battery-powered lamps—considering the age of everything else, I was almost surprised they didn’t use whale oil—and we had each been given one to take to our room.
After Norman had been treated and settled, we had reconvened in the drawing room with more hot chocolate. The fire had been fueled and stoked, and the room danced with flickers and shadows while Maeve explained what she had learned from Norman.
“He was a bit confused, but as best I can make out, his car was hit by a small avalanche at the narrow pass.”
“Sounds right,” Ian said with an air of authority he didn’t have any right to. “It sure was narrow there. We noticed it on the way in.”
“Then what?”
“As best I can tell, he got out of the vehicle and walked back to the house. He must have gotten lost along the way because he was suffering from mild hypothermia too. He was lucky to avoid frostbite.”
“Doesn’t he need an ambulance?” Uncle Joe asked.
“An ambulance would need the road cleared first.”
“What about a helicopter?” Jini asked.
“In this weather? They wouldn’t be able to see where they were landing. We’d need all the lanterns out there, and even then it wouldn’t be enough. No, he’s better off staying here. He’s concussed, but I don’t think there’s bleeding into the brain. He should be okay in the morning, or perhaps a day or two.”
“We should call and see what the emergency services say, just to be safe,” Joe suggested.
“We can’t,” Ian said. He tried to sound somber, but I recognized an underlying level of excitement. “The phone line is down, too, isn’t it, Maeve?”
“It is.”
“And our phones can’t get a signal anymore! Either the towers are down, or the snow is blocking the signal. I can’t get anything on mine. Everyone, check your phones. Maybe you can get a signal on a different network.”
Ian was right. None of us had any signal at all. It looked like we were incommunicado.
“I don’t like this,” Jini said. “We shouldn’t have come until Sunday.”
“Maybe no one will be able to get here, even on Sunday,” Ian said, his excitement now palpable to everyone.
“Surely the weather won’t stay bad that long, will it?” Jini asked with some consternation.
“Could do,” Ian said brightly. “And the road’s blocked now. It might take weeks to clear it.”
“It won’t take weeks,” Uncle Joe declared. “Even if I have to clear it myself.”
We fell into a silence that was broken only by the crackling of the burning logs on the fire and the howl of the wind dancing around the sides of the house.
That’s when I decided to call it a night. Two nights in a row, I went to bed early, and didn’t regret it one bit.
It meant I got at least some sleep in.
* * *
At four o’clock in the morning, my eyes flicked open. One minute I was fast asleep, the next I was wide awake and wondering precisely why that was the case.
The wind was still blowing outside, but its earlier howl had dropped to roaring gusts with an occasional whistle as the wind hit a certain feature of the building’s exterior at just the right angle.
The room was as dark as a room could be. Outside, the thick clouds and heavy snow were blocking any moonlight or starlight that may have been beaming down above. And inside, there was nothing to provide any form of illumination with the electricity off.
So, I listened.
The house creaked.
Or did someone make it creak?
Then another creak, farther away, had me convinced it was just the house settling. Or perhaps rising. Or even swaying? No. This house was made entirely of stone. It wouldn’t sway like the big buildings in Las Vegas might in a high wind. Stone doesn’t bend like that.
Stone.
Stone.
A little smile crept across my lips as I thought about my friend. He would be in his element out here.
Stone had spent years working for the government across the world, engaging in all kinds of missions on behalf of our nation. He used to be CIA. At least, I think he was, or had it been another covert agency? He was something anyway.
Now he had his own security agency up and running again, and was recently back in town. Shame I didn’t invite him along for this little trip. He’d probably have cleared the blocked road already and fixed the power.
Then again, inviting him would have been weird. If I had invited any other men on this trip, it would have had to have been my boyfriend, Ryan. But he was working, of course. He always was.
But Stone sure would have been handy.
There was another creak.
I sat up in bed. It wasn’t that I was afraid, or worried, but I realized I was wide awake now. I guessed it was my body rebelling against being put to sleep so early, two nights in a row. It probably thought I was jet lagged or something.
I reached for my phone, snagged it, and pulled it toward me. Its face lit up when I touched the power button, and I stared intently at the top to see how many signal bars I could get.
Still none.
Ian was probably right. Whatever cell tower we’d been connecting to earlier must have been taken out by the sudden storm.
Just as I put my phone back down by my bedside I heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps. They were accompanied by more creaks of the floor, but these were much noisier ones than earlier.
Someone else was up and about.
They couldn’t sleep either.
I lay back down, determined to make myself go back to sleep. I closed my eyes.
They flew open again when I heard something clatter.
There was a loud, “Oh!” Then a gasp.
Had someone walked into something in the dark? Knocked something over? I listened carefully.
But I didn’t need to be listening carefully to hear what happened next.
A door slammed, making me start. Was it an accident? The wind?
There was a loud gasp. Something smashed. “Get off—”
There was a scream.
Agh—
A short one. One that was cut off in mid yell.
I swung my legs out of bed and reached for the lantern. Where is it? It was right there! I held up my phone to light the area. There! I grabbed the lantern and made for the door.
Most of our bedrooms were on the second floor of the house. Beryl’s was the master room, at the far end of the hallway, near a small pair of secondary staff staircases that led down to the kitchen and up to the third floor. The scream had come from that direction.
Lantern held ahead of me, I hurried, eyes half-blinded by the bright lantern. A door slammed in front of me. Others began to swing open.
“Who’s that?”
“What was that?”
“What’s going on?”
“Ghosts!”
I almost crashed into Maeve in front of Beryl’s room as she emerged from the entrance to the narrow staff staircase.
Pushing open the door to Beryl’s room, I peered inside.
The first thing I saw was the smashed bedside lamp. It had been a large china ornament, now in a million pieces across the floor beside the bed.
Stepping inside, I looked at what I’d been avoiding. Call it a sixth sense.
Or maybe it was a combination of the five regular ones, but I hadn’t wanted to look at Beryl’s bed.
And it was with good reason.
Her pink satin sheets were stained red. As was her pink nightgown.
Beryl was sitting up, back against the headboard, mouth stretched open wide in a final, silent cry. Protruding from her chest was the ornate handle of an exotic looking knife. The other end of the weapon was now sheathed inside her heart.
Maeve let out an earsplitting, jaw-clenching shriek right into my ear as she saw the murder scene. I spun and crouched away from the sudden noise.
“Maeve!” I shouted, to stop her.
It didn’t work.
She continued to screech.
A banshee wail that sent my already soaring adrenaline levels into overdrive.
Then, Uncle Joe was there. He wrapped an arm around Maeve’s shoulder and squeezed her. Hard. Finally, she stopped.
I stood up straight, my lantern filling the room with light again.
“Oh my goodness,” Uncle Joe said as he stared at his ex-wife. His ex-ex-wife, I thought to myself.
Maeve shook her head to herself. She’d snapped out of it and was now ready to focus.
“I need to check her. I need to check. I’ll just check.” She hurried forward, and held two fingers against Beryl’s neck. The old lady’s lifeless eyes stared at her.
“There’s no pulse!”
Big surprise.
“She’s…” Maeve turned around to face us. I became aware that I was now surrounded by all the other guests. Only Amber and Angel remained outside the room. “Dead.”
I turned, still holding up the lantern.
Roman and Yumi. Uncle Joe. Ian. Jini. Maeve. Amber, just her head peering into the room from outside.
“Where’s Marcus?” I asked.
“Here,” called a slightly muffled voice. A moment later, his head was next to Amber’s, peering into the room. “What’s going on?”
And there I had it.
One dead body.
And a whole mess of suspects.
And this was supposed to be a vacation.
Still, isn’t that what they say? No rest for the wickedly sharp private investigator?
Reunions and Revelations in Las Vegas: A Humorous Tiffany Black Mystery Page 5
