What a Ghoul Wants

by Victoria Laurie

  I tucked the video camera under my sweatshirt when the boat came up to the boulder I was sitting on. “Miss Holliday,” the inspector said with a nod.

  I pointed the beam of my flashlight across the moat. “The body’s right there, Inspector. I think it’s lodged against those tree roots.”

  The inspector half turned and pointed his own flashlight across the water. “Yes,” he said without further comment on the floater. Turning back to me, he asked, “And how did you come to be here?”

  I pulled the camera back out and held it up for him to see. “I was on a ghost hunt for our cable show.”

  “Ghost Getters, is that right?” he asked me. I saw that he’d done his homework. Mostly.

  “Ghoul Getters,” I corrected, “but you’re close enough.”

  “Still,” he said flashing his beam all around the small bit of land I was stuck on. “How did you get here specifically?”

  I pointed up to the door ten feet above. “From there.”

  The inspector’s eyes bulged. “From there?”

  “Yes.”

  He flashed his beam around again. “But there’s no ladder or rope. However did you get down?”

  “I jumped.”

  “You jumped?”

  I pulled up the legs of my jeans and shone the flashlight right at the bruises just forming along my legs. “Yes, Inspector, I jumped. And I promise, it hurt like hell.”

  “Why the devil would you jump from such a height only to be stuck here?” he asked me.

  “Because I was running from the Grim Widow.”

  It was hard to tell in the dark, but I could’ve sworn the inspector’s complexion paled a bit. “I see.”

  “Inspector,” the constable said nervously. “Can we please help the miss into the boat and be off? I don’t like being so close to this end of the castle.”

  “This end?” the inspector asked. Apparently, he liked to repeat stuff.

  “We’re at the south side,” I told him. “The Grim Widow’s territory.”

  “Ah,” he replied before standing up carefully and offering me his hand. I moved gingerly to the top of the boulder and with his help I got in the boat. “You look quite cold,” he told me.

  “I still haven’t warmed up all the way from yesterday.”

  He seemed to take that in before telling the constable, “Niles, let’s get Miss Holliday across the moat and into your car. We’ll turn the heat on for her and wait with the body for the coroner.”

  I smiled gratefully at the inspector. “Thank you, sir.”

  “You’re most welcome, and while Constable Bancroft rows us to shore, why don’t you tell me why the drawbridge is up?”

  From the way he said that, I had the feeling the drawbridge was never up. “None of us are sure how that happened,” I told him. “I came home from visiting Heath in the hospital—”

  “That would be Heath Whitefeather? The young man who nearly drowned?”

  “Yes. He’s my boyfriend and a fellow member of our crew.”

  “How is he?”

  “He’s much better, thank you. They just wanted to keep him overnight to make sure his temperature came all the way back up and that his metabolism was functioning correctly again.”

  “That’s good to hear,” the inspector said. “I’m sorry, I interrupted you: What time did you arrive back from visiting with Mr. Whitefeather?”

  “Close to midnight. When I got to the castle, I discovered that a few other crew members had gone on a ghost hunt without me and they hadn’t been seen or heard from.”

  “They’re missing?”

  The inspector was back to repeating again. “Well, at the time I thought they were, but it turns out they were out on the moors trying to get some footage of the Desperate Duke and they got locked out of the castle.”

  At the mention of the Desperate Duke the inspector’s face turned down in a frown. “It’d be best for them if they never saw the duke.”

  I cocked my head. I was fairly certain I’d had an encounter with Sir Mortimer on the rocky ground below the door, and he’d done me no harm. The inspector must have noticed my curious expression because he said, “Legend has it that the duke only appears to those marked for death. It’s also said that he haunts the area near here and taunts his wife’s ghost from the shore.”

  I suppressed a shudder. I’d witnessed several spooky apparitions that night—not including the Widow. I wondered if they’d all been the duke. Had he been rowing the boat in the moat? And was he also the figure making his way along the moors? I felt certain he’d been the ghost six feet away from me after I’d jumped out of the door, but did that mean that I was marked for death?

  My thoughts spun nervously until the inspector called my attention back with his next question. “When you returned from your trip to the hospital, was the drawbridge up?”

  “No, sir. But about fifteen minutes after I arrived back in the main hall, my best friend, Gilley—he’s the technical adviser to the show—tried to leave with another man to go into town and have a drink, and that’s when we all discovered that the drawbridge had been pulled up and the mechanism that controls it tampered with.”

  The inspector’s brow furrowed. “Tampered with how exactly?”

  I shrugged. “I’m no mechanic, but the box that houses the switch was broken open and all the wires were cut. Oh, and all the phones inside the castle are dead too.”

  By this time we were at the shore across from the front of the castle, by the road where it stopped and turned onto the drawbridge—or where it would have turned onto the drawbridge had it been down. Constable Bancroft eased the wooden boat close to the short dock that jutted out from the shore and acted like a cradle for the drawbridge. The inspector stood up slightly and held out his hand so that he could assist me getting onto the dock. “After you,” he said kindly.

  I eyed the water nervously—I couldn’t help it, the memory of swimming after Heath in those murky depths would probably haunt me the rest of my days—but I forced myself to reach across the bow to grip the railing. As I was pulling myself up, however, I saw something long and white glide under the dock.

  I gasped and scrambled up, scuttling quickly to the center of the wood planks and trying to peer through the cracks. “What is it?” the inspector asked.

  I shuddered, pointing toward the water. “I saw something.”

  Both the inspector and the constable leaned over the side of the boat and looked into the dark water. “What did you see?” the constable asked me after they’d had a good long stare.

  “I. . . I don’t know.” I barely dared to peek over the side. What I thought I’d seen was the ghostly figure of a person swimming under the dock, but that’s not something I was really willing to confess at that moment. The two men in the boat were probably nervous enough with all the strange goings-on of late. Still, I felt it appropriate to caution them. “When you retrieve the body, please be careful, okay?”

  The constable eyed me with nervous curiosity, and I could see he didn’t discount my words. “We’ll take the most care,” he promised. “Now go warm your bones in my motorcar. The keys are in the ignition.”

  I nodded and turned to his vehicle, but couldn’t help looking back when I’d gotten off the dock and onto dry land again. The inspector was already speaking into his cell phone to alert the coroner, and his trusty constable had just turned their boat around and was rowing back toward the south side, when I caught another glimpse of something thin and white at the stern of the boat. Something that looked eerily like a bony white hand disappearing below the surface.

  I put a hand to my mouth and nearly called out to the two men to stop and come back, but as I squinted toward the water, I saw nothing but darkness. There was no hint of anything near
the surface.

  I watched the men in the boat for a long time, even though I was freezing and the warm car was only a few feet away. I saw nothing out of the ordinary, but even that did little to settle my nerves.

  After five minutes of watching the back of the boat, I turned away with weariness born of being frightened to the core over and over and moved up to the car.

  The constable’s car was unlocked and the keys were in fact left in the ignition. I turned the engine over and in no time was enjoying the warm air coming through the vent. I held my hands up to the heat and rubbed them vigorously, but my fingertips had long since gone numb.

  Every once in a while I made sure to look around at the area outside the car. I wasn’t quite sure how far the Widow could travel. I knew that she haunted the south wing and the moat, but did that mean she couldn’t come out of the water to the shore?

  I reasoned that if she did, I’d throw the car into gear and drive away fast, but as the minutes wore on and the heat from the car settled around me, I began to grow more and more sleepy.

  My lids felt heavy and my mind was muddled. It grew harder and harder to stay awake, no matter how many times I tried to shake off the oppressive fatigue.

  Finally I gave in. “I’ll just close my eyes for a little while,” I promised myself.

  The next thing I knew, Inspector Lumley was knocking on my window. I jumped and flung my arms up, adding a frightened shriek to boot.

  Outside the door he held up both his hands and apologized. “It’s only me, Miss Holliday. Terribly sorry to give you a fright.”

  I used the hand crank to roll down the window. “It’s fine, Inspector. I must have dozed off there.” I then had the chance to look around and I could see that the sky in the east was just beginning to soften from the deep hue of night. The clock on the dashboard read four thirty a.m. I yawned and rubbed my face. It felt like I’d only just nodded off.

  “The mechanic is here working on the drawbridge,” the inspector was telling me.

  I blinked a few times and tried to focus on his words.

  “He should have it down within the hour. You may stay here if you’d like, or use the ladder to go up the wall and climb down the other side.”

  I clambered out of the car to get a better look and that’s when I saw a long ladder propped up against the castle wall. I assumed that a twin had been positioned on the other side.

  It was a no-brainer as to which one I’d opt for, even with the added danger of crossing that moat by boat again. “I’ll take the ladder,” I said to the inspector. I wanted a real bed and some real sleep so bad I could hardly stand it.

  “The ladder’s quite sturdy,” the inspector said as he walked with me toward the boat.

  I didn’t much care if it was crazy rickety. I was going to get inside and head straight to my room and not come out until I’d had some decent sleep. As we walked, I noticed the coroner’s van again, parked in a similar spot to where it’d been the morning before. “Did you pull the victim out of the moat?” I asked the inspector.

  “Yes,” he said, his mustache turning down. “Nasty sight that.”

  “Do you know who it is?” I don’t know why I was so curious, but I was.

  “The identification in his pocket indicates his name was André Lefebvre.”

  I stopped dead in my tracks even though that was exactly who I’d feared it was when I’d seen that silver hair. “The fashion designer?”

  Inspector Lumley eyed me keenly. “We believe it’s him,” he said. “Did you know him?”

  “I didn’t know him personally, but he was a guest here at the castle. He brought a group of models with him for the shoot, but I was told that he’d gone into town with them earlier in the evening.”

  “Apparently he came back,” said the inspector.

  “Is there any sign of his wife?” I asked, remembering the elegant woman seething with fury when she caught her husband kissing one of the models.

  “His wife?”

  “I believe she may have been with him,” I said, worried that a similar end had come to her. The Widow was definitely capable of drowning two people, as Heath and I could attest to.

  The inspector waved to the constable, who was just getting off the boat after having come back across the water, and the man came right over. “Yes, Inspector?”

  “Niles, it seems that Mrs. Lefebvre might be missing. Please see what you can do to locate her whereabouts immediately.”

  “Oh, but I’ve already found her,” the constable said. I held my breath, waiting to hear that her dead body had also been discovered. “She’s inside the castle, sir. Arthur let me into Mr. Lefebvre’s room, and we found her there fast asleep, oblivious to our knocking because of her earplugs and the sleeping pill she took a few hours ago. Seems she never went out with the others due to a migraine or some such. And she didn’t even realize her husband had gone missing until we woke her. She’s in a terrible state at the moment, as you can imagine. As soon as we get the bridge down, she’ll come out to see about identifying the body.”

  “Inspector!” a man called, and we all turned to see a portly-looking man with strikingly white hair and matching beard waddling over to us.

  “Yes, Doctor?” Lumley said when he got close.

  The doctor put a hand to his chest, as if he was having trouble catching his wind, and said, “There’s something I’ve taken note of on the body that I believe you should be aware of.”

  “Which is?”

  “There is a sizable lump on the man’s head.” I took it that the good doctor was likely the coroner.

  “A lump, you say?” the inspector asked. The man certainly liked to repeat things.

  “Yes. At the base of the skull.”

  “I see. Then he slipped and fell into the moat, striking his head, and that’s perhaps why he drowned?”

  The doctor shook his head and rocked on his heels. “Oh, I doubt it, Inspector.”

  “You doubt what? My theory?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there is also a sizable lump on the man’s forehead.”

  My brow furrowed, and I wanted to ask the doctor why that mattered, but the inspector asked first. “What does that prove, Dr. Engels?”

  “Well, the man certainly didn’t strike both the front and the back of his head at the same time, Inspector!”

  Lumley looked taken aback. “How do you know they happened at the same time?”

  “The blow to the back of the man’s head was severe enough to crack the skull, and by the swelling evident there, it’s clear to me that it occurred antemortem. He would have died within minutes if he hadn’t drowned first. The blow to the front of the head also shows signs of swelling, though not as severe. I believe Lefebvre was struck very hard from behind before he tipped forward into the moat, striking his head on a rock or the bridge as he went in.”

  “Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?” Lumley asked.

  The doctor smiled wryly at him. “Yes, Inspector. You have another murder on your hands.”

  “Another murder?” I said, and the inspector turned to look at me, his expression suggesting he was quite surprised to see me still standing next to him. Without answering me, he said, “Thank you for alerting us to Mr. Lefebvre’s body, Miss Holliday. I’m sure I’ll be in touch with you very soon.” With that, he motioned for the doctor to accompany him back down to the tarp that I guessed was covering Lefebvre.

  “This way, Miss Holliday,” the constable said, extending his arm out to me like a proper gentleman.

  The constable was growing on me. “I never thanked you for saving my life yesterday,” I told him.

  “Least I could do after you went in after Mr. Whitefeather,
” he said humbly. “I give you a fair amount of credit too. That water was bloody cold.”

  “It really was,” I agreed, my mind still on the mystery behind what the coroner had revealed. “Constable Bancroft?”

  “Yes?”

  “What was the doctor referring to when he suggested that Mr. Lefebvre’s death was another murder?”

  The constable lifted my elbow to steady me as I got into the rowboat. He didn’t answer me until he was settled in too and had lifted the oars away from their resting place on the sides of the boat. “I believe he was referring to the suspicious nature of Mr. Brown’s drowning,” he said, leaning back to dip the oars into the water.

  “What suspicious nature?”

  The constable pushed on the oars, bringing his face closer to mine in the process. “Merrick’s wrists appeared to have been bound before he went into the moat.”

  My eyes widened. “He was tied up?”

  The constable managed to shrug in between rows. “Maybe. There’s no sign of the rope, just the burns on his wrists. Could be that he got free of them but drowned anyway, or they popped off when his body became bloated. Either way, Dr. Engels thinks his hands were tied together before he went into the water.”

  I sat up a little straighter in my seat as a cold chill traveled down my spine and I shuddered. Had Merrick really been murdered by someone other than the Widow? Certainly her ghost wouldn’t have tied him up before drowning him. And why would someone kill the kindly desk clerk? He’d seemed like such a nice young man, why would anyone want to hurt him?

  And, for that matter, who had murdered Mr. Lefebvre? A likely suspect had to have been his wife. She’d had the most murderous expression on her face when she’d spied on him kissing the male model.

  But then I reconsidered that. For good reason the spouse was always the most obvious suspect—why would she risk murdering him when she could simply divorce him and take half his wealth?

  We were midway across the moat as I considered who else might have had a hand in the fashion designer’s death. I had the sudden feeling I was being watched and looked to my left, and that’s when I saw the faint outline of a man near the water’s edge on the castle side of the moat. He was tall and slim, and tugging at something around his neck, and in an instant I felt I knew who it was. But a moment later, he was jerked violently forward, and pulled headfirst into the water. I could even hear the splash of water that accompanied it, and I put a hand to my mouth, knowing that I’d just seen Mr. Lefebvre’s ghost being hauled into the water by the Grim Widow.