by K. J. Emrick
“Putting it on paper will be fine,” she told Skye. “I might even have a pen somewhere, if you need to borrow one.”
The two women locked gazes for a moment. Skye was the one to look away first.
“Ooh-whee,” Kyle crowed. “Point, set, match. Nobody better stand between Miranda Wylder and her man.”
Miranda gave him an appreciative nod. Nice to have her best friend on her side.
“Just write it out as best you can,” Jack said to them all. “Obviously Caleb was staying here, and so whatever happened may very well have started right here in the Blue Jay. It will be immensely helpful if you all can do that. Even the smallest detail might be important.”
There was some grumbling, a few muttered words from Alfie and more from Ginger that seemed to be directed at her uncle, rather than Jack’s request. In just a few moments the four suspects had left the dining room, going off to their rooms.
“So what now?” Miranda asked.
“Now,” he told her, fishing into his pocket to take out the key that he’d found on the dead man, “we find out if this fits anything in Caleb Owen’s room.”
“Stellar,” Kyle said, approving of the idea. “Your man’s a smart one, Miranda.”
“I think I’ll stay here,” Sapphire informed everyone, reaching into the folds of her sleeves and producing that shard of amethyst crystal from before. “I’ll check the aura of this place and see if I can come up with anything that will help.”
“That sounds like a good idea to me,” Jean-Paul said quickly. “I will stay with her and help.”
Miranda kept her comments to herself. She knew Sapphire was as likely to trip over an aura as her own two feet—although truthfully, that was a likely thing in itself. She also knew that Jean-Paul didn’t believe in any of this mystical nonsense, but he sure was making a show of it to get Sapphire’s favor.
“All right then,” Jack said to Miranda. “Guess it’s just you and me.”
“And me!” Kyle protested. “How come no one ever remembers the ghost?”
Chapter 9
Caleb’s room was on the second floor of the Blue Jay. The stairs protested with every footstep as Miranda and Jack made their way up. They hadn’t seen the residents of the Bed and Breakfast since leaving the dining room and presumably they were off in their rooms writing their list of comings and goings, just like Jack had asked them to.
Jack, thinking out loud, said that they should have sent Jean-Paul or Sapphire, or both, to be with Ginger. He was worried that her Uncle Ben would try to influence what she wrote, one way or the other.
“I’m not saying that he would try to get her to lie, necessarily. It’s just that he wants to distance her from the relationship she had with Caleb. I know how police officers think. He might not be trying to do anything explicitly illegal, but anything she leaves out could be crucial.”
“Is that what you would do?” she asked him as they reached the top of the stairs. “If I found myself as a possible suspect in a murder case, would you have me change my story to make myself look less guilty?”
“Of course not,” he said immediately. “I’d want you to tell the truth. You only look more guilty if you get caught in a lie.”
“But Ben Clark doesn’t see it that way.”
“I don’t think so. I’ve got the feeling that he’s a very different kind of cop than I am.”
“So, if Ginger really is the one who killed Caleb…?”
“Then Ben Clark will be working hard to cover it up. Yes.” He shrugged, his expression a mix of frustration and concentration. “Either way we should be able to tell if anyone is lying—or leaving anything out—by comparing everyone’s stories. Even the best lies don’t hold up if you look at them from four different points of view.”
He was a smart one, this man of hers. She liked watching him use that sharp mind of his. It was incredibly sexy.
“Caleb’s room is number six,” he told her. “Looks like it’s the one at the end of the hall.”
“How do you know that?” she asked. “Did our dead man rise up from his muddy grave to tell you that?”
“No, he did not. I looked in the registry book at the front desk.”
Miranda felt foolish for not thinking of that herself. “And the book had all four of our suspects listed?”
“Well, three,” he corrected her. “Alfie’s name wasn’t written in the guest book because he owns the place. The other three are there. About half a dozen other people, too, but I can’t tell if any of them are staying here or not currently. The entries are all chaotic. Names are just crammed into the page, no date of registry, no check-out date, just names and room numbers. I’ll have to ask Alfie to clarify it for me later.”
“So there could be other people staying here.” Miranda didn’t say it as a question. “People who are currently out of the building.”
“Maybe, yes. I have my people up the road stopping all traffic and getting the information of anyone they encounter. For now, let’s just worry about the guy who was here before he… died…”
He trailed off when he noticed the same thing as Miranda did. The door to room six, Caleb Owen’s room, was ajar. Barely an inch, but enough to stop them in their tracks.
From the back of his waistband Jack drew a snub-nosed automatic. It looked small in his big hand.
“Jack! Where on Earth did you get that thing?”
“From the locked side pocket in my duffle bag,” he told her. “You know the one I mean? I never go anywhere without it. I figured I might need it now, so I got it when Alfie and I went to identify Caleb and wait for the police.”
“So wait,” she asked him. “Do you mean to tell me that you brought that gun with us on our camping trip?”
His smile became very lopsided. “Of course. You never know what kind of crazy things might happen to you when you’re on a camping trip.”
“Like finding a dead body in a lake.”
“Exactly.”
The moment of humor passed between them before reality brought them back the open door of the dead man’s apartment. Jack motioned her to stay back, and behind him, but he didn’t bother trying to tell her not to follow him. He knew her better than that.
For a wonder, the door swung open silently and revealed a cramped space more like a motel room. As far as Miranda could tell there was the main room here with the double bed and the bureau and the TV stand, and then a bathroom off to the left.
In front of them, going through the drawers of the bureau in a haphazard way, was Skye Rogers.
She had her back to them and as focused as she was with her furtive activities, she didn’t notice them come in. They watched as she pushed aside folded clothes, leaving them in rumpled heaps with sleeves or necklines hanging out when she shut one drawer, and moved to the next.
“Where is it?” they heard her hiss. “Where is it?”
“Where is what?” Jack asked her.
Her blonde hair spun as she whipped around to face them, one hand covering the yelp that tried to spill out from her mouth. She’d been caught red handed. Her eyes lowered to the gun in Jack’s hands, and then up to his face again.
The rest of the room already showed signs of her searching through it. The sheets on the bed were hanging over the side and both pillows had been dropped to the floor. A paperback book on the TV stand was upside down on its pages. The TV was twisted half around, facing the doorway to the bathroom. The room’s landline phone had been swept onto the floor.
Recovering quickly, Skye stood up and put her hands very deliberately at her sides. “What are you two doing here?”
Jack chuckled at that. “I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to be my question to you. This isn’t your room. Why are you searching through it like this? You have to admit, this looks very suspicious.”
“What? Don’t be ridiculous,” the woman said brightly, turning on the charm of a five-hundred-watt smile. “I was just… trying to find a book that I lent Caleb yesterday. Ah. The
re it is.”
She went to reach for the paperback on the TV stand, but Jack was there to block her way. He did put the gun away into the concealed holster at the small of his back, but he obviously wasn’t going to let things go with that thin explanation.
“Skye, you were looking for something. You’re in the room of a man we know to have been murdered and then dumped not far from this place, where you yourself are a guest. Maybe we should just arrest you now and bring you into the Moonlight Bay PD for questioning.”
“No, please don’t do that,” she said quickly, and at the same time she began batting her long eyelashes at Jack. “I mean, you want me to stay here, don’t you? I can help you find the real killer.”
“How do I know,” he said, his voice deep and flat, “that you aren’t the real killer?”
Something flashed across Skye’s expression. Something very at odds with her public persona. She was back to switching personalities like a flick of a switch.
What Miranda glimpsed in Skye now was an anger that ran deep into the woman’s being. She used her looks and her allure to hide it, but there were layers beneath that attractive surface that were anything but pretty.
And then in the next instant, she was putting her fingers on Jack’s chest, and trailing them up and over his shoulder. “Tell you what, Detective. Why don’t you search me, if you think I took something from this room?”
Miranda’s hands twitched. She was going to wring this woman’s neck. Wring it like a dishtowel, until her head popped off.
“I can hear you thinking,” Kyle said to her. “You can’t kill her. You don’t want Jack arresting you, too. I could maybe push her down the stairs for you if you want. Um. Do you want?”
In certain circumstances she would have found that to be fun. Kyle was right, of course. The world frowned on killing people, even when they were annoying and blonde and excessively pretty.
Besides, those charms still weren’t working on Jack.
“I don’t need to search you, Miss Rogers.”
“But,” she cooed, “I’m a bad girl. You have no idea what I might have… in my pants.”
“Whatever you have,” he told her, “doesn’t interest me. Why don’t you head to your room and start the list of your daily activities? That’s all I need from you.”
That quick flash of unreadable expression came over her face again. “I see. Well. In that case, Detective Travis, I’ll just be in my own room. All alone, waiting for you to come and investigate me.”
She winked when she said it, and Miranda actually took a step forward as the flirty blonde spun on her heel and went for the door. Kyle’s hand on her shoulder stopped her.
Miranda blinked at him in surprise. “I forgot you could do that,” she whispered.
He grinned from ear to ear. “Hey, I’m a spirit guide. We’re full of surprises.”
Kyle, as a ghost, had gotten pretty good at the whole poltergeist thing. He could move pencils and slide chairs across floors and make shower curtains move at the most inappropriate times. Then he had left Miranda for a short time, moving on to his eternal rest on the other side, leaving her missing him something terrible.
Unexpectedly, he’d come back under this guise of spirit guide. When he did, his advice hadn’t been any better than it ever had, but his ability to interact with the physical world had been much, much stronger. Especially when it came to her. He’d actually saved Miranda from a nasty fall off a cliffside once. Now he was saving her from a serious mistake. As satisfying as it would be to teach Skye Rogers to stay away from her man, it wouldn’t do anything but get Miranda in trouble.
Besides, there was still a silver lining. It was entirely possible that Skye was the killer.
That thought made Miranda smile as she said to Jack, “What do you think she was looking for?”
“I don’t know,” Jack replied, looking at the room around them, “but I’m sure it’s still here. Skye was still searching for it when we came in. That’s why I didn’t feel the need to search her on her way out. Whatever it is, it’s still here.”
“Oh?” Miranda said, cocking an eyebrow. “That’s the only reason you didn’t want to search her, is it?”
“Well. That, and the fact that the only woman I want to put my hands on is you.”
“Good answer.” Miranda promised herself that later, when they were finally back home, she would let Jack practice his technique on her. For as long as he wanted.
“Oh,” Kyle said to her, “I know that look going on between you two. Listen, if you and Jack need some alone time when we get back home, you just say the word.”
“Our friend Kyle,” Miranda said to Jack, “just promised to be out of the house the entire evening when we get home.”
“What!” Kyle protested. “I did not say any such thing! Look, I can be in the other room or something, but I never said I’d leave.”
Jack looked over Miranda’s shoulder, trying to face Kyle even though Kyle was on her other side. “That’s very nice of you to give us some space, Kyle. Thank you.”
“I didn’t say that!” Kyle threw his hands in the air. “I said ‘some alone time.’ I did not say the whole night! What is a ghost supposed to do for a whole night, huh? It’s not like I can just ring up my mates and go hang out. Play cards. Watch the game. Whatever. I’m a ghost, Miranda. My social life is pretty limited.”
She smiled sweetly at him, and he crossed his arms over his chest with a long-suffering sigh. “You living people really get under my skin. Er, my ectoplasm. Whatever. You know what I mean.”
“Come on,” Jack said. “Let’s have a look see and hope that Skye Rogers was the only person at the Blue Jay who had the idea of snooping through Caleb’s room. If Ben Clark or one of the others went through here first, there might not be anything to find in any case.”
They started with the bathroom. Since they had seen Skye in the bedroom, they were hoping she hadn’t had a chance to look anywhere else. The tub and the medicine cabinet and the area under the sink didn’t yield any real surprises. Soaps and shampoos and shaving cream in the shower. Under the sink was a toilet scrub brush and a bottle of all-purpose cleaner. In the medicine cabinet there was a toothbrush and toothpaste and an electric razor. There was a bottle of prescription antacid, and Jack picked that up to check the name on the label actually was Caleb’s.
“Well, well,” was Jack’s comment. “Looks like Caleb’s lifestyle was giving him ulcers.”
“Makes sense,” Miranda said, “considering what we heard on the tape recorder. Getting your life threatened if you don’t go out and steal a car the right way can do that to a person.”
“I’ll bet.” Jack put the bottle back in the mirror cabinet, and they went back to the bedroom area to continue the search. “What do you think about the guy on that tape maybe being the killer?”
“I wondered that too,” Miranda said, “but I’m really getting the impression that it was someone in this place. I just… feel it.”
He nodded silent understanding. One of those ‘psychic things,’ as he liked to say. Something he had to take on faith, which he did, because he trusted Miranda.
They went through everything, but it was becoming obvious they weren’t going to find anything. Moving aside the sheets, Miranda checked the bed again, between the mattresses, inside the pillow cases, and found nothing. Jack did the same with the bureau drawers. Stuffing the limited amount of clothing back in, he turned to Miranda with a shrug. Nothing there, either.
Miranda was at a loss, but Jack kept going. He looked under the bed, then felt along the underside of the frame. He looked inside the lampshade. He took the drawers out of the bureau and looked under them, and behind them too. He felt carefully along the rug and knocked on the walls. It was eye-opening to see him search a room with the eyes of a police officer. So many places that she just wouldn’t have thought to look. Even Kyle helped, poking his head into the walls themselves to look for hidden compartments. Miranda even saw him float
into the bathroom and poke his face into the tank on the off chance that something had been hidden there in the water.
Still, they came up with nothing.
Standing in the middle of the room, Jack put his fists on his hips and looked around them again, and Miranda half expected the place to burst into flames from the heat of his glare.
“Know what I don’t see?” he asked her.
“What?” Miranda said.
“Anything that a key would open.”
He patted his pocket where Miranda knew the key he had taken from the dead body of Caleb Owen was sitting, waiting to help solve the man’s murder.
“You’re right,” Miranda agreed. “Well. This was sort of a waste of time, wasn’t it?”
Kyle laid himself down on the bed, hooking his hands behind his head and staring at the ceiling, as if his hazy blue ghost body was exhausted from all that work. “You know Miranda, you and Jack are supposed to be this great mystery solving team. You guys are really disappointing me this time around.”
Miranda stuck her tongue out at him. He did the same thing, curling the tip in that way that had always annoyed her so much. Reaching back to the TV stand she picked up the paperback book and prepared to throw it at his intangible head.
Then she stopped.
Something trailing out of the pages tickled her wrist and she stopped to see what it was. Dangling from about halfway through the book, tucked right up to the spine so that it hadn’t fallen out even when the book had been discarded upside down next to the television, was a thin strip of supple brown leather.
“What’s this?” she asked, opening the book to that page. The spine of the book was bent and cracked in several places. Caleb obviously hadn’t taken care of it. The cord was right there, top and bottom sticking out of the book a good four inches both ways.
“Hmm?” Jack murmured as he came over to inspect what she was looking at. He looked at the length of leather, inspecting it with his eyes, before carefully taking it by one end and lifting it out of the book.
