Phantoms Can Be Murder: Charlie Parker Mystery #13 (The Charlie Parker Mystery Series)

by Connie Shelton

  “Your aunt conducts the best tours of anyone,” she told me in her high, proper voice. “The historical talks are marvelous but I especially like the scary ones!”

  I had to chuckle at the way her eyes lit up at the mention of the haunted sites.

  Louisa had put on her jacket and she placed a hand on Alice’s shoulder. “We need to be going now. Can you handle things until Hazel gets here?”

  Alice nodded some more.

  “What do you feel like having for lunch?” Louisa asked once we’d stepped out into the sunshine again.

  While it was tempting to go for a repeat at the Cornish pasty shop and another walk in the gardens, I realized that my time was limited here and it would be fun to try some different places. I told her I would defer to her recommendation. And so we found ourselves at The Dog and Partridge, a pub dating back to the 16th century.

  “This place is on my tour,” Louisa said as we took seats at a table in the corner after placing our orders for fish and chips at the bar. “However, I won’t bore you with the details now.”

  I shrugged my jacket over the back of my chair. “Speaking of the unexplained . . .” I went on to tell her about Dolly’s unfortunate mishap with the cup of scalding tea. “She swears she’d just set the cup down and that the tea was stone cold.”

  Louisa listened raptly. “It’s at least the third time, assuming she’s told me about all these events, since they moved into that shop. With the frequency . . . well, it’s as if some spirit doesn’t want her in that location. It’s quite common, you know, for spirits to appear to new tenants. They don’t always like us in their space.”

  I could think of possible explanations for each event. Perhaps Dolly had become so wrapped up in her work that she’d forgotten she’d already reheated her tea. The inventory of yarn being completely rearranged during the night was a little more complicated. Dolly obviously didn’t accidentally do it, which would suggest that someone had quietly sneaked into her shop. Certainly not impossible, but how likely? More likely than there being ghosts in the building. Just my opinion.

  Our fish and chips arrived and I put all other thoughts out of my mind as I ripped into the huge piece of battered fish that was done to perfection. The fries—I couldn’t quite think of them as chips yet—were hot and crispy, and we didn’t speak much for about ten minutes.

  Louisa reached a stopping place first, wiped her fingers on her napkin and peeked into the yarn sack I’d given her earlier.

  “Do you mind if we stop by Dolly’s again so I can pay her for this?” she asked.

  I let out a sigh of contentment. The traditional lunch had hit just the right spot for me. “You know, I was wondering . . . do you think the pranks at the shop might have anything to do with the fact that Halloween is coming up?”

  She sipped from the Coke she’d ordered and thought about it. “It’s still more than a month away. Someone would really be getting an early start.”

  “Do people here do all the same things we used to do?”

  “Pretty much. Mostly harmless and fun things—costumes, parties and treats, lots of orange and black, carved pumpkins, scary movies. The wearing of costumes goes back to pagan times when people believed that troubled spirits moved about at this time of year. They disguised themselves to avoid being recognized by the undead.”

  I smiled at the memory of the year I’d dressed up as a witch when I was about eight, thought I was the meanest thing on the streets until some bigger kid in a space alien costume practically scared the pants off me and chased me home.

  “So, you probably give a heck of a haunted sites tour that night,” I teased.

  “You bet! I take along a couple of assistants who can escort the terminally frightened back to their cars.”

  “Well, even though I won’t be here next month, I’d love to see the places while I’m here.”

  “I’ll put you on the list for my Saturday night tour. Meanwhile, there are some good spots on our way back to Dolly’s.” She slipped her jacket back on and picked up her shopping bag.

  We stepped out to the street again and Louisa led the way diagonally across the intersection toward St. Mary’s Church.

  “St. Mary’s was completed in 1427 and is the burial place of Mary Tudor, daughter of King Henry the Eighth. This area is famous for sightings of two ghosts, the Grey Lady and the Brown Monk. I’ll cover more about them on my tour.”

  Beside the brown stone church a pathway led into a graveyard where long grass grew over and among the graves. Tilted headstones dotted the uneven ground, not a place where you could safely assume you weren’t walking over someone’s grave. A small stone building sat in the midst of them, surrounded by a high iron fence painted black. I wandered over to take a look at the many plaques attached to it.

  “This is the Charnel House,” Louisa said, “built in the 13th century to store the bones of some of the graveyard’s inhabitants.”

  I read some fascinating inscriptions, including one about a nine-year-old girl killed by a flash of lightning as she prayed. So, church might not necessarily be the safest place to hang out, I decided.

  Louisa told more stories and pointed out that some of the graves had both head and foot markers at either end of their stone sarcophagi. “I can go on with minutiae for two whole hours, but you’d probably rather cover a little more ground than this single square block.”

  I skirted the lumps in the ground that felt like they undoubtedly contained bones and we made our way back to the paved path. A lone young woman was walking toward us in the shade of the huge trees. Surrounded by the church, the abbey and high walls, with the path that disappeared around a curve in the distance, I could easily imagine making that same journey on a dark, foggy night. A scatter of goose-bumps rose along my arms.

  Chapter 6

  The sunshine had dimmed behind thick clouds and I pulled my blazer a little tighter around me as Louisa led the way back toward the street. Cars zipped by on the narrow street and the shouts of school children came from somewhere nearby. The moody feel of the graveyard dissipated in a flash.

  Louisa glanced up at the sky. “Got your brolly?”

  I patted my oversized purse. The umbrella never got any use in New Mexico but I had a feeling it would come in handy here.

  However, by the time we reached The Knit and Purl’s front door the wind had shifted and the clouds were thinning again. Warm light glowed from the shop windows and I could see Gabrielle inside, flicking at the rows of candles on the shelves with a feather duster. She smiled at us when we walked in.

  “Dolly’s up in the apartment,” she said. “Go on up if you’d like.”

  Louisa knew the way and I followed along, through a good-sized stockroom lined with shelves and up a flight of uneven stairs, a reminder of the age of even the most simple buildings in this town. Ahead of me, she’d come to a landing and before she could knock at the door a shriek pierced the silence.

  Louisa gazed around with momentary confusion. With no qualms, I barreled ahead of her, grabbed the doorknob and shoved my way into the apartment. I found myself alone in a parlor similar in size to the one at Louisa’s house.

  “Dolly!” I shouted. “Where are you?”

  She bustled in from a doorway to my right, her hands fluttering, confusion on her face.

  “It’s another one!” she cried.

  I stared around the room and through the open door to the kitchen. “Another what?”

  Louisa had followed me inside and she rushed to her friend. “What is it, pet?”

  Dolly’s voice didn’t want to work.

  “Take a deep breath,” I said.

  Archie, the husband I’d briefly met yesterday, appeared from a hallway on the left. His hair was mussed, as if he’d just woken from a nap. “Dolly, what is it, love?”

  Dolly’s eyes scanned our faces, her mouth working without saying anything.

  “Breathe,” I reminded.

  She finally focused on me and I breathed deeply,
hoping she would imitate me. She did and finally calmed down enough to speak.

  “The tea. Again. Just like yesterday.”

  I automatically glanced down at her hands but didn’t see a new injury.

  “This time it went cold. My tea went ice cold in less than two minutes.”

  We all stared at her.

  “It’s true. I’d just made a fresh cup. I’ll show you!” She led the little procession into the kitchen. “See? The kettle is still hot. I had poured a cup.” She pointed to a solid white mug on the counter. “I felt the, well, the call of nature . . . went to the loo. I was not gone two minutes. When I came back—well, just feel this.”

  Call me suspicious but I held my hand above the cup for a second before actually touching it. When I did, I had to agree with Dolly, the liquid was actually ice cold.

  I looked around the room, not exactly sure what I was hoping to see. “And there was no one in the apartment but you and Archie?”

  “He’d laid down for his nap after lunch,” she said, glancing toward him for confirmation. He nodded.

  The electric kettle, indeed, still emitted a tendril of steam when I poured some of the water into the sink. The tea in the mug had not come from this source, not recently. Puzzling.

  “I felt a rush of cold air come through the parlor as I left the toilet,” she was telling Louisa. “But this place can be drafty. I didn’t think anything of it.”

  Louisa nodded knowingly. “The spirits are often associated with cold drafts.”

  Archie clearly would rather get back to his nap. He seemed torn between comforting his wife and getting out of the roomful of women. Eventually he just patted her shoulder and edged his way out of the room.

  Louisa speculated about the rash of unexplained incidents, while Dolly insisted she’d only been startled, that she hadn’t sustained another injury. I walked around the kitchen looking for real clues as to what might have happened. I have to admit, nothing seemed out of place.

  Dolly had regained her composure and now she squared her thin shoulders. “Well. This is becoming ridiculous. I have a shop to run. I’d best get back to it.”

  We trooped down the stairs single file and I wandered over to the display of herbs and essential oils while Louisa completed the mission that had brought us here, paying for her yarn order. Gabrielle had finished dusting the candles and was now rearranging the display.

  “Everything all right up there?” she asked, obviously not so worried about her employer that she felt the necessity of interrupting her work.

  I gave a quick explanation of what had happened.

  “Did Mr. Jones see it too, then?”

  “Only after the fact, like we did. Mainly, we just interrupted his nap.”

  She nodded, a soft smile on her face.

  “Ready to move onward, Charlie?” Louisa stood near the door, and it appeared that Dolly was once more in full control behind the register.

  I said quick goodbyes to the two women and joined Louisa on the sidewalk.

  “I want to pop over to Marks and Spencer for a couple of grocery items,” she said. “Thought maybe we’d just do a light dinner at home tonight.”

  That sounded appealing. My jeans weren’t going to take kindly to a lot more of those fish-and-chips meals.

  “What’s the story with Archie Jones?” I asked as we walked along. “He seems young to be retired, home napping in the middle of the day.”

  “Ah. It’s a little bit of a sore point with Dolly. He used to be a manager at the sugar factory. Got laid off more than a year ago and hasn’t found anything else. They lived on the outskirts of town, nice modern house. Had to rent it out and move to the empty apartment above the shop.”

  “That probably didn’t set too well with him, either.”

  “Not at all well. First, he wanted Dolly to sell the shop. Fumed over how much she’d spent to set it up in the first place. But she did that with her own money, something she came into when her father died. Dolly just put her foot down, said she was at least bringing in some money and if Archie couldn’t go out and get himself another job then he’d best start helping out around the shop.”

  I could imagine that conversation hitting the fan.

  “So, I suppose that’s what he does now. Unpacks cartons of inventory, washes the windows, that sort of thing.”

  I pictured the soft-spoken man with his slumped shoulders. I could more easily see him washing windows than in a management role with a big company.

  As if she’d read my mind, Louisa continued. “You’d hardly have recognized Archie two years ago. Top of the world, suit and tie every day, business lunches at the best restaurants and trips all over the country. Kind of sad, really, how his self esteem was so closely tied to that job. The longer he’s away from it the more stooped he becomes. Lucky for them, really, that they had Dolly’s shop.”

  She pointed at an entry on our right. “Here we are.”

  I followed her around the food market section of the store, eyeing the bakery items that would be new to my palate, thinking this would be a good place to stop by on my own, pick up a few things to take home. She chose fresh lettuce and tomatoes, along with some veggies.

  “I should have thought of this Saturday,” she remarked. “Market day on the square, and things would have been bargain priced. Plus, you would have had a taste of a tradition that’s been going here for a thousand years.”

  I expressed regret but she assured me we could catch it on Wednesday. Her purchases filled a plastic shopping bag, which I offered to carry since she still had the yarn.

  “I’d intended to show you one more local landmark, The Nutshell Pub, which is known as the smallest pub in Britain, but perhaps we should take these things home first. You might be up for a little rest, yourself?”

  The rain that managed to hold off more than half the day hit with a vengeance as soon as we walked into the house so our plan for the little pub got postponed. The downpour settled into a steady drizzle while Louisa napped. Restless, I wasn’t sleepy and found myself pacing through the parlor, once again taking stock of the books on the shelves.

  I suspected that the collection had, for the most part, belonged to the previous owner just like the rest of the furnishings. There were classic novels of the Bronte sisters’ era and several volumes on gardening, a pastime Louisa had admitted to me that she did not much indulge in. One of her neighbors loved the hobby so much that he came over to keep her roses fed and pruned and the scrap of lawn trimmed, and she was perfectly happy with that.

  The one section that no doubt came to the house with my aunt was a corner shelf filled with books on astrology, the occult, and histories of ghostly doings in and around the town of Bury. I pulled one down and flipped through the pages. It was an excellent reference and I could see why Louisa was now considered such an authority on her tours—she’d really done her research.

  A small booklet slipped from between two of the guidebooks and fell to the floor. Wrinkled from humidity and yellowed with age, it clearly was of a different vintage from the other books nearby. When I bent to pick it up, I saw that it was titled in a foreign language—something that looked a bit like German but with a whole lot of diacritical markings. Hmm . . . A crude hand drawing of a hooded figure decorated the front cover. I flipped through the pages and a single sheet of folded paper popped out. More of the foreign writing. The rain blasted the windows with renewed vigor, casting the room in a wavering light.

  “Charlie?”

  I jumped about a mile and I think a squeak escaped me. “Louisa! I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to snoop—”

  She gave me a quizzical look. “I was about to ask if you’d like some tea. Did you get to nap at all?”

  I shook my head and closed the booklet. “I was looking at some of your books about the haunted sites here in Bury and I—this—well, it fell off the shelf.”

  Don’t get me wrong. I am an incurable snooper. It’s just that I itch a little when I actually get caug
ht at it.

  Louisa patted my arm on her way to the kitchen. “Charlie, it’s fine. Help yourself to anything you see. I tend to keep an eclectic mix.”

  I heard her fill the kettle and take mugs from the cupboard.

  “So, then can I ask—what’s this language?” I stood in the doorway and held up the booklet.

  “Oh, that. It’s Romanian.” She spooned loose tea into a ceramic pot. A dreamy look came over her face. “Nicolae gave me the book. Right before I had to escape. That single sheet was the forged document that was supposed to keep me from the firing squad. I could have fallen in love with that man—dark curly hair, vivid blue eyes . . .” She sighed. “I really missed him.”

  “Romanian. Wait—escape? Seriously?”

  The kettle whistled and she poured boiling water over the tea leaves and set the lid in place on the teapot.

  “Of course, dear. Well, in those days one didn’t simply ask the communists to let you go. But there was a pretty well established underground movement, a few days dodging through the woods. It wasn’t really cold that time of year. Except on rainy nights. And of course I always questioned whether that document would have really saved me.”

  While she spilled out this matter-of-fact recount, she brought out a plate and opened a package of cookies that she’d bought earlier.

  “So you escaped from communist Romania in the dark of night . . . What were you doing there in the first place?”

  “Oh. Well that, of course, was because I’d gone to Transylvania. My interest in eastern European witchcraft.” She caught my incredulous stare. “I gave it up after a couple of years. Fascinating people, but it was sort of a crowded field.”

  I think my expression conveyed the What?? that was going through my mind. She smiled sweetly and I couldn’t help it. I burst into giggles. Once I started, she practically collapsed with laughter herself.

  “Oh, I can so understand why my father could not accept your lifestyle.”

  “I know—” she gasped. “Silly, isn’t it? Bill and me, brother and sister. It really never quite worked.”

  I sank into one of the chairs at the kitchen table. Once I caught my breath, I had to ask. “So, what’s the book about? Can you actually read it?”