Once in the bathroom, I did my business and hurried back into my room, stubbing my toe on the overly thick floor runner. It must have been two inches thick. The hallway was pretty creepy, all dark and squeaky, and I really didn’t want to stay out there any longer than I had to.
As I got in bed, I did give some thought as to how Clarissa could get her wheelchair up and over the floor runner. Her electric wheelchair must have a really good engine, I decided.
Just as my head hit the pillow, I heard this hair-raising scream that sounded like a woman being attacked. Goose bumps danced along my spine, and I sat straight up in bed. Well, as straight up as I could with a forty-five-inch waist.
“What the heck was that?” I asked aloud. My voice sounded spooked and twelve years old.
“Panther,” Gert said in between snores.
“What do you mean, panther?” I asked. “Don’t panthers meow or something like that?”
“No. Panthers scream. Like a woman,” she said, still without moving. How could she be this calm?
Then I heard it again. I sat in the bed unable to move, except for my eyes, which kept darting around the room expecting to see some rain-soaked crazy woman. The more I listened to it, the more I knew the sound was coming from outside. The scream seemed to get louder or quieter as if it was moving closer to the boardinghouse and then farther away. The fact that it was outside made me feel a little bit better.
“I’m telling you, it’s a panther. Go back to sleep.”
“Panthers live in the wild,” I argued. “In the mountains, in the boonies.”
“Yes, and you are in the boonies, in the mountains, and this is called Panther Run for a reason. Now go back to sleep before I brain you a good one.”
Enough said. Feeling very much like a scolded child, I snuggled back into my big fluffy bed with the covers up around my chin, but I still could not close my eyes. Rain pellets hit so hard against the glass that I thought for certain the windowpanes would break.
I lay like that until the storm moved on and the earliest rays of light caused shadows in my room. I’d heard the panther two more times in the middle of the night, and let me just say that it was the creepiest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.
At about six in the morning I had to use the bathroom again. I’d had to go for the last hour, but I waited until it became light enough to see where I was walking. As I stepped out into the hallway, I heard a creak. I looked up and down the hallway but didn’t see anybody. Between each room, bronze sconces with curved votive cups came out of the walls, and I wondered why they weren’t on. I felt inside of one and surmised that all the sconces like this one had no lightbulbs. The plush maroon floor runner was centered down the hallway floor. About three quarters of the way down on the left, the stairs exited into the great room below. A few feet of balcony stretched beyond the stairway until the very end of the hall, where Clarissa’s elevator was. Which was the opposite end of the hall where her room was. All of the doors in the hall were shut, except the one I’d just come out of.
I went to the bathroom and then walked back down the hall toward my room. Just as I was about to go into my room, I looked up and saw that the door to Clarissa’s room was open about six inches. I stood there a minute waiting for somebody to come out, but nobody did. I glanced up and down the hallway and saw nobody, so I decided to go down and at least check on her.
“Clarissa?” I asked as quietly as I could without it being a whisper.
No answer. I should have turned around and gone back to my room, but I couldn’t. I pushed on the already partially open door, and in the dim light of morning I could see Clarissa Hart lying on her throne of pillows, with one of the pillows covering her face.
It took a second for it to register that the old woman who had to use oxygen was lying with a pillow on her face. In all likelihood she would suffocate if I didn’t do something.
I rushed into the room and lifted the pillow. “Clarissa?” I said.
A noise at the window made me turn and look. Some sort of white bird flapped its wings and seemed to look into the room through the window right at me. It then made a chirping sound and flew away.
When I turned back around, Norville Gross was standing at the doorway looking at me with an astonished expression. He looked at the pillow in my hand and then at Clarissa, who didn’t seem to be breathing. Then ever so slowly he looked back to me.
This could be very bad.
Four
What did you do to her?” he asked.
“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “I just came in here and found her with a pillow over her face.”
“Why’d you come in here in the first place?”
I hate it when people ask you questions that you can’t answer without making yourself look bad. If I answered him honestly, it would make me look incredibly nosy. Which I was, but I didn’t want to admit it to him. “Her door was open and . . . I heard something,” I said. Which I hadn’t.
I made a move toward Clarissa to see if she was breathing or if indeed she was as dead as I expected. Norville gave a loud squeal and came partway into the room. “Don’t you touch her,” he said. His morning shadow was so dark that it was nearly blue in color. Maybe it just looked that color because his skin was a rather unbecoming shade of paste.
“For God’s sake,” I said. “I want to see if she’s breathing. Call 911.”
“I’m not leaving you alone with her.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, realizing that he wasn’t going to let this go. I checked for her pulse at her wrist and found nothing. An uneasy feeling settled on me as I set the pillow on the foot of the bed. I looked up at Mr. Gross, whose breathing had become more intense and irregular.
“Well?” he asked.
I went to her dresser and picked up a hand mirror. Carrying it in my sweaty little palms, I couldn’t help but wonder if Mr. Gross was so upset because Clarissa was dead, or because he thought I’d killed her. I placed the mirror below her nose and mouth, which was absent of any oxygen tube, and there was nothing. She was dead.
“Mr. Gross, are you going to stand there all morning, or are you going to dial 911? Clarissa is dead,” I said.
“No. She can’t be dead,” he answered. He shook his head in disbelief, and then quickly his expression turned perplexed. “Do you smell something?”
“Like what?” I asked and took a deep breath.
“Cologne?”
It was something sweet like a strong air freshener. I nodded my head that I did smell something, but I wasn’t sure what.
About that time, sixteen-year-old Danette Faragher walked into the room. She wore nothing but one of her tie-dyed T-shirts that came to just above her knees and, I’m assuming, underwear. She had a tattoo of some sort on her ankle. From where I stood, it looked like a rose or some other kind of flower.
“What’s going on?” she asked in a sleepy tone of voice.
“Danette,” I said. “Your granny died in her sleep.”
Mr. Gross was about to dispute what I’d just said, but the daggers that flew out of my eyes and across the room stopped him. Danette’s eyes got real big, and tears perched on her lower lids. Then just like magic, something else replaced the tears. “Oh, gross,” she said.
That wasn’t exactly the reaction I was expecting, but hey, she was not herself at the moment. She was sixteen. It would be years before she was herself.
“Danette, I need for you to stand guard at the door and not let anybody in,” I said.
“Why?” she asked, still staring at Clarissa’s body.
“Just do what I say. And I mean, nobody gets in, not even your grandfather, until Mr. Gross and I get back. Is that understood?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Stand out here at the door, because I don’t want you to touch anything inside, okay?”
“Okay,” she said and did as I asked. She looked a little pale and I felt really bad about leaving her to stand guard, but what other choice di
d I have?
“Mr. Gross, come with me,” I said.
He followed me out of the room, down the hall, and downstairs into the great room. The telephone was on the table by the front door. “Stay right there, Mr. Gross. I want you to witness this phone call.”
He nodded to me and I dialed 911. When the operator answered and I told her our dilemma, she became very quiet. “Where are you exactly?” she asked.
“We’re at Panther Run. The boardinghouse just out of town. Below Quiet Knob,” I said.
“On the Gauley River?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Ma’am, have you looked outside this morning?” she asked.
“No,” I said. I walked over to the window and looked out across the front porch to water. Nothing but water. Water over the road and nearly into the driveway of the boardinghouse. “Oh, great.”
“Flash flood,” she said. “From all of the rain last night. It’ll go down real fast. Probably a day or two.”
“A day or two?” I screeched into the phone. “What am I supposed to do with . . . with . . . the body?”
“Can you put her on ice?”
Oooh. Disgusting. “Uh, I don’t think that’s possible. Unless maybe they have a cellar?” I said to the operator, but it was a question to Mr. Gross. He shrugged his shoulders to indicate that he did not know. “Even then, I think it will just be cooler, I don’t think it would be the same thing as ice.”
Oh, I really didn’t want to think about this.
“Is there no way you can get a sheriff in here? By boat? A Hummer?” I asked. I’d been through floods before. Hummers are the way to go if the water isn’t too high.
“Hummer,” she said. “We’re not going to call in the National Guard or the army on a flash flood. It’s not as if it’s going to last a week.”
“No, but it’s going to last long enough to cause a really disgusting smell in this house,” I said. I sighed heavily and tried to get my bearings. “Please, call the sheriff and see if he can get here by boat. I think there might have been foul play involved, but I’m not sure. And I don’t want to sound like I’m expecting a miracle here, but her entire family is present. A decomposing Granny would not be a very good thing.”
I think I was nearly as hysterical as my voice sounded. The thought of being stuck in this boardinghouse for two days with a decaying body was just more than I wanted to deal with. I wondered where this situation would rank on that stress test I saw in Cosmopolitan last week at the doctor’s office.
“I’ll do my best,” she said.
I hung up the phone and looked into the very distressed face of Mr. Gross. A thought occurred to me, and I picked up the phone again. I dialed the number, and it rang about six times before a very groggy Sheriff Colin Brooke answered the phone.
“Hello, Colin?” I asked. He was my future stepfather and I admitted begrudgingly, an all-right guy.
“You are in West Virginia,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And it is five-fifteen in the morning.”
“Yes.” I’d forgotten about the time zone difference. He was back home in New Kassel, Missouri.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Then what’s happened? It better be worthy of calling me at five-fifteen in the morning, or I’ll wring your neck when you get back to New Kassel. I don’t care if you are pregnant,” he said.
“You know the old lady that I was coming to visit?” I asked. He acknowledged that he remembered. “Well, she died. In her sleep.”
“So?” he asked. “Let me guess . . . you think—”
“No, I have no opinion whatsoever,” I said. When in fact I did find the pillow on her face. “My problem is . . . there’s a flash flood and the water probably won’t go down for a day or two. What do I do with the body?”
The sheriff’s only response was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Come out with it,” he said finally.
He was going to make a good stepfather, because he could almost always tell when I was lying or withholding information. Glad he hadn’t been around when I was a teenager.
“All right, when I walked into her room there was a pillow over her face. Colin, tell me what to do. I don’t think they can get a sheriff in here until the water goes down,” I said. “I. . . I have probably fifteen or twenty people in this place, if you count the hired help. I really don’t want people to panic, and yet, I’m about to panic. If she was murdered, I’m not too thrilled about being trapped in this place with a killer.”
“Great,” he said. A moment passed without either one of us saying anything. Finally, he decided. “Seal off the room.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. As he spoke, something in the fireplace caught my attention. I picked the phone up and carried it as far as the cord would reach, which was right up to the fireplace.
“Don’t disturb anything. Leave the body as is, and shut the door. Crank the air-conditioning,” he said.
“That’s it? That’s all the advice you have for me?”
Lying in the fireplace was a pile of burned papers. There hadn’t been a fire in the fireplace probably since spring, so whoever had done this had just burned the papers and thrown them in the fireplace and left, thinking they would burn all the way. I knelt down and picked them up as carefully as I could so that they wouldn’t crumble.
“If you’re certain there was no foul play, then I’d say move the body and put it on ice.”
Did everybody think that boardinghouses were equipped with big blocks of ice just waiting to have a dead body piled on it? This was ridiculous. “Well, since we seem to have a shortage of ice, unless you want me to hack Granny up and stuff her in the freezer, I think that one is out.”
I happened to remember that Norville Gross was listening to my conversation, and that probably didn’t sound too good. I fished all of the papers out of the fireplace and laid them on the hearth. Norville gave me a very perplexed look, with one eyebrow raised.
“They should be able to get a sheriff in there by boat,” he said. “Once they realize there’s been a murder.”
“Okay,” I said. “So, clear the room and seal it.”
“Yes,” he said. “And don’t tell your mother.”
It irked me slightly that he was telling me what to tell and what not to tell my mother. That had been, up until recently, my job. The sheriff and my mother had a May/December relationship, which was fine by me. My mother robbed the cradle. More power to her. Their relationship did take some getting used to, though. The sheriff had actually arrested me once, when I was being a Good Samaritan, I might add. He and I never really got along, and was my mother sympathetic? No. She decided to marry him.
“I won’t have to tell her,” I said. “Gert will when she talks to her next.”
“What?” he asked.
“Gert will let it slip,” I said. “Well, I gotta go. Thanks, Colin.”
I hung up the phone, still knelt down at the hearth trying to make sense of the burned pieces of paper. Most of it I could not make out. However, there were a few words that had a familiar ring to me. They were: of sound body and mind.
“Mr. Gross,” I said. “Could you get me a Baggie or something to put this in?”
“What is it?” he asked.
“I believe it is Clarissa’s will.”
Five
Two hours later, everybody was dressed and assembled in the great room of the Panther Run Boardinghouse. I wore the best maternity outfit that I had, which was a blue and white striped dress, with a big white collar and red bow. Why did it seem most maternity clothes were designed to make you look like a sailor? Almost everything else I’d brought along was shorts and shirt sets.
“Okay, let’s be calm,” I said.
“Who put you in charge?” Prescott Lewis asked me.
His question was legitimate. I had just sort of assumed control of the situation, when in fact I was the biggest suspect there was. I was th
e one found with the pillow in my hand, no one else. Norville Gross, up to this point, had been gracious enough not to point that out to the others. Of course, it took an hour of talking my fanny off to convince him that he would do more harm than good if he let that piece of information out just yet.
All of the people who had been at dinner the night before were present, plus quite a few new faces. “Please, just be cooperative for right now. Everybody. Please?”
The people in the room quieted down a bit, and so I went on. “If you were not at dinner last night, please introduce yourself and explain how you are related to Mrs. Hart,” I said.
Maribelle wailed at the sound of her late mother’s name. Prescott rolled his eyes, but an unidentified man was compassionate and handed her a fresh Kleenex.
“Employees first,” I said.
“My name’s Dexter. Dexter Calloway,” a man said. He was about fifty and looked as though he’d lived every year to the limit. He couldn’t have spoken any slower if somebody had given him taffy to chew on. “I’m the handyman. Groundskeeper, butler, whatever Mrs. Hart needed me to do.”
“I’m Susan Henry. The cook.”
“Vanessa Killian. Cleaning lady.”
Okay, that took care of the hired help. “Are there any boarders other than Mr. Gross?” I asked.
A tall, slender woman raised her hand. She was about my age, early thirties, had long, straight blond hair to about the middle of her back, and wore tiny framed glasses. “I’m Sherise Tyler,” she said. “I’m a journalist.”
Oh, that was perfect. I could see people around the room reacting to her announcement moments after she said it. A journalist. They were all worried about the story being written up in the local papers where they had lived and worked their whole lives. That was called gossip. Only, once it was in print, it became fact to most people.
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