Haunted House Murder

by Leslie Meier

  The Oriental carpet from the upstairs hall lay in a heap on the floor. I pointed it out to Chris. “That’s exactly where Harley said Sarah Merriman fell down the stairs and broke her neck. Mom says the upstairs rug ends up there all the time.”

  Chris raised his eyebrows. “Maybe the place is haunted.”

  “Stop kidding around.”

  “Who says I’m kidding?”

  He picked up the rug and we crept up the stairs. At the top, we lay and straightened the rug and then kissed goodnight. My old room still had a twin bed in it, so he was going to sleep in Livvie’s old room, which also had a twin bed. It had been decorated aggressively in pink and princesses for my niece Page by my mother back when my father was dying and Livvie and Page had spent many, many nights at the house. At eleven years old Page was rapidly outgrowing the decor, but it always cracked me up to think of Chris sleeping in there.

  I tread quietly back and forth to the bathroom, hoping not to wake my mother and scare her to death. When I climbed into bed Le Roi jumped in next to me, the force of old habits. His loud purring lulled me to sleep.

  Chapter Seven

  Chris was gone by the time I got up. It was a clear, crisp day and he needed to get on with the fall cleanup and closing of summer homes that were a part of his landscape business.

  Mom was at the kitchen table drinking coffee when I came down. “Chris told me what happened,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay, I guess. It was pretty awful. The poor woman staying at the Snuggles saw her husband killed. Their sons saw it too, which seems even worse.”

  Mom shivered. “I didn’t want the tour to come through my house, but I never imagined anything like this.”

  “We can’t be sure it was someone on the tour who shot him.”

  “Who else could it have been? Other than the tour group it was you, Chris, Gus, Sonny, and Harley. It wasn’t one of you.”

  I guessed she was right. The kitchen door to the restaurant had been locked. No one could have gone out it. If it was opened from the inside, it had to be relocked from the outside with a key.

  “There’s coffee in the pot,” Mom said. “I have to get to work.” She went to the back hall to fetch her coat. “By the way, the upstairs rug was on the floor in the front hall again this morning.”

  “I know. Chris and I put it back last night.”

  “No, I mean when I came down this morning, it was there.”

  “Has this thing with the rug happened before? Before Harley told us about Sarah Merriman, I never saw it.”

  “Yes, very occasionally in the last couple of years, but not so frequently as it has this fall. In the past I assumed it was Page and her friends fooling around, but it’s started to happen when they’re not around.” She gave me a kiss on the forehead, an unusual display of affection, which I knew must flow from her concern about me. “Take care of yourself. Be good. Stay out of trouble.”

  After she left, I took my coffee mug and walked to the front of the house. There was no misplaced carpet on the front hall floor, but that wasn’t what I was after. I stared out the front window at the Snuggles Inn across the street. The leaves were off the trees and Sonny had taken the screens off Mom’s front porch earlier in the month, so the view of the B and B was sharp in the bright morning sunlight. Gingerbread molding snaked across the eaves of the now-empty front porch of the Snuggles. I couldn’t stand to think about the poor woman and unfortunate boys staying there. I took my mug back to the kitchen sink and then headed out the front door.

  * * *

  “Julia. How lovely to see you. Come in, come in.” Vee Snugg answered the door. She and her sister, Fee, were both in their seventies, neighbors beloved by our family and honorary great-aunts to Livvie and me. Vee looked glamorous as always, her snow-white hair swept back in a chignon. She wore a brown tweed skirt, a brown sweater set pinned with a gold brooch and, as she did for any task in any season, hose and high heels.

  “Is Joyce Bayer here?”

  “You’ve heard.” Vee led me into the big, old-fashioned kitchen, a place as comfortable for me as my own home.

  “I was there.”

  “Oh, my. I hadn’t heard.”

  “I was working with Harley on the tour.”

  “The tour group came here you know, to the old stable.”

  “I was with them.”

  Vee pursed her lips. “I’ve lived in this house for decades and I never heard that story about the stable boy.”

  Indeed. With Harley, poetic license was more like poetic armed robbery. “Where are Mrs. Bayer and the boys now?”

  Vee cocked her head toward the swinging door that led to the dining room. “In there, pushing food around their plates. She’s anxious to leave, but Sergeant Flynn has asked them to stay. He has to interview them again. As you can imagine, last night she was in no fit state, either to give her own statement or to be present when her boys were interviewed.”

  “I want to talk to her. Do you think you could distract the boys?”

  “Surely. We’ll bake.” Baking was Vee’s response to any kind of stress.

  I went through the swinging door, followed by Vee. As she had said, no one had eaten much breakfast. The older boy, Kieran, gazed out the window toward the harbor, while the younger boy played a game on a cell phone. Joyce Bayer stared at her plate. I studied the boys, trying to see a resemblance to Spencer Jones. I didn’t see it, except maybe Will around the eyes.

  “Mrs. Bayer, may I talk to you?”

  She looked up and I could see the toll the events of the night before had taken. Her brown eyes were red-rimmed, and deeply circled. Her sharp nose was raw, her curly, brown hair disheveled. The night before I had judged her to be in her mid-forties. This morning she looked much older.

  “Of course. You’re Julia, right?”

  “C’mon, boys, and bring your plates,” Vee said. “I’m going to teach you to make banana bread.”

  Will, the younger boy, looked at his mom, who nodded it was okay to go. Kieran heaved himself out of his chair and followed.

  I sat down next to Joyce. “The detective told me Spencer Jones was your husband. I am so sorry this happened to you and your boys.”

  “Thank you. It is horrifying. Neither of them has cried. I think they’re both in shock. I’m so worried about what this has done to them.” She hesitated. “And devastated about Spencer. We weren’t together anymore, but he was a part of my life for more than twenty years, and we had two beautiful children together.”

  “Did you really not know Spencer was here?” I asked it as gently as I could, hoping it didn’t sound like an accusation.

  “I didn’t. No one was more shocked to see him lying there than I was. I’d caught a glimpse of him coming through the trapdoor before the lights went out, but, honestly, I didn’t recognize him. It was so fast, and he was the last person I expected to see in the last place I expected to see him.”

  “So you really didn’t know he was here.” I said it as a statement, meant to reassure her.

  She misunderstood me. “I can see why you would be skeptical. That detective certainly was.” She put her hands together on the tablecloth and turned toward me. “It might be a coincidence, but I don’t think it was.” She lowered her voice. “I think Will somehow found out his dad was going to be here and wanted to see him. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Spencer was never very present in their lives even when he and I were together. His work caused him to be away a great deal. When the boys were little, we traveled with him, but once Kieran started first grade, I stayed behind in New Jersey. Spencer was only consistently with us four or five months a year, and even then, if he was in a play, he was gone by the time the boys got home from school, out way after their bedtime, and still asleep when they left in the morning.

  “Will, in particular, has been longing to see his dad, and he was the one who initiated this whole trip. I honestly couldn’t understand why a thirteen-year-old boy would think going to
Maine for a haunted house tour was the coolest thing in the world. But I knew from experience with Kieran, once they become teenagers, if they want to have anything to do with you, you have to be grateful.”

  “You haven’t asked him?”

  “No. We were all so tired and shocked last night. I wasn’t sure. I’m looking for the right moment. If it’s true, I think he and I have to have the conversation before we talk to the detective again. And I need to know if Kieran was in on it.”

  “What an awful thing, for him to scheme to see his dad and this happens. I am so sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You and Spencer were divorced?”

  “No. Never officially. We’ve been separated for seven years, though given how rarely he was home; the marriage was effectively over long before that. One of the ridiculous things about this situation is that I’ve been looking for Spencer. I wanted to serve him with divorce papers. We never got around to it. The separation was never formal; he just didn’t come home one fall after he left here. But now, I have a new partner, someone I want to marry, so I was eager to get officially divorced.”

  “Spencer didn’t have regular visitation with the boys? You weren’t in touch?”

  “Sadly, he wasn’t interested. It’s been hard on our sons. I’m lucky they like Scott. He’s great with them. They’re at an age when they need a man in their lives.”

  “Will you stay in town long?”

  She shifted in her chair. “I want to go home as soon as we can. We need to do these interviews with the police and then sign statements. And I guess, once the medical examiner is through, it’s my responsibility to figure out what to do with the body. Spencer’s parents are dead, and he and I are still legally married. I want my boys to see their dad treated with respect.” She lifted a paper napkin to her eye as a tear escaped.

  My heart went out to her. “My mom lives right across the street,” I told her. “I’m staying with her until the police say it’s okay to return to my apartment, which is in the same building where the shooting took place. Please let me know if you need anything. Anything at all.”

  “Thank you. Everyone has been so kind. I feel just awful about how everything has turned out.”

  I left through the front hall, avoiding the kitchen, where the sounds of chatter and the scraping of a spoon on a bowl told me the boys were occupied.

  Chapter Eight

  As soon as I left the Snuggles, I got a text from Flynn that my statement to the police was ready for me to review and sign. There being no time like the present, I headed down the street in the direction of the police station.

  On my way down the walk to the station house door, I ran into Marge and Elizabeth, the mother and daughter who’d been on the tour.

  “It’s you,” Marge said.

  “It is me,” I agreed. “Are you here to give your statements?”

  “We just did.” Marge turned back and pointed toward the glass door. “So long, so tedious.” Then she seemed to remember it wasn’t entirely about her. “And such a terrible thing to have happened, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Anyway, we were here for hours. Hours! That sergeant insisted we had to be interviewed individually, and by him. Even though we were in the same place and saw, and didn’t see, exactly the same things. Now we have to drive back to Brunswick. By the time we stop and pick up groceries on the way, the day will be done. Done, I tell you.”

  I didn’t know what to say to this. Silently, I tried out “What a shame,” which didn’t seem to fit, and “I’m so sorry.” But what was I apologizing for?

  Fortunately, Marge didn’t seem to notice my lack of response. “We’ve got to go,” she said. “Got to go. We cannot wait to leave this all behind us. It’s been nice to meet you, Julia, but I hope we never see each other again.” Marge grabbed Elizabeth by the elbow and dragged her toward the parking lot.

  By this point, I was truly speechless. I hoped Marge didn’t get her wish, because if I never saw her again, that meant there wouldn’t at some time in the future be a trial. And if there wasn’t a trial, that might mean the killer had never been caught.

  As I watched them go, I realized it had been my second meeting with Elizabeth Handey and I had yet to hear her utter a single word.

  * * *

  “I don’t think she did it.”

  Flynn looked up from his laptop, furrowing his brow as he did. “Mrs. Handey?”

  “Joyce Bayer. I think she’s shocked to her core by the murder, and I think she’s too much of a mother to murder their father in front of her sons.”

  “You’ve talked to her, then.” He sat back in the metal folding chair, arms across his broad chest.

  There was no sense in denying it. “I visited her at the Snuggles. I thought she might need some company, or support.”

  “Your friends the Snuggs strike me as the very essence of comforting and supportive.”

  “I don’t think it was her.” I dug my heels in.

  “Yet you admit it was a tremendous coincidence that after a long separation Mrs. Bayer happened to be in the place where her husband was murdered.”

  I wanted to tell him the visit had most likely been engineered by her younger son, but then I remembered Flynn hadn’t yet formally interviewed either Joyce or her boys. How they came to be in Busman’s Harbor wasn’t my story to tell. “I’m here to review my statement.”

  “I’ll get it.”

  While Flynn was gone, I waited in the uncomfortable metal folding chair across from the folding table he used as a desk.

  “Got it.” He waved the papers fresh off the printer in front of me. I took them and reviewed what I’d said. All seemed to be in order, so I signed them.

  “What else is new?” I asked him. Sometimes, depending on the case, he would tell me.

  “Ballistics reports and a preliminary medical examiner’s report is what’s new. Jones was killed with a single bullet to the brain from a Remington 22 Viper hypervelocity bullet shot from a Smith & Wesson 43C 22 caliber J Frame revolver.”

  I stared at him blankly.

  He grinned. “You have no idea what I just said.”

  “I heard some numbers, and also the letter. J.”

  “Mr. Jones was killed with a single shot from a small revolver.”

  “A small revolver? It sounded like a cannon.”

  “The high-velocity ammunition would have added a little volume, but mostly it was loud because it was fired from right next to you.”

  “Right next to me!” I could feel the color drain from my face.

  Flynn held up a hand. “Maybe not literally next to you, but from the area where the tour participants sat.”

  “So it was a member of the tour group who shot him.”

  “Most likely, unless someone snuck in and got in place before the trapdoor opened. But they would have to have hidden near, almost in, the tour group, and no one I’ve spoken to so far saw anyone who wasn’t on the tour.”

  Flynn’s certainty about the trajectory of the bullet eliminated Chris, Sonny, Gus, and Harley from suspicion. Not that I ever thought it was one of them, but it was good that Flynn had no reason to consider any of them. “Have you found the gun?” I asked.

  “No. It’s nowhere on the site. Whoever shot Jones must have taken the gun.”

  “Wouldn’t they need to get rid of it?”

  “One would think. The killer was a great shot.”

  Spencer had only been visible for a few seconds before I’d turned out the lights, and he’d been on the move. To place that bullet in the middle of his forehead in the dark seemed remarkable.

  “Have you interviewed everyone from the tour group?” I asked.

  “Not quite. I talked to the four teenagers, along with Mrs. Handey and the daughter this morning. Clyde Merkin’s on his way in. I’ll talk to Ms. Bayer and her boys this afternoon. I interviewed you, Chris, Gus, Sonny, and Harley last night, so almost everybody.”

  “You left
someone out.”

  “Ms. Santiler. She’s unaccounted for. She was registered at the Bellevue Inn and supposed to stay there overnight, but she retrieved her car from the valet less than half an hour after the incident. He saw her throw a suitcase in the trunk and leadfoot it out of the parking lot.”

  “She’s on the run.”

  “Maybe,” Flynn conceded. “Or maybe simply unnerved by the murder. Mr. Prendergast gave us her credit card number. If she uses the card we’ll find her soon.” He shifted in the uncomfortable chair, which made me aware of how much my backside hurt. “Did you talk to Mrs. Handey and her daughter on the tour?”

  “I introduced myself, but not much more. I talked to them a little bit when I met them on the walk on my way in here.”

  “What did you think? Mrs. Handey gave me a hard time about interviewing her daughter one-on-one. She wanted to be present.”

  I thought back over the whole of the trolley tour and the chat on the walk this morning. I had assumed Elizabeth was shy, and with a mother like Marge, could barely get a word in edgewise anyway. But maybe my assumptions were wrong. “Do you think the daughter is impaired in some way?”

  “You mean mentally? No. She was clear and straightforward once I got her away from her mother. I think the younger Ms. Handey is almost pathologically shy, but I don’t think she has any intellectual challenges.”

  He glanced at his watch. “Mr. Merkin is due any minute.”

  I stood. “I’ll go along then. Can I move back into my apartment?”

  “Yes. We weren’t done in time for Gus to open the restaurant this morning, but it’s clear now.”

  “Thanks.”

  * * *

  Clyde Merkin came down the walk toward the station as I left. “Julia! How are you doing? Wasn’t that something last night?”

  “I’m okay, Clyde. Still a little shaky, if I’m honest.”

  “Yeah. That’ll be the shock. Were you meeting with Sergeant Flynn?”

  “I just signed my statement. I was interviewed last night.”