Murder at the Beach: Bouchercon 2014 Anthology

by Patricia Abbott

  Nadia paused, and in spite of myself I waited in rapt anticipation for what she would say next.

  “This room, it was not like the others. As soon as I entered, I knew this. A strong sensation of cold washed over us. You may be aware that cold spots in a house can indicate the presence of a ghost.”

  I was tempted to think Nadia was re-imagining the past, since she had a dramatic personality. A more rational explanation was that cold air was piped into the room for exactly the effect Nadia described.

  “One of the plague figures in this cold room was not a mannequin, but a teenage boy working at the haunted house. He was very still at first—then reached out and grabbed a woman in front of me. I was not frightened, but it was a shock, you understand. That is why I dropped what I was holding in my hands: my gloves—which I had taken off in the heat of the stifling rooms—and a large ring that slipped off when I removed the gloves. It was not a ring that was especially valuable, but it was meaningful to me. Blue sapphire costume jewelry. As soon as my gloves and ring fell, I alerted Jack. He found a light switch hidden next to the exit door. The other six visitors in the room complained of ruining the atmosphere, but they did not stop him. My gloves were where they had fallen, but the ring was gone.”

  “It must have rolled away,” I said.

  “Jaya, do you think us stupid? We searched everywhere. The others moved on, but Jack and I searched the entire room. The ring was gone. And before you say that one of the others must have stolen it, remember this was not a valuable ring. Nor did it look like one. Even if someone had thought it to be valuable, none of the people we were with crouched down to the ground. They did not have an opportunity to pick it up.

  “It was then,” she continued, “that I learned the history of this haunted room. There was a crime committed there almost three-quarters of a century ago. A crime that was never solved. Because it was committed by a ghost—a ghost who is still there.”

  As if on cue, a light rain began to fall.

  “Come on,” I said, “let’s get out of here.”

  Nadia lingered a moment longer before following.

  “Tell me the rest of the story,” I said, ducking into the awning of a nearby café as the rain began falling harder.

  We grabbed a table at the front of the café. With the rain pelting against the window, I ordered hot coffee and a piece of the thick, gooey apple pie I saw another patron eating. There was sure to be enough butter and sugar in that pie to solve any problem.

  “The house,” Nadia said, “was built by a man with money from the Gold Rush. Several workmen died during its construction, which explains the ghost.”

  “Naturally.”

  “You mock me, but you should not. In the early 1900s, he lavishly entertained many wealthy people who would visit. On this famous visit, a portly scholar was visiting from his East Coast university. They shared a good meal with wine, and the owner saw his guest to his bedchamber. It was no ordinary night. The scholar locked himself into the room, and put a chair under the door handle. You see, he was traveling with something very valuable to the academic community. This is why he wished to stay with his friend rather than at a hotel. But his precautions were for naught.

  “The good professor reported a strange, ghostly noise shortly after lying down to sleep. He would not have thought much of it, for his girth made most beds squeak with all manner of sounds under his weight, except that this noise came from the other side of the room.”

  I had to hand it to Nadia. She was a great storyteller. “You sound like you were there,” I said.

  “After I experienced it myself, I read a history book. May I continue?”

  I nodded and took a sip of the coffee that had been set in front of me without my noticing.

  “When the scholar rose from the bed,” Nadia said, “he saw that the historical scroll he had discovered was gone.”

  “That sounds like a strange thing for a ghost to steal,” I commented.

  “It was the reason he was visiting San Francisco. The ghost must have sensed its importance and wished to be malicious.”

  “Or someone in the house stole it because it was valuable.”

  “The room,” Nadia said with a raised eyebrow, “and the whole house was searched. But that was unnecessary, since he had secured his room from the inside.”

  “There must have been a false panel in the room.”

  “The room was carefully inspected by a police officer, and then a private detective. There were no false panels. Even if you do not believe that, you must believe what has happened in the decades since then. The man who owned the house was long dead when Alan Marcus bought the house and opened it up for a Halloween charity.

  “Yet,” she continued, “whenever people go into that room...something disappears. It began with children’s toys. The ghost stole marbles from a child. This was decades ago when marbles were popular. The ghost has continued to steal, most frequently from children. It can only be a matter of time before the ghost takes not only crayons, but a child.”

  This time my shiver wasn’t from the cold. I didn’t feel nearly as warm and cozy as I should have sitting across from Nadia with a steaming coffee in my hands.

  “I know that expression of yours,” Nadia said. “I have convinced you.”

  “You’ve got me curious. I admit that much.”

  Two hours later, I sat surrounded by books and printouts from the newspaper archive at the library. As a professor of history, piecing through history is what I do, and I do it well. Absorbed in research, I was in my element—but I failed to come up with answers. Instead, I was more intrigued than ever. Much like Sarah Winchester’s desire to build new rooms onto her sprawling San Jose mansion until she died, the wealthy man who built this house wanted to renovate his home until his death. Unfortunately, he didn’t care much for the safety of his workers. At least two men had died in construction accidents while working on the house.

  I didn’t blame Nadia and countless others for assigning supernatural significance to the events that had taken place in the mansion. Though Nadia had exaggerated—it wasn’t every time someone entered the haunted room that something went missing—the disappearances had happened enough times that something was going on.

  Had the new owner Alan Marcus figured out the secret of the room and decided to use it to rob people? Initially that seemed like the easiest explanation, but none of the facts supported it. Not only was Mr. Marcus a wealthy man with no financial troubles, but the things that went missing were very rarely valuable.

  Another strike against that theory: When I called Mr. Marcus, the retired gentleman wasn’t the slightest bit evasive. He said he’d be happy to meet with us and show us the peculiar room.

  On my way downstairs to tell Nadia of my plan to visit the inside of the house, I ran into my neighbor, Miles, a poet who was stopping by to invite me to a poetry open mic night that evening. When I told him what I was busy doing, he asked if he could come.

  “I thought you had to practice reading your poem,” I said.

  “You’re going now?” he asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be working on a course syllabus or something?”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  I wished Miles good luck preparing for his poetry reading, then found Nadia, who wasn’t any more helpful. True to her word, she refused to go back to the house. Was I the only one who cared about the baffling mystery of the haunted room?

  “What if we could get your ring back,” I said.

  “Tempting,” Nadia said. “Very tempting.”

  That’s how I found myself heading back to the mansion with Nadia that afternoon. At least the rain had let up.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said as we approached the house. “What if Mr. Marcus wanted to throw the police off the scent by stealing seemingly random items to disguise the theft of a few valuable ones?”

  “You found a historic treasure, Jaya, and now you think you are an expert at all types of crime-solving?”


  Nadia’s sarcasm be dammed, I was feeling quite pleased with my deductive abilities until Mr. Marcus opened the door. I liked him at once. The octogenarian greeted us with a hearty handshake and a mischievous smile as he asked us if we were going to be the ones to solve his mystery. Most importantly, he also offered us coffee and cookies before we got to work. A man after my own heart.

  He explained that he only used part of the house during most of the year. The haunted house section wasn’t currently in use, its sparse furniture covered in sheets for ten months of the year. “After my wife passed away,” he said, “I no longer entertained. There wasn’t much point in keeping up the whole house.”

  I ate several cookies while listening to stories about his wife, who threw a wicked party in her day. Nadia sat stiffly, barely touching her coffee. I, on the other hand, was quite comfortable. Mr. Marcus kept the heat turned up, leaving me contentedly cozy on the plush couch. If it hadn’t been for my curiosity, I would have been happy to spend the afternoon looking out the sweeping bay windows with views of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Once I declared I couldn’t possibly eat another cookie, Mr. Marcus led us across the sprawling house to the room. We walked on beautiful Persian rugs in the hallways and passed original oil paintings that looked vaguely familiar, plus a series of impressionist paintings of San Francisco beaches. The perspective of the scenes suggested they might have been painted from the main room of the house, long before the city had grown up around it.

  Inside the supposedly haunted room, Mr. Marcus tossed the sheets aside and stood back, letting me have a closer look. The thick floorboards creaked beneath my feet.

  I had learned a thing or two about false panels from my best friend, Sanjay. He’s a magician, so I would have called him except I knew he was out of town preparing for a show. Even though he didn’t trust me with all his secrets, I had a good understanding of how many of his illusions worked. The same principles stage magicians used could be applied to situations like this. But that knowledge wasn’t helping me here. I was fairly confident I wasn’t missing any secret panels. But I had to be missing something.

  “Intriguing, isn’t it?” Mr. Marcus said. “The unsolved theft was one of the reasons that initially drew me to this place. My wife was a history buff. She loved the idea of living in a piece of history.”

  “So you two looked into the construction of the room.”

  “Oh yes,” he said, “most certainly. But we never found any hidden entrances to the room.”

  “The walls—” I began.

  “That,” Mr. Marcus said, “is the strangest part. Even if we missed a false panel, there’s no extra space between these walls. An electrician did some poking around years ago. There’s nothing there—and no room for anything to be hidden.”

  After eating another cookie—it would have been rude to turn down his hospitality—Nadia and I departed, and I headed back to the library. This time I paid attention not to the sensationalism surrounding the original crime or the construction of the house, but to the pictures of the room itself.

  The layout of the room struck me as strange. The nightstand had been placed across the room from the bed. That was odd...

  I stepped outside and pulled out my cell phone.

  “Mr. Marcus,” I said, “I know you checked the walls, but did you ever check the floor for any false panels?”

  “We certainly did. The floorboards were all connected to each other. There were no false panels there either.”

  “But did you check the space underneath the floor?”

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

  “You know,” he said, “I don’t believe we did. But without a teleportation device, I don’t see how anything could have fallen through that solid floor.”

  “Do you mind if I come back?”

  “It’s rather late.”

  “I promise it won’t take long.”

  This time I returned to the mansion with back-up. Not because I was afraid of a ghost, but because I needed to replicate the girth of the man who had once stayed there and been robbed of his valuable discovery.

  Nadia pursed her lips when I insisted on grabbing Miles from the poetry open mic night that was wrapping up at a coffee house in our neighborhood, but she said nothing. She didn’t like Miles, but she was at least as curious as I was.

  Twenty minutes later, the three of us piled into the corner of the room where the bed once stood.

  “Mr. Marcus, we need you, too, if this is going to work.”

  As he crossed the room and stepped within a foot of me, the floor began to shift.

  It wasn’t the movement of a single floorboard; the whole floor was subtly tilting. The floor was ever-so-slightly pivoting around a fulcrum in the center of the room. The tilt of the floor around the central hinge resulted in the edges of the wooden flooring being lower than the bottom of the wall. It was only a couple of inches—a small enough shift that in the dark it would have felt like stepping on a loose floorboard—but it was enough for anything small and circular to slip out of the room to the space beneath the floor.

  I took a pen out of my bag and dropped it. It rolled away and disappeared into the darkness.

  Everyone began to move at once.

  “Stop!” I said. “If any of us moves from this spot, the floor will go back to normal. “It was only because we have enough weight here that it activated the mechanism that was put in place to rob the professor who stayed here.”

  “Ingenious!” Mr. Marcus said, clapping his hands together. “Ingenious, but nasty. He altered this room and set it up to rob his friend.”

  “Let me see if I can see what’s going on under there.” Without moving away from the others, I crouched down on the floor and pulled a flashlight and a magnifying glass from my messenger bag.

  Sure enough, I could see an assortment of dusty items, mostly children’s toys like matchbox cars—anything that rolled.

  In the midst of the treasures, my flashlight shone across a blue stone ring. Nadia had said it was a piece of blue sapphire costume jewelry she’d lost.

  “Miles,” I said. “Can I borrow a pen?” He handed me a pen, and I used it to snag the large ring in the midst of the hidden treasures. Standing up, I handed Miles his pen and Nadia her ring.

  “After all this time,” Nadia said, shaking her head. “Thank you, Jaya.”

  “You can all move now if you want to,” I said. “I’ve seen what I needed to. Nobody has been stealing things in this house—not a ghost, not even a person. At least not for around eighty years. It was this mechanism.”

  I stepped away from the group. The floor slowly straightened out from its central pivot point. Because the floorboards were thick and uneven in this section of the old house, the small amount of space between the floorboards in the center of the room hadn’t raised any suspicions.

  “A hinge,” Nadia murmured.

  “I’m so writing a poem about this,” Miles said, scribbling a few lines in his beaten-up notebook he kept in the pocket of his cargo pants. “A theft from long ago,” he murmured to himself, “high above the Pacific Ocean’s beaches where the wind doth blow...Jaya Jones is the insightful professor, who’s more than a good guesser...”

  “Only when all the forces align,” I said, ignoring the clunky rhymes of Miles’ poem, “does something go missing. The floor was rigged to steal one particular thing—a valuable scroll from a very large man. The thief who owned this house was able to set things up with precision for that one-time event. He got his ‘friend’ inebriated, and saw him to bed with his valued possession safely in the corner of a room locked from the inside, with the bedside table and lamp across the room from the bed. When the large man went to bed, it would necessarily be dark. He would feel himself lower down into what he thought was an uneven mattress, but wouldn’t see the shift in the floor.”

  “When I opened my haunted house,” Mr. Marcus said, grinning excitedly, “people would huddle closely together be
cause they were having fun being frightened. Acting as a group, they replicated the weight necessary to activate the lever. That’s when the disappearances began.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “In the darkness and commotion, people felt that something was happening, but couldn’t identify exactly what it was. They were already discombobulated from walking through dark rooms that played with their senses. And as soon as they moved to turn on the lights, the floor was again completely flat. It was the house itself collecting treasures all these years.”

  “What a wonderful haunted house!” Nadia said. “I cannot wait until next Halloween.”

  Back to TOC

  The Hit-Man

  Roger Angle

  You don’t know me. You never heard of me before. Let’s keep it that way. The less you know about me, the better. Let’s hope we never meet in real life. At least, not in my line of work.

  It’s been so long since I used my real name, I can’t hardly remember it. Call me Sonny Owen Black. Sounds real, don’t it?

  That’s me, Sonny Owen Black—S.O.B.

  Get it? Son of a bitch. Har-har-har. Ain’t that a kick in the ass?

  This story is about Amanda. That’s my grown daughter. She got herself into some trouble, and I had to pull her bacon outta the fire.

  Amanda owned this cute little shop near the beach, in Venice, California. Hand-made soaps and perfumes. Called her store SMELL THIS. Funny, huh?

  I thought the name was a little too much, if you catch my drift. She made her own soaps and oils and perfumes. Fragrances. People would stop in on their way to and from the beach and buy sunscreen and shampoo and girly stuff. One best seller was Red Hot Mama soap. Had peppers in it. Another was Stud Bud—soap for certain guys.

  Amanda has a head on her shoulders, and business was booming. People in and out, little events on weekends, repeat business. Online sales, too.