Sweet Holidays: The Third Samantha Sweet Mystery (The Samantha Sweet Mysteries)

by Connie Shelton

  She set the mail on the granite counter and sniffed at the air in the kitchen. Stale, but the bad-food reek had subsided. She pulled the camera and writing pad from her backpack.

  “How about if I snap pictures and you write descriptions, since you actually know what you’re looking at,” she suggested.

  They went around the room, focusing on paintings and sculpture. Sam realized how little she knew about this whole world of high-dollar collectibles when Rupert pointed out an antique fire-screen and tools that he swore were pre-Civil War.

  In the dining area Sam recognized an RC Gorman oil, which Rupert immediately spotted as an original and noted on the inventory with a value upwards of $50,000. Once again, Sam got an uneasy feeling. Nobody walked away from assets like these.

  They worked their way through the rooms, even going so far as to photograph the kitchen appliances. In the library, Sam snapped wide angle shots of the bookcases, doing close-ups only when Rupert pointed out a section that he swore were first editions.

  Sam felt her energy flagging. They’d been at it for three hours already and she felt chilled to the bone in the unheated house. The thought occurred to her that she might be able to make a pretty good case for having the power restored, just on the basis of the value of the art. Something might become damaged by the cold. But she wasn’t sure how far Delbert Crow’s authority went. A stronger argument might actually be made with Montague’s insurance company, which could potentially be out hundreds of thousands in damage claims. She mused aloud about this to Rupert.

  “Why don’t you take the camera and the list and check both guest rooms and baths,” she said. “I’ll go through some of these files and see if I can get a name for his insurance agent.”

  He trooped out of the library and Sam took the leather chair at the desk once more. Before she touched it she realized that something was different. A stapler and metal ruler that had been in the top drawer yesterday now sat on top of the desk. A different kind of chill went through her already-cold arms.

  She visualized the desk as she’d left it. Each item that she’d touched she’d replaced exactly in its spot. The center drawer was open a little less than an inch. It, too, showed signs of a search. The place where the address book had lain was no longer a blank spot—a scattering of index cards and paperclips covered it. She reached toward the back of the drawer to see what else might have been moved.

  “Sam, I—” Rupert peeked into the room.

  Startled, she jerked.

  A faint whirring sound came from her left. Rupert stopped in mid-step and as Sam followed his gaze she saw that one section of the bookcase was slowly swinging outward.

  “What the—” Her breath caught.

  A dark void appeared behind the wooden case, which stopped at a ninety-degree angle to its normal position.

  “Holy cr—” Rupert cleared his throat. “Girl, what have you done?”

  Holy crap was right. Sam’s vocabulary wasn’t nearly as restrained as Rupert’s and she filled in with a few other choice phrases as well.

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  His eyes were as wide as hers felt.

  “Do you still have that big flashlight, Sam? Cause I’m not standing here without—”

  “Light. Good idea.”

  “No, I meant a weapon.” His lips had gone pale.

  “I left my backpack in the kitchen.”

  “I’ll get it.” He scurried from the room like a jittery rabbit. Sam rose from the chair and edged herself away from the black hole.

  “Here,” he breathed, so close that Sam jumped again. He handed her the light. Thanks a lot, big brave guy.

  She snapped it on and aimed the bright LED beam toward the exposed space behind the bookcase. The cavernous space was at least eight feet deep. The light glinted off various surfaces—wood and glass.

  “It’s a whole room,” Rupert whispered, standing two inches from Sam’s shoulder.

  She stepped closer and he trailed, like a second skin.

  At the doorway, Sam stopped. The beam traveled past shelves and display cases, obviously custom built to fit the safe room. They appeared to be filled with small objects: a set of short bones, like a very small finger; metal implements, including a huge syringe, in a wooden box with fitted compartments for each item; another compartmented box that contained teeth, perfectly preserved molars with gold fillings and crowns. Atop one of the display cases sat a shaded lamp. Sam gasped when she realized that the base of it was made from a human skull. She flicked the light away from it, then back, then away again as a queasy feeling crawled into the pit of her stomach.

  “Sam . . . I don’t like this.”

  “Creepy. Looks like the guy’s taste in collectibles goes a tad beyond paintings and Western sculpture.”

  She ran the beam along another display, this one filled with heavy-duty pliers and saws. A vision popped into her head, of a battlefield medical tent, an officer in bloodied whites amputating a leg. She blinked hard and the picture went away.

  Her light bounced off the opposite wall of the confined space and landed on a dark figure, standing in the far left corner. Sam shrieked and bumped into Rupert as she jerked backward, her heart pounding.

  “What? What is it?” Rupert said.

  Her feet kept scrambling backward, her butt bumping him awkwardly.

  She edged a glance over her shoulder and realized that she’d backed him entirely out of the hidden room. She aimed the light back at the dark figure in the corner and assured herself that it wasn’t a real person standing there. The hairs on her arms rose.

  A Klansman, was her first thought. The floor length robe, the pointed cap that covered the face. But the material was a dark green, almost like military khaki but with a more yellowish cast, a sickly, ominous shade. Dark stains ran down the front of the robe. Whatever held it up—mannequin, dress form, or skeleton—placed the arms together at the waist, and out of the bell-like sleeves unseen hands held a tattered rope noose. In the mask, the eye holes were crudely cut, as if a vicious animal had gnawed them out. The holes were deep, empty and utterly black but Sam had the sickening feeling that they could somehow see her.

  Chapter 11

  Sam felt her scalp prickle and her entire body contract with goosebumps. Acid rose in her throat. She scrambled backward to get out of the doorway, surprised to find that Rupert was already halfway across the library, the other side of the massive desk. His eyes were about the size of dinner plates and Sam imagined that her own looked the same. Her breath was coming in gasps by the time she reached his side.

  “What the hell—?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m not sticking around to find out,” Rupert panted. He headed for the doorway.

  “Wait. We can’t just leave the room this way.” C’mon, she thought, they were just things, inanimate objects. Creepy inanimate objects, but she’d dealt with a lot of disgusting things in this job. “Let me at least straighten up.”

  She took a deep breath and sidled around the edge of the desk. Sneaking up on the open bookcase, she pressed against it and was relieved when it swung soundlessly closed on its sturdy hinges. She heard Rupert give a nervous chuckle and saw that he stood in the door to the hall, watching her.

  She jammed her hands to her hips. “Thanks a lot, mister bravado.”

  He looked a little sheepish.

  “I’ll just tidy the desk,” she said, “and then let’s get out of here.” Beyond that, she had no idea what to do about the find. Her first thought was to report it to Beau, but although Montague’s collection was weird, eerie, macabre, just about any creeped-out adjective she could think of . . . was it illegal? Probably not.

  She gathered the few items that she’d removed from the drawer and jammed them back inside. She swiped the sleeve of her sweatshirt across the surface in a half-hearted attempt to remove the skiff of dust, then joined Rupert in the hall outside the library.

  “Okay, let’s go,” she said, heading toward the kit
chen. “You have my camera and our inventory list?”

  Miraculously, the camera still hung from his wrist by its strap.

  “Oh, Sam. I almost completely forgot. The reason I came looking for you in the library was because I found something.” He was walking down the hall in the opposite direction. “I think there’s been a break-in.”

  She turned around and trotted along behind him. When she caught up, in the front foyer, he was poised dramatically, one hand pointed at the heavily carved front door. A crack of light at the door’s edge evidenced that it had, indeed, been compromised. Sam knew, from her first visit here, that this door was securely locked three days ago.

  “Did you touch it at all?” she asked.

  “Definitely not.” He drew himself up even straighter. “I’ve written enough police procedure in my novels to know better than that.”

  Sam placed a fingertip high on the open edge and pulled it gently inward. No evidence that the lock had been picked or damaged. But that might not mean much. She, herself, could pick a lock with a simple set of tools, and there were even more sophisticated lock picks available. Then, too, it was simply possible that the intruder had a key.

  This was all getting too complex for Sam to figure out on her own. The open door gave her the perfect reason to hand it all over to Beau and let the authorities deal with the situation.

  She dipped her frozen fingers into her coat pocket and came out with her cell phone. He answered on the third ring.

  “Hey there,” he said, “enjoying your Sunday off?”

  “Yeah, well, it’s not exactly working out that way.” She quickly explained how the decision to inventory the home’s valuable contents had turned into the discovery of the open door, minus a mention of the hidden room and its unnerving contents—that could wait until he got here. “There were a few things out of place in the library, but otherwise I can’t tell that anything is missing. But I thought I better report the break-in.”

  “I can’t get out there now,” Beau said. “In fact, it won’t be for several hours. I don’t even have a deputy I can send at the moment. We’re up to our necks in calls for some reason today.”

  Sam didn’t relish the idea of hanging around the Montague house another ten minutes, let alone several hours.

  “If the door isn’t damaged, why don’t you just lock it up again, make sure everything is secure. I can call you when I’m ready and you can meet me there again, if that works for you.”

  Although Sam wasn’t crazy about coming back out here once she settled in at home, she agreed. There certainly was no point in staying in the unheated house staring at an open door. And although Beau could surely just write up a report with the information she’d already given, there were a few other things she’d like for him to see. Taking care not to leave prints, she pushed the door closed and twisted the deadbolt.

  Rupert helped her check the other entrances and windows and seemed more than relieved to leave the place behind as they gathered their inventory list and Sam’s backpack. He offered to take her to lunch, but she begged off, saying that she really needed to get things done at home with the rest of her free day. She dropped him off at his place, leaving him with a stern warning not to blab all over town the fact that a valuable art collection was sitting unattended. Some among Rupert’s artsy friends would give their eye teeth for those pieces.

  Home at last, Sam found a note from Kelly stating that she’d made plans with a couple of old school buddies—dinner and a movie. It felt good to know she had the house to herself for awhile. The thought ran through her head—not for the first time—that it would be good for Kelly to get her own place. Even though she’d wrecked her credit rating with an overextended mortgage and maxed-out cards, she shouldn’t be living at home with mom at this stage of her life.

  The problem was that she needed to build up her savings so she wouldn’t get into those same traps again, and now that her job as caregiver to Beau’s mother was on hold for awhile, who knew what the future would bring. Sam didn’t know what to suggest so she opted to run the bathtub full of very hot water and bath oil and soak away the cold that didn’t want to leave her bones.

  An hour later she’d bundled herself into her fluffy robe, made a chicken sandwich that would serve as both lunch and dinner, and settled into her favorite corner of the sofa with that book she’d been intending to read for a month. Unfortunately, her mind wouldn’t stay focused on the storyline. Although they’d pretended to be brave at the time, the Klan-like robe with the dead eyes kept coming back to her. What kind of sinister collection was that, with the old medical tools, the teeth, the bones? It was obviously strange enough even to Montague that he kept it out of sight.

  What if—the thought leapt at her—what if the photo she’d found of her wooden box were somehow tied with the other macabre items? Again, she had the thought that perhaps Bertha Martinez had been the target of some kind of plot, that she’d insisted on Sam taking the box so someone else couldn’t get hold of it. The whole idea set her on edge.

  She got up and carried her half-finished sandwich to the kitchen, dumping it into the trash, her appetite gone. Sitting quietly and attempting to read a book clearly wasn’t happening either. She needed to be taking action.

  Sam retrieved her backpack from the corner of the kitchen counter where she’d left it and pulled the camera and legal pad from it. She could download the photos to a disk to give to Beau. In addition to evidence of the open front door, he might need an official record of the home’s contents, if it should turn out that someone were to claim that anything was missing.

  As she sat at her desk, watching the little dots flow across the screen to indicate the progress of the download, her thoughts traveled to William Montague. What had happened to him? The more time she spent at his house, the more convinced she became that the man didn’t simply abandon the place. He was nothing like the typical mortgage defaulter. He could have simply sold one or two pieces of art, if finances were the problem.

  Plus, what about the other oddities? The broken vase in the bedroom, the fact that someone had come in within the past few days—seemingly taking none of the valuables, and yet leaving the front door ajar? Someone other than Sam had gone through the desk. For what? Had they taken something—the one item for which they’d come? It was certainly possible.

  The camera gave a tiny musical tone, indicating that all the pictures had been saved. Sam glanced at the thumbnail-sized images in the folder, making sure she highlighted the correct ones before copying them to a disk for Beau. Toward the end of the sequence of shots, she spotted one in the library. It showed the bookcase-door swung open to the hidden room.

  The image was skewed awkwardly; most likely Rupert had accidentally hit the shutter button at the moment he’d walked in. After that, they’d both been too astounded to even consider taking pictures. Well, it was probably a good thing that she include it with the photos for Beau. She intended to tell him about the room anyway. She hadn’t decided, though, whether to bring up the connection to the box she possessed.

  She didn’t realize how far gone the day was when Beau finally called. She’d switched on a lamp at her desk and now it was the only pool of light in the house.

  “Sorry, darlin’, I really meant to get back to you sooner than this,” he said.

  “It’s okay. I needed the chance to warm up. I’ve got the pictures for you.”

  “If you got the place secured all right, I don’t see much point in going out there tonight. Without lights, we won’t be able to get any more information than you collected today.”

  “True. It’s not like there’s a dead body on the premises or anything.” The minute she said it, she shivered. Nothing like foretelling doom.

  He didn’t seem to notice. “I just finished my last call, and I really need to run by the hospital and see Mama. I could bring by some dinner afterward, as long as I don’t get another call in the meantime.”

  “That’s okay. I don’t have
much appetite at the moment.” She realized that he probably just wanted to spend a little time with her. “I do, however, have the house all to myself.”

  “Maybe I better come there first. I can get out to the hospital anytime before nine tonight. And your place is right on the way . . .” He gave a little verbal leer and they hung up.

  Normally, they would want more, but tonight quick sex might be just the thing. As she closed out the file of photos, remembering the frigid house and its disturbing contents, she knew that Beau’s warm arms were exactly what she needed right now.

  By the time his tap came at the door, she’d swapped the flannels and fuzzy robe for a slinkier gown and delicate slippers. He’d come straight from work but that didn’t matter. She reached for his tie and pulled him into the room. His lips brought the winter evening inside, cool and warm at the same time. The second kiss melted away the outdoor chill and by the third kiss they began shedding clothing. His coat, Stetson and tie got lost somewhere along the way to the bedroom.

  Later, snuggled into the curve of his arm, running her fingertip across his collarbone, she sighed.

  Beau stretched and kissed the top of her head. “I better get going, much as I’d like to stay right in this very spot all night.”

  “I know. Me too.”

  As he dressed, she remembered to tell him that she’d made the inventory of the Montague place.

  “I started to go through an address book that I found in the desk,” she told him. “But I didn’t find any quick or easy answers there. And I meant to look for the name of his insurance carrier. They might spring for the cost of having the power turned back on, just to avoid damage to some of his expensive things.”

  She pulled on her robe and went to her desk in the living room. “Here are the disk with all the photos, the address book, and this is the inventory list Rupert helped me with. I was lucky that he knew the names of a lot of the artists and had some idea of the value of some of the bigger pieces.”