by Amy Boyles
“His computer. Do you know where he kept it?”
He ran his fingers carefully over his slicked hair. “I don’t pay much attention to such things, but it would be either in his bedroom or his gadget room. You’ll know it by the sticker on the top—skull and crossbones.”
Sounded like a laptop. “Isn’t this the gadget room?”
Henry shook his head. “Not quite.”
“Lead on.”
I crept up the stairs to a room decorated in red and black. “Is this seriously his bedroom? It’s more like a pimp’s room.”
Susan laughed.
There was silk everywhere along with a round rotating bed, a mirrored ceiling and black satin sheets.
“Talk about kinky,” Susan said. “If he’d been my ex-boyfriend, I would’ve given him an STD for sure.”
I glanced at Henry. “I can see why the two of you got along so well.”
I searched every surface but didn’t see a computer. Still, I’d deemed Henry completely unreliable other than the door-unlocking thing, so I searched the other rooms on that floor just to make sure Xavier hadn’t left his computer in one of them.
“No luck,” I said. “Take me to the gadget room.”
Back downstairs, off the main hall sat Xavier’s office. A large, elaborately engraved mahogany desk sat in the center, while pictures of houses lined the walls. I immediately recognized them as famous haunted homes. One thing you could say about Xavier, he was certainly serious about his work.
But still there wasn’t a computer on the desk. Or anywhere else that I could see.
“Is this the gadget room?”
“Oh no.” Henry chuckled. “That’s through this door.”
He snapped his fingers, and what had been a panel on the wall swung open with a hideous creak.
“Wow. That’s like, totally Freddie Kruger scary,” Susan said.
I rolled my eyes. Like these two were in any danger. If a serial killer jumped from the shadows, it would be me getting killed while they looked on and commented.
Boy, she sure was pretty, Susan would say.
It’s too bad about that violet hair, though. Henry, obviously. He’d probably be trying to get a hand up my shirt.
Gag me with a spoon, he just gutted her.
See how that would go? I had very little confidence that my partners in crime were actually partners. They were more like spectators. Or specters. Heh, heh.
I crept forward. “I need more light.”
Susan came over and burned brighter. A staircase spiraled down to the basement. The room must’ve been used a lot by Xavier because there weren’t any cobwebs hanging in the way and the air smelled nice, like cinnamon.
“He did like his essential oils,” Henry said.
Right.
I ambled down the stairs until I reached the bottom. “Holy smokes.”
The room looked like central headquarters for an intelligence mission. There were working television screens everywhere. Most of them were running surveillance feed from the cameras that Xavier apparently had sprinkled throughout the house and grounds.
There was also a table housing what looked to be his ghost-hunting equipment. I picked up one of the pieces. It was rectangular, like an EMF reader. It smelled of oil and sweat.
“Xavier must’ve been tinkering with equipment,” I said. “Trying to make his ghost-hunting stuff better, more apt to catch spirits or detect their activity.”
I kept searching the room. No computer. Nothing that was his personal one at least. The only computers in the room were those working on surveillance.
“Crap. I should’ve stolen his cell phone. The e-mail probably would’ve been on it. Too late now.”
I raked my fingers through my hair. I was swimming in Haunted Hollow without any leads, any help and had no idea where to go next or even what to do.
“Would Xavier have put the computer in his car?” I said more to myself than anyone else.
I didn’t remember seeing a computer in the equipment van. No, it didn’t make sense that Xavier would’ve done that. I tapped my cheek, trying to figure it out.
Finally it hit me.
“The cameras.” I glanced over at Susan and Henry. “Maybe one of the cameras caught the laptop.”
I tapped away on the keyboard, trying to roll the video back. “Aha! I got it.”
The footage rewound. I scanned it quickly, looking for traces of a laptop. I don’t know how long I stared at several different screens, but I finally noticed a black shape in the bedroom.
“Pause. Where’s pause?”
I banged away on the board until the video stopped. I studied the image. It was a small, thin case. “That’s the laptop. Now. What happened to you?”
I let the footage roll forward. The date and time stamp showed earlier tonight. It was after Xavier had been murdered. Only about an hour ago.
“Henry, did someone else come to the house?” I said.
He yawned. “Not that I remember.”
A dark figure appeared in the footage. They hovered in front of the computer and then moved out of the frame. When they disappeared, the computer was gone.
“Someone else was here. You don’t know who?” I said again.
Henry shook his head.
Trying to get a ghost to focus on time was like trying to catch water. They simply didn’t have any sense of time, not after dying. Time and dates weren’t relevant to them anymore. What happened ten years ago to me might seem like five minutes to a ghost.
I rolled the camera back, trying to see who had entered the house. After all, the person who stole Xavier’s computer might also be the killer. In fact, I was willing to bet money on it.
“Come on,” I said. “The police will be here soon.” The feed was working backward when a sharp crack came from upstairs.
“Crap. The cops.” I glanced at Susan and Henry. “You two scat. No one needs to see your light.”
I stepped away from command central and moved to the stairs. I raced up them as quickly as I dared to go without making a lot of noise. When I reached the top, I pushed the panel back into place and stood quietly, trying to figure out where the noise had come from.
Nothing sounded in the hallway, so I deemed it safe to head that way. I crept slowly. Susan and Henry had vanished, which was fine. I worked better alone anyway.
I tiptoed down the hall, heading in the direction I hoped led to the back door. I wasn’t sure what the noise had been, but I was going to leave anyway. I could always come back later and see the footage.
There was enough light that I could make out furnishings. I’d just reached the kitchen and could see the door when my feet crunched something.
Glass.
Someone had broken a window in an attempt to get inside. A cold, hard fact entered my mind. I wasn’t alone. There was another person in the house. I stood stock-still, listening.
The sound of breathing came from behind me.
“Hold it right there,” said a voice. “Don’t move a muscle.”
TEN
I had no idea who I was talking to, but I had to make them more afraid of something else than me. “The police will be here any minute,” I said. “You should be more concerned with them.”
“Ruth, I told you we should have just stayed in the background and let her go.”
“Alice, you idiot, now she knows your name.”
I groaned. These were the two grannies from earlier. Figuring they weren’t actually going to do me any harm, I crossed to the wall and flipped the switch.
White light flooded the room. The old women blinked. Ruth, the tall one with the blonde bangs, was pointing at me, her hands in an L-shape like a pretend gun.
“You going to shoot me with that?” I said.
She glanced at her hand, then flexed it and awkwardly slid it down her dress. “No. I wasn’t going to shoot you. We didn’t know who it was poking around. We figured whoever killed Xavier was here.”
I raised my hand.
“Wait. You know Xavier was killed.”
“Of course we do,” Alice, the shorter one, said smugly. “We always hang around the haunts when the boys go in. That’s if we know where they are. Heard the screaming, saw the three of them scatter like cockroaches. We were also there when the cops showed up and found his body.” She eyed me. “But you weren’t.”
“Oh, so are y’all detectives now?”
Ruth rubbed her face. “No, we’re not detectives. We were hiding in the bushes. Saw Sheriff Blount find the body. She questioned Truck and Slick, and also Mrs. Wilkes. They all talked about you, but you were nowhere to be found.”
I crossed my arms. “Are you insinuating I killed Xavier?”
“No,” Alice growled. “Of course not. Why would you have killed him? It was somebody else.”
“Then what are the two of you doing here?”
Ruth and Alice exchanged guilty looks. “Well,” Ruth started, “we wanted to see if Xavier had any equipment we could borrow.”
I quirked a brow. “You mean steal?”
“It’s not stealing if he promised it to us before,” Alice said. “He said if he ever died, we were entitled to take a look at his stuff, go through it and see if there was anything we could use. Well, the guy’s dead, isn’t he? So now we can plunder his riches.”
I snorted. “I don’t know if I’d call it riches. It was mostly EMF-looking equipment.”
Ruth grabbed Alice’s arm. “She’s seen it. You’ve seen it. Tell us, what was it like?”
Voices came from the front door.
“It’s the police,” Ruth whispered. “Let’s get out of here.”
“You broke his window,” I said.
Alice hitched a shoulder. “Maybe they won’t notice.”
Before I had time to argue, Ruth grabbed my collar and pulled me. She was awfully strong for being old. Alice yanked the kitchen door. It creaked. I could feel the sound all the way to my bones. There was no way we were going to escape without getting caught.
I shut the door behind us as the front one opened. Ruth and Alice were already sprinting toward the bushes.
Sprinting?
Yes, indeed they were.
I followed them, clueless as to where we were heading. I pushed away poking hedges in time to see Alice and Ruth jump into an all-terrain vehicle.
“Get in,” Ruth said.
It was a two-seater, and Alice and Ruth had already taken up the bench.
“Where?”
Alice thumbed behind her. “The back.”
The back, as she called it, was nothing more than an open utility carrier meant for hauling things like firewood. It was corrugated like the bed of a truck, yet much, much smaller.
“How am I going to fit in there?”
“You’re small.” Ruth started the engine. The motor roared.
“I think I’d rather walk.”
Just then, the sound of voices came from the back of Xavier’s house. My hair stood on end as I realized the cops had just discovered the broken window. Which meant they knew someone had attempted to break in. Which also meant that in about three seconds they would be crashing through the hedges looking for us.
If they found me, someone who had been at the scene of the crime but had conveniently disappeared, stalking about Xavier’s house, odds were I’d find myself being slapped with a murder charge.
So I hopped in the ATV as Ruth slammed the accelerator. I lurched back, toppling over. My shoulder slammed into the corner of the bed, and my head jerked to the side.
“Dear Lord, where’d you learn to drive?” I said.
“On my husband’s tractor,” Ruth yelled back. “He’s dead now.”
“No doubt from your driving.” I rubbed my aching shoulder.
We rumbled through the woods. The voices from the house lessened until they were out of earshot. The ATV bumped and jostled. I clung to the sides for dear life.
My heartbeat jumped into my throat. Any second now I was sure we’d crash into a ditch, tip to the side or I’d just bounce right on out of the vehicle onto the road. Of course I’d break my neck in the process. No doubt about that. I’d be dead and these two old ladies would be fighting about who got my belt or something.
“Hold on,” Alice yelled over her shoulder. “We’re hitting the bridge.”
I leaned over to get a look. The bridge as Alice referred to it, was nothing more than two strips of two-by-fours covering a creek.
Ruth was going full speed. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t stop for anything. But right at the last moment she slammed the brakes. My head knocked into a pole holding the canopy.
I saw stars. “Ouch!”
“I said to hold on,” Alice said.
The ATV slowed as we crossed the two-by-fours. Next thing I knew, we were bursting from the forest and hitting a residential street. I blinked. We were back by the bed-and-breakfast. We swung past and crossed over a couple of streets.
A garage door opened to a small cottage, and Ruth barreled the ATV inside. She slammed the brakes again. This time I was ready. My body was braced against the back of the vehicle.
She pulled the emergency brake and hopped out. “Everyone okay?”
I rubbed my head. “If by ‘okay,’ you’re asking if I don’t have permanent brain damage, I think I make the grade.”
Ruth grabbed a flashlight and peeled back my eyelids. She shone the beam into both my eyes. “Looks good. Come on. Let’s get inside in case Kency decides she needs to pay us a visit.”
I frowned. “Why would she pay you a visit?”
“I might’ve left our business card on the counter back at Xavier’s place.”
Alice smacked her head. “Why would you do that?”
Ruth opened the door to the house and grunted. “It just didn’t seem right stealing his equipment without at least leaving a note. He’s got all that good stuff, but what if someone needed it? I wanted them to know where to find the goods.”
Alice cursed under her breath as she waddled in and took a seat at the kitchen table. “I swear, I don’t know why I go anywhere with you. We were supposed to be looking for the good stuff. Xavier always claimed he wasn’t working on a contraption to catch ghosts, but I didn’t believe it.”
Ruth pulled a pitcher of tea from the fridge. “Anyone for a glass?”
My throat was so dry I could’ve used it to sand wood. “Is it sweet?”
She smiled widely. “Sweeter than a baby’s bum.”
“That’s a strange thing to say,” I admitted.
She shrugged. “It’s sweet. Want a glass?”
“Sure.”
Ruth poured up three glasses and lit a low lamp. I took a long, luxurious sip. Sugar immediately crystallized on my tongue. This was absolute heaven. It was amazing. It was… actually blissful.
After we’d each savored our sips of tea, Ruth placed her glass on a cork coaster, elegantly draped one hand over the other and tapped her fingers. Alice’s gaze shifted to Ruth, and the women exchanged a glance.
Ruth spoke first. “I know what the two of us were doing in Xavier’s house, but what about you? Why were you sneaking about?”
My throat closed. What was I supposed to tell them? The truth? No. We weren’t supposed to talk about the Team. Apparently that hadn’t stopped Anita from blabbing to Xavier.
I cleared my throat. A touch of honesty was usually the best policy. “Before he died, Xavier told me about something in his possession that I need. Something very important to me. So I went in looking for it.”
Alice’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “Before the police went in?”
I gave her a pointed look. “Same as the two of y’all.” I sighed. Maybe these two old ladies could help me. You never knew. “It was on his computer but now it’s gone. I was looking at surveillance video when you two broke in. Someone came and stole it—after the murder. But I never found out who.”
Ruth and Alice exchanged another look. Ruth leaned over, cocking one eye wide. “Who are you? Y
ou show up in town, get to eat lunch with a ghost. Oh yes, we know all about that. Xavier tells you something, and you just hop on over to his place, sneak in and look over his cameras. Are you sure you didn’t kill him?”
Maybe I’d been wrong to place any faith in these two after all. Maybe I shouldn’t have told them. What was to stop them from going to the cops and telling what they knew—I’d been at the murder scene and then broke into Xavier’s house under suspicious circumstances, same as them.
The doorbell rang.
Alice’s eyes widened. Ruth’s turned to saucers. She gave me a look. “Nobody move.”
She disappeared to the front of the house. I heard the door open and shut. Voices drifted inside. A moment later Ruth reentered, followed by a tall redheaded woman.
The woman took turns glaring from Alice to me and then back to Alice. Her gaze darted back to me. She crossed her arms and sank to one hip. The woman oozed attitude out the wazoo.
“You must be the missing Blissful Breneaux.”
“That’s me,” I said.
She flashed a badge. “I’m Sheriff Kency Blount.”
Then it hit me. All at once. Captain Blount and Farmer Kency from the graveyard. “Your relatives didn’t like each other much, did they?”
She blinked. “No. What’s that got to do with anything?”
I shrugged. “Nothing. It’s just something I heard in town.”
She sniffed really hard, like she was trying to pull a booger up to her brain. “I didn’t think anyone spoke about it anymore.”
I hitched a shoulder. “Must’ve been something I heard randomly.”
She stared at me so long I think her goal was to intimidate me. I batted my eyelashes at her, trying to throw her off. “First thing in the morning I need you to come down to the station, give a statement on what happened tonight.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Xavier Bibb was murdered.”
I jumped from my chair. “No! That’s awful!”
Kency didn’t respond. Instead she skewered Alice and Ruth with her gaze. “And do the two of y’all care to tell me why in the world you broke into Xavier Bibb’s house tonight? And I’m assuming you took Miss Breneaux with you?”
Alice’s mouth opened and shut like a fish. Ruth held “uhhhhhh” so long it sounded like the only word she knew.
