The Realm of the Shadows (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 2)

by Mary Bowers

  “It’s Ed,” he said, repeating himself, frustrated.

  Ah, I thought. The messenger of the Goddess. “What about him?” I asked groggily.

  “He wants us outside. Something’s happened in the barn.”

  “Oh, lord! Is the TV crew still there?”

  “I don’t know. I got hooked on a zombie marathon and lost track of time. I thought they left hours ago, but Ed wants us out there pronto.”

  I got out of bed and put some clothes on.

  Chapter 13

  Eight minutes later, we were standing in the barn, surveying the damage as best we could with our flashlights and the one naked light bulb affixed to a crossbeam. Charlie’s crew had started tearing down the old stables so they could run lines of kennel suites where they’d been, but the real progress had been in setting up the cabinets along the centerline: there was a long row of open frames waiting for doors and countertops. The wood had been spray painted with obscenities, and some of the old stable partitions were lying flat, with murderous splinters sticking up where they’d been split.

  “I heard noises coming from in here and ran over from the cemetery,” Ed said. “Whoever it was ran off when I shouted.”

  “Kids?” Michael asked.

  “I don’t know. I only saw one figure, but that might just have been the last one out the door,” he said, gesturing across the barn to the door at the other end.

  “You think it was the TV people?” I asked.

  He thought about it. “I’d like to say yes, but I don’t think so. They were banging around in here shooting flashlights everywhere and yelling to one another for a couple of hours, but they were gone by midnight.” Reluctantly, he shook his head. “Low as my opinion is of Teddy, this isn’t his style. It might have been one of his crew who stayed behind, but I don’t really think so.”

  “Then who?” I asked.

  “The same one who trashed the cemetery the first time, before Teddy even got here. Whoever it is, he also tried to get into the cemetery tonight, after Teddy’s people left and things had quieted down. It was about two in the morning. I was in my folding chair just inside the cemetery gates, and I guess I’d dozed off. Something woke me up, and I saw a figure in black coming over the fence into the graveyard. I stood up and shouted, and he vaulted back over and took off. By the time I scrambled around and got hold of my flashlight, he was gone.”

  “He? You think it was a man?”

  He considered. “Yes. I think so. Pretty sure. When I yelled, I must’ve scared the hell out of him, and he screamed.”

  “I bet he did,” I said with grim satisfaction. “Thinking he was alone in a graveyard at that time of the night, I’m surprised he didn’t faint dead away.”

  “Instead, he ran across the yard, waited for you to be off your guard, and got started on the barn,” Michael said.

  “Yeah. Sorry. Once I’d run him off, I thought that was the end of it.”

  “So it was only one guy, and you think it was a man?”

  “I’m pretty sure it was a man,” he said, sounding far more doubtful than before. Then he shrugged. “I never got a good look, and as for the scream – a man’s scream, a woman’s scream – I’m not sure how much difference there is. If the woman has a deep voice, or the man is a tenor –“

  “And you only saw one figure in the barn,” I said decisively, before Ed went off on a 5-page analysis of gender variations in involuntary vocalizations as affected by the acoustics of randomly distributed tombstones – which he would have. He has a mind like a treadmill.

  “Right. So it looks like we’re dealing with a lone wolf here,” he said hopefully.

  I wasn’t so sure. Running around in the dark of the night through the tangled landscape of Cadbury House, there could’ve been squads of vandals on the move and Edson wouldn’t have been able to count them unless they’d lined up so he could trip over them one by one.

  “Could just one guy have done all the damage in the barn?” Michael asked.

  “I’m not sure there is that much damage,” I said. “It’ll be daylight soon. Then we can see what he actually did.”

  “Those old horse stalls are practically falling down by themselves,” Ed said. “And as for the cabinets, other than spray paint I don’t think he did much to those. It was probably just spite, because he couldn’t get into the cemetery.”

  Michaels said something about making breakfast and went ahead to the house, while Ed and I looked around a little longer. By the time the sun started creeping through the dusty windows, we were feeling better – the damage wasn’t as bad as we’d first thought.

  Outside in the fresh air, we took a moment to breathe, then headed toward the house. Now that Teddy Force and the gang were gone, the property seemed strangely deserted. I had always relished the peace of Cadbury House’s quiet spot on the river. Now it just seemed lonely.

  I began to doubt myself. What on earth had I been thinking, wanting to put an adoption shelter at the end of a loooong dirt road where it’d be hard to even find us? Sure, there was plenty of space in the outbuildings to get all the animals comfortably situated, lots of room for them to exercise, but wasn’t the idea to get people in there to adopt them? Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing that the deal on my old house and the old shelter building had fallen through. I needed to stop and think.

  “I’m going to go home and catch up on my notes, then get a little sleep in my own bed,” Ed said before we got to the house. He began to walk around to where his car was parked, and I went along with him.

  “Is Myrtle getting to you?”

  He shrugged. “She is a little . . . omnipresent. She stays discreetly out of the way when Michael’s around, and she seems respectful of you.” I snorted. “But I’m just one of the hired help. I don’t get the same kind of consideration. Hey,” he said, coming to a sudden stop.

  “What?”

  He pointed. Then, slowly, he inched forward, took out his digital camera and began to take pictures of the dirt road.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Bicycle tracks. Fresh; they run on top of the tire marks from the crew’s vehicles. Looks like this is how our midnight vandal made his getaway.” We looked at one another for a moment. Then: “Come on,” he said. “Be careful not to step on them.”

  We followed them down the road until they were lost in the confusion of tracks and ruts and potholes. So whoever it was had made his mad escape on a bicycle, which made me more hopeful than ever that it was just some local kid raising a little hell after midnight. If only it had been. That would have been so much easier to deal with than the menace it actually turned out to be.

  As Ed was backing his car out, he suddenly braked and rolled down his window.

  “What?” I said.

  “You’re not wearing it.”

  It took a moment for the penny to drop. He flicked a glance at my chest, but Ed being the sexless creature that he is, I knew right away it wasn’t the usual guy thing going on. He was looking for the cat pendant that I always wore.

  I even reached for it, knowing it wasn’t there, then felt stupid. “I got dressed in a hurry. I forgot to put it on.”

  “Did you . . .?”

  It exasperated me that he wouldn’t put his full question into words, and it exasperated me even more that I wasn’t going to put it into words either. I just couldn’t.

  “Yes,” I said cryptically. “I called out to . . . I called out.”

  “And?”

  “As with all oracles, I just got the run-around.”

  “Do you mind? I’d like to know exactly what she said.”

  She.

  How much did he know about it, anyway? There was strong resistance within me – a resistance that was downright physical – to talking about it, even to a man like Edson Darby-Deaver.

  With a reddening face and all the fatalism of a kid who knows he’s about to make a fool of himself but can’t stop, I quoted to him: “’The end of the thread has come into your
hand, and if you have the wit, you will pull on it slowly until it unravels.’ I’m to pull the thread only in one direction. Toward myself.”

  He nodded, as if it all made sense. “So you’ve got new information. What is it?”

  I stared at him blankly. “I don’t have any new information! You know everything I know. I’m just supposed to pull the thread, and only in one direction. Toward myself. And toward my protector,” I added in a confused way, suddenly remembering.

  “Your protector. Who is that? Michael?”

  “I have no idea. I haven’t had a real protector since my dad died in 1977.”

  Like every man when faced with a female who’s showing the first signs of a melt-down, he mumbled a few words, nodded briskly, put it in gear and left.

  Michael had fixed breakfast for us: his old family favorite, and unlike most traditional Southern breakfasts, it did not involve any pasty white blobs of any kind. When he was a little munchkin, his mother used to fry up minced bologna in scrambled eggs (her exact proportions: one and one-half bologna slices for each two eggs) and serve it topped with melting cheese. During times of stress, it was his favorite meal. Myrtle was perched on a chair at the breakfast bar, self-consciously eating and beaming.

  “Mr. Michael insisted on making breakfast for me,” she said, preening. “He wouldn’t even let me help.”

  Knowing how people have to be carried away in a basket after Myrtle has “helped” them, I wasn’t surprised.

  For me, he’d fixed a nice little omelet with some kind of fancy white cheese. The bologna smells wonderful frying, but I don’t eat meat. Fish, sometimes. Bologna, never.

  I felt a lot better after eating, and thanked Michael. He grinned at me and began to clear the table.

  “At least let me do that,” Myrtle and I both said.

  Myrtle won, and Michael and I left her in the kitchen.

  “So, what’s on your agenda for today?” he asked.

  I tried to plug myself back into my routine. “Well, it’s Friday, and that means I’ve got laundry at the shelter.”

  “I thought you had a volunteer doing that.”

  “I did, but she’s going through some stuff just now, and I’ve been taking her shift until we can get another volunteer. Actually, I don’t mind. I could use a no-brainer today. While the machines run, I can sweep up and do a little mopping.”

  He smiled. “Well, you have fun with that. I’m substituting for Benny Wheaton in his Friday foursome, so I’ll be on the links all morning.”

  “What’s up with Benny?”

  “Cataract surgery.”

  “That seems to be going around your gang like the flu,” I said.

  “Yeah, we’re at that age. I guess my time is coming soon. And before you give me that look, remember – you’re not that far behind me.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him, told him to give Benny my best if he talked to him, then got ready to go. On my way out to my SUV, I took a look around and thought again how quiet Cadbury House was now. Like it was waiting. Even the distant sound of hammering from the barn didn’t seem to penetrate the silence that hung in the air around me like a gel. I tried to shake it off and got into my car.

  At the shelter, Angie was sitting behind the reception desk gossiping with Vivian Dear.

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” Vivian gushed as I came up to the desk. “Teddy took Angie out for dinner. Just the two of them.”

  “And afterward –“ Angie said, giving me the eyebrows.

  “You didn’t!” I blurted.

  “He was the perfect gentleman,” she said. “Dammit!”

  “I was here when he came in to pick up Porter,” Vivian said breathlessly. “Oh, Taylor, you were right about his eyes! They seem to see right through you into another dimension!”

  “I’m pretty sure they do,” I said. What the heck, let her enjoy herself. “Did you get to meet Wizard?”

  “He wasn’t with Teddy,” she said sadly. “But I did get Teddy’s autograph, and he gave me a picture of himself.”

  “He would. Listen, Angie, how are things going?”

  “Oh, they’re going great! They’ve figured out a way to salvage the episode at Cadbury House after all. They found out the true cause of Seth’s murder, and they were going to do an exorcism last night to send Betsy back where she belongs.”

  I had meant how were things going at the shelter, and I started to say so when another thought struck me. Only Teddy would be able to make himself believe that Betsy, with a mansion she loved just across the yard, which as far as I knew was uninfested with other ghosts, would choose to haunt the loft of a barn with nothing but a poster of a horse to look at. I don’t have elaborate ideas about the afterlife, but common sense dictates you wouldn’t hang around a place you’d never been during your lifetime, and I was pretty sure Elizabeth Cadbury had never been up to the hayloft.

  There was one good thing about it, though: I realized that once my landlord came back from the mountain and found out what his fraternity brother’s son was up to, the whole episode would be quashed. Betsy, after all, was his grandmother. You don’t mess with a guy’s Nana.

  “So what are they up to next?” I asked absently, looking around Angie’s desk for any phone messages I might have.

  Her eyes lit up. “The lighthouse. Teddy’s really excited about it.”

  “Teddy’s always excited. I don’t think Ed is going to be too happy, though.”

  She gave a lofty sniff. “That wannabe? Who cares? Teddy doesn’t feel threatened by him. Besides, isn’t he working for you out at Cadbury House?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Hopefully he’ll stay there and won’t get tangled up with Teddy again.”

  I walked down the hall to my office after that. Just the thought of Teddy being out of my life forever was enough to make the sunshine coming through my office window thirty percent brighter. I took a deep breath and decided I was all calm and level-headed now, and ready to talk to Rocky about what had happened to cause the sale of my house to fall through.

  Chapter 14

  “Honey, I don’t know why the buyer backed out, but I can sure make a guess,” Rocky said.

  I was all settled in with a cup of coffee in my hand and my feet up on the desk. “You’re the real estate expert,” I said. “Give it your best shot.”

  “Lance Skinner.”

  I took a moment to connect the dots, but they just weren’t connecting. “Lance Skinner doesn’t want me to sell my house? Come on, Rocky. Do you seriously think he cares about real estate deals where the sale price has less than six zeroes?”

  “I don’t mean he wants to buy your place, Taylor. I mean the fact that he’s scouted around the area and is probably about to announce a big deal is scaring your buyer off. They’re an older couple, looking for a quiet place to retire where the husband can work on his antique cars. Your property was perfect, with a nice little house and the old shelter building right there for his workshop. But they don’t want some big golf course and resort hotel going in just down the road from them. It would change the whole character of Tropical Breeze.”

  When we’d talked about it at the diner a few days before, Rocky had been excited about Skinner and his mega developments. Now that she’d had time to think about it, it seemed she’d changed her mind.

  “Is there a possibility that if the rumors about Skinner come to nothing, they’d still be interested?”

  “We-ell, maybe. I tried to get their agent to tell me if they’d found another place they liked better, and she hedged a lot, but I got the feeling that wasn’t it. So maybe they’ll still be in the market.”

  “But I need to get my equity out of the place now,” I fretted. “I needed this deal to go through.”

  Rocky sighed. “I know. I’m sorry. All we can do is get back in there and find another buyer. I’m gonna do my best, Taylor.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, thanks for being so understanding. I’d like to pull out my little pearl-handled pisto
l and make them buy your place, but there’s some silly law that says I can’t.”

  I chuckled. What else could I do? Anyway, by the time we hung up, we were at peace with one another again, and that was good. I hate conflict, especially with people I like. I put my feet back on the floor, leaned my elbows on the desk and rubbed my forehead. Time to do laundry. It was going to be nice having something easy to deal with for a change.

  I’m not a big fan of housekeeping, but I have to admit, there is something soothing about repetitive, unchallenging tasks. Sweeping a broom around, stroke by stroke, gathering up all the dust and sand and making a neat little pile of it is gratifying on some deep level. Dishwashing is the same way. I’d never give up my dishwasher, but when I have to do dishes by hand, I don’t actually mind so much. And, of course, there’s laundry. Even if you don’t have to take it down to the stream and pound it on a rock, there’s some work involved. But there’s something hypnotic about the hum of the machines, and a feeling of accomplishment in piling up fresh-smelling, warm towels and putting them neatly away.

  Laundry at the shelter is pretty constant. Blankets, cleaning towels, washable plush beds, you name it – you fold up a clean load to put away and here comes somebody with a push-basket full of dirty towels. Volunteers come in every day of the week to help out, and still we barely keep up with it. We run our machines pretty hard at the shelter, and I constantly bless the heart of the donor who gave them to us.

  I got the three washing machines going and started sorting another basket of dirty laundry. My thoughts began to drift as the noise of the machines shut out any other noises from the shelter. A few stray thoughts came together in a new way while I stood there, and I paused with a dirty towel in my hands. Then I slowly put the towel back into the basket and leaned against a washer, absorbing the vibrations of the spin cycle.

  Pull the thread. Pull toward yourself. The puzzle will unravel. A thread will come into your hand. Hmmm. I thought I suddenly understood what she had meant about pulling the thread toward myself. It was about me after all. The tangle of knots led back to me . . . .