Gilroy had switched off his regular flashlight and was bent toward Arthur, training the ultraviolet light on his chest, when I got to the library. The front of Arthur’s sweater was faintly smudged with something that glowed a soft whitish yellow under the light—and had been all but invisible under regular light. Especially on the sweater’s outrageously bold print. The book on his lap also bore a few small, glowing smudges on its open pages.
“What is it?” Underhill asked as he snapped a photo of the book.
“Food, maybe. Was he eating?” Gilroy said, glancing over at me.
“Arthur was pretty heavy into the eclairs,” I said. “But I don’t see any crumbs.”
“It’s not crumbs,” Gilroy said. He straightened and shot a look at the bear claw in my hand. “Hold that up, Rachel.”
When I held out my hand, Gilroy directed his light at the bear claw. The entire top of it glowed with the same whitish yellow.
“Radioactive pastry, who would’ve thought?” Underhill said.
Gilroy flicked on his other flashlight before turning off the ultraviolet. “Underhill, take what photos you can in this light and then keep an eye on the lobby.”
“Yes, Chief.”
“And Rachel,” Gilroy added, handing me his flashlight, “would you ask Mrs. Kavanagh to come back here? She doesn’t have to come in the library. I’ll meet her in the hall.”
CHAPTER 6
“That’s the glaze on the bear claw,” Holly said, shooting miserable glances at the library door. “Honey and maple syrup glow under ultraviolet light.”
Though Gilroy had waited for Holly in the dark hall, away from the library, she was still uneasy. So was I, truth be told. I wanted the lights to come back on, and I wanted the coroner to come and move poor Arthur’s body. Gilroy’s regular flashlight had lit the way ahead as Holly and I left the lobby, but the blackness had pressed in behind us. I knew Holly had felt it too. We had quickened our steps, and I’d called out for James. How he could wait for us in the darkness bewildered me. The man seemed to know no fear.
“I’ve read that tonic water and some soaps and detergents glow, but I didn’t know honey and maple syrup did,” Gilroy said.
“They don’t glow very brightly,” Holly said. “Not like tonic water.”
“What about eclairs?” Gilroy asked. “Any ingredients that glow?”
“No, nothing. The only pastries I brought that would react that way are the bear claws and cinnamon-honey rolls.”
“Do you know if Mr. Jago ate either of those?”
Holly glanced at me. I shook my head.
“I don’t think he did, Chief,” Holly said. “Eclairs were his favorite. If the night had gone on, he might have tried other pastries, but he was waiting for the eclairs. He asked me specifically for them, and I saw him eating one in room 108.”
“Okay, thank you.”
“Someone touched him on his chest or pushed him,” I said. “Maybe threatened him at some point.”
Underhill looked up from his work.
“Let’s keep this to ourselves,” Gilroy said.
“We’re stuck here all night for sure, aren’t we?” Holly said.
“It looks that way. I think you, Rachel, and Mrs. Foster should stay in one room—or in the lobby. Either way. But not in separate rooms. Don’t separate at all, in fact. Stick together at all times.”
“You don’t have to convince us,” I said. “What about you and Underhill?”
“We’ll stay in the lobby. Awake.”
Back on the couch in the lobby, I drank what was left of my now-cool coffee and told Julia that Gilroy said we should stick together tonight. No separate rooms, no walking around by ourselves. She readily agreed. “But let’s stay in my room,” she said. “It’s farthest from that room.”
Holly nudged Julia closer to me and took a seat at the other end of the couch.
“We’ve got more serious problems than room 108,” I said under my breath.
“Like we might freeze to death before the night is over,” Julia said, rubbing her arms to keep warm.
“Cold?” Shane asked, rising from his chair. “There’s a blanket on the couch table behind you.”
“Oh, you don’t need to—”
“My pleasure,” he said, handing Julia a fleecy throw. “So what do you think, ladies?” He sank back into his chair.
“About?” I said.
“Let’s start with Herbert Purdy.”
“Heavens, we’ll never be free,” Julia said.
Shane smiled at Julia and shook a finger at me. “I’ve read about you in the Juniper Grove Post, Rachel Stowe. You’re no ordinary observer.”
“You’re right about that,” Underhill said. Back from taking photos in the library, he took a huge bite of his bear claw and reached for his coffee to wash it down.
“Don’t believe what you read in the papers,” I said.
“I’d value your opinion, Rachel. I’d like to give my listeners a new perspective on the case, not the same thing year after year, and assuming we get back to Fort Collins in time, I’ll be talking about Purdy on my show tomorrow night. I’ll need to make up for tonight’s disaster.”
“All I know about the Purdy murder is what Connie told us when we arrived.”
Hearing her name, Connie swiveled in her chair by the fireplace. “More Purdy?” she said, looking back at our little group.
“Come on over here,” Shane said. “What can you tell us that we don’t know?”
Connie left Ian, and her toasty chair by the fire, and took a seat near Shane. “I’m not an expert, and unfortunately, fifty years ago, crime-scene analysis wasn’t as advanced as it is now. The police fingerprinted all the guests and employees, and only the employees’ prints were found in Purdy’s room. But that’s to be expected.”
For someone who professed to hate the Grandview’s reputation as Murder Hotel, Connie had enthusiastically joined the conversation.
“What about fingerprints on the knife?” I asked.
“There were no prints on the knife,” Shane said. “But what killer with half a brain would leave his prints on the murder weapon?”
“Gloves,” Connie said with a definitive nod. “The killer wore gloves the entire time he was in Purdy’s room.”
“So Purdy is in his pajamas, either about to go to bed or already in bed,” I said. “Someone knocks on the door. Purdy opens it, and he not only allows this glove-wearing killer into his room but he turns his back on him?”
I caught a flicker of a smile on Shane’s face.
“It could have been a maid or other staff member,” Connie said.
“Wearing gloves and knocking on his door at bedtime?” I said. “At any hotel I’ve ever stayed at, the maids are finished with the rooms by afternoon. After that, they don’t disturb the guests.”
“Maybe he asked for fresh towels,” Connie suggested.
“And the maid brought them wearing gloves? Weren’t there already towels in the room?”
“The only towels in the crime-scene photos were in the bathroom,” Connie said.
“I want to see those new photographs,” Shane said. “I’ve got a feeling about them.”
“Did the police question the maids?” I asked.
“They questioned everyone at the hotel, employees and guests,” Shane said. “Twenty-two people in all. No one knew Purdy or had the smallest connection to him. Or that’s what they claimed.”
“They didn’t have Internet searches back then,” Maria chimed in as she perused what was left of the pastries. “If they said they had no connection, the police had to believe them or travel who knows how far and interview other people.”
“I thought you didn’t eat sugar,” Dustin said.
“I make an exception when I’m starving.”
“The guests could have lied about knowing Purdy,” Shane said, “and the police would’ve been none the wiser.”
“Just because it was fifty years ago doesn’t mean they were
all fools,” I said. “They must have checked people’s backgrounds.”
Connie leaned forward, a kind of frantic delight in her expression. “Did you know the police searched room 108 for secret passages? The room was carpeted at the time, and they tore the entire carpet up, thinking there was a secret way from the room to the basement. That was one of their theories on how the killer escaped without being noticed by anyone else on the first floor.”
“And there was no escape hatch?” Shane said. “What a shock.”
“It was a solid wood floor.”
Maria tore the curved end from a chocolate croissant and stuffed it in her mouth. It was the first I’d seen her eat since arriving at the Grandview. Conyer was watching her too. His appetite spurred, he rose from his seat on a couch near the fireplace and wandered over to the coffee table. His lips pursed in concentration, he stared down at the pastry tray.
“Go ahead,” Shane said. “I’m not having any more. Ladies?”
“No thanks,” Holly said. I could tell her mood had lightened, but it was way past her baker’s bedtime, and she was fighting to stay awake. I gave her half an hour before she fell asleep sitting up.
Conyer reached for the remaining bear claw. “Has anyone considered the similarities between Arthur’s death and Purdy’s death?”
“It’s strange Arthur was stabbed in the back on the fiftieth anniversary of Purdy’s death,” Shane said. “I’ll give you that.”
“But the library door was open when I found Arthur,” Connie said. “Unlike room 108’s locked door. Anyway, the library door doesn’t lock. Anyone could have gone in there.”
“Anyone could have gone into Purdy’s room,” I reminded her. “Anyone at the hotel could have killed him.”
“But his door was locked,” Shane said. “The manager had to open it the next morning.”
I pointed out that a locked door the next morning meant nothing. It didn’t mean Purdy’s door was locked the night before—not that a locked hotel door would have prevented a staff member or guest from gaining access to Purdy’s room. And it didn’t mean that Purdy didn’t open the door to his killer—who then locked the door on his way out. “There are only three suspicious things about Purdy’s death. He was in his pajamas, he was stabbed in the back, and he was found face down in the middle of his bed.”
“I’ve never given the pajamas much thought,” Shane said. “People wear pajamas in a hotel.”
Proclaiming my need for coffee, I took my mug and a flashlight to the table by the windows and managed to pump a few ounces from one of the carafes. Frigid air seeped in through the old window frames, chilling me. The coffee, even if it was still slightly warm, wasn’t going to help much. But I had an ulterior motive for leaving my seat on the couch. Underhill had stationed himself by the coffee, and I wanted his permission to talk to Gilroy again before he sealed off the library for the night.
I whispered to Underhill, he nodded, and I exited the lobby.
Gilroy was running his ultraviolet flashlight over the library’s oriental rug when I knocked on the doorjamb. The near-absolute darkness of the hall, Arthur’s body—hidden from my view but a presence nonetheless—and Gilroy’s eerie purple light gave me a major case of the creeps. “I was wondering if I could borrow a photo album Connie Swanson said was in here.”
“I can’t let you do that, Rachel,” Gilroy said. “Everything needs to stay in place for the coroner and better photos in the daylight.”
“I figured. But I thought I’d try.”
“Why is it so important?”
I told Gilroy how the Swansons had discovered the Purdy crime-scene photos in the basement, and about my niggling suspicion that Herbert Purdy’s and Arthur Jago’s murders were connected in some bizarre way. Purdy and Jago—both stabbed in the back at the Grandview Hotel, exactly fifty years apart. I didn’t believe in coincidences.
“Hang on.” He scanned the bookshelves and found what looked like a yellow fake-leather photo album on a shelf opposite Arthur’s body. Still wearing his latex gloves, he slid it out and examined it with his ultraviolet light. Four tiny smudges glowed near the album’s spine. “That’s strange,” he mumbled. He laid the album open in his hands and held it before me while I stood in the doorway. “I’ll turn the pages, you look.”
I pulled my phone from my pocket, and not hearing any objections from Gilroy, I started snapping photos. Though Connie had said the album contained crime-scene photos, the photos’ clarity surprised me. Someone had used a quality camera and taken high-resolution color shots of everything in the room, from the door to the windows, the bed, the dresser, and the bathroom.
There was even a closeup of the doorframe and door lock, as if to say, See? No one jimmied the lock or broke down the door. It really is a locked-room mystery. And the police had indeed removed the room’s carpet, because while the first photo in the album showed a fully carpeted room, a later photo, with Purdy’s body gone, showed wooden floors.
“Can you go back to the first photo?”
Gilroy flipped the pages.
There was Purdy, face down on the bed, the murder weapon in his back, but slightly off center. “What kind of knife is that? A kitchen knife?”
“Hard to tell.”
“Purdy’s bed isn’t made. He was ready for bed, but he never got in it.”
“Looks like it.”
“One stab wound?”
“If the knife was long enough, it punctured his lung and one wound was all it took.”
“That could mean the killer had to wait around to make sure Purdy died.”
“That would be the smart thing to do.”
“Wouldn’t it have been smarter to stab him multiple times?”
“Maybe the killer couldn’t bring himself to do that. Especially if he knew Purdy.” Gilroy put the album back on the shelf and then shut the library door behind him. We stood silently in the hall, his ultraviolet beam our only light. Exhaustion was setting in for both of us.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I said.
He gathered me in his arms, and for a moment, Arthur Jago, Herbert Purdy, and the drafty halls of the Grandview Hotel disappeared.
“Don’t leave your friends tonight, Rachel,” he said. “No matter where I go. Don’t leave them, and don’t let them leave you.”
CHAPTER 7
Twenty minutes later, Shane and his crew toddled off to their separate bedrooms, and Julia, Holly, and I grabbed our coats from our own rooms and locked ourselves in Julia’s room. Aware of how ineffectual a Grandview lock could be, I wedged a straight-backed chair under the doorknob for extra measure. Julia flung open the room’s drapes and set her flashlight atop the room’s bureau, aiming the beam at the ceiling.
“I am so tired,” Holly said, dropping to the bed and wrapping the bedspread around her shoulders. She lay on her side, drew up her feet, and threw the bedspread across her legs.
“Holly, your shoes are still on,” Julia said.
“I don’t care. I’m not moving until morning.”
Tired as I was, I was more interested in mulling over Arthur’s and Purdy’s murders than in going to sleep, so I told Julia to take the other side of the bed. I slipped into my coat—it was only going to get colder in our room—and then found a pen and Grandview notepad in the bureau, sat in the room’s one comfortable armchair, and propped my feet on the end of the bed. Starting with Arthur’s murder, I listed the suspects—Shane and his radio crew, and Connie and Ian Swanson.
If either of the Swansons had a motive for killing Arthur, they’d had plenty of opportunity to kill before. But maybe they had waited for the anniversary of Purdy’s murder because it muddied the investigatory waters. Or maybe there had been bad blood between Arthur and them and it had finally boiled over with the stress of the remote radio broadcast.
“I hear doors opening,” Julia said.
“Maybe people are getting food in the kitchen,” I said.
One thing I knew: Connie was ambivalent at b
est about the Grandview’s reputation. On the one hand, she liked to say the hotel would make a lovely getaway if only people would forget the Purdy murder, but on the other hand, she and Ian had stocked the library with disconcerting photos of the Purdy crime scene. Strange behavior for the manager of a getaway.
Connie and Ian had probably felt themselves between a rock and a hard place. Unable to persuade Arthur to turn the Grandview into a bright and modern hotel, to divorce it from its grisly past, they had decided to make the most of the Purdy murder. It paid their bills. And now, sadly, Arthur’s death would add to the Grandview’s reputation.
Shane, too, had a stake in the Grandview remaining Murder Hotel, though even without his annual Purdy broadcast, his radio show was popular. But reading between the lines, the remote show brought huge ad revenues to the station and ensured Shane’s continued employment. Arthur Jago was no threat to him or his livelihood. If anything, Arthur was Shane’s benefactor. The hotel’s next owner might stop the broadcasts altogether—and even wipe out Purdy’s memory. If I owned this place, that’s what I’d do, I thought.
No one on Shane’s crew seemed happy to be at the Grandview, but one night in a creepy hotel wasn’t reason enough to murder the hotel’s owner. Or even murder Shane.
Had the crew been to the Grandview before? Thinking back to the way Maria had reacted to Dustin’s taunt about her sitting on the bed Purdy had died in, it was hard to believe she’d been in the room before. All of it seemed new and disturbingly macabre to her. Dustin, on the other hand, was the engineer, and probably not a newbie to Shane’s show.
Finally giving in to the late hour, I rested my head on the chair back and shut my eyes. Someone in this hotel was a killer. Were we in for a peaceful night or would he strike again? I drifted off to sleep, secure in the knowledge that Gilroy and Underhill weren’t sleeping.
Sometime later, I woke slowly to a distant clanging sound.
Juniper Grove Cozy Mystery Box Set 2 Page 17
