by Mary Bowers
“The what?” Michael asked, looking from Ed to me with a worried face.
“The murder room. Oh, don’t you know about Maxine Moon?”
“I’ve heard of her, of course,” I said. “She writes those supernatural thrillers, right? Werewolves and vampires?”
“Technically, she’s in the Horror genre. For one reason or another, I’d never heard of her, myself, but when I investigated the Moon family, I found that she’s a well-known author. Her books are extremely popular, regardless of their – er – graphic nature and – um – pessimistic tone.”
“Personally, I prefer a cozy mystery,” I said. “I started to read her book Scratching the Blackboard, and the first scene was a description of an autopsy knife piercing a corpse’s belly. Not even a new corpse. Old and oozy. That was as far as I got in that book. It was a week before I could eat pasta again.”
He was nodding. “When I found out about this project, I read one of her books for research. It is uncanny, how she can get into the mind of a maniac. He’s approaching the beautiful girl tied to the bed, who is struggling helplessly, eyes riveted on the chainsaw –“
“Yeah, not my kind of book. I read the nice kind. The ones you can read while eating lunch and not lose your appetite. Sure, there’s murder, but they’re nice murders. Then justice triumphs and you’re happy because you didn’t like the victim anyway.”
“That’s not what Maxine writes.”
“I know. Somebody tried to give me a copy of Peel Her Face one time.”
“Oh, yes. The razor-sharp potato peeler. No, don’t read that one.”
“I won’t. I did take it to Girlfriend’s to sell, though. All proceeds to the shelter, and fifty cents is fifty cents.”
“I understand.”
“Her books do sell, though. Makes you wonder what the world is coming to. So – she has a murder room at the castle?”
“In the dungeon. It’s a collection of all the weapons used to kill every victim in every one of her books. I’m told they’re safely locked up in display cases, so don’t worry.”
“The chainsaw department alone must be worth a fortune,” Michael said. I grinned at him, but Ed never recognizes irony. He just nodded seriously.
“Ed, what have you gotten us into?” I asked. “What kind of a family is this?”
“I haven’t met any of them in person myself. I guess we’ll find out together when we meet them.”
I looked at Michael and he looked at me. “Want me to get the gun?” he said.
“Oh, guns won’t help,” Ed said. “We’re dealing with the supernatural here.”
“Are you so sure?” Michael asked.
“Of course I’m sure. I thoroughly vetted the project. I’ve had too many clients who were only setting up a practical joke on somebody, or planning a child’s birthday party and thought it would be fun to have a ghost hunt. One couple was even trying to perpetrate a fraud, defaulting on their mortgage because the house had a demon. They wanted an affidavit from me to send to the bank, then they were going to write a book and get rich. That was the plan, anyway. I’ve learned to be careful who I accept assignments from, with or without a fee. And Oliver Moon is offering a fee that’s very tempting. But regardless of that, I believe him. He’s a frightened man. He needs our help.”
“Well, maybe he needs you, but I can’t figure out why he needs me. Or my cat,” I added.
Ed leered at me with that look of his, the pitying stare of a shrink looking at a stubborn case of denial.
Michael interrupted what would have inevitably happened next, looking at the kitchen clock and saying, “Well, if you want to be at the portcullis on time, you two had better get going. You three.”
“I should have left extra time to get her into the carrier,” I muttered, hopping down from the tall chair. Bastet believes cat carriers are only for lesser beings, and we had the usual tussle getting her in.
Once she was inside of it, glaring at me, Ed shook his head and murmured, “I can’t help thinking this is a bad omen, Taylor. Obviously, she doesn’t want to go. Usually, she’s cooperative when we need her.” He hunkered down and looked at me. “How do you interpret this?”
“Cats don’t like carriers. Let’s go.”
Now that it was time to leave, I was thinking of all the things I wanted to do over the next week, which I wouldn’t be able to do because I’d be in some drafty castle, probably with a rat-infested bedroom that I’d never get to sleep in anyway because night is when the ghosts walk the halls, carrying their heads under their arms and gibbering.
“One hundred thousand dollars,” I growled, staring Ed in the eye.
Michael picked up my suitcase and said, “You just keep repeating that, honey, and you’ll get through the week just fine.”
“Is that what he’s paying you?” Ed asked as we walked to the front door.
“No, that’s what he’s donating to Orphans of the Storm. Why? What’s he paying you?”
“The same amount, but as I am to be the team leader . . . oh, never mind. I’ll drive,” he added, walking down the veranda’s steps toward his little green Geo Metro.
“Me too,” I said, stomping off toward my Ford Escape. Michael already had the cargo door open and was setting my suitcase inside. I was carrying Bastet, and I headed for the passenger door to put her on the floor, where the carrier couldn’t fall. I looked over and saw Ed fitting his canvas bag into the back of the Metro, amid his usual paraphernalia for ghost hunting. The back seat seemed to be occupied by one of those little refrigerators. Where he had been planning to squeeze in a nearly six-foot tall woman and a cat’s crate was beyond me.
We slammed all the doors and looked at one another for a moment in the shimmering Florida sunshine. A delicious May breeze played across the surface of the river, rattled the leaves of the Live Oaks and came to caress me, reminding me that I was heading for a cold, dark castle full of nut jobs.
“One hundred thousand dollars,” I growled. Then I gave Michael a quick kiss, said, “Well, here goes nothin’,” and got into the driver’s seat. I wanted to get going first, so I wouldn’t have to eat Ed’s dust all the way down the dirt road to the highway.
He beat me to it.
Chapter 3
The iron gate of the portcullis was down. I looked around, getting huffy, and finding no doorbell or knocker of any kind.
“I thought they were expecting us,” I said, putting the cat carrier down and hearing an angry string of syllables from Bastet.
“They are.” Ed stepped back and looked up thirty feet to an arched window whose wooden shutters were closed.
The ocean slammed into the rocks below the castle, pounding in a way that I could both hear in my ears and feel in my feet. An updraft of wind gushed around me and climbed the castle walls, lifting my short, blond hair and chilling me, even though it was already near eighty degrees outside.
“Donatio aurum et argentum,” Ed said suddenly.
“Huh?”
He was still staring up over the portcullis, and I followed the direction of his gaze and saw the same motto that had been on the envelope of Oliver Moon’s letter, carved over the archway. “What does it mean?”
“’A gift of gold and silver.’ A riff on the family name. Clever.”
“I suppose. Also a little tasteless, if you forget about the light of the moon and think about the family trust they’ve all been living on.” I looked at my watch. “Five minutes to ten. I’m giving them five more minutes, and then I’m . . . .”
The grinding noise of a motor, quieter than the ocean’s fist against the rocks, but still loud, started up in front of us, and without the help of any human hand, the iron gate began to lift.
Ed stared with eyes of wonder. I muttered, “Oh, brother,” and watched the gate rise. “We’re supposed to be impressed, right?”
“I, for one,” Ed said, reaching down for his messenger bag and suitcase, “am.” He grinned at me. This was the kind of thing he lived for. The onl
y thing that would have made the setting more perfect, from his point of view, would have been an overgrown cemetery somewhere within view.
I picked up the cat carrier in one hand and my suitcase in the other and waited for Igor the hunchback to come out. Instead, a pretty, young woman in a modern business suit came smiling into the sunshine, as out of place against the castle doors as a jar of pickles would have been at a wedding banquet.
“Jeralyn!” I said. “What are you doing here?”
She smiled. She has dimples, the tiny ones below the corners of the mouth, like Shirley Temple, and she has the most intriguing hazel eyes. You can’t quite decide what color they are, because they have a little bit of everything, and a lot of sparkle.
“Taylor! Hello, Mr. Darby-Deaver. Ready for the big experiment? In answer to your question, I’m here because I work here. I’m Mr. Moon’s secretary. Come on in. I’d better show you to your rooms while we have the chance. Mr. Moon’s been on a tear; once he gets ahold of you, I’m afraid you won’t have much time to yourselves. Sorry there’s nobody available right now to carry your suitcases. The family has a butler, but he’s in the kitchen with his wife, peeling potatoes.”
“Peeling potatoes? Isn’t that beneath the dignity of a butler?” I asked. “Anyway, I’m a big strong girl, and Ed’s always hauling his equipment around by himself. We’ll manage. I left the case of cat food for Bastet in my car. Maybe Jeeves can get that when he helps Ed with his equipment. And we’ll have to figure out where to put her litter box. Are there any other cats in the castle? Or dogs?”
“No. As far as I know, the Moons have never had any pets, not even a bird.”
I turned to Ed. “Jeralyn comes from Flagler Beach. She used to volunteer at the shelter when she was a teenager. Congratulations on the job, but I thought I heard you’d graduated with a degree in accounting?”
She gave me a conspiratorial look. “All will be explained later. And as for the butler, his name is Cox. Tom Cox. He’s a local, like me. He doesn’t put on airs. Except in front of the family, of course. When they’re not around, he’s completely human, even kind of fun. He’d probably love it if you called him Jeeves. The family calls him Cox, and Mr. Moon doesn’t even trust him with the key to the wine cellar, even though that’s what a butler’s job is supposed to be.”
“Yes,” Ed said, ever the know-it-all. “Actually, the word butler is a corruption of the word bottler, as in wine bottles.”
“Yes, I know,” Jeralyn said, smiling prettily and leading us into the coldest, most forbidding chamber I’d been in since I’d toured the Tower of London. The graystone chunks of the outside paved the walls of the entry hall, and there were the inevitable suits of armor and halberds crossed with battle-axes. The Moon family crest was directly in front of us, set fifteen feet up a wall, below a small balcony, and as I looked, an elderly man came out on the balcony and looked down at us.
“Mr. Moon!” Jeralyn said. “As you can see, your guests have arrived, right on time.”
It was no way to be introduced, with the other party looking down upon us as if we’d come to worship him. He looked small but formidable from that vantage point, and extremely disapproving. I saw no ghosts hovering around him.
He didn’t introduce himself or address us. Instead, to Jeralyn, he said, “Get them settled in their rooms and have Mr. Darby-Deaver set up his equipment, as specified in the Contract.” At last, he acknowledged that we were standing right there. “The mid-day meal will be served at one o’clock sharp.”
Sharp timing seemed to be a thing with him. I made a mental note not to be late for lunch.
When he disappeared from the balcony, some of the chill went out of the entrance hall.
“He seems nice,” I said.
Jeralyn giggled.
“Does he loosen up once you get to know him?”
“Not really. This way,” Jeralyn said, and we walked across the entrance hall into what appeared to be a junction between rooms. Straight ahead of us, spread out in cavernous gloom, was what appeared to be a great room. Its size and the randomness of the furnishings were off-putting, and I decided to investigate it later. There were three other entrances in addition to the one we’d come out of, and Jeralyn was heading for the one that brought us to an enclosed, spiral staircase. I followed her, with Ed coming along behind me, looking this way and that.
“Do you eat with the family?” I asked. I hoped she’d be there at lunch. Even one familiar face can make all the difference.
“Oh, no. The staff has its own dining room at the back of the castle. Mr. Moon’s sisters each have secretaries, and of course there are the Coxes.”
“Good to know. If the Moons turn out to be snobs, I might come eat with you guys.”
“Taylor!” Ed hissed at me. “You might be overheard. Please save your witty remarks for when we are alone.”
“Yes, dear,” I said drearily.
We followed along silently after that, going up stone stairs that seemed to go on forever. Whenever we came to an arrow slit, I was surprised at how high up we were getting. The ceilings were very high on all the floors, especially the ground floor, and later I found out that our bedrooms were only on the third floor, which was the last stop before the castle roof. It felt like we’d gone up six flights, at least.
Finally, we exited the stairwell and went down a hall that ran the length of the castle. We went on all the way to the end, to a somewhat open area on the ocean-facing side of the castle. It was very bare, with a straggling suite of furniture comprising a seating area against the inside wall. But there were doors on the end wall, and I began to have high hopes for an ocean view.
All the walls were very rugged, as if they’d been hacked out of a quarry, and I wondered how many times I was going to skin my elbows against them. Like the ground floor, they were a stony, cement-gray color, and a closer look showed that, like the old Spanish fort, the castle had been constructed of coquina – a concretion of seashells and sand, solid enough to be quarried, like rock. Coquina had been a good, cheap building material in Horace Moon’s day, when it had been legal to quarry it. These days, it’s expensive in terms of how much of a fine you’ll have to pay if you’re caught collecting it.
Looking around for lights, I saw brackets with imitation torches set in them. There were two huge niches cut into the wall, with matching Chinese vases standing in them. Other than that, there were just a few dark tables with nothing on them. “A little sheet rock would warm the place up,” I said. “Maybe a coat of paint.”
Jeralyn laughed. “The Moons aren’t into warm,” she said, as she opened the slab-like door. “This is your room, Taylor, and Ed’s is down there.” She pointed to another door far down on the left, beyond the tables and vases. “You both have views of the ocean, but you have to walk right up to the windows to see it. The casements are pretty deep.”
Ed, who didn’t care about the view, nodded in a businesslike way, thanked Jeralyn, hoisted his bags and went down to his room. Pausing in the doorway, he turned and said, “Would it be possible for Cox to help me with the rest of my equipment soon?”
“Of course,” she said. “After lunch he’s free, as far as I know.”
Ed hesitated, frowning. “I’d like to start setting up now. I’ll bring up some of the smaller things myself.” He disappeared into his chamber.
Jeralyn came into the bedroom with me and went across to the window. There were thick brocade curtain panels, and they had already been drawn aside.
If I’d been the architect, I would have set in a bigger window. The view was fabulous, but you had to almost crawl onto the window ledge to see it. It was about four feet up from the floor, and only about four by four, inside a deep embrasure. The original Scottish castle had been built to be defended, and windows were weak spots. If anything, old Horace had probably enlarged the windows from the castle he was copying. I should have been grateful it wasn’t an arrow slit. There was a large fireplace in the corner to the left of the wi
ndow on the opposite side from the bed.
The walls were unadorned except for a large, shabby-looking tapestry hanging opposite the bed with some kind of hunting scene on it and a portrait of an old man hanging beside the door. He had a nice head of thick, white hair, very pretty blue eyes, and a benign expression. Looking at him, I felt oddly comforted. A huge chandelier hung from the 15-foot ceiling, bristling with deer antlers. I shuddered and looked down at the one modern concession: a large, plush Oriental rug.
I set the cat carrier down and opened its door. Bastet had been eerily quiet all this time, and once she was free, she streaked out the bedroom door and disappeared. My heart sank. If she decided to be difficult, there was no way I was going to be able find her in this castle when I wanted to take her home again. But that wasn’t going to be for a week, and I decided not to worry about that until the time came. The Contract had clearly stated that without her, there would be no donation to Orphans. I figured spending a week in the castle was the least she could do for her homeless comrades, but she didn’t seem to agree.
